I don’t know a thing about my husband’s romantic past. He refuses to talk about it and gets really mad when I talk about mine. We’ve been happily married for almost 13 years, and it really doesn’t matter, but I am curious sometimes.
My parents and their siblings are pretty closed-mouth about their pasts. Neither my mother nor father will admit to knowing why they named my brother the way they did, for example. I mean, come on. At least one of them knows.
My dad comes by it honestly, as he only found out when he was in his thirties that his own father (and his father’s brothers) had changed his last name as a teenager and wasn’t actually of German descent, but Slavic.
One of my cousins on my mom’s side lost her father (my uncle) when she was about four. Into her thirties she still had erroneous beliefs about him, because none of the relatives, including her mom, talked to her about him. At the family reunion she was trying to get her uncles and aunts to talk about their brother, her dad, and nobody would. It was sad.
It didn’t seem that they were deliberately covering anything up, just that they weren’t interested. Weird bunch.
It amuses me to realize that my sister’s kids have no idea about her teenage years and think that she’s just dull and boring. I don’t have the nerve to tell them about her promiscuity and drug use, though, at least not until they don’t live in her house anymore.
I found out that my grandparents, my mother’s parents, spoke French and used it as a secret language instead of passing it on! Arrggh.
I also had no idea that my uncle was a Mason until his funeral.
I know nothing about my maternal grandfather. My mother took his last name, and I know he was married to my grandmother. She told me that they divorced. And I know his name.
But why he left the family so soon after fathering my mother, no one knows. The only people who knew anything about it never talked about it, and the last of them passed away a couple of months ago.
I know almost nothing about any of my grandparents. Three of them died before I was even in the picture. What few stories I have heard I treasure.
More to the point, though, I know almost nothing about my own biological father. He’s dead now, so I couldn’t even ask.
I don’t know anything about my paternal grandfather. He left when my father was born, and that was it. I can’t really get any more information than that, because that side of the family is a “we don’t talk about that” kind of clan. We’ve also got bipolar disorder and Tourette’s (the twitchy kind, not the swearing thing) on that side of the family… or at least I think we do. Sure seems that way, but again, we don’t talk about why cousin Jane has that facial tic, or why Uncle Jimmy needed to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks when he wasn’t “sick”. I don’t dare ask any questions.
I mostly spent time with my mother’s side of the family, which is very French-Canadian, very loud, very open and familiar almost to the point of vulgarity (I swear, my grandmother is the horniest 93 year old in the history of the world, and she can make anything into a sex joke that could make anyone blush). The idea of not knowing anythign about your close family is… weird. Which is why Dad’s side of the family is so strange to me. They’re very reserved and hold a lot back.
I don’t know how much my boyfriend makes. More than me, for sure, but I haven’t a clue about his actual salary. Doesn’t matter, really, we’re fine sharing the bills the way we’re doing it now, but I am sort of curious.
In general, though, I know a whole lot about my family and my boyfriend. I know about my parents’ past, both together and pre-marriage. I know my maternal grandmother’s life story. I know everyone’s views and opinions on almost anything you could ask, and I know their favorite foods and what they collect and a whole lot of other things. I know about my boyfriend’s past, I know most of his childhood stories by now… I’m getting to know his family, too.
This is true, and I have read the article you posted, but considering some of the context . . .
Grandma was 40 when she had Mom. She didn’t tell anyone she was expecting, but ‘surprised’ them with a brand new baby. (She was a rather stout lady, so she might have pulled this off.) Mom’s sisters are 14 and 16 years older, so it’s quite possible that one of her sisters is actually her mom. The elder sister’s mother-in-law hated her guts, but would never say why. And there was an aunt who told Mom that her mother wasn’t really her mother.
Put that together with the generally accepted statistic that 1 in 10 children are not fathered by their mother’s husband, and . . . it’s a toss up.
I have never heard this. Is this supposed to be a common sense thing or have there been studies?
Wow. It’d be easier to ask me what I do know about the people around me. I tend to be a pretty private person, so I don’t really scoop much into other peoples’ lives. I am always surprised when I find out odd little things – such as my best friend goes to church. And not just any church, but one of the biggest “money-changers” in the area (you know the type – those huge fucking mega-churches with 9 bazillion members and a coffee shop and gift shop inside). I just don’t pay attention to those kinds of details unless they become relevant to something else that is important for me to know.
