You did what??! But...you're....you're my parents.

My parents meeting was a rather cute story. My father was my mom's high school teacher. There's more to the story, but I've managed to repress most of it.

 

My grandfather was a general in the Shah's army, so my dad spent much of his childhood doing weird Iranian military things. One of his 'outings' included being sent off by his father with a small team to do some scout work on horseback through some dangerous mountain passes. He was maybe 10.

He also vigorously denied ever smoking pot. My mom recalled it was because he was too busy smoking opium. Oh, parents.

My mom also revealed that she went to one of those fancy East Coast boarding schools reserved for the absurdly wealthy, where all her friends had elevators in their houses and such. She always alluded to her family being wealthy growing up, but it was never apparent just how much. Once that story came out, she pulled out pictures of her childhood house in Iran, a HUGE mansion that had been staffed with servants.

She didn't want us to grow up feeling entitled, or thinking we had any ties to that money. Her plan worked, but damn. I want some servants.

 

My mother was a preacher's daughter. Really.
While I was growing up, she was very informative about sex, but always stressed that it was forbidden until you were married. And if you had sex out of wedlock, you were going to hell.
I knew (from my mom) that my dad had fucked a lot of women before he married her. When I asked her about her purity, she insisted that she was a virgin when she got married.
Then my mom died when I was 14.
Her piosity made a big impression on me, and in my early teen years, there were a lot of girls that I turned down because I knew that they had sex, and only "dated" girls who were "wholesome."
Eventually, when I was 17, I became an atheist and had sex.
Fast forward about 8 years.
I was having a few beers with my dad, and somehow the subject of sex-before-marriage came up, and I asked him if he and my mom had sex before marriage.
He laughed, saying of course they did, and that my mom was fucking some other guy (older than both of them, by the way) when he met her, and that he stole her from him.
I felt very cheated by this.
There is no chance of me and my ex-wife pulling that bullshit on our son. I like to think it's for the best.

 

My mum is about the nicest old lady you'd ever meet. She worked for the national telephone exchange and then for a kids counselling telephone line and talks to babies in the checkout line at the grocery store.

My dad is a rough and tumble country boy. He drove trucks and worked on farms untill he found out that he had a gift for teaching and started teaching rural youth education programs and farmers demolitions courses and shit. He fluked into IT in the early 80's and has been doing increasingly senior IT stuff ever since.

My mum however was back in the day, a pretty bad ass biker. She's done the lap of australia clockwise and counter clockwise on a motorbike, shot the windshield out of a tresspassers car, talked kids down from suicide attempts and ended up marrying a gay man the late 70's and having a child with him and pretended to be a real couple for almost 25 years.

My dad is nothing like the 'gay' cliche. He's about the most heteronormative middle aged guy in the world in terms of his interests. His only really 'gay' job was as a Nurse where he worked ER back in the days when civillians also used the military base hospital. Between farm work, industrial transit, nursing and corporate IT - there's not much that he hasn't done - he met my mother when he was doing the serious biker thing. A lot of their old photos are of the two of them on motorbikes in racing leathers or wearing outlaw club colours for a while. My dad looks so fucking weird with a beard. Almost as weird as my mum when she looked like a bikers mole.

Digging a bit further, dad was right into musical theater, which astonished me - since he can't sing worth a damn, but made more sense when he came out.

 

Back when my dad was in school at Auburn University you could not get coors east of the Mississippi River. He and a buddy rented a U-Haul trailer and went on a Smoky and the Bandit trip out west to buy cases of Coors. He said they lived like kings for six months off the profit from selling it out of their apartment.

 

The details of my mom's drama with my older half-brother came to me in pieces over the years. I knew my mom had been married before and had a son, and that when he was a toddler they divorced. One day the father kidnapped him and took off. By the time they found him a couple years later, he had been told lies by the father about her and didn't want to go back to her. I didn't actually meet my half-brother until I was about 11, and we have never had a relationship.

My brother is 8 years older than me. My mom was 24 when she had me. It wasn't until I was an adult that I actually did the math and realized that my mom had my older brother when she was 16...conceived when she was 15. A teen mom in 1965. It kinda blew me away, so I finally asked her to spill that part of the story. Apparently the dude was her first, and when she got pregnant (first time out of the gate) my very religious grandmother demanded they get married. Obviously, from the above paragraph, that turned out well.

All this shit happened to her while she was still a teenager.