Family Secrets

My maternal grand mother has a "brother" uncle Mike, aka "Kiddo."
He's challenged.
My great grandfather played hide the salami with his sister and along came "Uncle Mike."

On my dad's side .. Six siblings were born, three are left... There's my dad and .. One is alcoholic and the other has been living with kidney failure for a decade. The three that died; cancer, mine accident at age 22 and (an alcoholic) drunk driving at age 26.
My one aunt, married one of my dad's alcoholic brothers. He died in a car wreck, drunk on the way home from a bar, leaving her with four kids under the age of 6. She was arrested for shoplifting, but she was dirt fucking poor and probably needed whatever she took.
She had another kid, but doing the math, it's impossible Uncle Tom was the dad... No one knows who my cousin's father is ...
My aunt's oldest son was also killed in a drunk driving accident. His cousin, my dad's other brother's son was driving.

 

I was 35 or so before my mom told me she'd been married before she married my father.

(By the time she told me, my father had been dead a few years.)

Her first marriage ended when my mother caught her husband sleeping with the wife of one of her brothers.

"And boom goes the dynamite."

 

On one side of the family, the grandfather's WWII experience was a family secret, just because he would NEVER mention a word about it, and want to relive it. He fought at D-Day. Passed away a decade and a half ago, and took a ton of knowledge with him.

A relative who gave birth to two children very close in age to each other. She raised one, her parents adopted the other -- and nobody knew until years after the grandparents/parents had died.

 

About five years ago, my dad found out that his parents weren't married when they had him ... or his three younger siblings. They finally got hitched in 1969, the year dad turned 13. Also, my grandmother had a nervous breakdown when he was a toddler and he was raised by his aunt for about a year. When grandmother reclaimed him, it resulted in a nasty fight.

Granddad was a known drunk and occasional guest in a Navy brig. What dad didn't know was that he (my father) was taken to a courtroom as a toddler for the benefit of the jury that didn't convict granddad of beating a man to death. Swell guy.

 

Because I don't want this attached to my real handle ...

A few years ago, my sister and I had to drive from Florida to New York after a family emergency. A few times, I asked to use her smart phone. One time I saw a note her husband had forwarded her that was his correspondence with another guy, talking about how he saw the other guy's ad on adultfriendfinder.com and it sounded like he and his wife had a lot in common with my sister and brother-in-law and they'd like to get together. "What we normally do is meet the couple at XXX," he wrote.

Now, I tried to reason that maybe my sister and brother-in-law were just trying to meet new people and this wasn't sexual. I had never heard of adult friend finder; I hoped it was a way for people to just make new, innocent friends.

It seemed like every time I used her phone after that, it was open to the mobile version of adult friend finder. And I gotta tell you, it sure didn't look innocent.

So I got home and checked it out. it describes itself as "a unique place for adult dating. Browse adult personals for sex dating, meet swingers for threesomes, try free sex chat with local singles."

I really thought I was going to throw up. But I couldn't leave it alone -- I put my sister and brother-in-law's zip code and age information into the search box and waited to see what came up.

There was my sister, topless and describing her current state as "naughty." It listed what they liked to do, but I think I blocked it out or took such a cursory glance that I don't remember.

All I could think about was how my brother-in-law wrote "We normally," as in, "We do this all the time," or at least, "We've done this several times." I couldn't believe it. My sister's been married for 12 years. She's my daughter's godmother. I never in my wildest dream imagined she was a swinger.

I've never brought it up. I did tell a mutual friend, simply because it was overwhelming me, and I wish I never had, because she's since been pretty crappy toward my sister. Oh, I haven't mentioned that my sister has five kids. I don't know what the hell she does with them when she and her hubby are off having sex with strangers. The whole thing is just impossible for me to comprehend.

 

It's an alternative lifestyle. Sounds like they're comfortable with it.

You wanting to vomit doesn't make them evil. Different strokes, etc.

 

Not scandalous, but my grandfather had an older brother who drowned when he was six in the outlet than runs through our town. This was happened in the early 1900s, but I was able to find the newspaper accounts of the drowning. For me it's just fascinating to read the accounts in the paper that I now work 100 years ago. My grandfather was named after him.

On a funny note, I found out that our family's history of bad driving goes back to horse and buggy days. About the same time I was found out about my great uncle, I came across a story of my other grandfather getting into an accident with his milk wagon on what is now a major trucking route in our county. I wasn't shocked. I was just glad I found when the pattern started.

A little more soapy, a relative of mine had an affair with a married guy for 20+ years and and had a kid together, which she gave up for adoption. He eventually went back to his wife, and they divorced. One of my earliest memories was going out on his boat with his kids with the two of them.

I guess it wasn't much of a secret, but since it happened when I was so young it's taboo to bring it up anymore. It's been bugging me a lot though since we hired the guy's sister at my job. It's a small town so we all knew each other anyway, but anytime she metions my relative or her nieces and nephews I cringe. Especially when she included the kid that was given away in the count.

 

My great great (maybe one more great) something or another may or may not have murdered someone in Texas and then fled to Mexico. Someone else was blamed for the murder though and found guilty. My great grandfather on the other side was a moonshiner with a molasses business for a cover. Someone working for him died and may or may not have been murdered. I've never heard enough details on either story to make up my mind on what I believe.

 

I'll agree. My old roommate was a swinger for a while and he is not "evil". There is nothing wrong with it in my mind.

 

Can the record show I didn't say it was "evil?" I said it made me sick to my stomach, and it does/did. Infidelity in general does, and even if they're both on board with it, it's adultery, which is not what I expected from someone I asked to be my daughter's godmother and who had me stand as her maid of honor.

 

My family secrets are buried deep.

Keeping secrets runs in the family as [JayFarrar] Vagueness is a running joke amongst my friends.

As a matter of fact, a regular poster here is also a close friend. He has said he knows more about my life from what I post here than from whatever I'd put in conversation, or a phone call or an e-mail.

*shrug*

 

My wife had an older brother who died of what they now think was Reye's Syndrome (couple of years before my wife was born). Her parents, who had four children live to adulthood, never talked about their oldest's death with the family, but they talked a good bit about it with me (of all people). My wife and her siblings pumped me for information for several years after I joined the family.