You know when your friend is telling you a story about their family history as if it's the most run-of-the-mill thing in the world and you're sitting there listening with your jaw wide open, exclamation marks circling your head — because most families do not have secrets (and stories!) like that … We are looking for short tales that elicit that kind of reaction. Did you find out in your 20s that your mom had a second family you never knew about? That your father was actually a government spy? That your estranged sister was adopted and never knew it?
Don’t think about this too much; just write. You can write one line or 200 words. Whatever this prompt inspires you to think of, drop your response in the comments. The response that gets the most likes will win a free six-month Narratively subscription!
And, if you have even more to say, we’re guest editing London Writers’ Salon’s Weekly Writing Contest this week, on a related theme: family secrets! These pieces can be up to 500 words, nonfiction *or* fiction. Submit to their contest by Friday, March 21 at 5pm GMT for a chance to win $65 USD, publication in Writers’ Hour Magazine, a free Narratively Academy seminar of the winner’s choosing and even more goodies from both of us. Learn more about it and submit here.
Mum and Dad's divorce was.not amicable. Mum did everything to show as the good and loving parent (which wasn't the case; at 14 I know what I saw and experienced.) She'd let us smoke in the house but tell him he should tell us that he was angry that we were lighting up in the living room. As time went on I think she knew she was losing the battle for our affection and preference. She screamed at me one afternoon that we had an older brother somewhere. Dad had gotten an ex-girlfriend pregnant! It was a huge shock but it didn't change how much we loved him as he was the very best Dad a child should have. Apparently, he and the ex-girlfriend had had a fling before she married her new boyfriend and she'd become pregnant. He told my Dad he would bring up the child as his own if Dad walked away and didn't contact the girlfriend ever again. She called Dad to let him know he had a son, but that she knew what her now husband had warned. I often wonder where he is. He has 4 younger sisters. Mum and Dad never had a boy, despite both wanting one.
A ladderback chair sits in an empty hotel room, facing a wall with a ¼-inch hole drilled in it. It’s 1972 and my father sits in this chair. He talks to men he cannot see on the other side of the wall. Their business is growing rapidly, they tell him, their voices surprisingly clear even though they are speaking through a hole in the wall. They need a high-performance UNIX server to help them manage accounts receivable.
My father listens closely as the men on the other side of wall outline their business requirements. No, they say, unlike most businesses, we don’t have accounts payable. And here, maybe my father’s forearms begin to break out in a sweat, the way the always do when he starts realizing the situation isn’t quite what he thought it was. Still, my dad tells them what server and software he thinks will solve their accounting headaches. Did he use the word “headache?” Because how many New York Godfathers had been shot in the head during the 50s & 60s?
The server arrives in New York and my father returns to the hotel room. Again, he sits in the upright wooden chair that faces the wall. He’s dead now, so I can’t ask him to clarify the details, but I believe the story he told me was that he walked them through set up and configuration simply by talking to the wall. I do know he returned two more times to this hotel to assist the men with their cutting-edge, business operations server.
On his last visit, the men offer my dad a permanent job as their IT systems administrator. I imagine he threw his head back laughing as his big, barrel chest strained at the vest of his dove-grey pinstriped suit. I can hear his reply in my head just as clearly as the first time he told me this secret: “Thank you, boys, but I’m sure you can’t afford me and my wife absolutely will not live on the east coast.” My dad always said he didn’t judge the companies who wanted to streamline their businesses and besides, the mob paid in cash.
I didn’t go home after school one day at 17. I had endured a lifetime of my mother’s mental and physical abuse, and something inside me finally just broke. I went to my best friend’s house, thinking I just needed relief. That night, I called home. I knew my dad—a quiet man who had weathered my mother’s rage and abuse along side me for decades—would answer. I asked if I should come back, and he shocked me and said no. Mom demanded he tell her where I was, but he refused. She told him to leave. He did. Divorce followed, and she made him a deal: he could have full custody of me if she got everything else—the house, the savings, the joint accounts. He agreed without hesitating. And just like that, the family I had known my whole childhood was gone. Leaving was supposed to be the hard part, but it turned out that surviving the trauma, the years of untangling what had been done to me—was something else entirely.
There were so many secrets that it's hard to narrow it down but basically for me, my dad wasn't my dad. My real dad was someone in Alaska. My sister never will know who her dad was as my mom wouldn't tell her and now mom has dementia and doesn't remember.
