I kinda wanna know about my parents past but I feel awkward asking. They love to interject and add phrases like “look how much worse our lives are and how much we sacrificed for you, you have to be grateful”, which just makes me feel bad for asking, but like… I just want the raw story, and that’s it.
(Idk when is the right time to ask, but hopefully I manage to get those stories before they die, it’d be a shame to lose that part of history.)
I found out my mom had spent three decades of my life lying about who my biological father was.
She has always spun some romantic bullshit story about a specific guy. Like I’m talking there was a whole ass story of her life leading up to my conception that she liked to tell me. A pretty fucked up story - she was a teenager, this guy was in his early twenties. But still, a mostly normal and consensual story barring the statuary aspect, not at all shocking where we live. He knocks her up, chickens out immediately, dumps her, etc. There was even a cathartic story about her being a then abandoned pregnant Sonic carhop, discovering the guy as a customer and throwing fries at his face. She describes my eyes and hair as his.
I reach out to the guy as a teenager with help from family, who keep track of this guy throughout the years in case I’d want to ever make connection. I reach out, he denies that he’s my father. Well, sucks, but nothing too unexpected.
As a lark, I get genetics testing kit one year. It’s on Amazon prime (back when that was a good deal and back before I realized how problematic that giving my DNA to a random company.)
I take the test. A woman reaches out. My aunt. And she’s not the sister of my “father.”
My biological father was a different adult man (mid twenties) who raped a teenager he met at a party. Even told me to my face that he hadn’t been interested in her, but more in her older sister.
When I confronted her with this. It was a non reaction. It was “oh.” She’s told so many lies throughout her life, but this was finally the one she couldn’t bullshit her way out of. She lied to me for thirty years, and unlike any other lie she’s told, there‘s no “oh you’re just remembering it differently” or “I didn’t really mean that.”
The most difficult thing is that maybe it was traumatic for her. Maybe it was violent. I’ve met him twice, and neither experience was really pleasant. He has a history. Maybe she did block it out, repress it in that Freudian way and did convince herself that some guy she had a crush on and her had some secret little tryst. Realizing maybe the hell of my childhood had an explanation - that she was trying to punish me, that she hated me as a symbol of rape. Can I forgive her for that?
It’s just such a complicated and difficult thing to wrap my head around. Nothing about her as a person has ever made any sense.
When they mention it, say “tell me more.” Or ask them to write it down.
I ask my grandmother. My aunts and uncles are also quite happy to share things about my mother.
My dad happily volunteers stuff he used to be up to in the old days, I don’t have to ask.
Both of my parents had difficult upbringings that both of them need some serious therapy for. I don’t really know any details, but a little bit ago my mom got a random call from an investigator in southern California. They had either caught some guy or were trying to catch some guy that killed a string of young girls some 30 years ago. All I know is that after talking more thoroughly with the investigator, she was sobbing - and my mother is a very hard woman. She had a run in with this guy and my guess is that there was something very traumatic involving an SA. But I don’t know and I don’t want to know because I don’t have the oomph to carry that weight with her unless she goes to therapy.
I know some other stories from either of them and it rings true that hurt people hurt people. But I don’t want to know more about any of the hard times nor the party times because it’s too much for me to bear.
