Parents’ Lies. | TheaterFire

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GallopingFree@reddit

My dad told me he was in the military when he was younger. He wasn’t. He made up this whole story about how he was injured and had PTSD, etc. None of it was true. He spent his teens and 20’s drinking and doing drugs.

I found my dad’s maternal family, they had no idea. I didn’t tell them what I learned about their mother for the reason she gave him up. Answer her dad made her, because she’d leave for weeks at a time without saying anything, leaving him with her dad and stepmom to raise. Which they did, along with their son who was a year older. He’s the one that told me what happened. One instance they were called to the morgue to identify a body in the river, it was not her. But when they moved to another state, she didn’t want to go, and since my dad wasn’t technically theirs, she had to put him up for adoption because she didn’t have any interest in caring for him. It was the best thing that ever happened to him.

She left the state too in the opposite direction and got married and had more kids (that I talked to). Two died of overdoses, another is methy, and the oldest one saw the lack of control or care, and left as soon as she could and became a nurse, and consequently kept her own kids at arms’ length from her side of the family. It’s continued in the next generations too, lots of posts from my “cousins” dealing with addiction on FB. She was an awful mother… but they all loved her, and it wasn’t my place to share that info about why she had a kid she got rid of, just that she did. Everyone has reasons.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Wow. Thats a lot. Stories like this are proof that everyone should have access to education, health care, good food, and day care. So many people are just ruined by the lack of these simple things and we all pay the price. I’m so sorry that happened to you.

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Auntie_Venom@reddit

The problem is, his biological mother had access to all of that, but she had no interest in any of it and just wanted to party, and let her other kids to the same. At some point she became a nurse, I hope she cared for her patients better than her children. I’m not saying she didn’t love them, but she certainly didn’t raise them and it wasn’t a typical Gen X feral latchkey situation. From what I hear the other siblings’ dad was a drunk and abusive, I know they lived in western PA, I think as a miner or something related.

It’s strange because her father and her step mother were great people, I suppose her actual mother had some issues. My dad’s mother was the only one that was rebellious and promiscuous, I don’t know if it was inherited or if it was a reaction to her mother passing away when she was younger. She had a good support system and rejected it for a wild lifestyle… Resulting in her surviving two of her kids at the time.

Regardless, I’m still thankful for at least some of it playing out the way it did. My dad was awesome, really. I miss him more than anything still. And of course I wouldn’t be here.

As far as parental lies, pop was a straight shooter, but would perpetuate the standard ones, like drinking coffee as a kid would stunt my growth or swallowing watermelon seeds would make vines come out my ears… I always knew he was full of it, because he’d get a wry twinkle in his eye.

My mom on the other hand, has but not to be malicious. She’d purposefully not tell me things or gloss over them so as not to change my opinion on people, or be disappointed in their behavior to “protect me”, like when my cousin got arrested in college, she was so mad when my sister told me, til she reminded her our cousin and I were close, I’d find out sooner or later. And no, it didn’t change my opinion of him in the slightest because it was because he was growing weed. I already knew all about that, she didn’t know that though. She later acknowledged trying to keep me naive, and said how proud she was of me for how naive I wasn’t… She didn’t have to worry about me, that I was clear-headed and intelligent to get myself out of a jam. I know it’s rare in this sub, but I have/had great relationships with both of my parents.

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asjs5@reddit

My dad wanted to name me after his mother but my mother refused since they didn’t get along. So he just told me my real name was “her name” and that they only called me by “my name”. I legit told people “my real name is —— but everyone calls me —“ until I was getting my license and asked my mom which name I should put down. She was like why TF would you put that as your name?

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Equivalent_Gap_805@reddit

After parents got divorced and as I older I learned pretty much all they said was a big lie.

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TorrEEG@reddit

My grandmother's mom died during the Great Depression. Her dad was an alcoholic, so she and her sister went into an orphanage.

Imagine her surprise when she was in her 60s and got a death notice about her mom.

Yeah this part. Though it's important to remember that so far studies aren't yet sure if marijuana causes or acts as a trigger for people who are predisposed to schizophrenia or if people predisposed to schizophrenia are more likely to be attracted to smoking marijuana. We're barely a century off from Reefer Madness type propaganda and still learning what's true, false or somewhere in between. (Some people swear by homeopathic remedies while other people see no difference positive or negative.)

