By the time a couple's child is born, there usually aren't too many surprises. Most expecting parents already know the gender and name, have a general idea of the baby's health, and are anticipating the birth of their child. Well, the families in the following stories are the exception to the rule. As you will soon find out, these parents, or at least the fathers, were in for one major surprise when they first laid eyes on their newborn sons and daughters.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
“What Are The Odds?”
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“I worked with a white guy married to a white woman. She had a baby that was obviously black. He had the baby’s picture on his desk and told people its look was a throwback to her American Indian background. One time, someone made a remark like, ‘Looks more black than Indian.’ He promptly reported them to HR. About three years later, there was a messy divorce and the wife remarried a black man she had known since childhood. What are the odds?”
The Father Was Not Surprised
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“My (white) mother was married to my (white) father when she got pregnant with my younger brother. She was working at a Chinese restaurant at the time.
My little brother is half-Chinese. I assume my mother knew the chances of that happening were pretty good because she took off across the country to give birth.
Eventually, she moved us back to our home state, and my father wasn’t at all surprised by my brother’s ethnicity, given my mother’s well-known proclivity towards sleeping around.
Because they were married at the time of my brother’s birth, my father is legally his father. He was forced to pay child support by the state, even though my mother never went back to him, and you can pretty clearly tell they are not blood-related.
My father always loved my brother, though. He never said he wasn’t his son, never complained about paying the support. Even years later after they hadn’t spoken in ages, my dad had no problem signing paperwork so my brother could marry his immigrant wife.
I think the saddest part of this story is the fact that my brother will never know who his real father is, and I doubt his biological father even knows of his existence. Although this doesn’t seem to bother him in the least.”
Not Even Cheating Would Prevent This Child’s Condition
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“I’m a nurse and took care of a black couple recently who had five black children. The whole family was very dark skinned. Then the sixth baby came out albino.
The dad freaked out in the delivery room, thinking his wife cheated on him, and the OB just matter of factly stated, ‘even if your wife cheated on you, the baby wouldn’t be THIS light.'”
He Was Never The Same
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“I had a friend who went down a dark path of substance abuse, and we lost touch after a big fight about how he was messed up all the time and that he was wasting his life.
He contacted me out of the blue to say that I was right. He said that he needed to step up and be responsible and that he had quit everything cold turkey because he was going to be a dad. Apparently, he was going to help his girl get sober and they were going to have this kid and get married.
He really got his act together over the course of the pregnancy. He was clean, got a job, and got a nice place to live. She was not so dedicated. She continued to use throughout the pregnancy.
She ended up going into labor early at 26 weeks. She gave birth to a premature addicted baby boy. He went directly into the NICU. She stayed in the hospital and visited the NICU until she was released. She then disappeared. She never visited the baby, never called to check in, didn’t go home, just fell off the face of the planet.
He, however, spent every spare second at the NICU with that baby. However, as the weeks passed, it became pretty obvious that the baby wasn’t his as the skin tone evened out and hair came in. The mother was blonde with blue eyes. My friend is super pale blonde with blue eyes. The baby was clearly half Hispanic.
He wanted to adopt the baby, but they wouldn’t let him. The state took it, and it went into foster care.
It messed him up for a long time. He relapsed for awhile and got into a bad car accident. He spent some time in the hospital and then got everything back together.
He’s married now to a really nice girl, and has four kids that are his, with another on the way.”
“It Ended The Marriage, More Or Less On The Spot”
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“My mother is white with brown hair and green eyes. She married a full-blooded Japanese man. My two younger brothers and I are very, very obviously half-Japanese. I have black hair, brown eyes, and a slight cast to my eyes; my brothers look very Japanese in the face, with brown hair and lighter eyes.
After the third kid, things weren’t going so hot with my mother and father. There were a lot of fights and a lot of nights where I would wake up, at the age of 5, and find my dad sleeping on the couch.
My mom got pregnant again, even though they only became intimate once after my youngest brother was born. Their relationship continued to deteriorate during the pregnancy. The big day came and out came my baby sister, the last of the bunch.
My sister was born white, with a shock of bright red hair and a VERY pale complexion, and no Japanese features at all.
My father’s best friend was a tall Danish redheaded dude. It took my father about 36 hours to put 2 and 2 together. He confronted my mother in the hospital, and she admitted she’d been sleeping with his best friend behind his back since before my youngest brother was born.
The divorce happened not long after that. My father ran away from it all.
Funny thing? I didn’t realize my sister was from another father until I was 16 years old, and my girlfriend asked why my sister looked nothing like my brothers and me. I asked my mother and got the full story. To this day, she’s not my half-sister – she’s my sister.
But yeah. It ended the marriage, more or less on the spot.”
A Misunderstanding Of Epic Proportions
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“My brother used to have a friend who was a black doctor, and he was there at the delivery of a child while he was working. The child was black and the father actually confronted the doctor with much hostility (he believed that it must have been the doctor who impregnated his wife).
