Did your parents keep secrets such as one or the other of them having been married before,

[raccoon]

the fact that one or the other wasn't your real parent but an adoptive parent, etc.?

Mine did. I was a teenager when I found out my father had been married and divorced before.
How I found out was someone had recorded his first marriage in the family Bible.

[CTyankee]

1. Yes. My brother freaked but I didn't.

[Brickbat]

2. As far as I know, mine did not. However, I've been burdened with secrets from friends' parents.

Awkward.

[Jim__]

3. If they did, I never found out.

Damn! Something else to keep me awake at night.

[queenjane]

4. My mother was married before. She intended me NEVER to know

Then one of my cousins filled out a bunch of family group sheets for genealogy research, gave me copies, and lo and behold, there was an entry on my Mom's for "other husband". When I asked her about it, she almost died of humiliation.

Turned out he was her cousin (it's common in my family for cousins to marry one another), and they married during WWII, when she was 14 and he was 24. She had the marriage annulled 2 years later (turns out his divorce from his first wife wasn't final when they married).

This man had been attending the family reunions all those years, but I had no idea who he was. Mom never spoke to him, introduced us, etc., but after I found out they'd been married, I went to him and started talking. What a wonderful man he was. After his older brother's death, he raised his niece and nephew. He never remarried. Once I officially knew him, I guess he thought the coast was clear and he started calling Mom (who by now was living with me) and they would chat for hours. Per his niece, who cared for him as he was dying, he carried a framed photo of he and Mom with him everywhere, even to bed. I don't think he ever stopped loving her.

Even now, the story makes me sad. My own father was not a good man, and I wonder how different my childhood would've been (not to mention how different I would look!), if they'd stayed together.

[Walk away]

7. That's a screen play! Get to it girl!....nt

[lumberjack_jeff]

61. How different you'd look?

Maybe you'd still look like your father but simply have a different mother.

We're a product of a father and a mother. Remove either one and you never happened.

[Walk away]

5. I have a Step Brother and my parents don't know that I have known about him for ten years!

I'm not sure what to do about the whole thing. He is half my age and apparently looks just like my Dad.

[raccoon]

10. If yall have the same dad, he's your half-brother.

I have a half-sister whom I've never met. I thought about looking for her, but never have.

[Duer 157099]

64. Do you want to meet him? How do you feel about his existence?

Do you think he should contact you, or you him? Do you think your parents should determine whether you can/should get to know him?

[The Straight Story]

6. I have a daughter in CA who does not know I am her dad - yet

She will when she is 17/18, I keep up with her and her mom on FB.

[Booster]

8. Yes. When I was 35 my Mother sat me down & said "I have

something to tell you that is going to shock you". I thought "yeah, right". A little background: my Mother and I never really got along and it was no secret in the family that she adored my brother, as we all did. I loved him more than I loved her too, so I understood and accepted this. She proceeded to tell me she had a daughter when she was 16 so I had an older sister. Again, I was 35 and both parents knew this secret. She said "you have to promise me you won't tell your brother". My brother died when he was 50 and the sad thing is I'm not the sort to want to get to know this sister, but my brother would have, and for that reason I'm sorry I never told him. He would have found her, he would have brought her into the family with an open heart, and he would have loved her. Now, they are all gone, and I still wish I had told him. I still resent that burden she put on me and wonder why she told me; what was the purpose. She nor I ever spoke of it again.

[Raschel]

54. Well that really stinks. How crappy of her. Like you said, what was the point. She just put more

stuff on you. :hug:

[Booster]

60. I really think she was testing me. If I had told my brother, she

would have said "see, I knew you couldn't keep your word". There just doesn't seem to be any other reason for telling that secret. At the time I thought it was mean spirited and I still think it was mean spirited. When we got older, she gave him thousands and thousands of dollars and never gave me a cent. At one time, after she had given him $40,000 to start a business, he called me because he knew I wanted to buy a house. He said "ask her for the $12,000 you need for the down payment because she can't refuse you now". I did ask and she got really mad and said "ok, but this is your inheritance and don't you ever ask me for another dime". I bought the house, turned that over several times and eventually made over half a million on real estate. I never asked her for another dime and to this day I credit my brother for my success. If he hadn't pushed me, I would have never asked for the money.