When I was seven, my father and I sat beneath the fig tree in the backyard, talking about his life. He looked both ways and whispered, “Don’t repeat the secret I’m about to tell you.” He began his tale with his escape from the Nazis in Poland, after which he joined the Soviet Army. At the end of World War II, my parents moved to Sweden for five years, then decided to emigrate to the U.S. One question on the form asked if he’d served in a foreign military. Since it was 1952, and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were still in full swing weeding out Communists, my parents would have never been granted entrance into the United States if my father had admitted to active duty in the Soviet Army. So he checked off the NO box. If his lie had been discovered, my mother, my siblings (who were born in Sweden), and my father would have been deported. I’m not certain why my father thought it was sound to tell a seven-year-old something that would lead to dire consequences, but I never divulged the secret.
My mother had a baby as a teenager. Her parents sent her to another city, alone, to a Catholic unwed mother's home, where she graduated from high school soon after giving birth and having her baby taken from her. She was forced to become a Catholic during this process. Meanwhile she was reviled and despised and forever branded by her family as a "bad girl."
And she carried this and never shared it with me, for the rest of her life. I knew everybody thought of her as a "bad girl," and always had. I knew she called her grandmother and her aunt the "queens of mean," but I never knew why. She wouldn't tell me, and she threatened everybody else with I-don't-know what if they told. So I didn't know I had a brother until my mother died, and my other aunt finally felt free to tell me. Of course, she had been a little girl when my brother was born, and had no details--just educated guesses.
Still, I found him through DNA research, but I also found other siblings. At first I thought they were my father's. That wouldn't have surprised anyone, but it turned out that my patrilineal DNA didn't lead to my father, at least not the one I thought I knew.
So, family? What family. I'm a mutt. I had one remaining relative on my not-bio dad's side, and she couldn't have been more awful about it.
It's the lies that hurt. And why? Why hide all that, and suffer because if it? Let's lay blame with my grandparents who tortured, rejected, reviled a poor teenage girl who got pregnant.
Being lied to by those who are supposed to care for us hurts. I felt that betrayal immensely, along with a complete loss of identity when I discovered at 50 my dad was not my biological father. I write about this in my substack – you are not alone!
My parents divorced when I was a baby, and I didn’t meet my biological father until I was 20, after which I made occasional visits to his home. It was on one of these that he explained why my mother couldn’t be hugged.
We were in his basement, where we would assemble after dinner and drink Austrian liquor. Suddenly, out of nowhere: “I guess you never knew that your mother got pregnant and had a baby before we were married. The father was Phonsi.”
My mother had borne a child and given it up for adoption, and the father was Alphonse Carlo, her college violin teacher. With this revelation, the mystery of her physical reticence was solved: She was raped (I assumed) by this married, much older man and never recovered.
When I was growing up, Mr. Carlo would come to our house with his wife, Katherine, to play chamber music, with me crouched under the baby grand.
Based only on the few words from my tipsy father, I thought I had discovered the answer to that part of my mother’s character that had so disturbed me as a child. Mom was impregnated by her violin teacher, and the trauma of this rendered her unable to give or accept physical affection, even a hug from her children.
When I was 74–thanks to a random DNA test—I found out that the dad who raised me was not my biological father. The devastation of that discovery was somewhat balanced by the fact that my best friend for the first 20 years of my life is actually my sister. We had reconnected on Facebook a few years prior. Now that we know we’re related, we’re committed to making up for 50+ lost years.
Thanks, Elle! I'm glad you and your sister reconnected after so many years apart. I can't imagine what it was like discovering you were sisters after all this time. But I do understand that desire to make up for lost time - for me, it was discovering my DNA father was born in Italy, that I was half Italian. I threw myself into Italian culture trying to make up for 50 years of not knowing my Italian heritage, and I felt an urgency in getting to know him. Today is the three year anniversary of our first meeting!
I'm so happy to hear that you connected with your bio dad. Mine was long gone by the time I made my discovery, but I have memories of him from my childhood--and my sister has been sharing additional information. How thrilling that you gained 50% Italian heritage! My story is just the opposite: I grew up believing that I'm 100% Italian, but lost half of that.
Wild! Have you listened to the podcast "Inconceivable Truth" from Matt Katz, by chance? It's the story of an investigative reporter who is on a search for his bio dad … but the journey only leads to more questions and some unexpected truths. It's great! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inconceivable-truth/id1737812524
For 10 years, I supported my parents. Bought them a home; paid the mortgage, taxes etc. As time wore on the expenses they agreed to cover became mine. A situation arose where I laid the groundwork to get them fulltime help as they were declining healthwise. Then suddenly, they didn't want me to continue. "Everything is fine. We can manage on our own' So, I began to wade through the maze of deceit. I uncovered payments to their youngest son, who kept getting into trouble. My family sacrificed so they could, surreptitiously, continue to finance his lifestyle. They even used the proceeds of their original home sale to purchase him a condo. All the while pleading poverty! I ended our relationship much to the contempt of my aunts/cousins. Cruel? Maybe? But my conscience is clear!
