Well it turns out that my dad is semi-fluent in Italian. The Russian guy I’ve known for 21 years never felt this was something worth talking about.
Apparently we spent a few months in Italy when I was around two years old so he had to learn the language. He spent the time selling useless junk on the streets of Italy.
My dad, hustling in Italy. It’s almost surreal.
They have sex
::shudder::
I found out a few years ago that my dad (an immigrant who still isn’t totally fluent in English after 30+ years) got a vasectomy after I was born. According to him, if he didn’t get one I would have “LOTS and LOTS of brothers and sisters”. :eek: I thought you weren’t supposed to have any kind of surgery done on your package if you’re Asian because it goes against the culture. Apparently he was acculturated enough to get that done! But ewww parents don’t have sex! Especially MY parents!!
My father passed away in 1995. Throughout my entire life I never saw him dance with my mother or anyone else. I can’t even conceive of him dancing; it would have been totally out of character.
A few years ago my mother informed me that my father had been an excellent jitterbugger in his youth; in fact he won many dance contests.
I still have a hard time picturing this.
Don’t laugh, but my Da has a middle name… I had no idea, until I went to collect his new pension book and the woman read out a three word name. “Who?!”
Mom never smoked pot in college, but Dad did. Anybody who met them would assume simply from their personalities that it was the other way around.
I didn’t find out until my grandfather’s funeral that he was an actor and singer in college and in church (which makes my family’s bewilderment with “where WhyNot got that acting and singing bug” all the more…well, bewildering.) But I also didn’t know that he was an Olympic class runner - figured to run on the American team in 1940 if it hadn’t have been for that pesky World War II thingy.
While I’ve always known what my dad does for a living, it was rather a shock to open a textbook once and see his name listed as “a pioneer in the field of ______”!
My mom is one of the most high strung, control freak, goody-goody types out there. Anything I was doing wrong or suspected of doing wrong would result in hysterics. Mopey, introverted high school youth? I must be on drugs! During high school, people associated me with the Columbine type incidents because I wore a trench coat and was a loner. My mom offered ZERO support for me on it- blamed me for perpetuating people’s beliefs.
She struck me as this little Ms Perfect when she was in school, since she was so terrified of herself/myself getting in trouble "Don’t park behind another car in the driveway! The cops will see that, and write you a ticket!!! :eek: " type hysterics.
Later, I found out when she was my age she and my dad smoked pot all the time, she went to coke parties in the 80’s, etc. Then she had an attack of conscience (maybe because I was conceived), quit the drugs, gained like 50 lbs after I was born and had a productive and stable career as a lab tech.
My biggest surprise came when I was about eight and learned that my dad’s father had died.
I knew he was raised by his grandpa, and his mother died in childbirth, but I never even thought about his father- he had never been mentioned. And it was years before I made the connection that there had been a grandfather that had never seen me.
When I was 15, I discovered that my dad’s gay. That was pretty surprising. 
It was another year or two before I told him that I knew.
For me - probably that I was the reason she never received communion. After I was born as a rhythm baby, she started using birth control, and considered herself a sinner…
Another one was during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and she told me that what really bothered her was that he was married to a white woman. Kinda came out of left field.
But I think the rest of you will have to go some ways to top my wife’s parental surprise. When she was 23 she found out that her father had another family, including a teenage half-brother and sister, living less than 5 miles from her family home.
Freshman year of college, I’m home for the summer. Dad’s driving me from his house to Mom’s. He reaches over and turns off the radio. “I don’t know when, but sometime soon, I’m going to be arrested for being part of a marijuana-growing operation.”
My family is chock full of this stuff:
My mother, the 6th grade science teacher, lost her voice for almost a year when I was little. Turns out it was from smoking too much pot. My parents, their friends, and especially my grandparents used to have big pot parties when I was a baby. There are a few picture those show me being held by grown stoners with smoke off to the sides.
I was the one that busted my father for his Nth affair and managed to swing a divorce out of it. Some of the intercepted phone conversations (cordless) weren’t something that I really wanted to here.
My mother disappeared to California (she was my single parent) for a summer and hooked up with I don’t know how many people. She shared enough details to make the conclusions obvious.
