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TIFU by exposing a 50-year-old family secret

Obligatory “not today, but a few years ago”...

My wife’s parents have never been easy to shop for at Christmas. They always did well financially and we didn’t. If they wanted something they just bought it. But a few years ago they retired at the same time my wife and I started doing better so we decided to actually get them something “big” in addition to our usual pictures of the kids.

My mother-in-law had always been into genealogy. She had been building her own family tree for a few years on Ancestry and had talked about getting a DNA test. But she kept saying that $100 was a bit much to spend on answers she already knew. So I asked my wife what she thought about getting each of her parents a DNA kit for Christmas. She thought it was a great idea, so we picked up a couple.

So Christmas morning comes around and we make the trek to the in-law’s house. We had dinner, visited, looked at pictures…the things you do at family gatherings. Finally, the time came for the gift exchange. My father-in-law and mother-in-law both opened their gifts. My MIL got really quiet for a couple of seconds before speaking up. “Oh! Thank you! I’ve really been thinking about this but didn’t want to spend the money. Now that I have one, I guess I’ll do it!”

The rest of the day was spent just hanging out and visiting. Nothing else was said about the tests.

A couple of days later, my wife and I were sitting in the living room when her phone rang. She looked at me and said she’d be right back. She went into our bedroom and closed the door.

After about half an hour, I had to get in there to use the bathroom. She was still on the phone, so I walked through quickly. When I got out, she was sitting on the bed with a blank stare and a half-smile on her face.

“Are you ok?” …silence…

She looked me dead in the eye, grinned ear to ear, and said, “I have a brother!”

Now…My wife and I had been together for over 25 years at this point. I know her extended family as much as I know my own. She has one sister. That’s it. Her parents were married when they were in their early 20s and my wife was born soon after. I was trying to figure out when they would have had a son...

“How do you…Oh shit…Your mom got pregnant when she was a teenager, didn’t she?”

“Yep. She was sent to a convent to have the baby and he was adopted out in a closed adoption. Her sister took a DNA test about a year ago and he showed up as her nephew. My mom knew she couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.”

“That explains why she hesitated when we gave her the DNA kit. She knew there’d be an immediate connection.”

“Yeah.”

Since then, we’ve met and come to know this new person in our family and things have been pretty solid with all of us (as long as we don’t discuss politics or religion.) My FIL knew about this before they got married 50 years ago, but they just never talked about it. My MIL spent over 50 years being really scared about revealing this family secret. Getting pregnant “out of wedlock” was super taboo in much of the US in the 1960s. It all ended up coming out ok, but I still consider this a FU because I inadvertently opened a closet of skeletons that I didn’t even know existed.

TL;DR - I got my mother-in-law a DNA test for Christmas that made her confess to being a pregnant teenager in the 1960s.

EDIT: Moved the TL;DR to the end. 😊

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