When I was a teen, my mom started talking about a time before her and dad were married when she went to live in Phoenix with friends. I can remember her starting to tell me some of the nefarious details and as a teen, I soooo didn’t want to hear about my mom’s escapades.
Now that she’s gone, I sure wish I would have learned more about her before she was my mom.
Apparently my mother was technically the “other woman” in my father’s first marriage. I found out in my early 20s while eating dinner with them at Red Lobster; my mother accidently let it slip that they went to Red Lobster to celebrate his divorce being finalized. Also my father’s always had a cordially relationship with his ex-wife (she’s the mother of 2 of my older half-siblings), and until I was about 8 or 9 I thought she was my aunt.
Did your say if it hurted?
Dad was a decorated WWll USAAF veteran. He met and married my mother, a British war bride, while stationed at Honington Air Base.
My siblings and I had a very stable upbringing by parents who were very loving, though quite conservative. They were conservative to the point of being tedious, but we kids didn’t mind; it was just the way things were. Dad had a stable, conservative job, wore mechanical pencils in his plastic pocket protector and voted for Nixon. Mom knitted and baked cakes and pies in the kitchen. I was considered the hippy of the family when I started wearing tie-dye shirts in Junior High.
My parents were universally liked. I can honestly say I never met anyone who didn’t like my parents. They had a large group of friends and they were all as seemingly tedious as my parents. Good, friendly folks…but, tedious, at least in the eyes of a rebellious youth. Many were members of my mother’s All Nations Club—a club Mom started and presided over since 1946, comprised of foreign women married to WWll vets. To me they were boring with funny accents.
The All Nations Club had monthly parties, rotating at a different member’s house each month. When the party was scheduled at our house, my siblings and I would be sent to bed early, upstairs. I imagined the partiers downstairs nibbling watercress sandwiches, sipping tea and reminiscing about the good ol’ days as I drifted off to sleep.
Years later, as a college freshman, I drove home for an unannounced visit one Friday evening with my roommate. I recall warning him that my parents were pretty “square” and having my Mom sprinkle colored jimmies on your ice cream may be the most exciting event for the weekend.
I trailed off my warning as I approached our house and saw dozens of cars parked in the street and driveway. *Hmmm, looks like one of my parent’s old folks parties…likely to be tedious to the nth power, that’s all. *
Or, so I thought…
Even before I opened the door, I could feel the deep thumps from my subwoofer vibrating the walls (what are they doing messing with my stereo!?!). Opening the door, the sound of very loud Middle Eastern music penetrated my ear drums. Middle Eastern music?!? As I walked into the living room, I’m wondering why on Earth they would be playing Middle Easter music…and…oh my…that’s why!
There, gyrating in the middle of our living room, before my roommate’s and my eyes, was a very voluptuous, very pretty, very topless belly dancer. An encircled group of my parent’s “conservative” friends were hooting and hollering in approval (can’t say I was exactly disapproving myself, I might add).
I found Mom in the kitchen with a gaggle of her girlfriends, baking pastries and downing cocktails like they were going out of style. The smell of marijuana was heavy in the air (hey, didn’t Mom give me that “evils of drugs” lecture just last year!?!).
My friend and I walked out back just as Harry M., one of my parent’s dearest, fattest friends, did a well-executed belly flop into our pool. I was used to seeing Harry in brown suit and tie, maybe pulling a quarter out of my ear when he was trying to be funny. Now he was wearing a rubber swim hat with flaps, a snorkel, a mask…and nothing else. Nothing. The women hooted and hollered as he splashed most of the water out of our pool.
I found Dad on the back porch, wearing a blond wig, dancing with a mop. He was so blotto, he didn’t even recognize me.
No, I didn’t find a punch bowl filled with car keys, but this was a shocking experience for me nonetheless. My roommate ended up having a much better time than he anticipated, too. He was offered a few hits of weed from the old folks and got a date with the belly dancer.
Mom and Dad had a lot of ‘splainin to do the next morning, let me tell you. It was fun having the shoe on the other foot for a change. And we did get colored jimmies on our ice cream the next day.
I sure do miss those party animals.
