My grandfather never forgave himself, and he never talked about it. My grandmother was the only person he ever told, as far as we know, and she didn’t tell my mother or me until long after he was gone. When we were cleaning out the house after she died last year, we found a small box in their bedroom. Inside was a clipping from the local newspaper about the accident.
It said they had swerved to miss a kangaroo and called it a tragedy. I don’t think my mother ever told her siblings, so technically, this is still the family secret. I guess now you’re all in on it. My mild-mannered Christian mother casually told me that she dated a gangster who trafficked cocaine in New York during the eighties.
He bought her a brand-new BMW before getting sentenced to twenty-plus years in prison for murder. A man who was friends with her and her ex for years turned out to be an FBI informant, and she barely escaped jail, had to enter witness protection, and moved across the country. Here’s the craziest part: he’s still stalking her, has contacted her on her birthday every year for forty years, and keeps tabs on her. My dad has no idea.
When I asked why she waited so long to tell me, I said, “What if she went missing? ” She said, “Oh, honey, he’s the type of person that if he wanted to harm me, I would already be dead by now. ”
Very comforting. My father was married to another woman before he met my mother.
They had a daughter, and my dad loved her so much that his wife started going crazy with jealousy. My dad noticed some strange behavior she showed toward the girl, and when he tried to talk to her about it, she started arguing with him. He then left with his daughter and went to my uncle’s house. She knew my dad would leave the girl with my aunt while he was at work, so she called the police and said my aunt had kidnapped her child.
The police came and took the girl away from my aunt. She immediately tried to call my dad, but the woman drove back home, put poison in her daughter’s milk, and forced her to drink it. When my dad arrived, he found his daughter already dead and alone. The woman was never found.
My dad never got justice for his first child. Then when I was born, my mother didn’t mind naming me after my sister. We share the same name, and that’s actually how I found out. When I asked my parents about my name, they told me the whole story.
When I was young, I thought it was really nice that my nana lived with my aunt and her family since she was getting on in years and it meant she was looked after and there were always people around. My aunt has six kids. Occasionally, my aunt would complain about being the one looking after Nana, since she’s also one of many kids. Being young, I sympathized.
But given they all spent loads of time with Nana too, I didn’t think it was a big deal. You don’t think about financial responsibility when you’re young, just the social and caring side of things. Well, it turns out the reason Nana lives with my aunt is because my aunt and her husband convinced Nana to put the house in their name so they could look after her affairs, then sold it out from under her and invested the money in a pyramid scheme, so it’s all gone now. Because of this, her siblings refused to give my aunt a penny toward looking after Nana, since it’s her fault Nana has no money or assets.
Instead, they pay to take Nana out all the time for meals, shopping, and activities so she doesn’t go without. But they let my aunt struggle under the weight of Nana’s general living expenses. My aunt’s kids are all independent now, so they aren’t going to be impacted by money problems. Now I look back at her complaining with annoyance and think what a terrible person she is.
My favorite cousin wasn’t missing. All I knew growing up—he was thirteen years older than me—was that he would come and go a lot. He lived with us when I was a baby, and after he moved out, he would visit every six months or so out of the blue. But we never visited him or called him.
His visits were one of my favorite things in the world. I loved him like a brother. By the time I was a teenager, I understood that he had issues with his parents. They had kicked him out at thirteen, and my parents took him in.
But that kind of childhood messes with you. In between visits to my parents, he avoided the rest of the family, moved a lot, and didn’t hold jobs for long, which is why my parents didn’t always know where he was. But in my later teens, he stopped coming over at all. I asked repeatedly if anyone had heard from him, and I was told no.
I asked about contacting him, and I was told no one had a number or address for him. He would come around when he felt like it, but it stretched on for years. I really worried he was dead, and I really missed him. In my late twenties, I finally found out that everyone knew where he was the whole time.
He was in prison for murder. From what I hear, it was actually somewhat justified. He was defending his new wife, who I never got to meet. I also found out some really messed-up things about how the extended family sided with his messed-up parents and refused to help him or his wife when he got arrested, and that they shamed my dad into not helping either.
