I remember one time i woke up, went to the bathroom and noticed the toilet had shit smeared all over it. So I asked my mother, what the hell? She dodges the question and asks me to drive her to the supermarket. Completely unphased by the fact shit is smeared all over the toilet and ignores what I said all together. And no, she wasn’t going to the store to buy cleaners.
Told me god was testing me from all the insane amount of bullying I received at school and if I continued to turn the other cheek I would get rewarded in heaven.
Everytime we would go to outback steakhouse, or texas roadhouse, my mom would steal the steak knives from our table before she left. We probably had about 30 steak knives in our drawer at one point.
They used to yell at the top of their lungs daily at each other. There’s no way to undo the years I witnessed this fighting. It’s was essentially psychological abuse.
Every word coming out of my mom’s mouth to me, was her yelling at me. She also used to hit me. Once she let her boyfriend beat the crap out of me while she stood in the door way and cried but never said a word to him. I then told them I was going to tell a teacher at school and they threatened to pull me from school and homeschool me.
Taking me on “dates” with the married man she was involved with. Worse thing was when we were all invited to his house for dinner. I’m sitting there with his wife, and kids and just expected to make comments about how good the chicken was. His son was showing me off his new bike, I’d gotten the exact same one for my birthday from his dad.
My mom would leave me at random strangers houses while she went out with her bf to go get high. I must of been around 7-8 years old.
I never questioned it when I was little but I do remember being in one house and this guy pulled out this big fucking gun from a dresser drawer. All while I was playing the NES TMNT 2 game with some other kids in that house.
My mom would beat me for the tiniest mistakes, or because she got angry and needed someone to take it out on, or she’d just make a flimsy excuse for why I needed to be beaten
told me and both of my siblings individually and separately that we were the favorite. and that we shouldn’t tell the others because they’d get jealous.
My mom would go to the bar down the road from our apartment when she was in between marriages. I was 5-7 years old. She would even tell me she was leaving, and wrote the phone number down for me to call her if i needed to.
So my mom had this thing called “shut up” spray. If sas a breath spray that she got from the dollar store. Well, it smelled good and it tasted good. So me and my brother obviously wanted it all the time. We only got to use it in the car on the way to like school or whatever. One day she accidentally sprays too much in my mouth and I shut up completely. Which was impressive cuz I was such a chatterbox growing. It didn’t hurt, it just was super intense and felt uncomfortable to talk. So I’d keep quiet and just wait for the super minty flavor to pass.
Momma thought this was FUNNY. Me and my brother would ask for the shut up spray verbatim, but momma would also give it to us if she had like a headache or wanted to see if it would still work. Haha I still get a chuckle out of that. Everyone always looks at me funny when I tell it though haha
Another one, we had to have a rule that front seat couldn’t hit back seat and vice versa when playing slug bug. Momma almost crashed the car one time cuz she turned around to punch us one time haha. And Jesus Christ, I had a bug for a first car and we had to put a rule in place where my car was exempt cuz we’d pass the window and sock the nearest person on the hour hahaha
My dad pushed us relentlessly, using dreams of success to manipulate us into working non-stop. He made us believe that our worth was only tied to do what he says to do, ignoring our feelings and well-being. Looking back, it was less about ambition and more about control.
I was an A/B student that was involved in after school clubs but also had undiagnosed (at the time) AuADHD and so we got into arguments a lot. They removed my bedroom door for more than half of my high school years because I “talked back” and then sent me to the family farm in another state each summer to “go work and get straightened out” by my grandparents and aunts and uncles so that they didn’t have to be around me for the summer. They put me on a greyhound bus by myself at 13 to get me there – wouldn’t even drive or fly me. Jokes on them for that at least. I got to spend my summer riding horses, gathering chokecherries, tending a garden, and just having awesome summers with family that actually understood me.
My mom would smoke in the car with the windows up for most of my childhood. Looking back now, I can only imagine how horrific I smelled when I arrived at school, friend’s house or where ever we were going. I was learning in school how bad second hand smoke was in school and I would beg her to stop. She never stopped.
They used to let me go places with my much older, teenage siblings. I remember riding in the bed of a truck and they were throwing glass bottles at road signs, around ‘78-‘79. This is out in the country, there’s not much to do.
I also remember one of their friends Hank, he was an “older guy” probably in his 20s and he had a house and a truck. There were tie-dyed tapestries and all these cool psychedelic posters, and then when you turned on the black light, the colors glowed. I was enchanted.
I don’t remember anyone smoking pot, but looking back, it seems like that would go with the psychedelic posters and tapestries. I’m pretty sure the glass bottles being thrown from the truck were beer bottles. Good times!
In the 70’s, my mother’s car had a buzzer in the dash when the seat belts were unfastened. She just clicked them together and jammed them down in the seat cushions rather than buckling us up. I didn’t wear a seatbelt until I was in my teens
My bio dad took me (4 at the time) and my brother behind the barn to watch my mom sit with a gun to her head while she contemplated suicide. She didn’t do it and is still alive today. Haven’t seen my bio dad in over 30 years.
I was molested by a family member and my mom made me go tell my bio dad by myself (4 at the time) and when I told him his nephew had touched me inappropriately he responded with “what do you want me to do about it?” The nephew was still allowed to spend the night at our house. 🙄
Enmeshed family. I was pretty much the second husband/dad. listened to my mom or dad talk about their marriage to me. They were young parents that didn’t really know any better. They have since apologized.
Going to list things that would drive my mother into a crying hysterical rage.
Using too many dishes to make dinner, having bangs, boys with long hair, wearing T-shirt and jeans to a football/baseball game (we had to dress up), my dog barking, making mashed potatoes from scratch, going to the comic book store, going to the arcade, going to the library, going anywhere, a stranger asking for money, house too hot, house too cold… And being convinced the house was on fire despite no smell, no smoke and no fire.
Drink and drive. They’re from eastern Montana and the towns are few and far between. If they were driving anywhere from 100-300 miles away they’d stop at every single bar along the way for a few beers. Us kids would stay in the car (station wagon) and they’d bring us cokes and chips, or sometimes the bar would let us in and we’d play shuffleboard and eat candy bars.
Starting when I was 14, my single mom would give me $40, tell me she was going to Mexico or Napa for a week & this money was for me & my 11 year old brother while she was gone. I was always glad to see her go as she came back in a much better mood. Also, she’d drop my brother starting when he was 5 at the marina & tell him to find a sailboat to crew on (out at sea on the Pacific). As an adult I asked her how she rationalized this behavior & she told me either we’d live or we’d die. I normalized this as her response to living through “The War”.
My brother & I both became very, very supervising of our children.
Edit: My brother became an outstanding sailor. He’s never mentioned any boating funny business but this dropping off at the dock sh*t is something that has impacted his parenting profoundly & he brings it up when we revisit our parent’s parenting horror stories (there are quite a few).
Got my brother diagnosed with ADHD and medicated, researched it, realized I had it probably worse than my brother, proceeded to never get me diagnosed. My grades were good enough, apparently.
CW: Animal Abuse: >!Also, my dad once neutered a cat we owned with an exacto knife. Stuck it in a chunk of chimney pipe so it wouldn’t scratch him.!<
My dad had an accident, lost his job, was diagnosed with cancer, and died all in the span of three years. There was not one family discussion about anything with my sister nor I. He wasn’t talked about by anyone after his death.
My mom was quite obsessed with not letting my brother and I have sugar or anything she deemed processed or junk.
The wildest thing was this obsession did not stop at birthdays. She molded a big block of mashed up dates into a cake shape, covered it with plastic wrap, decorated the wrap with real frosting so it would look nice and normal for pictures, then peeled the frosting off after pictures without letting us even have a lick of it.
She also filled up a birthday piñata with carrot sticks, celery sticks, sesame seed/honey candy, and “healthy fruit rollups”. All the kids invited were confused and disappointed.
We’d use the strands from spaghetti squash to make spaghetti instead of using actual noodles.