With schizophrenia it's genetic and nearly always presents in the late 20s. Most people who experiment with marijuana do so between their mid-late teens and late 20s. It's still like claiming that 100% of people who drink water will die at some point. Technically true. But not all the facts.

I know people who have been smoking mj for over 40 years and I know people who are diagnosed schizophrenic who have never touched any drugs or alcohol.

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Charlotte_Braun@reddit

LSD would make you jump out a window. My parents never said that, but a lot of other adults did.

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Mr-Banana-Beak@reddit

Um, so when I(f) was probably 5 or so I asked my dad where babies come from and he told me that he and mommy "prayed to god and said that they wanted a baby" then mommy got pregnant and later I was born.

Even at 5 years old I thought about this for a moment and then concluded "Then I'm not related to you. I'm only related to mommy because I came from her." I'll never forget the look on his face. He paused for a second and I remembered how he looked like he was thinking about that for the first time. In reality he was trying to think of a way to refute that without giving me the actual facts. He never did. I guess he just didn't know how to proceed with that. He just let me believe that for years. Meanwhile decades later when talking with my brother about when and where we learned about sex, he revealed that he also asked our dad at a young age where babies come from, and he was given the full explanation, all about genitals and sperms and eggs and embryos etc. Considering this was a younger brother, I think I stumped my dad and he decided not to take the fairy tale route with the next kid. I do remember a few years later we had a book with some kid friendly images and some actual images of ultrasounds and neonatal images showing eggs, zygotes, embryos and 6+ month babies that did explain sex and pregnancy for children. Iirc it was told from the perspective of a small girl and her brother who learn that mommy is pregnant with their new brother. Clinical words like "penis" and "vagina" and "womb" etc. The "we prayed to god" memory remained dormant until I was in my late teens even after learning the truth.

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Ok-News7798@reddit

I've known both my parents were liars since I was 4 years old. Sadly, they were far more concerned with themselves than me, eventually each going on to have another child with someone else

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Not unlikely. My dad's side of the family was olive complected with a Scottish last name. And I look like my mother's doppelgänger so probably didn't pick up a lot of the paternal dna.

On 23andMe I did see one third or fourth cousin that was Black, but considering that my mother's great-grandparents were slave owners I wasn't about to reach out and say "Hi cousin!"

Could have just been by marriage a generation or two back, but I feel like any contact would be greeted more with suspicion than warmth (and understandably so).

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leicanthrope@reddit

Not unlikely. My dad's side of the family was olive complected with a Scottish last name. And I look like my mother's doppelgänger so probably didn't pick up a lot of the paternal dna.

The funny thing is that I just did a double take upon reading that line paired with your username... It took a moment to click that the cousin I thought you might be is a millennial that would have had the olive skinned Scots on the maternal side.

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Elliott2030@reddit

LOL! No my username is completely unrelated to my family name, but I'm not surprised there are a lot of folks like us.

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Auntie_Venom@reddit

My husband’s mom is Native American of some sort, his great grandmother was adopted off the orphan train, so there’s no paper trail as to what nation she was from. They did 23 & Me tests and were freaked out that said 0 for all of them. My theory is that Native tribes know who they are and don’t need DNA tests so the services don’t have samples or enough samples to link to specific nations or tribes.

Great-Great-Grandmother. My Great-Grandmother's mother.

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Master-Dimension-452@reddit

I heard the same lie. But it was 1/4 Cherokee-Dad had a grandparent that was full Cherokee. That he had never met.

My dad grew up on the east coast, and later moved to the Midwest, where I grew up. I actually called him on it in my 20’s, because when I went to college there were many native Americans also attending, and I learned that likely was not true. My dad seemed to believe it, because that’s what he was told. 🙄

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PlantMystic@reddit

/s

Sorry you guys are going through this.

Incognito4771@reddit

Came here to say the same thing- I wouldn’t assume that what she’s saying now is true.

Near the end of my mom’s dementia, she swore she was at Kent State on May 4, 1970, and she most definitely was not.

She had gone to Kent State for one semester back in 1967, but by ‘70 she had my brother and was going to get knocked up with me on Race Weekend that year.

Also, you sound pretty angry about the lies you may have discovered- if your mom is still in there a little bit, try to enjoy the time you had left with her rather than being angry.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Thank you. I hear what you’re saying. She hasn’t had episodes like that. Yet. Sometimes she doesn’t know where she is, though.

