Armchair Anonymous: Parent's Secret

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Aren't You Anonymous. We have a fun prompt today. Tell us about a secret your parents kept from you as a kid. Yes, these really run the gambit.

There's some serious ones, there's some funny ones. Yes. Yeah, it's good. And there's no pukey stuff.

No. That I recall. Although I often forget. But there is an animal who passes.

Okay. But it's not gory. It's not a dog either. Okay, or a cat.

Or a rabbit. Or a rabbit, yeah. But closest to a rabbit. Yeah.

Yeah. I think a rabbit pest, okay? No, people did not like when I was trying to catch that mouse. Oh, they didn't.

Or rat. I don't know if they didn't, but I assume they didn't. I caught a mouse the other day. You did?

In the bus. Again? I know. These mice love the bus.

Who could blame them? I know. Yeah. They're really smart.

Yeah. But then we released it. In your backyard, in fact. Oh, no!

Yeah, and when I say we, I mean Carly. Dax! I can't start out with a mouse. Although it would be ironic.

He'll leave. There's nothing to eat over there yet. Oh, my God. We're going to start a war with each other.

We're going to have a mouse war. A mouse war. No, I won't be doing it. I'll forbade it one.

Okay. So, please enjoy Parents' Secrets. Hard times, come and go. Good times, take them slow.

My life, I had them go. But one thing, you gotta know, I'm gonna keep it shining. Hi. Hi.

Deepest apologies. Our previous prompt, we were talking to people, was stalking. Everyone in the stories was like 45 minutes, so we're so sorry we're behind. Holy shit.

No, it's okay. And get ready for those. They are, woo. Yeah, you're going to listen to those at high noon, not at night.

No, high noon. Good advice. Today I was at the gym, and I was listening to the gym one. On the treadmill, laughing.

That's one of the best visual stories. It is so funny. I was like laughing at you laughing. It was so good.

That one really got me on. It really did. I was crying laughing on the treadmill, but I kept my sweater on because I learned so much from that one. Are we calling you Susan?

Suzanne. Suzanne. It's spelled wrong, but my mom had a lot going on at the time, which we'll hear in the story, so we forgive her. Okay, and before we get there, even though we're making it for a lost time, you have that blurry thing on in your background, but what's happening is one of your pink shoes is popping out every now and then, so at first I thought, oh, she has like an emoji thing happening that my kids put on when they're talking, and I was like, her children must use this account, and they've got the pop-up emojis.

Not the case. No, I'm in my closet, and I did artfully arrange cute shoes right behind my head, looking back to do, but I don't have it on blur, so you can trust me. Okay, great. We call it set decoration in show business.

Set decoration, exactly, exactly. Also, I just realized this light in the closet is a motion sensor, so it sometimes just turns off. Okay, thanks for warning us. I hope Monica doesn't get triggered without a seizure with pop-up shoes, and we won't double down on your kepper right now, but I know generic brand.

Thank you, generic brand. I would feel horrible. Okay, Suzanne, tell us about a secret your parents kept from you. Okay, I'll go through the story kind of chronologically, and the reveal comes when I'm an adult, and Monica, just so you know, this is a happy story, so if you don't have to be worried, I don't know what you've been through today.

Oh, too much, too much. My cortisol levels are high. Okay, I think this will be a happy one. My mom and dad met in the 1960s at work.

My mom played the harp and my dad did the clarinet, and they were in the New York freaking Philharmonic. Oh, my Lord. This is beautiful. Growing up, we used to get Christmas cards from Leonard Bernstein, and I'm like the biggest family disappointment because I play no instruments, I have very little musical talent.

Are you good at math? I'm good at math. Yeah, because they say classical musicians are really good at math. But I'm not good at classical music, but I can sing, I guess.

I mean, I can like rock the karaoke mic, but that's a slightly different chromosome, right? Yeah. So they got together. They were in New York City, and they were like these cool musicians, and then I was born in 1969, and my sister, Lori, was born 15 months later, and then my mom and dad got divorced, like right after that, so I was a baby.

Those kids can ruin a marriage, let's just say. My mom had to quit the Philharmonic. He and I and Lori took a train from New York City, and we moved to Peoria, Illinois. Oh, big change.

Big change. Yeah, poor mom. But we moved in with our grandparents. They were great.