For years, I knew in my gut I was being scammed but my wife wanted our kids to have a relationship with them. After the scam was uncovered, my kids never heard from them again.
Two years ago my husband and I learned that we would not be receiving the $50,000 that my in-laws promised us to help with the down payment on a house. Because my father-in-law spent a similar amount of money on male prostitutes. I tried telling him that dick is a renewable resource that needn’t cost money, but my words fell on deaf-and horny-ears.
Hey, you got a little taste of what's it's like to be female and behave in a way that is completely self-possessed and fully human. Sent to the funny farm. At least you didn't get lobotomized. You had it easy.
Except you were committed for using women as objects to look at (oh and "prank and joke about"), so that's less of a courageous tale..
no not lobotomized but had to suffer through the various drugs that were made to stop my thoughts, drugs to kill any "normal" reaction, being locked in a dark room for hours, screamed at, called every name I never hear before, meals were used as a reward and the food was terrible so no loss...and don't forget the spankings...and after all that easy stuff for a 13 yr old, I guess it is a good thing I learned my lesson, huh?
All of that is terrible ..and some commenting here have been through EVEN WORSE ftr .. but the point is that you did the "boys will be boys" thing in your comment. So we're calling that out. Using women as objects once as a teen does not warrant a re-education camp, but it is indeed wrong.
The magazine was there "courtesy of brother" ..does that mean he *planted* it there? Or does that mean you accepted it from him to look at it and got caught?
Just want to make this point because these kinds of comments can be used to say "sexually repressing *specifically boys* is wrong, therefore anyone who speaks against using women as "things" is a big fat pURiTaNnnNnn." As long as that's not the angle, and we can admit that boys' behavior like this should be corrected in a REASONABLE way, then ok.
Mum and Dad's divorce was.not amicable. Mum did everything to show as the good and loving parent (which wasn't the case; at 14 I know what I saw and experienced.) She'd let us smoke in the house but tell him he should tell us that he was angry that we were lighting up in the living room. As time went on I think she knew she was losing the battle for our affection and preference. She screamed at me one afternoon that we had an older brother somewhere. Dad had gotten an ex-girlfriend pregnant! It was a huge shock but it didn't change how much we loved him as he was the very best Dad a child should have. Apparently, he and the ex-girlfriend had had a fling before she married her new boyfriend and she'd become pregnant. He told my Dad he would bring up the child as his own if Dad walked away and didn't contact the girlfriend ever again. She called Dad to let him know he had a son, but that she knew what her now husband had warned. I often wonder where he is. He has 4 younger sisters. Mum and Dad never had a boy, despite both wanting one.
A ladderback chair sits in an empty hotel room, facing a wall with a ¼-inch hole drilled in it. It’s 1972 and my father sits in this chair. He talks to men he cannot see on the other side of the wall. Their business is growing rapidly, they tell him, their voices surprisingly clear even though they are speaking through a hole in the wall. They need a high-performance UNIX server to help them manage accounts receivable.
My father listens closely as the men on the other side of wall outline their business requirements. No, they say, unlike most businesses, we don’t have accounts payable. And here, maybe my father’s forearms begin to break out in a sweat, the way the always do when he starts realizing the situation isn’t quite what he thought it was. Still, my dad tells them what server and software he thinks will solve their accounting headaches. Did he use the word “headache?” Because how many New York Godfathers had been shot in the head during the 50s & 60s?
The server arrives in New York and my father returns to the hotel room. Again, he sits in the upright wooden chair that faces the wall. He’s dead now, so I can’t ask him to clarify the details, but I believe the story he told me was that he walked them through set up and configuration simply by talking to the wall. I do know he returned two more times to this hotel to assist the men with their cutting-edge, business operations server.
On his last visit, the men offer my dad a permanent job as their IT systems administrator. I imagine he threw his head back laughing as his big, barrel chest strained at the vest of his dove-grey pinstriped suit. I can hear his reply in my head just as clearly as the first time he told me this secret: “Thank you, boys, but I’m sure you can’t afford me and my wife absolutely will not live on the east coast.” My dad always said he didn’t judge the companies who wanted to streamline their businesses and besides, the mob paid in cash.
