My Kids Are Half-Siblings AND Cousins

No incest here, but I bet I caught your attention! I have a bizarre love triangle story to share. I’m a 40-year-old bisexual/demisexual woman with a 10-year-old son (had him when I was in a domestic partnership with a woman) and a 7-year-old daughter (had her with a man). My baby-mommy and baby-daddy are siblings.

I fell in love with a woman, let’s call her Tammy, and we had our son together. I carried and gave birth to him via donor sperm through a cryobank and received a intrauterine insemination procedure. I got pregnant on the first try! Gay marriage was not a thing in 2010 so Tammy had to adopt our son via a “Second Parent Adoption”, which is usually a way to make a step-parent a legal parent in place of the biological parent.

When our son was one and a half years old things started to go south with Tammy and I had what I now understand to have been post-partum psychosis/depression in the form of anxiety. It caused a lot of problems with our relationship and she started to see someone else, unbeknownst to me, as we phased apart and I starting talking about moving out.

About a month after moving down the road from Tammy I found out she had already moved on and was in love with somebody else, a married woman who was a “friend” to both of us.

I figured if she had moved on so fast I could open up to my crush, which just so happened to be her brother (we can call him Steve). He had grown on me through the years (hence the demisexual reference, which means I don’t find myself sexually attracted to anyone unless/until they grow on me and I start to feel attached to them). I’m not trying to make excuses for this taboo, untraditional move; however, I just felt that if she was truly in love with this other woman it wouldn’t matter too much. I figured I had earned the “green light” to confess my crush and extreme sexual attraction to this man I had known for the past three years as my brother-in-law....

So I started texting Steve and “confiding” in him about Tammy and I breaking up, and one thing led to another. I confessed that I had been having thoughts and dreams about him. He said he had been having the same...

We secretly started seeing each other for about two weeks until we were confronted at a family Christmas gathering. He and Tammy’s cousin had caught us making eyes. We tried to deny it but -like always- the truth came out. We thought about calling it quits but ended up continuing a relationship on the downlow.

Fast forward about four months: You guessed it, I got pregnant and found out coincidentally on Mother’s Day of 2012 (we were not trying at all, despite what the family speculated, so it was a big surprise.

We had even considered adopting out our baby due to all the drama that ensued with his/their family, but ultimately I ended up with two amazing kids that just happen to be half-siblings AND cousins.

It has been almost eight years later and everything is fine for the most part. I’m not in a relationship with Tammy or Steve anymore, but we all get along. I will also say it’s pretty convenient that the kids have the same sets of grandparents on both sides and can still see each other at family gatherings on that side.

Nothing seems to shock anyone these days; stranger things are happening left and right. It’s a messed up world we are living in. I wouldn’t change anything about my past and how my children came into this world. No regrets here, I truly believe that everything happens for a reason.

I have to admit it can be fun to see peoples’ reactions when I tell them my kids are also cousins. They have to really think about it for a minute!