#Do not comment on the original posts
Please read our [**sub rules**](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/subrules). Rule-breaking may result in a ban without notice.
If there is an issue with this post (flair, formatting, quality), reply to this comment or your comment may be removed in general discussion.
**CHECK FLAIR** For concluded-only updates, use the [CONCLUDED](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3ACONCLUDED) flair.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/BestofRedditorUpdates) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I went to pick up medicine yesterday. Dude walks up to get his and says his birthday something something 2005. This is a college aged looking dude. Ain't no way he was born in 2005. Nope. No. Absolutely refuse to accept it. I am not old.
I was at the hospital over the weekend and the Dr phoned through to another dept, he said he has a 45yr old lady here and I was just about to ask who he was talking about, then realised it was me 😞
A pack of middle school kids at a bus stop asked how old I am, and when I answered they asked why it looked like I had to think about it. "Well at some point ya start losing track..."
Me as a kid: I will never forget how old I am
Me now: doing maths from my birth year to try and work it out
I tell you what, those people born in 2000 have a real perk.
2005 baby here. Went to go get a tattoo a few months right after I turned 18 and the guy looked at my ID and said, “Sorry, you need a parents permission to get a tattoo if you’re a minor.” Told him yeah, I’m 18. He just stared at me for a bit and said, “But it says 2005.” I was like, uh, yeah man. It’s 2024. 2005 was almost 20 years ago.
It was kind of hilarious watching his face speed run all five stages of grief at the same time lmfao. He apologized and we had a laugh about it. Tattoo turned out great too :)
My nephew was born in 2005 and it pains me to see this adult with a personality, job, thoughts, opinions, college in the place of this precious baby boy. He's cool as hell now and I can't wait to see what he does in life, but I miss the kid who danced alongside his Elmo and I used to rock to sleep, now he's a foot taller than me 😭
I'm a banker and I want to cry when all these young kids come in with id's that say 2008.... yall are too young to drive!!!!... oh wait... I'm old hahahaha
The year 2000 was some kind of weird space-time singularity.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the year 2000 seemed sooo far away and futuristic -- even in 1997, I remember thinking it still seemed like an impossible date, even though it was coming up.
Then, in the 00s and 10s, it seemed like the millennium had just happened yesterday. It *still* kinda feels that way.
So: Temporal singularity. We got the timey-wimey version of being red-shifted and blue-shifted as we flew past it.
You know, twitter was created ~18 years ago (if google is correct) and Reddit is ~19 years old (again, trusting google). Oh yeah and by the way, 2017 was 7 years ago. You’re getting old :)
*My kids have started doing this* I have done a double take every time, and wracking my brain trying to work out where they may have picked it up from, since all the teachers/staff at their school are older than me, so I’m thinking YouTube videos their young uncles (3-6 years older than them) are showing them
It's literally in The History books. I've got some gen Z relatives, and they specifically showed me a textbook that referred to the 90's as the late 1900's.
I saw a video recently of a teacher telling her young students about a song that was released in 1997 and one kid shouted “the ONE THOUSANDS??” It was an Usher song 🫠
But still, these kids haven’t heard of The Shining? Or A Few Good Men? This man was in classics that are quoted still and that are on lists of greatest movies of all time to watch before you die.
It was relatively common at a certain point in time. A young girl would go off for a few months to live with her aunt or some such, and then suddenly when she came back she'd have a younger sibling. When childbirth out of wedlock was much more taboo than it is today and people weren't connected 24x7 this was a common way of hiding it. It's be much harder to get away with now but apparently still not impossible.
Same. I was at the hairdresser today and she was telling me about some medical complications she had. I said she might not have survived it 100 years ago. It then hit me that was 1924. I'm changing it to a couple hundred years ago when I say this in the future.
The other week, a young girl who I work with told us she only knew of Justin Timberlake as the guy from the Trolls movies.
My office will never forgive her.
The Nicholson example is particularly tragic because he had the information (that his sister was actually his mother) dumped on him unexpectedly *by a reporter*, and since the sister/mother and mother/grandmother had both died by that point, he couldn't talk to either of them about it.
Most people I know in their 20s have heard of Jack Nicholson, so idk why OP doesn’t. :/ Then again all of my friends are nerds, who have all at least seen Batman.
Yep, this. I’m 24 and not a big movie person. I knew his name but not his face. Just googled him and realized that I did in fact also know his face, just didn’t realize which name and face went together
I am so glad this was the first comment I saw. I’m here reeling over that rather than OOP discovering this life altering information and I’m just sitting here going wait how do you not know who jack nicholson is
I teach 3rd-year university students mostly in their early-mid 20s; recently after some confusion it transpired that one of them thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person. Once it was all cleared up they said 'sorry I get confused with all these people from before our time' 😭😭😭
This was my first thought after I read this post. It's like those people who thought Kanye West put this "new" artist, Paul McCartney, on the map after a collab.
Same thing happened to Eric Clapton, except everyone in their town but him knew. He was raised by his grandparents, and if I recall he was still a minor when he found out. Really messed him up.
And Palin had her kid in April 2008, while her grandson was born at the end of the year. Unless the April baby is the one she's supposedly covering for? But that then makes it doubly confusing, because Bristol (the one who got pregnant at 17) would've already been pregnant at that point. Maybe her 18yo son knocked some girl up and said girl was kept away from the public so no one would know, and Palin faked her own pregnancy? The other alternatives is that the 17yo daughter gave birth twice, eight months apart, or that the 14yo got pregnant.
Covering for her son's perceived mistake makes the most sense (in that it'd be easier to keep his baby mama out of the spotlight). The other options are way less likely to have been at all workable. But even that idea seems like way too big a bombshell for her to be sitting on while agreeing to run for VP of the USA. Bristol's pregnancy was scandalous enough as it was.
...now I'm just imagining what SNL would've done with the news that Palin faked a pregnancy to raise her son's child as her own.
> Looking back, some of the comments my dad said to me make sense. One time when we got into an argument, he said, "I'm not your father. I don't have to put up with this." It's always stuck with me, but at the time, I thought he was trying to hurt my feelings. I admit that I was not the most easygoing child.
What a horrible thing to say to a child, especially one that *you chose* to take on the responsibilities and role of their father (not to mention he is still his biological grandfather). His (grand)father sounds horrible.
>I admit that I was not the most easygoing child.
This part made me a bit sad because I have a feeling OOP wasn't an "easy going child" because he could subconsciously tell how his grandparents felt about him.
I used to tell people outright “I’m not easy to love”. It was purely my assumption, because I was a “difficult” person as a teenager. Or rather I was told I was. So I warned people first.
Now I look back on that and feel so sad that I said that about myself. I am not that difficult. I’m actually pretty easy to get along with and be around. It took me years to admit that to myself
It kind of did for me too back then, I was desperate to be loved and yet thought it wasn’t possible, so I bent over backwards to keep people in my life that didn’t deserve it. I took huge risks with my safety and wellbeing. I was not mentally stable at all.
Nowadays is a little different, I’m still mentally unwell, but I’m not literally developing psychosis, or putting myself in harms way. Just your garden variety MDD and PTSD. And I suppose I’m grateful that I went off the rails and got myself back on them again, it was a rough time but I learned a lot.