Not a big secret, but recently my mother and aunt were talking about how their mother never seemed to like either of them, “it’s as if the only one of her daughters she ever liked was the first one!” I knew their eldest sister had died as a child, but not that she’d only been eight months old. We figured out why grandma liked her best: she didn’t have time to learn to argue :smack:
The story sure doesn’t make any of my relatives sound nice, but one, they aren’t, and two, it has been a huge relief to my mother and aunt after some seventy years of wondering what had they done to always be the bad daughters.
My older sister told me that my mom had an abortion before I was born. Apparently the baby was developing without a brainstem, so there was no chance it would survive.
She also had a miscarriage so it turns out I was actually the fifth child, not the third.
My Mother was engaged to be married in 1945 to a military man I’ll call “Bob”. They were neighbors who lived across the street from each other in Chicago.
My Mother ALWAYS told us kids that Bob broke off the engagement and she immediately met and married another military man, our Father “Phil” shortly thereafter.
Unfortunately my Father Phil passed away in the 1960’s when I was only three so I never got to know my Father in any meaningful way. Soon after my Father’s death Bob would show up at our house two or three times a year to visit with my Mom. {Bob was in a happy marriage, but still visited my Mom}.
Hmmm…
My Mother re-married in the early 1970’s, but the visits from Bob continued when my Stepfather was not home.
Hmmm…
Flash forward to a few years ago, and I get a phone call from Bob. He called me to inquire about my Mother’s declining health. She was living in a Senior Village type place after my stepfather died.{Bob’s visits had stopped by now, but they still exchanged cards occasionally}.
Bob let it be known that he and his wife of 60+ years no longer drive, but he sure would like to see his “Rose” one more time. I took the hint and volunteered to go pick him up at his house, drive him to visit my Mother, and then drive him back home.
If you spend 90 minutes {each way} in a car with someone you can learn a lot.
Well, what I learned in this. My Mother was the person who broke off the engagement because she had met and fallen in love with my Father !!! I told Bob that I always heard that he was the one to break up with my Mother. He looked at me with his almost 90 year old bright blue eyes and said “I would never break off the engagement with your Mother”. Then his eyes filled with tears…
To make a long story short, here’s my take on things.While my Mother was married to my Father, her and Bob stayed apart. After my Father’s death, Bob’s visits started to happen. Bob has been holding a torch for my Mother since 1945!!!
I truly believe my Mother had an occasional sexual rendezvous with Bob from say 1967 to 1985 or so.
My sisters think I’m crazy, but after talking to Bob for three hours that day in the car, it couldn’t be any other way…
From what you’re writing, and the era, my first thought wouldn’t be a resentful father, but, exactly as she told you, ending up as an unpaid servant. First, it would have been expected that the women in the house, including your mom, would do all the domestic chores, wether they worked or not, and second, it was pretty common in the past for children still living with their parents to hand out their pay to them. I’ve known a number of people (male and female) who were expected to do that until they left mom and dad, and much later than the 30s.
Having to do the family’s dishes and getting to keep only pocket money out of your own salary is quite a sufficient incentive to leave, without a need for a resentful father.
My mother was always a Christmas freak, while my dad would just hang out and watch TV. Socialize a little bit but really just hung back during Christmas Eve parties and really wasn’t there too much when we opened gifts Christmas morning.
Found out when I was in my late teens that my dad’s father had a heart attack putting up the Christmas tree on Christmas eve and passed away a few days later. My dad was 12 when that happened.
That certainly explained a lot.
The whole “nine months” thing is not exactly accurate though - it’s actually 40 weeks, which works out closer to 10 months.
I do know a family where all three of the kids are born within a couple of weeks of each other in September.
New Year’s Eve babies. 
That dad used to fly planes full of cocain to the states back in the late 70’s and got out before getting caught.
But it’s not 40 weeks from conception - it’s 40 weeks from the mother’s last period, which means about 38 weeks from conception, give or take a few days. Which is actually about eight months and three weeks from conception.
So basically, if you’re counting back either nine months or 40 weeks from your due date, no, you’re not getting the date when your parents had hot monkey sex and made you.
My father is an unusually charming and good-looking extreme alcoholic who always had very, ummm, liberal beliefs about monogamy (he doesn’t practice it at all). My mother always put up with one-off affairs even when it was with her friends but she put here foot down when I was a young teenager and he started abandoning me and my younger brothers to engage in actual relationships every time she was away. I busted him on one of those by listening in on a conversation from a cordless phone from a closet and used that to force a divorce beginning that night. That is no way to live when you are 14 but they had absolutely no business being married in the first place.
