I’ve been married for 15 years with my wife and our son is 18yo. I think I was a good father to him, always present, always supporting him, I was the first he talked to when he had a bullying problem, a math problem, when he needed romantic advice. He is straight but likes crossdressing and doing makeup, and I was the first one to support him on that too, while his mom was trying to make him more “masculine”.
However, recently I discovered that he is not actually my child. My MIL said he had to tell me something important, so I went to meet her and told me that my child is actually my wife’s high school boyfriend baby. She gave birth at 20 but apparently she was cheating on me with her old boyfriend. My MIL said my wife told her the truth after he was born because she had suspected that the baby didn’t exactly look like me and MIL confronted her about it, but the baby was already born and nothing could be done.
I was mad and asked her why is she telling me this right not? She told me it’s because she saw my son hanging out with his biodad at a park and believes that he is back in their lives.
I decided not to shoot the messenger and went out to confront my wife and son about this, after a long argument they told the truth. The biodad was back and wanted to meet his real son.
A lot of shit happened and I’m divorcing, and also cutting my wife’s son out of my will, because, I never had a real son and all this time I was putting all my energy and effort raising another man’s child. I’m also consulting if is possible to sue the biodad for all the money I’ve spent raising his bio son thought out the years.
My wife is obviously mad at me, but my (step?) son is just devastated, I can see him depressed, not talking to me, and constantly apologizing. My plan was to divorce and cut contact with them right after that, but now I’m wondering if I’m going too far by punishing him too.
Edit: Everybody is asking this: The kid knew about his biodad for about 4 months before I discovered it. And yes, we did a DNA test, he insisted a lot of it and after it came back negative is when I think his depression really hit. Y'all right, maybe it is useless to sue the biodad, but I'll ask a lawyer anyway.
Edit 2: Many people are comparing my situation to being a step dad or an adoption. There is a difference, I thought for over 18 years that he was my real son. I 100% believe that adoptive parents are real parents and their adopted children are their real children, but they willingly went into the adoption process, they know their family is not blood family. I was tricked into my situation. If I had known my wife after the baby was born I wouldn't have cared because I knew it was somebody else's son, but I thought this was my real son and just now I find out that he isn't. Anyway, I need to talk to him when he feels like it.
This is probably incredibly stupid and petty but this feels really disrespectful to me. I have been dating "Matt" for 2 years. We don't live together but in the past 6 months or so he has been here fairly often. I have 3 older children (13yo boy, 12yo girl, 10yo boy) and they all get along with Matt well. My issue is that Matt has zero respect for other people's things; towels mainly.
I have no washer/dryer in my rental and have to travel 35 minutes to the nearest laundromat. I only have time to do this once a week due to my work schedule and all else. I can only go Sundays. Matt knows this. I also only had 4 towels (one for each of me and my kids). It became a problem of like.. every single time that Matt and I has sex, he would go to the bathroom and grab one of the towels off the hook and wipe off with it after I told him not to several times. He said it was a force of habit (that's what he cleans up with at his place for 15 years). He will apologize, etc. Just to repeat it. Or I went out and bought him a towel for when he's here (I was tired of him using mine and he has severe ADHD and can't remember to bring his own / can't remember pretty much anything). He never uses his towel to clean himself. It's always one of the kids. Or there's been a few times that he will grab the kids towels and put them on the floor to soak up the water that he tracked out of the shower. Every single time I have talked to him about it, I've gotten increasingly more pissed off. The last time I had to mention it was a few weeks ago and I lost my shit entirely and told him to stop touching my kids fucking towels or we were done. He said something like "it's just a fucking towel" or "maybe it's time you get more than one towel per person" and whatever but he did stop using the towels. Until this morning.
This morning he woke me up for a quickie before we both had to go to work and tmi but I started bleeding. Sorry for the mental image. He runs to the bathroom, grabs a towel and starts cleaning both of us up. I truly thought it was his towel that he grabbed (and he had mentioned having to do his laundry anyhow so I didn't make a fuss) but then he turned on the light and it was my oldest son's towel. I asked him why the fuck he didn't grab his own, since he was doing his laundry anyhow and could have just taken it with him. He said he "panicked" and just grabbed the first one available. His towel is literally the first one on the hook when you walk in to the bathroom and I keep the bathroom light on at all times so there's no way he could have just not seen which towel he was grabbing. Now I have to go and do laundry today, again, after just having gone on Sunday. I told him that I needed a break from him because he has zero respect for me at this point. Yes, it's small and it's a fucking towel for Christ Sake but it's still something I've asked him not to do several times. He doesn't think it's a big deal and says I'm acting ridiculous over a towel. AITA?
No, I can't get a mini washer/dryer per my lease agreement. No, he won't wash our laundry as well. I asked him to take the towel with him and he said "no" because I "made him feel fucking stupid" and says that if I had been nice about it than maybe he would have but he won't now. Yes, I could get more towels but this was never an issue before he started coming around and frankly, I'd like to keep the laundry to a minimum because I already have a bad back and the laundry can be difficult. So I shouldnt have to buy more towels just so he can clean himself up with them.