“My Dad Forgot I Was With Him”: 30 Stories Families Would Rather Pretend Never Happened

One Christmas, we had to pretend my cousin wasn’t 7 months pregnant because her dad “didn’t know.” She was thin as a rail with a big beach ball belly. Denial was strong in that part of the family.

My mom had a brother who was a couple of years older than her. From what I’ve put together, he was autistic and was sent away for electric shock therapy some time in the 50s/60s, which eventually k*lled him.
We have no idea when he died, or where he is buried. My mother apparently found out when her parents casually mentioned it over dinner when she asked how he was doing. My grandfather (with whom I grew up with) refused to speak about him. Would change the subject or leave the room if he was asked anything about him.
The only evidence we have of his existence is a picture of him and my mother when they were children, and some forms from the hospital he was in describing an episode where he was hitting and scratching the nurses. Just really sad all around.

The fact that I have two half sisters…….my dad cheated on my mom. My mom knows about one of the girls, not the other. Ancestry DNA for the win……no one says a word because we don’t want mom to have to relive that trauma.

My dad beat the living s**t out of me and my brother very frequently. Almost every time he got drunk, he would either slap us till we fell down, haymaker swings at us until we ko'ed, jump kick/round house kicks us till we ko'ed. It was scary every night. Then we both grew bigger than him, I confronted him once when he was about to do it again. It stopped then and there, and we never talked about it since. I'm 40 now, and this happened throughout my childhood well into my late teens.

My late uncle had schizophrenia or something schizophrenia adjacent, things weren’t bad enough to force him into treatment but mental illness was completely undeniable. I once asked family if he’d been taken to a doctor to see if there was something diagnosable he could have been helped with and you’d think I’d kicked a baby. That uncle is “a little weird” and that’s the end of that conversation.

My Great Aunt.
She and my grandma (her sister) hate each other so much that I didn't even know she existed until I was 30 and I was accidentally shown a picture with her in it. I still don't know why they stopped talking and grandma is obviously not willing to talk about it at all.
The funny thing is, I know my great aunt's children. They're really close to my grandma and come to every holiday dinner. I always knew they were related to me, I just never knew how.

My blood type doesn't make sense. My mother is a B+, father is an O-. I donated blood in college and found out I'm A+. I brought it up in a casual "This is interesting, I must be a medical anomaly!" way and was immediately and brusquely shut down. I DNA matched to my paternal cousin on Ancestry, but no one else in the family would do a DNA test. There's more questions than answers. Considering I no longer talk to my bio parents or a majority of my family due to other things we don't talk about (like addiction, mental health and abuse), I doubt I'll ever get an answer.

I have an older sister I have never met. My dad got a girl pregnant in high school and refused to marry her. She gave the baby up for adoption. It was a closed adoption in the 60s so I would not even know where to look for her. I found out one night years ago when my dad had too much to drink and told me. Both of my parents are now deceased. They would never talk to me about it after that one time.

Both my parents cheated on each other. All my aunts and uncles got divorced but my parents stayed together and drank and fought and supposedly that was better.

How my uncle Freddy k*lled his girlfriend by pushing her out the back door in the middle of the winter I left her to freeze to death. He got off because of lack of evidence. Half a family won't talk to him now and the other half take pity and pay for his bills and help him after his bankruptcy.