I just want to clarify that my mother and step father were not abusive or neglectful normally. There were definitely WTF moments while I was growing up, but my childhood was actually pretty healthy. I think sometimes parents just severely fuck up and don’t want to admit it.
Fairly normal childhood here, but one of the things that still makes me think WTF? is that my father thought a hilarious nickname for Elizabeth would be “Lizzie Borden.” I still remember being traumatized when I found out who Lizzie Borden was, and again, my parents thought this was the height of humor. They would even sing the “Lizzie Borden took an ax …” song to me. For years, this went on.
Again, WTF?
My father’s biggest WTF moment was having kids in the first place. He is in no way qualified to be a parent.
My mother, for the most part, was a wonderful, caring mother. She grew up with a mentally and physically abusive mother so she took extra care to be a good mother.
Her first moment that I can remember was when she decided we would learn that smoking was bad if we tried it at a young age. When I say young, I mean I wasn’t even in Kindergarten yet. I tried it but didn’t like it. I did start smoking when I was 18 though. My oldest sister (she was maybe 5 or 6 at the time) tried it and loved it. She used to steall butts from anywhere she could get them throughout her whole childhood. She’s 27 now and still smokes. My middle sister was the only one who refused to try it. She still doesn’t smoke. That one totally backfired on my mother.
Other than that, the only WTF moment I can think of was last year. My oldest sister was about to leave her husband. My middle sister was 5 months pregnant and marrying her second husband. I am engaged and have been for almost 3 years. I also have no kids. So anyway, at my sister’s wedding, my mother continued her tradition of harrassing me to get married. HELLO!!! Two of your 3 children have failed miserably in marriage, not to mention your own mistake of marrying my father and you’re harrassing ME to get married?!?! I finally told her that if she didn’t stop, I would go home. So she stopped. An hour later, she asked me when I was going to give her grandchildren. WTF?!?! I was only 23, give me a friggen break.
Nice topic.
I have awesome parents, great childhood. Mom was a nurse, Dad was a banker, both sharp as tacks.
When I was around 2, I think, I walked out onto a frozen pond in my neighborhood. Evidently, it looked the same as the rest of the snow-covered landscape. Some neighbors coaxed me off of the ice, and I was taken home. Here comes the good part - I got punished b/c I wasn’t supposed to leave the yard to begin with.
I had dinner with the parents about a month ago, and I asked my Mom "What the hell were you letting a 2 or 3 year-old play by himself in the front yard after a snowstorm (A rare occurance)?
It was very out of character for her, and I still think WTF.
Even better WTF - they called me last week to tell me they are separating after 35 years. Sheesh.
I can’t think of any WTF moments from my parents. But my husband’s parents decided to start him smoking when he was about 3 because they thought he looked so cute with a cigarette in his mouth. :rolleyes:
I lived a couple of miles from my cousin and we visited on bicycles. One day, I visited her and we decided to ride our bikes down the road. My chain came off, I panicked, and I went off the side of the road and down an embankment. I was knocked out. My aunt told me I had to ride my bike home: she refused to drive me.
My sister drove over to pick me up. She was 13. When my mother got home, she was so furious with my aunt she didn’t speak to her in two years.
Broken collarbone, concussion, two black eyes, and about half the skin on my face was scraped off. Funfunfun!
Julie
:eek: That’s all I have to say, is :eek:
WTF #1 I’m in college and getting bc pills from Planned Parenthood (what a great organization). Home for the summer and realize I will run out before the return to school (need two weeks more, poor planning on my part). Recall that my boy-friend’s (now husband for 28 years) sister takes the same pills as I, write him and ask for an advance of a couple of weeks. He writes back his sister no longer takes pills and can’t help. Oh well, will just have to start over in the fall.
But!!! Mom rifles thru my drawers, finds the letter and confronts me. Am I taking drugs or “THE” pill. Fast calculation (drugs bad, the “PILL” responsible safe sex) and I decide to answer truthfully. Absolutely the wrong answer. She preferred that I be a drug addict and told me in no uncertain terms, for years.
WTF #2 Parents bought cartons of cigarettes for my younger brothers when they were only 10 and 11 for their birthday and Christmas. They still think this was ok??? 