Their names were Jack and Ethel. Jack and Ethel in Peoria had just built their retirement party house, and instead of getting to have their, like, groovy parties they got, two harps in the conversation pit, and two toddlers, and we used to scratch our names into the wallpaper, you know, I had, like, that 3D wallpaper, and I remember writing Suzanne in the wallpaper, and, like, doing striptease, Copic Cabana dances in that conversation pit. They never really got to have a party, because we lived there our whole childhood. Yeah, it never ends.

It was great. I grew up in Peoria in that house with my mom, grandparents, and my sister, and we really never heard from my dad again, although sometimes we would see him, because he was still in the New York Philharmonic, so, like, we would see him on PBS playing the clarinet, and my grandma would be like, hey, kids, come in here, your dad is on TV, but we never saw him again, and, really, the only memory I had of him was his shoes. I told this story to a friend in college, and she's like, you should paint that memory, so I did, and I'll just show you really quick. I still have this painting.

So you're a painter, so you are very artistic. I'm not a painter, and this is blurry. Oh, it's blurry. Anyway, I don't know what to do with it.

Okay, it's some legs and some shoes, yeah. The visual component of the story didn't pan out, but that's okay. That's okay. Exactly, and also, I realized we were on a podcast, but anyway, just for you.

So my sister, Lori, 15 months younger, we were complete opposites, and we used to fight all the time, and it would always come out like, I think you're adopted. And one time, just to get me in trouble, my sister carved the words, Lori is an asshole, onto her own bedroom door. Oh, self-aware. I mean, it was totally to frame me.

I was going to be thinking. That's very Machiavellian. I got to applaud Lori. I didn't even get it.

It was so dark. Wow. I am pretty proud of her. That was a good move.

And then, when I was growing up, my mom, who was pretty quirky and baseline, did a couple of really weird things that, in retrospect, were maybe, like, clues to the secret. So I'll tell you two. I have a sniff of the secret. I know.

Do you want to whisper to Monica? No, I don't want it. She hates that. She hates that.

So, weird thing, number one. When I was 19, I was living in Peoria, but headed out to a girls' weekend in New York City. And my mom was like, hey, while you're in New York, why don't you look up Dr. Nash?

He's the OB that delivered you. His office is on Park Avenue. I'm sure he would love to meet you. I was like, yeah, mom, whatever.

That is so weird. That's preposterous. OBs aren't trying to get reconnected with the 10,000 babies. I don't have my own ideas.

Yeah, they don't want to, like, see you again. He's missed you. Yeah, don't worry. I did not go hang out with my mom.

I'm a gynecologist. So, went to the girls' weekend. Had a lot of fun. Forgot all about it.

Then, I was 22, 23, in my first kind of serious relationship with a boy. And it was getting pretty serious. So, my mom wanted to meet his parents. And instead of just being, like, chill and normal, she started grilling them.

I'm like, where are you from? Are you from New York? What hospital was Rob born in? And what day?

And she was asking him all these, like, really super personal, cringey questions. And she wasn't like that. She was weird and quirky, but not that way. Well, she spent a lot of time with herself in a harpsichord.

That's a personality type. Okay, but now I do want us to tell what you think it is, because I want to say what I think. Well, I think the reason the dad was willing to just bounce all together is he found out these weren't his children. Right.

Is that your guess? I think there's more. You guys are good. You guys are good.

When I tell us the right party, people are just like, look. That's why I resist doing it, because I don't mean to take the fun out of your reveal, but I'm such a fucking skeptic that thinks everyone's counting everyone. I'd pick it up quick. I don't know.

And the topic is parent's secret, so there's got to be something. Huge clue. So, she's grilling the lover, which is uncomfortable, and she's telling me to meet the OB, which is super weird, and I didn't put this together until years later. So, now we're going to skip forward 20 years.

20 years. I'm 42 years old at this point. My mom is sick. She actually got cancer, and she was dying, and she sat me and my sister, Lori, down, and she told us this big secret that she had kept her whole life.

So, here's what I know. Things in the bedroom were not working at all with her husband. Yep. Your quote, dad.

Maybe he and Leonard were more. We don't know. There's a few. She couldn't get pregnant.

He couldn't get her pregnant. She went to the doctor, and she's like, I really want to have babies. So, he's like, okay, well, we have this cutting-edge new process. Yes, yes.

