The kids were raised on the mantra “Family is everything.” What happens when they find out their parents aren’t who they pretended to be?

The kids were raised on the mantra “Family is everything.” What happens when they find out their parents aren’t who they pretended to be?

Donovan, Melissa (2014-01-02). 1200 Creative Writing Prompts (Adventures in Writing) (p. 17). Swan Hatch Press. Kindle Edition.


“Family is everything!” was the rallying cry of my parents. I’m the oldest of three kids- I have two younger brothers and I’m the only girl. My parents pulled out that phrase every time one of us wanted to do something or go somewhere that wasn’t open to all of us. It didn’t always work out- I don’t really like baseball but I agreed to play Little League because my brothers wanted to play. They drew the line, however, at dance class and since they refused to take dance lessons, I was told to find an activity that all three of us could do together. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find something like that? I’m just grateful they didn’t want to play football.

“Family is everything” came into play for social events and holidays as well. I was invited to a sleepover party at a friend’s house but it fell on the same day as my youngest brother’s birthday, and so my parents nixed the sleepover. I felt really sorry for my middle brother when his junior prom was the same day as the family reunion- guess which event he attended? I think his girlfriend broke up with him over that one. As we got older it became more and more difficult to insist on doing things as a family but believe me, my parents tried.

“Family is everything” also meant that you supported the family through thick and thin. If someone picked on my little brother, I was expected to step in and defend him. An insult or injury to one was an insult or injury to all. It was kind of nice to have built-in defenders but it could be a pain to have Mom swooping in to fight our battles for us.

My parents must have come up with this “family is everything” when they had kids. They rarely talked about their own families and we had never met any of our grandparents; they had all died before we were born. We would talk about it sometimes and wonder why they were so adamant about "family togetherness." It was great to be close and luckily we all got along, but why were they so focused on “family is everything?” For years we batted ideas around but never came up with a good theory. We badgered Mom and Dad for years with questions about why and how they came up with their mantra and begged them to ease up, but they rarely  strayed and kept us on a leash, too.

We grew up, went off to college, built careers, had our own families. We had all decided long ago that family was important but we wouldn’t force our own families to follow the “family is everything” rule. We all settled within 100 miles of each other, mostly to please our parents, but it worked out for all of us. Mom and Dad kept trying to impose FIE from time to time but I think they realized that it was a lot harder once we had our own spouses and children.

Years passed and Mom and Dad grew older and retired from their jobs as professors. They depended on each other and were totally devoted to each other. It was almost as if the two of them made one whole person- Mom couldn’t drive, so Dad did the driving and Dad couldn’t manage the stairs, so Mom did the laundry. They died within weeks of each other; one couldn’t survive without the other. With sad hearts, my brothers and I met at Mom and Dad’s house one weekend to pack up their things and prepare the house to be sold.

We had a lot of good memories to share as we found mementos of family vacations and events. We found old programs and had a good time reminiscing about school plays and concerts, and shared a laugh when we found Mom’s shell collection. We worked our way through the house and saved the attic for last.

Our old attic was a mysterious place. Mom and Dad kept the door locked and never let us in the attic, citing danger and spiders and mice (which were enough to keep me out of there). We found the attic key in Dad’s desk drawer and prepared for our first-ever trip into the family attic. We thought we would find old textbooks, antique furniture, and a bunch of dead mice. We could never have imagined what we would find when we opened that door.

Sometimes when you’re a kid and things are going badly, you think that you must be adopted because you couldn’t do things as well as everyone else. I remember my youngest brother saying that he had to have been adopted because he couldn’t sing a note while the rest of us sang, if not perfectly, at least passably well. I thought I was adopted when I got my first “C” in high school- no one in our family ever got a “C” on anything. It never occurred to us that our parents had a big secret.

In that attic we found…big floppy shoes. Enormous hats. Brightly -colored wigs. Make up kits. Sparkly costumes and tutus. A unicycle. And posters. Posters all over the walls, garish posters proclaiming that the circus was coming to town. And on those posters were pictures of the performers, including pictures of our mom wearing a tight white costume and hanging from a trapeze. Another poster showed a crazy clown, and when we looked at it closely we realized it was our father. Our parents had been circus performers! Why had they kept this a secret? We searched the attic for more clues.

We opened one trunk and found photo albums of the circus owners, their families, and their performers. It was a family business and we found letters and documents that revealed that Mom and Dad’s parents had been major partners in the circus. We poured over pictures of Dad in a bunch of different clown costumes, and of Mom learning to fly on the trapeze. There were other performers’s pictures but none of the first names were familiar to us.   We wondered- could any of these people be our relatives? The grandparents that we never knew? Their last names were familiar and some of them even looked like Mom and Dad, including a frightening-looking bearded lady with Dad’s eyes and nose. The last set of letters was dated over fifty years ago and it seemed that the two families- Mom’s and Dad’s- had a bitter argument and sold their portions of the circus to other owners. No wonder Mom and Dad believed that “family is everything;” their families, once so close, had been torn apart.

Once we got over the shock, we had to laugh at the irony- Mom and Dad ran away from the circus to become college professors!