I always marvel at the amount of stress those double-wifed men must feel. Remembering birthdays, heck, remembering to call everyone by the right name . . . what about the finances and if someone got sick?
One family is quite enough for me . . .
100% of them could be avoided now if people told the truth.
Good gad man, can you imagine being bi…being whined at by two women? They’d probably gang up on me!
Kind of a backwards version of a secret life…
My family was brought up to believe that we were descendants of the Miami Nation, the federally unrecognized branch of the Miami Indians, through my maternal grandmother, who claimed to be 100% Miami. Not really unbelievable… it’s not like we were being told we were descendants of a Cherokee princess or anything, the Miami nation was active in Indiana in the area from which she sprang, we had resemblance to prominent tribal leaders.
As my grandmother neared death, some family members interested in genealogy were getting stuck in fleshing out our tree, so they approached her to ask questions about relatives and such. She was confused when they brought up specific names, and eventually they just asked her if she was Miami. “You believed that shit? Ha ha ha!” was her reply. After her death, some papers surfaced which enabled more genealogical research, and her deathbed confession was apparently the truth. She wasn’t Miami, and neither were we. Just random crossbreedings of settlers and mountainfolk-headed-north. Sonnuva…
I guess in this case, her secret life, which became ours, was that we really weren’t anything special at all.
Yeah; imagine having two women pissed off at you…:eek:
You’re special to us, Student Driver.
My dad had a couple of secret children. His family knew, but he decided never to tell his wife, and somehow thought it would all work out. He succeeded for years, until one of his relatives came to town for a visit, and let the news slip.
I didn’t know the guy, but I knew a woman who was breaking up a 15 year marriage to a guy who had another wife and family she had just found out about. He, like many of the guys in previous stories, traveled on business a lot and had managed to juggle 2 wives and 2 families for the entire time they had been together.
Their eldest sons were the same age and had birthdays just a few days apart. I don’t know what he would have done if they’d gone into labor the same day.
“The Parent Trap II: The Reckoning.” Except kind of in reverse from the original(s).
(Not starring Lindsay Lohan)
I have one-my birth mom kept my existence secret (not location or anything identifying) from her entire family, until I sent her my contact letter. Apparently the minds of the two sisters I never knew I had were completely blown when she subsequently decided to tell them.
My husband’s best friend died several years back. His mom gave my husband his old computer…
…which had all kinds of images of Asian women and horses.
Together.
Pass the Braino.
(bolding mine)
I think you might be slightly underestimating the Dope’s readership. 
I went to school with the daughters of a local restaurant owner–nice kids; nice family. We went to their restaurant a fair bit when my mom lived near there; they recognized my brother and me from the high school and always gave us discounts on the food…terrific people all around.
Lo and behold, the nice restaurant owner got arrested a couple years ago for his history of serving as a spy for Saddam Hussein. Turns out the restaurant was also a convenient meeting and recruitment spot for his activities.
Dunno if the restaurant stayed open after that…they had some kick-ass food.
Good point.
Well taken.
I don’t know how impressive this is compared to some of these other stories, but when I was a kid (maybe eleven or so) it came out that one of my best friend’s dad had a girlfriend on the other side of town, with whom he had a daughter. She was the same age as his youngest son in his official family - about six at the time.
My own younger sister is the same age as the two of them, so I know from her that they ended up being in the same class in junior high and high school. I think once the secret daughter thing was revealed, there was some effort made for the half-siblings to form some kind of relationship, but I don’t really know how that went.
It’s not really that big of a town. I’m impressed he managed to keep it a secret for so long.
My aunt was the teacher at a one-room country schoolhouse in a small village south of our town. At that time (1940’s) teachers were required to be unmarried*. So when she & my uncle decided to get married, they sneaked off to South Dakota (which had less strict marriage laws) with a couple of friends and got married. Then they came back, and she went back to teaching at the school, under her maiden name. For several more years, she continued teaching there, without telling anyone that she was married. I can’t imagine that some people didn’t know, but ‘officially’ she was an unmarried teacher. She didn’t actually tell them until some years later, when adults she had taught as kids started to replace their parents on the School Board.