He ended up having a fist fight with the doctor over it, though it was one-sided. I guess he was just very angry and confused, but he was a good guy. He ended up going to counseling with his wife and raising the black baby. Months passed and he contacted the doctor with a phone call. He wanted to apologize and explain that his wife never actually cheated. He found out he had a blood relation to a black man in his family that traced back to the 1800s.
Apparently, there was a family slave who got in the bed with one of the daughters of his great-great-great-grandfather. The gene stayed dormant inside him for many generations until now.”
You Big Dummy
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“I remember when I used to work on the maternity wards, that a baby was born that had black hair to two blonde parents. I was speaking to the father and this didn’t seem to phase him since both of his parents had black hair and he seemed well educated. She on the other hand, when the father left the room, obviously exhausted and slightly confused, said to the midwife, ‘He has black hair! We’re both blonde, who has he been sleeping with? Can I have a maternity test? Do hospitals do that?'”
This Family Was In For A Surprise
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“My wife is an Ob/Gyn. During her residency, she moonlighted at a hospital that served the ‘Beverly Hills’ of our area. She once assisted in the delivery of the wife of the scion of a true old money, blue blood family.
It was the first child of the only son. Every family member was there, including the old dowager matriarch who was giddy in anticipating her first grandchild. When the time came, and the blessed child was presented up like Simba at the opening of ‘The Lion King,’ it was quickly apparent something was amiss. See, the baby was very, very black. The husband and wife were most decidedly not. According to my wife, most babies born to people of color are a bit jaundiced right after birth, but not this lad. Apparently, he had the velvety smooth skin tone of a slightly moist chocolate Easter bunny. Gasps were heard, mouths dropped open, swears were muttered, and the matriarch passed out right there in the delivery room.
My wife heard later that when the mother left the hospital, she found her things waiting for her on the curb. Honestly, a sad story.”
This Father Was Convinced The Full-Term Child Was Early
“My wife was an Ob/Gyn resident. It’s important to note here that this particular hospital has a large Hispanic population.
She was the second year on-call for obstetrics when she received a frantic page that a woman had pulled up and was delivering on the ambulance dock. The husband ran up frantically telling her how the baby was coming very early. How early? Almost three months. He knew this because he’d been in Mexico until six months ago.
Unless this woman birthed an eight-pound baby at around 24 to 28 weeks, it was most definitely NOT early.
I have no idea what ended up happening with that one, but if I had to guess, no one was the wiser. Well, except for the mom.”
And Then Her Social Media Accounts Went Dark
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“There was a girl I went to high school with who was engaged and also pregnant (both her and her fiancé are white). She posted endlessly about how excited she was to be pregnant and uploaded lots of pictures. She posted the morning she went to the hospital in labor and then her social media went dark for like two months, which I assumed was just her being busy with a baby.
Nope.
It turns out, earlier that year, she and her fiancé had broken up for about a week, and she’d slept with a black man in that time. Her baby came out very obviously not white. Her fiancé broke up with her immediately after the baby was born.”
What’s Worse Than Bad News?
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“I perform vasectomies, and our general policy is to have the patient submit a sample six weeks after the operation so we can confirm it was a success and the patient is indeed sterile. The vast majority of the patients do this, but some never come back, and we can’t confirm it.
About 10 years ago, a man and his wife came storming into the office about 18 months post-op, threatening to sue me because she was pregnant. A check of my records revealed that he never submitted his six-week sample. So I calmed them both down and told them the first order of business was for him to do this, and we would schedule another appointment after the results came back. The tests revealed that he was, indeed, shooting blanks.
I called the wife into the office to ask her if there was any chance the baby was not his. She admitted to me that she had an extramarital affair right around the estimated date of conception. I made it her choice whether to tell him herself instead of me having to tell him. She said she’d handle it, and I never heard from either of them again.”
“I’m Not The Father, I’m Outta Here”
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“My best friend’s stepbrother had gone to rehab twice and was doing really well. He came back home for a weekend and slept with his ex-girlfriend. He left and went back to his house states away to continue his newfound life. He got the call she was pregnant and dropped everything to come back and be a father. We were really worried he would relapse, but he was great.
So nine months of preparation went by. He was going to be an awesome dad. All the worry about relapsing was gone and he seemed ready to become the best dad he could be.
The baby was born and everybody was happy. The nurse took my friend aside after a few minutes and told him, ‘I want to ask you something. You do know that’s not your kid right?’ He asked her what she meant.
‘Well, that baby is at least half black, but the pigments are probably going to darken.’
So he went over to his ex-girlfriend and asked if there was anyway what the nurse just told him could be true. She started sobbing and broke down completely. She admitted that she slept with a black guy right around the time he came back. So he said, ‘Alright. I’m glad you and the baby are healthy. Have a nice life.’
He walked into the waiting room where all the new grandparents were waiting. Cheers. Celebration. ‘Everything good?’