If you want to get pregnant, come back on Tuesday. So, on Tuesday, he entered the exam room with a vial of semen, a medical-grade turkey baser, and proceeded with what we now call artificial insemination. She got pregnant and had me. She didn't ask too many questions.

She was just so happy to have me. So, she went back 15 months later for another insemination. She was like, more of the same, please, and had Lori. And then, obviously, straight on the marriage, you guys were right, walked away.

And she always kind of suspected that somebody in the office, Dr. Nash, or one of his partners, might be our biological father. Yes, a very common of this time. There's been a lot of podcasts about this.

Well, Race to 35, we had this exact story. Yes, and there's a lot of scandal and lawsuits and people meeting each other. So, that's where my story continues. But this is a happy story, so we're not mad at anybody, unlike some other people.

You can see that I'm like a happy person. So, internet rabbit hole was entered by me. I googled Dr. Nash and only found his obituary.

But then, I went crazy. I, like, found all of his partners from that time. They're all 90-plus at this point. But one of them was still alive, retired, and living in Florida, as you could expect.

And I emailed him, and he agreed to talk to me, and he filled me in on the process. And it sounds like you know some of this, but I'll just give you a summary, and then I'll tell you how I met some siblings. But in 1969, artificial insemination was brand new. There were no sperm banks.

There was no, like, donor registry, nothing. So, the doctors were the sperm donors. Yes. Really quick, every time I've heard this story roll out on a podcast or in a documentary, I mean, it's obviously wrong in a lot of ways.

But at the same time, I can wrap my head around the fact, like, this woman really wants a baby. I'm a fucking doctor. There's worse sperm donors. She wants a baby.

I have sperm. You could think it was an act of generosity. I think it's positioned a lot of times as, like, an egomaniacal doctor who wants tons of replicas of themselves out there. But I don't know that that's my total conclusion on it.

After learning all of this, I agree with you. And you're right, there is the other side of it, too, that we've heard a lot about. There's a lawsuit in Washington right now with one of the OBs nearby. Well, because a lot of times they tell you it is a sperm donor.

They lie. And then they just go jack off in the back. There's almost like a, yeah, there's almost a cutoff, like, in the 90s when the infrastructure was there and blah, blah, blah. But, like, in 1969, it is a little bit different of a context.

Yeah, but they need to just say, hey. Hey, this is mine. Yeah. Yeah.

And then these guys probably didn't want to say, like, oh, this is mine because this guy had a family at the time. Yeah, the wife would be like, hon, you can't be impregnating all of you. Well, then that's also why it's not great. Anyway, okay, so go on.

Okay, so I'll tell you my thing, but this is such an interesting conversation, which is why I was so happy to see this prompt. What this guy told me, Florida guy, usually the resident doctors who were in OB-GYN, so the ones that were kind of apprenticing, they weren't paid very well. There'd be, like, $35 a week for work at that time. But they could make 50 bucks if they brought a fresh sperm sample to an office on the day an insemination was scheduled.

So the attending doctors, like Dr. Nash, could call up a resident and be like, hey, can you bring a sample to my office Tuesday at 9? I have an insemination scheduled. And this is rare, but getting more and more common in New York City at that time.

So some guys donated a lot, like, made a ton of extra money. And I actually met some people who all kind of traced back their dad to this one resident who was, like, prolifically donating at the time. Very fertile. Wow.

And they all kind of looked alike, and they all looked like this guy. That's not what happened with me. But some doctors donated a lot. There were a lot of babies born.

There were no records. So there's a lot of past siblings walking around in New York City at that time who didn't know that they maybe were related to each other and maybe could have gotten into a relationship. So that's a little bit gross. And that's why my mom was interrogating my boyfriend, like, just making sure, I know this would be crazy, but what if he's another one and they're about to make in-bred grandchildren for me?

Interesting. I didn't figure out that piece. Well, that was kind of a stretch for her out of all the people in the world. These two New York babies are going to get together.

You never know. But this is her grandchild she's talking about, so she's got to be careful. So she was just making sure that I wasn't about to commit incest, but luckily he was not a sperm donor baby. So then I joined this donor sibling registry, which is this big website where turkey-based babies like me are trying to connect with each other.

