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 🤔

No dementia, he was just a narcissist.

I found a file on our family computer that contained nudes of my mum 🤣 I closed that shit down quick.

Next visit, she said she'd thrown it out. Except it went off again that night. I didn't say anything but sneaked into their room the next day and of course, the clock was still there

Do you think the alarm was for something they didn't want to tell you about?

If it makes you feel any better - it may have been untouched bc she hadn’t wanted to ‘spoil’ it, if that makes sense. It may have actually meant a great deal to her and she wanted to keep it exactly how you made it as it was so special to her because of this.

Not my parents but my MIL who lived alone
She was deeply religious ( attended church ,,Bible studies etc) .
She didn’t agree with drinking , smoking etc
When she died me and my husband went to clear her belongings .
Numerous bottles of alcohol ( mainly whisky and brandy) hidden in the strange places
Dh came to the realisation that his mother was probably an alcoholic .
She obviously hid it well because dh and his siblings didn’t have any idea

This thread makes me want to clear out old letters & diaries in case anything happens to me! I lived abroad for a year & DH used to send letters.

I found KY jelly in their drawer at about 15!

Back on the 80s, when I was a teen, and when film reel was sent away to Truprint and the photos were posted back, I once found a packet on the doormat. Thinking they were holiday photos and the usual 10 of the cat by the electric fire to use up the reel, I cracked them open.

It was an entire reel of photos of my mother in various lingerie sets, posing in the lounge. Fair enough, they were entitled to a private life, but I was slightly put off by the ones of her, legs akimbo and holding the dog.

Hunting for Christmas presents in the drawers under their bed was a risky operation too, various copies of adult literature and a dildo were hidden beneath the spare blankets.

Not quite that high up but certainly high enough up it would have made the national press.

In my late teens, cell phones were a newish thing, my boyfriends mum asked me to help her with something on her phone. I found messages from a family friend to her which suggested that they were a lot more than just friends. Never said anything to anyone and as far as I know both sets of marriages remain intact.

*Dontlletmedownbruce · Yesterday 21:25
I made my Mum a handmade gift for Christmas one year, I was a young adult living away from home at the time. My mum told me a few weeks later how much she loved it and used it all the time. She died suddenly and I found it later totally unopened and untouched. It really made me sad. Sad that she hadn't liked the gift that I believed to be so thoughtful, but really really sad that she knew I wanted her to like it so made a point of lying just to make me happy.

If it makes you feel any better - it may have been untouched bc she hadn’t wanted to ‘spoil’ it, if that makes sense. It may have actually meant a great deal to her and she wanted to keep it exactly how you made it as it was so special to her because of this

I bie e this could be true as I am a 'saver' and do t want to use things that are special 'just yet'

Technology, computers, phones etc means that in the future there'll probably be a lot fewer accidental post-death finds, whether cute or disturbing 🙂

No, everyone doesn't masturbate same as everyone doesn't use sex toys.I've never done either in my life. I wish people would stop making these generalisations.

@SomewhatAnnoyed yes even at 14 I was put over my father's knee and my arse smacked so hard I could barely sit on it but that was just normal life in the 70s.

Not me but my friend. My friend was an only child and when she cleared out her parents house after they had both died, she discovered a lot of love letters in her father's desk to and from her mother's best friend spanning decades. Her mother never let on if she knew which my friend thought she didn't but it put her father and 'Aunty Best Friend' in a whole new light. They were all dead by then.

I found a list of my mum’s similar to the ones I write now and got into an intriguing conversation with her about how stressful she used to find parenting us. (She didn’t say stressful but we got into a lovely laughing conversation about how difficult x y and z is which led her to say loads of things I’ve always thought about parenting). It changed everything for me.

Maybe they don't know how to do it? Our alarm clock is incredibly tricky to change anything on! We are quite savvy but still had the bloody alarm going off when we were on holiday because we couldn't figure out how to change it.

No it wasn't sorry
Might have been normal in your house but not otherwise

Smacking was normal in the seventies.

I wonder whether she loved it so much she didn’t want to spoil it? My DD bought me some beautiful handmade soaps with her own money when she was about 14 and I was so incredibly touched that I never used them and never will. I remember worrying that she wouldn’t understand if she found them, and would think I didn’t like them. But I loved them too much to use them.

After my parents died I found letters between them they had written when they were first getting together. My father was going through a divorce when they met, and there was stuff in there with details of the divorce proceedings that I felt my brother(from the first marriage) shouldn't see as it was quite intimate and showed his mother in a very poor light, so I burned them. I also found letters from abroad from my mother's first husband (who was killed in WW2) which were heartbreaking because they had such plans for a future that never happened, and these I sent on to my other brother (her son) as he had almost nothing from his father.

Good grief. Did a quick straw poll of some of my friends (9 for the purpose of this post) and all have masturbated since childhood and still do. Honestly, more people do than don't. Perhaps you should try it!!!

You should give it a whirl. It's a nice way to relax

(Masturbation I mean,.not beating up children)

Blimey, that’s a hell of a group chat for a Friday morning!

”Morning all, do you still crack one off?”

I imagine it was varnished....and obviously hardwood........

It's the lack of grip that's the problem