I am angry for many reasons, but that’s another post. lol ;)

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Correct_Security_742@reddit

Lies...lies...lies...I dunt think so for myself. My mother was pretty open and brutal since I was the baby in the family.....the thing that hurt me most was forcing me to be in a religion(JWs) I knew I'd never accept even as a kid. My approval of my mother marrying after being alone for 12 years backfiring on me. My step dad was only 9 years older at 21, so when he started changing my whole life and what I was allowed to do, how I was disciplined, who I could spend time with like my cousin, vs what my mother had trusted me to do and let me do.. I was a latchkey kid, I was always in my own.. ....That really messed with me. She gave me over to his way of things... My mother was 43 and ran her own life, but she was happy to let him take lead and that began the war of 8 years with my step dad. Now we're closer than ever and actually family and I love the man, but during that time, he honestly hurt me as much as helped me with his learning curve of fatherhood. He made a hard life harder...and later it did get better.. But.. I almost...made a really really bad choice.

Growing up, my parents were sticklers for telling the truth. For ME telling the truth, that is.

Starting about the middle of high school, I started to realize they hadn’t told the truth about a lot more than just Santa and the Tooth Fairy. From my mid teens through my early 30s, there was a series of nasty “We never said that” gaslighting incidents about very important things they had repeatedly promised they’d be there to help with when the time came. It was really confusing and hurtful.

Fast forward to now. My dad has been gone for a few years now. My mom is 80, still sharp as a tack. Since my dad died, she tells more lies than Pinocchio, some for convenience, some to make her look better, and/or some to attempt to manipulate me and/or others. It’s been shocking. I’ve slowly realized my dad was a moderating influence. He wasn’t always truthful, and he sure was complicit in the big lies to me that I reference above, but it’s clear to me now that lying didn’t come naturally to him, it was a considered choice. And that Mom had a lot of influence over him and his choices - his most important priority was to try to make her happy (or at least appease her).

In contrast, Mom lies easily, whenever it suits her purposes, however whimsical. She lies about really silly things and really, really important life or death things. And many of these lies are readily susceptible to being disproven via easily accessible data.

Long ago, I gave up trying to force my parents to tell the truth by confronting them with facts. It was an exercise in frustration that led only to gaslighting.

It’s easier and less painful for me to just acknowledge to myself that both of my parents are/were not trustworthy narrators, and to learn to trust my own memories.

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Human_Type001@reddit

I slowly cut my mother off once I realized she lied about things. Things that didn't matter. Lied about lying. I don't like people like that and decided it was too toxic to have in my life.

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PDXisadumpsterfire@reddit

You’re braver and stronger than I am. As an only child who’s pathologically responsible, I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t try to support my mom still. I do try to set and maintain boundaries, though, like occasionally sending her calls to voicemail when she calls and I’m really busy at work. Also in the last couple years, I’ve started to ask that whenever she needs or wants me to travel across the country to assist her, she reimburse my out of pocket travel expenses. For context, Mom is very well off, so reimbursing my expenses is in no way a hardship.

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Human_Type001@reddit

It's good that you're setting boundaries and making her reimburse you.

leadpainttastetest@reddit

This is my mom right now. The stuff she is telling me is WILD. I have to find humor in it along with pity for her, because JFC her mind must’ve been a horrible place to exist (when it was still lucid).

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Thank you. I don’t feel badly about not spending much time with her at all. She doesn’t deserve it. She made her bed.

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NotTHATPollyGlot@reddit

My mother is an abusive narcissist. Everything she says is usually a lie.

HornetParticular6625@reddit

When I was maybe twelve years old, my mother was drunk and stoned, and told me all about how she tried to punch her own ticket with a bottle of pills while she was pregnant with me.

I don't think she was lying.

I've not known what to do with this information over the past forty seven years.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

That is heavy. As a woman, I understand the fear and stress of pregnancy, but telling your child about that is hurtful. Maybe she was trying to share something about herself with you, but because she was altered it came out wrong. I’m not making an excuse for her or discounting your feeling. Just trying to understand why.

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HornetParticular6625@reddit

As an adult, I understand that we are all trying to figure this out as we go. Some of us have parents that seemed to have their ducks in a row, to one degree or another. Others, not so much, and others who had it wayyy worse.

I put myself in "not so much" category. And, knowing my mother as an adult, I believe I can say that she doesn't have a lot going in the self reflection department.

I'll say that she did the best that she knew how to do.

