What happens when you find more than you were expecting?

MORE SURPRISES 

Tormented by doubt, she asked her father’s cousin, a woman in her 80s, to take the test too. “She was a very sweet person,” says Jane . “I feel terrible that I didn’t tell her the real reason. I said it would be a fun thing to do and promised I’d send her the report.”

Six weeks later Jane was sitting in bed with her iPad when the results popped into her inbox. Unlike her brother, she shared no DNA with her father’s first cousin.

“I could just feel my heart breaking,” Jane said, her eyes filling with tears. “I thought, ‘Oh, my god it’s true!’ My poor husband sleeping next to me had no idea what was going on. I have never felt so alone.”

GUARDED SECRET

Jane told nobody about her findings for several months. Instead she sent DNA kits to her remaining brother and two sisters and coaxed them into giving saliva samples. She had always thought she looked different from them – less tall and less dark – and the results confirmed that she was the odd one out.

Jenny also talked her 86-year-old mother into taking the test. “She was my mom of course, but I wanted irrefutable proof because finding out that the man who had raised me wasn’t my dad shook me to my core,” Jenny says. “I just felt like everything I’d known for 60 years wasn’t true any more.”

ONE YEAR LATER

Jane summoned the courage to bring the subject up with her mother, who was frail and suffering from diabetes. As they sat drinking tea, Jane explained that the DNA test had thrown up some weird results.

“My mom was holding a teacup, she had it up to her mouth and was about to drink but she just stopped and looked at me and her hands started to shake,” She recalls.

“She is a typical Nyeri woman , a strong proud one. I don’t think I ever saw her cry – so to watch her shaking like that was so hard,” Jane added.

“I really agonised about asking her – I didn’t want to upset her, but I also thought that I couldn’t let her die and not have some questions answered because I knew I’d always regret it.”

There was a business owner who lived in the same town as Jane’s family and she remembers that he had always been very friendly with her mother. She asked if this man was her dad. “I said his name,” says Jane. “Her eyes got huge and she asked me how on Earth I’d worked that out.”

Jenny’s mother admitted she had hoped to take the secret with her to her grave. She had never told her husband about the affair, so the man who raised Jane was unaware he was not her biological father – something which Jenny now finds “incredibly reassuring”.

She describes her father, an engineer who died nearly a decade ago, as “an introverted, innocent man” and she feels that he would have been devastated to learn the truth.

“It was like a new bereavement. I went through all these stages of grief,” she says. “It was something out of my control, there was no going back and no way to fix it.”

She found some solace in a book, The Stranger in My Genes, written by Bill Griffeth, a financial journalist who had a similar experience.

“Without his book, I think I would have gone nuts or done something destructive in my life. I contacted him through e-mail, and he encouraged me to write a diary about my feelings and he even read the stuff I sent him which was very kind.”

According to  a source at the Kemri DNA lab testing, stories like this are far from unique – across the country. The source that begged for anonymity said genetic testing  drags skeletons out of the closet in at least 3 out of the 5 cases they receive for testing.

“Paternity tests are the worst.Most of them reveal that most kids don’t belong to the dad’s that raise them,”She said.

People like Jenny  – mostly in their late 50s or 60s – are  pretty much in the same boat. Their mothers got pregnant by someone who wasn’t their husband – whether willingly or not. It’s hard to come to terms with, but the practical consequences tend to be limited by the fact that most of the parties involved are either very elderly or dead.

So what happens when a DNA kit reveals the secrets of those who are younger?

Lawrence (not his real name) 32 discovered her daughter who is now 11 years is not her real daughter. He says for years he was in doubt for the daughter did not resemble him at all.

After six weeks he received results that confirmed his hunch-the little girl was not my child. He knew this after  ten years.