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 🤔

I didn't find the cigarettes, but saw a red thing moving in the dark and it was my DM smoking at the side of the house. The worst part is that as a small child, I'd said I'd seen her smoke and she totally gaslighted me that I'd imagined it.

@Dartmoorcheffy I feel for you and you know your mother and father and their relationship. Is it possible she wrote it in the midst of grief when she wasn’t coping? It was absolutely a shitty thing to do, leaving it in there and people can be spiteful. 💐

My mother blamed me for my dad’s death, he had (IIRC) a leaky heart valve which as he aged could have gone at any time. He and I had had a heated exchange that evening. Mum went up to bed and found him lying on the bedroom floor. She said if we hadn’t argued he would still be alive. I prefer to think it was his time, plenty of things riled him and made him shout and if not that evening then the next? She was a spiteful person.

What a cunt. I hope you found out before he died and left you penniless and no job

Yes this! When I read this I realised I’ve kept a lot more of my first child’s stuff than my second. It’s the novelty of everything with your first too. Second time around it’s a bit less exciting when they bring home their first homework book or whatever, so it doesn’t occur to me to keep it.

@BauhausOfEliott you probably aren’t best placed to know about what women do/own beyond the realms of ‘online pornography’.

Obviously, pornography is a misrepresentation of sexual behaviour, and it is made for the viewer, not the participants.

Hahahaha!

How did you pay with that then? Surely not in cash and you couldn't have put it in your bank account without some questions being asked.

Yes nude photos my mother took while overseas visiting a man when I was a child.
i thought she’d just gone on holiday then I came across the photos

@greywolfie - you have reminded me of when we were packing up the family home to sell it after my parents’ amicable divorce. DSis and i were young adults at the time. My name begins with a “S” and hers either an “M”. We had to intervene quickly when we noticed our dad labelling various boxes “S&M books” and “S&M toys”…

I would have been homeless too, it would have involved giving up my secure, reasonably priced tenancy... He died soon after his offer thankfully.

Last year, brother stayed with my then 82 yr old dad and found some condoms while looking for something else.
Of course, he had to check the expiry date and figured that they were issued- at most- two years prior to finding them
Dad's single, so at first I thought fair play.
My next thought was, you're shagging someone young enough to be worried about conceiving.
My next thought was, maybe it's prostitutes.
My brother's quite jolly about the whole thing; I feel more discombobulated!
He's a quiet man, my Dad- you just never know.

Edited to add: of course he could have been worried about STI rather than pregnancy, although I can't imagine him worrying about that. Oh dear, I really should get these thoughts out of my head!

Unbelievable!

Not finding anything but something my Mum said, I was about 19 I think. We’d had a couple of glasses of wine & my dad was down the pub as always. She announced she was lucky my dad didn’t pester her for sex when he was drunk because he always had ‘brewers droop’. I think I just looked at her in horror 😆😆

😳

Hope you did not take up his offer.

how do you know EVERYONE has sex toys ??

The sad thing is he isn’t really a monster, or doesn’t mean to be - he’s very likely autistic with a mild learning disability that is apparent once you know him for a bit, but was never diagnosed. I reckon he knew he couldn’t cope living on his own, but didn’t have the social understanding to be a spouse or a father in any meaningful way. And MIL had been too conditioned to believe that divorce was shameful ever to consider leaving.

I think we all worried about what would become of him when MIL died but it turns out a man can almost always find a gullible / vulnerable woman to take him to raise and he’s happy as Larry in his new setup. But poor MIL really did have a wasted life with him.

@VoltaireMittyDream thanks for adding some background. Still so very sad for her and dh. What a life. ☹️

Totally off topic, but thanks to the sex toys/masturbation debate, I decided to pop onto Love Honey for the first time in many years.

WTF is paying £190 for a clitoral stimulator?!

When I was about 14,I found a couple of dirty magazines at the back of my dad's bedside cupboard (this was in the late 70s when top shelf magazines were still a thing!). I just couldn't look at my dad in the same way again after that.

When my great uncle died my mum found a stash of gay porn in his wardrobe. We all suspected that he was gay, but he'd never have admitted it. It makes me sad that he lived his whole life hiding who he really was because it wasn't acceptable back in the day.

My FIL is into ancestry and has researched my family tree. We discovered that my mum's mum was a twin, but the other baby died really young. We've no idea whether my Nan knew or not. She and my grandad also lied about when they got married as my uncle was conceived out of wedlock.

And on my dad's side my great Nan was divorced - my Dad only ever knew her second husband. It transpired that her first had run of with someone else, got her pregnant, then registered the birth with my great Nan listed as the mother!

When I was about 13 I found my mums birth certificate and realised my gran was 6 months pregnant with her when they got married. This was 1924 so clearly quite scandalous at the time. My mum was quite unpleasant and judgemental about unmarried mothers, and one time when she was being pious about a neighbour’s daughter I casually brought her own birth story up. She was absolutely furious, made me realise how hypocritical she could be.

No. I wasn't tempted, even for a moment. And then as luck would have it, a few days later he dropped dead.

Oh this is so similar to my Godparents story. He was super bright and won a scholarship to public school. But he was considered 'very odd', definitely a loner, no friends etc. He became an engineer in the Armed Forces and met my Godmother at a dance and was immediately obsessed with her. Wrote her several letters every day and stood for hours outside where she worked.

She was from a strict Catholic family and had recently been jilted by her fiancee. Her parents were desperate to 'hide her disgrace' and pushed her into marrying my Godfather. She did but she was desperately unhappy. On honeymoon she asked the waiter for a different flavoured jam at breakfast which so embarrassed and enraged my Godfather that he refused to speak to her for the next 5 days.

There's a whole litany of his bizarre and often cruel behaviour. He insisted they always ate the exact same meal on certain days. He insisted my Godmother recorded her exact mileage whenever she drove the car (using a specific pen in a specific notebook). She was never allowed to ever rearrange furniture in her own home. His little daughters were so scared of him that they would wet themselves when they heard his key in the door. I 100% believe he had undiagnosed autism and had no concept of what a marriage should be like. He forced them all to live such a rigid, restrictive life.

The saddest thing is that many years later my Godmother found out that her ex fiancee soon changed his mind after jilting her and wrote her several letters begging her to take him back. But her Mother read and then destroyed all of his letters.

My grandad was there too, as a motorcycle despatch rider, also with an infant son (my dad). Perhaps they knew each other.