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Yes. It matters. Maybe some of it is dementia, but there are realizations over the last 10 years that have changed my life and the way I think about things in a very significant way. When you realize that you weren’t a bad kid, you had a bad parent it’s tough not to be resentful. It affected everything I did and all of my relationships. It’s good to know now and I can move forward, but the pain it caused doesn’t just evaporate. The shame and self-loathing and self-sabotage doesn’t disappear. It’s taken a lot of work to heal from her bullshit and now I get to take care of someone who never took care of me. It fucking matters.

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Hungry-Treacle8493@reddit

First off, you DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF HER. You do that by choice. Being related to someone in no way shape or form obligates you to have a relationship with them, let alone be a caregiver. If, in fact, you were a victim of this person as a child don’t re-victimize yourself out of some weird sense of duty.

Very often, people with dementia hallucinate (visual and auditory) very vividly. It’s real to them; to them, they are not lying. But in reality, they are hallucinating.

I was told that my grandmother‘s mother… My great grandmother was essentially my great grandmother. Come to find out she was not biologically and was a step great grandmother.

Apparently, my grandmother‘s mother was in a love triangle with another married man and ended up taking the man his wife and her self out. So the great grandmother that I thought was mine by blood was actually my grandmother‘s stepmom.

I did not find this out from her. She took that one to her grave. I found out from a completely different family member that had been doing some genealogy work shortly after my grandmother died.

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inafishbowl17@reddit

My grandfather was having an affair and shot himself and the woman when it ended in the late 1950s.

My grandmother remarried and lived in the same small town.

Forty years later the woman's husband admitted to shooting them both on his deathbed.

He's lucky. My dad had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways. 🤣

Jadacide37@reddit

Oh yeah, turns out the standards she set for our approval as adults (that were based on her own milestones) we're all generous gifts from my grandfather.

No she did not buy her own house at 18. My grandfather bought it for her and her husband and it was transferred into her name a couple years later. That's the biggest one. I guess she couldn't have anticipated the advent of the internet.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

This is similar to my mother, as well. She always got on me about money management (you should have more money in your savings account! It’s so important!), while running up her credit cards that my step dad paid off.

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Jadacide37@reddit

!! Are you my brother? Lol in all seriousness, I hope you found some peace with this in your lifetime. I know it's been hard for me but finding these things out actually has kind of helped me forgive myself.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

No. I’m not male and have no siblings. lol You’re right that it makes it easier to be nice to yourself. We weren’t the bad guys. They were.

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Sorry, I wasn't very clear. They did not know. They did not even know my dad had been married.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Oh, wow! That’s intense.

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SC_Elle@reddit

Well, a bit on the lighter side, but I found out that it was actually my Mom that refused to let us have a cat, not my Dad. He was the bad guy on that our entire childhoods. Fast forward many years, and my Mom is confused at my confusion when my elderly Dad is taking care of my Aunt's cat while Aunt is on vacation. "Your Dad loves cats!" UM WHAT?!

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Hilarious. Go dad!

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Just2Breathe@reddit

Part of it is our own memories are biased, and we are biased narrators. Siblings can remember their parents differently, because they take in an experience individually. In my mom’s family, the sisters remembered certain things the brothers denied ever happened. So much can skew how you perceive, process and remember things. We forget things others remember. I had someone tell me about a time I shared something years ago, and it had a huge impact on a situation at the time (they remembered it 15 years later, insisted it was me), yet I could not recall being the one to share it at all.

flyfishfem@reddit

Santa. Easter bunny. Tooth fairy. Dolphins.

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happycj@reddit

Dolphins? DOLPHINS?!?!

This must have been a dad thing back then.

On the school bus a few neighborhood kids were asking why the ambulance, fire trucks and cops were at my house.

Clearly I had no clue what they were talking about. But now I had to sit with that little question in my head. Did something happen? If it did, was it my dad? Power of deduction led me to realize something bad had happened to him and he definitely wasn’t a work early like mom had said.

I had to spend the rest of the school day trying to keep it together with the fear that my dad was dead. Knowing I would not get answers until dinner time because that’s when mom got home.

She was waiting for me at home. Once I learned that he wasn’t dead, I flipped my shit on her for not telling me what happened.

She promised she’d never omit truths or lie to me. She kept her promise.

Rough_Condition75@reddit

I don’t know about anyone else but I can’t see shit out the windshield when the dome light is on. It might be my astigmatism though

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physhgyrl@reddit

I have astigmatism and the dome light doesn't effect me that way. Or maybe I don't really care what's behind me in dark. Like, I'm not driving backwards

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Rough_Condition75@reddit

Yay you

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Outrageous_Drag6613@reddit

Our lives sound like Unsolved Mysteries or Lifetime movies. Some of the secrets in my family and extended family include abortion, teen pregnancy and secret adoption, wedding date lies, infidelity and more

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MakeupMama68@reddit

Yikes!! 😳.

