“When my dad died, I found out that he had five wives, including my mom...with all parties thinking they were the only family.”

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"She got pregnant during her junior year in school, and her parents sent her away to live with her grandmother in another state. They were big at church and were embarrassed that their daughter was pregnant. They then adopted her and maintained this illusion for years. They had forced the sister/mom to stay away because they didn't want her to know."

"It's been about ten years since then, and he has regained a ton of memory, but nowhere near what would probably be considered normal memory of raising a whole family...he is now a completely different person.

It's literally like the pain that started the drug use, and the pain he couldn't handle from my mother leaving, both are gone. I feel inside that my dad did die, but I was blessed to still have him here on earth in some way.

We have gotten to know the new him. He's amazing and makes it his main priority to never become addicted to drugs again. He has never relapsed since.

It is so strange. My sister and I are the only people who can feel understood by each other, as it is such a unique experience...I've never met anyone who can even remotely relate.

Honestly, it changed me forever as well, and I’ve really been struggling mentally ever since the event a decade ago."

"I hated the guy, and my son is very much my husband's child."

"No one heard from him for four weeks. He'd quit his job, left his home — everything. Then one night, I got a phone call that he was dead. He ODed.

My heart was shattered. They flew his body out to Seattle, so I never got closure.

It had been five months since he passed away. Then I started seeing activity on his Facebook, and it would piss me off and make me confused, like someone was fucking with me. I asked my mom about it, who asked my grandma (my dad's mom) about it, and the truth came out.

My dad faked his death because he didn't think he could ever get sober and didn't wanna keep hurting me, but now he's sober again and decided he changed his mind.

I found this out two weeks ago. I have no idea what to do, so I just haven't done or said anything about it.

Plot twist? Dad overdosed; just kidding, Dad faked his own death!"

"She got pregnant when she was 14 and had me at 15. Apparently, they had decided I would be adopted by my grandparents because my mom was too young. Eventually, she got older, met a man, and left me with my grandparents, who I was told were my parents.

So at ten, I found out my 'sister' was my mom, my other 'sister' was my aunt, my 'mom' was my grandma, and my 'dad' was someone who my grandma had recently married, so I had no blood relation to him. After he left, he had nothing to do with me anymore anyway. I'm stuck with his last name, though. As for my biological dad, I've never met him and only seen a couple of pictures. 

Today, I'm almost forty, and I don't have anything to do with those people anymore. Toxic waste. I was lied to about who my family was for the first ten years of my life. It's given me so many trust issues, it's not even funny. I question absolutely everything because you can never be 100 percent sure everyone isn't actually in on it."

"God knows how, but yeah. He definitely made up some bullshit to the police."

"It was Transverse Myelitis as part of Spinal MS, following general neuroinflammation following damage from a fall.

Basically, I fell while snowboarding, resulting in a small area of spinal cord damage, which inflamed the whole spinal cord. After four years of this, my immune system severed the spinal cord at C5/6 — aka, Transverse Myelitis. The Spinal MS diagnosis was given as the benefits of that diagnosis/meds regime outweighed the risk.

Practically, this meant a headache, high fever with ascending numbness over the course of five days, and then paralysis."

"We’d never realized it before because her grandfather was estranged from the rest of the family going back decades."

"After my husband's death, I found a job out of my field that 100% percent trained me. It offers retirement benefits and unlimited time off as long as someone covers the front desk and the work gets done. They even hired my new husband 12 years in. They have super everything, except we buy our own health insurance from the Marketplace.

The moment we were feeling really comfortable financially, I had a brain aneurysm rupture. My insurance did exactly what it was supposed to do, but the out-of-pocket costs were high. Two years in, and we've managed to handle it.

Now the ACA subsidies are likely to end. I can't do both. I can't pay high out-of-pocket and high premiums. We don't qualify for Medicaid. I can't pay cash for procedures that cost half a million dollars.

I'm back to pinching pennies, and it sucks that I will now be taking my new husband on this same journey."

