I'm not really sure if what follows really counts as a myth since it wasn't really the biggest secret in my family (except to me, of course) but this is my best shot at one.
One I can think of starts right around the time my parents got divorced. It was around 1994 my parents finally decided to get a divorce. They had been together since 1986 but the last of those years were filled with a large amount of fighting. Eventually they just decided that to end the marriage.
Pretty soon afterwards, my mom and I had to move out of the house they had lived in together. The reason I was told at my young age was that the house was messed up and needed a lot of things fixed. The real reason was never actually given to me but I can assume now that it had something to do with her inability to pay for it at the time.
That was the time we started living one of the approximately 7+ apartments we would live in. They ranged from small apartments to townhouses through the years. During this time I spent a lot of time at my grandparent's house. They were some of the nicest people you could meet, my grandma had been a teacher when she was younger and was responsible for most of the good grades that I would get in grade school.
Their neighbors on one side had a grandchild and the neighbors to the other side had a lot of them so naturally I had been friends with all of them since I was born.
Anyway, so I started spending a lot of time over there because of the many kids that I had to play with and loved hanging out with. Well, that's what I was told and believed at least. The real reason was so that my mom could work the large amount of hours that she had at her multiple jobs. She was mainly working at two restaurants as a waitress trying to support not only herself but me as well.
Eventually she also went back to community college to earn a degree so she could get a stable job. I'm actually still not overly sure if she graduated college when she initially went out of high school.
So basically for the couple of years that she was trying to stabilize our life after the divorce, I was spending a large amount of time at my grandparent's house having fun with my friends. It took me awhile to realize that that wasn't the only reason I was over there on pretty much a daily basis.
The only reason my family really hid this from me is because there is about no chance I would've understood what was going on anyway. Nonetheless it probably would've had me worried all the time for no reason as well.
No one really ever told me all of this but there were a few ways that I found out. One thing was that being a kid, I would hear a lot of things I wasn't supposed to. They wouldn't mean much at the time but later on it might. Another thing is that my mom would tell me she had just gotten off work when she picked me up from my grandparents just about every time. I eventually also got old enough to realize that moving a lot tends to mean that you have problems with affording the place that you live.
Basically, figuring out this 'myth' just took me getting older.
Well I thought I was done but I guess I also can't finish this without mentioning the delicious taste of Dorito's.
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