Woman Helps Best Friend Deliver Baby Only To Realize Her Husband Is The Father
She uncovered the betrayal while caring for the baby her husband fathered with another woman.
Alex Pasarelu via Unsplash / Medvid.com via Shutterstock A woman from Arizona found out about her husband’s infidelity in the most shocking way after her best friend's baby was born.
While happily married to her husband of six years, Travis Bowling, 28-year-old Hailey Custer had been a support system for her best friend and helped her throughout her pregnancy. She had even helped deliver the baby and was a “father figure” for the infant.
“In the hospital, before I found out, I stepped into that father figure role. I was there for her every step of the way. Even in the hospital, I wore the daddy wrist band, when she got her epidural, she laid on me. I actually gave the baby her first bath,” Custer told Daily Mail.
When her best friend's baby was born, Custer realized her own husband was the baby's father.
A few days after the baby was born, Custer noticed a birth defect on the baby’s neck when she was bathing the baby.
Photo: Dragos Gontariu / Unsplash
“I was changing her daughter and I noticed that she had what we call the Bowling bumps, and several of his other children have it as well, so I knew exactly that that baby was my husband's,” she said, explaining that Bowling and one of her children has the same birth defect. “I'm very familiar with [the hereditary defect] because my older son has it - it's an extra piece of cartilage that grows out of the side of his neck,” Custer explains.
The revelation had come as a surprise to Custer but when she confronted her best friend about it, her guilt confirmed everything.
Custer felt betrayed to realize her husband had been cheating on her with her best friend.
“When I found out my friend was standing next to me, I looked at her and you could just tell. She couldn't say anything, she just dropped her head and looked to the floor, and I just knew.”
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Custer still helped and forgave her friend.
Instead of looking at the situation as a wife, she made decisions from a mother's perspective. Despite being upset with her best friend, Custer decided to forgive her and help her out for the sake of the baby and the kids.
“I kept thinking of my kids, at the end of the day that is their blood sibling and I'm not going to be the one who causes harm to that child. So, she ended up staying with us,” she said. Custer wanted to keep a mutual relationship with her now ex-husband as well because they have children together. “There is no hate in my heart for either party. My ex-husband and me have three children together so I have to co-parent with him. And at the end of the day, my now ex-best friend's daughter is my children's sister. So I don't hold any hate in my heart.”
Custer also found out that this wasn’t the first time Bowling had cheated on her.
He allegedly had affairs with at least 30 other women and two kids from two of the women throughout their marriage.
Despite the betrayal, Custer has prioritized forgiveness.
“It’s huge for everyone to know that I found forgiveness for myself. I’ve had to find forgiveness for myself and for the children," she told The Sun. “That’s the main point, you can walk through anything in life, and you can find forgiveness it just heals you from the inside out."
Sanika Nalgirkar, M.F.A. is a writer who covers entertainment & news, lifestyle, and pop culture topics.