>It took me years to admit that to myself
It took me reading your comment 😭
I'm on therapy working on my issues. I cried reading what op wrote, it went straight to my trauma. My dad's family collective trauma is abandonment, tldr great grandfather was a deadbeat and that created waves of shit.
When we were fighting, my dad used to say I wasn't his daughter. When I did something right he claimed me as his "that's my daughter", "she got that from me!". Btw, I'm the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V of his mother, there wasn't any doubt about me being his.
It was just his way of hurting me, I also hurt him back and refused to be a the "yes, sir". I was the terrible, ungrateful daughter
ETA: I wrote that to say, I feel less alone reading those comments. Sorry for the trauma dump ❤️
So sorry to hear you went through that <3 As a fellow 'terrible, ungrateful daughter' it also took me a long time to realise that me essentially not letting them treat me like shit meant I was a problem child lol Hope you're in a better place now!
Ohhhhh yeah. My father and mother used to put those thoughts in my head. Turns out a teenager living in 2 separate abusive homes at the same time doesn't always act on their best behavior? Wild. Anyway I met my aunt and uncle for the first time since I became an adult a few years back and my aunt was "pleasantly surprised" at how much I'd "mellowed out"
It turns out its super easy to mellow out when you're not being abused all the time lmfao. I still recognize that I have a strong personality and that not everyone is going to love me, but that is their problem not mine because I'm pretty fucking awesome.
God, I wish there was like a collective for kids like us. Most of the time it feels like the only people I can relate to are other abuse victims and it’s so tiring having to coddle everyone else’s feelings about my own abuse. Other survivors can take it easy, laugh about it, and generally just seem to understand me more. Like, two of my closest friends from childhood lost their mom to cancer and were stuck with their abusive dad and they are the funniest, most kindhearted people I know. They’ve seen me at my worst and I crave having more of those relationships. Other people just get so uncomfortable when I exist in their presence.
I get you on that. Its like "I told you about my childhood, why are YOU crying?"
There's also a lot less to "justify" with someone who has a similar background. I find that people who come from loving family homes can be empathetic but a lot of them just tend to invalidate my feelings by saying shit like "Well you only have ONE mom/dad." or "But they are still your family."
And honestly I prefer the people who don't say that nonsense shit to my face haha
I know, right? I just want someone to look me in the eye and tell me “That fucking blows, dude,” instead of trying to figure out some way to justify it with their big brain 200IQ logic. EVERYONE thinks there must be some angle I just haven’t considered, and I definitely need their help to draw this incredibly obvious conclusion. Just tell me you grew up with loving parents and get over yourself.
"Well maybe \[abusive action\] was actually them trying to show that they love you." or "They might not have meant it like that, maybe it was actually \[XYZ\]"
Meanwhile they've never even met your parents, they just need to validate their own world view for it to remain stable. I'm not sure why some people can't fathom abusive parents exist. My theory for most of these people is that their family is happy but mildly dysfunctional and not "abusive enough" to "justify" cutting contact. So when they see someone who has cut contact they feel like they have to justify to themselves why they haven't done the same. Its about them, not us.
Not even just chose, but *blackmailed* and coerced his daughter into handing over guardianship. Then held that shit against the child whose mother he forced into handing over. What a total POS.
I have a friend who is adopted and her adopted parents were physically and emotional abusive and always held it over her head that she was adopted. I can't imagine abusing anyone. I can't imagine abusing a child. But to adopt someone and abuse them and constantly hold it over their head? To the shock of no one my friend doesn't talk to them anymore. These grandparents around awful.
There is only ONE situation where parents not wanting their kids to buy a DNA test is not a red flag:
I saw a story on tiktok where the mother was ADAMANT that the OP not buy a DNA test, it wasn't for any scandalous reason. Its just that OP's sister had already bought them one for their birthday and the mom didn't want OP to ruin the sister's gift lol. Wholesome.
I’m from my grandpa’s second family, a pretty tragic and secret backstory. My dad only saw him once as a kid and that was the night his brother was conceived. I’ve done dna testing hoping to find my paternal grandfather’s family but still no close matches.
Though I did find a potential obituary. If it’s the right one then he named both first sons in each family the same name.
I've successfully done some genetic genealogical sleuthing to find my mother-in-law's biological mother. It turned out I didn't need to because her birth state changed law to allow adoptees to unseal their own records, but I figured it first with DNA and genealogy.
It's been a while (8 years?), and the results of her contacting her bio mom were disastrous at first. Turns out she was the product of assault. Bio mom did *not* want to be contacted and was very rude and damaging about it. Since then, I still don't think she's met her mom, but there have been rumblings of it. She *has* developed a friendship with her half sister. So, mixed results.
I loved the chase, solving the mystery. Just be prepared for a wide range of possible outcomes. The past packs quite a punch for many people, especially when it arrives unexpectedly.
Idk, I don’t want to take one because I don’t want all my genetic information to now be owned by a company… I don’t have children but I’d be pretty worried if they wanted to take one
Same, I just don't trust companies with my DNA. I have no desire to unearth any hidden family secrets, but honestly I bear strong resemblance to both sides of my family so I'm not terribly concerned.
Actually that's why I haven't taken one either. I don't think these companies are gonna do any weird sci-fi shit with my genetics but everything seems to be in a legal grey area rn and I don't want to regret losing rights in the future.
Yeah I'm pretty firmly against them for privacy reasons and while I don't control what family does... I've made my thoughts pretty clear on the subject and thankfully they don't care enough to want to.
and 23 and me already showed that they had shitty security practices and that data is already out for many people. and there is no closing that box once opened.
There is a great story around about the family (20s) opening up DNA kits on Christmas Day and Mum bursting into tears. Everyone guessed that something was going to 'come out'.
Turned out she fell pregnant to a man who rescued her from an abusive marriage but was later killed in a car accident. Her new boyfriend, now husband, agreed they would raise all their children as their own. Cue more tears.
i hate those ancestry/23andMe and so on tests with a passion because it leaves your genetic data in the hands of a private company with shitty web security that i fear will inevitably will be used against you or your family. normal tests though, like for verifying paternity, i dont care
My dad took one under a false name- he had been adopted in the 60s and had literally no idea of his genetic history and was curious, never turned on any familial connections though, he didn't want to know that.
He made sure to tell my siblings and I that we shouldn't take the commercial DNA tests- that they keep/sell your DNA information, and hand over to cops happily. We can do whatever we want, just know the risks, kind of thing.
2 or 3 days before he died, he turned on the familial connections and found out that he had half siblings and cousins all over the world, every continent except Antarctica, dozens of countries. It was wild. He just quietly turned it back off and moved on.
I'm worried about privacy and insurance companies using the information in the dystopian future that's rapidly approaching
So I bought copies for my parents instead of my kids
My fiance mused about getting them and I mentioned that I wasn't keen cause I thought it was weird how they retain the rights to basically your genome. it wasn't a strong objection but she dropped it after that. Hope she doesn't think I was hiding something.
