Family Secrets: We All Have Them

When I started to write this blog, I thought I would focus on how families have become more transparent, more open, in the discussion of family secrets.  I thought that years ago, family secrets were kept hidden, never to be reveled, or else discovered upon the death of the person keeping the secret.  Now, I think this is still the case.

I guess there are big family secrets and little family secrets.  A big family secret is when it is discovered that the deceased had another family, another wife, and several other children, that no one ever knew of.  My friend went to the funeral of her first husband.  He had three children with his first wife.  At the funeral, my friend saw one of the mourners who looked just like her.  It was her half sister from another family, someone she knew nothing about.  Wow, while married to my friend she had fathered other children, and no one knew about them until his funeral.  What a shocker!

We used to have a box at Hollywood Park, and became very friendly with the older couple who sat next to us.  We learned through the years, that the man had fathered another child, with a woman who was a family friend.  The child was always thought to belong to the woman and her husband, but in fact, our friend was the real father.  I knew the boy when he was an adult in his 20's.  He knew who his real father was, but the secret was kept from the father's wife.

Things like mental illness, pregnancy out of wedlock, alcholism or drug abuse, and abortion, are family secrets that are often not revealed, unless by accident.  More and more the stigma of these situations are becoming more understandable, and are being revealed.  People now realize everyone has family secrets, and keeping them locked away is hard.

I'm reading a book  called Annie's Ghosts, about a family secret.  A son has researched his family history to find out why his mother always called herself an only child, when in fact she had a younger sister, with birth deformities and mental illness, who lived to be 52, and neither he nor any of his three other siblings new about sister Annie.  It's very interesting, and it shows that usually secrets cannot be kept forever.  Something happens to reveal them, and often the hurt that is caused is greater than if the secret had been told in the first place.