Van Of Truth
I was sixteen, pregnant, and at my grandmother’s funeral when I learned the truth about my parents. Death, birth, and betrayal collided in one moment—proof that life doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It wasn’t my mom who told me, or even my father. It was my mom’s aunt, the woman who had been my grandmother’s sister and, after my grandmother’s death, had married my grandfather.
I don’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe she thought I deserved to know, swollen with life while burying the woman who had raised me. Maybe she thought enough time had passed, or that the truth would make me stronger. It didn’t. All it did was shatter the fragile idea of family I had clung to, leaving me confused and unsteady, standing there in my too-tight funeral dress, overwhelmed by the weight of it all.
She told me about my mom catching my dad with another woman. It wasn’t just catching him, though. It was hiding in his van, crouched under the bed, waiting to confirm the betrayal she already knew in her gut. And when she finally saw what she was looking for, she kicked him out. Just like that. The man who had been larger-than-life to me, the charming, funny figure who lit up every room, was suddenly so much smaller. A liar. A cheater. A man who broke my mother’s heart.
I thought I knew who the other woman was. I assumed, for years, that it had been his next wife, the woman he married soon after my mom. She was the first of what would be many stepmothers, so many that I stopped counting after a while. My dad went through women like pages in a magazine, each one with her own storyline, her own drama. His life was a revolving door of relationships, and I had learned not to get attached. But back then, at sixteen, I thought I had the story figured out.
It wasn’t until my thirties that I learned the truth. By then, I had spent years piecing together my family’s history, chasing down rumors and half-truths like a detective. But nothing could have prepared me for the twist that was coming. The woman in the van, the one my dad had been caught with—it wasn’t just some girlfriend or new wife. It was my mom’s cousin.
Her cousin.
That revelation hit me like a slap. Suddenly, the betrayal wasn’t just between my parents; it seeped into the family itself, cutting through bloodlines and shared history. It was like living in a soap opera, except this was my life. And with that truth came more questions. Had my mom known all along that it was her cousin? Had she hidden that detail from me out of shame, or out of pain? And what about the cousin? Did she ever think about the damage she caused, or was this just another chapter in the tangled, messy story of my family?
By the time I learned about the cousin, I had already stopped idolizing my father. His many marriages, his flaws, and his larger-than-life personality had made him human in my eyes, for better or worse. But this? This was something else. It felt like my entire family had conspired to keep the truth from me, like they had been living out their drama while leaving me in the dark.
But that’s not where the story ends. The more I dug into my family’s history, the more I realized that the cracks in our foundation went back much further than my parents. My grandfather, who had always been a distant, cold figure in my life, turned out to have secrets of his own. He had married my grandmother’s sister after my grandmother died, a fact that was already scandalous enough. But the real story, the one whispered about in hushed tones at family gatherings, was that he had been with her sister first.
It was rumored that my grandmother, my mom’s mom, had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and “trapped” my grandfather into fatherhood. That truth—or maybe just the rumor of it—seemed to explain everything. It explained the way my grandfather looked at us, the way his love felt reluctant, almost forced. It explained why he had married my grandmother’s sister so soon after her death, as though he was trying to correct some long-ago mistake.
I didn’t learn any of this until I was in my forties, long after my mother finally saw me perform a story about her own mother. That performance was a turning point, a moment when the truth began to seep out, piece by piece. And as painful as it was to confront, it also started to make sense of the chaos I had lived through.
The more I learned about my family, the more I realized that the drama I thought was unique to us was really just a reflection of something bigger. Families are microcosms of the world, tiny universes filled with the same betrayals, secrets, and power struggles that shape our societies. Take my family’s story, blow it up to scale, and you start to see the same patterns playing out everywhere. Families fight over inheritances; nations fight over land. Families hide their shame; governments hide their failures. Families hold grudges for decades; entire communities do the same, often at the cost of countless lives.
My dad cycling through wives was like countries cycling through alliances, each new relationship bringing fresh hope and eventual disappointment. My mom’s pain mirrored the larger betrayals that ripple through societies when trust is broken. My family’s lies were small-scale, but in the world, those same dynamics take on a life of their own, becoming wars, corruption, and systems of power that crush those who aren’t in on the secret.
And yet, just like my family, the world keeps going. We survive, not because we’re perfect, but because we’re doing our best for the people ahead of us. That’s what family is supposed to be. Not flawless. Not without its mess. Just people doing their best, day by day, to hold onto something bigger than themselves.
When we stop being that, we stop being family. We become just a collection of people bound by blood but divided by pain. And that’s not what family is—not to me. Family is the people who carry the torch forward, who keep moving through the mess, not for themselves but for the ones who come next. When I think about my family now, I don’t see the brokenness anymore. I see the effort. I see the best they could do with what they had. And that’s enough. It has to be enough, because when it stops being enough, family stops being family. And that’s all it really is in the end—a group of people doing their best, every day, for the ones ahead of them.