Did you have a fairly normal childhood with fairly normal parents, but still have a memory or two where your parents did something to/for/against you and you when you think back to it, you think WTF??? If so, please share.
I’ll start, of course. When I about 6 or so my mother had a boyfriend who smoked. One time I saw him blowing smoke rings and thought that it looked really cool. I asked my mother how he did this and she suggested I tried to do it myself :dubious: So she took a cigarette lit it up and handed it to me. I put it in my mouth and she told me that the proper way to smoke was to inhale deeply :eek: Yeah, I inhaled and then panicked for a minute or two because I couldn’t breathe.
Years later when I talked to my mother about it, she said she did it to keep me from ever starting smoking. Can we say “A little harsh”? No, I don’t smoke, but that incident had nothing to do with it. Being taught about all of the dangers, and seeing pictures of smokers lungs is what persuaded me not to smoke. But anyway, mom, WTF???
I’d say my father deciding that alcohol was important than having a wife and daughter a pretty good “WTF” moment. Also his decision a few months ago that booze was still more important than knowing his grown daughter and his little granddaughter.
My mother also told me as a teenager that if I ever wanted to try pot, don’t go find it myself. Come to her and she would get me a joint (only once) because she would rather know I was smoking something from a safe source. I can see her reasoning but it’s amusing considering when it came to alcohol it was always “if you drink I’ll kill you.”
My parents were pretty responsible, decent folks. The one thing that still shocks the hell out of me occurred when I was 13. I’d been sick, and getting progressively sicker, for about a week and a half. My mom had taken me to the doctor two or three times, and gotten a different diagnosis each time, everything from mono to “a bug.”
About 8:00 that evening, I took my own temperature, and it was 105.4. She didn’t believe me, and insisted on taking it herself. Sure enough: 105.4. Freaked her right the hell out.
So…they kept me at HOME all night, periodically taking my temperature and exclaiming about how high it was. Hello! I was 13, and even I knew I was dying by that point.
Mom finally took me to the ED late the next morning. Turned out I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and was practically on the other side of the documented mortality window.
I still don’t know what they were thinking.
My mother couldn’t swim, so she was obsessed that my brother, sister and I learn to swim. So once she took me to swimming lessons and I was scared to get in the water. So she took me home and whipped me with one of my father’s belts.
I still don’t know why I didn’t grab the belt and yell at her to stop it.
If my daughter was afraid to get in the water, I would have helped her to overcome her fear.
I’m not sure that he qualifies as a fairly normal parent, but yeah, I guess those would be WTF moments. Sorry to hear about it. I hope one day things get better.
I once had a friend who said that sometimes she spent quality time with her mother smoking pot togeather. Now, being the conservative type that I am, I don’t see smoking pot as “Fun for the whole family”.
So, did you survive? No, but seriously, maybe you should ask them, if you already didn’t, why they didn’t act sooner. Anything troubling that happened in my past due to, or connected with my mother (I was raised by her, and only visted my dad from time to time) I have attempted to find out why she acted like she did. Sometimes I get the information I seek, other times she doesn’t seem to know herself.
My WTF moment dates back to when I was about three years old. My father was mowing the lawn on a summer day and sent me into the house to get him a beer. According to him, I came back a few minutes later with two - one for me, one for him. When he tells the story these days, he says, ‘If the kid was smart enough to bring himself one, why not?’ So he had his beer, and most of mine, after I felt I’d had enough.
I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t have access to booze in controlled environments, or with occaisional dinners, but three does seem a bit young.
My mother wasn’t like that most of the time–it was a rare occurence. But I rationalized it, the way kids do, as her extreme fear of water and desparately wanting me to learn to swim. I was born in 1958, so it was back in old days.
