I found out that my father was an elevator operatopr after WWII while he went to school on the GI Bill. He was 37 years old, used to own his own store beofre the war, and it must have been really humiliating for him to have a job like that.
In the later part of my childhood, I was very startled to discover that my dad had been married before he married Mom. It was short-lived and during university and they had had no kids.
After his death, I discovered that he considered himself to have a drinking problem. That explained a lot.
My father was like this. I’d never ever think of him dancing but I learned that as a boy he was an accomplished tap dancer and performed with a drum and bugle corp where I believe he also played the bugle. He also played the violin and he had that violin forever but I never saw him play it.
When I was a teenager I also learned that my paternal great-grandfather had committed suicide and it was my grandfather at aged 14 that found him. It explained a lot about my grandfather, he always seemed a little distant.
A couple of years ago, laughing around a dinner table, the subject of why my mom and aunt called their mother’s (second) husnand “uncle” came up. Their response? “Because he’s our uncle!”
:eek:
Actually he had been married to one of their biological aunts, who passed away. When my grandmother divorced, they got together, and there you have it. Neither my brother nor I knew about this, and my mom and aunt couldn’t believe we didn’t know “We told you all this a long time ago!” “No you didn’t!” My brother and I have pretty good memories (especially him) and this didn’t seem even remotely familiar.
This led into a conversation about their aunts and uncles, which consisted of about 3 people that we’d never even heard of before, all of whom died fairly young, before we were born. They have a bunch of cousins we’ve never met, including a fairly rich guy currently living in England with one of the most generic names on the planet (think “John Smith” or something!) that my brother and I still like to joke that we don’t believe actually exists. It was really pretty surreal for both of us. “John Smith” is now a ridiculous joke in our family, and I almost hope I never meet him for fear of laughing in his face!
There is also some stuff I’ve found out recently (and still don’t have all the details) about my parents. I’m not sure I want to know the details… it explains a lot about them, but they are coping and it’s stuff that happened in childhood. Abuse and torment of my mom by her brother (who she gets along with now… very weird to me, but he definitely is not the person he was at 13 years old) and my father and his mother and sisters fleeing their house in terror to go to the neighbours/friends on a regular basis to avoid his drunken father. I am now reconsidering naming any future kids with that name - I didn’t know what kind of a person my grandfather was.
I kind of wonder what aspects of my life my kids will stare at me in shock over!
One day I was looking at my dad’s Army discharge papers for some reason (I think they fell out of a book I was looking at) and it was noted there that he hadn’t finished high school. I was a teen at the time and it really, really, REALLY shocked me for some reason. I did bring it up with my mom and him since then but I never got into the details of why.
I actually tend not to try to pry into the details of my parents’ pre-marriage life. I know they both come from pretty screwed up families and might have had screwed up lives and their lives are so normal and nice now that I just don’t want to know what kind of skeletons they have in their closets.
During a drunken rant, my father explained that in Vietnam while on guard duty his partner accidentally shot and killed a fellow soldier, and both of them were blamed (not sure of the punishment he got. He wasn’t discharged for it, I know that).
That actually explained alot about his extreme touchy-ness about taking the blame for stuff he didn’t do.
After my father’s funeral in 1998, my mother cracked up and told my two brothers about her parents - she has never mentioned it to me.
Supposedly her father and mother were Irish, he was supposed to be a ship’s steward. He supposedly died when she was about five, and her mother shortly after.
It seems that her mother actually lived until my mother was about eighteen, and while my mother spent some time in an orphanage and foster homes, she also spent significant time with her mother. There is a bit more to it, but that can rest.
I got to thinking about it. My mother has a really unusual forename, supposedly given to her by an Irish nurse. Well a few years ago I did a bit of checking and found that it is a Greek religious word used by Orthodox or Coptic Christians. So she was named by a Greek or a Christian Arab. Interestingly one of my brothers looks Morroccan, the other looks Lebanese and I often pass as Israeli in Israel.
My guess is that my maternal grandmother was jumped by a Christian Arab steward on a liner from the USA to the UK and that he stuck around long enough to name her.
I’m a pretty good snooper when it comes to paperwork, but I’ve never found anything regarding her parents.
