Stuff You Learned About Your Parents Years Later.

I found out recently that my father and mother broke up during college. After college, my father was determined to get my mother back, and in a “Big Fish” manner, won her back over.

Also, during the 70s energy crisis, when gasoline was rationed based on the last digit of your license plate, they were doing a lot of road traveling, and carried two license plates with them. They switched them out based on what day it was that they needed gas.

My mother smuggled a joint into Sweden when she first moved there. During a canoe trip, she tried getting my father to smoke it with her, but he wasn’t up for it.

My Dad was a pro boxer, in the 1950s. Welterweight.

Mom almost married an Iranian guy, in 1959. (The family is neither Islamic, nor Middle Eastern.)

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I was an adult when I found out that I was the reason my dad didn’t make the Marine Corps a career. He was stationed in San Diego when Mom was pregnant with me. He’d been selected for Officer Candidate School, but that would have meant going back east for the training, and Mom was too massive to travel. And since all the family was on the east coast, she’d have been left alone in San Diego.

Dad couldn’t get them to delay his entry into OCS, so a month after I was born, his enlistment was up, and he bid the Corps farewell (as much as any Marine can) and we all drove to Baltimore. So instead of being a military brat, I was just another kid in suburbia. But Dad was really proud when I went to OCS, even if it was in the Navy. :smiley:

My dad used to take my mum up The Arsenal regularly in the 1950’s…

My mom learned to drive in NYC! This is the woman who once got lost coming home from work. She also drove a cool little Beetle, the old kind, and had a giant stuffed doggie in her apartment. She dressed up like a man when she was young to participate in a school play.

I mean, it really makes me feel sorry for her. Life must have really beaten her down to become the woman she was when she died - bitter and jaded. :frowning:

My dad sailed in the boat race on Lake Michigan to Mackinac Island. That must have been in the 1940s. I found this out after he died in 2004. Before they were married my mom used to go horseback riding with her girlfriends in Jackson Park. I have pictures (black and white of course) of her in her jods with a jaunty neckerchief. And she wondered why I was horse crazy!

My mom’s first husband (the father of my two oldest brothers) wanted to start a cult back in the late 50’s and start taking on multiple wives. My mom said “Not only no, but hell, no” and got a divorce. I don’t know if the cult ever got off the ground.

I found out that my dad had had a previous and apparently fairly short career as a New Jersey cop. He decided that he’d rather be in the Army.

:eek::eek::eek:

Yeah I had to read it twice. Those quaint furriners with their strange ways of speaking. :slight_smile:

Goooooooalllll!

I found out my father dropped out of high school to join the Marines in an attempt to get into WWII before it ended. It didn’t work out that way. It ended before his training was up and he spent his enlistment at the Marine Barracks in D.C.

My Dad faked his way into the Navy after Pearl. Blind in one eye from childhood, when told to cover his right (good) eye, he used his left hand, and when told to switch eyes, he switched hands and in the confusion, they didn’t catch it. So he was enlisted. After the war, rather than wait around, he claimed an eye problem and got a expedited release. He said he just didn’t want to scrape paint in Guam until they got around to releasing him.

My mom was raped by a neighbor when she was 11. It sure explained a lot about how overprotective she was when I was growing up.

My mom got pregnant and had an illegal abortion before she married my dad. This was in Germany, just a couple of years after WWII. Apparently, it was a horrible experience.

I have always been pro-choice (heck, I even marched in DC once) but finding this out added a whole new dimension.

How did you learn about that?

My mother sang in a ‘big band’ type group when she was in college. Her band was offered a record contract, but she turned it down. She wanted to marry my father and stay in the midwest. When I cleaned out my grandmother’s house after she died, I found 2 ‘demo’ records my mother and her band had cut.

My parents lived together before getting married. They had never made any sort of reference about this to me. My paternal grandmother told me when I was in my mid/late twenties.

She also told me my maternal grandfather didn’t like my father. She said that when my parents were teenagers, he said something like “you’re the devil in my daughter’s life” to him, which made him cry. I never had any clue growing up that there had been conflict between my father and my maternal grandparents.

I’ve pieced together the fact that when my parents were young, my mother was attracted to my father because he was a rebellious bad boy. My parents are now divorced, and my father is remarried to the woman he cheated on my mother with. She’s begun saying “I should have listened to my parents.” However, she’s referring only to how she conducted herself within the marriage and as a mother. She still doesn’t have the insight to realize that if she had listened to her parents, she never would have gotten together with my father in the first place.