I Found My Deceased MIL’s Diary and Learned a Bitter Family Secret, I’m Devastated

We all may think that we know our family members well enough, and usually, we don’t expect that any of them may have a huge skeleton in their closet. Our today’s heroine is a woman, whose deceased MIL turned out to be a completely different person from what her family used to know her. And the woman revealed her dark secret right after her MIL’s funeral.

The woman thinks she’s in a quite big mess because of the situation with the diary.

An anonymous woman, 36, has written a letter to our editorial. She wanted to share her unbelievable story and seek advice from our readers in an uncomfortable situation she’s experiencing now.

She began her letter, saying, «Hello, dear Bright Side, there’s quite a mess I’ve gotten myself into, so I really need advice from other people who’ll read this.»

The woman went on with the story, saying, «My MIL passed 3 weeks ago and the whole family has been grieving a lot. My husband of 10 years, my SIL and FIL have all been taking her death really hard. MIL and I had a kind of amicable relationship. We for sure weren’t at each other’s throats, but we also weren’t the best of friends.»

The story of the woman goes on, as she mentions how she found her MIL’s secret diary. She said, «My father-in-law asked me to sort through his wife’s things after the funeral, and I agreed to do it. A week ago, I was sorting MIL’s things and going through everything, and then I got to a very old diary of hers, I believe it was started back in the 80s.»

The woman couldn’t resist the temptation to read the diary.

The woman goes on with her story, saying, «I know it’s absolutely my fault for being so nosy about other people’s private things. But I just didn’t know what exactly it was, and this old diary looked very different from anything else my MIL would’ve owned.»

Then, the woman started reading the diary and many things surprised her from the very start.

She said, «In this book, she wrote that she had trouble with her eldest daughter and described how she was acting at the time. This surprised me to the core, because my SIL is the youngest in the family and the timeline also didn’t match.»

The woman made a shocking revelation about her MIL’s life.

The woman goes on, saying, «It turns out that my mother-in-law had another child. And she was married to an entirely different person other than my father-in-law. This would’ve been an ordinary thing to me, but MIL always boasted about only being married once. She was always saying that FIL was the only husband for her, her beloved since their early childhood, and her partner of a lifetime.»

The woman revealed, «MIL talked about how her eldest kid never listens to her and that her and her ex got fed up. It was her ex-husband who convinced MIL to send their daughter to one of those ’tough love’ boot-camps. MIL wrote that it was the worst thing she had ever done in her life. Her daughter came back ’even worse than before.’ She confessed that they tried to work things out, but her daughter ran away, and she hadn’t seen her since.»

The woman’s MIL kept this all a secret, and the woman revealed that she blamed her ex-husband for all of this and finally divorced him. In the back of the book, there was a copy of her daughter’s birth certificate and a picture of her as a teen.

The woman is desperate about what to do with the truth she discovered.

The woman revealed that right now, she’s devastated, and she feels like she’s bearing a tough burden now. She has no clue how to proceed with the truth she now has found out.

She wrote, «I mean, my MIL just died and everyone in the family is grieving so much. I’m now literally stuck with MIL’s darkest secret and I don’t know what to do or even if I should tell anyone. I don’t know if I even want to surprise my father-in-law with this information. I don’t want to upset him even more after his wife’s death. The man is in his late 80s, after all.»

The woman said that many people have already given her advice that she’s hesitating about. She said, «During a few days I received advice from people around me. Some advised me not to tell my husband about everything, or he’ll leave me for ruining his family. Some said I must tell him because if I don’t, he’ll leave me for keeping secrets from him.»

The woman is now really desperate, and she said, «This all had my anxiety running rampant. I just don’t want to interfere with their family matters, but as long as I’m now the bearer of this secret, I’m the one who has to decide whether to reveal it all or let it go. And I feel guilty because I know my MIL would’ve judged me for my curiosity.»

And here’s yet another story about an accidental finding that eventually cost one woman her happy family life. She found out a tampon in her husband’s car, and at first she thought he was cheating. But the truth that she revealed later made her wish that he’d better cheated.