She’d repeatedly make meals that tasted awful but didn’t care we hated it because “it’s good for you” and that’s all that mattered. Not taste.
I remember my brother and I sneaking into the pantry and eating spoonfuls of straight brown sugar just to have something sugary once in a while. We had to only take a little so she wouldn’t notice.
I got grounded a lot for being caught sneaking to the local grocery store to buy snacks with my own allowance.
Every year of my entire life I was considered ‘failure to thrive’ at the doctors. I battle keeping weight on now, and don’t have a very healthy relationship with food. I have to remind myself to eat because it’s pretty easy to forget when it feels like a chore.
My dad once held me over the side of some railings on a 2nd story floor and started tossing me up & down in the air, literally fully letting go of me to catch me mid-air. I was around age 4.5 years old and it scared the absolute bejesus out of me, so I started to cry and begged him to stop. He said “Do you not trust me?” and I told him that I did, but that I was just really scared of heights and he was scaring me. He only promised not to do it anymore when I repeatedly reassured him that I wasn’t crying because I didn’t trust him.
I think my father did it because he was inspired by Michael Jackson’s bizarre stunt where he dangled his baby (called “Blanket”) over a balcony in front of a load of media reporters (a video of the infamous incident for those who don’t know about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ElddgJCgyg ), it caused a lot of controversy at the time and added to his “Wacko Jacko” image. Most people accused him of child endangerment but many fans also tried to rationalize his behaviour, though I don’t think MJ himself was ever able to coherently explain why he did what he did. My father wasn’t a big MJ fan but I heard from my mother that when he became aware of the incident he was very interested in it and rationalized MJ’s actions as a “trust exercise” with his kid.
My late fathers mental health was generally a lot better than my mothers, but clearly he had some serious issues to do what he did. At the time it occurred, my parents were beginning to go through divorce proceedings and they had already decided on which of us were to go to which parent (my brother to stay with my mother and I to stay with my father). I generally has a super good relationship with my dad and he was a model parent in every other respect aside from this bizarre incident, so I was as shocked by it happening as much as I was by him personally doing such a thing to me.
“TL;DR”; My dad once held me over a ledge and started tossing me up and down as a “trust exercise”, if he’d lost his grip at any point I would’ve ended up injured or dead.
It was always done very “well.” Like we would go to a sandwich shop that had the constant draw lottery, my memories are all basically getting my favorite sandwich and playing arcade games.
Or going to the smoke shop (which was also like a convience store thing) to get candy and browsing the magic shop next door while my dad hung out with the adults…aka doing lottery.
I never did feel as a kid like I was being dragged to a gambling thing. I was always doing a cool outing that was filled with good kid action. But there was always gambling along side.
I didn’t realize this in full until I was long an adult and was talking to someone and said a story. I said “I used to go to this magic shop while my dad played the lottery…” and dude said “oh he liked to play the numbers eh?”
I was like “oh no….well yeah..not like tha….oh…yeah”
My mom went to AA meetings just to pick up guys and get sympathy (she thrives on getting sympathy from everyone she meets) and forced me to go to Ala-tot meetings. She was not and still isn’t an alcoholic nor were any of my grandparents but used them as her excuse to attend those meetings. After a few months I got pulled aside by the Ala-tot meeting leader who was concerned that I never shared any stories. I didn’t share any because I didn’t have anything to share. After he asked why I was there I told him I had no clue why we were going to these meetings, ended up getting her kicked out of AA (didn’t think that was possible) and of course I never had to go to those Ala-tot meeting ever again.
Sad part, she did end up picking up a guy who relapsed while they were dating and was a total asshole. She dumped him after a few months.
My mother set me on a strict eating schedule that was carefully planned so that I couldn’t eat anything all day until dinner at around 6, and any time sge cooked she’d intentionally make stuff she knew I didn’t like/was to spicy/I couldn’t eat for whatever reason and force me to eat it or nothing at all. It persisted for a year+, 5 days a week because she wouldn’t do it around my dad but was “homeschooling” me (aka locking me in my room with schoolwork until 3 and spending all her time favoring my older brother)
She’d also constantly make comments about my appearance/weight, which she actually does to this day, and there were a few times she and my brother ate my whole portion of food so I wouldn’t’ve gotten anything if my dad hadn’t given me some of his and made more for himself.
Needless to say, I have a very unhealthy relationship with food. And with my mother.
Oh, right, how could I not mention these gems: She also told me when I was like 5 that if I had scars, I wouldn’t be pretty and no one would love me. She implied I have some kind of incestuous relationship with my dad because I prefer him due to him not being a psycho bitch. She also, instead of doing something about it, took pictures of me naked the morning after my brother was sexually abusing me when I was like 6. I’m sure there’s more I could mention, but honestly, I don’t want to think about it more
My bio dad used to cheat A LOT. My mom used to put me and my brother in the car and go sit outside whatever gfs house until my dad came outside. Then she would hurry up and leave. I guess she wanted him to know she knew? As a kid, I just knew it was GameBoy in the backseat of the car time.
When I was a kid, my mom took my brother aside and had a conversation with him. He refused to tell me what it was about. The next day, my mom did the same thing with me. Two weeks later we both finally told eachother what my mother had said to us in that conversation and she told us both the same thing: that the other child was her favorite and if we wanted mom to keep loving us, we had to work a lot better at being better children. We were both single-digits years old. My mom’s explanation was that she thought that instilling a sense of sibling rivalry in us would make us less spoiled and entitled.
My younger sister and I were raised by our mother, while knowing that we had two older half siblings that she just…never really interacted with. They lived with their dad in another state and eventually thru family gossip I figured out that when she and their dad split, she just “couldn’t handle them” and handed them over to him permanently.
It wasn’t until I was 30 that realized that, as a child, I figured my older siblings must have just been terrible for my mother to not want them around and that I should be as agreeable and perfect and helpful to her as possible so she’d want to keep me and my sister. It SUPER fucked me up when she actually did threaten to send me off to live with my dad hours away as a teen because my room was messy.
My dad used to blame me, a child, for major life decisions.
Our country was at war and my mom wanted to leave. He asked me about it once and I told him we should totally go to America because in the cartoons everyone has a butler. Coming to America became my fault.
He went back for a while because he was a nobody here and had unbelievable opportunities presented to him. According to him, he saw me in a dream and decided to come back. Him missing out on a huge opportunity became my fault.
They were looking to buy a house that was on the other side of the city. It was a pivotal time in my life having just started high school. We relocated from friends and family but I was supposed to commute 2+ hours in one direction because it was a magnet school. 13 year old me liked the pool so moving there became my fault.
I was caught with a boy when I was 16. Just making out like teenagers do.
I was sent to live with my grandma in a different state for the summer. Then I was grounded for 3 months upon return. Then my mom took me to the doctor to get a Pap smear done- first time ever doing that AND I didn’t know that was what was happening.
I cried the entire time while my mom stayed in the room.
That was pretty traumatic for just making out with a boy.
Drank every night until they went to bed. They never drank until the day was done, so in their minds they weren’t alcoholics. But they went through a giant bottle of Cribari Brothers wine every single night, except on special occasions, when they’d have whiskey or bourbon instead. When they had the bourbon out, I stayed away from home. They were in their mid 60’s before they recognized they had a drinking problem. And to their credit, they did stop drinking and stayed sober for the rest of their lives.
Made me watch the movie “Mommy
Dearest” so I would know other kids had it worse so she couldn’t be that abusive by comparison. She later tried to pull the same thing with the food as Joan Crawford but didn’t see the irony.
He looked at me gasping for air from anaphylaxis at age 18 and told me I could drive myself to urgent care the next day before leaving me with my grandma, who I was the caretaker for. He has since tried to convince anyone he can that I’m not allergic to antibiotics despite my husband having had to take me to the ER for anaphylaxis (and the ER doc dxing me with it) after taking antibiotics.
Father mine used to take me to cocaine parties back when I was 7ish. They always had a side of the house sectioned off for the kids with game consoles, snacks, and movies. It was weirdly wholesome, if wildly inappropriate, because someone would always come check on us every 20-30 minutes saying, “Hey, y’all doing alright? Need any more snacks? More juice?”