[Raschel]

56. I've had two people confide in me that they don't think their parent (one is her dad, the other her

mom)is their birth parent.

[closeupready]

9. Yes, something like that, and I wasn't very happy about it.

My grandmother married a man and then divorced him within a year or two back in the 1920's, and then married the man who would become my grandfather, to whom she remained married.

Funny thing is, she was Catholic. And I was raised strictly Catholic.

[csziggy]

71. After my father's mother died the family found out she had been married before

She married my grandfather. First, Dad found a set of silver engraved with the letter "L" - there were no "L" last names in the family ever that we knew about. Then Dad found her parents' family Bible. He thought this was weird since she had been seriously into genealogy but had kept that Bible hidden for her entire life. When he read the entries, he found her first marriage listed and a notation about the divorce. It shocked Dad and his brother - they never talked about it at all as far as I know.

Someday I want to get a copy of the divorce papers and find out why she was divorced and who was held at fault. Her first husband re-married less than a year after the divorce. He was divorced at least once more - I found a record of his third wife on Ancestry. Grandmother did not marry again for a number of years - she met my grandfather years later and they stayed together until his death.

[gkhouston]

11. I didn't know my Dad had been married twice until I was almost 30.

His first marriage was a brief one, during WWII, and ended long before he met my mother. There were no children, but his mother was put out that he'd divorced "one of their own" (a local girl) and later married an "outsider" (someone he met at college). :eyes: Finally, I understood why my grandmother had treated my mother like crap.

[madmom]

12. Yes, but they only thought is was a secret.....

my mom was very embarrassed when she told me that "they HAD to get married". I asked "what's the big deal?" She just shook her head and walked away, its never been mentioned again.:shrug:

[TBF]

13. My children are still young but they have no idea that I was married

previously. We had no children and the marriage only lasted 2 years. Someday they will know because I did use my first married name after the divorce so my current marriage certificate (also the wedding invitations etc) has that name on it as opposed to my maiden name. I would never tell them about it, it's not relevant now and it's not something that I like to talk about. I guess it could come up if one of them wanted to marry young and I could use it as a cautionary tale ...

[calimary]

14. Yep. My mom.

My brother isn't really my brother - he came from her earlier marriage. No relation to my father. And since I was adopted to begin with, there was that added level of disconnect. She didn't see fit to tell me until the last few years of her life. Thing is, though, I already knew. My dad finally told me, and of course I heard it from other people with whom he'd shared that info before he told me. One of them was the mother of my best friend, who, naturally, told my best friend who then told me.

Love it. :sarcasm:


Probably one of the things that helped make me such a cynic. I spent quite awhile wondering WHEN are they gonna tell me? It became almost like a game. "Let's see how long it's gonna take before one of them just finally admits it. Let's just see." Good GOD, STOOOOOPID old shames and taboos. It was just STOOPD and completely fucked! What did they think I was gonna do? Disown them or something? Forcryingoutloud.

[raccoon]

46. That's the way I felt--why keep it such a deep, dark secret?

Whenever you find out someone's been keeping a big secret like that, you wonder what other secrets they're keeping.

[calimary]

62. It just rendered me REALLY tired, fed-up tired, of these STOOOOPID taboos from yesteryear.

It made me mad that I was deprived of that information because of somebody else's shame, a full 17 years BEFORE I was even born! When no one cared anymore and it didn't make a damn bit of difference in an regard whatsoever.

It motivated me to confront another taboo even bigger: who my birth parents were. 'Cause I'm adopted. I always knew that part of it - my parents never hid that from me. I got a fair joke out of it, though: that's where I thought babies came from. The baby store! You just went down to the baby store and you picked one out and that was that. I found information about my birth mother - who's long dead, but even so! And her kids - who ALSO didn't realize their mom had an "oopsie" before she met their dad. I mean, shouldn't there be a shelf-life on these things - so they EXPIRE after a few years, or, okay, a decade or two maybe.

