17 Secrets Parents Hid From Their Children Until They Were Older

9.

“My dad was in prison before I was born. I never would’ve known about it, but he violated his parole when I was a baby and the FBI came for him five years later, when my parents and I were living across the country under fake names. (It was much easier to stay under the radar in the analog age.) The feds took him away and he served eight months before he was released. I’d ask my mom over the years what he did, and she’d lie and say it was racketeering. (My dad was Italian). Finally, when I was in college the Internet was developing past AOL and you could find criminal records online. I looked up my dad and finally saw what his underlying crime was all those years earlier: murder.”

“He killed a criminal informant and did 12 years. That’s actually how he met my mom. Right before he got paroled, she was visiting prisons as part of the nascent prison reform movement in the ’70s and she fell in love with him almost immediately. He got out, they had me, and he thought he was gonna be a mobster again but he got caught with a gun and coke thanks to a criminal informant. Instead of facing the music, he took my mother and me and went on the lam. Finally away from the streets, he focused on building his family. He taught himself how to clean and repair carpets and built a business from scratch. By the time the FBI came for him, he was reformed. When he was released he went back to his 9 to 5 life. He died of cancer when I was 23, and my mom followed four years later. They’ve been gone a long time now, but they were my best friends, and I’ll never forget how hard they worked to keep our family intact.”

—jenmas