The Problem with Family Secrets
I think it’s common knowledge that taking to the internet to reveal one’s secrets isn’t a new thing. It’s also not the best thing, sometimes, because once it’s out there…it’s out there. It also means that friends and family will see it. Strangers will definitely see it and cast various forms of judgment. It’s a great risk to bring something to the surface that has been quietly eating at me for well over twenty-one years: the woman I knew as my maternal grandmother was actually my maternal aunt. The woman known as my real maternal grandmother was someone I thought was my aunt.
At the great risk of becoming an outcast, I have to tell my story. I have to let others know that they are not alone. I also would like to speak to family members who hold on to these secrets: you risk everything just to keep a sane household/familial unit by keeping people in the dark. The past is the past, and we cannot change that. However, the present and the future are what we’re living in/on our way to. How long is a fair enough amount of time to keep your kin in the dark? It may be something very ugly, it may be something very helpful, or both — but you shouldn’t have the power to decide if somebody should know it or not. You may not want them to be mad, you may not want them to be upset and I get that. But the worst thing in this world that I’ve carried since both the aunt and the “aunt-grandma” have died is that one of them had all of me, and the other was robbed of time with me. My first cousins who weren’t sheltered from the secret got to know and love her. Since my mother died long before we could ever talk about it, I had to find out when I was at my biological grandmother’s funeral. It’s a bit of a smack to the face to find out, once you’ve gone through the list of first cousins and discover that she’s your mom’s real mother.
I’ve never been able to gather her daughters together to fully ask why. My late Aunt Barbara (the woman in the light blue sweater) told me in a candid chat that it wouldn’t be a good idea to look into it. My father explained to me that my aunt-grandma would have had a fit, had anyone decided to tell me. They didn’t want her upset, as she was mad about my mother, and raised her as her own. Still, when all the dust had settled, I was still in the dark. I treated my biological grandmother as an aunt. I respected her, I hugged her, and I spoke. It was all set up how you hug and spend time with an aunt you don’t see often, but respect because she’s family. Meanwhile, for the first 13–14 years of my life, I’m treating my aunt-grandmother as if she were the biological one.
The revelation did not make me love my aunt-grandma any less. She was a graceful, eccentric, proper woman. She wasn’t quite fond of me being fat, but she did influence my love of fine china, Mandarin orange tea, and fancy pins. She tried her best to teach me a few etiquette lessons, and I like to feed birds because of her. She bought all sorts of nice clothes, she took me places, and her husband made a mean pot of chili. As far as I was concerned, she and my uncle WERE my grandparents. I will not disown them, I do not resent them. I just feel cheated and left out because I did not get to know and properly love my other grandmother. I can only imagine how she felt, being unable to tell me everything.
I wanted to be mad at her daughters, but I can’t. I cannot move myself to be angry. I’m unhappy about certain means of how things were carried out in the end, but I can’t change decisions that have been made. All I can do is acknowledge, work through, and try to live a life that they’d all be somewhat proud of. However, I didn’t start out this way. I felt betrayed, I felt bitter that I didn’t know who she really was, and I felt like a coward for never asking anyone but my dad. Much like those who want to keep secrets secret, I didn’t want to cause trouble, despite having wounds of my own to heal. Memories are important to me because I don’t have a lot of them.
Family secrets save the drama, hurt, and time that come from revelations. It’s a great excuse I’ve seen unravel in a lot of Reddit stories and social media posts. It is something that a younger me would have agreed with. As I’ve become older, knowing who I am and where I come from has become more important. Tracing my bloodlines for $19.99 a month at a time has given me a greater knowledge of self. Where have I come from? Where am I going? Who paved the way for me to get there? How can I know, if the branches of the tree are tangled up, and the fruit growing from it remains silent on which seeds came from where?
I wasn’t sure what to do with the information once I had it in my hands. I look at pictures of my biological grandmother and wonder about her life. I stare at pictures of myself, with my aunt-grandma, and recall trips to toy stores and visits to her sister’s high-rise. I think of the smell of my uncle-grandfather’s Cadillac, and the long-forgotten mangoes he left in the bar fridge in his basement. I can even recall the coveted teacups I wanted and the elephant teapot that I was SURE to have. I also think of being the unofficial family outcast, lacking access to one of the greatest secrets of our clan.
On my father’s side of the family, I made sure that this trend of secrets doesn’t have room to flourish. If I want to know, I ask. As far as I know, there are no bombshells to be had on the paternal end. My father is my father, and we can’t really deny that — his mom gave birth to a chubby baby with a full head of hair, and then my mom gave birth to a literal copy of his infant self. Familial discrepancies have been explained, and I’m satisfied with the answers. Yet the burning questions on my mother’s side may go unanswered as time passes, and those privy to said secrets begin to die out. Despite my own advice of revealing all, I feel like cutting open old wounds for the sisters (my grandmother’s other daughters) would cause a familial disruption that would leave me feeling incredible guilt. This is why I understand why people keep some secrets, and why revelations aren’t as black and white as we’d like to think they are. There is an expansive gray area of possibilities that affect more than one person. Family secrets are tricky pieces of history that have the power to change everything. Some are large, some are small, and some are simply switches of titles and names. While I may have the opinion to stop keeping secrets secret, I don’t suggest tell-all situations that annihilate. Revelations need to be gauged. I will say this — it’s true about what is said about all that’s done in darkness will come to the light, someday.
Maybe, instead of having a kid find out that her aunt is her grandma at her funeral, it would have been better to give her space and respect to know her kin as they lived. Having that come to the light moved me to act on knowing my lineage. Yet being unable to converse with my grandmother left a lot unresolved.