WTF #3 Take my kids to visit the parental units at their vacation “cabin” in MN. Kids are to sleep on a cot/ledge with one of those 3 inch foam cushions on it. Kids complain that the “bed” is lumpy. I investigate and there are 4 GUNS under the cushion!!! Parents are surprised that I am concerned and wonder what’s the big deal :eek:
These are the only ones that I feel comfortable sharing. The rest scare me to this day. :rolleyes:
Which one is the scary one, my husband’s parents or my aunt? 
Julie
Your husband’s parents, of course. You kind of seem like a wuss for not walking off your little bike accident
My mother tried to put me on a protein shake diet when I was thirteen. I really wasn’t that overweight. A a little extra pudge around my hips and thighs, sure, but that was it. I did grow out of it later.
Okay, a little on the lighter side.
The first time I got my period, I happened to be in the bathroom and found my undies full of blood. I didn’t panic, because I knew what was up, but I yelled for mom anyway.
Now, I’d often yell from the bathroom for anything from toilet paper to invading spiders. So, WTF? How did she know?
In comes Mom, carrying a pad, brand new belt and clean undies. I can’t imagine how she’d have explained it if she was wrong!
I’ll never know how she knew it was “The Yell”.
Well, there was this one time when Mom was laying in bed with this man who wasn’t Daddy. And they were smoking something through this glass pipe, looking, thingy. And then they dressed me up in a sailors uniform and made me dance around and sing songs while they layed there and laughed at me…
My last post was a joke BTW…
Oh come on! I would have taken the picture and kept in the family album.
I still puzzle over this one. Although I have many WTF moments – this one sticks out in my memory.
When I was about 13 – in 8th grade – and my sister would have been 16 with her driver’s license, some band came to town that we both were dying to see. (Okay, I’ll confess: it was Journey!) My sister had gotten tickets and another friend of hers was going and the tough part was going to be to get dad to let me go too. (This was on a school night and would be the first concert he let me go to. Since that night, he let me go to many with no problems at all.)
So weeks before the show, I started working on him, begging, pleading, negotiating and trying to find out what deal I had to make to get him to let me go. Finally, we settled on three conditions: 1) I had to have all my homework done before I left, 2) No matter how late we got in, I still had to go to school the next morning and 3) my room had to be spotlessly clean before we left.
The week of the show, I made every effort to meet each of the conditions: I got all my homework done and cleaned my room even more thoroughly than I normally did. I even dusted and vacuumed and everything. Day of the show, all conditions were met and dad let us go. This involved his two teenaged daughters driving to Cleveland (an hour and a half away) unsupervised to attend a rock concert with beer and pot and boys and all that. (BTW, we totally behaved and did not partake in beer, pot or boys until many concerts later.)
We got home around 1 or 2 in the morning and I flipped on the light in my bedroom to find it completely destroyed. Everything that was in a drawer was now on the floor. Everything in the closets was scattered on the floor. Bedding ripped off the bed; even a mattress thrown across the room. The rest of the house was perfectly spotless, so it’s not as if we were robbed while my parents were sleeping. But every single thing I had dusted and carefully put in its place was now tossed somewhere else in the room. And it may bear pointing out that my sister’s room was not touched and was still as pristine as she left it – nor did she have to make any deals about getting homework done or going to school on time. (As if the rules should have been different because I was younger.)
I remember standing there, with my hand still on the light switch, ears ringing, in shock. And my sister, who normally never make offers like this, said, “Do you want some help?”
And I don’t know why I thought the entire room had to be put back together by myself that very night but I remember thinking that I had BEST not go to school in the morning, leaving it that way – there was no tellling what the consequences would be for THAT. (Flogging? Hanging? Being made to eat Brussels Sprouts? Who knew?) So I put my room back together, was up until about 4 or 5 in the morning and promptly went to school by 8 a.m. or whatever time I was supposed to be there. And refused to let my sister help because I had sensed that somehow, that would violate some other unknown rule that nobody had bothered to communicate to me.
To this day, the incident has never been discussed. It was never addressed the next day or ever. I still have no idea at all why that was done, what part of the bargain I missed, or exactly what lesson I was supposed to have learned from that. What I did learn, was that my dad cannot be trusted to keep his end of a bargain – I have never trusted him since. That, and the other lesson: sometimes you still get punished even when you do everything right – a valuable Life Lesson if you as me. And people wonder why I’m cynical.