I tried to send a message to him in prison, but I don’t know if he ever got it. I wish he knew that I didn’t turn my back on him for decades like everyone else did. I just didn’t know. Not very much of a secret, but it took me until I was older to understand what was happening.
My mom would sometimes have us play a game called Army, which consisted of me, my mom, and my siblings army crawling around our apartment, kind of a hide-and-seek style game. She would yell “hit the deck” randomly, and we would all drop and find a hiding spot. We would giggle and giggle while my mom army crawled around looking for us. We loved the game so much.
I realized a few years ago while retelling the story that we lived in a really terrible neighborhood, and she would yell it out when she heard gunshots outside the building. I’m assuming she was worried about stray bullets. Turns out the reason my mom’s parents divorced wasn’t because they fell out of love, but because he had an affair with another married woman from church. The families had known each other for years, and my mom was good friends with the other woman’s kids.
They ended up getting married less than a year after their respective divorces. They each had three kids. It was especially sad because my step-grandmother’s children—the other woman’s kids—suffered pretty badly because neither she nor her ex-husband were functional adults. Their kids grew up fast, and the oldest daughter basically became a mom at the ripe old age of twelve since her dad refused to step up.
My bio grandmother, bless her, didn’t tell a soul about this. When I told her I knew, she sort of smiled and nodded like it was a relief that someone else knew besides her. I can’t imagine keeping a secret like that for so long and not being able to tell your kids that it really wasn’t your fault that you divorced and upended their lives. So yeah, I learned that little gem while helping with my step-grandmother’s hospice care this past fall.
She was always a chatty person, but end-of-life drugs really amped it up. It was pretty shocking because my grandfather is a pretty laid-back, kind, straight-laced church person, and you’d never suspect him of cheating. The worst part is that in my shock and confusion, I told my mother about it, and it was pretty obvious she had no clue prior to me telling her. I really wish I could take that back.
My grandfather and his first girlfriend were meant for each other. They loved each other greatly and started dating when they were around sixteen. Then one day, when they were in their twenties, back in the 1950s, my grandfather heard a rumor that his girlfriend had entertained some unknown men at her apartment. They fought and split up, and immediately my grandma swooped in and married him.
They had three children, but my grandpa never stopped loving his ex-girlfriend, who also got married and had children. My grandparents divorced as soon as my mom, their youngest child, moved out, and my grandpa and his ex-girlfriend got back together. They lived together until her death a few years ago. My maternal grandma had alcoholism, and even though I loved her very, very much, she wasn’t necessarily a good person.
She died when I was ten, many years ago. My mom recently told me that my grandma, while drunk, confessed that she had started the rumor. She had torn my grandpa and his girlfriend apart because she wanted him all to herself. Mom told me that since she was drunk, we can never confirm it.
But if it was true, I exist only because my grandma was a jealous person who tore apart a couple meant for each other. What an internal conflict I had when I first heard this. Mine is more cool than horrifying, in the sense that I’m proud of this one. My grandfather was an amazing guy.
He was a sniper paratrooper in World War II. He always refused to talk about the army. I learned later that he was dishonorably discharged after an injury. Turns out the sergeant in his squad was an absolute bastard.
He had to go behind enemy lines to set up a post, and the plane was flying too low for a safe jump. He protested to the sergeant, who proceeded to shove him out of the plane after calling him a coward. Both my grandfather and his spotter partner were seriously injured in the landing. His partner, who I never knew, was paralyzed and lost a leg.
My grandfather broke both of his legs, his hand, and some ribs. They were both rescued shortly after and taken to a military hospital. That’s not what got him discharged, though. Turns out the sergeant showed up to visit them in the infirmary, and my grandfather punched him square in the face with his only good hand twice.
If his only army buddy we ever knew is to be believed, he was also visiting at the time and my grandfather told him to flee. After that, and on top of his injuries, the army sent him home for the rest of the war. We found out later, after he passed and we had to go through his stuff, that he had kept a bunch of newspaper and article clippings about the folks involved. The sergeant was also discharged after a similar incident cost the lives of two other members of his squad a year later who weren’t so lucky.
The man apparently drank himself to death years later. We found all these written but unsent letters to his sergeant. We found photos of my grandfather’s squad and the two who died. It was heartbreaking.
