Your Dirty Deeds: To Tell or Not to Tell

Contrary to the cookie-cutter way you portray yourself to your grandkids, your salacious past made you the fun-loving grandparent you are today. Those moments should just never creep into dinner conversation... or can they?

There are secrets we keep, some not even suitable for virgin ears. These tales of debauchery and wrong-doing may even include tidbits your own children don’t even know — so of course the grandchildren are safely shielded from the torrid truth. But what happens when a juicy bit slips out? How do you deal? We asked some sinners to share their scandals.

“I was at a party and I did a line of cocaine once,” 61-year-old Maryanne shared with a bit of shame. “But it burned my throat and I didn’t like it. It was the ’70s — people were doing a lot worse!”

Does she want her granddaughter, age 7 months, to ever find out? Absolutely not. “I am very open with my kids, but there’s something different about revealing that kind of information to my grandchild. If the story involving wild parties ever presented itself, I would just shrug it off and say something like, ‘That was different era… a long time ago.’” Maryanne’s going to sugar-coat that tale.

Katharine’s story is quite complicated. “I was married to a man named Joseph and we had two children. Joe came home with Tim, one of his co-workers, and it was love at first sight,” she revealed. “I left Joe for Tim and, sadly, Joe passed away a few years later. Tim raised my kids like they were his own and they called him Dad." Katharine says the kids do remember their biological father even though he died when they were young. However, the grandchildren don’t know that Joe even existed. "You know teenagers — they are at that age where I fear they will think badly of me if they know the truth. I also fear they would reject Tim, who has nurtured them since they were born.”

Tim and Katharine, who wouldn’t disclose their ages, have been asked how they met by their grandchildren and they have kept it simple: “We said it was through a work colleague and that from the minute we laid eyes on each other, we knew we had to be together.”

Is the omission of the whole truth a lie? In a way, yes, but we do it to protect the feelings of others.

Henry has tales from the Vietnam War that he wouldn’t dare tell his grandchildren. “I haven’t even told my own kids. There are things I had to do that no daughter of mine should ever hear,” the 67-year-old said. He admits, however, to sharing details with his sons-in-law.

Sometimes confiding in the same sex grandchild is more apropos, and it leads to kinship, not judgment.

“I was a wild one in my late-teens/early twenties,” 60-something Madeline whispered. “I spent a good part of a year — a year I was supposed to be in college — on the road with a very well-known rock band… on the arm of the lead singer,” she shared with a devious smile. “I wouldn’t dare tell my sons that, but my daughter knows, and once her daughter is old enough, I may even share it with her, too.”

So how does Madeline explain her trunk filled with memorabilia from that time? “I tell my sons that I was doing a story on the band for school,” she said. “I’ll probably tell my granddaughter the same thing… until the time is right.”

“I used to grow pot in my garage,” 70-year-old Marty revealed. “I had the hydroponic lamps and everything. I would light up almost every night after dinner… until my teenage daughter walked in on me.”

His ganja days are long behind him, but Marty’s memory of how his daughter reacted is still very fresh. “She called a family meeting,” he said. “And she told me that I was risking her career of wanting to become a teacher someday by keeping drugs in the house. My 15-year-old daughter! So mature, so concerned. She thought if the police caught me, she would also be charged, and then have a criminal record, which would prevent her from realizing her goals. My heart sank,” he confessed. “I would never want my kids to feel I let them down or prevent them from following their dreams, so I took my plants to the shed out back instead.”

“My daughter has brought it up at the worst times!” he said. “It was a holiday, maybe Thanksgiving, and we’re all enjoying coffee and digesting, and she says, ‘Hey, Dad, remember when I caught you smoking pot?’ There’s my 12-year-old grandson looking at me like I suddenly became super cool, and I thought, ‘I don’t want him to think bad of me or, worse, tell other kids at school.’ That would then lead to us having a bad reputation. But then I thought, ‘Screw it… I am who I am’ and fessed up to it.”