It did not exactly surprize me, I’ve always suspected something fishy, my mother’s memories tend to diverge from known facts rather a lot, I think what did surprize me is that I was not tipped off.
My family had always been told that my paternal grandmother’s father, who died around 1933 (when she would have been four) had been a wholesale tobacconist in Salt Lake City.
A couple of years ago, my father did some research, and determined that, while that was the job he held to the outside world, he had also been a bootlegger, had engaged in the distribution and manufacturing of punchboards, and that there were some suspicious elements of his tobacco business (a peculiar lack of competition, for instance).
Moreover, it had always been known that he died in a freakish auto accident (everyone else in the car suffered only minor injuries), and one of his sons had a photo business in Las Vegas in the 1950’s and hung around mobsters.
Given what we’ve figured out, the last two things look a lot more interesting.
My younger sister and I were hanging out with our dad just before his mother died, and he was regaling us with embellished versions of the same stories we’d heard him tell 1,427 times when we were growing up. But there was a new story we had never heard:
Dad went to Vietnam in 1967. According to him, the US Marines sent him over with a crew to rebuild a radar station that had been bombed (my dad operated radar at the USMC air base in Yuma, AZ). This trip allegedly took place while Mom and my one-year-old self were back in Washington visiting Mom’s parents, and she never knew about. My sister and I call bullshit on this one, though. Why the hell would this be something to keep secret for almost 40 years? A non-combat, non-classified “mission”?
When we were young kids we kind of wondered why we spent so much more time visiting our paternal grandparents than our maternal grandparents. It was a 90-minute drive to visit them, and the two sets of grandparents lived near each other, but almost every trip was a very brief stop-and-say-hello at Mom’s parents’ house, followed by spending the rest of the day with dad’s parents.
We found out, as teenagers, that Mom’s dad was the town drunk. Those quick stops at their house were to find out from Grandma if Grandpa was drunk, and if so, off we went to the other grandparents’ house. I was eight years old when Grandpa finally sobered up, and looking back that coincides with when the longer visits started (though it would still be some years before we learned why).
The biggest surprise, though, was one time when I was a teenager and I’d done something or other to make my mom very angry, and she used the word “bullshit” in her lecture. I can officially confirm that profanity is much more effective when used sparingly. I was so shocked that I don’t think I ever again did whatever it was I had done. I didn’t think Mom even knew words like that!
No family secrets for me personally, although my mother herself didn’t find out until recently that she had a third brother who had died at the age of about seven. Both her surviving brothers had known about this, and one even named his son after the dead child. The whole thing, that presumably happened before my mother was born, had been kept from her until my grandmother blurted it out a few years ago when she was in her eighties.
My biggest surprise from my parents was when my Mum confessed to me that she was an atheist. I was about 14 and had harboured pretty strong atheist beliefs since the age of about nine. Although my parents were not at all religious, and were often scathing about the excesses of religious belief, I thought that they at least believed in a god, because everyone else seemed to, so I never said anything, believing I was a wicked freak!
Now that I have a child, I can only marvel at her self-restraint in going along with the ruse, because I can’t bring myself to do the same with my own son. My Dad, who is not actually an atheist, claims that my Mum used to be a believer but became ‘angry with god’ following a family tragedy that happened when I was about 10.
Another minor surprise was the first time I heard Dad use the f-word when I was about 17.
Not really my parents, but I had no idea that my mom’s oldest sister was NOT her dad’s daughter. Apparently, my grandma got pregnant at 13 and had my aunt, and my grandfather married her when my aunt was little. I had no idea until about a year ago.
And we like to tease my mom about this one, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true - we joke that her oldest sister is HER mother, and my grandma raised her instead. My aunt is years older than my mom, so it’s a possibility. What convinces my husband is that my mom never denies it.
The only major thing I’ve got on my parents is that they were both big pot smokers when I was little. I once busted my mom to my grandma when I was two years old - my grandma was trying to get my dad to quit smoking by telling him that my mom didn’t smoke, and my little two-year-old self busted in with “Yes, she does! Mommy was smoking that little cigarette the other day!”. 
Other than that, we don’t really have any deep, dark secrets.
E.
Nothing really to add, except that this really brought a lump to my throat. Sometimes people surprise you with unexpected understanding and humanity.
