The day I discovered my husband had fathered a lovechild – just like Dave Grohl

On an unremarkable Saturday afternoon ten years ago my world exploded.

We’d just had lunch when my husband of 12 years darted upstairs. Five minutes later, he dashed back into the kitchen, stopping stock still in front of me.

“I had an affair,” he said. “It’s over now, but I had an affair, and I am so, so sorry.”

Weirdly, I laughed at first. Was this some terrible joke? But his face was white, his mouth hard and straight.

“No, it’s true. But it’s over now.”

A decade later, now 55, I can still recall it as an out-of-body experience. My head was spinning.

After firing a short volley of questions – Who? How long? How serious? Who knew? – I stumbled out of the house.

Gasping for breath and feeling nauseous, I jumped in the car and drove, pulling in by a field on the edge of our village.

By the time my husband found me, I was shaking all over. The crying didn’t start immediately but once it did I thought it might never stop.

It took weeks, months, years to recover from the rupture in our relationship.

But, with an enormous amount of effort and honesty, on both sides, we did recover. I have since heard friends say we are the closest couple they know, which is pretty amazing given that, along the way, my husband discovered he had become a father to a child without even knowing it.

The recent revelation that lead singer of the Foo Fighters Dave Grohl has fathered a child outside marriage has brought many feelings bubbling up again.

Grohl says he plans to be “a loving and supportive parent” to the child.

As for his wife and three daughters, aged between 18 and ten, he added: “I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”

Good luck, Dave. These are not things that can heal to order.

In the early days, directly after my husband’s lunchtime confession, I went over and over and over what had happened: when, where and why.

We had both been married before, but only I had a child, a teenage son.

Then, after seven years as a couple, when we were both 39, we had a baby.

It hadn’t happened quickly or easily and, up until the blue line appeared on the pregnancy test, I felt we were getting near to giving up.

On what, I wasn’t sure.

It turned out my husband’s feelings – at one point at least – were even stronger than that.

He had started to doubt that we would make it – the baby or the marriage.

I can’t speak for exactly how or why – this is very much my story, not his – but I do know that one night he met up with a female friend in a hotel near where she worked and they had sex.

“I immediately felt terrible about it, and told her so,” he said.

But a decade later, when he was again feeling despondent – and with this friend no longer married – they started an affair that lasted, sporadically, for around six months.

When the affair ended, he told me everything.

It’s probably only fair to say that I am not a stranger to extra-marital relationships.

As a teenager, I was illicitly involved with a man who was married with children, and I was noticeably free of moral scruples about it.

During my first marriage, I fell in love with someone (not my second husband) while my son was just starting school. But I admitted it to my first husband before it even really started, so averse was I to secrets and lies.

Perhaps I should have been more understanding, but the bombshell of my husband’s betrayal truly rocked my world.

I felt a rush of humiliation every time I thought of him with this woman, who I knew slightly – she was a friend of a friend.

Images burned so brightly in my head that I wondered if I was on the verge of a breakdown.

My GP gave me sleeping pills, and suggested that speaking to a therapist might be useful. I took her advice.

I know that lots of people think, why pay someone to listen to you talk about your private life? What are friends for? Or sisters, cousins? Or your mother?

For months, though, I was too ashamed to speak to anyone about what had happened.

With friends and family I became shockingly adept at putting on a front. So it was a great release to sit down with my therapist, a rather stern-looking American woman, and start gabbling about the two people who had brought such chaos into my well-ordered life.

I told her everything I knew about the relationship, as if doing that would help me understand it and tame my feelings.

In the privacy of her consulting room I could be bitter and angry, suspicious and sarcastic.

I didn’t have to be the calm and collected woman I wanted the world to see: I could let myself feel the full force of being rejected, overlooked and lied to.

I also talked to my husband – a lot.

This was new. Somewhere along the line, we had stopped talking intimately; sometimes I wonder if we had ever really started.

But now, with layers of my skin removed and my jealous sensitivities on high alert, we would talk – into the night, almost every night – about what had happened and where it had left us.

At first I demanded every detail – how often they had seen each other (not very much), where (her house), whether he had thought about leaving me (not really, though he wasn’t convincing), whether he loved her (yes, and me too).

He told me that talking to her was free and loving, whereas “I couldn’t really talk to you at all”.

That was painful to hear but, eventually, I realised he was right.

I had been scared that talking about our relationship would lead to it unravelling, so I’d literally turn away from heart-to-hearts.

Over the months I kept notebooks and computer files filled with fury and sadness, confusion and questions.

For me, it was a full-on bereavement; what I had lost was trust in my husband.

I genuinely didn’t know what I would do about it.