[nenagh]

15. My father died when he was 92 yrs old, and essentially ..

He kept hidden until the very end of his life a 30 yr relationship with a woman and her three children.

It was as if he had a second family which he helped support and hid from his wife, his child and every friend he had.

After he retired, he and my mother became "Snowbirds" and my Dad had a part time job that took him away on weekends. :)

The bosses weren't there then, he would say.

I met this lady at my Dad's deathbed, and was the person to explain to the nurses and physicians, that this was not his health-care worker, this was a woman that he had greatly cared for for many years...

I knew there was someone who meant a lot to him in the last years of his life... but never imagined that the relationship went back 30 years. She was 22 yrs his junior.

[eShirl]

16. No, but there was a secret that grandmother tried to keep about great-great grandmother

Great-great grandmother had a child (great grandmother) out of wedlock before marrying a different man who adopted/raised her as his own (with his last name). One of my siblings, who had been working on genealogical research for a few years, asked grandmother about the inconsistencies in dates on official records - surely some of the data was in error? That's when the truth finally came out... She hadn't outright lied, she just hadn't corrected people's assumptions as to who her biological grandfather had been.

[dmallind]

17. Nope - mother was twice married and never secret. Half sister and all

Not much chance of adoption as I look too much like my dad. Admittedly a 5'11 275lb version of his 5'5 145lb original, but same enough barring size.

[Raschel]

58. I'm not questioning your situation, but I know a a young lady who looks just like her adoptive

father. People comment frequently on how much they look alike. It's weird!

[dmallind]

59. I suppose it's possible - only a limited number of "looks". Major coincidence though! nt

[spin]

18. Yes. I found out that my father had been married before ...

My uncle accidentally told me this when I was in my thirties and my father had been dead for over fifteen years. That's as much as I could find out.

My father was a man of many secrets as was my uncle. I imagine both were far more interesting than I will ever know. I'm not even sure that my mother knew that my father had previously been married, which may be why my uncle would not discuss it. My mother was still alive when my uncle died. Sensing that there was a possibility that my mother never knew, I didn't ask her.

I do know a few tidbits about my father. He was an civilian investigator for Naval Intelligence during WWII, did background checks on scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project and helped to break up a German spy ring in Pittsburgh. On the other hand he ran numbers for the mob when the cops were cracking down on illegal gambling prior to elections. He traveled on both sides of the law.

You've reminded me of something I need to check into. I need to do some research on my family.

[KatyMan]

19. If there were no children, does it matter?

I can see if one found out that one had a different father or mother, or that there was a sibling out there somewhere you didn't know about, but if you mom married a guy when she was 20 and divorced at 22 with no kids, and married your father then had you, what's the big deal? Parents have lives too!

[DCKit]

20. I always wished I were adopted and unrelated to my family.

Sadly, that is not the case.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

21. My dad had been married before, during the Depression.

When I was in high school, my older sister told me dad had been married before, for 12 years, but had no children.

When he married Mom after the war he told her he was sterile since he didn't have any kids. So guess who got here 11 months to the day after the wedding: My big sister!! My mother must have been naive!!

I was completely shocked when my sister told me that. I was not shocked that he was divorced. I was shocked that nobody told me. Mom said "I thought you knew". I said, "Well you never mentioned it, how would I have known?"

:banghead:

I don't understand my parents' and grandparents' generation: If you had been married before, whether divorced or widowed, you were supposed to act like that person never existed and never mentioned it. It was shameful for some reason.

If a previous spouse was mentioned, it was only in whispers.

When I was cleaning out my grandparents' house, where I live now, I found a beautiful set of sterling silver flatware for 8.

