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