People Are Sharing 40 Family Secrets They Were Told Only When They Became Adults

So when I had my son, my dad got very emotional and pleaded with me to get him vaccinated as soon as he can. I was taken aback because I: already booked his 2 month vaccines, and my dad got very distraught out of the blue. Then he let me know why he was upset.

So between my vaccines, as an infant, I caught whooping cough. If I didn't have my first vaccine and booster I'd probably be dead. None of the whopping cough vaccines lined up with the other boosters after a certain time period on my records.

I was in and out of hospital and as a toddler sickly. I remember going into the washroom at night for steaming air, and having 3 inhalers. Nights up with my parents...it must have been miserable for them. Also breath stress tests once I started puberty. I was told asthma, but I never had any attacks. I just had trouble with my lungs in general.

As a parent now, I would definitely be a wreck...no wonder all these years later he's so traumatized still.

How much money my dad had. We could have had a much bigger house in a fancy neighborhood with a pool and all kinds of stuff, but we had what we needed in our modest bungalow, and we never went without. He was very wise with his money and was very generous.

Several years ago my dad dropped the truth bomb that he didn't think I was his kid when I was born. My mum had an affair and he thought I was an illicit lovechild.

As soon as I started growing, he could see a lot of himself in my features so eventually brushed it off. But like... gee thanks dad. Not sure I needed to know that.

My adopted brother was actually my cousin. We knew my aunt died in a car crash, but they left out that my uncle was shot/murdered with his son in the room. He was 3 years old at the time, and alone with the body until the next morning. My brother was a pretty troubled kid, and it made a lot of sense when we found out what he had gone through and how he had received basically zero counseling after.

My mom was super anti-abortion her whole life, we figured it was just religion. Turns out her mom (my grandma) got put in jail for helping women do illegal abortions in Illinois before Roe vs Wade. Everyone found out because women kept turning up almost bleeding to death. Turns out back alley abortions are super dangerous

When I was 16 I got my learners permit and I decided to test for my license at 17. I had just gotten my motorcycle working and wanted to be able to ride it but I needed the drivers license portion to attach the endorsement to. Once I had my license, my mom told me that I got one free call, she didn't care what state I was in, how messed up I was... Didnt matter, she would come pick me up no questions asked. (She said she might ask if im okay or if a guy hurt me or something like that.) About a month after that, I get a call from her at like 9PM and she says she went out with a few friends and accidentally got drunk and needed me to come get her. Because she gave me one free call, she figured that she should also get one free call. This was weird because she never drank while growing up. She had one bottle of Khaluha (can't remember the spelling srry) on the top of the fridge and it was there since I could remember. So I said sure and took a bus out to the resturant so I could drive the car back.

While in the car she started to tell me about her night with friends and how nice it was to go out. I could tell that she definitely had way too much by how she talked. Then she said something that I never forgot.

"Alice, you were my biggest mistake. I had you hoping to save the marriage with your father, if I had known children were career killers, I wouldn't have let my family bully me into having a child. I would have focused on being happy instead." Then she kinda mumbled a bit and fell asleep.

I wasn't in the greatest head space at the time and I remember thinking to myself. "You're driving, you can't cry and lose control. Keep it together." I managed to get home safely and carry my mom to her bed. I set an empty bucket down next to her bed, laid her on her side and left a cup of water on the nightstand.

I spent the night with a pack of razors thinking to myself that if I did something bad, it would only make her sacrifice a waste. The next morning when she woke up she asked me what happened the previous night and I told her she called me drunk so I took a bus and drove her home in her car so she wouldn't have to go back to the resturant to get it. I was thanked and told im the best kid ever and then I was heavily interrogated on how I knew to set out water and a bucket.

About a month later I asked if she ever regretted having children and she told me her kids were the light of her world. And that's when I realized. The secret she revealed to me is how we as a society treat ourselves and others. We avoid hard conversations and we avoid owning up to mistakes. We shy away from grief and sadness and topics on negative emotions make us uncomfortable. It's far easier to just lie and pretend nothing is wrong than to acknowledge the feelings we have. We hide in ignorance and thrive in recklessly abandoning honesty. I also learned that growing up, our parents are our heroes. She survived 2008 with multiple kids, working in the housing industry... I always considered her my hero, and I still do. But... I also learned that day heroes aren't perfect.

Tl;dr: i learned humans love to lie to others and ourselves, and to not do drugs and stay in school. And get lots of sleep along with staying hydrated.

After my dad died, my mom sat me and my brother down and told us we were both conceived by IVF with sperm from anonymous donors. I was 30 at the time. A subsequent DNA test confirmed we were only half siblings. The revelation explained a lot, but I'm still processing even now and don't know how to feel about it.