I looked up when it was made. It was made about 1920. The grandfather (actually grandmother's third husband--she outlived three of them) had been married once before in about 1920, so it must have been first wife's flatware. The only times I heard the woman's name mentioned, they were always negative. I knew nothing about her. She died in the late 1950s and they had no children.

All the rest of the flatware here was silverplate. So it probably had not seen the light of day in 50 or 60 years.

:shrug:

[raccoon]

47. Exactly how I felt! "I was shocked that nobody told me."

And there were no photographs of my father's first wife.

"I don't understand my parents' and grandparents' generation: If you had been married before, whether divorced or widowed, you were supposed to act like that person never existed and never mentioned it. It was shameful for some reason."

Exactly how it was in my family.

[csziggy]

74. One reason it was kept hidden was there were no "no fault" divorces

The only way to get a divorce was if there was a serious reason to be divorced - desertion, abuse (but often that was not considered a good reason), cheating, etc. Somebody had to take the blame for the divorce and it was generally for a shameful reason.

These days a couple can agree that they cannot get along and get a divorce pretty easily. But in the old days, it was not easy or blameless.

[get the red out]

22. Yea, I created a "shot gun" situation - found out at 47

We recently found out my Mom was pregnant with me when our parents got married in 1964, we had always been told they married in 1963. It would be no big deal except she was unbelievably Victorian in her attitudes regarding sex and just about went nuts when my sister and I began dating in college (not high school).

Of course I am still too embarrassed to even consider talking about stuff like this to my Mom and Dad's gone (going through his things and finding the marriage license after he passed is how we found out).

[sad sally]

67. When our son was seven years old, his older cousin told him that

his mom was pregnant before she got married. Our shocked son came in and asked in disbelief if this was true. Yes, honey, I told him and it was you who was the precious baby. He survived - is 46 now, married father of two - we did too. In fact, him knowing about it made talking about being a responsible hormonal teenager very easy (and he was).

[csziggy]

75. Yeah, hubby was born exactly seven months to the day

After his parents' wedding date. His mother no longer keeps it hidden but I can remember when I started collecting genealogical info on his family and hubby confirmed what he had long suspected. His parents always celebrated their wedding anniversary but never mentioned how many years they had been married.

[sinkingfeeling]

23. No.

[Javaman]

24. I think my aunt was really my grandmother but that's a whole other story. nt

[DisgustipatedinCA]

25. Yes. My parents even had a fake anniversary date that covered 2 marriages

My dad was a Southern Baptist preacher. He had been married once before marrying my mom. Instead of telling the church the truth, he just backdated his 2nd marriage to cover the time of the first and second marriages. My mom had also been previously married, and I guess she kept her previous marriage quiet in order to make the math work for Dad's claim. The church threw a surprise 25th wedding anniversary for them once. They were actually somewhere around the 12-year mark at the time.

I found my mom's wedding announcement one day in the spare junk bedroom, and the groom wasn't my dad. I was 12 or 13 at the time.

There's probably not much you could make in the way of a response that I haven't thought of at some point or another. I still shake my head when I think about this.

[ljm2002]

26. My dad was absent from our lives...

...he left my mom, and my brother and me when we were still tiny tots. Apparently he never told his new family about the first one -- that is, he did not tell his children. So one day my brother, then a young man seeking his roots, shows up at our dad's door, and one of the half-brothers answers. My brother identified himself, and the young boy ran upstairs, very upset, to get his father. "Dad, someone is at the door and he claims he's your son!"

Must have been awkward. :-)

[hifiguy]

27. My story is similar to yours

After my dad died, my mom told me that he had been married once before to a woman who had a daughter (not with my dad) and gotten divorced. I didn't think it was a very big deal at all. Why would I? It was at least 15 years before I came on to the scene.

[Throckmorton]

28. Yes, and it all made sense years later.

But, as a kid I never understood why my father didn't have anything to do with his family.

My fathers oldest brother killed his wife and himself, leaving two grammar school aged sons (age 6 and 8) locked in the upstairs closet.

