How I found my father had kept a secret second family all my life
One man’s terrible deception — and the devastation it wrought on his ‘loved’ ones
THE REVELATION took my breath away. Blinking at the computer screen, I re-read the words: ‘Your dad is married to my mum. They have three sons — and I am one.’
I knew Dad had been married before, with children I’d never met. It was the use of the present tense that set my heart racing; Dad had told us he’d divorced long ago.
I’d found my half-brother on Facebook. Dad was estranged from his parents and siblings and, curious about my extended family, I’d been contacting people in the area with our surname.
Talk about opening a can of worms. We continued exchanging messages and out it all came. How Dad had been living with his other family half the time: when he was away with ‘work’, he was actually with them.
It was the real reason he’d never married Mum, too: every time any of us queried this he’d say: ‘We don’t need an expensive piece of paper to prove our love.’
If that’s not audacious enough, Dad had been leading this double life for 28 years — since seven years before I was born. So for my entire life, Dad had been lying to me, to my sister and to my mum.
I broke the news to Mum straight away and, distraught, she called him. She had thought he was away for work, as normal, but this time she told him not to come home from wherever he’d been. Apart from one or two cursory text messages, we have heard nothing from him since.
Six months on, perhaps not surprisingly, my mum, my sister Lauren, 25, and I are still struggling to come to terms with it all. Not only has Mum spent nearly three decades loving a man who was married to someone else, Lauren and I have had to deal with the fact our father is not the man we thought he was. While there are so many unanswered questions, there are also many answers.
I don’t think I’ll ever know why he did such a thing — perhaps it’s as simple as having his cake and eating it — but other things have clicked into place. I’d always wondered why I’d gone from being an upbeat, gregarious child to an introverted, distrusting teen on anti-depressants. Now I put it down to a continuous gnawing doubt that all was not as it seemed.
I appreciate it sounds inconceivable that Dad got away with it for so long, but his routine of staying with us for half the week and every other weekend was something we grew up with.
We all believed that, for the rest of the time, his work as an accountant for a large fruit and veg distributor kept him away. He blamed work for the fact he could never be with us on Christmas Day, and led us to believe it
was why he was largely absent from our birthday celebrations. There was always talk of meetings up and down the country and overseeing early deliveries.
I have since discovered that in fact, in recent years, he has been working for an estate agent — so he even lied about his job.
When I was very young, Dad’s absences weren’t something I questioned because it was how it had always been. In fact, I would still say we had a happy childhood growing up in Blyth, Northumberland.
My parents had met three years before Lauren was born: my mum, Moira, now 55, had been working in a local pub and Dad used to pop in every lunch for a cheese and ham toastie. Of course she thought she’d met ‘the one’, while all along he was secretly married.
As I grew up, my parents seemed happy. They held hands, took us on holidays and weekends away.
AsWE were so close to my mum and my late grandmother, I can’t say we missed Dad much when he was away. It was great when he was around but otherwise, we just got on with our lives.
But, through the prism of hindsight, I can see how his absence inspired a sense of worthlessness in me. It wasn’t until my early teens that doubts set in. I started to wonder if he had girlfriends. I confided in my grandmother, who tried to reassure me, telling me ‘not to be daft’ and that Dad was hard at work. But any relief was only momentary.
I was so concerned I broached the subject with my mum once or twice. she batted away my suggestions confidently: ‘Don’t be silly, he’s just working.’ It’s only lately that Mum has admitted she, too, had nagging doubts but pushed them to the back of her mind.
I think she clung to their talk of retirement plans. Both allotmentmad, t hey t al ked of buying somewhere rural and living the good life. Meanwhile my desire to impress Dad became an obsession, meaning I took on far more studying than I could handle.
I was eventually diagnosed with depression aged 16 and given antidepressants. something Dad brushed off with unhelpful comments: ‘Just smile, for God’s sake!’
When I went to university to study journalism, I saw him less and less. That’s not to say I wasn’t bitterly disappointed when he showed up late to my graduation last July on my 21st birthday and barely said a word.
In 2012, the family had been shaken by two terrible events in close succession. Mum started chemotherapy for cancer in the April. Four months l ater, my grandma died of the disease aged 85. Dad was absent throughout.
Although he attended Gran’s funeral and stood there holding Mum’s hand, he had nothing to do with the preparations, nor did he ask how any of us were coping.
It would be just over a year before the truth would finally out last November. I was living in Birmingham and working as a reporter.
I started thinking about Dad’s shadowy heritage. I didn’t even know if he had any siblings. He’d always said he wasn’t in touch with his own family. As for my three halfbrothers, I’d never felt compelled to meet them because Dad gave the impression he didn’t see them either.
I decided to search Facebook for people with my surname who lived in our area. I don’t know what I expected to find, but it certainly wasn’t a whole second life.
MuMonce told me that, in 1990, a year after Lauren had been born, she’d been confronted by a woman who claimed to be Dad’s wife. That’s when she discovered he had three sons.
My parents split for a few months, after which Dad came crawling back, insisting he’d divorced the other woman. Mum took him back and things gradually got back on track before I was born in July 1992.