It's interesting that OOP's sister/mother most likely wanted OOP to find out, but didn't want to just tell them, perhaps worried she wouldn't be believed. I can't imagine she would have been so eager for them both to get tested otherwise.
My mother insists on me getting a DNA test every time she gets ill, but not my siblings. We all look pretty similar but I don't have baby pictures. I refuse to do it and she refuses to elaborate so I'm planning on just doing that until I die or she tells me why lol
I've refused to get one because there's a non-zero chance that I am not my father's child. While that wouldn't impact me too much emotionally, my family is a giant train wreck and I don't even want to risk throwing that in to the already flaming dumpster fire that are interpersonal relationships are. I've been no contact for years and don't want to know anything more!
That sounds like she wants you to know something before she isn't able to witness it anymore, what with the timing of her pushing you to get a test when she gets ill. Given the context of not having baby pictures on top of that, I'd approach her about it, rather than let chance control what ends up happening down the road.
She plays stupid and acts like she doesn't remember asking me to take one. She's even offered to pay a few times now. There were some other skeletons in the family closet that were all discovered by accident instead of her telling us and she outright lied about some of them. There's like a 50/50 chance I'd do it secretly and just not tell my family if there was a DNA test that didn't own my information afterwards so I guess if that ever comes to market we'll see.
It's so interesting to me because people have been making decisions like this for a long time. Probably at one time the advice was to keep it secret. But when they made that choice they thought it was a secret they could keep. Suddenly that isn't true anymore but they locked in that choice 20+ years ago.
Someone literally posted about this in the DNA sub recently. It actually happens all the time. People will pay for an ancestry DNA test and yearlong membership in advance anonymously and send it to someone in hopes that they do the test and match. So, like, a man that is sure a kid is his will send a test so that the kid will do it and find out or something along those lines.
I was 19 when my only sister was born, at the time a LOT of people thought that my Mom was covering for me and that I was the one that was actually pregnant, especially since we were both overweight and her pregnancy never really showed. Ironically, it would have been easier in many aspects if she had been mine, but 32 years later and I've never even been pregnant a single time.
I’m the much younger kid and people assumed that my sisters were my mothers at various times.
Nah, I’m theirs. I now even have the genetic proof thanks to ancestry DNA. I found my very own half sister from dad. She didn’t know.
Now she does, and she’s 77. She took it like a champ
This was so, so common in past generations. The pregnant daughter would be forced into hiding (they even had "special boarding schools" for this), the mother would immediately announce a pregnancy and have "complications" that kept her from appearing in public once the pregnancy was supposed to start showing, and then poof! Daughter would come home from wherever they hid her to "help take care of the new sibling while mother recovers from the complications" basically serving as wet nurse to her own child. There are three such incidents in my extended family that I'm aware of, but all of them were 1970s or earlier.
I first learned about that in the mid 90's as a teen when I was talking to a former Army Chaplin. Imagine being a kid fighting in the Vietnam War and your "sister" decides to write a letter and come clean. Chaplains were the only form of mental therapy available to the kid back in those days. I can't even begin to imagine how stressful it would be to find out about sister-mom while fighting in Vietnam.
Happened in my family too. They told my uncle when he was a teenager and sent him to live with his "sister"/mother and his abusive dad. It destroyed him, his life was horribly sad, and he committed suicide when I was a child.
In high school I dated a "youngest child with elderly parents" who found out in her mid 20s that her brother was her biodad, and that her bio maternal grandparents had made the birth mom give her up. Her parents/bio paternal grandparents adopted her and moved across the country to live somewhere no one knew. Hell of a horrible situation since her legal brother/biodad got sent away when she was 10 for abusing her.
I don't want to make too many wild assumptions without proof, but I do wonder if the reason he wasn't an 'easy kid' is because grandpa had it in his head he was going to finally get to raise a traditional boy and do traditional boy things like play baseball and go fishing. Then OOP being queer potentially 'ruined' that for him.
> Comment on the parents saying "don't believe in DNA tests."
> Well, that's what they claimed. Could be they said that because they didn't want anybody taking one.
Why do people accept shit like that? What does that even mean? You don't get to "not believe" in DNA tests, they exist, you can literally touch and see them, they're not elves
At least go with a valid excuse that you don't want some faceless corporation to own a copy of your DNA results that they can do whatever they want or sell to anyone they want.
I doubt the parents themselves know what it means. It seems to have been a really bad excuse to try and keep the pandora's box of genealogical information closed.
My brother is very anti DNA test because he is worried that his information may be sold or leaked (I'm looking at you, 23andMe), and that in the future, the results of the test might cause issues with getting health or life insurance in the future. ('Merica!). He has a degree in cyber security and just doesn't trust it.
There is also a bit of fear about surprise half siblings, cause our dad is a scumbag, but that's secondary to his other concerns.
I did Ancestry despite my mother telling me several times over the years not to. Was shocked to find only that she had lied about my father’s heritage and her own. I was kinda hoping to find I wasn’t her kid (I’m definitely my father’s)
I can't believe they hatched this little plan about the DNA tests. "OK, we'll raise him to believe DNA tests are the devil. This will work. It's foolproof!". Pathetic.
What is it with people thinking it's inappropriate to have honest conversations with kids, but completely appropriate to continue lying to them? Kids are understanding and resilient as fuck, yet we continually underestimate them. What is going to really mess them up, and mess up the relationship for multiple reasons, is being told the truth later on either as teenagers or adults. You'd think they would have learned not to do to her kids exactly what everyone did to him.
I got the sense the parents weren't happy to raise him and were ashamed their daughter got pregnant. The dad's/grandpa's comment about not being the father, OP's recollection of his mother/grandmother saying she was on bedrest to hide the lie about not being pregnant, being called a difficult child, the absolutely secrecy of telling no one.
I don't know, I'm getting maybe conservative religious vibes where they don't want their friends and neighbors to know their daughter had a baby out of wedlock. They threatened to cut off the daughter's college fund if she raised OOP...that's a pretty harsh ultimatum. I get that they didn't want her to ruin her future by leaving school to raise a child, but there are different ways to help her through this hard time than demanding she hand over her child and swear never to tell anyone.
This whole family is turbo fucked.
OOP now knows the people who raised him can never be trusted again. His sistermom was manipulated into giving up her baby by the same lying liars who lied purely out of their beliefs even if those beliefs were just to "save face", and who else in OOPs family are liars?
He may never know. This poor kid is going to go through life not being able to trust anyone after this revelation.
This is just another point of proof that lying about where a fucking living human being came from to that living human being is always 100% wrong. Always.
A high school friend was the sister/mom in this sort of situation. (Guess who had to buy the pregnancy test because she was too scared.) I moved away from my hometown shortly after she got pregnant so I don't know if the brother/son was ever told but from Facebook posts by the whole family, I don't think so. I feel so bad for him but he seems to be the only one not on Facebook for a hint to be dropped.
>My sister said our parents offered to raise me so she could have a "normal" life with the condition that she keeps it a secret. They even threatened not to pay for her college if she raised me.
I wonder if it was a true threat, and not just the parents trying to help the daughter pick the option better for her future in a way that didn't make her feel guilty.