They ended up living with us until they were married. I was 2 and vaguely remember their arrival.

My mother and father never explained any of this to me as a child, and I was 43 when dad told me the entire truth. He didn't want me telling the story around the neighborhood as a kid, (Army Bases) so all I knew was that their parents were dead, and had died really close together (I always thought it was months apart).

My father was the youngest of 10, all of his remaining older siblings refused to take the boys, including his Lawyer Brother (who's wife threatened to divorce him if he did). They all agreed that an orphanage was the best place to send them. My mother was horrified (eldest of 9 children) and begged my father to take them, he was a SSGT in the Army and we lived 1500 miles away. He agreed, and his family told him it was his choice and that they washed their hands of them completely.

They grew up as older brothers, and the younger of the two and I are still very close. He went on to earn a PhD in Physiology and was immensely helpful with my own two children when my wife died 8 years ago. It was only after this personal tragedy that my dad told me the entire story.

[JVS]

48. What kind of group of siblings wouldn't take in their nephews?

Especially since at least the lawyer in the bunch would have had the means to provide.

[Throckmorton]

65. That was why I never met any of them.

They are all dead now, only my father remains. Neither of the boys (as my mother still calls them) went to their mother's funeral, and when I asked my PhD brother a few days before my wife died if I should take my two children to their mothers pending funeral, he advice was to ask tham if they wanted to go (they were 7 and 9). Just about the best advice I got the entire time, and you could tell he had pondered the same thing a thousand times before I asked.

[TwilightGardener]

29. I don't think so--my parents' and grandparents' lives are pretty well documented

in terms of when they graduated from high school, married, had kids, where they lived, where they worked, etc. They'd have had to lie about something, because there doesn't seem to be any holes or gaps in their stories. My husband's family, OTOH--there's a prior marriage/family that one grandfather had had, but apparently grandpa's NEW family with my husband's grandmother (second wife) never knew about it until they were adults. Never knew they had half-sisters and -brothers, and as far as I know no one ever made contact with these abandoned kids or wife from the previous marriage. And no one talks about it. My husband knows very little about it. I think back then a lot of men and women simply walked away and started over, pretended it never happened.

[mysuzuki2]

30. I didn't find out until I was in college that my dad was adopted.

[ChazII]

31. Yes.

No big deal for me.

[ieoeja]

32. My grandmother kept secret being raped by her biological father and the subsequent abortion.

She was in the room when her daughters (including my mom) were haranguing my (now ex-)wife over having had an abortion when she was young. After all other attempts to get her daughters to shutup, she finally told them about the rape and abortion.

They never bothered my wife again.

[gkhouston]

40. One of my grandmothers was the illegitimate child of her "foster mother".

We never knew it until after she died and someone who'd grown up next door to her wrote my mom a condolence letter.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

33. Sure did.

My father was previously married and had a son from that marriage, all kept a secret. I was an adult before I knew I had a half brother, or that my father had been married before. It did explain why he never spoke to his family and why I never met any of them.

Then there was the fact that my brother was not my father's son, and that my mother was pregnant with him when she married my father. I found that out when I was in my mid-teens. He (my brother) and I always looked the most alike and both had identical green eyes and hair coloring. Which oddly enough isn't like any other person in our family. It's always left me wondering.

[Xithras]

34. I found out as a teen that both of my parents had been married previously.

It wasn't a huge deal, as they were divorced from each other at that point, but it still came as a bit of a surprise.

My dad married his high school sweetheart a week after they graduated. The marriage lasted a year and a half.

My mom took a road trip to Tijuana when she was 16, and married her 16 year old boyfriend while they were half-drunk. My Catholic grandfather was furious when he found out. That marriage lasted two weeks until both of their parents had it annulled.

Though the marriages didn't bother me, I did later learn an additional detail that bugged me for quite a while. Apparently my dad's first wife was pregnant when she filed for divorce. They assumed that the baby belonged to the mothers boyfriend (they split up because she was cheating), but after birth they discovered that the little girl was really my dads. Unfortunately she was born with a heart defect that was not correctable in the early 1970's, and she died a few months later.