My mom forced me to have plastic surgery against my will when I was a teenager. I woke up on the table screaming my lack of consent, so she rescheduled it and had them give me a stronger sedative. Then she made them do it again, before the swelling was down and against the surgeon’s advice (because the swelling wasn’t down and we didn’t know what my nose would look like). This was back when plastic surgery was pretty new for consumers and doctors were not mandatory reporters. I’ve written to the surgeon as an adult to ask why he would do this, but he never responded.
My dad would hotbox in the car, with my sister and i in the back seat, racing down the highway. We were like 4 and 6.
Dad would invite his weed dealer to Thanksgiving, for a bunch of years it was this guy who was a convicted murderer who has served his time.
For several years our after school babysitter was a woman with Down’s syndrome. Her parents lived next door, but still. I don’t remember her ever saying anything except, “I dunno.”
Dad would take us to Grateful Dead concerts and spend the whole time tripping on acid. My sister and I got very good at a young age, at going from the field of a stadium up into the bleachers, finding the bathroom, and making it back to our dad, all the while he was tripping balls to the point he barely knew we were there.
When the guy across the street used to squat in his yard with his balls hanging out where every kid on the cul de sac could see, mom basically just shrugged.
There was a lot more. It was the 80s, it was weird.
Kneeling on a broom or sitting in a pitch black room all day as punishment or spraying me with a super soaker in the face to wake me up in the morning. Among other things… I didn’t realize it was bad until I brought it up to other people and they looked mortified.
My mother insisted my father wasn’t an alcoholic. “He’s just a heavy drinker.” This is a guy who started his day with whiskey in his coffee. Then he made his rounds to drink with various friends at several taverns, ensuring he also had a six-pack of beer in a cooler while driving. Once home, he had his second, beer fridge in the kitchen with a keg of beer installed and tapped for easy serving.
My mom took a condom I had kept in my back pack when I was in high school.
Us girls had a sex ed type class that told us all to always be prepared because boys wouldn’t be. And even if we weren’t sexually active, it’s better safe than sorry if that were to change on a whim.
So my mom’s excuse for snooping in my bag was that she “heard a beeping sound” and wanted to turn off whatever that was. There was nothing. The pocket that single condom was in was not one you would dig in on a whim. She was absolutely snooping. Then had the audacity to not believe me when I explained the class, and the instruction to have one on hand. I wasn’t sexually active at the time, didn’t even date anyone. And she told me I wasn’t getting it back because I wasn’t going to be having sex.
So I’m just sitting there thinking this is the dumbest shit any adult could do, taking away the only protection from your teen who may or may not be having sex. what could go wrong there. Instead of having a real conversation about sex and safety, it’s just a “nope you won’t be doing it” that attitude sure didn’t stop me when I finally did. Stupid ass Christian nuts.
Sending me to the liquor store to get booze, I was 8.
Taught me how to drive stick shift one summer so I could transport materials and a couple of workers back and forth while adding 2 rooms to the house, I was 9. The drive was just a few blocks away but he didn’t wanna be bothered and none of the workers knew how to drive stick.
Owned a grocery store, gave me free reign to eat whatever I wanted when I wanted, never told me no. I was 6, my diet consisted of Cokes, potato chips and pastries, I’m surprised I didn’t get diabetes.
Opened up a bar, it was open from 5-11 every day, didn’t wanna pay a bartender because the bar wasn’t very popular so sales were slow, guess who had to be bartender at 15? Yup, I got home from school around 2:30-3:00 I just had time to eat do my homework and straight to the bar. Did it until I turned 18 and moved out, I didn’t get pay for any of it but I didn’t expect it. You are supposed to always help family.
We had a split level house with a staircase that went from the lower floor to the kitchen and a longer staircase that went from the kitchen to the upstairs.
My mom would make me run up and down the two flights of stairs (she called then up n downs), and going all the way up to the upstairs and all the way down one time was one up n down. She would make me do as many as a hundred up n downs or more at a time and she would stand in the kitchen where the two staircases met in the middle to hit me with a wooden spoon that she wrote “mommy’s little helper” on in sharpie. I would try so hard to run fast enough to not get hit but she was always faster. She would make me do this for stuff like not cleaning the bathroom well enough, or not emptying the dishwasher fast enough.
They regularly got into fights about winning ths lottery. When it would get particularly high, one would say to the other- what would you do with the money? ALWAYS one would ask the other this question. And who started it by asking the question always changed.
The person asked would answer. The asker would disagree snd DING DING DING round 1 has started. It was identical every damn time.
1: what would you do if we won?
2: I’d buy a horse farm in floride and spend my winters there.
1: like hell I’d still be following those horses around if we won. I’d be going golfing in South Carolina
2: so you’d leave me alone to tend to ths horses?
1: they aren’t my horses. I am not spending my lottery money on horses.
2: IM NOT SPENDING MY LOTTERY MONEY ON GOLF
And then the yelling would start. They’d fight about how stupid the other would be to spend lottery money on X because spending it on Y was smarter. They’d yell till both of their feelings would be hurt. Then They’d be cold to esch other for the next few days. When they didn’t win the lotto that week, they’d start talking again.
I was definitely in my late 20s when i realized how messed up it was. I was visiting and this argument started. I ended up yelling “for the love of God, if you win the lotto you are getting divorced. That is all that ia guaranteed to happen”
Oh boy where do I begin!
Dad – during dinner one evening, family got into an argument and dad threatened he would toss his knife at me. I dared my dad to throw it , not thinking he would and to my surprise I got a knife chucked at my chest.
Being in the car when my parents were fighting was frightening. Dad would swerve the car, speed and drive recklessly.
Mom: confided in me things I should not have heard as a kid, stuff about my dad, money, her life, I just wanted a regular mom!
Couldn’t complain or be sad about anything because somehow it always turns into my mom’s time to shine and take over the conversation.
I later learned this was abuse and enmeshed relationships.
When my sister and I were kids, like 8 or 9, we both got head lice. Our mom decided to pour gasoline on my sister’s head to get rid of them. My sister cried so much, that our mom just gave me regular lice shampoo. At the time, I considered myself lucky. Looking back on it, that’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.
my mother was an addictions counselor. I was 16 when I realized she was shagging her clients, likely well before she and my father split. She had often brought them home to “stay for a while” or because they hadnt gotten into a halfway house. My brother and I caught her kissing them multiple times but she would claim they were just hugging and we were crazy. She would also buy them alcohol and drugs.
Took me til I was 25 to realize just how fucked up she is. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
My family stays friends with all the ex’s and I mean ALL OF THEM.
So my (biological) uncle cheated on his wife, and she moved in with my grandparents during the divorce.
Imagine that though, you cheat and your family takes in your wife and helps her divorce you? Helps look after the kids so she can go to work and buy a new house after the divorce too. It was totally normal for me growing up and she was at all our family celebrations more than he was.
And then my mum had a relationship with the husband of the wife that my uncle cheated on my aunt with. And then when they broke up, 2 of my mums friends got with the husband of the wife. He moved into the house next to my mum and there were no issues.
It was totally normal to have my aunts ex husband over for lunch even though they divorced 25 years ago. Even our friend’s ex partners were alway around.
My dad and mum separated, and he was friends with all of my mums ex boyfriend/current boyfriends but 2. He still keeps in touch with a lot of them now. My dad and mum’s ex Tony would often work in my dad’s garden together.
The thought of jealousy or ownership never happened. I remember my grandmother being in hospital and all her children, grandchildren, current partners and ex partners + the ex partners families showed up. + neighbours and friends. The hospital was packed, the hallway and wait room were full.
I never knew that jealousy was even a thing. Ok so you break up but you don’t go away.