And the recommendation there is, like, get your DNA out there on all the websites. So a lot of people do now, and I know you guys have talked about this, too. I sent my DNA to Ancestry.com, 23andMe, to see if I had any half-siblings. And I mailed my DNA, and I waited, and I, like, forgot my password and forgot to check.

This is increasingly common, the story. And that means that happened for her in 1956, they were doing that. Yes, 1953. Oh.

Crazy, crazy time. So I talked to her. We kind of, like, put it together. We met in New York City.

We went to dinner, and she was, like, nonstop talking with her hands the whole time. You guys were similar. Yeah, and my kids were there, they were like, yeah, I think you guys are probably related. And really quickly, does that feel immediately connected?

My children have very little interaction with any of their cousins because of where we live. And my cousin Justin brings his kids over. It's undeniable. They know they're related.

It's so weird. You know, it's hard to know the placebo effect mixed in here, because we kind of knew that we should be alike, but we did think we were alike. Oh, and I sent Emma a picture. Oh, great.

There's more of us, so there's a little more to it. But the thing I think that was the most alike between the two of us is that we both immediately thought that this was, like, a positive thing. She thought her dad was her dad her whole life and knew him. But for her, she was like, this is cool.

I got more family. Everything is good. So the optimism. And some of them, you could go, like, okay, once you find out that the dad wasn't your dad, somehow that would erase the fact that you had been abandoned by your father in your mind for 40 years.

Like, but that can't happen, right? No, it still hurts. You can just, like, clean the slate of abandonment. I have been thinking about that because someone like me could grow up and think, oh, you know, this guy never even wanted to meet me.

And I do remember thinking when I acted like an asshole, I'm like, well, he must be an asshole, so that's, like, where I got it. Yeah, sure, sure. But I had a pretty good life. And you had grandpa, obviously, was a father figure.

Yeah, I don't think I have the sad part of the story that other people in this situation might have. I had it pretty good. Being raised by your grandparents, five stars. Highly recommend it.

Oh, yes. Yeah, I know. When I'm a grandparent, I definitely want to, like, help out. Now, as a parent, I'm like, oh, my God, how did they do this all over again?

But for the kids, it was great. I mean, I probably have some issues. I'm a little scathed, but not a majorly scathed. So we looked at Dr.

Nash's obituary again. And he was in med school in 1953 at Columbia. That is where and when Arlene was conceived. And then he worked at Lenox Hill Hospital in 1969.

We know that's when and where I was conceived. And then the obituary was, like, you know, warm smiles, sparkling eyes. Everybody loved him. And we're like, oh, yeah, that's definitely our chance.

Exactly. I'm like, oh, I'm reading into this. I'm like, oh, my God, it's a bully man. So then Arlene and I went down the rabbit hole of Ancestry.com.

And eventually we figured out that his grandparents chased back and were related to us, too. So we were almost positive. It was Dr. Nash.

So from there, my internet stalking skills really came in handy. You know, in an obituary, there's a lot of information. And one of the things you can find out is their kid's name. So he was survived by these two adult daughters in New York.

And, you know, listed their names and their husband's names. So then I found their wedding announcements. Then I found where they worked. And then you guys, I fucking called them.

Were you scared? I was so scared. Yeah. And I actually started with the email.

I'm like, I swear, I'm a normal person. You can Google me. I'm not trying to scam you. I don't need a kidney.

But I think we might be related. So, like, could we meet? And they did not at all know that their dad was, like, donating sperm at work. But they did agree.

They did. Because I was going to point out, the context is so different with the other sister. You guys are both in search of something. These people, in a weird way, you're like, Dad, why did you go do, you know, it's so opposite.

It's only disruptive. Well, unless, like, now you guys have a great relationship. Then that is additive. But they've got to be pretty confident people and well-adjusted to think this is a win for them.

That their dad was out knocking women up. And you have all these half-siblings everywhere. Yeah. For Arlene, he was kind of a kid.

He didn't have a wife and kids yet. But his two daughters are older than me. So I didn't know. And my mom didn't know.

But he knew he was, like, a married guy giving sperm to a person. So, like, it could be super awkward. But, you guys, it's not. We love each other.

And Emma has a picture of the four of us. Oh, that's so sweet. So when I tell the story, I always say, like, they sent in their cheek swab to confirm the theory. And now I have three new sisters.

And none of them is an asshole. Oh, wonderful. I think this guy was a very generous, good person. Because every sister is nice and kind and generous of spirit.