THAT bothered me. I went from being "the oldest" to "the oldest that lived". I really wish that my dad had been honest with me about it when I was younger. Deciding not to talk abotut your past is one thing, but hiding the existence of siblings, even if they've passed away, is another thing entirely.

[EFerrari]

35. My family had more secrets than the Winchester Mystery House.

lol

[Rhythm]

36. I found out about my dad's two previous marriages when my older half-sibs showed up

My mom knew about all of this, but I was 11 when i found out about the first two half-sibs -- a brother 5 yrs older, and a sis 4 yrs older (their mother was deceased, and they'd been raised by their maternal grandmother). The THREE oldest (a brother 10 yrs older, plus fraternal twin brother & sister 8 yrs older) didn't come into conversation until they showed up on the doorstep along with my dad's first ex-wife!

Suddenly, our financial ordeals made a lot more sense. We should have lived comfortably with his military pension and full-time office-manager salary, plus my mom's paychecks, but we always struggled.

He was paying alimony to the first ex, plus child support for 5 kids, the oldest was 10 yrs older than me.

[jtrockville]

37. I found out about, and met my half-sister when I was 24.

Didn't meet my half-brother until I was in my thirties.

[pipi_k]

38. I never knew for years that our grandmother

wasn't my dad's biological mom.

She treated my sisters and me like the rest of the grandkids...never favoritism toward them or anything.

It wasn't until I got older that I found out that my dad's mom "left" him when he was 5 (in 1930) and my "meme" was grandpa's second wife.

Dad never saw his bio mom until maybe 50 years later, just before she died. He never told us what happened, and it took until 2007 for me to accidentally find a cousin from that side of the family who filled me in on some parts, and we found out Edna (my bio grandmom) was put in prison by her mom where she delivered another son. My dad's brother. He also had half siblings by "meme" and grandpa. Edna was put in prison for promiscuity. Seems her son wasn't her husband's son. Most likely he was my grandpa's BROTHER'S son...nobody knows for sure, but I'm willing to believe it because he looks SO much like my father. I never knew about him, either. Dad never told us, although I'm sure Edna did tell him.

My uncle died some time ago, but I did connect with his daughter on Facebook...a cousin I never knew.

There were so many family secrets. So many... :(

[mimitabby]

42. me too

after my father died in 2003, I got a phone call from a man with a NJ accent. uhoh, I thought, some sleazy lawyer...
boy was I wrong.
During the time that my father was courting his last wife (they stayed married for 37 years) he got another woman pregnant. She was (gasp) black! so I now have a brother who is black. After he called me, his daughter (who looks SO MUCH LIKE US) got in touch with me and she and I still keep in touch via FB. My brother (half brother really) is the best son my father ever had. Too bad he rejected him completely. My father paid child support to his mother until he turned 18. That is, 10 dollars a week. He paid more than twice as much to MY mother, but we weren't black children.
I am the only person on this side of the family to feel enriched by this information. It's nice to know the family genes are living on through this good man..

[raccoon]

52. Good golly! "Edna was put in prison for promiscuity." If people were put in prison for that now,

just imagine the prison jobs it would create! :sarcasm:

[laundry_queen]

39. There are a few in our extended family

Nothing (that I know of) with my parents. They were quite young when they were married and everything checks out. However, I did find out when I was an adult that my grandmother's parents were cousins. She was highly ashamed of this (she was bullied because of it) so we found out through other relatives.

My aunt and uncle kept secret from my cousin the fact that my uncle spent 3 years in prison for some kind of fraud. My aunt had just found out she was pregnant when he went to prison. She waited for him and when he came out he had a 2 year old daughter, my cousin. She has never been told. The whole family knows so I'm surprised it hasn't slipped out. Said cousin is now in her mid-thirties.

