I was having a conversation about secrets with my friends about four months ago. One of them said, 'Liberate yourself from your secrets,' and it has stuck with me ever since. (I later found out he got this wise comment from a chocolate candy wrapper, but I like it anyway). Back during what I now refer to as my dark ages, I kept a lot of secrets and I kept them very well, but since I've gotten my life back on track I've decided to stay away from secrets (as much as possible). Nothing good usually comes from them, I think honesty is always best and it's rare that you can be completely honest when keeping a secret.
The topic of secrets has come up because my little brother has finally emerged from his almost year and a half long odyssey that was brought on by the death of the father we never knew. His childhood sweetheart and mother of his two children finally pulled the trigger on their divorce and that seems to have snapped him out of his haze. I'm happy he's coming around and I hope they can repair their relationship. But there is one more hurdle that's been thrown into the mix and that is the fact that my brother has decided to liberate himself from his secrets. The biggest one is that he had tracked down our father and was planning to contact him in June of last year (which was about a week before his death). He picked up the phone several times but never dialed the numbers to talk to him. Then we found out about his death. This revelation explains a hell of a lot about his self-imposed exile, but it also opens up a whole new can of worms.
Since he never got to know his birth mother, I completely understand his need to reach out to our father. What I don't get is why he also felt the need to keep it a secret, even from his wife who is/was his best friend. He knew how my sister and I felt about our father, we never gave him much thought until we heard about his death. Neither of us ever felt the need to reach out to him or know anything about his life and we still don't, really. But if he had come to us at the time and talked about it we probably would have been open to explore it. And I know his wife would have been 100% on board with his decision and would have gone with him to meet the guy. And then maybe some stuff could've been resolved between them and we all could've avoided these last 15 months of uncertainty and fighting. So instead of just saying something, he internalized and this mess is the result.
I love him and I'm glad he's coming out of the fog. But it kinda sucks to know that this all probably coulda been avoided. I just hope he learns from it and realizes that he's lucky; he has a family who would support him through anything (like what we just went through) and who love him no matter what. It just bothers me that he didn't realize there was no need to keep this from anyone, that he didn't think his siblings, of all people, would understand. I've never thought of him as my half-brother because it doesn't matter to me, family is family. But I think that's part of what played into all this, he somehow felt neither of us would understand because we're not in his exact position. That's unfortunate. Hopefully things work out for him and his wife and kids.