And his daughters agreed. They're like, this is totally the kind of thing Dad would have done. He loved people. The only tricky thing.

But the one I'm hung up on is when did he decide. He's like, just because he thinks your mom's hot. It's like, when did he decide to donate his own sperm versus the resident? Yes, that's a fair question.

Well, they're not always available. Maybe it was a down day. Maybe he did kind of think she was cool. Because she was cool.

She was, like, a harvest in the New York Olympics. But they definitely didn't have sex. I don't buy that as attractive to her. But what I do think is possible is you're like, I'm going to combine my sperm to create a kid.

So probably I'm not giving my sperm to a junkie that comes in. Why? I do still think you have some bizarre primitive notion that my offspring need to be taken care of. So you would be selective a bit if you were in his situation in that moment.

Yeah, I don't know. I just think that part's interesting. Okay. I wish we could ask him.

Or he's like, well, the resident didn't show up. She's ovulating. Shit, I gotta get this done. But are you and your sister biological?

Lori did a DNA test too, and she and I found out that we are half sisters. And then she found her donor, who was like another OB-GYN, I think a resident during that time. So she didn't get the same sperm that I did, even though my mom kind of wanted that. And I think that was a good call by Dr.

Nash, because he didn't want to have a whole family with this lady. Yeah, but also this... Okay. Interesting.

Wow. I know. You're uncomfortable, Monica. I'm not uncomfortable.

I'm just uncomfortable with the fact that your mom thought something was happening and it wasn't. That feels unfair to me, for her. It's weird. I can't imagine this.

As a patient now, there's so much more disclosure. She said she didn't really ask that many questions. Right. When you want something, you're not trying to poke holes in it.

I want a baby. You're a hooker crook. I'm not trying to talk myself out of it. Exactly.

Like, well, I get to ask three questions of this thing. If I ask too many, I'm not going to get what I want. Yeah, so that makes sense. Yeah, this is kind of a very positive story.

Other than that you thought your dad didn't care about you. That part's still probably a bit unresolved. Yeah. He was kind of painted as like an asshole by my grandparents.

I think they probably knew what was up, because they were like, yeah, yeah, don't worry about him. We got you. My childhood was actually flat stars. Well, Suzanne, this was awesome.

Yeah, thanks for sharing. Nice to meet you guys. Bye. Okay, take care.

There's a lot to glean from that. You get to choose how you... Of course, how you look at life. Yeah.

You're in the driver's seat. She's the hero of her story, not the victim of her story. Hi. Hello.

Where are you in the world? I am in a suburb outside of Toronto. Oh, wonderful. We are nice neighbors to the north.

And you have a lot of wonderful eclectic clothing. Yes, you have a vibrant aesthetic. I like bright colors. They look good on me, so I'm not going to lie.

I'm not even going to pretend. Greens and purples are my go-to. Yes. Did you grow up in that area?

I did. The story takes place in this area. Oh, it does. I haven't gone too far.

I did go to school in the States, but I came back. Where? All the way to Buffalo. You were like, no, Buffalo's not for me.

I loved Buffalo, but when I was in school, it was right after 9-11, so staying was kind of out of the question. It was kind of hard to get pieces back then, so I had to come home. I got you. Okay, so your parents kept a secret from you.

They did, and this takes place here in the suburbs back in like 1988 or 89. Okay, great. I don't really know when. I was eight or nine.

Monica was one or two. Yep. I was coming home from school. It was a short walk, and when I turned the corner, I noticed there was police cars in the driveway, and I was like, oh, shit, this is not good.

We live in a very upscale suburb, so not what I would be expecting to come home to, and I'm panicking, like, oh, did something happen to one of my parents? See if you're missing anything valuable. Valuable being a key word. I'm eight.

Game boy. Yeah, so I go upstairs looking for the one key thing that if it was going to be devastated, which was my regular handball, which I took everywhere with me, but luckily it was there. My sister checked herself. All of our stuff was there.

Obviously, we didn't have anything of value for the thieves to take, so I went downstairs, and we chatted, and I was like, no, no, there's nothing missing. So after we've had a couple of hours to kind of digest with everything's going on, I was like, oh, you know, we haven't checked on our pet guinea pig. Backstory is my father never wanted dogs. Oh, my God.