I never knew any of this. He was such a fun, kind, and goofy guy that you’d never think anything like this would happen to him. Now I knew why my parents always said never to bring up the army around him. Miss you, Grandpa.
I’d have punched the bastard too. My step-grandfather has always been an alcoholic. As a child, he even taught me how to mix his favorite drink. At about six years old, I would mix his drink the way he liked it and bring it to him in the living room.
Don’t ask what the drink was a mix of, because I literally can’t remember. My grandpa always acted funny, and I always liked spending time with him because I found him humorous. So I never saw the bad side of his alcoholism, and he never made me drink or anything. Overall, he didn’t have any negative impact on me at all.
But before I was born, he could get so drunk that he threatened to attack my grandma. And when he got into a car accident and came home, he was bleeding badly from his head and started saying my grandma had attacked him. He even threw out some of my parents’ wedding pictures. I never knew how horrible he was.
Maybe because he liked kids or something. He would make me cocoa and watch Garfield with me when I was a kid. He was never a bad influence in my life. So it was so weird to me when I found out these things about him.
Before he died though, he really regretted drinking and completely stopped. He became really depressed too, until his biological granddaughter was born. He was so happy about his granddaughter. He died regretting everything, sober and happy to have been able to meet his one and only biological granddaughter.
Regardless of everything, he really changed in the end, and everyone was really upset when he died. I accidentally uncovered a fifty-nine-year-old family secret, and it has torn two families apart. I have not felt comfortable sharing this story until my cousin’s wife let the cat out of the bag on social media. A few months ago, I took a DNA test to confirm the regions my ancestors come from, and it went so wrong.
I got my test results back and checked my ancestry results, which were similar to what I was expecting. Then I went to the matches page to see which of my family members had taken the test and how much DNA we share. The top two matches were people I didn’t know. My dad’s family is part of a religious cult.
Think the closest you can get to fundamentalist polygamy without being polygamous. It turns out that my grandma had an affair with her husband’s uncle, who was the leader of this cult at the time, and ended up having my dad. Some of the church members were apparently listening in on another phone when my biological grandfather—my grandma’s husband’s uncle—made a phone call to my grandma, and something was discussed that made it clear they were having an affair. They leaked the news to everyone who was in the church at the time.
My biological grandfather left the church and moved halfway across the state. My family tried to keep it on the down low, and it was kept a secret other than my dad’s cousin hinting at it when they were twelve. My dad graduated high school and ended up leaving the cult. He was pretty much cut off from the family when he did this, because the main rule of this cult is that people who aren’t part of it are going to a very hot place, if you catch my drift.
The matter was never brought up again, and my siblings hadn’t heard of it other than what my dad told us. We took that story with a grain of salt, because most kids, us included, make up a rumor about another sibling or cousin being adopted. The two people I matched with ended up being my half-aunt and my half-first-cousin. My half-aunt is still part of this cult and was aware of the affair.
She was a teenager when it happened. I reached out to her, but she ignored my messages and told my cousin that she wouldn’t talk to my dad’s side of the family to protect her dad’s reputation. Her dad died almost twenty years ago. My half-first-cousin is my dad’s age and had no idea about any of this.
This cousin has also left the cult and had very limited contact with his mom, but her response to this entire situation led him and his family to go no-contact with her. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got another close match. This person turned out to be another half-cousin’s daughter. I reached out to her, and she was very kind but understandably seems to be very uncomfortable with this situation.
The most messed-up part of this whole thing is having to rethink how I’m related to people. The people I thought were my dad’s full siblings, and therefore my full aunts and uncles, are actually my half-aunts and half-uncles, but also half-cousins, since my dad’s father is their dad’s uncle. The woman I thought was a cousin is actually my half-aunt. It gets even more confusing with the age differences.
My half-aunt is just a few years younger than my grandma, and my half-first-cousin is my dad’s age. The half-cousin’s daughter that I matched with also has a child, making me a college student with two generations of family members below mine. I’m not quite sure how to approach this situation other than to just keep quiet about it. I don’t want any more relationships to be damaged because of this family secret.