My dad was an alcoholic. He would drink the gallon bottle of vodka during our weekends with him, the kitchen was littered with the bottles. And he was an angry and depressed drunk. I remember this one night so vividly, we were at his friends place, his friend had a daughter mine and my sisters age, we couldnt have been more than 10 at this time. We were playing with whatever and my dad calls us in, he and his friend were lying on his bed and my dad goes on this rant about wanting to die, that his life is nothing with our mom, that the divorce isn’t fair, why don’t we love him, etc. Then he sees the sword that’s hanging on the wall and gets it, hands it to me and says “just kill me now, just stab me here, under my ribs and into my heart.” And I’m just in shock, my sister is crying behind me and I’m just frozen. And he guides the sword and is like “do it, just do it. Just kill me! Kill me OP. Just stab me here and kill me.” and then his friend like sober up real fast and steps in and takes the sword from me and sends us to his daughter’s room for the night. And this was a normal night for us when we were at our dads for the weekend.
As other people have mentioned, yelling does me in. Once my mother and father were going at it and noticed I was listening from around a corner or through a door or something. She grabbed me and dropped me in the middle of their “conversation” and continued the fight.
Raising our son, my wife was the yeller(not judging my wife) I couldn’t. I would show my displeasure through silence.
I still can’t help with the decoration of a Christmas Tree. It would always turn into a nightmare when I young because I couldn’t spread the fucking tinsel around correctly. I’m now 62 years old.
This is a list of a few incidents I can remember off the top of my head but there’s more I don’t remember and such. My mom is pretty normal now but she has mental health issues and went through menopause cold turkey due to cancer when I was elementary school and she’d apparently had some kind of suddenly onset of mental illness between when my older brother was born and when she got pregnant with me. She also suffered several childhood traumas. This is not me excusing what I’m about to list but it’s me explaining why it happened and why it’s all so nonsensical. I used to wish she’d just hit me so maybe my dad would leave and maybe I could explain what was happening because the weird shit she was doing was hard to understand or explain.
Elementary school aged:
My mom told me The Muslims were going to take over the country and because I was so pretty, they’d turn me into a sex slave (because they couldn’t marry a Christian girl so they’d make me a sex slave instead???).
My mom told me if I got pregnant as a teenager, she’d wait until I gave birth and then kill me so my dad could raise the baby while she was in jail.
My mom told me if I ever came home with a girlfriend, she’d kill us both.
She said she understood why parents murder their autistic children after a news story about an autistic child in a wheelchair suspiciously drowning came on. (A teacher told her to have me tested for autism but I was never tested.)
Told me she’d buy me a shirt she’d seen that reminded her of me but when I kept asking about it, she told me to stop asking about it or she wouldn’t buy it for me. I stopped asking and she never bought the shirt. I wasn’t with her when she saw it so I have no idea why she went out of her way to tell me about a shirt she didn’t plan on buying.
Told me my food was on the table on Christmas. I was a picky eater so my food was different than everyone else’s. My potatoes were already buttered and everything (and we had cats) so I ate my food because why would she come tell me my food was on the table if I wasn’t supposed to eat it. She then yelled at me for ruining Christmas dinner and, because this was a rare incident that my dad witnessed, he told her off for it.
Hyped me up about how beautiful I was for having blue eyes and blonde hair before spitefully saying, “Hitler would’ve loved you.”
Middle school:
Accused me of shaving my legs at my Papaw’s funeral in front of my dad’s family (the people grieving their father).
Accused me of lactating and being pregnant because I had a stain on my shirt. I was 11. I’d started menstruating the year before.
Highschool:
Yelled at me through a bathroom door while I was crying over her yelling at me for missing school due to a stomach bug (she was the one letting me stay home) a few minutes earlier. I’ve never like crying in front of people because of other things she did during my childhood so this was especially rough for me. I literally always hid to cry.
Asked my friend if I was a lesbian while handing her money.
Got mad because I wanted to stay out a bit later to see a movie with friends and I asked if I could. (I was already 18 and my brother had been allowed to stay out late all he wanted before he was 18.)
Got mad at me for not getting home soon enough from prom even though I wasn’t the one driving and I was already 18.
When I was 6, my sister was 5, and our brother was a baby, my sister got a splinter in her toe while we were at her house. My mom looked at it, tried to get it out, but couldn’t (my sister was kicking and screaming), and so declared it would come out on its own, and put a bandaid on it.
A few days later, she asked for my help so she could look at it, and I remember cornering my sister in the bathroom while she screamed, kicked, tried to bite us, because it hurt so bad. She was barely even walking. Mom got exasperated, and clearly decided it was too much trouble, and so, did nothing.
In those days, her meth addiction was really, really bad. She often slept for 18-20 hours at a time after a binge. Me and Mom cornering my sister happened towards the end of a binge, and she laid down for a long sleep sometime way later that night, and we knew full well that you don’t wake Mom or her bf up when they’re having a long sleep.
So, when I woke up the next morning and my sister was gray, barely speaking, and refused to leave the bed, I knew better than to wake Mom up. I fed the baby and myself, and then crawled into bed to feed my sister. She wouldn’t even open her eyes, let alone her mouth. I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. I thought maybe my sister needed to sleep longer.
A couple hours later, my sister still hadn’t gotten out of bed, and Mom was still sleeping. I snuck into her bedroom to steal her phone, and I called my grandma (Dad’s mom) to tell her what was happening. She got in touch with my other grandma and came over as fast as she could. She walked in and said we’d wait for my other grandma to take the baby – until she saw my sister. She made sure the baby was safe in the crib and told me Grandma was on her way to get the baby, we needed to go NOW.
We went to the hospital, where doctors had to ask me what happened, cuz Grandma didn’t know and Mom wouldn’t wake up. I told him as much as I could, and he lifted my sister’s pajama pants leg to get a better look. I remember seeing little red lines snaking up her foot and her leg, and the doctor going pale and saying “This little girl needs surgery right now.”
My sister had gotten cellulitis from the sliver, and a good chunk of her toe had to be amputated. I remember the doctor telling me I saved her life, but I didn’t know what that meant. My Grandma couldn’t get a hold of my Dad cuz he was working, and she didn’t know my sister was allergic to penicillin, so my sister had to stay in the hospital even longer to be treated for the allergic reaction. I remember pushing her around in a wheelchair to the game room on the pediatric ward so we could play Donkey Kong on the Super Nintendo.
My sister and I are in our 30s now, and she has 2 kids, 1 of them a little girl who is about to turn 5 next month, and looks just like my sister did at that age. And sometimes, I just look at her and I’m overcome with absolute rage that my mom looked at a little girl like that, clearly sick and in pain, and decided it was too big of an inconvenience to do anything, to the point that my sister almost died from it. Then I hug my niece extra tight.
My mom claims to this day she did nothing wrong, that my memory is messed up and my sister got the sliver and got sick overnight.
I’ve told this story here before, but my parents once made me sit at the table for 36 hours because I wouldn’t eat liver and onions. They watched me in shifts like I was a fucking POW. That was the first time I bested my parents will, and god did my mother hate it. But I never had to clean my plate again.
I looking back, I realize my parents used to leave me in the for short errands without a second thought, windows cracked, of course, but still! It was 90s, and I guess that was just normal back then. Now, as an adult, I can’t believe how risky that was.
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Tiered switches with a shame walk to get them.
I remember one time i woke up, went to the bathroom and noticed the toilet had shit smeared all over it. So I asked my mother, what the hell? She dodges the question and asks me to drive her to the supermarket. Completely unphased by the fact shit is smeared all over the toilet and ignores what I said all together. And no, she wasn’t going to the store to buy cleaners.
My stepmom wanted me to start drinking tea for some completely dumb reason (I just didn’t like it. I don’t know what her problem was.)
So one time we were in a cafe and I asked for a water. When the waiter arrived, he gave all of us tea.
She then told me “they didn’t have water”. Before me was sitting a cup of—you guessed it…water— with the tea bag besides it.
My father just sat there quietly, letting this woman gaslight me.
Unhinged…
Told me god was testing me from all the insane amount of bullying I received at school and if I continued to turn the other cheek I would get rewarded in heaven.
