Two of the people I am representing in court are fathers who discovered that they were not the biological parent of children they had raised. In each case, the mothers lied to the fathers until they separated. Birth certificates and acknowledgements of paternity were signed while the mothers knew full well that their might be a different father, but they chose not to raise the issue until it was to their advantage.

The response of both of these fathers was the same: it did not matter whose genes the child had, they considered themselves the parents of those children. In both cases they fought to prevent the mothers from raising the issue, and the courts agreed with them. It is marvelous to see how dedicated these fathers are. One has custody, and the other sees his child on an almost daily basis.

I'm dating a woman now who has a three month old child(not the same one from the entry on the 8th: never got a response from that one - this is the woman I went on a hike with a few weeks back), and it is interesting to see how it works. It has something to do with eye contact I think, because I've had two dates where the child came along, and I had to rock her for a little bit this last time. We sort of stared at each other for a while, and I remember thinking, "What a wonderful little child." Afterwards, I thought about my two clients and it made a sort of sense. I'm not saying that I'm ready to be this child's parent by a long shot. There are any number of reasons why this relationship might not last, but I could see better how that bonding happens, and if I were around this child more, I might end up forming the same sort of attachment that my clients did with their children, and that I did with my own daughter.

There is something different of course, when it is your own child. My daughter shares a lot in common with me that has more to do with genetics than my biweekly presence in her life can explain. Our strengths in high school are almost identical. She has exactly the same average that I did, and does well in exactly the same classes. We share some of the same mannerisms, and of course we look alike.

There is a power to those commonalities. While she is very definitely her own unique person, in some ways it feels like a part of my own consciousness is inside her. I'm probably just paying too much attention to coincidences, but this last week I was having trouble sleeping because the cases I was working on were stressing me out, and at the same time my daughter was also having trouble sleeping, even though I hadn't talked to her about my work.

I really admire the dedication of my two clients, but of course I also wonder about how these children will react when they get older, and they learn the truth. I wonder if they will miss that sense of connectedness. Of course their situations are very different. The biological fathers in both of those cases were aware that the child was born, and they knew that they might be the parent long before the person raising the child did. For extended periods, they chose to ignore their children and let these other individuals raise them ignorant of what had really happened. I had the blood test done (and cases like these make me glad I did), but I also made an effort to get involved with my daughter at the outset.