This certainly pales in comparison to the above post, but it always sorta bothered me.
My dad, really treated me like an adult, ever since I was maybe 12 he pretty much counted me as an adult. I was perfectly fine with this at the time, because I could ask him pretty much any question and he would answer it. But I’m now starting to think that it probably wasnt good of him to tell his 13 year old daughter about drinking binges, acid trips, how to evade the cops when holding drugs*… and many other things that made me feel that my father had a very wild youth.
My father wasnt a drug dealer, nor was he a heavy user, but his friends were all of the above, and he was known to be holding stuff usualy hid somewhere on his motorcycle as I recall.
My grandmother (mom’s mom) used to make my aunt kneel on uncooked rice for an hour for punishments.
Dogzilla, you have got to ask about that!
Are you sure it wasn’t your sister?
Was one of your parents searching for drugs?
Please ask about it and update us!
I’m sure it wasn’t my sister since I was with her the entire time. Room was clean, we left together, she wasn’t out of my sight, we get home, room is trashed. Nope, wasn’t her, we were the only kids in the house and we did not have a dog.
While my dad could have been searching for drugs, that would have been stupid (but not impossible, given his tendency toward bullshit logic) for two reasons:
a) Why not search both kids’ rooms, especially since the older kid (not me) was more likely to have had drugs in the first place, and
b) If one or two teenagers had or were doing drugs… wouldn’t you think we’d take 'em with us when we’re going to a concert? Why would you leave your stash at home when you’re going out to party?
What they didn’t know: my sister and I were smart enough to keep contraband away from the house, i.e. our lockers (this was before they searched lockers), friends’ houses, etc. We were even known to have PO Box addresses so we could keep dad from reading or opening our mail. Once we were on to their invasion of privacy policy, we were careful enough that they never found a thing. Which makes me wonder why they suspected we were troublemakers in the first place, being church-going honor roll students and all that goes with that. What I mean by contraband would be things like Prince albums or other music not acceptable to Mormon dads. In high school, neither of us drank, did drugs, smoked, fooled around with boys. To this day, I’m not sure why we were even treated with suspicion, as if we were delinquents – neither of us ever did anything wrong.
I’m kind of afraid to ask about this. My dad may not remember this at all – he often “forgets” these little wtf moments. I know my sister remembers – we’ve discussed it – but she has no clue either. I’m concerned about whatever under-the-bridge bullshit emotional luggage that getting an explanation could bring to the forefront. In other words, I’ve dealt with, accepted or gotten over my parents’ dysfunctional parenting choices. Why bring up something painful now? Generally, his explanations are something lame, like, “Well, I found a dust bunny under the bed and I didn’t know what else to do to get through to you damned kids.”
My dad took disobedience and basic teenager rebellion personally. As if we were the only kids who were ever “bad” (which meant we didn’t rinse out the kitchen sink after finishing the dishes) and that we purposely set out to piss him off. Like we laid awake nights trying to think of something we could do that would cause him to commit violence or trash our rooms. :rolleyes:
If I do get up the courage to ask, I will be back to update you. I’d prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.
A milder WTF here - my father, for some reason, never ever allowed me to get a bicycle. My older sister had one, but I was not allowed. We lived in a large, contained neighborhood with quiet roads, so cars were never a problem; traffic was the reason my father quoted, though, for not allowing me the bike.
So, here I am today, never having learned how to ride a bike. Now, I can ride horses, yes… no problem there letting a child go off for the day on a stallion in the backwoods of Ocala (I’d been riding since age 6 and could go unattended when I hit my teens). But a bicycle… that’s plain crazy!
Another possible WTF concerns my mother - when I was little, she tried to expose me to the chicken pox several times so I’d “get it over with”. Once, I was even shut in a room most of a weekend to play with the neighbor’s infected child.
Some of my friends find this really odd and almost cruel. I’ve heard of other parents doing this, so it never struck me as bizarre. A shame it never worked… it seemed I had an immunity to the chicken pox… until I turned 18, that is. (What a miserable week in March that was!)