Also, I have a great uncle by marriage who fathered a child with one of my second cousins. I only met them - and the resulting child who was now an adult - once. Apparently that 'child' had no idea until adulthood and it really messed her up. My mom said growing up everyone *knew* something was off but no one REALLY knew for quite a few years exactly what had happened.

I have numerous friends that had first marriages that their now-teenage children know nothing about. I don't get what the point of keeping it a secret is, because it really makes kids (adult ones too) doubt everything they ever knew about their parents when they find out later on. It's best to just mention it as a part of our life that was 'before' your current marriage/children. Secrets are dumb and selfish imo.

[raccoon]

55. Well said!

"I don't get what the point of keeping it a secret is, because it really makes kids (adult ones too) doubt everything they ever knew about their parents when they find out later on."

[MountainLaurel]

41. Found out when I was about 10

That my father had been married before and had another son. Long-story short, her family was against her marrying so far out of her social class, and after my dad reenlisted (during Vietnam), she divorced him. Her second husband officially adopted my half-brother, so the only contact over the years was a photo when he graduated from high school and a call after my dad died. He left a phone number, but I think my younger brother may have lost it.

I also know a young man who has been raised to believe that his biological mother is his older sister. I was friends with another sister. Judging by their father's obituary, the boy (probably not about 30) still doesn't know.

[shanti]

43. no, but a cousin

found out that the father she had always known (my uncle) wasn't her bio father when she was a teen. she accidentally discovered the papers showing her adoption, which is when her parents came clean. pretty devastating for her then, but she made peace with it.

[hunter]

44. A family history of mental illness.

OMG.

I now understand why my older relatives would look at me kind of funny when I was a kid. All the signs were there that I'd grow up to be one of the lunatics nobody talked about.

Thank goodness for modern meds.

[pipi_k]

49. I hear ya...

mental illness up the wazoo in my family also.

Plus enough alcoholism to keep treatment centers in business for a very long time, if enough family members had even bothered going.

[Wait Wut]

45. My greatgrandmother disappeared.

On my dad's side. Just vanished and no one bothered to find her. There were rumors that my greatgrandfather had her "exiled". She was from Spain, my greatgrandfather was from Germany. He was extremely wealthy, but no one knows why. From what my grandmother told me, she was a warm-hearted and compassionate woman. He was pretty much king asshole with some embarrassing and sickening ties in Germany. Some believe that she may have questioned his allegiances and voiced her opposition. Possibly even threatened him with exposure (they were living in the US).

[seabeyond]

50. hm... nada. or secret so well kept, i never found out. my parents were really young

they didnt have much time to acquire secrets. moms family had stuff in the closet, but she wasnt the closet type and swung door open for us all

[Solly Mack]

51. Yes. Both big and small secrets.

Some they died with.

[bigwillq]

53. No

My Mom was engagaed to someone else before she met my father and they told me.

[Aerows]

57. My mother

She kept the fact that she had a child when she was very young and put her up for adoption. Somewhere out there I have a half-sister and I didn't know about it until I was 30. I always wondered why she was so secretive about my birth certificate, until she pointed out that I was listed as her third child (I have an older sister). Oblivious me never noticed it, but apparently, my sister had at 15 and knew about it.

[Raine]

63. I found out long after she was dead that my grandmother was a lesbian

and a grandfather who had another family. That one of my aunts was raped by her brother-inlaw and that another aunt had a boyfriend who shot himself in the head because of her. All kinds of family secrets probably more than I'll ever know about.

[grasswire]

66. I have come to think that my mother was bi or lesbian

....and I have no idea if anyone in her family ever knew. Two of her sisters are still alive, in their 80s. No one would ever, ever, ever think of raising this possibility. I would never dare to mention it to my teabagger fundie sister. I wish I knew more about the ways that lesbians connected and hid in the mid twentieth century.

Addendum: she's been gone for almost 25 years now.

[MilesColtrane]

68. It was never discussed that...

my brother was really my half brother from my mom's first, brief, abusive marriage.

I don't think my parents tried to actively keep that from me, but they offered no information until I was looking at my brother's baby stuff one day and asked them why he had a different last name on his birth certificate.