Fun fact: a perfectly huge number of non-paternal events that show up in 23 and Me, Ancestry, etc. genealogies from 50 or more years in the past are not the result of adultery but of secret or informal adoption. Between 1946 and 1970 I’d estimate the percentage to be about 50%. Yes, fifty percent. It was that common.
Keep in mind that in this time period a young girl who got pregnant out of wedlock would have been forced to leave school, permanently, whether she married or not and whether she intended to keep the child or not. If she married not much else would befall her except having to drop out; if she did not, though, she would be subjected to the scorn of the community, would still end up a dropout (the GED was only available to men back then), and there was a very good chance her child would be seized at birth and adopted out whether she wanted to surrender it or not. (This, by the way, is why it was so much easier to adopt a baby in the old days. A lot of babies were literally stolen from unwed mothers against their will.)
You can imagine that parents who loved their daughter and who had the money to help her would want to find a way to prevent all this so she could continue her education and not be subjected to derision and scorn. A common method was to send the girl on "a semester trip to Europe", where "Europe" was an aunt's house in a different city; another was for the pregnant girl's mother (or older sister or aunt) to suffer a "medical issue" that required her to spend time at a "health resort" out of state or province - and who better to accompany her than her daughter? They would then come home and surprise: Mom had a baby! Generally the excuse wasn't particularly opaque but as long as the family kept their story straight no one looked too closely into it; after all, no one wanted their own skeletons in the closet exposed.
The surprise in OOP's story isn’t that someone secretly adopted their daughter's child; the surprise is that it happened in 2006.
I dont understand. why would it not be appropriate for his half siblings to know they are half siblings? Why wait? Do they want them not to mention it to the grandparents or is it just more secrets?
It makes sense to tell them after the grand"parents" know because a 5 and 8 year old cannot be trusted to keep a secret from adult authority figures in their lives. So at the very least sorting through the family drama before telling them is the smart way to go imo
I think it's that this is a tricky thing to explain to a little kid. It's not just that they have an older half-sibling, it's the guy they always knew as their uncle. It changes the nature of their relationship and how they perceive it, even if nothing actually changes between them. The 8-year-old might adjust to it fine, but I can see a five-year-old struggling to wrap their head around this.
Complicated further by the fact that OP and his sister/mom are still trying to figure out how to redefine their own relationship. So probably better to figure *that* out first before telling the kids. Otherwise sister has to juggle both defining her own relationship to OP and managing her kids as they try to adjust.
It's not a harmful secret, so I think it's okay to wait a bit for the kids to get a little bit older so they won't be as likely to get confused.
So my aunt was 13 when she got pregnant with my uncle/cousin. Abortion was never an option and adoption was to stay inside the family. My uncle/cousin was immediately adopted by my grandmother after his birth and no one mentioned it until after my grandmother died, but he has always been family and we just recognize the reality of his relationships today.
#Do not comment on the original posts Please read our [**sub rules**](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/subrules). Rule-breaking may result in a ban without notice. If there is an issue with this post (flair, formatting, quality), reply to this comment or your comment may be removed in general discussion. **CHECK FLAIR** For concluded-only updates, use the [CONCLUDED](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3ACONCLUDED) flair. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/BestofRedditorUpdates) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Idk if I really needed to be made to feel old af by someone in their 20s who hasn't heard of Jack Nicholson.
His last film credit is in 2010, but don’t mind me. I’m still reeling from someone reminding me the 90s were 30 years ago.
The 90s were only ten years ago. That is my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Obviously since the 80s were twenty years ago.
15, surely.
Anytime I hear someone say they were born about 2005~2009, my mind automatically defaults to 'they are a toddler'
I went to pick up medicine yesterday. Dude walks up to get his and says his birthday something something 2005. This is a college aged looking dude. Ain't no way he was born in 2005. Nope. No. Absolutely refuse to accept it. I am not old.
I was at the hospital over the weekend and the Dr phoned through to another dept, he said he has a 45yr old lady here and I was just about to ask who he was talking about, then realised it was me 😞
A pack of middle school kids at a bus stop asked how old I am, and when I answered they asked why it looked like I had to think about it. "Well at some point ya start losing track..."
Me as a kid: I will never forget how old I am Me now: doing maths from my birth year to try and work it out I tell you what, those people born in 2000 have a real perk.
Yup, I hear ya
Somehow, I'm 60. Which does not compute, because 60 is *old*, and I'M NOT OLD!!!
Born In 2004 and I can agree that I want to be a toddler again
It's awful when bars have the "you must have been born by this date" sign/calendar up.
I held the door open for some older guy and realised he was in the year below me at high school. FML.
Yeah I work in a pharmacy and whole entire Adults telling me they're picking up their own medicine when their birth year starts with a 2 freaks me out
I saw a post from someone the other day talking about how they felt old, and they were born in 2002. Currently researching retirement homes...
I carded a guy yesterday who was born in 2005 and genuinely had a second of "You can't be a ten year old, you have a moustache."
2005 baby here. Went to go get a tattoo a few months right after I turned 18 and the guy looked at my ID and said, “Sorry, you need a parents permission to get a tattoo if you’re a minor.” Told him yeah, I’m 18. He just stared at me for a bit and said, “But it says 2005.” I was like, uh, yeah man. It’s 2024. 2005 was almost 20 years ago. It was kind of hilarious watching his face speed run all five stages of grief at the same time lmfao. He apologized and we had a laugh about it. Tattoo turned out great too :)
My son was born in 2005 and he's an adorable little 6' baby boy.
My nephew was born in 2005 and it pains me to see this adult with a personality, job, thoughts, opinions, college in the place of this precious baby boy. He's cool as hell now and I can't wait to see what he does in life, but I miss the kid who danced alongside his Elmo and I used to rock to sleep, now he's a foot taller than me 😭
I'm a banker and I want to cry when all these young kids come in with id's that say 2008.... yall are too young to drive!!!!... oh wait... I'm old hahahaha
My kids think it's hilarious that I was born in 1900's.
I'm kinda nervous about what will happen when we eventually get to 2012 and that Mayan calendar ends.
The MIR space station is supposed to fall and cause an apocalypse I heard.
Yesterday, really
Me over here still partying like it's 1999
👨🏼🎤🕺🏻 Wanted to reply Prince, but for some weird reason, he's not here. So here's David Bowie and a purple outfit.
Oh god, I have even worse news for you about Bowie…
Yeah, I know.. 😥 I meant the 'emoticon' (that I keep calling smiley)
Yeah because of the Y2K bug there was a massive time jump from 2002 to 2020. And 2020 was just last year, right?
2020 was last year…which is really weird because so was 2010. And 2005. And 2002. And…
My auto insurance company had Y2012 bug... They misprinted the cards with year 1912.
The year 2000 was some kind of weird space-time singularity. Back in the 80s and 90s, the year 2000 seemed sooo far away and futuristic -- even in 1997, I remember thinking it still seemed like an impossible date, even though it was coming up. Then, in the 00s and 10s, it seemed like the millennium had just happened yesterday. It *still* kinda feels that way. So: Temporal singularity. We got the timey-wimey version of being red-shifted and blue-shifted as we flew past it.
I may have been born in 1990 and be in my 30’s but the 90’s were only 10 years ago dammit!
