WTF Parenting moments

In My Humble Opinion
21

When I was 12 or 13 I was left home alone. Everyone else went somewhere, but I didn’t want to go with, so I thought I’d impress my parents with a nice Spring Cleaning session. When I moved the couch, I found five unused syringes. No one in my family takes insulin or anything, so I knew that they had to belong to my older brother who, at the time, was involved in a woman almost 11 years his senior who was heavy into drugs. My parents knew, everyone knew.

So when they got home, I gave the syringes to my mother. She threw them away and that was the end of that.

My brother would have been about 16, maybe 17, at the time. She could have had him committed to a Rehabilitation Clinic or whatever, but she never did. He’s not into heroin anymore, but he’s addicted to hydrocodone, klonopins, oxycontins, etc. I always wonder why she never did anything when she had the chance. :frowning:

22

When my mom found out I was addicted to meth, she told me she’d rather I did coke “because it’s cleaner”. Oh well.

And when I was five, my dad let myself and my three siblings all have a swig off his beer, “to show you how gross it is”. And he was right, it was really icky. Didn’t stop me from becoming an alcoholic though.

23

Geez, I thought I had it bad…

When my parents would visit us they would love to leave very early in the morning before my daughter got up so they wouldn’t have to tell her goodbye. So she would wake up and run upstairs to the guest room and be so upset that they were gone. So the next time they came I told them that no matter what time they were leaving I was going to wake up my daughter so that she could say goodbye, because her well-being was more important than them not wanting to say goodbye. So they stopped leaving at the crack of dawn.

My sister recently told me that once they were visiting her, she had two children and her marriage was really bad–long since it has ended. But she was telling them that she needed their help to get out of it. They packed and left within 30 minutes.

Wouldn’t want you daughter to get divorced! That would be embarrassing! Of course, she married the guy in the first place because she was pregnant, and you can’t have a baby without marring the freak!! That would embarrass the parents!!!

So now her second marriage is on the rocks…not great.

Also, with her second marriage their little girl was born with multiple birth defects and only lived a year, was in the hospital for the first four months, etc. During this awful time when the baby was in the hospital my mom would say she couldn’t go to visit and help out because she had this volunteer job thing where she answered the phone, but mainly just sat at some desk and stared at the phone waiting for it to ring. My dad finally just went without her and she finally quit the volunteer stuff and helped out with the situation at my sister’s.

24

Funny: my grandmother had a mastectomy @ 1959 or so. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad these days, but back then they did a major surgery. Once my sister walked in on her and saw her chest and she had no idea what had happened. My grandmother told her that she had been struck by lightening!

She believed that for years!!!

25

My mother was the queen of WTF moments until I was an adult. She did things during my teenage years that I still don’t understand.

I came home drunk one night when I was fourteen, and my mother found it funny. The next morning when I woke up, I was expecting to be grounded for the rest of my life. Instead she asked if I had a hangover. When I said no, she looked disappointed and said she’d been hoping I’d get one so she wouldn’t have to think of a punishment. Then she couldn’t think of a punishment and didn’t punish me.

My mother found out I smoked when I was fifteen. Instead of kicking my ass or screaming at me or grounding me or SOMETHING, she asked if she could have a cigarette.

When I was twelve, my holy-roller stepfather caught me trying to bring a novel into church. He ripped it out of my hand and backhanded me hard enough to knock me on my butt. Then he threw the novel out onto the highway and yanked me into the church. My mother just stood there watching. Afterward, she wouldn’t look at me.

The entire time my mom and stepfather were married, they beat into my head (not literally) that premarital sex was a major sin. When they divorced, my mother started seeing a man she worked with. Pretty soon, he was spending weekends at our house, and she spent some weekends at his. I asked my mother if premarital sex was still a sin, and she could never give me a straight answer.

My mother would disappear for entire weekends at her boyfriend’s house, leaving me alone (AS A TEENAGER) in her giant condo. We had so many parties. . .

There are so many more, but I’ll leave you with those for now.

26

Oh, one I just remembered-my grandfather gave my father and his sisters help when they planned to blow up a neighbor’s mailbox with an M-80.

Then covered for them when the neighbor came and accused them.

Okay, what happened was that my dad’s youngest sister, my Aunt Katie, had a paper route, and this one woman kept refusing to pay her bill, and was really nasty and hateful. So, with the help of my father, (the oldest) and probably at least two of the other three sisters, they rigged up an M-80 with a lit cigarette attached to the fuse, in the mailbox. (I think my grandfather told them how to do it).

Then, when the woman came to the house screeching, my grandfather played dumb and swore they had been home the entire time.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Aunt Katie, the rest refuse to discuss it and all of them insist they weren’t in on it.