It made me feel stupid, like I should have figured it out before, and a little like I was not worth them telling me about it.

But, I realize now that they weren't trying to hurt me.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

69. The woman I thought was my Grandma......wasn't.

It turns out that my Grandpa had been married before, and had 3 children with his first wife. But the 4th pregnancy ended in tragedy: both she and the baby died.

I'd never heard this story. It had been hushed up and when it had been talked about, everyone whispered as though the dual deaths were something shameful.

It was many years before I even saw a picture of my original, biological Grandma. She was beautiful and looked so strong and healthy. But the babies had come pretty quickly, and back in the 1920's, health care wasn't as good as it is now...

I wish I'd known her.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

70. My dad did not speak to his sister for FIFTY YEARS

She had an illegitimate child in the 1930s. Her boyfriend was married. The younger brother raised the daughter.
I never met my aunt until the 1980s. Dad did not want us to contact her. She was in NE Ohio and we were in Texas.
And my uncle's wife would come down here every summer, and always said "You look just like your aunt Lucile"!

Lucile was the oldest, Dad was the middle child, and Oren was the youngest. Their mom died in the flu epidemic in 1918.

I never knew why my dad acted that way, didn't want me to see her.

We finally went up there in 1986 and I met her. It was spooky how much I looked like her. She was a very nice lady.
After I met her I cried for two days over the relationship I never had and the other aunt and uncle would not discuss it.

Dad did not see her from 1936 to 1986. That is sad. :cry:

He said that when he knocked on the door she said "Well, you're not Oren so you must be Cliff".

However, Mom told me that Dad's first wife, mentioned in a previous post, called Lucile a slut, and that Dad "knocked her across the room" for that.

Sounds like he had conflicting emotions. I have since met the two granddaughters at Lucile's funeral in 1995, and they are good people.

[iris27]

72. Oh, God, tons.

Over the years, I have learned:

- my father was married before

- my father may not be my father, because my mom was having an affair right around the time I was conceived. I know the guy, but have no real interest in finding out for sure.

- my uncle was gay and mostly kicked out of the family for it (yeah, I'm related to some real winners)

- my much-older cousin was gay, again kicked out, fled to San Francisco as basically a runaway teen and ended up dying of drug OD at 21

- my grandfather had a fiancee when he left for Korea, but dumped her when he came back to marry my grandma instead

- my other grandfather was adopted as an infant from Ireland by American parents



Most of this, I found out from other people who knew (or from genealogical research) and not from the family members involved. Well, except for my uncle -- he had the guts to show up at my great-grandmother's 80th birthday party with his partner. :)

[astral]

73. This is an amazing thread. Thank you.

I found out when I was only 12 that my father was not my real father, and it was only because I knew something was wrong and went looking for evidence that my mom wasn't my real mother, but she was. I was so traumatized by this information that I never tried to talk to my parents about it. Never! I struggled with it until my early 20's and somehow made a decision to drop it because I wasn't capable of opening my mouth to speak, after all those years. Plus, my father never treated me like I wasn't his child.

There is no reason for lies and deceit, maybe the last generation was raised that way, but let's stop it now. It's so harmful.

Oh, as I entered middle-age, my mother finally decided to have that talk with me about my heritage. It wasn't that she never meant to tell me, it's just that ... well, when was the right time, I guess they never quite figured out at what age I was old enough hear about it. So I may have relatives I don't know about besides my real father who is probably dead by now but do I want to know? Something happened to me, when I grew up all alone with my 'secret,' that I wasn't good enough to even be told about my true heritage, and then having to make a decision to drop it in order to move on with my life, something happened to me then, too, like finally dropping a very heavy load, and then finding out very late in life that people who weren't relatives nor even friends of mine knew about this thing that my parents had never told me about. People I didn't even know.

Sounds silly, but it would have helped to know as a young girl that it wasn't just me, wasn't just my family that withheld big secrets from their kids.