In my darkest times I wondered whether it would have been easier for me if he’d been involved with two different women, ten years apart – not the same one.

Did going back to this person suggest it was a much more serious relationship?

I said I wanted us to stay together, that I loved him, but I didn’t know if I was fooling myself.

Eventually though, with the therapy ending and the dust settling, I stopped needing to dig it all up again and again and I started to walk towards our future together.

Then came the earthquake.

During one of the endless post-mortems, he told me this woman had mentioned that she thought one of her children might be his, from that one-night-stand ten years before their full-blown affair.

I scoffed, telling myself some women will say anything to get someone to leave their wife.

My husband had seen this young girl briefly when she was around ten years old, but hadn’t felt a jolt of recognition.

However, several years later, on social media, he came upon a picture of her and was struck by a family resemblance.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it. It then happened again, a few months later.

He wanted to get in touch with the girl’s mother and request a DNA test, unless I said no. I had the veto on him discovering if he had another child.

Some people think he should have left well alone. What right did he have to disrupt this child’s life and cause who-knows-what trouble for the couple who were raising her together?

Sometimes I thought that myself. But, despite my hurt – renewed with greater force for a while – I felt strongly that a parent and a child should know each other if at all possible.

I am sorry that I hurt you. I really didn’t mean to hurt you,

Within my extended family and close friends there had been several instances of babies given up for adoption who had later been introduced, with great success, to their blood parent and siblings.

I had seen the joy that had blossomed in their relationships.

Also, perhaps stupidly, I thought he was probably wrong, and that this young girl was not related to him.

The mother had some story about checking with a doctor about times of sex and conception but she was, my husband told me, an unreliable narrator.

So, with my approval, he asked her and, eventually, she agreed.

It turned out my husband was right and he told me immediately that he had found his daughter.

I tried to look pleased for him, but I was deeply rattled. What would it mean for us? For our family? We had a daughter barely two years’ younger.

I felt as though I’d been thrown on to the set of a soap opera, or lined up for The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Would this living, breathing proof of his infidelity wipe out more than two years of building a new relationship?

Would the mistrust, anger and sadness come roaring back to rip us up again?

The news sent me back to my therapist.

She knew the backstory and could see how far I had come from when I first turned up, tearstained and shell-shocked.

She helped me see I could focus on myself and my children – our ten-year-old daughter and her older brother, by then 22 – without getting in the way of my husband building a relationship with his other daughter.

It might challenge the re-conditioned couple we had constructed, but maybe that was no bad thing?

The story of my husband and his daughter’s relationship is not for me to tell.

What I can say is that, largely, everyone has behaved pretty well, with generosity and not too much curiosity about the details.

My husband was introduced to his daughter by her mother and, for about a year, visits were rare and formal.

When our daughter, who is two years younger, met her half-sister they built a camaraderie and the possibility of more connection opened up naturally.

I have to admit I have struggled.

The logical bit of me wants to be generous and pleased for him and open-armed with his daughter, who is not to blame for any of this.

But the very thought of her re-activates my shame at being the woman whose husband was sleeping with someone else, and didn’t even notice.

That’s a bruising way to see yourself.

I once ran into my husband’s daughter’s mother at a social event.

She looked faintly terrified to see me, but then came up at a quiet point, when I was standing alone.

“I am sorry that I hurt you. I really didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said.

It still surprises me to say this made a huge difference to me. I felt almost elated, while she looked the opposite, flat and sad.

Years have gone by and my husband’s daughter is now a regular visitor and joins us on some outings and holidays as a family.

She’s a lovely girl, sensitive and intelligent, and I think she would like to have a closer relationship with me.

Sometimes I can be that woman, but at other times it’s too hard to accept.

It depends on how vulnerable I am feeling. Stories like mine are rarely told, but they are not as rare as you might think.

Both of my children have friends whose families contain additional, later-discovered half-siblings.

Some are welcomed into the larger family, some have never met, so great is the shame and anger.

While all the important people in my life, including my parents and siblings, know the basic facts and are understanding and supportive, I haven’t shared them with everyone.

Probably many more people than I am aware of know vague versions of the story, but I won’t let it drive me mad wondering what they think of me – or of the man I married.

I am now in my late 50s, and the strongest emotion I have about the whole story is pride in both myself and my husband for building a much better, stronger and loving marriage.

Also, gratitude that all the children involved are, apparently, good with it, too. I do know, though, that it has knocked my self-confidence and left me a more vulnerable person.

When I read about anything that is close to what we went through – such as Dave Grohl’s story – I can’t help but feel the twinges of pain again.

By writing this, even anonymously, I am hoping that it will help me continue to feel survivor-strong, but with enough humility to know that you never do know what life will throw at you next.