Norwegians are funny about their secrets. It seems my American friends can’t wait to pass on secrets they hear, as soon as they hear them. Maybe it’s just the crowd I hang with, but I’ve noticed that Norwegians take secrets to a whole new level.
On my mother-in-law’s deathbed, she told my husband a few secrets she’d kept her entire life, things she’d never even told her sisters. She’d been raped as a teenager by her employer – a friend of her father’s she’d gone to work for as a nanny. I can’t imagine bearing that burden alone, but she did.
In doing family research on my father-in-law’s side, I discovered that he had an older sister he’d never known about. It seems his father had an illegitimate child years before getting married. My father-in-law never knew this, but then, he was the youngest in the family. Some of his cousins had heard “some rumors” from their parents, but of course, never spoke of it.
We were at a family gathering when I brought up this tidbit of information. Two cousins, who were in their late seventies, had been best friends their entire lives. I asked if either of them knew about this “aunt” that hadn’t shown up on any family tree I’d seen. One of them quietly said, “Yes, I’ve heard something about that….” The other one, in complete shock, turned to her best friend/cousin and shouted, “You knew about this and you never told me?” To which the reply came, “You never asked.”
This typifies Norwegian communications.
When my husband was a teenager his mother told him that she was illegitimate and that the man he called his grandfather, was in fact, his step-grandfather because her parents never married. My husband didn’t ask questions. He just listened and let her tell what she was comfortable telling. She did say she’d never met her father and had no desire to, and the subject was dropped for the rest of her life.
After my mother-in-law died, I started working on her family tree. Her birth record revealed the name of her father. Upon further investigation I discovered he’d gotten married and had three children. The phone book listed Per, one of my husband’s previously unknown uncles. Kory called Per, told him his father had a child before he was married and asked if they could meet.
Per told Kory he had the wrong number and hung up. Per then turned to his wife and said, “I just had the strangest phone call. Some American just called and said that I was his uncle. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
To which his wife replied. “He’s right.”
“What are you talking about?” Per asked. His wife went on to tell him that his father did have an illegitimate daughter. Per was astounded.
“How long have you known about this?” He asked.
“About fifty years,” she replied.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
And her reply was again “typical Norwegian,” when she said, “It never came up.”
