Ann Friedman - I'm the Product of an Affair

I'm still on leave this week and next. Today I've got a great guest essay for you from 2023 writing fellow Paige Curtis, who chose to tell a very personal story about a shocking revelation about her family. Read it with kindness and gentleness, please. I'm honored she's chosen to share it here.

By Paige Curtis

“My Dad and I are estranged because I haven’t forgiven him for what he did. He had an affair, and tried to hide it. And by ‘it’ I mean me.” 

The year is 2015, I’m in college,  and I’ve just told a friend why she will never meet my Dad on parents weekend. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “Plenty of people come from broken families.” I am shocked. I don’t see my family as broken, and I certainly don’t feel broken.  

As a young child, I knew my Dad only as a figure who visited sporadically and called me on my birthday. I simply thought my parents chose not to get married and were co-parenting in a way I was too young to understand. When I was 15—old enough to put the pieces together, it was devastating to realize that my father had a whole separate family, with two older children and a wife, that he intentionally tried to hide me from. The revelation sent me down a spiral of paternal abandonment I’m still trying to come out of.

While tons of people come from nontraditional families, there is a particular shame associated with infidelity that I internalized as my own. Ashamed of being thought of as a “bastard child” or the product of a “homewrecking” woman— archetypes that garner little sympathy in our culture. Ashamed of fulfilling long held stereotypes about Black families. And ashamed that my father’s infidelity meant something about my own capacity to be faithful to a partner. 

So I lied. Growing up, I often told classmates and friends that my parents were divorced, knowing it was simpler, and more palatable, than my true origin story. I’m almost 30 years old, and I still occasionally say that I’m an only child, although I technically have two half-siblings.

As my Dad and I worked to repair our relationship post-college, I spent more time around his extended family. Aunts, uncles, and cousins who may have heard whispers about me over the years or nothing at all. Some of them have welcomed me into the fold, while others have not. Though my facial resemblance to these relatives is uncanny, we come from such different worlds. My father’s people are God-fearing folk with a sense of propriety—a stark contrast to the bohemian “be who you want” sensibility my mother’s family instilled in me. 

I became the person I am today not in spite of my circumstance, but because of the people who poured into me: friends who I think of as siblings, mentors who taught me my worth, a partner who loves the heck out of me, and a formidable mother who remains unflappable against all that life has thrown at her. In other words: people who saw my origin story as a strength.

Although my experience is far from unique, there is no meetup group for illegitimate children (believe me I’ve searched) and no cultural script for how to handle infidelity, especially when it results in a child. The result is that I feel like I lack some essential human experience in not growing up with both parents. I mourn the person I might have been were I raised in a tidy, two-parent household. But I know that my conception of family is more dynamic and rich because I did not.

Paige Curtis was 2023 writing fellow and is a climate and environment journalist based in Boston. You'll definitely want to subscribe to Bad Environmentalist, her eco-humor newsletter.

Thank you, Paige! Next week, the final guest essay in this series. It's from Mercedes Gonzales-Bazan, who normally works behind the scenes with me to keep this newsletter running. I'm excited for you to check out her writing—her essay is about how an influencer "dies" when they were never real in the first place.