I (27F) found out something terrible that my grandma (70F) hid from my mom (50F) and I don’t know what to do?
So basically my mom has never had her dad in her life. This is what my mom (and the rest of us) have always been told by my grandma:
-When my mom was a baby, her parents got divorced
-Her father never wanted to be a dad, which is why they divorced
-After the divorce, her father just stopped coming around/being in her life, despite my grandma always calling him and begging him to be in my mom’s life.
This has always been really hard on my mom, never getting to have a dad and knowing that he didn’t want to be in her life. Well, I recently found out that that’s not the truth, and my mom (along with everyone else) doesn’t know what really happened. I only found out because my great-aunt (my grandma’s sister) told me.
What really happened is that my mom’s dad cheated on my grandma so they got a divorce, and my grandma was so angry about him cheating on her that she didn’t want to ever have to see him again. But obviously having a child together meant that she would have to see him. So what she did is told him that if he just agreed to stay out of my mom’s life, she would never go after him for child support and she would also pay him a large amount of money (my grandma comes from money so she had the means to do this). He originally objected and said he would be staying in my mom’s life. But then my grandma increased the amount of money she would offer him to stay away. He then accepted my grandma’s offer, she paid him off, and she never made him pay child support.
My mom, me, my siblings, my dad, all my extended family members, etc have all been lied to by my grandma. My mom went her whole life thinking her dad just never wanted her, which was something that really affected my mom’s mental health, when in reality my grandma paid him off to not be in my mom’s life so that my grandma didn’t have to co-parent with him. The only person that has ever known the truth is my great-aunt, but by the time my great-aunt found this out, my mom was in high school and my great-aunt thought it would hurt my mom even more by knowing what her mom did, so my great-aunt never told anyone. Until now, when she just told me. And as of right now, I haven’t told literally anyone about this.
Now obviously my mom’s father still has some blame here because he chose being paid off a large amount of money over his own child, but I am so angry at my grandma for what she did. She didn’t want to have to deal with the inconvenience of co-parenting with her ex-husband who cheated on her, so she selfishly paid him off to stay out of my mom’s life, which then caused my mom a lifetime of pain not getting to know her father and thinking that she was unwanted.
I don’t know what to do. I could tell my mom the truth, which would probably hurt her even more to know what her mother did, and would also probably damage her relationship with her mother (the only parent she has). Or I could not tell her the truth and save her from any further pain and a destroyed relationship with her mother. I’m so conflicted.
Source: Reddit.com
Summary
This is a story about a woman who found out her grandma lied to her mom about her dad. The grandma told the mom that her dad never wanted to be in her life, but the truth is the grandma paid the dad to stay out of the mom’s life. Now the woman is conflicted on whether or not to tell her mom the truth.