I didn’t go home after school one day at 17. I had endured a lifetime of my mother’s mental and physical abuse, and something inside me finally just broke. I went to my best friend’s house, thinking I just needed relief. That night, I called home. I knew my dad—a quiet man who had weathered my mother’s rage and abuse along side me for decades—would answer. I asked if I should come back, and he shocked me and said no. Mom demanded he tell her where I was, but he refused. She told him to leave. He did. Divorce followed, and she made him a deal: he could have full custody of me if she got everything else—the house, the savings, the joint accounts. He agreed without hesitating. And just like that, the family I had known my whole childhood was gone. Leaving was supposed to be the hard part, but it turned out that surviving the trauma, the years of untangling what had been done to me—was something else entirely.
Wow, blown away by this, Jennifer. Are you writing about this?
Thank you - yes, I'm working on writing about it but it brings up a lot, so it's a slow process!
We can very much relate. :)
There were so many secrets that it's hard to narrow it down but basically for me, my dad wasn't my dad. My real dad was someone in Alaska. My sister never will know who her dad was as my mom wouldn't tell her and now mom has dementia and doesn't remember.
When I was seven, my father and I sat beneath the fig tree in the backyard, talking about his life. He looked both ways and whispered, “Don’t repeat the secret I’m about to tell you.” He began his tale with his escape from the Nazis in Poland, after which he joined the Soviet Army. At the end of World War II, my parents moved to Sweden for five years, then decided to emigrate to the U.S. One question on the form asked if he’d served in a foreign military. Since it was 1952, and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were still in full swing weeding out Communists, my parents would have never been granted entrance into the United States if my father had admitted to active duty in the Soviet Army. So he checked off the NO box. If his lie had been discovered, my mother, my siblings (who were born in Sweden), and my father would have been deported. I’m not certain why my father thought it was sound to tell a seven-year-old something that would lead to dire consequences, but I never divulged the secret.
My mother had a baby as a teenager. Her parents sent her to another city, alone, to a Catholic unwed mother's home, where she graduated from high school soon after giving birth and having her baby taken from her. She was forced to become a Catholic during this process. Meanwhile she was reviled and despised and forever branded by her family as a "bad girl."
And she carried this and never shared it with me, for the rest of her life. I knew everybody thought of her as a "bad girl," and always had. I knew she called her grandmother and her aunt the "queens of mean," but I never knew why. She wouldn't tell me, and she threatened everybody else with I-don't-know what if they told. So I didn't know I had a brother until my mother died, and my other aunt finally felt free to tell me. Of course, she had been a little girl when my brother was born, and had no details--just educated guesses.
Still, I found him through DNA research, but I also found other siblings. At first I thought they were my father's. That wouldn't have surprised anyone, but it turned out that my patrilineal DNA didn't lead to my father, at least not the one I thought I knew.
So, family? What family. I'm a mutt. I had one remaining relative on my not-bio dad's side, and she couldn't have been more awful about it.
It's the lies that hurt. And why? Why hide all that, and suffer because if it? Let's lay blame with my grandparents who tortured, rejected, reviled a poor teenage girl who got pregnant.
Being lied to by those who are supposed to care for us hurts. I felt that betrayal immensely, along with a complete loss of identity when I discovered at 50 my dad was not my biological father. I write about this in my substack – you are not alone!
Wow. Have you ever read this wonderful story by Meredith Hall?: https://www.narratively.com/p/the-cost-of-one-night-on-the-beach-with-a-boy Think you'd like it.
My parents divorced when I was a baby, and I didn’t meet my biological father until I was 20, after which I made occasional visits to his home. It was on one of these that he explained why my mother couldn’t be hugged.
We were in his basement, where we would assemble after dinner and drink Austrian liquor. Suddenly, out of nowhere: “I guess you never knew that your mother got pregnant and had a baby before we were married. The father was Phonsi.”
My mother had borne a child and given it up for adoption, and the father was Alphonse Carlo, her college violin teacher. With this revelation, the mystery of her physical reticence was solved: She was raped (I assumed) by this married, much older man and never recovered.
When I was growing up, Mr. Carlo would come to our house with his wife, Katherine, to play chamber music, with me crouched under the baby grand.
Based only on the few words from my tipsy father, I thought I had discovered the answer to that part of my mother’s character that had so disturbed me as a child. Mom was impregnated by her violin teacher, and the trauma of this rendered her unable to give or accept physical affection, even a hug from her children.
