Folks Are Spitting Out Family Secrets That Aren’t For The Weak

I knew Mum was sick… I had no idea how many times she tried to [unalive] herself.

My dad had a whole separate family with a daughter a year older than me. He ran the family business, and the lady that lived next door to the business had been his girlfriend since before my parents got married. When my parents got divorced I was about 11 or 12 and I didn't really know why. My dad and I barely talked all through high school but for some reason I talked him into letting me move in with him between my senior year and college to get to know him better.

What I found out about him was that he was d**k, a womanizer and alcoholic. The verbal and physical abuse i took as a kid was even worse now that I was older, resulting in actual fist fights a couple of times. I worked at his business and made friends with the lady next door who we'll call Wendy. She made me dinner all the time and really took care of me while my dad was too drunk to cook or do any parenting at all most of the time. I was 18 and the lady next door had a daughter about my age and we became friends. This is the daughter, we'll call her Dianne.

We hit it off that summer and neither of us knew that we were half siblings, and there was strangely something about her that made me really like her. Dianne was pretty but not crazy beautiful, but I couldn't take my eyes off of her. Something about her just drew me to her. I think she felt the same way, because we spent a lot of time together getting to know each other that summer. I couldn't get enough of her nor her me. We watched movies on VCR at night after work every night (I'm that old), and smoked a lot grass out on my porch. One night I took Dianne to a house party at a friends house and after a few drinks I was getting up the nerve to make a move when she kissed me. We ended up hooking up that night and messed around pretty good, but thankfully didn't have sex. I was kissing her good night on her door step when her mom came out screaming and yelling and told us we weren't allowed to see each other, and I never saw her again she wasn't around for the next few days. When my dad found out he flipped his lid too huge fist fight that night. It got so weird around there I just went back to my mom's for the few weeks left before college.

I mentioned to my mom, that Wendy was really nice and I really liked her, but I had screwed up somehow and pissed her off and I wasn't sure why. I never told my mom about messing around with Dianne, but I don't think she knew about her. She has dementia now so I have no chance of knowing if she did. Over the next few years, my dad and I drifted apart again, I had real hatred for him for a long time, and we didn't speak for almost 30 years.

Found out he was dying and I went to see him to bury the hatchet. It actually wasn't too bad. While we were catching up on the events of our lives, my dad told me the whole story. My dad had two girls Wendy and my Mom that he was dating. He chose my mom and broke it off with the other woman, and asked my mom to marry him. A few months later right before the wedding Wendy shows up very pregnant and tells him its his. My dad who was running his dad's business at the time, put her up in the property next to the business and took care of Wendy and Dianne. Eventually things rekindled with Wendy and he ended up in a relationship with her the most of the time he was married to my mom. He admitted the guilt was too much and he started drinking and over time the drink was all that was left, both my Mom and Wendy had eventually kicked him to the curb and moved on with their lives, so did I and so did my young sister and Dianne. It was a terribly sad story. For the first time the verbally and physically abusive monster had his mask pulled back and was human after all. I didn't completely forgive him, but I definitely understood him for the first time in my life.

My family fought in WWII


on both sides.

I have an uncle who went to prison for [unaliving] a homeless man in the street with a few of his friends. They let him out early and he goes to family gatherings. He’s fairly close with a lot of the family and as kids we would have sleepovers at his house. At one of the sleepovers we overheard him abusing his wife thankfully they divorced but the family still invites him. But she’s the crazy one according to the family.

My grandfather was greatly displeased with his son Roland, who was mentally handicapped after an infection. So one day he gathered his 8 children in the yard, took out his hunting rifle and staged a mock execution of Roland to "teach him to be right".

My mom was maybe 10 years old when this happened.

My great grandfather got his wife’s sister pregnant and f****d off leaving both women humiliated. With their mother and children the two women made a new life in Canada where no one knew of their shame.

Grandma didn't just disappear. Grandpa put her into an institution for what would probably be baby blues/ depression and irritation with a 5 year, 3 year, and a few month old kids, he was a trucker, so he was gone the majority of the time.
They gave her enough brain zap zaps that it turned her into a shell of a person, and she didn't even remember her kids. They visited only once when the youngest turned 18. She stayed there for 40 years completely alone, and no one knew or cared she died. She's just a random number in a mess of a graveyard they toss the wards of state in. She's less than two hours away in Minneapolis, but I won't drive in The Cities. I much prefer my small Wisconsin town.

That my father's arrest at a rodeo in his teens (that led to his mom kicking him out, complete estrangement from his mom and siblings and his eventual adoption by his best friend's family) was not just a little dustup. He beat another person so badly the victim almost died. He was fifteen.

Great grandparents living in Europe lost all their kids in the Spanish flu epidemic; immigrated to the US and just popped out 5 more kids. Wild.

My great aunt was a nurse at a mental hospital and fell in love with a guy being evaluated to stand trial for [ending people]. She helped him escape and they ran off to Florida. But the police tracked them down and her lover was sentenced to the electric chair. She got off easy, though.
Before all of that craziness, her younger sister had come to live with her and then [unalived] herself. My aunt worked in a distant city and promised her father that she would get her sister a job at the hospital and look after her. But the sister got pregnant by a married man who dumped her, so she jumped off a bridge.
I found all this out like 80 years after it happened while doing family research. My 90 year old mom reluctantly confirmed it.