Friends betrayal

It wasn’t her secret to tell though was it. I’m very impressed by her capacity to keep a secret.

You're angry at the wrong person. Your parents could have told you.

She's dumb for admitting she knew though, given that she's the only one left for you to be angry with. Pointless.

She’s a bit dim for telling you she knew. It wasn’t her secret to tell but I don’t know why she had to let on she knew the whole time.

A teen who us now an adult to deal with it an adult way.
Yes she's an adult now...but she was a child then .

So you expected a teenager who is now an adult to deal with it in an adult to behave in an adult way?!
YABU in the way you feel, but "think before you jump"- so to speak ...e.g. it wasn't her fault your mum had an affair. It was your mum's fault. It wasn't your friend's secret to tell.

Has your sister considered doing a dna ancestry type thing as that can bring up additional info if you are both really keen to know. Not necessarily her dad, he may have passed too but other family members of her dad who may have known something. It can open a can of worms so it needs careful consideration.

The friend was in an awful position. Really untenable. The adults who told her handled this really badly. At the point where the friend knew, the adults should have told the OP somply because it was an awful burden to put on a teen's shoulders.

She was damned if she told (by the adults) and damned if she didn't.

There's no winners in this mess.

Has anyone else wondered how the friend must be feeling right now? I wouldn't doubt if she's had quite enough of this whole family, dead and alive. 😖

I think your friend was in a very difficult situation and I can understand her reasons for not saying anything but I can also understand how you feel.
We have a similar but not the same situation. About 20 years ago we found out that my Granny had a baby who had been adopted and she didn't want to tell us, but auntie went looking for her birth mum and found her, so my mum, aunties and uncle had a sister they didn't ever know about as well as her children. It was a shock and I couldn't believe my Granny had carried that weight all these years.

Well yes quite. The OP could indeed have discovered she had a half-sister and found her through SM - exactly.

And yes, it's a shock for all the siblings involved to discover this sort of thing. Which is why the carefully-handled truth is better than deception and keeping people in the dark.

Whichever way it's handled is going to be difficult. But to add shock, and the discovery that even your longest friend knew but you didn't, into the mix just makes it worse.

She was a teenager herself when she was told. That’s not her fault. Her parents should have been the one to say something not the friend. It’s not her fault. Should the friend have just stopped speaking to her?

This is a complicated one.

I don't think your friend betrayed you. Information was dumped on her that shouldn't have been. She was left having to try to navigate a situation she didn't ask to be dragged into. As far as she knew, you might have just as easily been upset if she had told you, so she chose the reasonable option of continuing to mind her own business and stay out of it. But after you found out anyway, she probably couldn't resist the chance to finally unburden herself of the long-held, unwanted secret.

Another side to this is that it's your half-sister's father you're wondering about, not your father. I don't think you're entitled to that information anyway, to be honest. So I'd drop the issue of who your half-sister's bio father is and leave it for her to deal with it, if she wants to.

Secrets can have quite a ripple effect, hurting people who had nothing to do with them. I'd just try to enjoy the newfound sister, forgive the friend and put it to rest now, if you can.

I never said it was nothing to do with her. I said it wasn’t primarily to do with her.

And discovering you have half-siblings isn’t vanishingly unusual. DNA tests have brought lots out of the woodwork.

A school gate friend of mine from DS’s primary days discovered in her 40s that her parents had given up a child for adoption that they’d conceived very young, before they were married, and that her father had also had another child before the relationship with her mother, within the space of a year. Both parents were still alive and had kept the secrets for upwards of forty years until the adult children made contact, and even then I think it was a few years before they told my friend and the full siblings she grew up with. Unsurprisingly it’s been tough for the unknown full sibling to discover he was given up for adoption by parents who later got married and went on to have five more children.

The only real case where I can think that keeping your mouth shut is entirely justified is in the cases where adoption (pre-1975) happened and the half-sibs met and fell in love, because they had a connection, and married and had children. It has happened, unfortunately.

As for who would have benefited, the OP may have. The friend may have, because right now the long standing friendship is at serious risk.

The mother may have, because that sort of secret is a heavy one to carry. On the other hand, she may not have. Having given up a child for adoption is another of those things that people react enormously differently to.

What we do know is that the OP feels deeply betrayed and is now questioning her mother. And has the feeling of having missed out for many years. So there are a number of negatives. We don't know the possible positives if the friend had spoken earlier.

Mainly - there's going to be difficulties either way but I've seen far too many ill consequences of secrets kept, in several families. Carefully handled truth can lead to some very difficult emotions but those difficult emotions tend to be even worse when deception is involved.

