What truths did your parents shield you from, with good intentions?

[letsgomaths]

Not a judgment about whether it was for better or worse, but I'm curious about this. I think my parents were honest about many things, but here are a few things they didn't tell me at the time, for very good reasons, some of which I only found out about as an adult:

How bad things were between my dad's parents, before their divorce. Although I knew and loved those grandparents individually, I never saw them together; I just knew that I was not to mention one to the other. My dad later said that as he had been brought up on conflict, being married to my mum made him calmer over the years.

That my parents were planning to relocate a very long distance, and had packed me and my brother off to a friend for an overnight stay, while they visited the house we might have lived in. This move never happened in the end.

That on a residential trip with a youth group when I was six, some of the teenage helpers were doing what teenagers do, in the children's dormitories (in the daytime, while the children were busy doing other things): this was in the 1980s, long before safeguarding. My dad was a helper on said trip, and he said that some of the children knew what was happening; but I knew nothing about this until many years later. He also cut the trip short because of this.

Gosh, either my parents never shielded me from anything or they did such a good job i still don't know about it.

We were always told stuff in an age appropriate way. My mum was sick when i was small - i remember asking my dad if she was going to die. He said "I hope not, and the doctors are working really hard to make sure she gets better, but she is very sick and she might die." I was 9, i had already known this, and i remember so clearly being so, so relieved that he hadn't lied.

That children can't get cancer. I asked my DF, I was about 6. He told me. O they can't. When I discovered a couple of years later that they could, I was unbelievably upset that he had lied to me. That's why I never lied to my DC, who now at 24 tell me I ruined the magic of Xmas for them when my Dc asked me aged 6 if Father Xmas was real.

I heard about rape on the news when I was about 10yrs and asked my mum what it was. She said it's when someone is murdered by cutting them up!

I know it's a difficult subject to explain but 🤦‍♀️.

The fact their marriage was fucked and they'd be separating the second my brother left for uni. Which they did. Brother left and Dad was kicked out a week later.

my mum didn't tell me what my dad had died from until I had to be tested for it myself, 14 year old me then had an in-depth conversation with my family members about honesty.

My mum had a full term still birth after me but before my db. She didn’t tell me till I was mid 20s and even then it was one conversation and I’ve never felt able to bring it up again.

We were trapped underground in a building collapse incident and they told us it was all fine, we just needed to stay where we were and someone would come and rescue us. Which was the case, but I only found out years later quite how bad the situation was and how lucky we were.

That a relative killed themselves. It was mainly because other people in the family didnt want the person's child to know.

A terrible idea in hindsight because children fill in gaps. We knew it must be something dreadful and the story the child came up with was much worse than the truth.

When it came out, as these things do, the fallout took years to recover from.

Found out recently from a family facebook group that my mum had a baby girl when she was a teenager long before she had me and my sister, my cousins and my sister knew about it but i was never told, poor little girl was brought up by my mum's auntie, and died of menengitis at age 2, the worst thing about it was i got pregnant as a young teen too, i wanted to keep the baby but my mum and elder sister who was already a mum, persuaded me to have an abortion even though i was 22 weeks pregnant, i had to go through the labour, i've never got over it, it happened 40 years ago now, and my mum has been dead 20, i think about it every day why she never told me

My mum hid the fact that I had a half brother until I was 12. I was upset when she told me but also grateful that she hadn't told me when I was younger - as I was given agency to decide whether or not to meet him and have a relationship with him.

My mum told me that nobody died on the Titanic. When we leaned about it in school, I insisted that there had been no victims. I still remember the embarrassment when the teacher said how many deaths there had been.

My mum had a full term still birth after me but before my db. She didn’t tell me till I was mid 20s and even then it was one conversation and I’ve never felt able to bring it up again.

Very similarly.
My sister and I found out as adults that my Mum had had a full term baby, born after me, and before her, but never, ever, ever spoke of it. When we found out, my Dad made us swear we would never mention it to her or let her know we had found out. It was a silence she took to her deathbed. It was her way of dealing with it.

That they'd been told not to have any more children after me (difficult birth) and that was why the two youngest were born in hospital instead of at home.

That the reason they were so anti-boyfriends-in-teen-years was the hasty marriages and later divorces (of varying degrees of acrimony) of all my dad's siblings and one of my mum's.

For a long time, about my disability. They had the idea that having 'labels' is bad and that if I didn't know about it, I'd be 'normal'.

It really didn't work. It's a physical disability and I always knew I was different. I just blamed myself for being bad at things instead of knowing that it wasn't my fault and finding adaptive ways to do things - because with them, it was do it the 'proper' way or not at all.

Anything to do with sex. I did not have a clue!

Not much I don't think; my mum is very anti covering things up. As a pp said, people fill in the gaps.

However, when I was a young teen, my dad was managed out of a job. They certainly made it seem less of a concern than it probably was. He was about 47 so a tricky age.

