Not really a secret life, but - my mom got in a big fight with my bio-dad. She was 18, he was a bit older, they were doing the flower child thing in San Francisco. She accused him (wrongly, it turns out) of seeing someone else. She throws her things into the car and drives back home to Minnesota. He calls the house every day - multiple times - for the three days it takes my mom to drive home. When she gets home, she tells her mom (my grandma) the story, hears he’s been calling day and night, and says ‘I never want to talk to him again’. The next day, he calls again. Grandma answers the phone, says ‘yes she’s here. Shame on you for breaking her heart. She never wants to see you or talk to you, ever again. Don’t ever call her again’.
He calls back the next day, same response from Grandma. He never calls back again.
A few days pass, mom has calmed down and is starting to realize that maybe she’s over-reacted a tad. She talks to a friend in California, and realizes that he wasn’t seeing anyone else at all. Frantic, she calls him back. No answer. Calls him day and night for a week, no answer. Calls mutual friends, calls his work place where he was temping. No one’s seen him in over a week.
She’s about to drive back to California when she realizes she’s pregnant. With me.
She is never able to find bio-dad; it’s like he disappeared from the face of the earth. When I was about 13 she divorced from evil step-dad and spent a lot of time and money trying to track bio-dad down. No luck; she’s convinced that he probably died that summer 40+ years ago. But if any of you know a 60-something R. Trig or possibly Trigg…
A very close friend and former co-worker from when I was living in Japan had a Japanese wife and two kids. He confided in me that he had a second family - Chinese wife - in Hong Kong. And a third family - Philippi wife - in the Philippines. And last time I saw him when I was in Hong Kong for business, he was hanging around with another young Philippi lady. Like, his life wasn’t complicated enough already, apparently.
About three months after my niece had a baby girl, she found out from a letter from the husband’s ex-wife (she didn’t know that he had been married) that the reason they had gotten divorced…was because he had sexually abused their little girl. Yuck.
My current family situation has no such drama, alas.
I can basically cut and paste some stories already on here. One friend’s father had another family (and ended up killing himself, saying he couldn’t meet ends meet – y’think?). Another friend has a lovely new half-sister thanks to his his father’s secret Thai girlfriend. Only instead of supporting her overseas, dad decided the families should meet and live in bliss in NYC. Apparently his actual wife, an alcoholic SAHM, is a bitch for finding something weird about having a strange woman and child attend family functions and live in the same borough (rent-free, of course).
I had forgotten about a friend I had in the late 70’s. I’d been over to their place a number of times and always marveled at how much everyone looked like one another.
It must have been a terrible burden of shame that she carried - but one night in a teen-aged drunken state she told me her horrible truth. Her mother and father were brother and sister :eek:
She told me that no one had ever suspected as they’d moved far from their birth town and both had the same last name - everyone just assumed they were married. I wonder what happened to her . . . I wonder if she ever got counseling . . .
My true love was murdered when I was 17. To this day I have never spoken his name again Mississippienne that’s 30 years ago and it still hurts too much.
This is not nearly in the same category, but here’s the small story I have to share.
Once, chatting with a friend of mine, I ask him about his last name and where the XXX family originally came from. He tells me “that’s not my family’s ‘real’ last name”. It turns out that his grandfather was from Wales, was a criminal wanted by the law, got on a ship to America, and when a guy died on the ship his grandfather swapped papers with the dead man.
My family–both Mom’s and Dad’s sides–are great, down-to-earth, simple farm families. Just real boring people, but that’s the way we like it. However, two things really stand out with Dad’s family.
My paternal grandparents were married in 1934 and my first uncle wasn’t born until 1942. (Sidenote: I found out Grandma conceived Uncle Danny on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.) Anyway, it was a bit strange to have no kids for nearly 9 years of marriage. Fast forward to 1990 or so. Dad volunteered his time to take care of a very small family cemetery about a mile away from the family farm. He would take my grandpa’s riding mower and string trimmer up there every couple weeks. Nobody had been buried there for at least 30 years and there was noone else to care for it. He had been doing this for just a short time, when one day he took the mowers back to my grandpa & grandma’s house and my grandpa spoke as he walked by. “Did you see your brother up there?” Dad was confused, thinking one of his 2 brothers had been by to see him. He said he didn’t see either Danny or Lindy and didn’t know they were gonna be coming. Grandpa said that he meant the oldest one. Grandma had given birth to a boy a few years before Danny, but that son died in the first week and was buried up there.
To this day, that was the only time my grandma or grandpa mentioned this. Grandpa died in 1992 and Grandma is still alive and 95 y.o.