He married that lover and it predictably crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion a few years later. She opened fire on him in public because he was having yet another affair. She missed of course but did manage to blow out a few store windows. Inexplicably, no charges were ever filed. You have to love small town politics…hey, accidents happen, sometimes repeatedly. He later married a very decent woman who he didn’t respect because she was actually good and cheated on her too so they got a divorce.
I didn’t really speak to him that much from the time my parents got divorced and just a few years ago when I was in my mid-30’s and circumstances brought us back together out of necessity in both good and bad ways. I was willing to forgive him for everything as long as he agreed to be a good grandfather to my daughters and tell me the truth when I asked. I didn’t expect him to actually do it but he did. He has been an excellent grandfather but some of the truth was wilder than my worst nightmares could have prepared me for.
Everything that I suspected as a child turned out to be true and that includes things that kids shouldn’t even know exist. There weren’t just a few affairs. There were enough to make JFK and Bill Clinton shake their heads in disbelief and that was only one category of indiscretions. He freely admits that to me today just like we are talking about the weather.
One thing that I always suspected based on that was that I have an unidentified sibling somewhere. I don’t know why I always thought that but it was just a general feeling that I didn’t really want to know the answer to but still needed to. My father called me one night last year completely drunk and was being unusually open and honest about anything I asked so I just threw the question out there casually. I expected him to say ‘No’ but he didn’t. He said it was completely possible but he wasn’t sure. When I asked who it could be, I wasn’t really prepared for the answer. He told me that he had an affair with his first cousin shortly after my parents got married and their oldest son, my cousin (half-brother? 
) may, in fact, be his. That is especially bad on many levels because I grew up with my cousin and never really liked him that much, although, I do have to admit, the resemblance is there.
No one else in the family knows this at all and I am fairly certain that my father doesn’t even remember telling me. I just have to bury that potential fact and never mention it to anyone that it may impact. I don’t even know if it is true either. My father’s cousin was married at the time as well and the her husband has always been the purported father. A DNA test could easily tell today but the consequences of a positive result would be disastrous to many people and has no upside.
I asked my aunt why my father stopped talking to her, and she told me she had no idea… One day he just walked past her in the 1950’s and never talked to her again. She said she tried to figure out what was going on, but he refused to talk to her. Period.
I was about 40 when an Aunt let slip that I wasn’t the oldest child. My parents had had another son, their first, a couple years previous to me. He’d developed pneumonia at birth and lived 4 days. They’d never spoken of this.
That was lot more unsettling to me than I’d ever imagined something like that might be. It sat especially weirdly with my youngest brother, who almost certainly wouldn’t have existed had the real #1 survived.
None of us ever told our parents we found out. And they’re both now deceased, so our secret about knowing their secret is safe.
Life sucks sometimes. A lot of people are carrying a lot more battle damage than it at first appears.
My mom at 86 years old has the predictable health problems. I did find out that when she was a girl, she would eat raw potatoes just to fill her belly. This was in Chicago.
A luxury to some I guess, after the depression, but it sort of surprised me.
My mom and dad had a child before they were married and mom put her up for adoption in a town 1200 miles away from where they lived in Texas. My dad got my mom pregnant and left their home town to look for work before he found out. This being like 1952 my mom could not contact him so she went off to stay with her sister in Ohio and have the baby. She put the baby up for adoption and left to go home. When she got back my dad showed up and they got married. She never told him about it for fear that he would think the baby wasn’t his.
Twelve years later they moved to Ohio across the street from the very hospital my mom gave birth at. She never mentioned it. My dad died in 2001 not knowing he had a daughter. My mom’s sister told my brother about our sister and started looking for her. Ends up she grew up only 10 miles away on a big farm with a big family. At age 52 I found out I had a sister.
I just recently found out that my father was a “test case” for an employment/hiring discrimination lawsuit, the ruling of which established some legal principles. He was contacted by a non-profit entity looking for someone in his situation who was interested in establishing the some set of rights.
By the time the case was settled, he had moved on to a different job and career anyway. But the case did establish the ground rules, and he got written up in a few papers at the time.
Are raw potatoes more filling than cooked ones? Or did they not have enough money to pay for fuel to cook them?
…daaaang.
When I was eleven or so, I learned that my parents… um… had sex, occasionally.
I was shattered.