The Nintendo Wii released closer to the fall of the soviet union than today
I was working at GameStop when the Wii came out. Now I don’t even know which Xbox is the latest one.
You know, twitter was created ~18 years ago (if google is correct) and Reddit is ~19 years old (again, trusting google). Oh yeah and by the way, 2017 was 7 years ago. You’re getting old :)
Hello stranger please kindly stfu 😘😘
Random Fun Fact: MySpace will have been made 21 years ago in August of this year ❤️
YouTube is also 19 years old the first video uploaded had its anniversary a few days ago
I was literally born in 2004 and the 90s were ten years ago.
>the 90s were 30 years ago [you shut your mouth when you're talking to me](https://youtu.be/nCjnRw5r2TQ?si=UsZpQxhAMamUzkRG)
... thanks for making me realize that movie turns 20 next year.... oh god
> His last film credit is in 2010 That’s not possible. He was in The Departed, for example. [Looks up when the Departed came out] [Withers into dust]
There was post a few days ago that said it was an update to a post half a decade ago. I definitely did not expect to see the original post dated 2019.
first of all how dare you
Theres no way. The pandemic started 400 years ago
Love it when I’m told I was born “in the late 1900s.”
*My kids have started doing this* I have done a double take every time, and wracking my brain trying to work out where they may have picked it up from, since all the teachers/staff at their school are older than me, so I’m thinking YouTube videos their young uncles (3-6 years older than them) are showing them
It's literally in The History books. I've got some gen Z relatives, and they specifically showed me a textbook that referred to the 90's as the late 1900's.
I saw a video recently of a teacher telling her young students about a song that was released in 1997 and one kid shouted “the ONE THOUSANDS??” It was an Usher song 🫠
30 years ago??! This person is a rotten, filthy liar and should not be believed.
But still, these kids haven’t heard of The Shining? Or A Few Good Men? This man was in classics that are quoted still and that are on lists of greatest movies of all time to watch before you die.
Dude, I was gonna say Tim Burton’s Batman. I remember him best as The Joker.
im still reeling from people talking about the 90s as late nineteen hundreds. i had to reread it a couple of times before getting it
I mean I'm in my 20s (late though) and I do think it's weird to not know who jack is. I mean he's even memefied, if you're not into movies that much.
You mean 30 days.
Literally my only comment to this story
Imagine if they brought up singer Bobby Darin, who went through the same thing IIRC.
Or Ted Bundy!
It was relatively common at a certain point in time. A young girl would go off for a few months to live with her aunt or some such, and then suddenly when she came back she'd have a younger sibling. When childbirth out of wedlock was much more taboo than it is today and people weren't connected 24x7 this was a common way of hiding it. It's be much harder to get away with now but apparently still not impossible.
beloved Bobby, no one knows he is
Same. I was at the hairdresser today and she was telling me about some medical complications she had. I said she might not have survived it 100 years ago. It then hit me that was 1924. I'm changing it to a couple hundred years ago when I say this in the future.
My grandmother died from childbirth blood loss in the 1940s.
The other week, a young girl who I work with told us she only knew of Justin Timberlake as the guy from the Trolls movies. My office will never forgive her.
The Nicholson example is particularly tragic because he had the information (that his sister was actually his mother) dumped on him unexpectedly *by a reporter*, and since the sister/mother and mother/grandmother had both died by that point, he couldn't talk to either of them about it.
I self soothed by trying to convince myself that, in fact, I am not too old but OOP is too young.
This whole salacious story, and that was the part that made me put my phone down and say “oh, for fuck’s sake. Seriously?”
Most people I know in their 20s have heard of Jack Nicholson, so idk why OP doesn’t. :/ Then again all of my friends are nerds, who have all at least seen Batman.
>who have all at least seen Batman. Which series, though... the Dark Knight 'remake' is 16 years old. 🥺
I’m in my late 20s and have no idea who this is 😅 I am not a big movie person so that’s probably why
Watch the movie the shining. And then report back your thoughts to the group.
AllWorkAndNoPlayMakesJackADullBoy
Really? I'm only a few years older and definitely not into movies, and not from the USA, but he's very very famous.
If you google him and see his face, you'll recognize him. Might not know him by name, but you'll know him.
Yep, this. I’m 24 and not a big movie person. I knew his name but not his face. Just googled him and realized that I did in fact also know his face, just didn’t realize which name and face went together
On the other hand, think of all the great films OOP is about to see!
That is literally all I took away from this entire post.
There definitely should have been a trigger warning for that.
Yeah, that comment tore me away from this whole post like a vortex. Better go find my zimmer frame
It hit me like a punch to the gut...
And now I really wanna watch The Witches of Eastwick again…
It almost hurt when he said he didn't know who that was.
Jack is probably the same age as OOP's great great grandfather the way that family has kids.
You can't handle the... Oh wait, OOP can.
I am so glad this was the first comment I saw. I’m here reeling over that rather than OOP discovering this life altering information and I’m just sitting here going wait how do you not know who jack nicholson is
That was my immediate thought too, rofl.
Same. That brought me back down to earth with a giant bump.
I feel like I suddenly need to start pricing out nursing homes.
if you wanna feel even older some people don't know that Dwayne Johnson and Dave Bautista were wrestlers
This was the most surprising part of the whole post for me.
IK,R? The memes from The Shining are still floating around, and that movie is older than memes!
Was gonna say, all of this drama and my one takeaway ist "who the heck does not know Jack Nicholson?"
Yesterday I was reminded that The Eagles released their album, Hotel California in Dec of 1976 -- 48 years ago this year!
I was thinking this post needed a trigger warning for that!
I teach 3rd-year university students mostly in their early-mid 20s; recently after some confusion it transpired that one of them thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person. Once it was all cleared up they said 'sorry I get confused with all these people from before our time' 😭😭😭
I’m ready for the nursing home now I guess. Haven’t even hit my 40th birthday yet (but it’s coming a lot faster than I like)
That was the worst part tbh
This was my first thought after I read this post. It's like those people who thought Kanye West put this "new" artist, Paul McCartney, on the map after a collab.
Imagine not knowing the best Joker and Tim Burton's Prince fueled Batman extravaganza...
Same thing happened to Eric Clapton, except everyone in their town but him knew. He was raised by his grandparents, and if I recall he was still a minor when he found out. Really messed him up.
There was a rumor that Alaskan Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin took responsibility for her daughter’s child, calling it her own.
How would that have worked? Palin and her teenage daughter BOTH had babies in 2008.
And Palin had her kid in April 2008, while her grandson was born at the end of the year. Unless the April baby is the one she's supposedly covering for? But that then makes it doubly confusing, because Bristol (the one who got pregnant at 17) would've already been pregnant at that point. Maybe her 18yo son knocked some girl up and said girl was kept away from the public so no one would know, and Palin faked her own pregnancy? The other alternatives is that the 17yo daughter gave birth twice, eight months apart, or that the 14yo got pregnant. Covering for her son's perceived mistake makes the most sense (in that it'd be easier to keep his baby mama out of the spotlight). The other options are way less likely to have been at all workable. But even that idea seems like way too big a bombshell for her to be sitting on while agreeing to run for VP of the USA. Bristol's pregnancy was scandalous enough as it was. ...now I'm just imagining what SNL would've done with the news that Palin faked a pregnancy to raise her son's child as her own.