I had seen my parents talk about “lunch at the Daggerwound” in a way that made it a double-meaning, but didn’t find out what it was about until a couple years ago. La Punyalada (“the Daggerwound” as in “it leaves your poor wallet bleeding”) is a very expensive restaurant in Barcelona, where Mom is from. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia; Catalans have a reputation for being more tightfisted than Uncle Scrooge’s jewish-scottish cousin Solomon McDuck. In my family’s case, it’s pretty much true; when my aunt invited Mom and myself to visit her for a week, the first conversation the two sisters had was about how much was Mom going to pay Auntie for the visit.
My aunt was dating a guy that rubbed my parents completely wrong. But she’d decided that getting married was the only way she’d ever get out of her parents’ house, so she was. Grandmother took Mom and Dad to lunch at La Punyalada and told them that they were Not, Under Pain Of Death, to interfere with Auntie’s plans. She then made them pay for lunch.
The only two good things to come out of that marriage were my cousins 
When the split was announced, Grandma told Mom “don’t you dare say a word!” and Mom answered “I wasn’t going to.” I’ve heard Grandma critizice that uncle quite a few times (my cousin once told her “he’s my dad, you know, and yes, I agree he’s a bastard but cut it out, willya?” - this was after he’d refused to acknoledge her once they’d run into each other on the street, they live about 500 meters away) but never Mom. The way Mom saw it, once the split had happened it was time to patch things up, not say “I told you so”.
This was a bit of an odd one for me. My mother has always seemed a very straight-forward, moderate-conservative type.
When I was interviewing for colleges, she tried to encourage me to sign up for honors programs even though my honors grades in high-school weren’t fantastic. During part of the interview process, she asked the interviewer about the honors english program, and the interviewer talked about how that symester they’d done a unit on the 1960’s counter-culture and ‘deviant lifestyles’.
After we left the interview, my mom was semi-offended. She revealed to me that in the 60’s, she -was- part of that ‘deviant lifestyle’! She’d been a peace protester and the like. It was such an odd reveal at such an odd time, it really took me aback.
I found out when I was 22 that my parents were getting a divorce after 26 yrs of marriage because my dad was gay. Guess the summer stock theater, his impeccable style of dress and his love of show tunes should have been a dead give away.
My Grandmother (staunch Irish Catholic) would not speak to my mother for 5 or 6 years after the divorce cause my Mother had done what no respecting catholic would do, get divorced…the rift was mended when my mom got the local bishop to annul my parents 26 yr marriage, does that make me a bastard?
I also found out that my older brother once, while parents were still together, had to bail my dad out of jail for cruising the local gay pick-up area of a local park…not a good thing for a catholic hospital administrator. He eventually got dismissed from that job for flaunting his relationship with his partner, a small town doctor that had also, later in life, come out.
My dad went on to work in Saudi Arabia his last ten years of life, maintaining his long distance relationship with the doctor. Upon my fathers death the doctor took my whole family, including my mom, out to dinner…we all got along well, mom and the doc reminiscing about my dad and such…
My one real regret, dad never got to meet either one of my kids, he was due to visit USA a few weeks after his death but the reaper had other plans.
tsfr
I assume you’re wooshing, but just in case: no.
Wooshing??? :dubious: Not at all…the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
tsfr
My grandmother had a truly Wicked Stepmother. Her own mother had “run off” after WWII and her father placed her and her four siblings in an orphanage for about a year until he found a new wife. The woman was monstrously cruel and went out of her way to show preference to her own kids. She was physcially and mentally abusive to my grandmother.
I never knew this until a few years ago when I asked her about a memory I had from when I was young. An old, bedridden lady had lived in a spare bedroom in our house with my grandmother taking care of her. I asked who that woman was and my grandmother explained that it was her stepmother. All of the stepmother’s own children had written her off and no one would take care of her, so grandma stepped up and took on the job.
That my grandmother would take care of that horrible, evil woman after all the torture that she put her through told me a lot about my grandmother as a person.
Any children born to a marriage thought to be valid are still legitimate after an annulment.
Thanks… I guess that helps. I was not contesting whether I was legitimate or not, just whether i was a bastard or not…(tongue in cheek) 
peace and happy holidaze 
daniel …aka tsfr