Everytime we would go to outback steakhouse, or texas roadhouse, my mom would steal the steak knives from our table before she left. We probably had about 30 steak knives in our drawer at one point.
They used to yell at the top of their lungs daily at each other. There’s no way to undo the years I witnessed this fighting. It’s was essentially psychological abuse.
Beat me, made me think it happened to everybody…
Told me they didn’t know better,,,
I feel fucked up for life…
Every word coming out of my mom’s mouth to me, was her yelling at me. She also used to hit me. Once she let her boyfriend beat the crap out of me while she stood in the door way and cried but never said a word to him. I then told them I was going to tell a teacher at school and they threatened to pull me from school and homeschool me.
Taking me on “dates” with the married man she was involved with. Worse thing was when we were all invited to his house for dinner. I’m sitting there with his wife, and kids and just expected to make comments about how good the chicken was. His son was showing me off his new bike, I’d gotten the exact same one for my birthday from his dad.
Bedroom and bathroom doors are never to be closed. “In case of emergency” and “prevent mold in the bathroom” are some of the reasons.
My mom would leave me at random strangers houses while she went out with her bf to go get high. I must of been around 7-8 years old.
I never questioned it when I was little but I do remember being in one house and this guy pulled out this big fucking gun from a dresser drawer. All while I was playing the NES TMNT 2 game with some other kids in that house.
My mom would beat me for the tiniest mistakes, or because she got angry and needed someone to take it out on, or she’d just make a flimsy excuse for why I needed to be beaten
Mom drank herself to a stupor to end up half-concious on the floor on many occasions.
She also kicked me out of the house whenever we got in a fight.
Physical punishment if I dared to not find a job during summer break.
My mom was unhinged’s very own poster child.
Drrove home so drunk he couldnt make it to his bed when we got home.
Mom orders prime rib so well done it’s black and crispy all the way through
They are Mormon. Early 2000s, many thought it was a sin to drink any caffeine.
My mom found an empty bottle of Dr. Pepper in our basement. I got treated like she found cocaine.
Today, they drink tons of caffeinated soda.
My parents were hoarders and I realized later that piles of junk in the home was definitely not normal
told me and both of my siblings individually and separately that we were the favorite. and that we shouldn’t tell the others because they’d get jealous.
My mom would go to the bar down the road from our apartment when she was in between marriages. I was 5-7 years old. She would even tell me she was leaving, and wrote the phone number down for me to call her if i needed to.
So my mom had this thing called “shut up” spray. If sas a breath spray that she got from the dollar store. Well, it smelled good and it tasted good. So me and my brother obviously wanted it all the time. We only got to use it in the car on the way to like school or whatever. One day she accidentally sprays too much in my mouth and I shut up completely. Which was impressive cuz I was such a chatterbox growing. It didn’t hurt, it just was super intense and felt uncomfortable to talk. So I’d keep quiet and just wait for the super minty flavor to pass.
Momma thought this was FUNNY. Me and my brother would ask for the shut up spray verbatim, but momma would also give it to us if she had like a headache or wanted to see if it would still work. Haha I still get a chuckle out of that. Everyone always looks at me funny when I tell it though haha
Another one, we had to have a rule that front seat couldn’t hit back seat and vice versa when playing slug bug. Momma almost crashed the car one time cuz she turned around to punch us one time haha. And Jesus Christ, I had a bug for a first car and we had to put a rule in place where my car was exempt cuz we’d pass the window and sock the nearest person on the hour hahaha
My dad pushed us relentlessly, using dreams of success to manipulate us into working non-stop. He made us believe that our worth was only tied to do what he says to do, ignoring our feelings and well-being. Looking back, it was less about ambition and more about control.
I was an A/B student that was involved in after school clubs but also had undiagnosed (at the time) AuADHD and so we got into arguments a lot. They removed my bedroom door for more than half of my high school years because I “talked back” and then sent me to the family farm in another state each summer to “go work and get straightened out” by my grandparents and aunts and uncles so that they didn’t have to be around me for the summer. They put me on a greyhound bus by myself at 13 to get me there – wouldn’t even drive or fly me. Jokes on them for that at least. I got to spend my summer riding horses, gathering chokecherries, tending a garden, and just having awesome summers with family that actually understood me.
My mom would smoke in the car with the windows up for most of my childhood. Looking back now, I can only imagine how horrific I smelled when I arrived at school, friend’s house or where ever we were going. I was learning in school how bad second hand smoke was in school and I would beg her to stop. She never stopped.
They used to let me go places with my much older, teenage siblings. I remember riding in the bed of a truck and they were throwing glass bottles at road signs, around ‘78-‘79. This is out in the country, there’s not much to do.
I also remember one of their friends Hank, he was an “older guy” probably in his 20s and he had a house and a truck. There were tie-dyed tapestries and all these cool psychedelic posters, and then when you turned on the black light, the colors glowed. I was enchanted.
I don’t remember anyone smoking pot, but looking back, it seems like that would go with the psychedelic posters and tapestries. I’m pretty sure the glass bottles being thrown from the truck were beer bottles. Good times!
In the 70’s, my mother’s car had a buzzer in the dash when the seat belts were unfastened. She just clicked them together and jammed them down in the seat cushions rather than buckling us up. I didn’t wear a seatbelt until I was in my teens
Locked the fridge with a bike lock
My dad locked me in the bathroom when I cried until I was old enough to figure out how to let myself out
My bio dad took me (4 at the time) and my brother behind the barn to watch my mom sit with a gun to her head while she contemplated suicide. She didn’t do it and is still alive today. Haven’t seen my bio dad in over 30 years.
I was molested by a family member and my mom made me go tell my bio dad by myself (4 at the time) and when I told him his nephew had touched me inappropriately he responded with “what do you want me to do about it?” The nephew was still allowed to spend the night at our house. 🙄
Enmeshed family. I was pretty much the second husband/dad. listened to my mom or dad talk about their marriage to me. They were young parents that didn’t really know any better. They have since apologized.
Going to list things that would drive my mother into a crying hysterical rage.
Using too many dishes to make dinner, having bangs, boys with long hair, wearing T-shirt and jeans to a football/baseball game (we had to dress up), my dog barking, making mashed potatoes from scratch, going to the comic book store, going to the arcade, going to the library, going anywhere, a stranger asking for money, house too hot, house too cold… And being convinced the house was on fire despite no smell, no smoke and no fire.
Drink and drive. They’re from eastern Montana and the towns are few and far between. If they were driving anywhere from 100-300 miles away they’d stop at every single bar along the way for a few beers. Us kids would stay in the car (station wagon) and they’d bring us cokes and chips, or sometimes the bar would let us in and we’d play shuffleboard and eat candy bars.
Starting when I was 14, my single mom would give me $40, tell me she was going to Mexico or Napa for a week & this money was for me & my 11 year old brother while she was gone. I was always glad to see her go as she came back in a much better mood. Also, she’d drop my brother starting when he was 5 at the marina & tell him to find a sailboat to crew on (out at sea on the Pacific). As an adult I asked her how she rationalized this behavior & she told me either we’d live or we’d die. I normalized this as her response to living through “The War”.
My brother & I both became very, very supervising of our children.
Edit: My brother became an outstanding sailor. He’s never mentioned any boating funny business but this dropping off at the dock sh*t is something that has impacted his parenting profoundly & he brings it up when we revisit our parent’s parenting horror stories (there are quite a few).
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My dad used to count how much toilet paper I’d use and would get angry if my showers were longer than five minutes ore more than three times a week 🙃
Got my brother diagnosed with ADHD and medicated, researched it, realized I had it probably worse than my brother, proceeded to never get me diagnosed. My grades were good enough, apparently.
CW: Animal Abuse: >!Also, my dad once neutered a cat we owned with an exacto knife. Stuck it in a chunk of chimney pipe so it wouldn’t scratch him.!<
My dad had an accident, lost his job, was diagnosed with cancer, and died all in the span of three years. There was not one family discussion about anything with my sister nor I. He wasn’t talked about by anyone after his death.
My mom was quite obsessed with not letting my brother and I have sugar or anything she deemed processed or junk.