Don't do it. We're all thinking of it. Okay, let's keep hearing it. So we have guinea pigs because my father did not want a pet dog.

He said it was too much work. We had to go look over where the cage was supposed to be, and the cage was empty. And I was like, Mom, what happened to Poppy? Poppy being the name of the pet guinea pig.

It had beady red eyes. That's why it got its name for Poppy. Anyways, she was like, oh, my God, the robbers were taking it in the robbery. And I was like, why would the robbers take a guinea pig?

Okay, so you already thought this weird. Were you suspicious from the jump? Yeah, because I was like, really? And my mom's like, maybe they had kids that really needed a pet.

And I was like, okay. But I trusted my mom. Okay, really quick, Christine. I'm just imagining there was a real robbery.

How quickly into this was your mom or dad like, well, look, God gave us lemons, but we've got a real opportunity here. I wonder how long into processing the fact that their house has been burglarized before they're like, fuck, we could get rid of this guinea pig right now. No, I don't think. I think the whole thing.

I think the whole thing. You think even the rock? Yes. That's the frog.

All right, let's see. I love the idea of them walking through all the houses. Are your jewels here? No, they're gone.

Oh, my God. Okay, my tools are still here. And then you get in the kitchen. Oh, well, this is very upsetting.

They hired the ambulance guy. Okay, go on, please. So through high school, through university, I would tell the story. I'm like, you would never believe our house was broken into, which was first a weird thing for the area.

But I was like, they stole our guinea pig. And my sister and I would repeat this story to people. And there were times when I was in high school, people would be like, there's no way they stole your guinea pig. And I'd be like, ask my mom.

And my mom would back up my story that the guinea pig was stolen. And I was like, see? And people are like, that's just so weird. And I was like, well, if my mom's still validating my story, it has to be true.

So come to like when I'm 30 and I'm retelling the story at our cottage with a group of five of my girlfriends. And my mom's sitting there listening. And she's like, Chris. Are we drinking?

Is mom tipsy? She could have been. Who knows? We're always drinking at the cottage.

Of course. That's why you build a cottage. For no other reason. So she's like, Chris, I really, really should tell you something.

And I was like, what? She's like, the guinea pig wasn't stolen in the rubbish. It died in the commission of that crime. Oh.

And I was like, I'm sorry. She's like, yeah, when I came home, the cage was knocked over. And I guess it had gotten out. But then it was laying dead in the hallway when she came home.

Oh, no. This is much sweeter. Although now we're already on the foundation of deception. Is this part two of the story?

She's like, well, she's no longer buying this. How do we? She tells me this. And then one of my friends, who just happened to have my mom as a professor in college.

It was a random fact. I met her after the fact. And then she saw my mom when we came up to the cottage. She's like, hey, wait, you were my professor?

And she's like, this story sounded familiar. And I was like, what do you mean this story sounds familiar? I'm just learning this. And she's like, your mom used this story as an example in her organizational behavior class on decision making.

I actually got it from my mom. I was like, I'm sorry. You use this as an example of a moral dilemma. A situation where a person is required to make a difficult choice.

The example involves whether you lie to your children to minimize the trauma of a break-in and tell them their guinea pig was stolen versus die. Or tell them the truth and hope that they can cope with the news. So basically, my mom had decided in that moment that she'd rather not have two traumas in the day, just a singular trauma. So she lied to us for almost 30 years.

Okay. That makes sense. And she probably thought you were eight. You'd forget about that.

And then apparently you've been talking about it for 30 years. But she knew I was still talking about it in high school. So she's teaching a class on it. And everyone's kind of can't move on.

To further that, she was like, I would tell my class that if you ever saw my children, please don't tell them this story. Oh my God. This is incredible. It is.

Wait, I am sad, though, that the whole robbery wasn't made up. I wanted the dad mostly to go like, you know, we've got a golden opportunity here to get rid of this. That would be really bad. But that's what happened.

Remember the cat one? Yeah, yeah. We've now had two armchair anonymous stories that are siblings. It just happened to be like too random.

And the dad is a real hoot in both of these stories. If that was your dad, it would have been my story where they just made up this entire robbery because the guinea pig got out and they didn't want it to be their fault. Oh, you went to there. Like, I got you.

He didn't want to be their fault. I was like, sorry, there was a robbery. No, we have staged this robbery. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. No, the robbery really happened. Oh, unfortunately.

