Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets that
Speaker 1: are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. As I tore
Speaker 1: the nation from my book Inheritance, I've heard from so
Speaker 1: many about your own family secrets and realize that what
Speaker 1: we are creating for each other on this podcast is
Speaker 1: a community, a community for those who are looking for
Speaker 1: a safe and supportive space to unburden themselves. To that end,
Speaker 1: we've created a number for listeners to call in to
Speaker 1: record stories to share here in this space. This week,
Speaker 1: I'd like to share a few of those stories from
Speaker 1: our community. Thanks for listening. So my family secret came
Speaker 1: out with my paternal grandfather died. There had always been
Speaker 1: your tension and conflict in his relationship with my dad,
Speaker 1: who um suffered from drug addiction and mental illness and
Speaker 1: lots of things throughout his life. But UM, I remember
Speaker 1: being very distraught when my paternal grandfather died, and my
Speaker 1: maternal grandmother said something like, well, I don't know why
Speaker 1: you're so sad. He's not even really your grandfather. And
Speaker 1: that was the first that I'd ever heard of it,
Speaker 1: And only over the last five or six years since
Speaker 1: that happened, through talking with my aunt, my dad's half sister,
Speaker 1: have I found out that my paternal grandmother had an
Speaker 1: affair with a married man in the early sixties and
Speaker 1: um ended up pregnant with my dad. And then this
Speaker 1: man died, right, I guess he had cancer. I don't
Speaker 1: know what kind, And to this day, my paternal grandmother
Speaker 1: and my dad don't know that I know, because we
Speaker 1: have a very observant Roman Catholic family, and I think
Speaker 1: my grandmother was just so ashamed that she still can't
Speaker 1: talk about it. Anyway. Thank you for sharing your secrets
Speaker 1: and so many others and making us feel us alone.
Speaker 1: My secret, I guess is I found out a secret
Speaker 1: and now I may be part of a secret. And
Speaker 1: it's strange how that all happened. The story begins with
Speaker 1: my name not being is the same as my mom's
Speaker 1: maiden name, and I don't have a father on my
Speaker 1: birth to the kids, so when questions were asked, I
Speaker 1: was told that this other guy was my father, and
Speaker 1: he was a father to my brother and sister, and
Speaker 1: my third last names matches, so I just she just
Speaker 1: said that the paperwork wasn't done and that's where it ended.
Speaker 1: And then he died when I was six. So we
Speaker 1: just left it at that for the rest of for
Speaker 1: most of our life, until we found out that she
Speaker 1: had given up another child for adoption when she was
Speaker 1: younger before me, and that came out when we were teenagers.
Speaker 1: And then uh, we actually met him, so I have
Speaker 1: a half brother. And then uh, right before she died,
Speaker 1: I asked her she had come down with cancer, and
Speaker 1: I asked her again, point blank, was the original father
Speaker 1: my father? And she said it was over the phone
Speaker 1: or email, and over the phone and she said, I
Speaker 1: wanted to tell you face to face. I was supposed
Speaker 1: to see her that week. And I'm like, well, why
Speaker 1: would you say that. She said something to the point
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to hurt you or I was afraid,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, okay, So I told her I had
Speaker 1: talked to her then, but he died the next day.
Speaker 1: A few years later, I did ancestry DNA and while
Speaker 1: somebody tops up on my list as a brother who
Speaker 1: isn't in my list, And it took about a year
Speaker 1: until we finally touched base and I was able to
Speaker 1: give him my story and time frame and he had his,
Speaker 1: and yeah, sure enough, we think we've confirmed that we
Speaker 1: had that secret, and that's where we ended up. Like so,
Speaker 1: I now have a father who was alive, not dead,
Speaker 1: and my brother and sister are not my half brother
Speaker 1: and sister, and I gained a few other ones a
Speaker 1: during all this. When I married my life. Right before that,
Speaker 1: she had found out to his prince as an accident,
Speaker 1: found out to his pregnant, and she wasn't sure if
Speaker 1: it was me or somebody else, and she had talked
Speaker 1: to somebody else, and he wanted her to get an abortion.
Speaker 1: And I had already been engaged to her for three
Speaker 1: years and I said, I'll take that maybe no matter
Speaker 1: what I know he has mine. And then when we
Speaker 1: had the maybe, and when she grew up, she looked
Speaker 1: as like my family, so we didn't take anything of it.
Speaker 1: But when I took that answers to d NHS, she
Speaker 1: did too, and she didn't find me in her list.
Speaker 1: So at a moment now, after years of thinking that
Speaker 1: she was my daughter, and I still believe she's my daughter.
Speaker 1: I raised her as my daughter. But am I keeping
Speaker 1: a secret now too? I did tell my life and
Speaker 1: asked her if we should talk to her about it,
Speaker 1: and she doesn't want to do that because it affects
Speaker 1: so many people, my family and her family, and I
Speaker 1: don't know. So now I'm part of a secret, and
Speaker 1: it's it's strange how it's come around, or maybe part
Speaker 1: of a secret. She it just means we have to
Speaker 1: prove it, and I don't think we're gonna to try
Speaker 1: to prove it. So that's that's my strange Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: By My family secret story is that when I was
Speaker 1: fourteen years old, um I was informed that my father
Speaker 1: had a refugee family living with him and my parents
Speaker 1: have been divorced for about two years at this point,
Speaker 1: and there was some hushed tones surrounding this information. And
Speaker 1: then I went to go see my father and learned
Speaker 1: that this quote unquote refugee family was actually my father's
Speaker 1: second wife that he married when he was in the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, and that I had siblings from that relationship,
Speaker 1: and those siblings had known about me my whole life
Speaker 1: and my siblings, but I had never known about them.
Speaker 1: And this was also a very complicated situation because my
Speaker 1: father had already been remarried to another woman at the time,
Speaker 1: and he was a minister and a chaplain in the army,
Speaker 1: so for one of his churches that was on the
Speaker 1: army base, my one stepmother was his niece, and my
Speaker 1: stepmother um, my other stepmother from Vietnam was just a
Speaker 1: refugee family living with them and on his civilian church
Speaker 1: off base. The story was that my one stepmother was
Speaker 1: his wife. See now I don't even remember all of
Speaker 1: this because it was so complicated, and I was also
Speaker 1: asked by my father to keep these secrets. Meanwhile, I
Speaker 1: was told that I was also supposed to tell people
Speaker 1: that I was going to a boarding school in another
Speaker 1: city and that my biological mother was in a mental institution.
Speaker 1: So my father asked me to keep a lot of secrets.
Speaker 1: Some of them I knew about and some of them
Speaker 1: I did not. Uh. It was a very complicated family
Speaker 1: history with a lot of unraveling and undoing. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to share because I've been listening to your podcast
Speaker 1: and it makes me think about my own family secrets.
Speaker 1: Thank you. If you'd like to share your story, call
Speaker 1: one eight eight eight Secret zero and record your story.
Speaker 1: We won't be able to run all the stories, but
Speaker 1: we do want to shine a light on as many
Speaker 1: as we can. The number again is one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight Secret and then the numeral zero. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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