I remember responding similarly on another thread like this. Someone commented didn't that I think people should have privacy in families? I thought that was an extraordinary reaction! There's something in between covering up things on the family and explaining loads of details about sex life etc.

Anything to do with sex

How people can be mean and have an agenda and how not everyone is pure with good intentions!

They didn't tell me its OK to be selfish, I think they pushed the martyrdom thing a bit tbh

I remember idly listening to the news whilst flicking through a comic and heard the word "lesbian". This was probably 1985, so it probably wasn't being mentioned in a positive way.

I'd never heard the word before and I asked my dad what it meant. He sort of stuttered and said "oh dear, I don't know, the lady [newsreader] was just explaining and we missed it". I puzzled over it for a while and then asked my gran, who was always blunt and she told me.

A school friend invited me to watch an Orange Lodge march with her family and my mum just sort of skirted round the subject whilst saying no she didn't think so. She was usually pushing me out the door so it seemed a bit odd.

Apparently I was so upset at the ending of a particular fairytale that my mum glued the last page to the back cover so I couldn't see the picture.

They then regularly 'read' me the story minus the ending and I got used to that as the actual tale.

Embarrassingly, I only found out the truth when I started teaching and said to my class, 'Oh, my story has a different ending!' And brought my copy in.

My book even ends mid-sentence. How did I never realise? And was I really so traumatised that I blanked the original ending from my memory?

Both my parents hid that my father’s father had taken his own life in 1973. Meant well, but then my own father took two overdoses in front of me when I was a teenager, and I blamed myself (I had been asking him to move out due to fights/Dv). If I had known what his own father had done maybe I would not have tortured myself as much and developed so much PTSD.

After my mother divorced my father he moved in with a lady who had committed infanticide in the 1970s and been diagnosed with schizophrenia. This was kept a secret from me (they had an 8 year relationship) until my DS was 18 months old, he was calling her Nanny, they were pushing me to babysit and then my aunt mentioned in passing that my dad’s DP had been in Holloway prison. Then my aunt totally backtracked and I had to find out from the national archives online what had actually happened and how ill this person was.

My father has also told me that his 60+ year old next door neighbour living alone “did something very bad when he was young and a drinker and that’s why his daughter won’t see him” then my dad tried to persuade me to leave my kids with him.

Needles to say I am now NC with my father but of course I am the bad guy.

That, on many occasions, we were absolutely skint, in spite of their very best efforts, but they ran their own business and some times were extremely lean.

On one occasion, we went to a concert (booked and paid for a long time in advance) and my Dad said I couldn't get a souvenir programme, when he normally would happily buy one, despite my pleading and moaning. Eventually, he finally agreed, but I'm guessing that something else went unpaid instead. At the time, as a child, I thought he was just being grumpy for some reason, but now I realise the truth. Not grinding poverty, of course, but I now understand how much pressure they must have felt under during times like that - especially without the cushion of a guaranteed income each month.

Mind, there was no hiding the lowest point, when we went to London and everything had cost a lot more than my parents had expected. On our last day, the only actual way we could afford to have any drink at all (didn't even have ready access to a tap) was to take the Pepsi Challenge and linger for some time and multiple gulps over whether we preferred it to Coke or not. It actually sounds rather funny now, but if I'm honest, I don't look back on it now with unalloyed laughter.

My mother never told me that her first husband was not my biological father

My biological father was called my Godfather until I was 14 years old. When he decided couldn't take the secrets any more and told me the truth

It turned out half the extent family and family friends new too

Mine kept from me for years about my DGF alcoholism. He regularly beat my DGM who would not leave him because she had been told by her very Catholic family that she had made her bed, married below herself, but her family did not get divorced. It got to be a regular Friday night thing, that he would get very drunk and beat my DGM. My DM had seen it most of her life, and after she got married, my uncle was born and as he got older he would climb out of a window and call my DM and the police.

When I was 16 my DM had got him a job in the warehouse where she worked, my DF had bought him a car so he could get to work. He went on a bender with his weekly wage, sold the car and went missing. My DM phoned his family in Scotland who said they had not seen him, so he was reported missing. An hour later that relative called my DM back to say he was there and had just gone to the pub. The money was sent up to buy him a coach ticket back (he lived in Kent). He slept rough for 2 days in a park. None of this was hidden from us because it wasn’t just a night time event that we would sleep through it went on for days. He went into rehabilitation after that. He was given medication to stop him drinking. Came home from school to be told by our neighbour, that he had taken all of his tablets and drank a bottle of scotch and was currently in ITU. He did survive and never drank again.

They “had” to get married, and were only married for 3 months when my DM was born. She needed her birth certificate to get married and unusually, her time of birth was on it. My DF asked why and was told by my DGM that was how they did it in Scotland. It came out years later my DM was an identical twin, and that they suffered what we know now to be twin to twin transfusion. After my DGM had admitted it, it was never spoken of again.

Sorry that was a lot longer than I intended!