The wildest thing was this obsession did not stop at birthdays. She molded a big block of mashed up dates into a cake shape, covered it with plastic wrap, decorated the wrap with real frosting so it would look nice and normal for pictures, then peeled the frosting off after pictures without letting us even have a lick of it.
She also filled up a birthday piñata with carrot sticks, celery sticks, sesame seed/honey candy, and “healthy fruit rollups”. All the kids invited were confused and disappointed.
We’d use the strands from spaghetti squash to make spaghetti instead of using actual noodles.
She’d repeatedly make meals that tasted awful but didn’t care we hated it because “it’s good for you” and that’s all that mattered. Not taste.
I remember my brother and I sneaking into the pantry and eating spoonfuls of straight brown sugar just to have something sugary once in a while. We had to only take a little so she wouldn’t notice.
I got grounded a lot for being caught sneaking to the local grocery store to buy snacks with my own allowance.
Every year of my entire life I was considered ‘failure to thrive’ at the doctors. I battle keeping weight on now, and don’t have a very healthy relationship with food. I have to remind myself to eat because it’s pretty easy to forget when it feels like a chore.
My dad once held me over the side of some railings on a 2nd story floor and started tossing me up & down in the air, literally fully letting go of me to catch me mid-air. I was around age 4.5 years old and it scared the absolute bejesus out of me, so I started to cry and begged him to stop. He said “Do you not trust me?” and I told him that I did, but that I was just really scared of heights and he was scaring me. He only promised not to do it anymore when I repeatedly reassured him that I wasn’t crying because I didn’t trust him.
I think my father did it because he was inspired by Michael Jackson’s bizarre stunt where he dangled his baby (called “Blanket”) over a balcony in front of a load of media reporters (a video of the infamous incident for those who don’t know about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ElddgJCgyg ), it caused a lot of controversy at the time and added to his “Wacko Jacko” image. Most people accused him of child endangerment but many fans also tried to rationalize his behaviour, though I don’t think MJ himself was ever able to coherently explain why he did what he did. My father wasn’t a big MJ fan but I heard from my mother that when he became aware of the incident he was very interested in it and rationalized MJ’s actions as a “trust exercise” with his kid.
My late fathers mental health was generally a lot better than my mothers, but clearly he had some serious issues to do what he did. At the time it occurred, my parents were beginning to go through divorce proceedings and they had already decided on which of us were to go to which parent (my brother to stay with my mother and I to stay with my father). I generally has a super good relationship with my dad and he was a model parent in every other respect aside from this bizarre incident, so I was as shocked by it happening as much as I was by him personally doing such a thing to me.
“TL;DR”; My dad once held me over a ledge and started tossing me up and down as a “trust exercise”, if he’d lost his grip at any point I would’ve ended up injured or dead.
I was a teen when i realized that beer counted for drinking and driving.
Going places that involved gambling.
It was always done very “well.” Like we would go to a sandwich shop that had the constant draw lottery, my memories are all basically getting my favorite sandwich and playing arcade games.
Or going to the smoke shop (which was also like a convience store thing) to get candy and browsing the magic shop next door while my dad hung out with the adults…aka doing lottery.
I never did feel as a kid like I was being dragged to a gambling thing. I was always doing a cool outing that was filled with good kid action. But there was always gambling along side.
I didn’t realize this in full until I was long an adult and was talking to someone and said a story. I said “I used to go to this magic shop while my dad played the lottery…” and dude said “oh he liked to play the numbers eh?”
I was like “oh no….well yeah..not like tha….oh…yeah”
Then I realized this dude did a LOT of lottery.
My mom went to AA meetings just to pick up guys and get sympathy (she thrives on getting sympathy from everyone she meets) and forced me to go to Ala-tot meetings. She was not and still isn’t an alcoholic nor were any of my grandparents but used them as her excuse to attend those meetings. After a few months I got pulled aside by the Ala-tot meeting leader who was concerned that I never shared any stories. I didn’t share any because I didn’t have anything to share. After he asked why I was there I told him I had no clue why we were going to these meetings, ended up getting her kicked out of AA (didn’t think that was possible) and of course I never had to go to those Ala-tot meeting ever again.
Sad part, she did end up picking up a guy who relapsed while they were dating and was a total asshole. She dumped him after a few months.
Used the white pages to find random Korean people in any city they were visiting to cold call to ask where to buy Korean food.
My mother set me on a strict eating schedule that was carefully planned so that I couldn’t eat anything all day until dinner at around 6, and any time sge cooked she’d intentionally make stuff she knew I didn’t like/was to spicy/I couldn’t eat for whatever reason and force me to eat it or nothing at all. It persisted for a year+, 5 days a week because she wouldn’t do it around my dad but was “homeschooling” me (aka locking me in my room with schoolwork until 3 and spending all her time favoring my older brother)
She’d also constantly make comments about my appearance/weight, which she actually does to this day, and there were a few times she and my brother ate my whole portion of food so I wouldn’t’ve gotten anything if my dad hadn’t given me some of his and made more for himself.
Needless to say, I have a very unhealthy relationship with food. And with my mother.
Oh, right, how could I not mention these gems: She also told me when I was like 5 that if I had scars, I wouldn’t be pretty and no one would love me. She implied I have some kind of incestuous relationship with my dad because I prefer him due to him not being a psycho bitch. She also, instead of doing something about it, took pictures of me naked the morning after my brother was sexually abusing me when I was like 6. I’m sure there’s more I could mention, but honestly, I don’t want to think about it more
My bio dad used to cheat A LOT. My mom used to put me and my brother in the car and go sit outside whatever gfs house until my dad came outside. Then she would hurry up and leave. I guess she wanted him to know she knew? As a kid, I just knew it was GameBoy in the backseat of the car time.
My mom sent me back to school three days after my dad passed away from cancer. Never took me to a therapist. I was a sophomore in high school.
Dumping all her adult problems on child- me.
When I was a kid, my mom took my brother aside and had a conversation with him. He refused to tell me what it was about. The next day, my mom did the same thing with me. Two weeks later we both finally told eachother what my mother had said to us in that conversation and she told us both the same thing: that the other child was her favorite and if we wanted mom to keep loving us, we had to work a lot better at being better children. We were both single-digits years old. My mom’s explanation was that she thought that instilling a sense of sibling rivalry in us would make us less spoiled and entitled.
My younger sister and I were raised by our mother, while knowing that we had two older half siblings that she just…never really interacted with. They lived with their dad in another state and eventually thru family gossip I figured out that when she and their dad split, she just “couldn’t handle them” and handed them over to him permanently.
It wasn’t until I was 30 that realized that, as a child, I figured my older siblings must have just been terrible for my mother to not want them around and that I should be as agreeable and perfect and helpful to her as possible so she’d want to keep me and my sister. It SUPER fucked me up when she actually did threaten to send me off to live with my dad hours away as a teen because my room was messy.
Like what the fuck bro.
My dad used to blame me, a child, for major life decisions.
He still does this, he just used to as well.
Leave me (6/7yrs old) home alone with my 3 younger brothers with no way to contact them and no food prepped. It just felt normal at the time.
Got all the young cousins together for weekend sleepovers, and while we played, the adults smoked lots of pot together, lol
I was caught with a boy when I was 16. Just making out like teenagers do.
I was sent to live with my grandma in a different state for the summer. Then I was grounded for 3 months upon return. Then my mom took me to the doctor to get a Pap smear done- first time ever doing that AND I didn’t know that was what was happening.
I cried the entire time while my mom stayed in the room.
That was pretty traumatic for just making out with a boy.
Drank every night until they went to bed. They never drank until the day was done, so in their minds they weren’t alcoholics. But they went through a giant bottle of Cribari Brothers wine every single night, except on special occasions, when they’d have whiskey or bourbon instead. When they had the bourbon out, I stayed away from home. They were in their mid 60’s before they recognized they had a drinking problem. And to their credit, they did stop drinking and stayed sober for the rest of their lives.
I wish they started doing that when I was 12.
