When The Truth Comes Too Late

Family lies stole my truth — and it nearly stole my story.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Why do people lie?

Not those little white lies, where we tell someone we like their new hair, or lie about the muffin we had directly before dinner. No, I mean those colossal lies.

Lies that can change the course of a life.

My life.

Lies my parents had told…

What if? What if they’d never told those lies? What would my life have been like? And how about my daughter’s life? And then the newest questions: how would my brother’s life have been, and would we have had the bond I’d always hoped for?

I will never know the why of those lies. Why had they told them? And even worse: why did my parents go to their graves without ever telling the truth? Without ever offering something resembling an apology?

Why had they been so cruel to allow three people they supposedly love to live with traumas they’d caused?

I won’t swallow every bitter pill
that you coat in sugar,
to disguise lies.

A week after I started writing this — and stopped because tears stopped me from seeing the words — I read the above words in a poem by May More. Those hit me square between the eye and unlocked the rest of this article.

I have to write about the lies. I have to, because it feels like parts of my life are being retroactively rewritten. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.

Until November 2020, I had lived my life believing my boyfriend had abandoned me and left me to raise our child by myself. But between lockdowns, everything changed when I learned the truth after my daughter had read through papers, which once were my mom’s. He’d never abandoned me — they’d forbidden him from contacting me.

By then my mom had passed, and when my daughter confronted my father with it, all he said was: “Sometimes people make mistakes.” Five months later, in April 2021, he passed. In December 2021, my daughter found her father.

But there were more lies than just making me believe my boyfriend had disappeared… as if that wasn’t bad enough!

My mom passed away in July 2017, and that was the last time I saw my brother. He didn’t want to have any contact with me, and neither did my sister-in-law. Until mid-March when out of the blue, she contacted me. A week later, my daughter and I met her for a coffee.

We came away from that meeting feeling unsettled. Disillusioned. Shocked.

It will take time to work through what I heard. To get back to the image that I had of my parents — especially my mom.

At 16, my brother had heard that he’d caused my parents’ divorce. My father accused him, and later my brother learned that he’d been the baby who should’ve saved the marriage. I was the wanted child, while he unknowingly carried that burden.

My mom, on one of her trips to visit my brother when they still lived in South Africa, had tried to apologize to my brother for the way she’d treated him as a child. He couldn’t handle it and told her he didn’t want to talk about it. Apparently, my mom had mentally abused him, because she resented him for keeping her in an unhappy marriage.

My mom could be hard, especially in business, but everyone knew her as a soft and kind person. Was it just her sugarcoating the lie she lived? We have so many questions. Did we ever really know her? Don’t get me wrong, I loved and still love my mom, but learning these things hurt so damn much.

Who was she really?

Both my daughter and I are still trying to come to terms with the betrayal we’ve discovered toward the end of 2020, and now we learn new shocking things on top of that.

And as if that wasn’t enough, a new lie surfaced.

Shortly after my boyfriend and I had told my parents about my pregnancy and my boyfriend disappeared, my parents told me they’d learned he had impregnated another girl in the town where he worked. That was about 50 kilometers from where I lived with my parents. I can’t remember when I learned there never was another pregnancy other than my own. It could’ve been after my daughter had found her father; it could’ve been before that.

After our coffee appointment, my daughter was so upset, she called her father. Ever since she’d learned about my parents’ betrayal, she’d wondered about her grandmother, my mom. Was my mom so incredibly loving and kind to her because she felt guilty for taking my daughter’s dad from her? Or did my mom really love her that much?

Did my mom sugarcoat her lies with her kindness, and left us to now swallow the bitter pills?

Back to my daughter calling her father…

It was during the call that he told her about another lie from back when I was pregnant.

I met my boyfriend because my father worked with his older brother for a brief three months, just over a year before I fell pregnant. My father still had contact with the brother after I fell pregnant. Shortly after we’d told my parents I was with child, my boyfriend’s brother told him what my father had said — that they should ‘hope’ my child is my boyfriend’s, because I slept around.

Sounds familiar?

And you know what I hate the most about that lie? It’s that I feel I have to defend myself, that I have to tell the world my boyfriend was the only one. That’s a damn bitter pill to swallow.

How can a parent put you in a position like this? How can a parent spread such horrible lies? What else had they lied about?

I will never know, because I can never ask them.

I will work through this. I will find a new balance. Will get back to the balance I had, but with more knowledge than before. That coffee date has opened up a Pandora’s box of thoughts and memories, or rather, the lack of memories, and left me with a strange dream a few nights later.

I will write about those… one day.

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Also read this powerful essay by

Cynthia Shultes, PharmD

On Death, Dying, and Courage