Family skeletons

[Torie]

In reading the thread below about a poster's new found roots and relatives, I got thinking about family stories and skeletons and coverups and thought I would share a couple of mine, which actually caused me when typing it out to wonder about one incident in my life, and muse about what may have been the real reason it occurred. More on that towards the end of this narrative.

On the issue of newly discovered relatives, my cousin discovered a few years ago that we both have a first cousin we never knew about. You see our mothers' older brother while not yet of the age of majority of 21 at the time, eloped with this woman. The story our grandmother told us is that she had the marriage annulled because she disapproved of the woman and questioned her son's maturity. As she told the story, her son as soon as he turned 21 then married the woman, whom my grandmother continued to disdain for the rest of her 50 years on the planet, and they had two sons, cousins of course that we know about. Our uncle was always quite introverted and misanthropic, a glass half empty rather than half full type. His mother had a role in that I suspect.

It turns out that the woman that our uncle eloped with was not the woman that he married at 21, but another woman with whom he had a daughter. It is that daughter who was raised by this unrevealed woman who somehow tracked down my cousin and introduced herself.  Our grandmother lied to us to cover up this family "scandal."

That was not the only lie she told to us, our grandmother. She told us the story that her  brother was rocking the cradle next to the fireplace in which lay his newborn sister, and rocked the cradle too vigorously, causing the babe to fly into the active fireplace.  Grandmother framed the story as an example of adrenaline, because her mother Rambo-like self levitated over the stove to grab the baby out of the flames. It was too late. The baby was dead.

The way the story was told had at least one error in it however. On my grandmother's death bed she confessed to my aunt that it was her, and not her brother, that was rocking the cradle. You see, our grandmother  was 4 at the time, and jealous of her new baby sister, supplanting her role as the youngest child doted over by her parents, and wanted her dead,  acted upon her desire, and succeeded. I should have known my grandmother was lying. Her older brother was about 10 years old, and would not have done that. When my grandparents bought out her siblings interest in the family farm upon the death of her mother, the very first thing my grandmother did was tear down the ancestral farmhouse in which she grew up. She wanted to destroy any trace of that fireplace that so tortured her conscience, a conscience so tortured indeed that she felt compelled to finally confess her murder 95 years before on her death bed at age 99.

Oh I might add, I spent 6 months living with my grandparents when I was 4 because I was too much to handle when my younger brother was born. We had a fireplace too. My younger brother is still alive. My grandmother told my mother to let her have that child, me, and I will take him back to Iowa while you cope with your newborn. And those 6 months with my grandparents I still remember with fondness. They were some of my happiest times as a little kid.  My grandmother had a structure and discipline that my "neurotic" mother was absolutely incapable of. In typing this I suddenly discerned another potential dot connection. Yes, you guessed it. Did my grandmother have an ulterior motive for taking me far, far away from Los Angeles and its fireplace and the newborn? I will never know.

Not every family story that you hear is true. Perhaps a majority of them are not true. The truth is sometimes just too painful.