Have you ever found something belonging to your parents that made you see them in a different light?

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When I was a teen I found a sex toy in my mum’s drawer. I shouldn’t have been snooping.

It made me think of her differently, and I felt a bit weird about it for a bit.

I’m over it now, I think 🤔

Not me but dps ex (shes a lovely lady and he still talks fondly of her)
We where in the pub and she had just lost her father who,she says was a quiet and 'upright' kind of man
She'd gone with her sister to clear out his house and found letters to his girlfriend and hers to him
Lots of 'pussy' 'fucking' 'rimming' 'oral' and 'pegging' references in them *from the bits they did read) and then they found the photos,toys and outfits
Apparently they where both in their 90's!
Good for them but not so good for his poor dds!

You sound fun.

Same here - tables, sideboards, mantelpieces covered with pictures of my three brothers and their sons. Only one of me and that was because I was holding one of my nephews!

Yes I came across this a good ten years after my mother's death .
I'd kept her diaries and in those years had only opened them up a few times and read random days finding it intrusive ( the bits I read were not earth shattering ) just about the weather , gardening or places she'd been .
But I thought rather than keep them , I'd send them here.
It was a very easy process as well .

I hardly think that owning or using sex toys can be classed as a perversion, since it is now neither an abnormal nor deviant sexual practice. You might not use them, but that does not mean that the considerable number of people that do are perverts.

The earliest known example of a sex toy is 28,000 years old (phallus type dildo found in what is today Germany), and could have been used for either sexual or ritual practices. So it's certainly not a modern phenomenon.

Not my parent, but when I was in primary school (about 8 years old) I went round to a friend’s house for tea. She took me into their parents bedroom and showed me her dad’s bedside drawer that was stuffed with porno magazines. It was the first time I’d seen pubic hair!

When helping to sort out my Grandads house after his death I found a note to him amongst lots of office paperwork. It turned out to be a letter from the writer expressing their love for him, regretting how things had worked out, and the offer of leaving her husband for a relationship should he change his mind.

I have no idea whether there was previous misbehaviour although I know he adored my Grandma before, and after, her death. Given the note came from the writer after they'd emigrated to Australia he had clearly chosen not to join them so I didn't tell any of his family. Rightly it wrongly I didn't want to risk spoiling their memories of him.

@RaraRachael Apologies if it wasn't you - I got mixed up in the comments.

Of course you didn't want to hear about her sex life, but the problem there was the fact that she was talking about her sex life - not the fact that the thing she mentioned happened to be a vibrator.

It's quite ironic that the first electric vibrator was actually invented in the late 1880s in the UK by a doctor called Joseph Mortimer Granville. Apparently it was initially developed to ease muscle ache in men, but was soon put to use to treat "hysteria" in women.

Yes I found divorce papers relating to my father, the reason cited was ‘unusual sexual preferences / requests’

Well, so far about a dozen people have clicked the Like button on my post, and you are the only one who took it seriously. So make of that what you will.

Ancient practices of human sacrifice, incest, child marriage, etc. are also many thousand years old - it does not make them good or normal.

What language is this written in?

That wasn't normal life in the 70s. Yes, people were more likely to give their child a slap. No, it was not in the slightest bit normal for fathers to be beating their 14-year-old daughters' backsides. It just wasn't.

I had the opposite experience, when my dad died suddenly I wondered what I’d find. I found nothing - house immaculate, all paperwork in order and a file labelled “how to handle my money when I am gone” with a list of things to do. Bless him!

I have a sex toy.I am not disabled nor perverse, and I have hands and a brain. However an 'unfortunate sexual encounter' shall we say rendered me with blunt force trauma injuries that have resulted in it being very difficult to orgasm with hands, I have indeed only managed it once since. Rather than get frustrated I resort to vibrations.

I've got the letters my dad wrote to my mum both when he was overseas on national service, and when he was working away in the UK. She was married to her first husband with a daughter at the time - though I think the letters do go past this date (they are mostly undated, so have to work it out from context).

It's actually quite unpleasant to read. He was obsessed with her, in quite an unhealthy way. A lot of the letters talk about his vision of their future together. They mention my sister, which is quite sad because he was in fact very abusive to her after they married. But he was sucking up to this young mother (mum would only have been 20-21, he was three years older) through her daughter.

They also show signs of his controlling nature and say things like "make sure you eat something my darling, but not just biscuits because you don't want to get fat".

I don't think I have read them all. I actually first found and read them as a teenager at home, but now they are both dead I have them, though for now they are still in the unsold house. My sister wanted to have some ceremonial burning of them, but I can't be arsed with that - we either keep them or throw them away (I mean, she can do that if she wants, but I won't be there). My brother hasn't mentioned them though I left them in the "memories box" I put together of things I thought both of them might want to look through or take.

There are no replies from her. I imagine in the main she had nowhere to send a reply, but I think from his letters it looks like she did reply to some, but he obviously didn't keep those.

My late DM was very forthright about relationships and how sex before marriage was an abomination and scandalous etc etc, and that being conceived outside wedlock brought shame on the family.

Some years after her death, I did some family tree research and discovered that she'd been born 6 months after my grandparents' wedding.

@BauhausOfEliott the level of smacking was what happened in our house so I just thought that was normal.

Regarding the workmate discussing her vibrator use it was the fact that she said it so blasé as if she assumed everybody had one. We live in a quite religious area where people are very reserved and just don't talk about stuff like this.

Hope that makes sense

My grandmother had that attitude and I found out her mother had been pregnant when she married.

You have made a giant leap from sex toys to "human sacrifice, incest, child marriage". You seem to associate sex toys with extreme violence and practices which in our society are (rightly) considered immoral and illegal. However, going out on a limb here, I would suggest that that is a very niche view, especially since it is estimated that 60-80% of women in the UK own a vibrator.

Your comment above is what I believe is called 'Whataboutery'.

I want to know who Joice is!

Probably means "joist". That's autocorrect for you...

I'm sorry that happened to you, and I'm genuinely glad a toy is working for you.