The Secrets Revealed

I guess every family has secrets or someone in the family who is the official secret keeper. It must be hard to be the secret keeper, a heavy weight to carry. I can imagine that the secret keeper would be torn between the desire to share and the perceived consequences of sharing the secrets. Secrets from another time, another era would be hard to judge how the world would perceive it now. Things that were acceptable in another time, may be taboo now. Things that were taboo, may be the norm in today's society.

Recently the best secret keeper in our family passed away, my maternal grandmother. She left behind her sister as the final player to tell her tale... or so we thought.

Two things of great historical note occurred in May, 1945. The Germans surrendered ending WWII and my mother was conceived. This was the beginning of the greatest secret keeping in the history of my family. The identity of my grandfather would be a point of mystery and intrigue for decades to come.

So this past December, my maternal grandmother passed away... the hope that she would have left a letter to explain everything to my mother was quickly dashed. Back in 1995, I had spent some time with Grandma and had made this request. I don't think she intended on taking her secrets to the grave but I think that she just never found the words to explain herself and probably thought she would have more time to figure out the words.

In February, my mother made an innocent call to her aunt (grandma's sister) to check on things and the tangled web of secrets began to unravel.

Expecting to hear the answers to a lifetime of questions, it seems she hadn't been asking the right questions. The name she had been given for a father, the name that she had used for years to search for her missing branch on her family tree was completely fictional; A name snatched out of the air by a family matriarch who reigned over the family with an iron fist.

That was a horrific blow but the next piece of information quickly overshadowed that...

My mother grew up as the oldest child of 3, or so she thought. This turned out to be another secret as she is actually the oldest child of 5 by my grandmother. Grandma had given birth to a daughter and a son in the years between the birth of my mother and her marriage to her first husband. These pregnancies were concealed and both children were put up for adoption.

Several years ago, the daughter had great success in her search for her biological family and found her brother, her aunt and eventually her mother. My grandmother requested that my mother not be contacted. She was afraid that my mother would not understand why she made the decisions that she had made. She was afraid that she would lose the love of the person she adored most in the world. The daughter agreed to respect her wishes.

On this quiet night in February, my mother reached out into the world to speak to her "other sister" for the first time.

Since that night, the secrets have continued to unravel. My mother remembers the man that fathered her brother and sister as a companion of her mother. She used to play with his son. The question that is now on the table, did he father 2 or 3 children with my grandmother? Is this man, the man my mother has such fond memories of, her father as well?

The secrets will be unravelled. Time will tell everything... to quote a wise friend, when you die, there is no one left to hold the closet door shut anymore.

I wonder if Grandma knew how well her secret were received if she would have changed her mind about keeping them. Makes you wonder why we bother to keep these silly secrets anyway.