- Why teachers were required to be unmarried I don’t understand. For stewardesses, etc. it was an obvious marketing item – enhance the fantasies of the businessmen on their airplanes. But I can’t see that applying to an elementary school teacher! Maybe they were afraid that a married teacher might become visibly pregnant, thus leading the kids to ask questions? But these were all farm kids – they knew all about reproduction. Possibly a worry about a married teacher having to take time off at the end of her pregnancy – but substitute teachers were easily available. I really don’t understand this restriction.
Story told before, and it has even more chapters… what happened to this particular family in four years would be enough material for a southamerican culebrón or two.
Dr. C was the pediatrician in my hometown. The pediatrician, because even though the population was about 30K people, there wasn’t another one. He worked mornings in the health center and had a private practice in the afternoons. His four daughters (C, one year older than me; S and c, twins and my age; and L, three years younger than me) took after their mother: all five were blonde, blue-eyed and kind’a look like Infanta Cristina (that’s the pretty one).
Dr. C was an only son; his wife had a sister, but the sister lived in the Canary Islands and didn’t even come over for family celebrations, the daughters had never met her.
Until we were in 6th grade, when this woman came to visit and dropped the bomb that triggered the divorce: she wanted her daughter back.
Her what where how when?
Her daughter.
Explain that slowly.
Well, L? Turns out she wasn’t Mrs. C’s daughter, she was the daughter of Dr. C and Mrs. C’s sister. So her Mom was actually her Aunt and her Aunt was actually her Mom, and the biomom now had a boyfriend who liked children so she wanted hers back.
The whole thing exploded, and it was an ENORMOUS scandal; the health center had been dragging its feet about opening a second pediatrician position for years, but the admins got a rocket up their collective ass when all of a sudden hundreds of women started taking their children to the GP instead of to the pediatrician because they didn’t want Dr C on it. That second pediatrician position got opened in record time, and those women took their kids to the pediatrician again.
The bio-mom got her daughter; Dr. C and Mrs. C got a divorce; she went back to school (she’d dropped out of law school to marry him in a hurry), taking the eldest daughter (the only one old enough to be asked for her opinion regarding custody) and the twin she’d been given (why do so many judges love splitting twins in case of divorce?) with her.
Meanwhile, the wife of one of the town’s councilors asked him for a divorce, but even with them having a ton of kids, it was not half as much of a scandal as the C’s…
until the councilor’s now-ex-wife and Dr. C went on their honeymoon, that is. Turns out they’d been lovers for… well, long enough that her four youngest children at the time might be his (later they had more). There were other lovers at the same time as well, from what I hear, and each of them thought she was the only one. There may have been others later, but if they’ve managed to convince themselves that they were the only ones, they had blood in their alcoholstream.
Maybe their wife said “You should be more affectionate!” So he got another wife. The punishment for having more than one wife is…
… having more than one wife.
When I was 13 I found out that I had a half brother who was about 6 years older than me. I found out when he sent me a letter from Viet Nam where he was serving as a gunner on a helicopter. Apparently, he was the product of my father’s wild oats before he was married. I initially tried to have some sort of relatiohship with him, but he was a stranger. He was also a self-aggrandizing dork who was constantly lying about his accomplishments.
It was only years later after my half brother died from a heart attack that I thought my father should be assigned some of the responsibility for his pathological behavior. I could see where he might have been desperate for anyone’s approval after being abandoned by my father, and trying to get my and my brothers’ approval was one step removed from getting my father’s.
I know a girl who did that, maybe we should set them up.
Another co-worker was always bragging about his wife and wonderful daughter. When I finally met his wife, I found out they had three children–Ms.
Wonderful, the lesbian daughter and the gay son.
When I question the co-worker about this he stated that his daughter was just a woman with a short haircut who had a female roommate, and his son had commited suicide because he had “teh gay.” I knew from talking to his wife that the latter was a big, fat homophobic lie.
The guy transfered to another real estate office that week.