Say you meet a sibling that you didn't know existed.

In My Humble Opinion
1

What if an unknown sibling from one of your parents’ past relationships gives you a call or shows up at your doorstep. Lets say that the person has proof of his or her claim, and isn’t an axe murderer or anything. How do you react toward this person, and why*? Invite the person into your life? Tell them never to contact you again, and take steps to make sure that they won’t get a cut of the family inheritance? Something in-between?

There was a similar question directed at fathers awhile back, but I’m interested in hearing what a sibling’s reaction would be. If anyone has actually been in a similar situation, please feel free to share your story.

other questions:
Does it matter how this person is related to you (father’s child vs. mother’s child or full sibling)? Would your answer change based on whose DNA you two share?

Do you think that your answer would change based on your current siblings? (Would you think some variation on, “I all ready have a brother, and don’t need another” or “Well I’m an only child, so having a sister would be nice” or even “I hate all of my other siblings, so thanks but no thanks.”

*I’m sure that most people will say that they would welcome the person with open arms (assuming that anyone decides to post:),) but I’m very interested in hearing the reasons that a person unwilling to let the sibling into his/her life might have.

2

The factors are many Omega. To me I’ll list the premier factors affecting my decision, and give a short anecdote to back it up.

First, I would think it would depend on your relationships with your mother and father, and their relationship with each other. In addition, you would need to factor in your relationship with your other siblings should you have any.

If your parents are divorced, and perhaps there had been some sort of estrangement, I would think the initial surprise may be slightly easier to deal with, meaning, “*Ok I haven’t seen my father in 20 years, Oh I see he has been busy, and I have a half brother from his current marriage…” * Or some other configuration therein.

If you parents are not divorced, and seemed happy for the past couple decades and you suddenly find out there was some infidelity way back, then I would think you may be inclined to question the new sibling a little more.

Ultimately the decision resides within you, and should be dealt with according to your relationship with your parents and your own personal values relating half brothers or sisters.

Anecdote: My step sister found out when she was 38 that she has a half brother only 3 years older than herself. Having an OK relationship with her father, she eventually opened up to this man, and his family. And now they are extremely close. Remember blood is slways thicker than water.

3

I think it would make me question my parents and my relationship with them more. With my mom, of course, it would have to be along the lines of things that happened before we were born, my dad it could be any time.

If it were pre-marriage, I’d ask why they had kept the sibling away from us, and I’d try to build a relationship with the person based on how we got on. If they haven’t been brainwashed by the parent we didn’t share, we could probably get on well.

If it were during the marriage, well, I’d probably hate my dad quite a bit and it would likely disrupt our relationship quite a bit. He made a great effort in keeping together our little family (mom did too but she couldn’t have had another kid w/o us noticing) and to find out he’d tossed one to the wolves would shake me considerably. Same bits about brainwashing and uncommon parent.

But even if it turned out to be “oh, we share a parent” claim that ultimately turned out false (mistaken identity, or whatever), I wouldn’t use the sudden “lack” of bloood relation to dump them.

I don’t find blood thicker than water. I have a family by choice, and nothing other people do will break me up with those I choose.

4

My dad, the son of a bigamist, met 4 younger siblings who never knew HE existed until just before they contacted him. It was and is and always will be the happiest, most wonderful thing to ever happen to him. I’ve only met one of them, my Uncle Caleb, and he’s just the greatest guy in the world.

5

I was 13 when I found out I had a sister, my mother’s daughter, that I never knew about. I learned about her from my step-mother, who just assumed I knew about her. To this day, I haven’t been able to meet her (she lives in Thailand) but I intend to. There’s a thread around here somewhere where I talk about the experience I had in tracking her down, and we’ve talked a few times.

Had I been older, my reaction probably would have been a lot more painful, but even at 13, I was floored to think that my mother could hide the existence of one of her own children. Mostly, though, I was thrilled to think I had a big sister, something I’d always wished for, even if it was mostly in my imagination.

6

I would not welcome the person with open arms. I like my family the way it is, thankyouverymuch, and it would be extremely upsetting to suddenly find out I had another sibling. It would feel like a stranger was trying to infiltrate our family, no matter if that person was a blood relative or not. And, yes, if it was due to infidelity, that would cause unbelievable heartache for all involved, I’m sure.