Considering that what they did was probably a felony, and a federal offense, to boot, they’re damn lucky my grandfather went along with it.

27

This isn’t exactly WTF Parenting since it has more to do with my aunt, my mother’s sister. She’s 12 years younger than my mom, so she became an aunt at a younger age than most women. She was 14 when I was born. I don’t know if she was jealous at no longer being the “baby” of the extended family or if she is just a naturally pissy person, but for as long as I can remember, she has gone back and forth from being a nice person and being just plain mean. She never ever hit me or anything…it was always more of a passive aggressive guilt trip kind of thing. You never quite knew how she was going to treat you, and if it was one of her “bitch” days, she somehow made you feel that it was your fault she wasn’t being nice to you.

One thing that sticks out in my mind is the time when I was 13 years old and had just been diagnosed with an eating disorder. She was in medical school at the time, so I guess everyone figured she knew the most about the disease. She sat me down on the couch and proceeded to let me have it. I was young, underweight, insecure, scared…it would have been so nice if she had been an understanding person I could talk to about my feelings. Nope. All she did was make me feel even worse than I already did by laying on the guilt trip. And boy, she laid it on thick. She even said to me at one point, “Do you have any idea what you are doing to your mother?” It was like she thought anorexia was just some choice I made to inflict pain on my family, and I could stop anytime I wanted to. I’ve been recovered for over almost 7 years, but I never have quite forgiven her that. She could have helped me and made a difference in my recovery, but instead she just made me feel like some stupid kid that keeps screwing up.

There’s other stuff too, but I don’t want to go on and on. She does it to my sister too. I don’t think my aunt likes that my sister wants to go to college to pursue a dance or musical theater degree. I’m working on a Nursing degree and doing quite well in the program, but I’ve always had the feeling she looks down on me because she is a doctor. My sister and I like to come up with ideas for stuff to say around her that will piss her off. For instance, I’m curious about what she’s going to say when she finds out I will be living with my boyfriend in May! :eek:

28

I have sooo many WTF’s when it comes to my mother, I still cannot believe I am now at 39 years old living in her house as her Carer …

She once threatened to leave home - why? because I hadn’t made my bed.

I fell over running for the school bus and split both my knees open (and almost collided head first with a stone wall) I staggered back home in a state of shock, I walks in the back door and she instantly started screaming her head off at me for missing the bus. I pointed at my knees and said “I fell” (I think I was 12 at the time) there was blood all over my legs. She looks at me, purses her lips and tells me to get into the bathroom and wash my legs and get out to school. I actually started to walk in the direction of the bathroom, she stops me and says “did you rip your tights?” (nylons for our American viewers) rip them? They’d fecking disintegrated, I’d skidded about 5 feet when I hit the ground … *uck me, she really started screaming at me now for ruining a pair of tights that had cost her however much money of her money. I stood there meekly listening to this about to apologise profusely when something snapped and I started cursing her out of it for being more concerned about a 50pence pair of tights than my legs, and that I was going to have a bath and go to bed.

When I was maybe 8 or 9 I came home from school one day to find my bedroom empty of toys. I ran to my mother, and asked what had happened to my toys? She sneered at me and said she’s given them to Mrs B down the road to give to her two daughters, who were much nicer little girls than me, and they deserved those toys - I didn’t …

When I left school I saved really hard to buy myself a horse, I finally succeeded, and a couple of years later I was offered my “dream job” which meant moving away from home - and unfortunately selling my horse. I was lucky enough to sell her within a week to someone I knew from the riding school that I went to. I spent most of the money I got for her buying myself things that I’d need for when I went away. I phoned the woman up to tell her I would be arriving that weekend, and she told me she’d given my job to someone else because I’d dithered (uh no, I’d had to go to hospital for a doctor’s appointment and postponed my start date as a result). I was in bits over it - having lost both the job and my horse. When I told my mother she laughed in my face and said it was about time I’d sold that bloody horse anyway …

When I was in my early 20’s I met a fella and fell *crash bang wallop * head over heels in love with him. He didn’t reciprocate my feelings and in one horrendous instance he humiliated me in front of a half a dozen other people over my feelings for him. My mother thought this was quite the most delightfully funny anecdote to relate to other people (after I’d stupidly told her what had happened)

These days, because of my circumstances I’ve put on a fair bit of weight, one day in front of an audience of two or three people my mother informed me that she’d been speaking to Mrs M and Mrs M had asked her “when did your daughter get married?” my mother had informed her that I was single, Mrs M expressed her astonishment as she’d seen me the other day and thought I was pregnant. My mother loudly proclaimed “see you’re so fat Mrs M thought you were pregnant!”