Made me watch the movie “Mommy
Dearest” so I would know other kids had it worse so she couldn’t be that abusive by comparison. She later tried to pull the same thing with the food as Joan Crawford but didn’t see the irony.
He looked at me gasping for air from anaphylaxis at age 18 and told me I could drive myself to urgent care the next day before leaving me with my grandma, who I was the caretaker for. He has since tried to convince anyone he can that I’m not allergic to antibiotics despite my husband having had to take me to the ER for anaphylaxis (and the ER doc dxing me with it) after taking antibiotics.
Father mine used to take me to cocaine parties back when I was 7ish. They always had a side of the house sectioned off for the kids with game consoles, snacks, and movies. It was weirdly wholesome, if wildly inappropriate, because someone would always come check on us every 20-30 minutes saying, “Hey, y’all doing alright? Need any more snacks? More juice?”
We felt like kings
My mom forced me to have plastic surgery against my will when I was a teenager. I woke up on the table screaming my lack of consent, so she rescheduled it and had them give me a stronger sedative. Then she made them do it again, before the swelling was down and against the surgeon’s advice (because the swelling wasn’t down and we didn’t know what my nose would look like). This was back when plastic surgery was pretty new for consumers and doctors were not mandatory reporters. I’ve written to the surgeon as an adult to ask why he would do this, but he never responded.
My dad would hotbox in the car, with my sister and i in the back seat, racing down the highway. We were like 4 and 6.
Dad would invite his weed dealer to Thanksgiving, for a bunch of years it was this guy who was a convicted murderer who has served his time.
For several years our after school babysitter was a woman with Down’s syndrome. Her parents lived next door, but still. I don’t remember her ever saying anything except, “I dunno.”
Dad would take us to Grateful Dead concerts and spend the whole time tripping on acid. My sister and I got very good at a young age, at going from the field of a stadium up into the bleachers, finding the bathroom, and making it back to our dad, all the while he was tripping balls to the point he barely knew we were there.
When the guy across the street used to squat in his yard with his balls hanging out where every kid on the cul de sac could see, mom basically just shrugged.
There was a lot more. It was the 80s, it was weird.
Kneeling on a broom or sitting in a pitch black room all day as punishment or spraying me with a super soaker in the face to wake me up in the morning. Among other things… I didn’t realize it was bad until I brought it up to other people and they looked mortified.
My mother insisted my father wasn’t an alcoholic. “He’s just a heavy drinker.” This is a guy who started his day with whiskey in his coffee. Then he made his rounds to drink with various friends at several taverns, ensuring he also had a six-pack of beer in a cooler while driving. Once home, he had his second, beer fridge in the kitchen with a keg of beer installed and tapped for easy serving.
My mom took a condom I had kept in my back pack when I was in high school.
Us girls had a sex ed type class that told us all to always be prepared because boys wouldn’t be. And even if we weren’t sexually active, it’s better safe than sorry if that were to change on a whim.
So my mom’s excuse for snooping in my bag was that she “heard a beeping sound” and wanted to turn off whatever that was. There was nothing. The pocket that single condom was in was not one you would dig in on a whim. She was absolutely snooping. Then had the audacity to not believe me when I explained the class, and the instruction to have one on hand. I wasn’t sexually active at the time, didn’t even date anyone. And she told me I wasn’t getting it back because I wasn’t going to be having sex.
So I’m just sitting there thinking this is the dumbest shit any adult could do, taking away the only protection from your teen who may or may not be having sex. what could go wrong there. Instead of having a real conversation about sex and safety, it’s just a “nope you won’t be doing it” that attitude sure didn’t stop me when I finally did. Stupid ass Christian nuts.
Sending me to the liquor store to get booze, I was 8.
Taught me how to drive stick shift one summer so I could transport materials and a couple of workers back and forth while adding 2 rooms to the house, I was 9. The drive was just a few blocks away but he didn’t wanna be bothered and none of the workers knew how to drive stick.
Owned a grocery store, gave me free reign to eat whatever I wanted when I wanted, never told me no. I was 6, my diet consisted of Cokes, potato chips and pastries, I’m surprised I didn’t get diabetes.
Opened up a bar, it was open from 5-11 every day, didn’t wanna pay a bartender because the bar wasn’t very popular so sales were slow, guess who had to be bartender at 15? Yup, I got home from school around 2:30-3:00 I just had time to eat do my homework and straight to the bar. Did it until I turned 18 and moved out, I didn’t get pay for any of it but I didn’t expect it. You are supposed to always help family.
based on what i’ve read here : Loved me.
We had a split level house with a staircase that went from the lower floor to the kitchen and a longer staircase that went from the kitchen to the upstairs.
My mom would make me run up and down the two flights of stairs (she called then up n downs), and going all the way up to the upstairs and all the way down one time was one up n down. She would make me do as many as a hundred up n downs or more at a time and she would stand in the kitchen where the two staircases met in the middle to hit me with a wooden spoon that she wrote “mommy’s little helper” on in sharpie. I would try so hard to run fast enough to not get hit but she was always faster. She would make me do this for stuff like not cleaning the bathroom well enough, or not emptying the dishwasher fast enough.
They regularly got into fights about winning ths lottery. When it would get particularly high, one would say to the other- what would you do with the money? ALWAYS one would ask the other this question. And who started it by asking the question always changed.
The person asked would answer. The asker would disagree snd DING DING DING round 1 has started. It was identical every damn time.
1: what would you do if we won?
2: I’d buy a horse farm in floride and spend my winters there.
1: like hell I’d still be following those horses around if we won. I’d be going golfing in South Carolina
2: so you’d leave me alone to tend to ths horses?
1: they aren’t my horses. I am not spending my lottery money on horses.
2: IM NOT SPENDING MY LOTTERY MONEY ON GOLF
And then the yelling would start. They’d fight about how stupid the other would be to spend lottery money on X because spending it on Y was smarter. They’d yell till both of their feelings would be hurt. Then They’d be cold to esch other for the next few days. When they didn’t win the lotto that week, they’d start talking again.
I was definitely in my late 20s when i realized how messed up it was. I was visiting and this argument started. I ended up yelling “for the love of God, if you win the lotto you are getting divorced. That is all that ia guaranteed to happen”
Oh boy where do I begin!
Dad – during dinner one evening, family got into an argument and dad threatened he would toss his knife at me. I dared my dad to throw it , not thinking he would and to my surprise I got a knife chucked at my chest.
Being in the car when my parents were fighting was frightening. Dad would swerve the car, speed and drive recklessly.
Mom: confided in me things I should not have heard as a kid, stuff about my dad, money, her life, I just wanted a regular mom!
Couldn’t complain or be sad about anything because somehow it always turns into my mom’s time to shine and take over the conversation.
I later learned this was abuse and enmeshed relationships.
Punish me for having asthma attacks. They thought I was doing it on purpose for attention.
When my sister and I were kids, like 8 or 9, we both got head lice. Our mom decided to pour gasoline on my sister’s head to get rid of them. My sister cried so much, that our mom just gave me regular lice shampoo. At the time, I considered myself lucky. Looking back on it, that’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.
my mother was an addictions counselor. I was 16 when I realized she was shagging her clients, likely well before she and my father split. She had often brought them home to “stay for a while” or because they hadnt gotten into a halfway house. My brother and I caught her kissing them multiple times but she would claim they were just hugging and we were crazy. She would also buy them alcohol and drugs.
Took me til I was 25 to realize just how fucked up she is. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
My family stays friends with all the ex’s and I mean ALL OF THEM.
So my (biological) uncle cheated on his wife, and she moved in with my grandparents during the divorce.
Imagine that though, you cheat and your family takes in your wife and helps her divorce you? Helps look after the kids so she can go to work and buy a new house after the divorce too. It was totally normal for me growing up and she was at all our family celebrations more than he was.
And then my mum had a relationship with the husband of the wife that my uncle cheated on my aunt with. And then when they broke up, 2 of my mums friends got with the husband of the wife. He moved into the house next to my mum and there were no issues.
