What secret did your parents keep from you?

Not that I know of.
They didn’t talk about money to children though. I believe they thought it was improper.
My paternal grandmother though was another story. She stonewalled any attempt to learn about her family. I had to figure it out through public records research. Turns out she was an “oopsie” baby born to a teenage mother. I only have a name for the father from her birth certificate. He quickly disappeared. She was raised by her aunt (grandmothers sister) who never married or had kids. I suppose that was a big scandal in the 1890’s. Nobody would blink at it now. Her actual mother (my g-grandmother) eventually married a different man and had three more daughters.
 
C50 said:
When I was around 15 I learned that my moms father was actually her step father. He had already passed but when alive he was the only grandfater I had so the big secret had no impact on me.

Here's one I just learned about a couple of months ago. My dad was forty when he married my mom who was seventeen, and pregnant. What I just learned is he never told my mom he was married before and had five other children, that didn't become known for many years and when my mom found out she threw him out. This was before I was born but one of my older brothers told me they lived apart for a couple of years before she took him back.

Growing up I knew he had another family but it was rarely discussed, now I know why.
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This reminds me of a joke I heard many moons ago.
One red-neck asked another red-neck “If your dad divorces his wife will she still be his sister?”
 
When I was about 3 years old my parents got me a dog.
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His name was Blackie. One day Blackie ran out into the road and got hit by a car. My parents told me that Blackie was at the Vets getting fixed up. I would ask them when Blackie was coming home and they would tell me that the Vet needed to keep Blackie for just a little longer. They kept that up for years. Finally when I was about 7 years old I figured out on my own that Blackie wasn't coming home because he was dead.
 
Although the little psychic me sensed that my parents weren't my "real" parents since I was about 3 years old, they kept secret who my birthmother and biological father were. I knew and loved my birthmother as my "cousin". She died when she was 25 of Bright's disease (what they called kidney failure back then). I didn't find out until the day of my 16th birthday party that she was my mother. I had forced my mother's hand by begging to get my working papers for which I needed my birth certificate. My parents were actually my grand uncle and his wife, who were absolute blessings in my life (and I in theirs). More to the story that I won't go into now.
 
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Nothing major was very open group. when my mom passed my stepdad told me a few things that not really a secret but just not spoken of.
My dad passed in an accident when I was young, but I remember parents not really having a happy marriage. they should never have married.

We ALL could do math of the wedding until my oldest sister arrived. Many probably married like that but they stuck it out like a prison sentence for over a dozen years til his death. They taught us to smile through things and being miserable is part of life.

They tried to act the part, but I really look back after what my stepdad said and see my dad was truly miserable on the wedding day. my paternal grandma hated mom I did not understand then .. do now.

I always felt dad liked to look non emotional but photos when I look at photos now. It looks like he ate bad fish and is doing all not to throw up.
mom was also a big hypocrite about pre-marriage sex.
 
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Not me, but my wife's family held on to a big secret for years, and it only came out a few years ago. Basically, my wife's grandmother and her children assumed the identity of another family that died in the Blitz on London in the early years of WW2. The children of the dead family were slightly older than those of my wife's family and they had a house, so the wife's grandma told everyone that she and her children were the other family, and tried to get better accommodation from the authorities.

I've no idea whether it worked or not, because my mother-in-law wouldn't talk about it when she was alive. But after she died my wife did some digging and found out the truth. She then confronted her living aunts and uncles about it and they admitted it. That was why her uncle Eddy was really uncle John. Several other of the children (there were 5 altogether) also had two names, one of which was their proper name and the other of which was the name they assumed.

The only secret my mum ever kept from me was that I was born the wrong side of the blanket. She told me my dad was a soldier and posted overseas. However, as I got older she gave up the pretense and told me the truth, that I was the product of a date rape. It hasn't affected me all that much except for the lack of money when I was young, as we didn't have the income of a father to keep the family finances afloat.
 
Hard to answer, but what I "knew" about my lineage was that my father's side of the family was Swedish, and my mother's side was German. So one time when my mother was explaining some of this to me, she said she was basically German, but there may have been "some other stuff" mixed in. But she didn't tell me what "the other stuff" might have been. Was it something bad?

Years later, my sister who is the keeper of our family's history and archives found out somehow that my mother's parents had immigrated to Germany from Russia, or at least a part of Russia that was ceded to Germany as a gift(??) by Catherine the Great. My best guess for my mother's reluctance to clarify this is that since I was growing up in a suburb of Chicago that was 90% Czech and for good reason hated the post war occupation of their homeland by Russia, if I were to go blabbing to my friends that I was part Russian, I would alienated by my closest friends and be labeled a Communist or something.

I'd like to know more, but the best my sister could do was tell me about the Russian connection. All further speculation is my own.
 
My ex mother-in-law gave up a girl baby when she was 15 and later the girl searched her out, my MIL had never told anyone about the baby, even my FIL didn't know. MIL was upset by confessing to the family, it was her hidden skeleton for sure, but honestly no one thought it was a big deal, everyone welcomed the woman into the family.

Ended up turning bad though, she was a forty year old woman with five kids from four different men, and she only had custody of one kid, who tragically ended up commiting suicide. She had many issues and caused a lot of drama within the family, blamed all her problems on being an "abandoned child", which was easy to sympathize with until you got to know her and realized she was simply a very bad person.
 
I was born in an Unmarried Women's Hospital
Raised thinking my sister's Dad was mine
Went through school under step-dad's last name though he never adopted me
No record of me with my Official name until I applied for my 1st S.S. card

So, by all recorded sense I was not alive and living until 1967 so maybe I am officially 16 years younger than I am?
 
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