Maria Shriver's entire world was turned upside down when she discovered that her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had fathered a lovechild with the family's housekeeper -- who had worked
for the couple for 20 years -- Mildred Baena. But Shriver knew that she could not change the past and has vowed to continue to put her children first in the future.
"While Maria may not have been as angry at Mildred as she was at Arnold, her instinct would be to protect her family," an inside source told People. "Whatever she did in the aftermath was about taking care of her kids, trying to shield them and trying to minimize the repercussions."
A task that, even though Baena told her entire side of the story to Hello! magazine, Shriver has kept to -- she has yet to comment on the magazine's tell all style story.
Adhering to the long Kennedy tradition of keeping your emotions in check, Baena recalls a graceful Shriver who, after confronting Baena about her husband's affair, picks the sobbing 'other woman' off the floor to embrace her.
"Maria asked me directly if Joseph was Arnold's son, and I just broke down," Baena said. "I dropped to my knees and I was crying, saying that yes he was and I was so sorry ... She was so strong. She cried with me and told me to get off my knees. We held each other and I told her it wasn't Arnie's fault, that it takes two."
But Baena's admission that her son, Joseph, was Schwarzenegger's biological child wasn't a fact that was always to clear to Baena or Schwarzenegger.
"Arnold's been providing for the kid ever since he found out he was the father, which was when the kid was a young child," the source continued. "He did not know when she was pregnant and perhaps not even until he was a toddler, but he knew when the boy was very young."
Thirteen-year-old Joseph seemed to be the only one who had not had suspicions that he looked oddly like his mother's 'The Terminator' boss. When Baena finally told Joseph, at the age of 13, that Schwarzenegger was his biological father, the young boy -- who was not able to graduate with his middle school class due to the media storm -- simply responded, "cool."
With the worst of a family's secrets now in the open, it seems as though the Schwarzenegger-Shriver-Baena group can finally begin to heal.
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