I think imagining that if the OP’s friend had spoken out earlier, everyone would have sat down and had a civilised conversation is pretty naive.

Goodness gracious me, I don't thnk that it would have been easy.

Blood relations are one of the things that people react to in the widest of possible varieties. Discovering you have half-siblings means nothing to some people. To others, it goes to the core of whom they are - and there's a wide range of reactions in between.

You can't, if you have any actual experience in this area at all, just say "it's nothing to do with the OP". Yes it is. It's her half- sister.

Knowing that you have a half sibling, knowing they exist, makes a huge difference to how you react when they contact you. The sheer shock of discovering your own parent had this giant secret is a slap in the face and saying "it's got nothing to do with her" really is naive. Then you have to actually come to terms with the fact you have a half-sibling. It's easier to cope with contact with a half-sib if you know they exist, whether you reach out or whether they do.

And there's a considerable chance now that the OP might have discovered she has a half-sib through DNA testing, as so many other people have. In some cases it's worked out, in others it's been devastating.

And fyi, I've held my own biological mother when she wept, heartbroken, at having given up her baby because she had to, pre-1975. It's not pretty. And it really, really can have an impact on the mother's other children. Perhaps not in all cases, but in very many, in fact probably the majority. Denying that - now that's naive.

A cheated-on spouse has to deal with not knowing they were sharing a sexual partner, possible STDs. They’re personally involved.

This is not primarily to do with the OP. It primarily concerned her parents and their decisions. She doesn’t get to be privy to the details of how the decision to put the child of her mother’s affair up for adoption came to be. One imagines it was potentially horrifically traumatising for her mother, at least. Who knows?

The OP would not have had contact with her half-sister until that half-sister chose to get in contact, so it’s not that she’s missed decades of the relationship. She would have had to wait to be contacted in any case. And it’s perfectly possible that if her half-sister had made contact with her birth mother during her lifetime, no reply would have been given, and the OP would still be none the wiser that she had a half-sister, and the half-sister would still not have found out the identity of her birth father.

I mean, I get that the OP’s head is reeling with this new, dark insight into her parents’ marriage, and that her mother, unhappy enough in the marriage to have had an affair, still wanted to stay in the marriage enough to give up her baby, but I think imagining that if the OP’s friend had spoken out earlier, everyone would have sat down and had a civilised conversation is pretty naive.

Who would have benefited from her telling?

What is mature about making a decision based on a fantasy scenario that may not happen? I’ve seen 2 families with secret child and it was actually completely fine. You have no idea which way it would go and even if there were major difficulties they may resolve. But that’s their issue to deal with. It’s not your place to make decisions about what is right for others when you don’t know what that is.

I was in a similar situation, it was my family and no way would I ever have said anything.
Your friend has carried this burden all this time and it’s a shame you’re blaming her.
She couldn’t win either way and it was nothing to do with her.

It wasn’t her secret to keep. What was she doing making herself complicit in the deception of and betrayal of her friend?

Every time that friend saw her for the last 30 years she knew that somewhere she had a sister that she might have liked to know, looked her in the eye and said nothing.

OP is angry with both of them for different reasons, and that’s entirely justified.

Well yes - now the OP has a lot of unanswered questions that never can be answered, and considerable feelings of betrayal about her oldest friend.

There's no easy answers here, but the sting of betrayal lasts a long long long time (ask any cheated-on woman whose husband thought 'what she doesn't know won't hurt her') and the gnaw of unanswered questions is one that also can't be laid to rest.

It wasn’t your friends secret to tell.

If you admit to yourself, you are angry at your parents and since they aren’t here to be angry at, you are choosing to blame your friend.

But an equally emotionally mature decision might have involved concluding that continuing to conceal a piece of knowledge you were made privy to without your consent might be the best thing to do, given the amount of suffering likely to be caused to several people.

At some point, I hope I'd have had the emotional maturity to tell her that there was a very serious conversation that needed to be had. Possibly in the last 20's or early 30's.

A pp made the point that in the old days, secrecy ruled and if the secrets came out at all, all hell broke loose at times. Relationships were destroyed. Trust was destroyed.

This is situation where whatever happens, the decision you make might be wrong. But secrecy breeds betrayal.

It was up to your mum/parents to tell you when you were old enough to understand just in case anyone else told you. Obviously they chose not to tell you and hoped for the best/kept it quiet which is what people did years ago. The longer they left it the secret was kept but these things have a habit of coming out in ways they would never have expected. There's nothing you can do about it now except be thankful your half sister is a nice person and the rest you'll have to try and make peace with in the passage of time.

I would feel betrayed too but it's not your friend's fault - switch it round and put each other in the opposite situation - what would you have done in her shoes?