I am the daughter of a father of two families

“A long time ago, on a trip with my older sister, there was a situation that made me question everything. One day we went to a bar, my sister had a few too many drinks, she got angry and started treating me really badly. While shouting, he said very horrible things to me, it surprised me a lot because we love each other and we don’t usually treat each other like that.

Among the things he said to me were phrases like, “If you knew what really happened in our family,” “You wouldn’t be where you are,” or “You’re vain.”

The next day, I called my sister-in-law to ask if she knew anything. He told me that he couldn’t tell me, that it would be better to talk to my parents. It was obvious something was happening. So as soon as I returned from my trip, in fact in a restaurant where we were going to have lunch with my parents on the way back from the airport, I asked them what my sister had meant with these comments.

My parents looked at each other and without thinking too much, my mother said ‘you have to tell him’. He didn’t react, he remained silent, so my mother stepped forward: “Your father has two families,” she told me.

By family, he didn’t mean another woman, he told me that my father had two children, my age.

I was frozen. Throughout my life, for 23 years, my family had orchestrated a lie so that I would not find out. They wanted me to grow up in a calm environment and without the suffering that my other brothers and sisters had lived with.

Since my father’s job involved a lot of travel, it was completely normal for me that he lived with me for six months, in Santiago, and the other six months in Iquique, where he “worked.” But in reality, he lived there to be with his other children and his wife, with whom he was also raising children the same age as me.

When I discovered this, I realized that many of the things that had been explained to me as a child that I had never questioned were lies. Like when my brothers had to explain to me that I couldn’t disturb my mother, who had been locked in her room for days, because the Brazilian monks were visiting her. Which was a lie to cover up how depressed she was. I couldn’t believe they put on this elaborate show just to maintain a perfect family image.

From the beginning, my mother knew and accepted it. But not because she really didn’t care, but because she comes from a family background with a lot of violence from her father towards her mother, and for her the only important thing was that they didn’t mistreat her, that they were not mistreating her. I didn’t hit her, and my father met those demands. She was a very loving person and always had excellent willpower. He was always friendly and available for everything.

Now, looking back, I think they kept up this lie for so long because of my mother, who was a very strict woman who governed her life based on duty and fear of what people would say. others.

The disappointment I felt from my entire family that day, because of this lie, was very painful. I felt that the betrayal was so great that the ideal I had for my father, who was always very present in my life and who was a fundamental pillar of it, fell.

Furthermore, I found it very unfair that my father had an “official” family and another in the shadows, because the other woman was not his lover. Being one means having a secret relationship and that wasn’t the case. They loved each other deeply and lived as a family. My father naturally interacted with his other wife’s brothers, cousins ​​and friends. But it was a secret from everyone around him in Santiago. They had been lying to their daughter, her family and her closest friends for at least 23 years.

After finding out, I was my father’s worst tormentor for ten years. I hated him with an intensity I’d never felt before. Every time I saw him, I would lecture him until I got tired of it. With great anger, I demanded that he take matters into his own hands and introduce us, but I never got anything done. When I told him about it, he looked at me expressionless and silent. It was like talking to a wall of pure pent-up emotion. The only times I saw him react was when he drank alcohol. I was just crying. He didn’t even look at me.

It took me ten years to contact my sister. At that time I was in therapy and it took me a long time to get there. He couldn’t do it because he felt it was unfair. He knew the best thing to do was for him to do it because he was their father. I couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t want to organize our meeting with the same naturalness with which he lived his parallel relationship for years. But he never gave in, he never discussed the problem with me.

In March 2020, both my parents contracted COVID. I had to pick them up from their house to take them to the hospital. On the way, my father looked so bad, gray and soulless, that I knew at that moment he wouldn’t make it. He was going to die. As they had to be hospitalized, the medical staff asked me to take their things. When my father was about to give me his cell phone, he grabbed my hand firmly and looked at me intently. I couldn’t speak because I was very weak, but I immediately knew what I wanted. He needed me to tell his other wife that he was going to die. “Don’t worry, I’ll call her,” I told her and she let go of my hand. This is the only time in these ten years that he has “referred” to this subject.

My father was dead for three months. In the meantime, I had to support my mother, her other wife and my brothers. While chatting and calling to update them on their progress, we met and I realized that my father loved both of these women equally. When he woke up, his health having improved slightly, his doctor asked us to make him a collage of photos of all his loved ones. It was very controversial in my family because they didn’t want to include his other wife or my brothers.

This hurt my mother and older brothers so much that they denied its existence and importance. But no, I knew that for my father, they were as important as us and I defended them. It was so painful and they were so against each other that it meant a major rift between us. Today my mother (with years of therapy) understands it in a different way. But at that moment, it really hurt them.

When my father passed away, because we were in the middle of COVID and the funeral was at reduced capacity, others had to watch the ceremony broadcast on Zoom. During the broadcast, people began writing messages in their digital condolence books. Among the messages were those from my brothers in Iquique, whose existence until then no one outside my family knew about.

Then it was the messages “I love you so much Dad” and “I’m going to miss you Dad” that revealed the secret my parents hid for so many years from their friends, family and acquaintances.

Having recently died, my father freed my mother from the greatest shame of her life. He had nothing more to fear. He was free from this burden, there were no more lies.

For me, one of the gifts of my father’s passing was finding a new family that I love dearly. I was able to form a super nice relationship with this “new sister”. We have both spent a lot of time in therapy to heal ourselves emotionally and it has been very nice to love each other from that place. We always say that the best thing that could have happened to us was the death of our father, because if he was still here, we would continue to be slaves to this secret. We may not have known it, but now we are free too.”

* Paloma Valenzuela is 37 years old and a Paula reader.