Can he be the father?
The presumed father of a newborn baby was skeptical of his paternity after the baby girl was born with blonde hair and blue eyes. He and his wife of two years have brown hair and brown eyes, so he thought there was no chance it was his child.
The wife reassured her husband that they could have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby and that, quite often, a baby’s hair and eye color can change over time.
But the husband “freaked out at this and refused to listen,” the wife wrote in a viral post on Reddit’s AITA page. Instead, he “demanded a paternity test and threatened to divorce me if I didn’t comply, so I did.”
The man was so confident that after the baby was born, he moved into his mother’s house while he awaited the results of the DNA test. The wife stayed home with the baby and was helped through the first few weeks by her sister.
To make things worse, the wife’s mother-in-law began to make threats. “My MIL called and informed me that if the paternity test revealed that the child wasn’t his, she would do anything within her power to make sure that I was ‘taken to the cleaners’ during the divorce,” the mom shared on Reddit.
Finally, three weeks after the child was born, the DNA test results arrived and the husband came home to read them with his wife. “I was on the couch in the living room, so he sat next to me and we started to read the results,” she wrote. “They showed that he was the father and my husband had this shocked, kinda mortified look on his face with his eyes wide as he stared at it.”
A man is shocked to learn that he is the father.
The wife said, “I told you so,” and laughed in his face. In the post, the wife also notes she has “zero history” of cheating.
Although it is rare for two people with brown eyes and brown hair to have a blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby, it is entirely possible. According to Verywell Health, there is a 19% chance that a couple with brown eyes can have a blue-eyed baby. And, as the wife noted earlier, a baby’s eye color can change over its first year of life.
Further, two people with brown hair can have a blonde-haired child if both parents carry the recessive gene for blonde hair. The blonde hair may darken over time as well.
A strand of DNA
If the father had done a quick Google search on the topic, he would have quickly realized that there was a very strong case that he was the father and the drama could have stopped before any damage was done to the marriage.
The positive part of this story is that the wife’s post on Reddit earned her a ton of support from people who thought her husband’s antics were utterly inappropriate. The support probably also helped to put her husband's wild antics into perspective while she determined their future. The wife felt bad about laughing at her husband, but most people thought it was appropriate, given her husband's behavior.
“Not only doesn’t he have a basic grasp of genetics, he threw a tantrum and left you immediately after having the baby to struggle alone for almost a month,” CrystalQueen3000 commented. “He’s lucky all you did was laugh in his face.”
A lot of commenters thought that the woman should leave her husband for accusing her of cheating and leaving her alone with the child.
“Honestly, if my husband left me for weeks after giving birth due to a faint assumption like this, I would be done. I can't be together with someone who abandoned me when I needed them desperately,” Matakakiba wrote.
This article originally appeared on 1.5.24