Oh I could go on all night … :frowning:

29

Oh yeah, different times, for sure – but there are limits.

In our family, special occasions warranted a big ol’ bottle of Baby Duck (a sickeningly-sweet carbonated wine,) for the kids. The mid-seventies being what they were, I suspect that Baby Duck was developed with the pre-teen palate in mind – so I agree, making wine available to us didn’t really qualify as a “WTF moment.”

I think this does, though: The tail-end of the Thanksgiving of 1977 found a seven-year-old Mudd curled up under the dining room table with the now-empty bottle of Baby Duck. I’d hit it hard and was passed out cold, cradling the dead soldier for all the world like a teddy-bear, my face transformed by rosy cheeks and and a sloppy sleeping grin. My parents’ reaction? “Quick! Get the camera!” I think every time the photo album came out and was showed around, and that picture stayed in there counts as another WTF moment.

30

I just remembered another. A little background first. I lived with, and was raised with my mother. My parents were never married (yes, I literally am a bastard :D), and I my father wasn’t involved with me until I was six.

We lived in California and my mother was an LVN (Licensed Vocational Nurse) so when she went to work, she’d drop me off at the family of a friend of hers, Juliana Alvez (I think that’s how you spell it). Now at first, it started off nice enough, but as time went on, they started being meaner to me. The would punish me for the tiniest offenses, meanwhile, a little girl they were baby sitting never seemed to get punished. Being very young, I thought that I deserved all the punishments I was getting, like having to stand in the corner for walking barefoot in the front room instead of wearing my slippers :rolleyes: . Well, a while after that, I had another baby sitter, Beatrice, a name I will never forget, and even though it’s been over 20 years or more, I still want to track her down, yell and scream and chew her out…but I digress. Anyway, she, and the other people living with her were psychologically and mentally abusive. One time, when I finally had enough and couldn’t take it any more, my mother drove me there, and I didn’t want to get out, my mother asked why, and I finally told her about how horrible they were treating me. My mother said she was sorry and didn’t know that, and then proceeded to tell me that she had no where else to take me, so I needed to stay one more day there :mad: I go in, Beatrice asks me what I was talking about with my mother for so long. I didn’t say. She asked me again, and I didn’t tell her. She grabbed my hand, and bent my fingers back until I finally told her.

Years later when I asked my mother how she could do that to me, send to a baby sitter I told her was abusive, she didn’t really have a satisfactory answer.

31

When I was 14, I took a Weight Training class in my HS. Since we lived in MI at the time, we had to do or warm-up running inside the building. Run through a hallway, up a flight of stairs, across the sym (WHY the gym was on the 2nd story, I’ll never understand), down a flight of stairs, and repeat.

Well, one day I was running down the flight of stairs. My right foot was on the 3rd stair up, and my left foot, instead of going tot he 2nd step, went directly to the floor. I twisted my right ankle, pulling loose a tendon with a small chunk of bone, I’d later find out.

For about a month, it hurt to walk. It really sucked going to a two-story school with half my classes on the second floor. My ankle was swollen hugely.

My mom’s response?

“Take some ibuprofrin and keep it elevated.”

Now, she’s a nurse, and since there weren’t any bone protruding and no blood, I think she figured it was just a sprain.

Finally, 3 months later, I got to a doctor for it. Turns out, if I’d gotten to the doctor’s within 3 weeks after the injury, I could’ve had a splint and it would’ve healed up fine. But now, my ankle occasionally goes out from under me and is weak, and the only way to fix it is an operation.

A WTF, but not MEAN. She told me she thought it was just a sprain, nothing serios.

32

The summer before sixth grade my family moved. A few days before the first day of school, my brother and I went fishing. At some point in the half mile walk back home from our pond, I stepped in a hole. I twisted my ankle. By the time I got home it was so swelled that I couldn’t hardly get my sock off. My mom was at work so I just put ice on it and put it up. My dad had no sympathy for me, told me it was just sprained and I was fine. The next day I showed my mom it was horribly bruised and still very swelled. She told me I would be fine in a few days. The first day of school comes, I hobbled on it through the day. That night I told my mom that it still hurts. She told me I would be fine. Fast forward two more weeks, my mom gots tired of hearing me whine about my foot and took me to the doctor. Turns out it was broken. A big WTF? I will never understand why they let me go over two weeks in pain. I understand not running kids to the doctor for every little bump and bruise, but you could clearly see it wasn’t getting any better.