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Outrageous_Drag6613@reddit

I was shocked but at the same time they lived large and my aunt used drugs off and on so I guess it makes sense. It’s sad really. Now she is elderly and destitute. When she was young she wanted to model.

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My grandpa was blonde with the most incredible ice blue eyes and my dad is extremely Italian looking. His mom is from Italy so we just figured he favored her. When our cousin sent the pics of him there was my dad’s and my older brother’s exact face. It was crazy

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Future_History_9434@reddit

My husband has dementia. He frequently tells me things so confidently that I believe him automatically. Then they turn out to be made up. Learning to make sure of things myself if they matter is still something I forget to do. He really seems to believe what he’s saying.

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Gavin_Tremlor@reddit

Yeah this. People think its just that they "lose their filter" when they get dementia, but more than likely the things they said when they were still .. sane, for want of a better word, are much more likely to be based in fact than whatever they say now. Unless you can back up that things they told you before were false, I don't think I'd trust the things coming out of their mouth once the disease has taken hold, nor discredit the things they always said before.

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nopost23632@reddit

My mother and father were not great parents, who ended up inflicting their own damage on me, intentional or not. However, my mother, I didn’t have the language to describe how she lies and manipulated others until I became a therapist.

What I learned was that my mother was a 3rd generation narcissist, whose actions inflicted trauma onto me and my siblings. Her behavior was developed from watching my grandmother, who learned it from my great-grandfather. She told me one time she was going to divorce my stepdad, go with her current to boyfriend to California and bring us with her. Never happened. When I cut ties with her in 2016, she would go onto Facebook and talk about how great my younger brother was, but would talk about my attributes instead of his. After she died, I ran into the ex-wife of my 2nd stepfather’s son and talked about how my wife and I finished up school, and how I graduated grad school. My mom never told her anything about me, and it came as a surprise to her.

My advice for those of us who had narcissistic and terrible parents, look at all the terrible things they did, and do the exact opposite of that. You’ll have a happier life. Also, if narcissism runs in your family, talk to you siblings about directly ending it.

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Apprehensive-Bag-900@reddit

Exactly why I didn't have any kids! Bloodline dies with me

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Outrageous_Drag6613@reddit

Yep

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My grandparents lied about their wedding date and yes they eloped too, so my dad (and twin) weren't exactly wedding night babies after all!

My husband found an extra uncle when doing ancestry, older than all his dad's siblings. His grandpa eloped in high school (16) and her family found them, had it annulled but not before she conceived. He did meet his uncle but his dad and siblings (half siblings) refused.

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Outrageous_Drag6613@reddit

I had a receive also lie about a wedding date

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katiekat214@reddit

My parents told me they never smoked weed, my dad because it was illegal and my mom because she didn’t like the way it made her feel. When my mom was older, she admitted to being high when they got home the night SNL premiered and finding it extra hilarious. After both my parents had passed, I was cleaning out their nightstands and found an old film box with my dad’s weed “kit” with roach holders and other paraphernalia. I kept it, for science.

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misanthropymajor@reddit

For me it’s lies by omission.

Found out at age 34 that my dad is gay. I don’t care that he’s gay, I care that he lied about it my entire life. I care that he lied to my mom about it their entire marriage. Whole thing was a fucked up dynamic. The lie made for years of misunderstanding about moods and normal relationship behavior and — no.

Now I cannot tolerate secrecy at all. I will instantly ghost you. Did it to my only remaining maternal family (aunt and her adult daughters) last year. Hid something major from me. Nope. You may not make me feel that way and get to have me in your life.

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Aynitsa@reddit

Your anger, frustration and betrayal are understandable. However have you paused to consider what life was like for men who were openly homosexual in the 80’s? Let alone the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s. Being gay wasn’t socially acceptable, people died, lived in the shadows and were treated like pariah.

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Aynitsa@reddit

Looks like I activated someone’s trauma and got blocked.

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misanthropymajor@reddit

Yes, I’m not an idiot. I’m telling you how this affected me and my mom. He didn’t have to get married. And btw they STAYED married, she died 5 years ago, he lives with me and my husband and he’s my best friend.