7

I’m an only child so I wouldn’t consider it to be a bad thing.

It would make a HUGE difference to me who’s kid it was, though. I would be much more likely to welcome a long lost child of my mother’s. Given my dad is a GIANT jerk, I’d be really leery until I got to know them better.

8

But doesn’t concealing the siblings existence (assuming it is known) also mean that parent is a bit more of a stranger than you thought?

9

Assuming my parents were out of the picture and had a good reason for forgetting to mention it, it’d be quite cool to meet them. Getting to know them better would depend entirely on how we got on, I think.

10

Family has nothing to do with biology. In my mind your parents are the ones who raised you, your siblings are the people you grew up with. A random person showing up at my door is just that a random person showing up at my door. It doesn’t matter to me that we have similar DNA.

11

This happened to my wife a couple of years ago - well, almost happened. This woman got in touch with my father-in-law (FIL) to say that she was his daughter by a girl he had dated a couple of times many years ago in another city. Her “father” had recently died, and her mother had “confessed all” to her. It had been kept a secret from everyone. Apparently (we never met her as it turned out) she was the spitting image of FIL, and all and sundry back home welcomed her with open arms, going as far as organising a family gathering as a sort of welcome party. It turned out that this woman was also living in the UK, only a couple of hours away from where we were. My wife made contact with this new “half-sister” and we exchanged emails, trying to arrange to get together, while the blood tests that she and FIL had had in South Africa were being processed.

My wife went through a gamut of emotions from excitement, to anger at her dad, to jealousy over the ease with which everyone welcomed her in, and you can imagine the confusion when the blood tests came back negative - no chance of the two of them being relatives… everything fell apart after that, she stopped responding to our emails, and to be honest, we were rather relieved, as it would have been rather awkward. I don’t think she was being dishonest, it was just a coincidental resemblance and a hasty conclusion…

All rather confusing really…

Grim

12

That’s interesting to me, is your mother Thai and she had a child before she met your father, or did she just spend some time in Thailand and have a relationship while there? The second way around seems a lot more common with men visiting Thailand although I’d guess it happens more often with women these days.

13

My mom (like your wife, IIRC) is Thai, and had a daughter before she met my Dad.

14

Background: My dad and mom got hitched when I was on the way and they were both in their very early 20s. They had me and my sister, and divorced when I was 5. The divorce was fairly friendly, and we spent two days a week (not weekends) with dad and, later, my step-mom for the whole time we were growing up. All the parents (including, later, my step-dad) got along well together, and I have a good relationship with all concerned to this day. (I’m 28 now, and have two more sisters from my mom and step-dad.)

Cut to: When I was 16, I was riding in the car with my dad and sister, and dad says, “I heard from Sam.” I asked who that was, and he said, “Your brother.”

Turns out, he was married straight out of high school (again, because of the kid being on the way - evidentally, condoms were not part of dad’s life in the 70s). They had Sam and divorced not long after. When Sam was 5 (and I was negative 1), his mom moved him out of state and her new hubby adopted him. For 17 years dad had no part of his life, and we had no idea this guy existed.

So he came to visit. He looked sort of like my dad - more so now than then - and we were all friendly, but it was like meeting a shirttail cousin, sort of. No real connection besides blood. From then to now, we’ve bumped into each other from time to time. He now lives in the same town we all do, and once in a while will join in some family gathering, but not all the time. I tend to run into him in the liquor store, since the apple didn’t fall too far frm the tree in some ways. He’s a nice guy, but in no way do we have the same relationship that I have with my sisters - both full and half.

15

I feel similarly but not quite the same. While someone having half my DNA does not entitle them to me liking, loving, or even respecting them, it’s enough of a rarity that I’d be interested in at least getting to know them a bit and then deciding from there if I should bother continuing my relationship with them.

This attitude gives my mother, an orphan who spent years tracking down family, no small amount of unhappiness.

16

I was 31 when I got a call from someone claiming to be my half-sister. Since I’d never heard anything about another sister, I kind of brushed her off. She was passing through town, and I didn’t meet with her because I wasn’t too sure about her story. I’d met her mother some years back, and she’d always struck me as being beyond eccentric, to the point of being a little crazy, so I thought perhaps she’d passed some of that on to her daughter. I called my dad to ask, just in case, and he said yes, she was his daughter. She was born in between his divorce from my mother and his marriage to my first stepmother, and she’s eight years younger than I am.

