It is mind-boggling that an Ontario man has been ordered by a Superior Court judge to continue paying child support for twins that DNA tests now show he did not father. Oh, the unfairness.

On the other hand, the brain is equally tugged from its moorings by the fact that this man suspected all along that someone else fathered the twins. But handed two, gorgeous muffin-like infants, he nevertheless sought joint custody of the children when the marriage broke up and agreed to pay child support. What goodness of heart!

The point where the reader begins hyperventilating is where everything was going swimmingly — until the ex-wife went to court seeking even more child support. The gall!

Then the court judgment revealed that the wife claims to have no memory of the affair that preceded the birth of the twins, thanks to medication she was taking at that time. At which point the reader stops breathing entirely.

In cases such as this, all sympathy transfers to Madam Justice Katherine van Rensburg, who presumably became a judge knowing she'd have to adjudicate on matters as fraught as this one. But she probably never dreamed she'd be spending her distinguished years shifting papers on a mess that will still be a mess even after she renders a decision.

At this point, she may have wished she had a somewhat easier case to decide: like the one of the New York doctor who is suing his estranged wife for access to their three daughters and the return of the kidney he donated to her, their marriage having finally collapsed after she had an affair with her physical therapist. He values the kidney, an asset that after all kept her alive and pumping, at $1.5 million.

A gassy swamp

I am almost as reluctant to write about divorce as I am about religion. I find all religion pointless and mystifying. But then so is divorce, not to mention marriage.

No sane columnist looks at a divorce case and longs to opinionate. It's like looking at the greenish gassy bubbles popping in a hot swamp and thinking, why don't I dip my foot in that, it will be liquefied by viruses or severed by something with teeth, but at least I'll know what lives there. (Take that, Richard Attenborough.)

In the Ontario case, van Rensburg had to decide what constitutes parenthood.

Given that family law is based on furthering the best interests of the child, she had to decide whether a man who spends years acting as a father can, after a DNA test, go back in time and ask for his child support back. (Yes, the divorced husband wants a refund. Given that he lost his case, he'll probably have to pay costs, too, poor guy.)

In other words, can children be abandoned despite a moral wrong committed by adults? Despite changed circumstances, and despite an entire loss of desire for a person who once glowed so hotly that you became all slippery just thinking about them, that you longed to make and bear their children, and one day you put on your wedding clothes so that you could do so?

No, they can't, obviously. This is a court of law we're talking about, not a motel room. The couple are in loco parentis, which is Latin for crazy parents. (I've never heard that joke before but I bet it's ancient.) Pull yourselves together, people.

The right of a child

"The right to child support is the right of a child and independent of a parent's own conduct," van Rensburg rightly concludes. The divorced husband was the only father the twins knew and even though the marital relationship ended in 1998 after six years, he continued to behave like a father, at least until the damnable DNA test.

The twins are 16 now, not the easiest age, and the vicious fight between their parents must make them feel wretched.

How DNA has vexed our lives. I recently watched Presumed Innocent, the 1990 Harrison Ford courtroom drama that spins entirely on whose semen was in the corpse. In the pre-DNA era, it lasted 127 minutes; today it would be over in a brisk 27.

Divorce cases tease us with unanswered questions. Who the hell is the ghostlike "Tony" to whom van Rensburg glancingly refers to in the last page of her judgment? Why did the husband not act on his doubts about parenthood at the time?

And what medication could make a woman "forget" she had an affair? (A lot of people will be clamouring for this drug.)

I worry

Child support is a laudable construct difficult to fit into real life. I worry that one of the twins has dropped out of school, which means support is suspended, which means the paying parent financially benefits from the teen's continuing distress.

Who is going to put the twins through university, if they ever sort themselves out? Another fight looms.

Another problem is that child support doesn't go to the child; it is always funnelled through the recipient parent who is free to blow it on cigarettes and whisky, which makes it seem like a disguised version of alimony.

Since it is notoriously difficult to enforce — and who can afford the slice of income demanded by current child support rules? — an unloving parent can use it as an instrument to control an ex-spouse.

In this case, it can't please the courts or the patient judge that this decent and rational judgment will make equally decent and rational people balk. Over a duped man who must continue paying for 16 years of being lied to.

That's not fair, we say, and we're right, but that's the law.

The practical lesson of this case: stay out of family court. Everything hangs on chance. A bad-tempered judge, a hungry lawyer, a change in sperm technology and your life turns to ashes.

If only you had never met that that gorgeous young nurse named Dawnell. If only you could take back that athletic liquid night with some jerk named Tony.

Know the price of infidelity. The poet Carole Ann Duffy described it best in the terrifying Adultury:

So write the script-illness and debt,

a ring thrown away in a garden no moon can heal,

your own words commuting to bile in your mouth, terror—

and all for the same thing twice.

And all for the same thing twice.

Which leads to the other practical lesson: don't marry. Marriage transforms you. It puts you at the mercy of judges — logical people who sigh and do the right thing.