33

When I was about 15 I was staying with my dad during some kind of school break. A friend had come with me, and some of our friends, including my boyfriend, came over. My dad and his girlfriend went out to the bar, and our friends mentioned that they had some pot, so we went out to their car to smoke, so the smell wouldn’t stick around the house. I knew that my dad smoked pot, but he didn’t know that I did.
Well, we’re sitting there in the car and we see my dad drive up into the driveway. He was home early and there was no way that we could have gotten anything past him, so I braced for the worst when I saw him walking over to the car. He opens up the door, a cloud of smoke blows out, and he says “You’re busted.”
My friend says “Hey John, wanna smoke?”
I cringed, but dad and girlfriend jump in the car and smoke up with us, or them at least, because I was severely weirded out by the whole thing.

Another “Wtf?” moment concerning my dad and weed was the time that I went over for our every-other-weekend visit and he’d left a little tin of pot sitting on the table. I grabbed some and hid it until I went back to my mom’s house. Well, I guess he found out about it, and much like the lady who called the cops to tell them that her boyfriend stole her weed, he called my mom and told her that he thought I was smoking pot and thatif she looked in my stuff, she’d probably find some. She came in and asked me, and I told her that I found it on his table and I was just curious.

34

This one’s brought to you by my uncle and grandmother.

I was about 7 or 8 and we were at a family reunion. I was a fat kid, and the ONLY fat kid in the family. All of the cousins were running around the backyard playing and having a ball.

The house we were at had a really cool swing that several kids could sit on at once. Well, my young cousin, who was about 2, was on the swing and I sat down next to him. I sat down weird, though, and so he was thrown off headfirst into some gravel. It was the way I sat down, not my weight, that caused it; it could have happened to anyone.

So he hit his little head and screamed, etc., but he was fine about a minute later. My uncle and granny immediately packed me up in the car and took me home.

It made me feel as if I were somehow inferior and something to be kept hidden away from the “normal” people. Like I was just so fat that I was dangerous. WTF were they thinking?

After that I started bringing books with me to family reunions and hiding in a bedroom somewhere. Still do.

35

Wow, the OP asked for single moments in otherwise “normal” lives, starting off with a relatively harmless story about smoking, but most of this thread is made up of horrifying stories of abuse and lifelong trauma… Not that I’m trying to put down anyone’s experiences, but I can’t imagine this is what the OP had in mind. It’s kind of emotionally draining.

36

Want emotionally draining? My mother let my father beat me up at random for fourteen years. Much later, she told me that she refused to let him treat my two brothers like he did me. Thanks a lot, mom. And they wondered why I took drugs.

37

I had a brother who was pretty severely brain-damaged. I believe it was difficult to find babysitters. I remember one time when I was 8 and he would have been 6, I was left alone with him. His ballance was never good, and he fell and hit his head on the stair banister. He was bleeding all over the place and I had a hard time getting it stopped. I remember using hot water because I knew either cold or hot water would stop the bleeding, and I figured that I didn’t like to use hot water so it must be that. Fortunatly I did get the bleeding stopped, and a while later my father and aunt came home. He may have been picking her up at the airport.

My mom doesn’t remember the incident and now I think perhaps she wasn’t told. The reason my aunt was there was my mom had complications after my youngest sister was born, and went back in the hospital. My aunt was there to help out. (We had immigrated the year before so there would have been no family there otherwise.) I remember asking my aunt about it once ( my father is dead so can’t ask him) She said that she thought sometimes my parents wound up putting alot of responcibility on me because they couldn’t see other options. The part I still can’t figure out is where my sisters were.

38

I broke my right arm when I was 14. Was pretty nasty break too, 4 different places all around the wrist area. My mom, rather than taking me to the hospital, calls up one and asks if it would be ok if I just took some medicine and slept it off. Shes a registered nurse. I asked her about it a couple years ago and she said she was just freaked out because we didn’t have any medical coverage. We were a very poor family growing up. Of course that response didn’t sit well with me so I threaten to put her in a home when she gets older. :wink:

39

Reading this thread makes me realise how damn lucky I’ve been to have good, kind, decent, loving parents all though my life.

My mother’s a nurse too, and when I broke my collarbone at the age of three she told me to stop whining, and left me lying on the sofa for 4 hours before taking me to the hospital. Maybe it’s a nurse thing - I’d go “I’ve got a terrible cold” and she’d say “Oh yes, I’ve had that for a week now, but I didn’t want to complain”. :smiley: Bless.

40

Yeah, some of the posts aren’t what I had in mind when I started the thread, but when I start threads I’m always worried about them doing well because I’ve had some bad ones, and even a couple that got zero replies. So when I saw that this thread is doing just fine, if I ran across a reply that wasn’t what I had in mind, I just let it slide.