I love my wife Anna very much, she from our first meeting, as if she had bewitched me. We met on a blind date, organized by our mutual friends. We spent the whole evening together in the pub, just chatting. She seemed very faithful and sincere to me at the time.
We dated for about a year and when I realized I couldn’t live without her, I asked her to marry me. After that we started a wonderful, almost magical married life. I worked quite a bit in the office and she worked from home – she was a journalist and emailed articles. When weekends coincided or she didn’t have much work to take with her, we traveled, went on nature trips with tents, and in general spent all our free time together, preferably the two of us. Sometimes, of course, on holidays or other occasions we would meet up with friends, but more often just the two of us.
My parents loved Anna, too. They were somewhat disappointed to learn that her profession, though creative, was not very profitable and promising, as she worked in a magazine for housewives, writing articles with advice on “how to remove grease stains”, “how to soothe a baby” and the like. My mother used to say that in our family, I was in charge of the analytical processes, and Anna was in charge of the creative ones.
And so, after three years of living just the two of us, we had a daughter. Such a lovely girl, very pretty, like Anna. But the older she got, the more bad grades she got from school, the more she disappointed me. I hoped she would go for me, not Anna.
Anna took great offense to some such statements from me, and in a fit of anger she herself admitted that her daughter was not mine. I knew that she was joking, but once my mother also jokingly suggested that my daughter did not get anything from me because she was not my daughter. After those two events in a row, it was like I had a switch.
Had I lived my whole life in self-deception, thinking I had the perfect wife and the sweetest daughter? It gnawed at me from the inside, and in one minor quarrel I raised the issue, demanding a paternity test. Anna became very angry, withdrew into herself, did not speak to me for days. Neither saw, nor wanted to hear. And yesterday she came to me with a statement, a kind of bet – we will do a paternity test, and if the daughter is still mine, Anna files for divorce, because she does not want to live with someone who unreasonably suspects her in such a case. If I am right and my daughter is not my own daughter, I am free to do whatever I want, which means that it is probably a question of filing for divorce again.
I don’t know what to do about that. I am sure that our relationship will not be the same after such a quarrel, but I do not want to lose my family either. I know Anna, she may cool down by the time the test results come in, or she may hold a grudge for life. Maybe I should just stop filling my head with silly thoughts and enjoy what I have? I have no idea how to get out of this situation and find out the truth.