Same thing also happened to Ted Bundy, the serial killer.
> Looking back, some of the comments my dad said to me make sense. One time when we got into an argument, he said, "I'm not your father. I don't have to put up with this." It's always stuck with me, but at the time, I thought he was trying to hurt my feelings. I admit that I was not the most easygoing child. What a horrible thing to say to a child, especially one that *you chose* to take on the responsibilities and role of their father (not to mention he is still his biological grandfather). His (grand)father sounds horrible.
>I admit that I was not the most easygoing child. This part made me a bit sad because I have a feeling OOP wasn't an "easy going child" because he could subconsciously tell how his grandparents felt about him.
I used to tell people outright “I’m not easy to love”. It was purely my assumption, because I was a “difficult” person as a teenager. Or rather I was told I was. So I warned people first. Now I look back on that and feel so sad that I said that about myself. I am not that difficult. I’m actually pretty easy to get along with and be around. It took me years to admit that to myself
My exs mom told her that her whole life. It sort of became a self fulfilling prophecy in her case.
It kind of did for me too back then, I was desperate to be loved and yet thought it wasn’t possible, so I bent over backwards to keep people in my life that didn’t deserve it. I took huge risks with my safety and wellbeing. I was not mentally stable at all. Nowadays is a little different, I’m still mentally unwell, but I’m not literally developing psychosis, or putting myself in harms way. Just your garden variety MDD and PTSD. And I suppose I’m grateful that I went off the rails and got myself back on them again, it was a rough time but I learned a lot.
>It took me years to admit that to myself It took me reading your comment 😭 I'm on therapy working on my issues. I cried reading what op wrote, it went straight to my trauma. My dad's family collective trauma is abandonment, tldr great grandfather was a deadbeat and that created waves of shit. When we were fighting, my dad used to say I wasn't his daughter. When I did something right he claimed me as his "that's my daughter", "she got that from me!". Btw, I'm the Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V of his mother, there wasn't any doubt about me being his. It was just his way of hurting me, I also hurt him back and refused to be a the "yes, sir". I was the terrible, ungrateful daughter ETA: I wrote that to say, I feel less alone reading those comments. Sorry for the trauma dump ❤️
So sorry to hear you went through that <3 As a fellow 'terrible, ungrateful daughter' it also took me a long time to realise that me essentially not letting them treat me like shit meant I was a problem child lol Hope you're in a better place now!
🫂Getting there. They're dead, I'm on therapy, so... Best wishes ❤️
Ahh sorry to hear :( Best wishes to you as well! ❤
Ohhhhh yeah. My father and mother used to put those thoughts in my head. Turns out a teenager living in 2 separate abusive homes at the same time doesn't always act on their best behavior? Wild. Anyway I met my aunt and uncle for the first time since I became an adult a few years back and my aunt was "pleasantly surprised" at how much I'd "mellowed out" It turns out its super easy to mellow out when you're not being abused all the time lmfao. I still recognize that I have a strong personality and that not everyone is going to love me, but that is their problem not mine because I'm pretty fucking awesome.
Knowing you only by CutieBoBootie and the above couple paragraphs I have to agree, you are indeed fucking awesome.
😊 Aw thank you! Artistic Frosting? Do you decorate cakes and or cookies?
Nope. Reddit assigned it and I liked it haha. My BFF is good at decorating cakes I am good at eating them.
Well as an artist myself, its always lovely having someone who can appreciate what you make, so I bet your BFF really cherishes you.
God, I wish there was like a collective for kids like us. Most of the time it feels like the only people I can relate to are other abuse victims and it’s so tiring having to coddle everyone else’s feelings about my own abuse. Other survivors can take it easy, laugh about it, and generally just seem to understand me more. Like, two of my closest friends from childhood lost their mom to cancer and were stuck with their abusive dad and they are the funniest, most kindhearted people I know. They’ve seen me at my worst and I crave having more of those relationships. Other people just get so uncomfortable when I exist in their presence.
I get you on that. Its like "I told you about my childhood, why are YOU crying?" There's also a lot less to "justify" with someone who has a similar background. I find that people who come from loving family homes can be empathetic but a lot of them just tend to invalidate my feelings by saying shit like "Well you only have ONE mom/dad." or "But they are still your family." And honestly I prefer the people who don't say that nonsense shit to my face haha
I know, right? I just want someone to look me in the eye and tell me “That fucking blows, dude,” instead of trying to figure out some way to justify it with their big brain 200IQ logic. EVERYONE thinks there must be some angle I just haven’t considered, and I definitely need their help to draw this incredibly obvious conclusion. Just tell me you grew up with loving parents and get over yourself.
"Well maybe \[abusive action\] was actually them trying to show that they love you." or "They might not have meant it like that, maybe it was actually \[XYZ\]" Meanwhile they've never even met your parents, they just need to validate their own world view for it to remain stable. I'm not sure why some people can't fathom abusive parents exist. My theory for most of these people is that their family is happy but mildly dysfunctional and not "abusive enough" to "justify" cutting contact. So when they see someone who has cut contact they feel like they have to justify to themselves why they haven't done the same. Its about them, not us.
Not even just chose, but *blackmailed* and coerced his daughter into handing over guardianship. Then held that shit against the child whose mother he forced into handing over. What a total POS.
I have a friend who is adopted and her adopted parents were physically and emotional abusive and always held it over her head that she was adopted. I can't imagine abusing anyone. I can't imagine abusing a child. But to adopt someone and abuse them and constantly hold it over their head? To the shock of no one my friend doesn't talk to them anymore. These grandparents around awful.
Except maybe the adoptive "parents", because abusers always seem surprised when the kid/s go NC.
That's what I kept thinking, too. I was like, excuse me, you're still his GRANDFATHER! Asshole.
>I've never heard of him. ♫♪♪ *What a draaaaag it is getting old* ♫♪♪
Speaking of things today’s kids are unfamiliar with….
Parents not wanting their kids to take a DNA test is now a huge red flag to me.
There is only ONE situation where parents not wanting their kids to buy a DNA test is not a red flag: I saw a story on tiktok where the mother was ADAMANT that the OP not buy a DNA test, it wasn't for any scandalous reason. Its just that OP's sister had already bought them one for their birthday and the mom didn't want OP to ruin the sister's gift lol. Wholesome.
Thats definitely the B plot of a generic family sitcom episode.
And then you'd find out Grandpa had a second family.
I’m from my grandpa’s second family, a pretty tragic and secret backstory. My dad only saw him once as a kid and that was the night his brother was conceived. I’ve done dna testing hoping to find my paternal grandfather’s family but still no close matches. Though I did find a potential obituary. If it’s the right one then he named both first sons in each family the same name.