It was a murder. It was a murder. I don't know. Maybe it died just in complete shock of what was transpiring in the house.

It just was crazy. And it was the 80s. I'm not really sure what they could have stolen because we had one of those really large, like the TV was a piece of furniture. It wasn't something you could just follow.

When you're telling the story, I'm remembering when we came home and our house was robbed and it was my mom and my brother and I. Yeah, and they stole like the two jam boxes we had gotten for Christmas from my grandpa. They got nothing. Oh, wow.

That was great. That was. I really enjoyed that. Thank you for this experience.

It's crazy. I am now the coolest aunt. Apparently, that's what my niece and nephew have told me. So I wanted to shout out to my niece and nephew, Hunter of Scarlet.

Oh, what's up? Coolest aunt in the world. I'm the coolest aunt because one, I was on the podcast and two, I work for a company that makes the Canadian version of Lunchables. Oh, that is really cool.

That's very cool. Wow. What a life. Well, Christine, that was a humdinger.

Yeah, thank you so much for that. You gave me a lot of giggles. Thank you for having me. Yeah, our pleasure.

All right. Take care. Bye. What a hoot.

Oh, man. It's so funny. You and I came to such a different. Yeah.

I'd never kill my kid's pet. Most people wouldn't. But I'm a very ethical person, as you know. It turned really high on the scale.

Here's Wayne. Wayne Johnson. Wouldn't that be great? We said that before, I guess.

Just to shit talk to you, Jim. Yeah. Hi, Dwayne. Good to see you both.

Yes, it's Dwayne, yeah? It is, yeah. And where are you? I'm in Burlington, Ontario, which is about 40 minutes west of Toronto.

Yeah, this is going to blow your mind. Or maybe why we just talked to Christine in the exact same spot. We have no Canadian callers in the suburb of Toronto. And now back to back.

That's funny. Maybe if you can meet you. Oh, this is what we could do with our very small sample set. Yeah, I'm married.

Canadian parents are deceptive. Let's proclaim that. Okay. The Canadians, as nice as they are, and as friendly and polite, they lie to their kids.

Yeah, and this one's a weird one. Oh, good. So we had a cottage when I was growing up. And it's about three hours north of Toronto.

We were on this really small lake. Really, really remote. I had lots of great memories there growing up. We water skied, tubed, all that sort of stuff there.

Life's the best life, period, right? It's number one. Yeah. We were a single income family, so we didn't take big trips anywhere.

We had a cottage. We shared it with my grandfather. That was like every summer was going up. So fast forward to maybe 10 years ago, so I was around 30 at the time.

And I found out that the reason that we bought into the cottage was because someone was murdered there. Oh, wow. Wait. Wow.

We need more details. We'll just end it there. We're like, oh my God. Thank you, Dwayne.

Have a great day. Hey, what? The cottage was originally purchased. It was my grandfather.

He was a policeman. It was another policeman and a real estate agent. Her name was Maureen. And from the time I was born, it was only my parents and my grandfather that I knew owned the cottage.

And at some point there, I found out that there had been a third owner before. My parents said, yeah, somebody else used to own it. Apparently, they got into an argument and he murdered her with a rock. Oh, my God.

Very rudimentary. Crime of passion. Very primitive. Oh, crime's a passion for a prop.

Okay. So they already all owned it at that time. Yeah. Okay.

So my parents didn't own it at that point. It was just my grandfather and the other two there. My parents had gone up there before. My dad's pretty handy, so I guess he had done some work in the cottage.

And I guess the rock that they used on the door to sort of prop it open there, he'd walked past it. I don't know how many times. That wound up being the murder weapon. So it's something in his birthry all the time.

So she was killed in the cottage. Yeah. So I think it was 1981 when she was murdered. I tried looking for any kind of news story about that.

Can't find any more details. But yeah, they got the argument. He murdered her with a rock. Apparently, he stuffed her under the bed and made a run for it.

I don't know how far he made it down the road, but the car caught on fire. I think he might have set the car on fire. Police got called out there. And again, like, we're super, super removed.

So the next sort of major city, if you know, Ontario at all, it's about halfway between Huntsville and North Bay. Police get out there. They wind up going down this very quiet road. They go door to door, trying to figure out whose car that was on the road that had been set on fire.