My father was kidnapped when he was 17. The guy hid in the back of his car at a convenience store and then rose up with a knife when he got in. It was a case of mistaken identity but he intended on killing my father with his girlfriend who he believed was sleeping with my father. My father was being forced to make a call from a pay phone at 5:30 am when he had enough and hit the guy with the phone and beat him within an inch of his life. The guy got life in prison for that and other crimes.
I grew up in a poor Southern town that was about half black and half white. I recently found out that some of my black classmates were cousins because my great-grandfather’s first child was conceived with the maid. I was only told because I was the first-born male which had been the tradition.
My mother got agree a few times and said that my father had some deep-dark secret that I could ever know. I confronted him about it a couple of years ago and he blushed and played it off. Compared to the others, I don’t know if I want to know. I assume that I have brothers and sisters living in a pygmy tribe somewhere dealing arms to Iran.
After all that, my family isn’t what you would call trash at all. My mother has a PhD and my father and his family are all community leaders. My grandmother, 80 years old, called me a little while ago complaining about glaucoma and told me that she decided to start doing pot again. Not surprising. This is the woman that popped in a porn tape for laughs the last time I went to her house a couple of years ago.
My wife’s family is almost as bad. Between the two sides, I can’t even talk in the normal realm about that stuff and I generally keep my mouth shut.
The night before I got married (at age 26) we were at my folks and the doorbell rang. The woman at the door looked just like my Dad. Introduced herself as Aunt Mary. Dad says “Meet your Aunt Mary”.
They had not spoken in 30 + years and we had no idea my Dad had surviving siblings. She was in ill health and making amends to “make things right with the Lord”. In other words, a loon.
My mom’s first husband wanted to become a polygamist and form his own commune/compound, like Dave Koresh only probably not so crazy.
Hence the divorce, followed by marrying my dad.
When I was 10, I found out that my two oldest brothers were adopted. When I was 14, I found out that they had been adopted by my dad, because they were my mom’s from her first marriage. So, for ten years, I had three brothers, then for four years I had a brother and two step-brothers, and since then, I’ve had a brother and two half-brothers.
When I was about 16 I was talking to my mother about my aunt (her sister) and her husband (my uncle). I knew how my parents had met but I asked her “So how did Aunt Jo and Uncle Jim meet?” She replied, “Oh, I used to date your uncle Jim in high school so she met him after that.” :eek:
I had dinner with another Aunt last year (I’m 37) and she’s telling everyone at the table how her eyesight is going down hill. “I like to blame it on my grandparents though. They were cousins you know.” Me and my 47 year old cousin- :eek:
I thought this one was strange, because I was the one who figured it out, not my mom.
My mother has brown eyes. Both her father and mother have blue eyes. This simply isn’t possible.
Mom had mentioned that Grandma was forty years old when she had Mom, and that Grandma hadn’t told many people beforehand. It was a “surprise”. Mom’s brother is ten years older than her. Her sisters are 14 and 16 years older. Once, when she was a child, a crazy aunt told her that her mother wasn’t her mother.
It does all kind of add up. I hope some day I get the chance to ask my one aunt still in possession of all her faculties, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I’d kind of like to know the story.
After 12 years of miserable marriage, I arrived at my parents’ to let them know I was leaving my husband. Stricter Catholics never lived, so I was trembling as I told them.
They looked at each other. They looked at me. Daddy said “Lawyers like money. How much should I get?” Mama said “A thousand should be good to start.” Daddy got up and left the house and returned 30 minutes later with a thousand in cash—there isn’t a bank in our hometown.
Didn’t ask any questions, my mother just let me lay my head in her lap until Daddy got back.
When I was in my 20s, my Dad told me many things about himself that he had not until then:
– He helped lay sandbags in Winnipeg during the 1950 flood.
– He was a civilian contractor with the Canadian Army in the Arctic during the early '50s.
– Needing to get from Vancouver to Toronto once at around the same time, and having no money with which to do it, he managed to hitchhike the total distance: about 2700 miles.
There were a number of others, all the more interesting because Dad didn’t seem the type to just do these sorts of adventurous things. But he could prove it–his Arctic photos were especially fascinating. When I asked why he hadn’t told me these stories earlier, he just shrugged and said “Your mother didn’t want me giving you any ideas.”
Gee, thanks, Mom! :mad: