When I turned 18 I got a letter from a distant Aunt and Uncle wishing me a happy birthday. I hadn’t seen them since I was a a baby, but there’s hundreds of pictures of them and me together when I was a baby. They used to babysit me a lot and take me on vacations with them. My Mom told me they used me to smuggle things. I guess they said it was super easy to smuggle just about anything with a baby. At one point literally hiding cocaine in my diaper.

When I was a kid, I used to be friends with the next door woman, who was about 20 years old. To me she was a best friend because she would read to me, or play with me or take me to walks. One morning I woke up and her dad was at my house and gave me a painting she made, then my parents told me my friend had to move to another city for work and she left me the painting to remember her. Some time later we moved to another city but returned years after when my dad died. I found the dad and sister were living there still. There I knew the truth, my friend had died on a car accident back then, but they decided to lie to me because they didn’t want to hurt me.

My grandfather was a small business owner who everyone always thought of as extremely frugal due to growing up poor. Later we found out he spent a significant amount of money on charitable causes and helped a lot of his employees with financial and in one case legal trouble. Positive secret, but it was definitely a secret.

My son is 20. His mother just told him about me in December. Nobody knew I was his dad, even me. 20 years not knowing I had a son. It's been 6 months and he's the greatest thing I've ever done. He's smart, in the military and we have a wonderful relationship. Had he not pressed her about it, she would have never told him. I'm so happy I can hardly contain myself most days. Words can't describe my emotions.

Most of my college was paid by someone named Tony (random dude to me). I know you're all thinking that it was some sort of lovechild thing, but it turns out my grandfather was a bookie and Tony was always just a bad gambler." "So instead of My grandpa having his knees capped, he made a deal Tony would pay for college.

When I was a kid, my dad accidentally killed a raccoon with his car. It had a young one with it that wasn't hit, so we adopted the baby raccoon. We adored it, but we were not at all equipped to care for it. There was no lock or cage that could stop this thing. It was very clever, strong and curious. It got into cupboards and ate food and trash, and we'd find its shit in the most random places. One day my dad sat me down and told me that my raccoon had "gone to live on a farm." I was old enough to know what that meant, and I was heartbroken. Just a few years ago I was telling this story to my husband and my dad interrupted me and said that he literally, actually gave my raccoon away to a work acquaintance of his that had a farm and a lot of wooded property. It had become so accustomed to humans it constantly broke into the man's house and ate his food, and got enormously fat and lived a long ornery raccoon life.

There was story growing up about how a local prince wanted to marry me and offered things like cows for my hand in marriage. When my father passed away I went to my home country and met cousins I had not met before. Turned out the prince was the president's son and it wasn't an offer, it was a demand. We snuck out of the country because he was going to make me his wife - bear in mind, I was a toddler. My mom filled in the back story. The company my dad worked for had to smuggle us out of the country. My life was so exciting when I was 6.

That college fund that they were always talking about had $148.74 in it.

That I had a much older half-sister. Apparently my father had got some girl knocked up in high school, her parents didn't like him and thought they were too young to raise a kid, so they just packed up and moved. He knew she existed, but never tried to locate her and just moved on with his life. After I was in college, the sister had contacted him and they got together. Well nobody bothered to mention this fact to me until I come home from college for Thanksgiving and this strange women is sitting at the table and my dad says, "Meet your sister."

That secret was revealed to me not when I reached adulthood but when my father passed away. When I was a baby, I had a baby doll which I loved. I still have that doll now that I am 28 y.o. One day, a month about after my fathers death, my mother told me that he had bought me 3 same baby dolls and when the one I was using had gotten damaged, he secretly replaced her with a new one. He kept that secret as a present for the day of my wedding, along with all the baby dolls I had used all those years. He didn't make it to reveal it to me himself.

My great-uncle (dad's uncle) left me a large sum of money in trust that I was to receive at either age 25, graduated from college, or was honorably discharged from military service (he retired from military), whichever came first. I had no idea and I'm glad I didn't. I joined the military right out of high school and when I had my DD-214 in hand, my parents took me to a lawyer who laid it all out. Wow. Because of the enhanced GI Bill, I didn't have to touch a cent of it for tuition. I did use it to buy a house though. I miss my great-uncle as much for his wisdom as his company.

My mom was super anti-abortion her whole life, we figured it was just religion. Turns out her mom (my grandma) got put in jail for helping women do illegal abortions in Illinois before Roe vs Wade. Everyone found out because women kept turning up almost bleeding to death. Turns out back alley abortions are super dangerous

Several years ago my dad dropped the truth bomb that he didn't think I was his kid when I was born. My mum had an affair and he thought I was an illicit lovechild. As soon as I started growing, he could see a lot of himself in my features so eventually brushed it off. But like... gee thanks dad. Not sure I needed to know that.

When I was 8, I got a cat named Toes. Big fluffy gray long haired kitty with white feet. Sweet kitty. I went away to visit my grandparents for the weekend and when I came home, my mom broke the news to me Toes had been hit by a car and killed. I was terribly upset but mom took me to a shelter and we adopted a new kitty almost right away. Years later, when I was probably 21, my mother called me and sounded very upset. She said she had something to tell me. Turns out Toes had not been hit by a car that weekend. He had instead climbed into the warm clothes dryer to sleep and mom didn't see him and loaded the dryer with a blanket she had washed... and then found Toes when she opened the dryer an hour later.

My mother recently (I am 52) told me that I have a half-sibling out there somewhere. She had a child before she met my father and put him up for adoption.

Near adulthood. My Dad left when I was 10 (but took the kids on weekends, etc) and very soon afterwards was dating a woman seriously. By my teen years I had kinda-sorta worked out that he had probably been seeing her before he left, meaning he cheated on my Mom. But I rationalized it that the marriage failed and hey, he actually was in a relationship with that woman for years afterward so it wasn't a cheap fling. Then in my late teens Mom told a story about the summer when they were still married when Dad was sent on a 6 week training seminar in another city. She paused, uncertain if she should add this tidbit, then mentioned she had been told by one of his co-workers that he dated a woman there for that whole 6 weeks. TL;DR: Found out Dad had a pattern of cheating on my Mom, not just the once.

When I was 18 my mom told me how my dad cheated on her with this woman named Kathy. I actually remembered Kathy when I was kid because my dad would take my brother and I to her house. She would buy us computer games and stuff so we loved her at the time. I never understood why my mom hated her until I was older. Kathy ended up marrying my dad's best friend. As an adult I was never nice to her and my dad would give me s**t about it. I finally told him that I knew about her and that mom had told me everything. He just said "Oh, alright then." He never gave me s**t again.

My mom met my dad in the military. I learned she joined the military to escape her town. Her best friend had killed himself and she dropped out of school. She started hanging out with his dad a lot and he convinced her to go back to high school and graduate. They became really close and his wife learned about it. At her graduation the wife finally met my mom and told her she was going to kill her for ‘messing around’ with her husband. So my mom joined the military and didn’t tell anyone until a couple years later after she had met my dad and had me. I learned all this when I was like 25. I don’t even know if my dad knew the whole story as they had never brought it up.