I kept my first marriage a secret from my kids. I wish I hadn't

“Mom!” My son Chris, then 16, was summoning me to the basement. The concern in his voice made me think he’d seen a spider. Or maybe there was another baby squirrel in the furnace. What he’d found was more jarring: an old photo from a box of items my parents were temporarily storing at our house. In it, I was wearing a white suit, a man in military dress blues was putting a ring on my finger, and a woman holding a book was standing between us. 

“Were you going to a dance?” he asked, his face confused.

It wasn’t a dance. The photo was of my wedding day — my first wedding day, the one that didn’t include his father.

“No,” I said quietly. “I was married to someone else before I met your dad.”

Chris looked at the photo and then at me. “The marriage was short and annulled,” I continued. “I never told you because it never came up. It was so long ago and honestly feels like it never happened.”

Then, in a strange need to redeem myself, I blurted out, “Your dad was married to someone else before me, too.”

Chris dropped the photo back into the box, touched his fingers to his temples, and gestured that his mind had been blown.

I never set out to keep my first marriage a secret; it just happened. The truth is it was a period of my life I wanted to forget. I was in my early 20s when I met him, and our relationship was rocky from the start. He was impulsive and proposed on a whim, and we married quickly — and then got it annulled almost as fast. 

It took me about a year, but I finally put that part of my life behind me when I met David, my kids’ father. Ironically, he’d had a short-lived first marriage, too, and the shared experience made us appreciate each other even more. When we married and had a family, I told myself that my first marriage didn’t count. It was a blip in my life. No children. No ties. Our kids didn’t need to know because it wasn’t relevant to them. It was a mistake in judgment I could simply erase, as if it had never happened at all.

I decided that if they never ask — and why would they? — I didn’t need to bring it up, either. But I didn’t quite follow that plan. A couple of years before he discovered the photo, Chris asked me, “How old were you when you got married?” Without thinking, I responded, “To your dad?” He missed my need to clarify, and I let a perfect opportunity go by.

Once Chris knew, I wanted to be more proactive with my younger son, Nick, who was 13. A few months later, we were in the car, talking about someone we knew who was getting a divorce. I took a deep breath. “Did you know I was married to someone else before your dad?” I asked.

“Wait, what?” he said, looking up from his phone and turning to me in disbelief. I told him an abbreviated version of the story, proud of myself for seizing the moment. Nick was speechless, which was unusual for him, and finally shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, I didn’t see that coming.”

Keeping my first marriage hidden gave it more meaning and power than it deserved, and I regret the way Chris found out. He was just a teenager spending a rainy afternoon perusing a box of old family photos. He didn’t expect to discover his mom’s “secret” past. Fortunately for me, he shrugged it off, later telling me that he could have gone his entire life without knowing and it wouldn’t have impacted him at all. And that’s true.

“There are always parts of your past that make you wonder, ‘Should I tell, or shouldn’t I tell?’” Dr. Michele Borba, an author and child psychologist, tells TODAY.com. “It’s always up to you.”

But that decision isn’t always so easy, so Borba suggests that parents ask themselves if their child is developmentally mature enough to learn the information, and assess whether the information would fortify their relationship with their child, or cause harm. And she recommends parents always end the conversation by saying, “You probably have other questions about this. Remember, I’m always here for you.”

While it may feel awkward, divulging parts of your past can have a surprise benefit. “There’s going to come a time when your child will go through something,” says Borba. “When you choose to be open, your child is more likely to come to you. He’s going to think, ‘Mom’s going to get this.’”

After talking about my first marriage, I noticed my sons asked for my advice a little more than before. One came to me about a breakup from a girlfriend. I don’t know if he would have done this before realizing I’d had breakups of my own.

Both of my boys have confessed that they’d never thought of me having a life before their dad. The revelation gave them a different perspective. Now, I’m more than just their mom; I’m a woman with life experience, and I like that. Finally, there are no skeletons in the closet — or photos in a box — to scare anyone, including me.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com