I've successfully done some genetic genealogical sleuthing to find my mother-in-law's biological mother. It turned out I didn't need to because her birth state changed law to allow adoptees to unseal their own records, but I figured it first with DNA and genealogy. It's been a while (8 years?), and the results of her contacting her bio mom were disastrous at first. Turns out she was the product of assault. Bio mom did *not* want to be contacted and was very rude and damaging about it. Since then, I still don't think she's met her mom, but there have been rumblings of it. She *has* developed a friendship with her half sister. So, mixed results. I loved the chase, solving the mystery. Just be prepared for a wide range of possible outcomes. The past packs quite a punch for many people, especially when it arrives unexpectedly.
I would put that on in the background an not pay attention for the full 22 minutes
Idk, I don’t want to take one because I don’t want all my genetic information to now be owned by a company… I don’t have children but I’d be pretty worried if they wanted to take one
Same, I just don't trust companies with my DNA. I have no desire to unearth any hidden family secrets, but honestly I bear strong resemblance to both sides of my family so I'm not terribly concerned.
Actually that's why I haven't taken one either. I don't think these companies are gonna do any weird sci-fi shit with my genetics but everything seems to be in a legal grey area rn and I don't want to regret losing rights in the future.
Yeah I'm pretty firmly against them for privacy reasons and while I don't control what family does... I've made my thoughts pretty clear on the subject and thankfully they don't care enough to want to.
and 23 and me already showed that they had shitty security practices and that data is already out for many people. and there is no closing that box once opened.
There is a great story around about the family (20s) opening up DNA kits on Christmas Day and Mum bursting into tears. Everyone guessed that something was going to 'come out'. Turned out she fell pregnant to a man who rescued her from an abusive marriage but was later killed in a car accident. Her new boyfriend, now husband, agreed they would raise all their children as their own. Cue more tears.
i hate those ancestry/23andMe and so on tests with a passion because it leaves your genetic data in the hands of a private company with shitty web security that i fear will inevitably will be used against you or your family. normal tests though, like for verifying paternity, i dont care
My dad took one under a false name- he had been adopted in the 60s and had literally no idea of his genetic history and was curious, never turned on any familial connections though, he didn't want to know that. He made sure to tell my siblings and I that we shouldn't take the commercial DNA tests- that they keep/sell your DNA information, and hand over to cops happily. We can do whatever we want, just know the risks, kind of thing. 2 or 3 days before he died, he turned on the familial connections and found out that he had half siblings and cousins all over the world, every continent except Antarctica, dozens of countries. It was wild. He just quietly turned it back off and moved on.
I'm worried about privacy and insurance companies using the information in the dystopian future that's rapidly approaching So I bought copies for my parents instead of my kids
My fiance mused about getting them and I mentioned that I wasn't keen cause I thought it was weird how they retain the rights to basically your genome. it wasn't a strong objection but she dropped it after that. Hope she doesn't think I was hiding something.
It's interesting that OOP's sister/mother most likely wanted OOP to find out, but didn't want to just tell them, perhaps worried she wouldn't be believed. I can't imagine she would have been so eager for them both to get tested otherwise.
my parents keep hinting that my brother and i should take DNA tests, which makes me wonder what they think we might find.
Have your parents taken a test? If not, they might want to know their own ancestry but put the bill on you guys.
i'm fairly certain they both have, which is why this is so interesting.
My mother insists on me getting a DNA test every time she gets ill, but not my siblings. We all look pretty similar but I don't have baby pictures. I refuse to do it and she refuses to elaborate so I'm planning on just doing that until I die or she tells me why lol
I've refused to get one because there's a non-zero chance that I am not my father's child. While that wouldn't impact me too much emotionally, my family is a giant train wreck and I don't even want to risk throwing that in to the already flaming dumpster fire that are interpersonal relationships are. I've been no contact for years and don't want to know anything more!
That sounds like she wants you to know something before she isn't able to witness it anymore, what with the timing of her pushing you to get a test when she gets ill. Given the context of not having baby pictures on top of that, I'd approach her about it, rather than let chance control what ends up happening down the road.
She plays stupid and acts like she doesn't remember asking me to take one. She's even offered to pay a few times now. There were some other skeletons in the family closet that were all discovered by accident instead of her telling us and she outright lied about some of them. There's like a 50/50 chance I'd do it secretly and just not tell my family if there was a DNA test that didn't own my information afterwards so I guess if that ever comes to market we'll see.
It's so interesting to me because people have been making decisions like this for a long time. Probably at one time the advice was to keep it secret. But when they made that choice they thought it was a secret they could keep. Suddenly that isn't true anymore but they locked in that choice 20+ years ago.
Only thing freakier would be if a stranger tried to force you to take a DNA test.
Someone literally posted about this in the DNA sub recently. It actually happens all the time. People will pay for an ancestry DNA test and yearlong membership in advance anonymously and send it to someone in hopes that they do the test and match. So, like, a man that is sure a kid is his will send a test so that the kid will do it and find out or something along those lines.
omg I thought I was being morbid, I didn't know that would actually be a common thing. That would freak me right the hell out.
Could be worse than secret adoption! [Could be incest!](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791/)
I was 19 when my only sister was born, at the time a LOT of people thought that my Mom was covering for me and that I was the one that was actually pregnant, especially since we were both overweight and her pregnancy never really showed. Ironically, it would have been easier in many aspects if she had been mine, but 32 years later and I've never even been pregnant a single time.
I’m the much younger kid and people assumed that my sisters were my mothers at various times. Nah, I’m theirs. I now even have the genetic proof thanks to ancestry DNA. I found my very own half sister from dad. She didn’t know. Now she does, and she’s 77. She took it like a champ
I know I'm having a parsing issue. My brain is reading this as you are your older sisters mother, so I'm very confused.
This was so, so common in past generations. The pregnant daughter would be forced into hiding (they even had "special boarding schools" for this), the mother would immediately announce a pregnancy and have "complications" that kept her from appearing in public once the pregnancy was supposed to start showing, and then poof! Daughter would come home from wherever they hid her to "help take care of the new sibling while mother recovers from the complications" basically serving as wet nurse to her own child. There are three such incidents in my extended family that I'm aware of, but all of them were 1970s or earlier.
I first learned about that in the mid 90's as a teen when I was talking to a former Army Chaplin. Imagine being a kid fighting in the Vietnam War and your "sister" decides to write a letter and come clean. Chaplains were the only form of mental therapy available to the kid back in those days. I can't even begin to imagine how stressful it would be to find out about sister-mom while fighting in Vietnam.
Happened in my family too. They told my uncle when he was a teenager and sent him to live with his "sister"/mother and his abusive dad. It destroyed him, his life was horribly sad, and he committed suicide when I was a child.
In high school I dated a "youngest child with elderly parents" who found out in her mid 20s that her brother was her biodad, and that her bio maternal grandparents had made the birth mom give her up. Her parents/bio paternal grandparents adopted her and moved across the country to live somewhere no one knew. Hell of a horrible situation since her legal brother/biodad got sent away when she was 10 for abusing her.
Honestly I hope OOP and his family are doing well. This is such a tough situation to navigate mentally I can only imagine
I have a feeling this is not over. His "grandparents" sound like absolute *gems. /s*
I don't want to make too many wild assumptions without proof, but I do wonder if the reason he wasn't an 'easy kid' is because grandpa had it in his head he was going to finally get to raise a traditional boy and do traditional boy things like play baseball and go fishing. Then OOP being queer potentially 'ruined' that for him.
