Family Secrets

I agree as well. OpenHeart, you may not be calling them evil, but you are certainly being very judgemental. As long as they agree to do it together, I see no problem at all. No way in hell I could do it, but if they are happy, good for them.

 

This is more of an open secret. My aunt and her first husband had a son who died when he was about 3. The only explanation I've ever heard (from different people over the years) is that one of my aunt's friends "who was on drugs killed the baby." When I've asked what that means, no one has been able to (or wanted to) give me more detail. It's not something I've ever talked to my aunt about. She has a 25-year old daughter who completely cut off communication with her a few years ago (my aunt doesn't know why and my cousin won't say anything more than her mother is "nuts."). I can only imagine how devastating it is for my aunt - one child dead at 3 and her living child not speaking to her. Every so often I think about my cousin, who would have been a couple of years younger than me if he had lived.

 

No real opinion on the swingers -- it is skeevy, but so are a lot of other things -- but the fact that the need for the hook-up was so urgent that they have the Adultfriendfinder app on their phones is hilarious.

 

I'm guessing this is an open secret in my family. My aunt and uncle on my mom's side had four kids and we got together quite a bit when we were kids. When I was probably seven or eight, I found out my aunt and uncle were divorcing (it was very amicable as I recall), and then in matter of months, my uncle started living with this guy, who soon enough was at all the family functions -- really good guy and liked by everyone in the family. When I was college, my mom told me the "roommate" died of "cancer," and in subsequent conversations, she remarked that my uncle wasn't doing well and wouldn't last much longer. About a year later, she called and told me the uncle died, but it was never made very clear to me what he died of.

Well, your a smart bunch here and you probably know where this is going. I figured as I got to my teens that my uncle and roommate were probably a gay couple (they kept living together over years and three different houses) and everybody pretty much knew it -- however, it was never, ever discussed, even after they died. And I'm also thinking they might have died of AIDS, because I never really got a clear explanation of their death causes. My parents have never alluded to the nature of the relationaship at all through all these years. I won't hear it from my mom, who herself passed a few years ago, but I'm tempted to just ask my Dad to see if he'll confirm it.

 

Very funny.

And I should rephrase that post: I have three sisters by two dads, not three as that post implied.

 

My wife's family has a lot of these kind of secrets....I will give the caveat, though, they are from rural S.C.

-- her dad's mom's had four kids. She kept three and gave up one. The three she kept have all been essentially white trash for most of their lives. However, my father in law who is functionally illiterate can beat me pretty much blindfolded in chess and there is not a mathematics equation he can't figure out. He also can solve rubicks cubes and complete the peg game at Cracker Barrell to one peg from any starting point. So where is this going? The one son they gave away became a NASA scientist because his adopted parents pushed him to learn. I look at my father in law and can only imagine what he could have been if someone saw the math and science potential. Luckily, my daughter has that math gene.

-- my wife's mom was one of 11 kids born to a sharecropper. Based on the ages, I get the feeling some of the younger ones are children of the older ones, who were then raised by the grandparents as their own. But that is not the real secret. When my wife's grandfather died, about seven kids from another woman came forward from N.C. to say that he was their father as well. Not a happy funeral, according to my mother in law.

 

I guess I was the family secret for a while. I was born to a 17-year-old in Munising, Mich., in Upper Michigan, who had gotten knocked up by the 19-year-old from suburban Detroit who was staying with her family while he helped coach the town's drum corps (at the time, every town in the UP had one). Then again, her then-21-year-old sister by that point had already had two daughters and was either divorced or was never married -- I can't remember. She also had given up a child for adoption. Anyway, my birth mother got married to someone -- not my birth father -- while she was pregnant with me.

I ended up finding her 11 years ago, looking mostly out of curiosity. The biggest problem, if you will -- she's a nice, stable person. No horror stories of birth parent craziness. So like my mother (also a UP native -- my parents adopted me while my dad, a Concord, Mass., native was a student at Northern Michigan following an Air Force stint up there) did with my brother and I, I'm taking my kids up to the UP every Fourth of July for some r-and-r and a small-town Independence Day parade and celebration with much extended family. (Very few of my mother's relatives are in the UP anymore.)

By the way, thanks to the magic of the Internet, knowing only my father's name, I know where he lives, what he does for a living, what his phone number is, what his wife's name is, what she does for a living, how many kids he has (two daughters, both college age, and one son in high school), what religion he is (Byzantine Catholic) and where the graves of most of his relatives are (someone in his family maintains active pages on find-a-grave-type sites, and by looking at dates and other background, I think I had relatives survive the fatal, for five workers, Bituminous Coal Strike of 1894 in Uniontown, Pa.). I also learned that despite what the state of Michigan put on my adoption form, I'm not Polish on my father's side -- I'm Slovakian.

What I haven't done is actually call him. The state of Michigan coordinated me meeting my birth mother, so she had the right to say no, or to think about it and contemplate the idea before saying yes. With my birth father, I feel like it's a 50-50 chance he's told his kids, or even his wife, that he's got a 42-year-old son out there, and I don't want a ruin a man's life with two little words: "Hi, Dad!"

 

My grandmother's parents and two sisters disappeared one night. Blood was found in the house and a year later, parts of my great grandfather were found in the river. That's all my grandmother will tell me. She told me once, she'd "tell me about old times" when I got older. Nothing yet.

 

WTF? Nothing more detailed than that? C'mon man, that's a Flannery O'Connor story in the making.

 

My aunt died of breast cancer about two years ago. A month after her funeral, her immediate family and her siblings all gathered in Hawaii to spread her ashes in her favorite diving spot.

While there, my uncle started talking about how he was on Match.com and EHarmony and how he had dated three different women in the time since my aunt had died. He was going on and on about how much fun dating was and he completely implied that he had slept with two of the women.

His daughter, my cousin, lost her shit and ran out of the condo. My uncle said, "What's her problem?"

My cousin's husband started yelling at him, "We're all very happy that you're dating again, but maybe the time to tell that is not in front of your daugher on the day she spread her mother's ashes!"

 

Did he show everyone his new earring and tattoo as well?

My wife's family has secrets, or so they think, as they confide with another person who goes to blab it all over the place, but the family member with the "secret" is oblivious to everyone knowing.

Some secrets are using a story that one family member was date raped instead of admitting getting pregnant in a competition with a roommate as to who can have sex with more guys. Another got pregnant at age 17 with a 30-year-old business partner of an older sibling.

Other secrets include obvious signs of drug abuse, fraud (because there is no way in hell some can afford the cars and houses they have on their scant incomes), male siblings pretty much abandoning their kids in childhood after divorce, and others serving time in jail.

 

Everyone deals with grief in a different way. All things considered,this sounds like a pretty good way (though maybe with less bragging).