During a huge fight, my wife told me I’m not our daughter’s father.
My wife and I have a six year old daughter. We’ve been married for almost 9 years.
We got into a really big argument, which isn’t unusual for us these days. We’ve been on the verge of divorce multiple times but always end up changing our minds.
This time, she got so mad that she yelled at the top of her lungs “She’s not even your daughter, and he was a better fuck too!” “She” being our daughter, of course.
My wife’s facial expression told me she immediately realized what she said. Then she claimed she was just mad and said it just to be mean, it’s not true, blah blah blah.
It made me start to think about when our daughter was conceived. We had been having marital problems even back then. We had actually kind of informally separated for a short time and I was pretty sure I was done with the whole thing but we both changed our minds. I can’t help but wonder if she was with somebody else during that time. She could have just said what she said to be cruel, but that’s a pretty serious thing to say. I hate myself that I’m looking at my daughter and wondering if features I thought she got from me really aren’t from me at all. She looks so much like my wife that it’s hard to see much of anyone else in her at all anyway.
I love my daughter. I love being a dad, her dad. I feel like I was meant to do it. We have such a great relationship. She loves her mom, but my daughter and I just have a special bond that my wife has said she’s jealous of. That might be why she said what she did, I don’t know.
It wouldn’t change how I felt about my daughter, but my wife would definitely no longer be my wife. It scares the shit out of me to think that somebody else could have some sort of parental right to my kid, even though I’m still legally her father regardless of DNA. It’s not like a random guy is going to want to come along all these years later and try to establish paternity anyway, but it’s still unsettling. I’m probably overthinking it and my wife was most likely just trying to be extra cruel, which is her defense mechanism in arguments, but I just wish I could stop thinking about it.