A Family Secret 42 Years in the Making

I’ve always disliked the concept of protecting someone by lying to them, but there are countless families that operate in this fashion.

The person engaged in deception is convinced that their actions are motivated by love, but love and deception mix as well as oil in water. In reality, the secrets and lies the family abides by are hiding shame, guilt, and judgment.

I mean, have you ever met someone who’s said, “I’m glad I was lied to?” Of course not.

However, the truth, not the lie, always gets blamed for the fallout once revealed, destroying bonds and trust built with the people you loved.

I’m currently dealing with my own version of deception, one I had no clue was even taking place, and I’m still processing how to move forward in life.

As I understood it growing up, my father had another child with another woman but I knew nothing else about them. For years, I told myself that it didn’t really matter but as I got older, I thought, “What if my sister was looking for me?”

I talked it over with my wife and she agreed that I should try to search for her, so I took the first step of submitting my DNA to Ancestry.com and seeing if there were any hits. My results came in a few weeks later, and while I didn’t see anyone that resembled my sister, I found something else I’d never even considered.

My father was an immigrant from Trinidad who’d moved to America around the age of 30, yet when I looked at the family tree on my father’s side, there was zero lineage from the Caribbean.

I saw a first cousin listed there whose tree branched to great-grandparents from Mississippi. Something didn’t make sense. I talked to my wife for hours about what I was seeing, but I still couldn’t make sense of it.

I was in a state of denial until I could accept the truth that had been hidden from me: the man I had called my father wasn’t my father.

There never had been any rumblings of me being someone else’s child. That possibility was a secret only known by one person. Without divulging too much information, I wasn’t getting any help understanding the situation and was encouraged to leave it alone, as if wanting to know the truth was a bad endeavor.

With the help of a search angel, someone who helps to reconnect family members, I was able to get in contact with my first cousin. Immediately, he welcomed me as family and wanted to help me connect the dots as to who my father was.

Hours later, my cousin called me back.

“Are you sitting down?”

“No.”

“You should sit down.”

“Okay.”

“We found your father.”

Those words of discovery made me cry like a child who had been missing his entire life finally making his way home.

He spoke with his uncle about whether he knew who my mother was and he confirmed he did. He remembered when she was pregnant but wasn’t sure if he was the father, as there was someone else in the picture at the time.

Growing up, my conversations with my father were superficial and incredibly brief. But today, I got to have a deep conversation with my real father. The man I’d always wanted my father to be was always out there, and I had no idea until the age of 42.

I was robbed of growing up with siblings, uncles, and a father who would have been involved in my life, all because of a secret. A secret that covered up someone else’s shame but robbed me of what every child deserves: a father.

A secret has left me with pieces of an identity that I now have to glue back together, virtually on my own. I spent years healing my father wound, and now it’s been picked back open because of a family secret.

The only saving grace is that I’ve now had the opportunity to talk to my father before he leaves this earth. I don’t believe in coincidences, and I thank the Lord for helping to reveal the truth to me.

This past Father’s day was the most difficult Father’s Day. I broke down crying in church as my deacon held me. Darkness had covered my entire life, but now it was time for the Lord’s light to shine on me.

Even if my family wouldn’t tell me the truth, God eventually did.