"During the horrible months of the breakup, I also ended up moving in with a coworker who also needed a place to stay. We barely knew each other when we moved in because we had only met a couple of months prior, but now she is my absolute best friend, and I can't imagine how I didn't know her before.

My boyfriend (the guy I met in January) treats me better than I ever thought I deserved and is beyond excited to meet his son in a couple of months. Basically, I went from having an abusive boyfriend and zero friends to having my dream man, a son, and a whole support system of friends in about three months. Totally not the direction I thought my life was going to go if you had asked me any time prior to January, but it has been the best time of my life."

"Fast forward three days, and she didn't show up to school. I called her because we had a presentation that was due that day. After multiple calls and texts, she finally picked up, and it sounded like she was in a box. Her voice was very muffled and sounded short. I asked her where she was, and that's when she hung up. 

I walked into math class, and my teacher was absent.

Turned out my friend and my math teacher had been sleeping together, and her brother didn't like that, so he killed the teacher."

"When I started out as a 20-something, I could never have imagined that once I 'made it,' how cruelly I would lose so much."

"There's a lot more, but I'll give some highlights:

We moved into his neighborhood when he was 11, and I was 14. When I asked him when he started thinking of me as more than a friend, he said, 'The day we met, I thought I wanted to marry you.' My younger brother and his older brother were best friends all throughout middle school and high school, so he was at my house all the time.

We lost touch after I started college, then when I needed a place to stay closer to campus, he reached out and told me they had a room in his great-grandmother's big family house I could live in. So before he joined the Army, I was his roommate.

We were able to chat online while he was deployed, and that made it easier for him to tell me how he felt. When he came home, he was stationed two states away, so we did long distance. Then he came into town and was awful to me. So I broke up with him; it completely shattered me.

When he came back into town to visit family, we had a long talk. He confessed that he had been diagnosed with PTSD and had really been struggling. He told me all about his therapy, and he asked me what he needed to do in order for us to try again. I told him one thing I needed to know was that he was serious about me. He told me he planned to marry me. I thought that was pretty serious, so we tried again.

When the doctors in the Army weren't taking his symptoms seriously, I called them and asked what I could do. They told me I would have to marry him. So I did. After that, I could speak to the people in charge of his care. One of them told me I could try to write a letter explaining how his behavior had changed since he returned from his deployment, but it wouldn't really help, since I married him after he came home, so I didn't really 'know' him until after his injuries. I told this guy that I'd known my husband since he was 11. I could tell you what he was like before puberty. Later, someone else told me my letter was a huge help.

He has always worked on himself, and he has always tried to be better. Something must be right because when people post things like 'I want to find my person and spend 50 years in love with them,' I think…50 years is not enough with this man."

Admittedly, this is going to sound like it's out of a romantic comedy movie, but I swear to the deities, this is how it happened:

My first week in college, I made friends with a bunch of guys, and we were talking about which of the girls in our class would be good to tap. Being young, foolish, and excessively arrogant, I declared that they could choose whoever they wanted, and I could have her by the time the semester ended.

So they were throwing out names, and one of them declared that he was going to win this bet easily. He named a girl who was highly invested in her grades and grew up with traditional values in a strict Chinese household.

Of course, I took this bet. And I imagine you know where the story is going.

I decided to go all-out with this girl. And through those little bits and pieces of conversation, I found a genuinely intriguing and wonderful person. By the end of the semester, I told my friend that I didn't care about our 'bet', I was going to take her seriously. He told me he already knew. It was at this moment that I realized I was in love with this girl."

"She didn't want to come off as a loser who traded me for a stepdad who didn't want kids, even though that's exactly what happened. Their marriage lasted about 20 months."

"He and his partner are excellent people."

"SECOND TWIST: I had never spoken to my biological father until a few weeks ago. Turns out, he changed his mind on the day I was born. As soon as he saw me and held me, he fell in love. He proceeded to flip out about his decision, and everyone told him it was too late. He refused to sign the papers for a while. Eventually, he calmed down and agreed to sign since it was the best thing for me, but throughout my childhood, he tried sending me birthday presents and letters; my parents told him it had to stop. I didn't know any of this until recently. I grew up thinking of him as some jerk guy, but he's actually pretty cool."

