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I discovered that my mother was having an affair
At 14, I discovered that my mum was having an affair. I didn’t tell anyone for three years.
At first I tried to not let it get to me, but it was impossible. I kept just trying to push it to the back of my head, but then there’s a point when you just can’t do that anymore.
I used to hang out with my mum a lot: we would go shopping and do girly things together; but then I started to notice my mum acting differently. I got a suspicion that she was up to something by her facial expressions and the way she’d look at her phone when she was reading something. I’d never really seen her do that before.
Me being suspicious and young, I obviously checked her phone – and that’s how I found out that my mum was having an affair.
I didn’t tell her I knew, nor did I tell my two brothers or father because I didn’t know what the right thing to do was. I had the fear of losing my family – the fear of us falling apart and not being the way we’ve always been.
After three years of keeping the secret, I decided I had to tell someone. It all got too much for me. It was all I could think about. I couldn’t pretend any longer to my mum. My dad didn’t deserve what she was doing and I had to get it out.
I told my older brothers and they decided to tell our mum that we knew what she was hiding. She became a complete mess during the confrontation. She begged us not to tell our dad and she promised she’d stop. But a year later, we found out that the affair was still ongoing. So we ended up telling our dad.
The first thing he said was: “You’re lying, she would never do that!” But he had to believe us because we had proof.
My dad, bless him, would not leave her. He was like, “she’s the love of my life and I will do whatever it takes to get her back!”
More than a decade later, my parents are still together and the family is in a happy place.
I didn’t think that I could ever forgive my mum, but it was my mum… I had to forgive her, I just had to.
If anyone has to go through anything like this and hold something in like that, don’t feel ashamed about having to talk about it. It’s not the time to worry about what other people think.
After my dad passed, we found out about our half-sister
The hardest thing is finding out that your parents had kept secrets from you.
After my father died in 2012, my brother and I were going through the probate form with our mother. We’d gone through all the routine questions when then there was this question: does the deceased have any other children? And she said, “yes, he does”.
We were very taken aback and thought that she didn’t understand the question. My brother repeated it and she said again, “yes, he does”.
My late dad had apparently had an affair about 40 years previously, which resulted in a daughter. My brothers and I had a half-sister.
It was certainly a big surprise that there was a half-sister but the main shock was the fact that they kept it a secret from us for so long. That was the most upsetting thing. However, my mum thought we should be more upset about her and what she’d gone through – not the fact that she hadn’t told us till now.
I was angry. It was like it wasn’t supposed to be a big thing because it was revealed to us so casually.
We asked her why she hadn’t told us about our half-sister. She just said that it wasn’t her secret to tell, but since the form was a legal document she had to tell the truth.
The revelation of this secret affected my relationship with our mum. It didn’t ruin our relationship, but something definitely changed. If she had said something like, “I’m sorry, I probably should have told you but I felt that I shouldn’t, can you forgive me?” then things might have turned out differently.
Mum lived for another six years after dad passed. The half-sister was never mentioned again and we have never tried to make contact with her either.
We didn’t know what we might unearth, particularly while our mum was alive. We might potentially upset our half-sister a lot as well, because we don’t know what she has been told about her parentage.
Now there is always the possibility that someone could come knocking on our door one day.
The truth about my biological mother
I grew up with my mum and dad where we lived in a flat. My parents were very secretive and we weren’t encouraged to speak to neighbours. I didn’t understand why, but that’s how it was. It was only when I got older that I realised that my upbringing might have been strange.
All I knew was that my parents weren’t married and that the family had a difficult relationship with my mother’s sister, Amy.
Nobody really liked her. Even my grandmother (her own mother) didn’t like her very much. My mum was her main support, financially. She looked after my aunt her whole life. My mum and I used to go and visit her and bring stuff for her. We were always having to deal with her and to get her out of scrapes.
In 2017, I decided I wanted to see my original birth certificate as I had only ever seen a shortened version: it only had my date of birth and the name of my grandma as registrar, but it didn’t say who my parents were or anything else, really. So I sent off the paperwork.
Honestly, I don’t know what prompted me to do that. Nothing had happened. I guess it just hit me one day that as a working adult I hadn’t actually seen my proper birth certificate.
After I’d sent for the full birth certificate it suddenly came into my head, “what could I possibly find out that would be really awful?”
What I found out was my aunt Amy is my biological mother.
When the birth certificate arrived I opened it, not expecting to see anything unusual, but there it was: name of the mother, Amy [redacted]. Name of father, unknown.
My birth mother was Amy, the woman I had known all my life as my aunt.
My mother’s whole family, they all knew. All of her brothers knew. My dad had known as well. Everyone knew except me. Even my dad’s sister knew, evidently. How did I not know for the whole of my life?
The secret has made me appreciate the mother who brought me up even more.
As well as having loved my mum, I’m now very grateful to her. I don’t remember being grateful to her before. What is a mum? A mum is somebody who looks after her children, loves them for their foibles, for their good bits, their bad bits… and that’s who she was to me. That’s who she will always be: my mum.
For more stories like this, read: I’m A Malaysian Woman Whose Family Abandoned Me Because Of The Voices In My Head and After My Dad Died From Covid-19, I Found Out He Had A Mistress
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