What's Wrong with Half Siblings and Multiple Baby Daddies

[Mahogany Momma]

KLove sparked my desire to talk about fathers and I really want to put in my 2 scents about half siblings and having children with multiple partners. I myself am of Caribbean descent as is my son's father and we both come from a long line of half siblings. Though I am an only child on my other's side, my father had 4 children with 3 different women. My grandmother on my mother's side, had 5 girls, all with different fathers. My significant other has one brother and a sister, and again all 3 do not have the same fathers.

This happens so often in black culture and its one of the most common things people bring up when they talk about black women and sex or black men being dead beat dads. But there are other layers to this issue beyond failed black relationships that I think we don't talk about, but are actually very important.

When I got pregnant, my son's father and I participated in that genealogical survey you have to do during the first or second trimester to find out the probability of any birth defects in the child. The doctor asked us about any known health issues in our family, and after going down the lists of half we realized how completely clueless we were on the subject because our genetic lines were so all over the place. It was then we realized that on the topic of heath issues and genetic diseases, we had little clue about what our future held, or that of our child, because we had little clue about where either of us collectively came from. Shortly after that doctors visit I found out I had gestational diabetes and soon after that an aunt from my fathers side, informed me that not only did she just learn she was diabetic, it is common on that side of my family. This took me back for a loop when I sat down and not only contemplated the fact that I could be diabetic, but the reality that I have no clue about what potential health issues await me as I get older.

I feel like in our ignorance of normal family structures, lacking generations of grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles to connect to we lose so much knowledge of ourselves. This isolated issue really brought home all those grand and overall intellectual debates about the importance of rebuilding black family structures. It was the first time that I saw all our halfs as more than just a quicky commonality, its one of the many ways in which generation by generation we loose connection to our personal heritage and ancestral lines. Unlike other, for example Jews or the Irish, I can go back and talk about any one older than my great-great grandmother and now that she has passed, all of those people have died with her. But who would those people even be when we are constantly splitting into broken up families of mothers and multiple children of multiple fathers without shared grandparents, aunts, or cousins to bind us and make us one.

This is something that my significant other and I have talk about in great detail and we both feel that if we don't have any other children together, we certainly are not going to have children with anyone else because we want our children to have a shared family background. The same relatives to tap into, as opposed to a web that is far to complicated for any of us to navigate.

[Reading Diva]

My parents had two kids. When I was 18, I found out that my dad had another life which included a son. As I got older, I found out that I also had two older half brothers. To this day, I have yet to meet the oldest one. I have two daughters by two different men. I was with the youngest's dad for a while before I realized he was a mistake. My oldest's dad has 4 sons younger than her. She and the oldest boy are 3 months apart. The younger three are with his wife and they range from 9-14 (I think I have the ages right). My youngest's dad had two kids with his wife before they decided to go their separate ways. My girls are very close and they enjoy spending time with their siblings. I encourage it because I would never want to have any mistakes of hooking up with a sibling. My brother has three kids with three different women. My youngest half brother has one daughter and a child on the way with two different women and one of the oldest half brothers has two daughters with two different women and raising a daughter with his current wife.

[Nappykat]

Besides being on the lookout for not marrying or procreating with your cousin or half bro or half sis, why is this is a problem again?

Folks sharing stories and all, but why is this a problem? As descendents of Africans, we are most likely from a polygamous families - meaning a father had kids with many wives. So somewhere down the line we are cousins.

Personally I would have liked some extra siblings. My mom had one other child (different father) and he died without any kids. My dad got one (me) and he says maybe a possible, but she's not interested in seeing me appearently and my daddy won't give me no information about her. I've never seen or heard from her.

So I'm kinda like an only child. I would love to learn that my mom or dad had other kids - by anybody!