‘Yep. Healthy baby. Healthy mom. I’m not the father. I’m outta here.’ And then he walked right out the door.
The girl’s parents even wanted him to pay child support. He moved back to where he got his life back together and is doing incredibly well. But man, I wish he had all that time back.”
She Got More Than Her Fix From The Dealer
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“I had an Italian patient in labor. She had her mom and grandmother and some aunts in the room with her. I asked them to step out for a minute so I could check her cervix, and that was when she told me they were going to flip out if the baby was black. She wasn’t sure because she had dated a white guy, but her dealer was black and she had had relations with him.
The baby was indeed black. Actually, they were shocked but were very loving towards her and the baby. At least that day. She didn’t get clean though and ended up with more than one baby by the deadbeat dealer.
Not a happy ending.”
Not The Christmas Gift She Expected
“A woman was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve with abdominal pain after she fell over wasted. We ran a routine pregnancy test which came back positive, and the doctor thought that she was either a bit plump or about 30-weeks pregnant, which she was oblivious to.
We transferred her to obstetrics due to ongoing pain which turned out to be contractions. Her sister came in while I was just writing in her notes, and asked about her partner who apparently was on deployment with the Army until a month ago. He was already on the way; he knew she was pregnant, but not 30 weeks.
He arrived and out came her baby, eight-weeks preterm, but not bad condition, all things considered.
He quickly put 2 and 2 together and realized it was clearly not his child. She genuinely didn’t even know what was happening as she was still sauced.
He just left, and I presume never came back.
The next day, I reviewed her on the postnatal ward and she was discharged. Her baby was staying in, so she decided to stay around and asked me what happened. She had no idea she was pregnant and admitted to having slept with someone but couldn’t remember who, and didn’t remember her partner showing up and dumping her.
I felt sorry for her and her child; she might see this as a massive wake up call and turn her life around, but she had everything stacked against her; she was a single unemployed mother with a baby she was unprepared to raise.
We called it the Christmas miracle.”
“The Husband Dropped The Camcorder”
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“My mom was witness to the following situation in October of 1987 when she had my sister.
The girl in the bed next to her had her husband and both of their parents there for the birth. The husband had splurged and bought one of those first-gen hard-copy camcorders that rest on your shoulder to film the event.
When the baby was born, it was the only black person in the room. The husband dropped the camcorder and ran out of the room. Everyone else was shocked, and the mom didn’t know what was wrong until they showed her the baby. Cue hysterical crying about how she only cheated on her husband once and didn’t think that she had gotten pregnant then.”
He Never Returned
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“I am a Corpsman in the Navy who works on labor and delivery, and in my three years on the floor, the baby has only been a different race on two occasions; one where the patient was knowledgeable and one where our staff inadvertently instigated the situation by confirming the husband’s obvious suspicions.
In the second case, it was due to the fact that the baby girl that was born had several prominent features usually found in African American babies, such as dark curly hair, and more prominent lips and eyes, as well as one of the tell-all signs which is a Mongolian spot (a darkish bruise that usually appears on the buttocks of newborns of ethnic backgrounds). The mother and supposed father were both white as white could be, and the husband had just come back from a deployment.
Investigating further we discovered the baby had a sickle cell trait as well as physically being around three weeks younger gestationally than the mom had reported, making the time of conception lying after the husband had left for deployment. To make matters worse, the mother kept asking if her baby’s skin would lighten up, confirming our suspicions. The doctors kindly asked the husband out of the room and explained the evidence to him, and offered a paternity test if he wanted to be 100% sure. The man declined and proceeded to walk out obviously crushed. I continued to care for the baby for the remainder of the stay and never saw the husband return.”
The Neighbors Noticed Something Was Different
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“My childhood neighbors across the street were having a baby. They had two older daughters, cute little blonde haired, blue eyed girls. They looked just like their daddy. The couple was really social around the neighborhood. My mom and I even went to her baby shower.
Everything seemed fine and dandy until we noticed that right after the baby was born the family seemed to withdraw. No one saw the baby, which was odd for this once social family. The father rarely was home, and one day he stopped coming home altogether. The mother, two daughters, and baby remained at the house for a year after it all happened, never coming out to talk to anyone. One day, we saw the mom carrying the little baby boy out to the car. Normally, he was wrapped in blankets or had a heavy coat with a hood. But it was spring, so the weather was nice enough to allow for children to emerge from their winter coats. Along with his mom and two sisters, we saw a dark-skinned, curly-haired little baby boy.
The family moved not too long after that.”
A Taste Of Things To Come
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“This happened to my uncle about 50 years ago. He and his wife were white, blonde hair blue eyed Danes. Their first born came out black, just like the next door neighbor. My uncle followed tradition by naming him after his father (my grandfather).
They went on to have a few more kids. He was a great father, but never really got over the betrayal. The marriage didn’t last and he died after drinking a hole in his belly a few years ago.”