Diela1968@reddit

You forgot the people who want to claim it to get tribal money.

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Gone_feral27@reddit

Omg dude, really? There’s probably a few folks who do this, but really? You probably believe in Reagan’s “welfare queen” cultural myth too?

My mother conveniently forgot all the abuse she put us through and not only that, was under some delusion she treated us like little princesses. She claimed things like she brought us our slippers before we got out of bed on cold days, and baked us cookies to have after school. None of that ever happened.

But the biggest lie I never found out whether it was true or not before she died, is that some of us suspected one of my sisters was not my dad's.

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VR46Rossi420@reddit

You and your sisters could figure that out now if you guys really wanted to.

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ancientastronaut2@reddit

They're deceased. Just me left.

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Sensitive-Rip-8005@reddit

Yeah, my mom started telling me things about how she really felt about certain people. The resentment she felt. TBH, I knew the backstories and wasn’t really surprised and it confirmed that she wasn’t really confrontational.

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Short_Tailor@reddit

Yep.

Single parent. My mother told me my whole life my father was an American Indian. Explained how I was so brown among my friends.

Fast forward... those genetic testing deals. I am genetically 95% Germanic. I have no idea why I am dark, but I am not American Indian.

I found a picture of my father and he is really brown. I love this stuff, I am the anomaly, I have the science.

And if you’re demanding a paternity test, there’s already a fair amount of suspicion.

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LadyNorbert@reddit

The stories I have of this sort are uncomfortable to me, so instead I'm gonna share the one that happened to my grandmother. She grew up under the thumb of her own grandmother, who was known locally as "the wicked witch of Willow Avenue" because she was so unpleasant, and who frequently scolded her granddaughters to behave like proper ladies and be chaste and modest. Normal 1930s stuff, I guess. Anyway, great-great-nana held herself up as their model, of course, as the mother of four and a churchgoing woman who never did anything wrong. Never mind that they frequently caught her smoking, that never happened and they were imagining things.

Then she died. And as they were clearing out her house, Nana and her sisters found their grandparents' marriage license. Something seemed off. They had to sit down and do some math and they realized that their prim and proper grandmother was six months pregnant at the altar.

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MichaSound@reddit

What they used to call ‘a honeymoon baby’…

Hubby has a friend who had a simillar experience. When friend's mom was in the throes of dementia, she kept asking where her "other baby" was. Friend's aunt, Mom's sister, finally let them in on a long-buried family secret: When friend's Mom was 15, she "had an affair" with one of her high school teachers (I think we'd consider that "affair" something very different now) and she became pregnant. The father, unsurprisingly, skipped town. So as was typical of the time, friend's mom was shipped off to a home for unwed mothers, where she gave birth to a baby boy who was given up for adoption. She came home after she gave birth, and was expected to behave as if nothing had happened and her baby did not exist, but it haunted her for the rest of her life.

Friend and his siblings were floored, and decided to try and find their half-sibling before their mom died, but unfortunately they were not successful. They did eventually find him, a few years after their mom passed, and in retrospect it was probably a good thing friend's mom didn't get to meet him before she died. Turned out that half-brother had a very shitty childhood; abusive adoptive parents, landed in foster care as a teenager, and eventually did time in jail for sex offenses. Friend and his siblings are no longer in contact with the half-brother, and at one point, hubby's friend said he wished they had never opened that pandora's box.

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mom2artists@reddit

Ouch

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Stigger32@reddit

My mum denies laying more than the occasional hand on me. She totally brain wiped the hardcore beating and occasionally punching she did when she got angry.

Boomers. Fuck em.

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mybloodyballentine@reddit

Great-grandma told a bunch of lies about her heritage--came over right after the pilgrims, related to Robert E. Lee (we were NYers, so who would even care? seems embarrassing to me). All lies. Came over as indentured servants in the 19th century from Ireland. She still weaseled her way into the Daughters of the American Revolution (although maybe that was a lie too--who knows?).

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green_dragonfly_art@reddit

You have to back up your claims with documentation to join lineage societies, so probably a lie.

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mom2artists@reddit

It’s very difficult to weasel yourself into DAR. They require all sorts of documentation and idk if I’d believe ggm would have means to reproduce those docs. Lol Anyway, you can go onto the DAR website and look up her name and see if she’s on there, if you wanted to see for sure.

