Bonus: Listener Stories, Episode 18

In this bonus episode we hear from listeners in the Family Secrets community. To share your secret, call 1-888-SECRET-0.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio High
Family Secrets. Family. It's Danny and we're back with an
episode of listener messages. Our mailbox has been rimming with
your amazing stories, so we're going to start dropping these

(00:23):
in from time to time as we continue to be
hard at work creating Season four of Family Secrets with
an amazing lineup of guests, launching in early October. I
know it's a long time to wait, and I know
we could all use the distraction, but good things take time,
and I promise it'll be worth it. In the meantime,
we're trying to bring you as much great bonus content

(00:45):
as we can, and to that end, here are some
stories recorded by you. Are wonderful, devoted listeners. I'm honored
and grateful that you're part of my world. Hi, Um,
I thought I wouldn't leave my story. I became pregnant

(01:06):
at fourteen and a half while I was living overseas.
My dad was in the military, and this was my
first time having sex, and the boy that was that
I knew was the father was also a visiting person
from another country. We moved back to the States in
nineteen seventy six. I didn't tell my parents. Um, as

(01:30):
I got more in showing everybody around me knew my friends,
my parents friends, but nobody ever talked about it. Told
Denial Um and then somebody, an adult, told me if
I didn't tell my parents, they were going to tell them.
So I told them, and within a couple of weeks,
Um I went into labor and the baby was taken away,

(01:54):
given to Catholic charities on the premises she had to
be raised Jewish. Fast forward to two thousand seventeen. My mom,
of all people, wants to do a twenty three in me,
so she's given one by my dad for her birthday
and my husband tells me, you know this is going
to open up a whole can of worms. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um.

(02:15):
I get a call for my brother one day while
I was at work and he never called me at work,
telling me that he really needed to talk to me,
and I already knew what it was about. So fast
forward from that three years ago. I have a lovely
relationship with my biological daughter. She had a pretty happy childhood.

(02:35):
Her biological father never knew about her and found out
and was ecstatic. He is married. Never was not able
to have children. So it all worked out in the end. Um,
I had to tell my own daughters who didn't know.
Nobody really, my current friends didn't know because I was ashamed.

(02:56):
But I'm so happy it's out in the open now.
I am first telling me say thank you so much
for just creating a platform where you don't feel alone
on an island when it comes to um knowing secrets

(03:18):
or or have been brave enough to tell your secret.
So I thank you so much for that. Um, this
is double. This is a double mission. The first one
is I have three donor conceived children, me and my wife,
and you give me confirmation that it's okay to tell
them at a young age who they are, where they
come from, and you know, to go out and seek

(03:40):
that information, which leads me into the second mission. The
second one is family history. So I am a life
skinned African American woman. There's normally this African American myth
that you know, like if you look a certain way,
you are you know, related to a Native American person.
And most times that is not room And I had
to break that down to my mother. The secret was that, UM,

(04:04):
she always assumed that we were Native American through this
last name that sALS Native American is not um, It's
actually German and Swedish. And so I found out through
ancestry DNA and tracing my roots that my um fourth
great grandfather was a slave. He was will to a grandson.

(04:27):
So the new grandson was actually the father of my
great great grandmother. So I had to share that secret
with my mother and let her know that we are
not at Native Americans. There's no Native Americans in our DNA,
and this is that to our story. I feel good
because I know that there's a woman that was spoken for,

(04:49):
even when a whole entire family wanted to hide that fact. Hi.
I was fifteen years old when I was looking through
a drawer filled with items of my deceased father. He
had died when I was six, and I always went

(05:10):
through the store, you know, smelling his watch or holding
his watch, and just picking up little odds and end
to feel closer to him. That year, though, my hand
went across something very slick, and I reached in and
found a laminated used super article. My mom had recently
become a teacher and had started laminating everything in our

(05:32):
house the plusterity, so that's why I found it this time,
and the article said, the headline of it said, how
can I deny guilt from a young girl? Wide? And
as I read the story, I realized it's a story
about my father going to prison for involuntary manslaughter. He
was coming home from work um and had had one drink,

(05:56):
was not, you know, technically drunk, but came around the
curve and head on into another car. In that car
was a young woman and her fiancee. They wished to
be married, um at least later, but the younger dad
and my father was prisoned. My father was, in my mind,

(06:16):
had always been the good doctor. He was a dentist.
We lived in a nice Sbourban home, We belonged to
the country club. Everything before his death had always seemed
like the good time of our life, and I always
thought if only Dad were a lot of things would
be better. He's a good guy. By this time, my
mom had been dating on and off for a very
long time, an alcoholic, um abusive man who tried his

(06:40):
dentist but just as kind of had his own names
and and to me, he represented all that was bad,
and my dad represented all that was good. And to me,
years become terms that you know, maybe not everyone that
can be defined by one act in their life. And
I was able to give both my mom's boyfriend and
my dad, but I still struggle with to give me

(07:02):
my family, my half sisters and brothers, and my mom
keeping that secret from me because now I kind of
always live wondering when the next shoe for the next
secret is going to dropped. If you'd like to share

(07:25):
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 Secret and then the numeral zero. For

(07:54):
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