Yes. That I had a half brother that was adopted soon after his birth. I met him when I was 13. My mom kind of had to tell me as he had become a policeman and was at our house to arrest my dad. He didn’t keep in touch, I don’t blame him

Kind of. My sister decided to take a DNA test to get some insight into her ancestry. She got her results back and had zero percent Italian, while our dad is 100% Italian. She didn’t confront them right away and instead decided to wait until I took the test and get my results. Four weeks later I got my results back and sure enough, I also had zero percent Italian, and it actually identified my biological father, who isn’t my dad. They revealed the secret when my sister intentionally let it slip that she was and I were waiting for our DNA results. I’m 38 and it never once came up. It wasn’t even really for a bad reason, they had fertility issues and went to a sperm bank. I’m honestly not sure they ever would have said anything

My dad and his cousin were both raised by my Grandmother. I always thought that was odd but never questioned it. Later learned that this was due to the fact that the cousin's mom murdered her husband (Grandmother's brother).

When I was 18 my mom told me how my dad cheated on her with this woman named Kathy. I actually remembered Kathy when I was kid because my dad would take my brother and I to her house. She would buy us computer games and stuff so we loved her at the time. I never understood why my mom hated her until I was older.

Kathy ended up marrying my dad's best friend. As an adult I was never nice to her and my dad would give me s**t about it. I finally told him that I knew about her and that mom had told me everything. He just said "Oh, alright then." He never gave me s**t again.

When I turned 18 my dad told me how he’d spent the better part of 10 years as a drug smuggler. Mostly cocaine and weed that they would get in South America, put on small planes to land somewhere in the Caribbean and then move to Florida on super fast boats they’d only run at night. He didn’t tell me all the insane stories I’m sure he had but he did tell me about being stuck in a bar in Colombia for an entire day during an attempted coup and how more than once they traded guns they stole to the FARC for cocaine. This was all especially crazy since to me he was pretty much the most straight laced dude alive.

My mother recently (I am 52) told me that I have a half-sibling out there somewhere. She had a child before she met my father and put him up for adoption.

My father told me that my mom (a teacher) used to steal the money for school trips where she worked at. For some twisted reason she moved me and my sister to the same school. I never understood why were the other teachers so bitter towards us...

Apparently there was a big scandal between the teachers, but we had no idea. Worst years of my life, finally explained.

Near adulthood. My Dad left when I was 10 (but took the kids on weekends, etc) and very soon afterwards was dating a woman seriously. By my teen years I had kinda-sorta worked out that he had probably been seeing her before he left, meaning he cheated on my Mom. But I rationalized it that the marriage failed and hey, he actually was in a relationship with that woman for years afterward so it wasn't a cheap fling.

Then in my late teens Mom told a story about the summer when they were still married when Dad was sent on a 6 week training seminar in another city. She paused, uncertain if she should add this tidbit, then mentioned she had been told by one of his co-workers that he dated a woman there for that whole 6 weeks.

TL;DR: Found out Dad had a pattern of cheating on my Mom, not just the once.

My grandma owned a bar when we were growing up but also ran a huge bookie/betting service from the bar. I didn’t know until she passed away. It all made sense, the random police showing up, the robberies.

My mom was 3 months pregnant at their wedding. They were married for 45 years but might not have married at all had my mom not been knocked up.

My mom almost left my dad 13 years into the marriage until she got preggo with my brother and changed her mind.

My mom had a lesbian affair and my dad used to watch. She used to babysit my brother and me when we were little.

When I was 8, I got a cat named Toes. Big fluffy gray long haired kitty with white feet. Sweet kitty. I went away to visit my grandparents for the weekend and when I came home, my mom broke the news to me Toes had been hit by a car and killed. I was terribly upset but mom took me to a shelter and we adopted a new kitty almost right away. Years later, when I was probably 21, my mother called me and sounded very upset. She said she had something to tell me. Turns out Toes had not been hit by a car that weekend. He had instead climbed into the warm clothes dryer to sleep and mom didn't see him and loaded the dryer with a blanket she had washed... and then found Toes when she opened the dryer an hour later.

My parents raised me in a Southern Baptist Church and pushed True Love Waits/abstinence on me when I was a teenager (not a big deal, since I didn't date anyway and if I did, I didn't want to have unsafe sex and mess up my life with an unwanted pregnancy). Two decades later, Mom admitted she and Dad had had sex before they got married. Not an earth-shattering revelation but kind of funny in a way.

Me and my sister used to play with a doll, we named it talk to it and everything, but then one day it disappeared, years later my mother told me that she threw it away, because she saw "Chakki" and the doll looked really realistic and had the same size, so my mom freaked out and couldn't sleep until she threw my beloved sweet heart lolo.

But yeah i had to hide that I'm upset when she told me because i was a teenager boy in a country where they're obsessed with musclinty, so couldn't say "oh this make me really upset" instead just stopped talking about it.

I'm actually 25 now, and still miss it and feel bad about it, maybe that's why I've never wanted a child because i lost one in a very young age and can't do it again.