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Otherwise_Object_446@reddit

I guess the biggest one was when she said she cared about me but the latest one was that she lied what she told me she vaccinated me. I got the measles and then looked into my vaccine record and it became clear that she’d forgotten to take me. That’s the big one. She also claimed she had taken me for childhood eye checkups and hadn’t leading to me need a complex surgery to correct a problem that would have been simple to fix in childhood.

Positive_Ad_1751@reddit

He isn't!?!?! 😭

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skye_888@reddit

“If you study hard and work hard you will be able to own a house and have a pension”.

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MotherAthlete2998@reddit

My parents told us that adding salt to our food would cool it down when it was too hot (temperature) to eat. To this day, I cannot stand table salt. They both have denied saying it but my sister backs me up on this.

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Ilovethe90sforreal@reddit

On a lighter note, my grandma told me if I played my flute for the chickens in the backyard, they would lay better eggs. I totally fell for it, lol.

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Perplexio76@reddit

When I was young my Mom told me that my sister's first marriage hadn't worked out because of "irreconcilable differences." When I was in my 20s she finally told me that it had been because of my brother-in-law's infidelity. She knew how close I'd been with my brother-in-law. He was always doing cool things with me and in many ways he'd been more like a big brother than my actual big brothers had been. My Mom hadn't wanted to take that away from me when I was 8.

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ennuiandapathy@reddit

There were so many lies that were uncovered over the years.

Found out at 18 that my parents never got married - to each other. Both were (likely) married to other people - this is up for debate because I can't find any info on my mom besides her birth certificate which doesn't even list where she was born correctly. It's possible they were still married when they met.

Mom said she dropped out of college in her last year to join the Air Force. Except her mom told me that she dropped out to run off with her first partner (Gma didn't know if they got married or not, and she didn't know that Mom never married my dad).

She claimed that my dad never paid child support (the only time he didn't was when he was laid off). She also said that he wouldn't come to visit us because he'd be arrested for not paying child support if he came back to the city. A few years later, I overheard several conversations where she was telling him we didn't want to see him (we did) and was telling him that she'd make sure he would never see us.

She lied about so many things, important things and things that didn't matter.

RunsWithPremise@reddit

Haven't gotten there with my parents. I don't think my dad could lie with a gun to his head, so not really worried about too much there.

When my grandmother got near the end, it wasn't lies that were exposed, but childhood trauma. It was actually good because it helped me to understand her and some of her behavior better. She was German, born in Dresden prior to WW2. She lived in Germany during and after the war. Growing up, I heard some stories about surviving the incendiary bombing, having to eat potato peels, having to hide in the trees when Allied planes would fly over and strafe, etc. And, while that stuff sounds pretty bad, it was always expressed in a very matter of fact way and she did a good job of making it not sound scary.

What came out much later, was her life in Germany after the war. Being in East Germany with a bunch of angry Soviets was not a good place/time for a teenage girl. Immediately after the war, the Soviets came to their village and took whatever they wanted from people, including their homes. They would make a sport of wrapping 5-6 people in barbed wire and tossing them in the river to watch them try to get out while they drowned. My grandmother was sent to a Soviet re-education camp where she was sexually assaulted several times. Many people starved to death. My grandmother was able to escape at 17 and get to West Germany, with the help of family. When my grandfather was stationed in Germany for the Berlin Airlift, they met, fell in love, and the rest was history.

I don't know if she ever told anyone the stuff she told me. I don't think she told my grandfather, my mom, or my uncle any of it. But it all came out one day when I was alone with her and we were packing her up to move to an assisted living facility.

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sunfish99@reddit

My parents and paternal grandparents also have WW2-related trauma. (I assume my maternal grandparents did too, but the both died around the time I was born.) They also didn't lie so much as very rarely talk about anything from before they came to the US. I think I'm also the only one to know of my parents' trauma firsthand because they both told me (under separate circumstances), and my sister never had those kinds of conversations with them.

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Flat_6_Theory@reddit

Mom claimed she had Cherokee ancestry. Also figured that’s why she liked to cheer on the Indians in cowboy movies.

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Kindly_Jellyfish_451@reddit

Similar situation here...my parents married right before high school graduation because my mother got pregnant with my oldest sibling, and I found proof after their deaths. We had always suspected mom had been pregnant because there were some pretty strong clues, but they were adamant that they had impetuously eloped.