My uncle Danny, mentioned above, graduated as salutatorian of his H.S. class. He went to college for 1 semester before flunking out. He joined the Air Force not long afterward, around 1962. Apparently, the officers saw he was a very intelligent person and he was selected for covert operations. He spent 2 years at a base in Japan studying Soviet language, culture, history, etc. After this time, he was a Soviet. Grandma spoke of it to me a few times. She knew what he was doing and feared for his life. According to her, he carried a cyanide pill that he was ordered to consume in the event of his capture. Even 25 years later, she would cry whenever she was telling me of this. Danny has never said anything about it to us, and I’m not sure his kids know.
After serving his time, he went back to Illinois, where he lived a regular life, marrying, having 3 kids and working for the post office. He retired January 2009 and is enjoying his golden years traveling the country and playing with grandkids.
You know, the Patriarchs did this multiple wives thing. I wonder how they handled it.
“I’m busy talking to G-d, women, take your Mothers to the market or something already!”
One of my best high school buddies had a very problematic relationship with his (Bosnian) father, who died when my friend was a high school sophomore (so the year before I first met my friend).
Fast-forward about 15 years or so, to the siege of Sarajevo. My friend’s mom gets a letter forwarded to her via the Red Cross, from…her late husband’s son by some other woman, who was only a couple of years older than her own son, and had the same first name. She had no idea this kid existed, but here he was, asking her for money and help getting out of Bosnia and to the States.
This exact thing happened to my maternal grandparents. They married in 1932, but their first (surviving) child wasn’t born until the mid-1940s (that would be my aforementioned aunt, who was killed by the drunk driver). Part of that was the time Grandaddy spent in WW2, but at some point, they had a stillborn son that they never spoke of. My mother and her sisters only found out he existed because other relatives told them about it. They don’t even know what year he was born. Back in those days it just wasn’t something people talked about.
I knew a couple that wanted to get married in their early 20’s. Both of their parents thought they were too young and just encouraged them to live together and wait until they were older to get married. They didn’t want to do that, but they didn’t want to make their parents mad either, so they went to the justice of the peace and got married, only telling a couple of their close friends.
Fast forward 7 years, and their parents are wondering if they are going to ever get married. So instead of telling them they were already married for 7 some years, they planned a big elaborate wedding and invited 100+ guests and had the big traditional church wedding. They had to secretly show the minister their original marriage certificate and that this wedding was for their family, and ask him to go along, which he did.
As far as I know, they never told their family the truth.
A guy I knew wanted to have a sex change but I did not know that. I lost track of him but 10 years later I found out that he did get the sex change. I found out by accident because of where he worked, I thought the person who ran the place was somebody else but it was him, she now had a woman’s name.
My ex once did a vanity search on Google and discovered his brother had starred in a gay porn movie. Bit of a shock, to say the least.
Not exactly a secret life, but when my family was living in Atlanta we had a circle of Korean families we were close with (the girls were all around my age). Our parents were all conservative, typical middle-class Asian American parents, but when we grew older we discovered that during their university years in Korea they were involved in a lot of the radical student demonstrations and some of them had even been arrested by the secret police or had had to go into hiding in case they were arrested. It was bizarre to imagine our parents as hippie rebels.
These don’t count much compared with some of y’all’s, but -
[ul][li]A good friend of ours had seven years of his life that he basically denied existed. He had been married, but never mentioned it, and lied about his age and simply never accounted for the time. His wife found out after he died from seeing his birth certificate, and doing some research with Social Security or something. [/li]
[li]My grandmother had a boyfriend after she divorced my grandfather. Nice guy, never said two words in a row the whole time I knew him. (Mostly because nobody could get a word in edgewise while my grandma was within earshot.) [/li]
He was a truck driver. (Maybe you see where this is going.) Anyway, he died, and my grandmother went to his funeral, as was natural.
My wife’s biodad and mother divorced when she was around 2. Part of the divorce agreement was that biodad couldn’t have any contact with my wife and, in return, he wouldn’t have to pay child support or alimony.
My MIL remarried when my wife was around 4 and her new husband adopted my wife but they didn’t have anymore children. My wife ended up being an only child. Her mother was an only child too, so my wife never had any family around her own age.
On a fluke, my wife did a facebook search of biodad’s last name and found her half sister and half brother. Elated that she finally found some family (and siblings, no less) she sent them a friend request with a short note explaining who she was. Her half sister freaked out and closed her facebook account and her half brother never responded. We’re pretty sure biodad never told them about his first family.