I know for a fact that my cousins don’t know, but I’m not sure about my dad’s siblings. Overall, this is the most messed-up situation I’ve ever been in, and I regret taking the DNA test. If you want to take an at-home DNA test, please consider my experience and decide if you’re willing to take that risk. My father was a dentist, as was his stepfather.
They shared an office until my grandfather died when I was five. Dad practiced in the front office, while the older back office was kept in pristine shape but unused, as far as I could tell. I thought it was out of some kind of respect for his stepmother, who continued to live above it. Many years later, I was comparing old dental instruments scavenged from his office with my younger brother.
I showed him a giant curved forceps, wondering what the hell he used that for. “Oh, didn’t you know he used to do abortions in the rear office? ”
I didn’t, but a lot of pieces finally fell into place: the late nights at the office, the cash, and the items patients often bartered with as payment. I was too innocent, I suppose, when I left for college to be let in on his secret.
But my younger stay-at-home brother wasn’t. Shock was quickly overcome with pride and joy. There’s nothing good about illegal abortions, except when they are desperately desired by the people with the most need and the least means. My father had a reputation for kindness and flexibility in billing.
If you needed work done, it would get done. And best of all, done well by all accounts. “See this temporary bridge? Doc put that in fifteen years ago, and I never had to go back.
” He was an unhappy dentist with a surgeon’s hands. I imagine he provided high-quality health services to hundreds of women who otherwise might have ended up in the emergency room or worse. I was told that my father was not my biological father when I was fifteen. I always had a difficult relationship with him, and I was treated differently from my siblings growing up.
My biological father did a runner when he found out my mother was pregnant. I tracked him down three years after finding out. I managed to find out where his brother worked and left a message there for him explaining who I was and that I wanted to connect. The letter was handed to him at his other brother’s funeral.
He eventually made contact with me. We met up, and it seemed to go well enough. The first red flag should have been that he kept my number on his work phone only. He didn’t want to tell his kids, as they were all in a good place at the time.
He said his wife didn’t want me in contact with his family. I suspect he never told his wife. We met up for three months and got coffee from a McDonald’s drive-thru. He stopped responding to my messages after those three months.
The funny thing is, he walked out on me twice. I’m a better father to my kids than that coward could ever dream of being. Not super dark, but I found out my mom and her best friend met because my dad had dated them simultaneously. My dad picked my mom over her.
Then my mom’s future best friend married my dad’s best friend, even though she was and still is miserable with him. Some people, not my mom surprisingly, think she married my dad’s best friend to stay close to my dad. My mom is so likable. She just kind of won her over.
She’s still super bitter about it, but it’s just never been directed at my mom, since she didn’t have anything to do with any of it. Learning this finally explained why, whenever I was alone with her for even a minute, she was so insidiously emotionally abusive toward me, which was so frightening as a small child. I never told my parents about it until I was old enough to be more confrontational when she did it. Then it just stopped.
She loves me now, but despised me as a kid because I had my dad’s personality just in a little girl’s body. So she seemed to treat me the way she wanted to treat my dad but couldn’t. He really did some damage, though, because some of the things she’d say to me were dark. When I was about ten, I was snooping around in my older sister’s room, and I found some old pictures of my mom and sister.
I thought, “Wow, Dad really looked different when he was younger. ” I then spoke to my mom and casually said, “Dad looked so different when he was younger, didn’t he? ” Mom said, “What do you mean? ” I then told her, even though I knew I was going to get in trouble, that I had been snooping in my sister’s room and found these photos, and Dad looked totally different.
I didn’t think too much about it, but later on I was called in for a family meeting where I was told that the guy in the picture wasn’t my dad, and that in fact my mom had been married previously, and that was the man in the photos. I was also told that my sister wasn’t my dad’s biological daughter and that she was actually my half-sister. I was quite confused, as you can imagine. Then towards the end of this massive discussion about how she was my half-sister but I shouldn’t treat her any differently, I was hit with another bombshell.
“Oh, also, you have a half-brother you have never met, and we have never mentioned. He went with your sister’s real dad, and I had your sister. ”
I freaked out, as you can imagine, but after that meeting this stuff was never spoken about again. I met my half-brother when I was sixteen, and as you can imagine, I hated my mom.
So yeah, the moral of the story is, kids, be careful snooping, as you just might uncover things your family would rather hide.