My parents also moved us around a lot–my dad worked for IBM. Three of them were really bad for me, in the middle of the year. (1st grade, 6th grade, 12th grade) So, I moved to a little town in Ohio in 1986 and have only moved from a small house to a bigger house. My daughter will go to the same school system for 13 years because I am obsessed with that. Since I have lived here, my parenst have lived in Texas, Virginia and Arkansas, in 7 different residences. They claim that this is their last house–I think the jury is still out on that.
I don’t think that’s particularly specific of the old-times. I was born in 1981, and I wouldn’t say I had an enlightened father.
My father never beat me that I can remember, but he was so incredibly anal about every little chore my brother and I were asked to do. He’d get angry and tell us what a sh*tty job we did. I don’t know how it effected my brother. He was the obvious favorite, sixteen months older and a much better student than I. When I played football in highschool, I got to be the favorite, but then I had to endure my father asking me when I was going to start. The answer of course, was never, but I never could have told him that. When I quit football, my brother was in college, so he became the favorite again. When I got accepted at Northwestern, and my brother went to state-school, I held the favorite torch for another year. Now he’s getting married and I’m all but forgotten until my father wants something from me. Hell, he never called or emailed until my brother expressed an interest in coming to Chicago to visit me for his bachelor party, and then it was more of a “Can you handle this without screwing it up?”
Oops. I guess that’s not a WTF moment, more like a WFT timeline. There’s a lot of detail omitted for brevity.
That really sucks. I don’t know why parents have to be so mean to their kids, and why they make the home life unpleasant. I have decided not to do that. Well, except for the time I found a tuna fish sandwich in my daughter’s dresser drawer…
I just don’t see the point of having tons of rules and regulations and forget about loving life.
All you can do is do better for your children, and also to try to get something out of life for yourself. Forget your father.
A lot of these are of the underage smoking and drinking category, including one of mine - dad used to get me to light his cigarettes while he was driving. I was about 12.
One thing that they did that has often caused me to think WTF were they thinking was the fact that they packed me off to stay with my grandparents (who lived in another country) when my sister was born. It was ‘sold’ to me as a treat, and as far as I can recall I took it that way, but I don’t think psychologists would consider this a sensible step.
How long did you stay with your grandparents, Martha? Did you know to expect a little brother or sister upon your return or was it “Surprise! You know how you’ve always wanted a puppy…”?
At one point, during their visit, my grandfather started bringing out their suitcases. They weren’t due to leave for another week or so, so I asked him where they were going.
My grandmother told me that they couldn’t bear to be around my horrible attitude, that I was ruining their visit, and they were going to leave. Of course, 13 years old, I immediately began to cry and beg them to stay.
During all this, my mother is standing in the kitchen, watching the whole thing, and she never said a word. She let them manipulate and be cruel to me.
I am so grateful my children have loving grandparents who go out of their way to treasure and spoil them. If any of them had pulled the crap on my children that my grandparents pulled on me, I’d be up in their face like a flash, and it would be a cold day in hell before they laid eyes on them again.
Reason #42 I no longer speak to my mother OR her parents.
I have a similar story to ivylass’s. My grandmother was a vindictive, hateful, abusive person.
When I was about ten, she was visiting for Easter. After breakfast, I took my plate into the kitchen and was hightailing it out of the room because I didn’t want to spend any more time with the freak. She starts screaming at me that I didn’t take my dishes into the kitchen when what she meant was “you didn’t take MY dishes into the kitchen”. I wasn’t going to let her get away with this as she had been getting away with things like this for years, so I said, "oh no grandma, that’s your plate, but I’ll take it in for you.
She got up, packed her suitcase and drove home (a twelve hour drive) on Easter Sunday morning. I didn’t speak to her again for almost five years.
I’ve got more!
One more and then I must let this thread go… I could go on for hours.
She always told my mother and I that we were fat. My mom was not fat until her mother kept telling her that she was. “stupid fat pig, stop eating, porky” and the like. When I was 20, we went to her house for Christmas. She got my mother and I 5X shirts and kept insisting that they weren’t going to be big enough. When I got home, I stretched mine over the dining room table.
