My Family Has Always Been Cagey About My Estranged Older Siblings. I Just Discovered the Shocking Reason Why.
Slate · L · trust 37/100
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I was adopted at 4 and my parents were very open about the process. However, they refused to talk about their two older kids, “Emily and Aaron.” There was a huge age gap between them and my sister and me. Our parents alluded to drugs and loss. We didn’t even know Emily committed suicide until my sister and I were well into our teens and no one knows if Aaron is still alive.
After our dad died, I moved home as my mom started showing signs of dementia. My sister works overseas and has two kids, she couldn’t possibly help on a day-to-day basis. I was going through family documents when I found letters between my mother and her sister and found a secret that shook me to my core.
Emily and Aaron were having a sexual relationship and it resulted in a pregnancy. It wasn’t spelled out, but my aunt wrote “you know what you need to do,” and from the dates on the letters, it tracks back roughly to my sister’s birthday. She was a home birth and attended by family members.
I don’t know what to do about this. My mother just cried when I confronted her and later forgot about it all together. I know Emily was a year older than Aaron, but there was nothing left behind about what happened to them after the birth other than my parents moved to a different state. I feel rotten and sick. My sister has never expressed any interest in genealogy, but it is so common now you can find kits in drugstores.
Jenée Desmond-Harris : Just to make sure I’m reading this correctly, because you know once letters have more than three characters, I start mixing people up … the letter writer is suggesting that their sister who lives abroad is the biological child of Emily and Aaron, the two older kids?
Lizzie O’Leary : I … I think so. This letter is so upsetting!
Jenée : Honestly, the situation was upsetting even before the most recent revelation. Two older siblings who were just unaccounted for? I just know it took a toll on everyone and the weight of the secret probably made the house a really unhappy place to grow up. And now this!
Lizzie : I keep thinking back to this Atlantic piece I read a few years ago about how the prevalence of over-the-counter genetic testing has meant that a lot of people are discovering previously hidden incest. As far as the LW is concerned, I wonder if there is someone—maybe the aforementioned aunt?—who is still alive who she can talk to about this. I feel like the LW’s sister probably does need to know, if only for her (and her children’s) health. But the LW can’t go on what she thinks is true. She needs to know for sure.
Jenée : I’m not totally sure the sister needs to know! Because I’ve unfortunately received so many letters about children born from incest, I’ve looked into it a few times and have a very basic understanding of the risks. And I believe the issue is that it leads to a higher chance of health complications. But if her sister has these issues (like a limb difference or intellectual disability) they already exist. I don’t think it’s the case that knowing her parents are siblings would give her important information that she could bring to her doctor to do something preventative and avoid a future condition or illness. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
I think if I’m honest I don’t want her to have to know. And in general, I think that with the easy access we all have to genetic testing, we should assume that people who are interested in all the potentially interesting and potentially devastating information that can result will pay a few dollars and do it. The sister is aware of the mystery around Emily and Aaron too, and if she had any curiosity, she would have spit into a test tube and looked up whether anyone popped up in her report as a sibling.
Am I just trying to justify being avoidant and taking it to the extreme? You can tell me if I am.
Lizzie : I don’t know! I am confrontational to the extreme, and I think one of the things I have learned from doing these Uncensoreds with you is that, uh, sometimes you need to let things lie. Also, I am gutted that you have gotten so many letters from people born from incest. That is profoundly upsetting.
Jenée : Well, a lot of them are probably fake; I think some people have been trying to recreate the energy of that letter about the twins who were in love with each other for about a decade now.
Lizzie : Oh yeah, I remember that one! Okay, so back to our LW. Do you think it’s worth her spending the energy to find out the truth? I think it’s important to note that one option is always to do nothing. To just sit with this for a little while and see how she feels. But I also think she would not have taken the time to write in if she didn’t want to do something .
Jenée : Yeah, I do think she should find out the truth. And then decide what to do with it, because the truth (if it is what she thinks it is) means something different to her than it does to her sister. And that makes it very tricky.
I will argue against myself a little and say that I can see the argument that it would be good to get this all out in the open and that it would be a relief for everyone (parents included) to stop tiptoeing around the family mystery. In the best-case scenario, everyone involved would come to the conclusion that what happened is not their fault. But it could also go very poorly. You know how sometimes when there’s a terrible, stupid, upsetting, or TMI thing said on social media, someone will say “We weren’t meant to know this much about what other people think?” or something to that effect. I feel like maybe we weren’t meant to know this much about our own families either.
Lizzie : Maybe so! We all have our own biases in how we approach the world, and I think mine is that I always want to know everything so that I can make decisions for myself. I am not saying that is a correct or always…
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