There were no stand-out moments when Mum’s suspicions were raised. He was careful to keep his work life very private: we never met any of his colleagues, for example.
Mum often complained when he missed birthdays and Christmases but his reply was always the same: he had no choice because he had to work hard to earn money for us all.
No one could have imagined Dad had been lying from the outset. He’d clearly been lying to his other family, too. When I got in contact with my half-brother on Facebook, he explained how he’d recently found a note from me in Dad’s office, but Dad brushed it off, making it sound like he didn’t have much to do with me.
When I told him Dad lived with us, he wrote: ‘And sleeps in the same bed as your mum?’ ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘And does he come home every other weekend? Does he say he’s working when he’s not there?’
From that I gathered he’d fed this other family, who live 20 miles away i n Newcastle, the same l i es. I wanted to find out more, but my half-brother clammed up, telling me he had to go because he wanted to confront Dad.
I was at work in Birmingham so I phoned Mum straight away. Of course I’d rather have done it in person but she was too far away. ‘I think you need to sit down,’ I said. ‘Dad’s still with his ex-wife: in fact, he never divorced her.’ ‘You’re joking?’ Mum gasped. I could hear the quiver in her voice as I explained that, while the oldest of his sons, 34, knew about us, the younger two — 32 and 27 — didn’t. As for whether the wife knew about us, my half-brother had said he wasn’t sure. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘I’ll phone you back,’ said Mum. In the meantime, she tried to call Dad. His phone was switched off, as usual, so she sent a text message: ‘I know your secret. Don’t come home.’ The response made my blood boil. ‘I’m sorry. I tried to do good by everyone, but just messed it up in all ways. I’m not a bad man. I just got it wrong in so many directions. I will have the consequences of losing everything and everyone but that’s my fault and it’s what I deserve.’
self-pity and self-justification, that’s all he had to offer. I was disgusted — but desperate to know more of the story. I tried my half- brother again, but this time all I got were one-word answers. ‘Don’t you think we need to talk?’ I asked.
He wrote back, saying maybe one day but he didn’t think he could handle it now. I gathered he’d spoken to Dad but when I asked how his mum had reacted, he replied: ‘That’s none of your business.’
I managed to find photos of his mum on his profile page: she had light blonde hair and seemed about the same age as Dad, who’s 61.
My half-brother has now deleted me as a friend on Facebook. When I queried this, he said: ‘We don’t need to be in contact.’
This was a double blow, as not only did it mean I couldn’t find out any more information, but I would have liked to forge a relationship with my brothers. I still hope to do so one day.
It’s the reason I haven’t gone round there and made a scene: I didn’t want them to think badly of me. I don’t blame them because, l i ke us, they were i n kept in the dark. My sister, Lauren, was as shocked as Mum and me. she has chosen to maintain a relationship with Dad — albeit through text as he hasn’t dared to phone any of us — but there’s no disguising how much he has hurt her, too.
she sent him a text about her disappointment and he responded with the same pathetic excuses and large dose of self-pity. They didn’t wash with me.
I left him one voicemail saying, ‘Call me’ but he didn’t. I haven’t had a single word: no apology, no acknowledgement, nothing. That really hurts; it’s the final confirmation that I don’t matter to him.
Although Mum, Lauren and I are closer than ever, we have spent a lot of time crying together. Everything we had believed in is a lie. Mum is inconsolable, torturing herself that its her fault because she should have guessed. she feels so stupid that she hadn’t worked it out herself. Incredibly, our instinct was to blame ourselves. We just felt so foolish.
WEALsO worried about what other people would think: we were the secret family, after all. Mum was — albeit unwittingly — the ‘ other woman’. Would people judge us?
Thankfully the main reaction from friends has been disbelief: ‘ Not Kevin!’ And then: ‘ How on earth didn’t you know?’ That annoys me because it puts the onus on us, rather than Dad.
Two weeks after the revelation, Mum packed Dad’s belongings, drove to his other address — which I’d got from the electoral roll — and dumped them in the front garden. she hasn’t tried to contact Dad’s wife or any of his sons.
Like us, they must be struggling to deal with the truth. Although Lauren wished Dad ‘Happy Christmas’ by text and told him about her engagement in January, she only had text responses with the ironic sign- off: ‘ send my love to your mum.’ I still haven’t heard a word. And that’s what hurts me most. I wish I didn’t care that he’s chosen to erase himself from my life — but despite everything, he’s still my dad. I’m not saying I could forgive him, but surely it should be me rejecting him, not the other way round? Why am I the one bereft, nerves jangling with fear that it’s me who’s to blame? Thankfully, I have Mum and her seven siblings to confide in when I feel down — not to mention my wonderful boyfriend Michael, 25, who I’ve been with for two years.
Mum at least seems to be turning a corner. Last December, she was given the all-clear from cancer and now feels she’s not going to waste a second more on a man who didn’t deserve her in the first place.
It’s a little trickier for his children. Not a day passes when I don’t battle the urge to drive to his other home. Fear of making a scene in front of his other family stops me.
But I really want Dad to face up to the i mpact of his actions. Perhaps seeing it in print will jolt him into some sort of contrition.
The average age of first-time fathers in the UK is 32