My ex-husband was an extremely secretive person. He told me that both of his parents died when he was sixteen and that he had an older sister he was estranged from, so basically he had no family. He had three kids by his first wife. I’m told they lived in our town, but I don’t know that he ever had any contact with them during our seven-year-long marriage. He had another child by his second wife. He spent lots of time with this kid until she was about five, when he suddenly “wasn’t allowed to see her anymore”.
Questions were futile; he would literally stare right through you if you tried to ask anything. He would do the question-stare to me, my family, his boss…anyone. If you tried to ask questions on a lesser topic, say, “Did you buy some new shoes?” you might get something like, “Whaddaya…writing a book?” You would never, ever, ask a direct question and receive an answer.
Once I found a wad of cash in the trunk of his car. I didn’t ask.
When my mother was a child, a neighbor did something to her which resulted in his going to jail. When I was a child, a neighbor did something to me as well, which resulted in his going to a retirement home. What happened? Don’t know.
A good friend of mine grew up as an embassy brat because his father was a career diplomat. I mentioned to him that his dad could well have been a CIA spook and that the embassy thing was just a cover. It was a running joke between us for like twenty years. When his father was literally in his deathbed, he confessed to my friend that out decades long joke wasn’t a joke after all.
How my father proposed. I tried to ask my mom and my grandma happened to be visiting. Mom didn’t really have an answer and then grandma told me it was a very personal question I was asking! 
People have conjectured that perhaps they were in bed together, but that I can be sure wasn’t true.
I remember hearing of a study on this and a great deal of arguing over it. There are similar studies on animal parentage, which the sociologists arguing in favor of the original study cited as confirmation.
Can I produce a cite? Not without a lot of searching.
This Cecil column addresses the question: Who’s your Daddy? Is it true 10-15% of children in modern society were not sired by their putative fathers?
A relevant quote:
Are you me?? I came in here to post this very thing!
My sister had both, so it’s not necessarily and either/or proposition.
I do not know if any of my relatives still consider themselves Republicans. My family were all registered Republicans, and active in local politics. I first registered as a Republican out of respect for my realtive who was party chairman for our county. I never voted “party line”, and he had told me never to do that unless it really matched my sentiments. About 2 days after the SC ruled on the 2000 election I changed my registration.
He’s been gone more than 20 years, but his children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews are around. We have pretty similar world views, but I’ve never asked if they’ve changed their registrations.
To tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure HE would’ve changed parties over that.
The only things I know about my paternal grandfather are that he was a teamster, and he was very strict with the kids.
When my family gets together, there’s inevitable talk about family members who are not there, or are deceased. But never any talk about my grandfather. It’s as if there were a conscious decision never to mention him. It’s as if he never existed. And now . . . I don’t think there’s anyone still alive who actually knew him.
I know a grand total of about six things about my paternal grandfather:
[ul][li]He was some kind of engineering crew aboard ESSO tankers during WWII.[/li][li]He was incapable of being faithful to my grandmother, who married him, divorced him for infidelity, married again and conceived a child to keep the marriage together, then divorced him again for infidelity before my father was born.[/li][li]While my father was post-toddler he’d take my father to bars, and use him as bait for getting the attentions of women. (I don’t know that he didn’t do that before my father was old enough to remember it, but I know my father remembers more than a few trips.)[/li][li]He was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party at one point[/li][li]He died from complications of type II diabetes. After losing his legs.[/li][li]He was a lawyer, and died intestate. :eek: :smack: [/li][/ul]
To be honest, while I regret, in a vague sort of way, that I don’t have any oral histories that go beyond him in my father’s family, I really don’t feel I missed much by never having had the chance to meet him.
Bingo. I know very little about the romantic past of my girlfriend of 6 years. It is a paradox how on one hand I know her better than anybody on the planet but on the other I know next to nothing about a huge part of her life.
And I read that and everything! Damn, I swear, my ability to retain random information has really taken a beating since I turned 35.
Now I’m wondering how the chance of the kind of genetic mutation EJsGirl posted about compares to the possibility that Grandpa isn’t Grandpa. Or, more likely, that Grandpa and Grandma are actually Great Grandpa and Great Grandma.
However, the eldest aunt has dementia, the other aunt would never speak of it, and both Grandpa and Grandma are years dead. Even a genetic test wouldn’t clear things up, as Mom would have the same mitochondrial DNA as all her siblings anyways.