It was totally normal to have my aunts ex husband over for lunch even though they divorced 25 years ago. Even our friend’s ex partners were alway around.
My dad and mum separated, and he was friends with all of my mums ex boyfriend/current boyfriends but 2. He still keeps in touch with a lot of them now. My dad and mum’s ex Tony would often work in my dad’s garden together.
The thought of jealousy or ownership never happened. I remember my grandmother being in hospital and all her children, grandchildren, current partners and ex partners + the ex partners families showed up. + neighbours and friends. The hospital was packed, the hallway and wait room were full.
I never knew that jealousy was even a thing. Ok so you break up but you don’t go away.
My mother tried to burn the house down whilst I was sleeping. That was pretty grim.
My dad was an alcoholic. He would drink the gallon bottle of vodka during our weekends with him, the kitchen was littered with the bottles. And he was an angry and depressed drunk. I remember this one night so vividly, we were at his friends place, his friend had a daughter mine and my sisters age, we couldnt have been more than 10 at this time. We were playing with whatever and my dad calls us in, he and his friend were lying on his bed and my dad goes on this rant about wanting to die, that his life is nothing with our mom, that the divorce isn’t fair, why don’t we love him, etc. Then he sees the sword that’s hanging on the wall and gets it, hands it to me and says “just kill me now, just stab me here, under my ribs and into my heart.” And I’m just in shock, my sister is crying behind me and I’m just frozen. And he guides the sword and is like “do it, just do it. Just kill me! Kill me OP. Just stab me here and kill me.” and then his friend like sober up real fast and steps in and takes the sword from me and sends us to his daughter’s room for the night. And this was a normal night for us when we were at our dads for the weekend.
As other people have mentioned, yelling does me in. Once my mother and father were going at it and noticed I was listening from around a corner or through a door or something. She grabbed me and dropped me in the middle of their “conversation” and continued the fight.
Raising our son, my wife was the yeller(not judging my wife) I couldn’t. I would show my displeasure through silence.
I still can’t help with the decoration of a Christmas Tree. It would always turn into a nightmare when I young because I couldn’t spread the fucking tinsel around correctly. I’m now 62 years old.
This is a list of a few incidents I can remember off the top of my head but there’s more I don’t remember and such. My mom is pretty normal now but she has mental health issues and went through menopause cold turkey due to cancer when I was elementary school and she’d apparently had some kind of suddenly onset of mental illness between when my older brother was born and when she got pregnant with me. She also suffered several childhood traumas. This is not me excusing what I’m about to list but it’s me explaining why it happened and why it’s all so nonsensical. I used to wish she’d just hit me so maybe my dad would leave and maybe I could explain what was happening because the weird shit she was doing was hard to understand or explain.
Elementary school aged:
My mom told me The Muslims were going to take over the country and because I was so pretty, they’d turn me into a sex slave (because they couldn’t marry a Christian girl so they’d make me a sex slave instead???).
My mom told me if I got pregnant as a teenager, she’d wait until I gave birth and then kill me so my dad could raise the baby while she was in jail.
My mom told me if I ever came home with a girlfriend, she’d kill us both.
She said she understood why parents murder their autistic children after a news story about an autistic child in a wheelchair suspiciously drowning came on. (A teacher told her to have me tested for autism but I was never tested.)
Told me she’d buy me a shirt she’d seen that reminded her of me but when I kept asking about it, she told me to stop asking about it or she wouldn’t buy it for me. I stopped asking and she never bought the shirt. I wasn’t with her when she saw it so I have no idea why she went out of her way to tell me about a shirt she didn’t plan on buying.
Told me my food was on the table on Christmas. I was a picky eater so my food was different than everyone else’s. My potatoes were already buttered and everything (and we had cats) so I ate my food because why would she come tell me my food was on the table if I wasn’t supposed to eat it. She then yelled at me for ruining Christmas dinner and, because this was a rare incident that my dad witnessed, he told her off for it.
Hyped me up about how beautiful I was for having blue eyes and blonde hair before spitefully saying, “Hitler would’ve loved you.”
Middle school:
Accused me of shaving my legs at my Papaw’s funeral in front of my dad’s family (the people grieving their father).
Accused me of lactating and being pregnant because I had a stain on my shirt. I was 11. I’d started menstruating the year before.
Highschool:
Yelled at me through a bathroom door while I was crying over her yelling at me for missing school due to a stomach bug (she was the one letting me stay home) a few minutes earlier. I’ve never like crying in front of people because of other things she did during my childhood so this was especially rough for me. I literally always hid to cry.
Asked my friend if I was a lesbian while handing her money.
Got mad because I wanted to stay out a bit later to see a movie with friends and I asked if I could. (I was already 18 and my brother had been allowed to stay out late all he wanted before he was 18.)
Got mad at me for not getting home soon enough from prom even though I wasn’t the one driving and I was already 18.
When I was 6, my sister was 5, and our brother was a baby, my sister got a splinter in her toe while we were at her house. My mom looked at it, tried to get it out, but couldn’t (my sister was kicking and screaming), and so declared it would come out on its own, and put a bandaid on it.
A few days later, she asked for my help so she could look at it, and I remember cornering my sister in the bathroom while she screamed, kicked, tried to bite us, because it hurt so bad. She was barely even walking. Mom got exasperated, and clearly decided it was too much trouble, and so, did nothing.
In those days, her meth addiction was really, really bad. She often slept for 18-20 hours at a time after a binge. Me and Mom cornering my sister happened towards the end of a binge, and she laid down for a long sleep sometime way later that night, and we knew full well that you don’t wake Mom or her bf up when they’re having a long sleep.
So, when I woke up the next morning and my sister was gray, barely speaking, and refused to leave the bed, I knew better than to wake Mom up. I fed the baby and myself, and then crawled into bed to feed my sister. She wouldn’t even open her eyes, let alone her mouth. I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. I thought maybe my sister needed to sleep longer.
A couple hours later, my sister still hadn’t gotten out of bed, and Mom was still sleeping. I snuck into her bedroom to steal her phone, and I called my grandma (Dad’s mom) to tell her what was happening. She got in touch with my other grandma and came over as fast as she could. She walked in and said we’d wait for my other grandma to take the baby – until she saw my sister. She made sure the baby was safe in the crib and told me Grandma was on her way to get the baby, we needed to go NOW.
We went to the hospital, where doctors had to ask me what happened, cuz Grandma didn’t know and Mom wouldn’t wake up. I told him as much as I could, and he lifted my sister’s pajama pants leg to get a better look. I remember seeing little red lines snaking up her foot and her leg, and the doctor going pale and saying “This little girl needs surgery right now.”
My sister had gotten cellulitis from the sliver, and a good chunk of her toe had to be amputated. I remember the doctor telling me I saved her life, but I didn’t know what that meant. My Grandma couldn’t get a hold of my Dad cuz he was working, and she didn’t know my sister was allergic to penicillin, so my sister had to stay in the hospital even longer to be treated for the allergic reaction. I remember pushing her around in a wheelchair to the game room on the pediatric ward so we could play Donkey Kong on the Super Nintendo.
My sister and I are in our 30s now, and she has 2 kids, 1 of them a little girl who is about to turn 5 next month, and looks just like my sister did at that age. And sometimes, I just look at her and I’m overcome with absolute rage that my mom looked at a little girl like that, clearly sick and in pain, and decided it was too big of an inconvenience to do anything, to the point that my sister almost died from it. Then I hug my niece extra tight.
My mom claims to this day she did nothing wrong, that my memory is messed up and my sister got the sliver and got sick overnight.
I’ve told this story here before, but my parents once made me sit at the table for 36 hours because I wouldn’t eat liver and onions. They watched me in shifts like I was a fucking POW. That was the first time I bested my parents will, and god did my mother hate it. But I never had to clean my plate again.
I looking back, I realize my parents used to leave me in the for short errands without a second thought, windows cracked, of course, but still! It was 90s, and I guess that was just normal back then. Now, as an adult, I can’t believe how risky that was.