Is it worse that nobody had to die? I was raised by my mom and, after moving out from under her roof, I learned a lot about the pain she caused and the number of people she'd deceived, including me. I resolved to never accept her word on anything ever again and to maintain a distance between us. The family holds it against me and it weird them out that I refuse to be emotionally invested about it. But hey, nobody died!

Secrets and Lies:

Maybe a future one for someone else. I have a daughter from a casual encounter, she kept it from me and I only found out through an amazing stroke of chance. She married a person who she represented to me as a platonic roommate and raised the daughter with his name. I have no way of knowing what either the girl or the husband were told. So far only my Y is on record which wouldn't be trackable through a female offspring.

Not a big family secret, per se. But family members began opening up and revealing more fckd up shit about my mother as she was dying and after she died. Nothing quite as big as having secret long lost family members though.

I've got one I can't tell yet.

We never knew my grandmother had been married. My mother was always secretive about it and we assumed she was a bastard child. Three years after my mother died, we discovered my grandmother had been married twice. My mother was born from her first marriage, but she spent the first ten years of her life under the care of my grandmother's second husband. My grandmother, meanwhile, had moved to a different country and was living with a man whose wife was in yet another country!