Because I missed my chance to meet her then, eight years passed before I actually met her in person. We exchanged letters and photos in the meantime, although she’d been brought up with stories and photos of me and my brother and our half-brother and -sister. She grew up an only child with a rather mentally unstable mother, and she lived with her emotionally distant maternal grandparents for much of her childhood before she was sent to boarding school. She always wished she could know her siblings, but she never got the chance to meet any of us because our father refused to have any contact with her. He paid a minimal amount of child support to the German government, and that was it.

Once I knew that she was actually my half-sister, I really wanted to meet her. I felt angry at my dad for not telling any of his other children about her, and I felt that I’d been cheated out of having a real relationship with my sister. He was surprised that I was willing to acknowledge her as part of the family, but once he realized that I not only accepted her but felt that he had not lived up to his obligations to her, he started to correspond with her. Once I met her, we felt that there were a lot of uncanny similarities between us, even though we were brought up in very different circumstances. By the time I did meet her, our father had died, and she’d only met him a couple of times, so she was very eager to hear about him. Her mother had given her an idealized version of him, so I think she was surprised at how vehemently angry I was about his complete neglect of her.

Now that we do know each other, my sister and I have settled into the pattern of mostly non-contact I have with all my family members. We get in touch now and again, but we live in different countries, so we very rarely see each other. However, she will always be my sister, and that means that I’ll always be here for her, no matter what. I’m firnly in the “blood is thicker than water” camp.

17

If the sibling is older than me and my father’s child, no problem.
If the sibling is older than me and my mother’s child…I’d be a little freaked out. Well, a lot freaked out.

If the sibling was younger than me–my parents married about 7 months before I was born–then I would be furious with who ever the parent is, but I would try to form a relationship with Long Lost Sibling if that’s what he/she wanted.

18

I want to clarify I’d be freaked out about my mother not because I expected her to be a virgin or anything, but that seems so completely antithetical to everything I know about my mother that it just doesn’t seem possible in any way…I can’t imagine any situation where she would give up her child.

19

It would depend a lot on how old the half-sibling was and which parent.

First off if a half-sibling did come out of the woodwork I would like to get to know them, or try to, learn about their life and see if we could at least be friends.

What changes isn’t so much how I would react to the sibling, but how it would effect the relationship with my parent.

If they were my Dad’s child and older than me… well I would be surprised. Really surprised actually, because Dad did his damndest to stay a part of our lives after the divorce and still sticks his nose in. If he knew he had a child he probably would have mentioned it, or I would have had some inkling. I may not be in the loop but I manage to pick up stuff all the time, and Dad seems to have this thing with confessing to me about stuff. If he didn’t know that he had a child then I would understand not telling.

A child younger than my brother is a very slim chance though, but between my brother and I… I would be pissed. It would probably wreck our relationship again because I never felt Dad could cheat physically (emotionally is another story)

Mom, well I would be surprised she hadn’t mentioned anything. I wouldn’t be too surprised that I had an older sibling because from what I understand she was a wild one in her younger days. Because of her family she would’ve given the child up for adoption… but I’m pretty sure she’d tell me that I had a sibling out there. So I would be really surprised that she hadn’t said anything to me. I don’t think it would effect how we deal with each other though, we get along better than Dad and I.

20

I have a close friend who, in his 20s, discovered a half-brother in his 30s. Father’s previous relationship; my friend doesn’t think much of his dad, so he just met the brother once, I think, and was cordial but didn’t pursue any further contact.

On the other hand, I think the world of my parents and I doubt that would change if I discovered a long-lost half-sibling from one of their previous relationships or, maybe, even from an extramarital affair. I think I would enjoy getting to know new family, though no one will ever measure up to my sisters. As an adult I have gotten to know a few of my second cousins for the first time; I imagine meeting half-siblings would be similar.

All this is not impossible but, in my opinion, extremely unlikely. My parents have led pretty quiet lives, as do I.

I have another friend who discovered in adulthood that “family friends” he’d known all his life were in fact his biological father and three half-siblings, thanks to an affair his mother had had in the 60s. That was odd.