Heteropaternal Superfecundation

This week, it was announced that a Dallas set of 11-month old twins have different fathers. The parents noticed that the twins had different facial features. DNA later confirmed 99.9% that they had different fathers. Scandalous! What a way to out an affair.

Heteropaternal superfecundation is not new. There is a spattering of similar stories online. For example, there is a 2007 story of a Chinese man suing for divorce on the grounds that only one of his wife’s twin babies was actually fathered by him. I don’t blame him.

However heteropaternal superfecundation (I just like saying that) may not be that rare. Either that or women are just sleeping with multiple partners within the same time-frame more often. I mean how else can you explain it? Some of those swimmers are quite strong and once a sperm makes it past the cervix, it can hang around a couple of days praying that an egg will just happen to make its way down. And sometimes, an egg will make it way’s down even if another already fertilized egg is trying to make its home in the wall of the uterus. Science is beautiful and just amazing.

When I was but a child I had a magnificent imagination. I was probably 8 or 9 but I had created this persona, Jacqueline, a beautiful dark-skinned black woman, who lived in a mansion in Australia by herself. In this alternate world which lasted a couple of years in my childhood imagination, Jacqueline was either not married and had two close guy friends or was married to both. Don’t ask!

One man was a handsome fair-complexioned, green-eyed black man, and the other a handsome blond, blue-eyed white man. And somehow, my dear Jacqueline ended up pregnant with triplets. In December of one year she gave birth to two healthy boys. The third child was not ready yet so the doctors kept the pregnancy going. The following year (February to be exact), the third child was born. It was a girl and her name was Clarissa and she was a bit of a weakling.

Jump forward many years and the babies are now children and the boys very protective of their kid sister. It was a weird but loving family. See, the first boy was dark-skinned with green eyes and tight coily black hair; the second boy was light skinned with blue eyes and wavy sandy hair; and dear Clarissa, what was she? Olive skinned with brown eyes and auburn hair. I had just learnt the word and colour auburn you see. In this make-belief world, all three children were Jacqueline’s, but the first boy’s father was the black man, the second boy’s was the white man, and dear Clarissa was fathered by both men. And they all lived happily ever after!

If that is not the imagination of a child then what is? Lol! I know one can begin to wonder what would possess a child to think up a story like that. But I am not to blame. I was an avid reader and I loved mythology. And if you know your mythology, you know that the king of the gods Zeus had many baby-mommas who were either female gods, mortals or nymphs. I felt for Hera by the way. In any case, one of the baby-mommas was Alcmena, a mortal woman who was married to another mortal Amphitryon. Alchema gave birth to Zeus’ son the demi-god Heracles and the following day gave birth to Amphitryon’s son (therefore Heracle’s twin-half brother) the mortal Iphicles. So if the gods can do it, why not man?

That’s not blasphemy, but I wonder if speculating whether Cain and Able are products of heteropaternal superfecundation is?