It doesn't really make any real difference; they had a great marriage and were clearly very much in love all their lives. What was irksome to me about it is that it was one more example of how hypocritical about stuff they could be. My parents were very much, "Do as I say, not as I do" people, and sex outside of marriage was a big no-no. I know perfectly well if one of us had gotten into a similar situation in high school they would have gone ballistic. I would have respected them a lot more if they'd owned it and said, "Life was a lot harder for us than it needed to be because we didn't wait until we were a bit older, and we would rather you didn't have to go through that."

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cptn-hastingsOMG@reddit

I learned in my mid-forties that "my dog" that we had when I was under five was actually my mom's friend's dog that we would watch on the occasional weekend.

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LastOneSergeant@reddit

I'm still unsure if talking scares the fish.

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Exciting_Pass_6344@reddit

This one is not super important but I found out my mom never finished her college degree. She talked about her college experience regularly but it wasn’t until she was in her 80s that she told me she never got a degree.

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I never grew a bubble gum tree in my stomach.

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KitchenNazi@reddit

Not yet.

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MavBro@reddit

Give it time

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TitoBandito5@reddit

Did you give birth to the watermelon that grew after swallowing a seed though???

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Love4Lungs@reddit

On my grandmother's death bed, we learned she was five years older than any of us knew.

We also learned she had an additional marriage none of us knew about, with two or three additional kids.

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theinvisablewoman@reddit

Yeah my Grandmother was married to someone else with 4 kids and ran off with my Grandfather to a small country town. They were "married" flr 50 years and had 2 kids. My heart breaks for those first children being abandoned.

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Neener216@reddit

My mother never shared that she'd been born out of wedlock until the very last years of her life, when I was in my 40s.

While it was obviously not a huge deal to me (my bio grandfather died before I was born, and my mother's mother passed away when I was a toddler), my love and admiration for my mother only grew after the revelation, because she was so embarrassed by the situation and had spent the majority of her life feeling somehow inferior and ashamed of something over which she had absolutely no control. She saw very little kindness from her mother's side of the family and none whatsoever from her father's side, and was made to feel like a burden when she was a child.

The experience only cemented her desire to be the kindest, most loving mother she could possibly be, and in that sense, she was an absolute champion.

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prntmakr@reddit

Try to remember, though, while suffering dementia, your parent is not a reliable witness. My mother repeatedly called the police to say she was being held captive by her caregivers, which was completely untrue.

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FAx32@reddit

Not an uncommon dementia response to being told you can't do whatever you want to do. I am a physician and have seen dementia patients (and even delirium patients who will fully recover their mental ability once their illness improves) call 911 from the hospital. They are confused and disoriented and they are able to see a phone and somehow remember that 911 is for emergencies. As dementia progresses that stops because they forget about 911.

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PBRStreetgang1979@reddit

I grew up believing that I was the oldest child in the family, only to learn around the age of 14 that my mother had had a baby out of wedlock and gave it up for adoption a couple of years before I was born. She even named it and that child's middle name was recycled into my first name. When I confronted her about it she denied it was true and refused to talk about. But in the vast scheme of my mother's pathological lying, it was just a drop in the bucket.

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Ray_The_Engineer@reddit

My father was incapable of lying, possibly the most honorable person I've ever known.

Dad told a lot of WW2 navy stories.

Long after he died I looked up his ship. His first deployment left San Diego in July 1945, and spent very little time under threat. Turns out his stories were almost all second hand.

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nakedreader_ga@reddit

The only real lie I can remember is my mom saying her dad had a heart attack. We never met him and he died in the 70s. When I was older, she said he actually committed suicide.

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TemperReformanda@reddit

Thankfully, no.

My parents were about as honest as you could hope for. We had a ton of problems. Alcoholism, shouting, drama. Maybe they lied to each other, but they never lied to me.

The closest thing to it was stuff I heard from the gossip train. Most of which turned out to be true, but not as malignant as it was made out to be, since most people don't do things just to piss someone off or being selfish jackass.

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LuceLeakey@reddit

I can't think of any directed at me personally, but my eldest brother was completely shocked when he learned (in his 40s) that he had a different father than the rest of us. He completely cut off contact with our mother after that. My sisters and I had known since we were teens. I'm not sure if our other brothers knew or not.

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belligerent_tortoise@reddit

Yep. Found out when I was 30 that the guy I thought was my father (and who had pretty much abandoned me when I was like 14) wasn’t actually my dad. Instead it was some other dude I’ve never met. Nothing like an identity crisis in your 30s.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Whoa. Thats heavy.

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this_kitty68@reddit (OP)

Sorry to hear that. I know the feeling.