My parents divorced when I was 11 (1984) and I stayed with my dad, even though technically I was joint custody. My mom told me when I was in my 30’s that she took a ton of flak for that - those were the days when the child automatically went with the mother. Apparently she had to fight to give my father joint custody and never demanded child support. She said that it was her decision to leave the marriage, and no way was she going to take me away from my daddy who was perfectly capable of taking care of me, and she had me for half the week anyway. I never knew how much outside shit she endured for my best interests.
My Dad joined ROTC thinking that it would keep him from the draft (Korea). It didn’t work, and he was drafted just before the end of the war. By the time he finished basic training, the war was over, and he spent his entire tour at Fort Dix in New Jersey.
When I was in college, I once had a complete meltdown thinking that I had failed one of my final exams and was going to flunk out. It turned out that I got a B and was fine. Just a few years ago I learned that my father had an almost identical experience. He was engaged to my mother and was about to graduate from Law School with a job waiting for him when he took his final exams. He was so convinced that he had failed that he called my mother and told her the engagement was off because he wasn’t going to graduate. Of course it turned out that he did fine, graduated with his class and married my Mom. I told him that I never knew that thinking you had failed was hereditary.
Is that some sort of sex euphemism?
I came across a wedding album when I was 16. In it were pictures of my mom and some I didn’t know. That’s how I found out my mother was married, before she married my father. :eek:
I also found out when I was a teenager, that my mom was taken from her real mother and sister as a young girl, when her father remarried. He took my mom and moved away. She never saw her mother or sister again. We have tried to find them, but we didn’t have any luck. My mom’s new step-mother proceeded to beat her nearly every day, until she finally escaped when she was 17. I would love to know what happened to my real Grandmother and Aunt. 
Obligatory xkcd comic: xkcd: Genetic Analysis
Seriously, you must tell us what this means. The only Arsenal I’m familiar with is the football club and I’m not sure it would be a revelation that your parents used to go. If you don’t explain we’re all going to have dirty dirty notions about Ma and Pa mascaroni 
What, me guv?
Lucky they didn’t play at Northampton Town, or he might have taken her all the way up to The Cobblers…
Spurs fan?
Well done Sir…A deduction that would make Watson ejaculate.:eek:
I was an accident, and probably the only reason my parents married. Oh, Dad loves her and all, but I don’t think it’s 100% mutual.
I posted this a few years ago.
Turns out, my parents had a big secret they hid from everyone for 50+ years…
My dad just wasn’t in WW II, he was a border-line hero. In the 70s he finally was able to receive his Chinese medals – and he got them from Madam Chiang herself. She had kept his and others for AVG servicemen and that was the first chance she had to present them.
I found out on the day of my Dad’s funeral (I was in my 30s) that they had to get married because my Mom was knocked up with my older sister.
Similar, except that it was my father who was married before. It was during WWII and I presume it was one of those ill-advised quickie romances that tended to happen at that time. They had a daughter, who died as an infant (crib death, I believe). Much later, after the story became known to us offspring, he referred to his first wife as a drunk and a nymphomaniac, which I took to mean that she liked to drink more than he did, and that at least once she had sex with someone else while they were married (to be fair, it may have been more than once).
There is a photo from that period, I believe, of my father with a blond woman possibly his first wife, and another couple, taken in a nightclub, possibly in San Francisco (where he spent some time during the war and where the daughter was when she died). The other couple looks like they are trying to have a good time, my father’s companion has a pleasant look on her face, and my father looks like grim death. So much to speculate about without any real knowledge.
After my mother died, I found out that my father wasn’t her third husband, but her fourth.
Apparently the one before my dad was very brief and was annulled.
My mom was full of secrets. I’m not entirely sure that anything I knew about her was true, to be honest, unless it came firsthand from my dad (who didn’t marry her until she was in her 30s). I wish I’d dug deeper to try to find out her story, because I think it would have been fascinating.
Spring dance in college. Fun times had by all. Dad returns in the Fall to find out mom is pregnant. He calls home to find the name of the physician friend of the family to do an abortion (this was early '60s). Instead, he is told to bring mom to their house (a 700 mile drive). He drives out, grandad puts them both in HIS car, drives over another border to a state that does not require a blood test - and they get married. Dad then drives back to college while mom lives with grandma and grandpa until my older brother is born.
I found this all out from my grandparents, and some details filled in by mom’s best friend on a chance visit.
They are still married (over 50 years now). They don’t celebrate an anniversary, and they still lie about how many years they have been married (mom let it slip ONCE, and from that we figured out how fast my brother was born after their marriage). It bugs him a bit still.
Dad has some resentment. When I was in high school, he would regularly warn me to be careful or I would end up married instead of going on great adventures. A decade later I learned WHY that was a recurring theme in his conversations with me.
As an adult I learned my father had a successful “career” as a pimp. Successful as defined by the family member that told me this information meaning “he made a lot of many and none of his ‘employees’ ever got killed”. That same family member also informed me that my father’s only run-ins with law enforcement were largely because of evidence hand delivered by my mother (which she of course has always denied) And it was not because she had any moral objections to prostitution. She didn’t want her husband to have so much contact with “those slutty women”. Yeah, my mother was seriously a piece of work.
When my mother was in high school - supposedly already going with my father - she dated Jerry Siegel a few times. How cool would that have been, to have the inventor of Superman as my father! But she said he was kind of nerdy and boring, and she went back to my father.
The two big family secrets about my parents that I learned were:
-
My parents got secretly married in November 1955, although the big formal wedding that everyone THOUGHT was their wedding occurred in June 1956. They did this because my mother, a good 50s gal, would not have sex outside of marriage, and they were really horny. My mother was in nursing school at the time and students were not permitted to be married, hence the secret marriage.
-
My dad was enrolled in veterinary school and flunked out after he married my mother.
I was never supposed to know either of the above. My mother let the earlier marriage date slip in a rare moment of mother-daughter confidences. The code to disarm the alarm system was 1955, and one day when I was in my twenties and came home for a visit, my dad said “Do you remember the deactivation code?” I responded, “Sure, it’s the year you got married” and he about had a heart attack. Apparently he thought this was some huge horrible secret that no one should ever know. My mother had totally forgotten she’d revealed it to me, and sternly commanded me not to speak of it again.
On my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I had to give a speech, and I told everyone at the party that they’d married in 1955! I’m not sure how my dad felt about this, but … c’mon, it’s actually really cute that they got secretly married. It’s just a symptom of my parents’ weird secretiveness that it was such a huge shame to them half a century later.
As to the second secret - flunking out of vet school - I found that one out because I was looking for a recipe in one of my mother’s old cookbooks and a newspaper announcement covering their June 1956 wedding fluttered out. It said “Mr. CairoFather is a student at the blah blah School of Veterinary Medicine.” I said “Hey mother, look at this - they sure screwed up your wedding announcement!” She reluctantly told me it was true, that my father had flunked out, and never to speak of it again.
So, I never mentioned the vet school thing - my father died without knowing that I knew. Obviously it was a source of great shame to him, and I respected that. But I also was very frustrated growing up in that house. Everything was hidden - it was like being on “double secret probation” all the time. I would say something and get immediately slapped, and not know what exactly I had done wrong. God only knows what other secrets died with them.
Bah. Both of my parents have passed away, and I feel freer and lighter than I have in years.
My parents ( who are older, my mother is 88 ), meet on a blind double date – she was with the other guy and he was with the other girl.
They were engaged one month after they met and married 3 months later.