she is 78 and lives alone. her health is not good, but i feel like i dont really care to be honest.

Man that sucks, & totally understand why you must be angry. However, presumably she had her reasons for denying you of the truth. She raised you.

My own experience of this is as follows, my Grandad was a bit of dick, as was my Uncle (Dad’s brother) there was a family falling out, I’m not sure what it was about but it was serious enough for my Grandad & Uncle to stop talking to my Dad & my Aunt (Dad’s sister). For years before this incident neither my Dad or my Aunt had any contact with my Uncle due to his dickish behaviour. Now roll forward a few years & my Aunt decided to try & build bridges with my Grandad. She finally tracked him down & my Dad got a call one from her one night, my Grandad had died 3 years previously. Obviously this news deeply affected them both & they’ve never really made peace with it.

It wasn’t nice watching my Dad go through this & it almost ended my parents marriage.

So my advice to you would be forgive your mum, when she’s gone you’ll not be able to make peace & you’ll carry it around with you for the rest of your days.

Well, stories like this often surface at the most inopportune moments.
Sadly for your Mother she chose a particularly stressful time to tell you, probably knowing that you’d be too stressed to do/say much about the situation. Seems she was right.
It’s not uncommon either for Mothers to confide in daughters, situations beyond all recognition. This is a particularly tense and pointed situation.

What I find odd, sorry but I do, is your sisters lack of respect for you and the situation. I can’t quite comprehend why they didn’t tell you way back, regardless of what restrictions your Mother imposed on them.

So, ostracised and now on her own.. I’d definitely forgive.. no way on this planet I’d forget and I’d carry that to my maker. But there’s only one overriding factor here, your Mother was brought up in a particularly odd enclosed period where matters of family were kept secret. You are Not, only you can face the angst and anger that’s built up. Only one way of dealing with it and that’s to face it.

Go see your Mother, I imagine she’s as sad and mixed up and upset about the situation as you are.

Don’t take your wife, go alone. There will be no threat or side taking that way.

Best of Luck, I do hope it all works out well for you all.

Surely how your mother cared for you over your life is more important than one fact which would have had little bearing on your upbringing, as whoever was your father wasn’t present?

Ton, in your shoes, I think I might be able understand and maybe eventually accept my mother keeping such a thing secret, but that would depend very much on the circumstances, especially the reasons for doing it.

As I am sure you will remember and know better than many of us, being a single parent in the 1960s and 1970s was generally a lot harder than it is nowadays, and there was a great deal of social stigma to being a single parent, which often also affected the children concerned. I hope my using this word will not upset you, but at that time the word b*****d was a much stronger swear word than it is today, and it was used more in its literal traditional sense to mean a ‘child born outside wedlock’. I can imagine a single parent mother in those days making a decision to conceal the parentage of her child to protect not only herself from social stigma, but possibly more so to protect the child. Sadly some adults and children can be extremely cruel and would readily use knowledge of any weakness to hurt others, and it’s much much harder for a child to cope with social exclusion and bullying (especially by other children), than it is for the adult parent.

So the decision your mother took when you were a child may then have been for the best, and once that lie was accepted, it would become more and more difficult to tell you the truth with each passing year, even when you were an adult.

As to her telling you now, I think her reasons – as much as you can be confident of what they are – are key to how I would eventually view it. Did she tell you because she she felt she owed it to you to be honest, and because she considered it wrong to keep it from you any longer? I would not be so willing to forgive if I thought someone told me something which they knew would upset me greatly, but they had decided to do it anyway because it would make them feel better (confession may be good for the soul, but it can be a fundamentally selfish act). In reality, I suspect it’s a usually a mixture of motivations, and only you can decide whether to accept – or possibly even overlook – your mother’s reasons.

However, in your shoes I think I would be most upset by her telling both your elder and younger sisters, and I would struggle to accept any excuse for that.

My advice to you would be to take as long as you need to process this information. Your mother has known the truth for half a century, and after so long and at her age she probably does not see it as being anywhere near as important or significant as you do. You on the other hand are only just now beginning to come to terms with what is a huge shock for you and a realisation that people whom you trusted implicitly have deceived and lied to you. So, in your situation, I would not be rushed into forgiving someone, and I would wait until I had come to terms with it myself before doing anything.

Was she otherwise a good mum to you? If so, then you have to accept the fact that she had her own reasons for not telling you (historical prejudice being one example) – even if you might not agree with them. It’s a bit harsh to judge her on this one thing, regardless of how it makes you feel.

Ton

Aged 18 I found out my brother was only my half brother. I discovered that my mum was divorced in the late sixties (still a very big deal then) on the grounds of marital cruelty after her husband attacked her, having previously shook/killed her second child (in the days when it wasn’t investigated). She therefore married my dad in 1970, before I was born, my dad being from a Liverpool/Irish catholic family (think mrs browns boys) and marrying a divorcee with child, which again was a huge issue back then, with him being excommunicated from the church as a result.

As you can imagine, this was all a bit of a shock… did she do the right thing keeping all this from me as a child, growing up regarding my brother as my full brother? Too bloody right she did, and I wouldn’t have blamed her if she never did. It certainly shook me a bit at the time, but I realise now how remarkable it was, and how remarkable a bloke my (now late) dad was to take on my mum and brother at a time when divorce was a real issue.

See things in that light, and you can maybe at least understand why she never told you, and that might make it easier to come to terms with, even if it hurts at the moment

No , carrying a grudge helps me balance the chip on my other shoulder .

Scottish, by any chance? 😉

For this sort of thing, I’m in the not forgive category. My family were, and indeed still are, shite. I have nothing to do with the lying, backstabbing, selfish twunts. The damage that they did and would, and I’m sure still are behind my back, continue to do is unforgivable.
I don’t get this “they’ll be gone one day” malarkey. They should have thought about that before.
I’d look at how much damage you feel you’ve suffered, and no one can tell you that as it’s your own experience. Be sure that if you decide to cut ties that you’re not alone.

rear all the replies…..and thanks.
just to add, I am still seeing my mother twice a week. and will do so until she passes away. I just don’t feel like seeing her.

life eh…

Forgive her Ton, I was in exactly the same situation, my elder brother & sister knew but not me and I was born in the fifties. I knew life was hard for her, working long hours in a woolen mill for low pay and bringing up three kids on her own with virtually no state support but I always felt loved and wanted and apart from the usual shit everyone carries around, I think I’ve turned out ok. Life’s too short, make peace.

Tough, as is often the case the cover up is worse than the issue.

All your questions are legitimate and deserve an answer. You have been “wronged” and are entitied to an explanation.

A couple of thoughts … it’s not that an uncommon situation, as I read it the real kick in the teeth is being told last, as a typical bloke I could imagine my mum would find it easier to share stuff with my sister than me, maybe a “good opportunity” never came up, time rolls on etc …

Your mum is ’78 .. have a chat, ask her all the questions, try and get it sorted out not just for her sake but yours too.

Best of luck