William, so sorry to hear that. That must have been really difficult to learn about.
When I was 74–thanks to a random DNA test—I found out that the dad who raised me was not my biological father. The devastation of that discovery was somewhat balanced by the fact that my best friend for the first 20 years of my life is actually my sister. We had reconnected on Facebook a few years prior. Now that we know we’re related, we’re committed to making up for 50+ lost years.
I was 50 when I found out my dad is not my bio father, because my kid took a DNA test. My substack is mostly centred around this discovery.
I am definitely following you!
Thanks, Elle! I'm glad you and your sister reconnected after so many years apart. I can't imagine what it was like discovering you were sisters after all this time. But I do understand that desire to make up for lost time - for me, it was discovering my DNA father was born in Italy, that I was half Italian. I threw myself into Italian culture trying to make up for 50 years of not knowing my Italian heritage, and I felt an urgency in getting to know him. Today is the three year anniversary of our first meeting!
I'm so happy to hear that you connected with your bio dad. Mine was long gone by the time I made my discovery, but I have memories of him from my childhood--and my sister has been sharing additional information. How thrilling that you gained 50% Italian heritage! My story is just the opposite: I grew up believing that I'm 100% Italian, but lost half of that.
Wild! Have you listened to the podcast "Inconceivable Truth" from Matt Katz, by chance? It's the story of an investigative reporter who is on a search for his bio dad … but the journey only leads to more questions and some unexpected truths. It's great! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inconceivable-truth/id1737812524
Thanks! I’ll check it out. Leaning about my sister was a pretty circuitous journey, so I can relate on several levels.
Psst…Begin worrying! Details to follow.
We're at the edge of our seats. :)
One grandfather was a robber baron while the other was basically Willy Wonka
Consider our interest piqued! Sounds fascinating (happy to hear more if you feel like sharing, but no pressure)!
For 10 years, I supported my parents. Bought them a home; paid the mortgage, taxes etc. As time wore on the expenses they agreed to cover became mine. A situation arose where I laid the groundwork to get them fulltime help as they were declining healthwise. Then suddenly, they didn't want me to continue. "Everything is fine. We can manage on our own' So, I began to wade through the maze of deceit. I uncovered payments to their youngest son, who kept getting into trouble. My family sacrificed so they could, surreptitiously, continue to finance his lifestyle. They even used the proceeds of their original home sale to purchase him a condo. All the while pleading poverty! I ended our relationship much to the contempt of my aunts/cousins. Cruel? Maybe? But my conscience is clear!
I think it's the betrayal that stings. So hard when you can't trust your own family.
Oof, that's a tough one. Glad you're in a better place …
For years, I knew in my gut I was being scammed but my wife wanted our kids to have a relationship with them. After the scam was uncovered, my kids never heard from them again.
Two years ago my husband and I learned that we would not be receiving the $50,000 that my in-laws promised us to help with the down payment on a house. Because my father-in-law spent a similar amount of money on male prostitutes. I tried telling him that dick is a renewable resource that needn’t cost money, but my words fell on deaf-and horny-ears.
Wow. Has everybody always been THIS selfish? Makes me despair of the human race.
Oh gosh, a twist we didn't see coming! 🙃
Hey, you got a little taste of what's it's like to be female and behave in a way that is completely self-possessed and fully human. Sent to the funny farm. At least you didn't get lobotomized. You had it easy.
Except you were committed for using women as objects to look at (oh and "prank and joke about"), so that's less of a courageous tale..
no not lobotomized but had to suffer through the various drugs that were made to stop my thoughts, drugs to kill any "normal" reaction, being locked in a dark room for hours, screamed at, called every name I never hear before, meals were used as a reward and the food was terrible so no loss...and don't forget the spankings...and after all that easy stuff for a 13 yr old, I guess it is a good thing I learned my lesson, huh?
All of that is terrible ..and some commenting here have been through EVEN WORSE ftr .. but the point is that you did the "boys will be boys" thing in your comment. So we're calling that out. Using women as objects once as a teen does not warrant a re-education camp, but it is indeed wrong.
The magazine was there "courtesy of brother" ..does that mean he *planted* it there? Or does that mean you accepted it from him to look at it and got caught?
Just want to make this point because these kinds of comments can be used to say "sexually repressing *specifically boys* is wrong, therefore anyone who speaks against using women as "things" is a big fat pURiTaNnnNnn." As long as that's not the angle, and we can admit that boys' behavior like this should be corrected in a REASONABLE way, then ok.