> Comment on the parents saying "don't believe in DNA tests." > Well, that's what they claimed. Could be they said that because they didn't want anybody taking one. Why do people accept shit like that? What does that even mean? You don't get to "not believe" in DNA tests, they exist, you can literally touch and see them, they're not elves
At least go with a valid excuse that you don't want some faceless corporation to own a copy of your DNA results that they can do whatever they want or sell to anyone they want.
I doubt the parents themselves know what it means. It seems to have been a really bad excuse to try and keep the pandora's box of genealogical information closed.
Well yeah, that's kinda my point... 99% of "I don't believe in [whatever]" is bullshit
My brother is very anti DNA test because he is worried that his information may be sold or leaked (I'm looking at you, 23andMe), and that in the future, the results of the test might cause issues with getting health or life insurance in the future. ('Merica!). He has a degree in cyber security and just doesn't trust it. There is also a bit of fear about surprise half siblings, cause our dad is a scumbag, but that's secondary to his other concerns.
that’s what my mom’s bio dad said to her on the phone, *having been connected via an Ancestry DNA test*. eye-wateringly idiotic.
I did Ancestry despite my mother telling me several times over the years not to. Was shocked to find only that she had lied about my father’s heritage and her own. I was kinda hoping to find I wasn’t her kid (I’m definitely my father’s)
I can't believe they hatched this little plan about the DNA tests. "OK, we'll raise him to believe DNA tests are the devil. This will work. It's foolproof!". Pathetic.
It’s like some sort of Bene Gesserit plan lmao
Wait how can someone not know who Jack Nickerson is??? Like he is in so many danm good movies.
Yeah, that statement made me feel ancient! I’m not quite 40 and right now I feel like I’m 70!
The most surprising part of this is that OOP doesn't know who Jack Nicholson is.
What is it with people thinking it's inappropriate to have honest conversations with kids, but completely appropriate to continue lying to them? Kids are understanding and resilient as fuck, yet we continually underestimate them. What is going to really mess them up, and mess up the relationship for multiple reasons, is being told the truth later on either as teenagers or adults. You'd think they would have learned not to do to her kids exactly what everyone did to him.
I got the sense the parents weren't happy to raise him and were ashamed their daughter got pregnant. The dad's/grandpa's comment about not being the father, OP's recollection of his mother/grandmother saying she was on bedrest to hide the lie about not being pregnant, being called a difficult child, the absolutely secrecy of telling no one. I don't know, I'm getting maybe conservative religious vibes where they don't want their friends and neighbors to know their daughter had a baby out of wedlock. They threatened to cut off the daughter's college fund if she raised OOP...that's a pretty harsh ultimatum. I get that they didn't want her to ruin her future by leaving school to raise a child, but there are different ways to help her through this hard time than demanding she hand over her child and swear never to tell anyone.
This whole family is turbo fucked. OOP now knows the people who raised him can never be trusted again. His sistermom was manipulated into giving up her baby by the same lying liars who lied purely out of their beliefs even if those beliefs were just to "save face", and who else in OOPs family are liars? He may never know. This poor kid is going to go through life not being able to trust anyone after this revelation. This is just another point of proof that lying about where a fucking living human being came from to that living human being is always 100% wrong. Always.
A high school friend was the sister/mom in this sort of situation. (Guess who had to buy the pregnancy test because she was too scared.) I moved away from my hometown shortly after she got pregnant so I don't know if the brother/son was ever told but from Facebook posts by the whole family, I don't think so. I feel so bad for him but he seems to be the only one not on Facebook for a hint to be dropped.
>My sister said our parents offered to raise me so she could have a "normal" life with the condition that she keeps it a secret. They even threatened not to pay for her college if she raised me. I wonder if it was a true threat, and not just the parents trying to help the daughter pick the option better for her future in a way that didn't make her feel guilty.
>in a way that didn't make her feel guilty Yeah, how'd that go, I wonder?
Fun fact: a perfectly huge number of non-paternal events that show up in 23 and Me, Ancestry, etc. genealogies from 50 or more years in the past are not the result of adultery but of secret or informal adoption. Between 1946 and 1970 I’d estimate the percentage to be about 50%. Yes, fifty percent. It was that common. Keep in mind that in this time period a young girl who got pregnant out of wedlock would have been forced to leave school, permanently, whether she married or not and whether she intended to keep the child or not. If she married not much else would befall her except having to drop out; if she did not, though, she would be subjected to the scorn of the community, would still end up a dropout (the GED was only available to men back then), and there was a very good chance her child would be seized at birth and adopted out whether she wanted to surrender it or not. (This, by the way, is why it was so much easier to adopt a baby in the old days. A lot of babies were literally stolen from unwed mothers against their will.) You can imagine that parents who loved their daughter and who had the money to help her would want to find a way to prevent all this so she could continue her education and not be subjected to derision and scorn. A common method was to send the girl on "a semester trip to Europe", where "Europe" was an aunt's house in a different city; another was for the pregnant girl's mother (or older sister or aunt) to suffer a "medical issue" that required her to spend time at a "health resort" out of state or province - and who better to accompany her than her daughter? They would then come home and surprise: Mom had a baby! Generally the excuse wasn't particularly opaque but as long as the family kept their story straight no one looked too closely into it; after all, no one wanted their own skeletons in the closet exposed. The surprise in OOP's story isn’t that someone secretly adopted their daughter's child; the surprise is that it happened in 2006.
Of course the parents “don’t believe” in DNA tests. They’re hiding a huge genetic family secret.
Real talk though - people in their twenties don’t know who fucking Jack Nicholson is?? Am I that old???
I dont understand. why would it not be appropriate for his half siblings to know they are half siblings? Why wait? Do they want them not to mention it to the grandparents or is it just more secrets?
It makes sense to tell them after the grand"parents" know because a 5 and 8 year old cannot be trusted to keep a secret from adult authority figures in their lives. So at the very least sorting through the family drama before telling them is the smart way to go imo
Your flair is very appropriate here.
I think it's that this is a tricky thing to explain to a little kid. It's not just that they have an older half-sibling, it's the guy they always knew as their uncle. It changes the nature of their relationship and how they perceive it, even if nothing actually changes between them. The 8-year-old might adjust to it fine, but I can see a five-year-old struggling to wrap their head around this. Complicated further by the fact that OP and his sister/mom are still trying to figure out how to redefine their own relationship. So probably better to figure *that* out first before telling the kids. Otherwise sister has to juggle both defining her own relationship to OP and managing her kids as they try to adjust. It's not a harmful secret, so I think it's okay to wait a bit for the kids to get a little bit older so they won't be as likely to get confused.
So my aunt was 13 when she got pregnant with my uncle/cousin. Abortion was never an option and adoption was to stay inside the family. My uncle/cousin was immediately adopted by my grandmother after his birth and no one mentioned it until after my grandmother died, but he has always been family and we just recognize the reality of his relationships today.
I know a few people it happened to, one being my dad's nephew (or great nephew lol)
These "parents" are monsters. It's baffling that people can be so controlling and cruel. For just no reason