Burdened

Four days prior to my wedding to her son, I received a phone call from my then future mother-in-law telling me that her husband (my fiancé’s father) has cancer, but she didn’t want me to tell Kyle because it would ruin the wedding. In fact, she made me promise not to tell anyone in the family until the cancer becomes obvious, which it has not in these four weeks after the wedding.

Apparently she felt the need to unload this news on someone, and that someone was me. I have honored her wishes not to tell, but it put a pall over the wedding for me, and it bothers me every day to keep this secret from everyone else in the family, especially my husband. It is weighing on me terribly, and making it difficult to enjoy our first few weeks of married life, and the melding of our families. Kyle has even asked me a couple times if I’m ok, and I try to brighten up and assure him I am fine. But I am not.

I don’t want to betray my mother-in-law’s trust, but it is difficult to be around her and my father-in-law with this elephant in the room. Do you have any suggestions or thoughts?

Burdened

Dear Burdened,

You should ask your mother-in-law to sit down and talk with you. Let her know that keeping this secret is too large a load for you to bear with her only, and that she and her husband need to let the rest of the family know. Let her know how difficult it is for you to start a life with her son while keeping a secret from him.

Keeping in mind that she apparently feels close to you because you are the one she chose to tell, it is my opinion that this was an awful thing to do to you. Let her know you love her, but think she should not deprive the family of the knowledge of her husband’s illness, and the opportunity for them to be lovingly supportive.

It’s possible that the directive not to tell the family came from Dad himself – something about the stoic male, you know? If so, he needs to be in on the talk, too. Cancer is serious, obviously, but it is not necessarily a death sentence.

Your mother-in-law may think she is doing the family a favor by hiding this important news from them, but really what she is doing is demonstrating her lack of faith in them. She may think they can’t handle the news (which they almost surely will learn at some point anyway), but helping each other deal with bad news helps make a family solid.

Any time someone says, “I’m going to tell you something but you can’t tell anyone else”, the response should be, “Then please don’t tell me. I can’t promise to keep it a secret if I think someone else needs to know.” Refuse to listen unless the restriction is lifted. An unrelated side benefit is that this would stop a lot of gossip.