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Man Learns His Sister Is Actually His Mother | TODAY

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An 18-year-old drove 20 miles to a motel bar to drink away news that would take him decades to process.

Steve Lickteig grew up as the youngest of nine kids on a small farm in rural Kansas, the son of Don and Mary Jane Lickteig — or so he believed for eighteen years. On the eve of his high school graduation, his two best friends pulled him aside and told him the truth: the people raising him were his grandparents, and his oldest sister, Joanie, was actually his biological mother. Lickteig shared the story on the August 19, 2019 broadcast of the 3rd Hour of TODAY alongside author Dani Shapiro, host of the “Family Secrets” podcast.

• Lickteig discovered at 18, the night before graduation, that his “parents” were his grandparents and his oldest sister Joanie was his real mother.
• The secret had been an open one in his tight-knit Kansas community for years — known to classmates, neighbors and extended family who stayed quiet under early-1970s social norms.
• He and Joanie went 15 years without discussing it again after one brief exchange at a motel the night he found out; Lickteig later made the 2011 documentary “Open Secret” about the ordeal.

A Secret the Whole Town Kept

What made Lickteig’s discovery especially jarring wasn’t just the revelation itself — it was learning that everyone around him had known for years. Classmates, neighbors, even extended relatives had quietly kept the arrangement to themselves, a byproduct of the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy in a small early-1970s farm town. Lickteig was the last person let in on his own origin story.

He sat on the knowledge for six weeks after his friends told him before he confronted his grandparents directly. That confrontation didn’t bring resolution — it sent him spiraling. Angry and upset, he drove 20 miles from home to a motel to drink with friends, trying to put distance between himself and the news.

Confrontation at a Motel

Joanie tracked him down there that night. The two had a short, tense conversation in which the truth was finally acknowledged out loud between mother and son. But acknowledging it and actually dealing with it were two different things — after that exchange, Lickteig and Joanie went 15 years without bringing the subject up again.

“Your life doesn’t have to be destroyed over something like this.”

That line, which Lickteig repeated on the TODAY set, has become the throughline of his public retelling. He eventually turned the experience into the 2011 documentary “Open Secret,” using his own family’s story to document how rural communities absorbed and buried these arrangements rather than confronting them.

An Epidemic in the DNA-Testing Era

Lickteig’s TODAY appearance came alongside Dani Shapiro, who has built a platform around exactly this kind of family fracture through her “Family Secrets” podcast. Shapiro told the hosts that stories like Lickteig’s amount to an epidemic now that home DNA kits are putting decades-old secrets in front of people who never asked for them. Her position was direct: people have a right to know the truth about where they come from, regardless of how uncomfortable the answer is for the family keeping it.

That framing gave Lickteig’s story a wider relevance beyond his own Kansas upbringing — a segment that, like plenty of morning-show sit-downs from Rockefeller Center, turned a personal history into something with broader resonance for anyone watching NBC’s TODAY show lineup that morning.

Still a Work in Progress

Lickteig was candid that reconciling with his mother hasn’t followed a clean arc. He described the relationship with Joanie as something still being rebuilt piece by piece, decades after that motel parking lot conversation. It’s the kind of slow repair that daytime programming — the same shows that have hosted everyone from Kathie Lee Gifford to first-time authors processing family trauma — rarely gets to sit with for more than a segment.

What Lickteig wanted viewers to walk away with wasn’t sympathy — it was a roadmap. He’s spent years since “Open Secret” positioning himself as a resource for people blindsided by the same kind of discovery, especially now that a $99 DNA kit can surface a secret a family spent 50 years burying.