No one cried at her funeral. She made me want to be a nicer person.
burundi - I’ve been trying to remember the timescale. I was ‘packed off’ a short while after my sister was born, which I would say was worse. My grandmother had come over to help my Mum, and when she left I flew back home with her. My sister was probably two or three weeks old by then. I was four.
I think I bought into the ‘treat’ aspect, but I’m not sure. I know that most psychologists would say that it is the last thing you should do with an older sibling when a new baby is born. I sometimes tackle my parents about this and they say it never crossed their mind that it was anything but a good thing, to send me ‘on holiday’ at Granny and Grandad’s.
Who can say what effects it had? I was fairly jealous of my sister throughout our childhoods, now we have a good relationship. We do live in separate hemispheres though.
My parents always let me sip their beers when I was a toddler and child. I don’t think of it as a “WTF” thing, though, because it was a different time, when people were less concerned about alcohol. It also didn’t turn me into a booze freak. At some point I stopped asking as I sensed I was at an age where it wasn’t cute or harmless and was instead a little weird. They did buy me beer at college when they came out for parents weekend, while I was still a minor, something I got into trouble for having (okay, I admit it, I shouldn’t have taken it down to the Dean of Student’s office and drank it THERE) but you know, they trusted me. It was not a big deal.
However, my friends’ mother used to send her pot. At college. She had also made her mushroom brownies while she was still in high school. Something of a free spirit, her mom was. And she lived in Hawaii, where the pot is much better. The thing was, it had a similar effect to my parent’s actions: my friend didn’t do drugs much at all. I still thought it was sort of a WTF thing to do, though.
We were visiting our grandmother in IN. My twin sis and older sis were play wrestling and things got out of hand. My twin sis got hurt. She ran and told my mother. My mother decides to even things out by play wrestling with our older sis. Big mistake.
The two started off “playing” but things escalated quickly to real violence. It ended with my mother–a holy and pure woman who is now an ordained minister–standing over my sister screaming repeatedly, “I’M GONNA FUCK YOU UP!”
I was eight or nine years old. People tell me I was in the room but I have completely blocked it out. Thankfully.
And then there was the time that my twin sis got slapped a dozen times by my father and blood exploded all over the kitchen.
My aunt used to let my cousin (when he was about two or three) sit on her lap and help her drive.
Then there was the time my aunt and uncle (a different aunt) bought booze for all my cousin’s friends at his high school graduation party, provided they didn’t drive home. And there were tons of high school kids there, most of them my aunt and uncle didn’t know.
Um, hello, do you WANT to be arrested or sued? Jesus, how stupid can you be?
I was watching Soul Train with my Stepfather. At the time he was drinking, but he didn’t seem as drunk as he could get on occasion. Anyway at some point my youngest brother James came in from outside and walked in front of the TV on his way to the kitchen. My stepfather “Yelled don’t walk in front of the TV” and threw an encyclopedia at him. (Yes it was typical for him to be violent when drunk). My mom came out of the kitchen yelling and asking what he thought he was doing. He slapped her down. I jumped on his back and he threw me into a wall. I don’t remember all the details after that. I do remember both my Mom and I holding him at knifepoint until Detroit PD got there. Two weeks later we were in California.
Almost as WTF: A few years later my Mom confessed to me that she had intentionally got him drunk knowing he’d get violent so he’d get arrested. Her and my grandmother had planned it in advance to get us out. We were all approaching our teens (I was 12 when the above happened), and she was scared that one of us would eventually kill him. Years later I would read Delores Claiborne and really go WTF.
No, but seriously, maybe you should ask them, if you already didn’t, why they didn’t act sooner. Anything troubling that happened in my past due to, or connected with my mother (I was raised by her, and only visted my dad from time to time) I have attempted to find out why she acted like she did. Sometimes I get the information I seek, other times she doesn’t seem to know herself.
