What secrets do families cover up?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Here’s a recent, as in, “within the lifetime of anyone reading this right now” one:

My wife got pregnant her freshman year at college (1994) by a fellow student. It was a very strictly religious college and premarital sex (of which she was now walking evidence, of course) might well have been grounds for expulsion, but in any event would have been so stigmatizing that she withdrew from school before they could do so.

She moved back in with her parents, who presented her with one option: carrying the baby to term and placing it for adoption. Abortion would have been absolutely out of the question in that family, and marrying the father or raising the child herself as a single mother were not even mooted. The family more or less hid her for the final months of the pregnancy, when her condition would have been obvious. When people came by, she simply stayed upstairs in her room. (Years later, neighbors, family friends, and members of their congregation were surprised to hear this story, never having known at the time that she had been pregnant.)

She had the baby at the local hospital under an assumed name, because too many people worked at the hospital who knew her family and would have recognized her name. The baby, a son, was adopted by a local (~25 miles away) family (under an assumed name as well) a few days later. All parties agreed to have the record unsealed on the boy’s 21st birthday, so that if he so chose, he could contact his birth mother at that time.

My future wife, already clinically depressed, became nearly suicidal when postpartum depression and the guilt and loss feelings associated with giving up a child were piled onto her already very full emotional plate. I harbor real resentment towards her parents for how they handled the whole situation, even though it was 15 years before I would meet her.

Of course in 1994 the internet was in its infancy, and social media as we know it now was still nearly a decade away. So imagine our surprise when, through a bit of search-fu and some savvy, birthson found my wife on Facebook in 2014, nearly two years short of the official unsealing of the records. (That became a brutal and harrowing ordeal all its own for all concerned, involving midnight ER trips, attempted suicide, and a case of military AWOL, but that’s probably a story for another thread.)

22

My family had an alcoholic they kept quiet about. Some people knew about it, some people didn’t. Even when they talked about it, they literally talked in hushed voices. I think it was hard to come up with an explanation when he drove through the side of a 31 Flavors, though.

I remember, after he died, someone was reading his Obit and as they were going through the list of all his friends and relatives (they were pretty wealthy and the obit column was something like a half a page long) a person named Bill W was mentioned and everyone spent a few minutes saying “Bill W? I don’t know any Bill W, who’s Bill W?” until I mentioned that it’s code for being an alcoholic (and probably being in AA).

Another one, though not that big of a secret since it wasn’t that long ago and everyone still knows everyone (involved) but just about two or three generations back from me a good chunk of my family was involved with the mafia. But I think people are more proud of that then secretive about it. At this point the court cases are well over with, money isn’t changing hands anymore, the last major mobster in Milwaukee died a few years ago (and he did still pull a few strings). So they don’t have to worry about getting in trouble for talking like they used to.

23

If it isn’t too painful to do so, please start a thread to tell us the story; it sounds fascinating.

24

Anything that people get shamed over is going to be covered up, if it can be. What exactly is considered shameful and worth covering up is going to change over time, but I doubt we’ll ever see the end of family secrets.

My parents didn’t tell me until right before I got married that my dad’s family has Native American, specifically Cherokee, ancestry. My reaction was to think how cool that was. A few years later, I went to the model Indian village in Cherokee, NC, which I loved (sort of a Cherokee version of Colonial Williamsburg).

I think there’s an argument to be made there that it really isn’t anyone else’s business. Mental illness is more the business of other people in the family, because many mental illnesses have a genetic component. Same goes for addiction. Divorce isn’t genetic.