"Cut to December 2016; he was honorably discharged due to being diagnosed as diabetic. He was also in the middle of divorcing wife #2, who had already moved back to her hometown. He was a motorcycle freak, and the day he was officially discharged, he bought a brand new one to celebrate leaving the military and his divorce. That day, we were talking on the phone, making all kinds of plans, talking about us finally having our chance to really be together. Around 7:30 pm, he told me he was going to get ready to go out. I told him I loved him, then went back to work, where I bartended from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Around 9 p.m., I got a link from his best friend to a news article from NOLA news. The image in the article was his brand new bike, crashed, lying on the road at the end of a skid mark, fluids leaking everywhere.

The headline 'Motorcyclist thrown from Causeway: Missing'.

They didn't find his body for two weeks. It was the longest two weeks of my life. I don't even know who I am anymore. He was ingrained in every bit of who I am, and I'm still struggling with it almost two years later. I still wake up some mornings and try to text him like I always would.

It's just so weird. The timing of all of our dreams coming together in one day, and then every bit of it just gone, in an instant, that very same day. "

"They refused to sign the papers and started saying the wildest lies to keep me in there longer. I ended up spending three more months in there. One day, I woke up for the morning group meeting, and they told me to pack my stuff, telling me I was going to a GROUP HOME for foster kids. It's been many years since all of that. I don't hold hostile feelings about it anymore, but at the time, I felt so betrayed.

Although it's not the best memory, I’m glad it happened. That's where I met my husband. We've been together for six years and married for five. We have two daughters, and we are raising my younger kid brother. I'm doing better in life and am more stable than anyone else in my family. If this hadn't all happened, I would probably still be addicted to drugs with no real future."

"I talked to a buddy I trusted about the whole situation. He told me not to worry too much. He said she could just be going through some things, and the last thing she wanted was to talk about it. I disregarded what he said and asked her what was wrong until she answered. We ended up getting into an argument, resulting in her stepping outside. I calmed down and went outside to apologize. She tells me she was going for a drive.

It got late, and I fell asleep on the couch in the basement.

I woke up the next morning to find that she had taken all her clothes and jewelry from the upstairs bedroom. Her car was gone, and she wouldn't answer her phone.

I called her friends and my friends, and no one seems to know where she went. At that point, I accepted the fact that she wouldn't be coming back.

I got a text later that day from her saying that she thought we needed to see other people. I was devastated and didn't know why she decided to break up.

I went to my friend's house (the same guy I mentioned earlier) to watch football and talk about my relationship. He's an understanding person, and I trusted him to listen. When I went upstairs to use the bathroom, I found items similar to what my girlfriend had — an orange toothbrush and a pink hairbrush. I left the bathroom and peeked into his bedroom and found suitcases of her clothes. I then knew what I had to do.

I rushed down the stairs and confronted the backstabber. I got furious and stormed out of the front door. I couldn't believe I trusted that guy. I had opened up to him many times, and he'd just betrayed our friendship.

I felt miserable. I left town to stay with my parents for a little while. Needless to say, I'll never trust anyone like that ever again."

"Knowing this, and using meds and habit changes, this has been the most productive, fulfilling, and overall happy month I've had in the past 10 years."

"Pretty similar story for me. My parents wanted three kids, and they had three, but I wasn't one of them. Their youngest died only a few months old, and after grieving, they decided they still wanted three kids. So here I am.

It definitely feels like I'm living a stolen life."

"My father instantly left the company and prepared for a lawsuit, but in the meantime, this man ran the company into the ground. He tried to embezzle as much money as he could from the place and ended up being sued by the employees before my dad could even get to him. Like THAT, my family lost everything, including my college fund. All because of the greed of a man I thought was great. BAM! Twist. Fuck."

"I've never really talked to her about why she did it because it just seemed so weird. She was a really sweet girl; we stayed friends for a year or so until I moved. But what are the odds that I'd run into that guy at all?"

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