“Just fear of losing my family completely, fear of family falling apart and not them being the way we’ve always been.”Īfter three years of keeping the secret of her mum’s affair, Jess decided she had to tell someone. “I didn’t tell my mum because I didn’t know what was the right thing to do. Jess didn’t tell her mum she knew, nor did she tell her two brothers or father. And I found out that my mum was having an affair.” “Me being suspicious and young, I obviously checked her phone. I’d never really seen her do that before. “I got a suspicion that she was up to something by her facial expressions and the way she’d look at her phone when she was reading something. “I used to hang out with my mum a lot, go shopping, do girly things, and I just started to notice my mum acting differently. She begged us not to tell our dad, and she said she’d stop.”Īt 14, Jess discovered that her mum was having an affair.
“What is a mum? A mum is somebody who looks after their children, who loves them for their foibles, for their good bits, for their bad bits, and that’s who she was.” “As well as having loved my mum, I’m now very grateful to her, I don’t remember being grateful to her before. The secret has made Christine appreciate her mum who brought her up even more. How didn’t I know for the whole of my life?” “My mother’s whole family, they all knew. Name of father, unknown.”Ĭhristine’s birth mother was Jean, the woman she had known as her aunt. “When the birth certificate arrived, I opened it, not expecting to see anything like that, but there it was: Name of the mother, Jean Elsie Louise. “After I’d sent for it suddenly came into my head, what could I possibly find out that could be really awful? And what I could possibly find out that would be really awful would be that Jean was my mother. “Honestly, I don’t know what prompted me to do that. This gave her date of birth and that her grandmother registered her, but it didn’t say who her parents were.
#A FAMILY SECRET FULL#
In 2016, Christine decided she wanted to see her full birth certificate as she’d only seen a shortened version. We were always having to deal with her and get her out of scrapes and things.” We’d take clothes for the children, we’d take bed linen because the children would be sleeping on beds with no bed linen.
“My mum and I used to go and visit her and take her stuff which she would then flog. My mother looked after Jean her whole life. My mum was her main support, financially. “She had eight children by different men. Even her own mother didn’t like her very much. It was only as I got older that I realised that not everybody was like that.”Ĭhristine knew that her parents weren’t married and that the family had a difficult relationship with her mother’s sister, Jean. “I didn’t understand why but that’s how it was. We weren’t encouraged to speak to neighbours. “I grew up with my mum and dad, we lived in a flat. There are hundreds of women who did exactly what my mum did all through history. “If you look at a lot of oral history about gay people, it tends to still predominantly focus around men. Now whether that was a relationship that would have continued, for the rest of her life, I don’t know. My mum was technically denied the one thing she wanted, which was to be with probably the woman she loved. “I’ve been able to have a career, have a family, and still be gay. She feels like she’s finally able to talk about it. “She said that she’d had a relationship, quite a long standing relationship with a woman and that her parents had written her a letter saying that if there was any form of relationship going on, that they didn’t approve and that it wasn’t an appropriate way to live a life.”Įllen kept her mum’s secret for nearly 20 years. “I then asked, ‘does anybody else know?’ and she said, ‘no, I will go to the grave with this and you are to tell nobody.’ The way she fixed her gaze on me, when she said that, I knew she was serious. She just span round and said, ‘I think I do’.”Įllen’s mum told her that she’d had a relationship with a woman, but that she had married Ellen’s father and had never told anybody. I said, ‘you don’t know what it’s been like’. “I eventually just turned around and said ‘Mum, I’m gay’. “We were just standing between the living room and the kitchen and Mum was busy cooking. I didn’t think I could continue not being honest with them. “I’d been living my gay life quite quietly away from the family home and I just got to the point where I needed to talk to my parents about my life. “I asked, ‘does anybody else know?’ and she said, ‘no, I will go to the grave with this and you're to tell nobody.’"
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