Valerie Spruill Raising GSA Awareness

Valerie Spruill, a woman I blogged about the other day because she unknowingly married her genetic father, continues to make the news. CNN picked up her story in this piece by Chelsea J. Carter…

It was a dark secret. The kind that destroys lives, devastates families and decimates faith.

That’s a bit negative and overly dramatic. He provided half of the genetic material that made her. And they loved each other.

Spruill met and married her husband-father in Akron and settled in Doylestown, a working class suburb of about 2,300.

It was her second marriage. Spruill was a nice man, a good provider. He was kind to her three children from her previous marriage.

"We had a good life," she said.

Isn’t that what is important???

In recent days, she has been in contact with a couple who found out after they were married that they were brother and sister.

They told her, she said, that her story is helping them deal with their own experience.

"They are trying to be friends now," Spruill said.

I wonder if they are people we already know about? It is unfortunate that they felt a need to end their marriage.

Others, though, have been less kind.

"They've said things like 'Some secrets should stay secrets,'" she said.

They’re hateful people who want to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the truth.

Spruill, herself, has three children and eight grandchildren. She struggled with telling her children that the man they believed was their step-father was their grandfather.

A therapist "advised me to tell my kids," she said. "I told them about two years ago. They are remarkable. They are handling it better than I am."

In recent days, shortly before the news broke, she also told her grandchildren.

"They have been so supportive. They are telling me they love me, telling me they will do whatever I need," she said.

That’s as it should be. Good for them!

In her spare time, since retiring from the accounting department where she worked for 34 years at Goodyear, she has been writing down her story with the hopes of publishing it.

It could make a great book and a great movie. Whether or not this was a case of Genetic Sexual Attraction, I don’t know. I have not read anything about how she and her husband met and what her feelings were like then. This case involves some of the same issues as GSA either way. In none of the stories have I seen an example of why her marriage was a problematic, other than her feelings about consanguinamory. This indicates to me that if we change our attitude towards consanguinamory, there will be less suffering.