I, too, thought this was going to be a light-hearted thread, but since it’s not…
When I was in high school I lived with my grandmother. My aunt, uncle, and cousin lived next door. My cousin, who was about my age, took it into his head to start sexually abusing me (trying to, that is). It went on for a few weeks before I got up the nerve to tell Grandma. She said, “Did you tell your uncle?” I said no. She said, “Well, don’t, he’d kill your cousin.” End of story.
I asked her about it years later and she says she doesn’t remember it. (BTW, I got a knife and took care of my cousin’s problem myself.)
Dung Beetle!!! Tell us what you did with said knife!!
I know the feeling all too well. When I was about 6, a man moved into our house, renting a room from us. When I was 8, he began sexually abusing me (he hit two of my older sisters first). When I was 13, I told a school counsellor about it, who suggested I tell my mom. I told her, and her response? “Well, stay away from him”; not easy advice to take, considering how, any time I needed a ride somewhere, he volunteered to drive me and mom let him. I still don’t know WTF she was thinking, and unfortunately, never worked up the nerve to ask her.
On a lighter note, a WTF moment from my MIL (whom I’ve always said has been ‘the mother I never had’): One Christmas, MIL got me a shirt; I liked it a lot, except that it was about 3 sizes too small; I said “this is really cute, but it will never fit”. MIL said “Well, the sales clerk said it would” 
Aw, shucks, t’werent nothin…
The next time my cousin started up, I showed him the knife and told him I was going to chop his dick off if he didn’t quit. He tried to take it from me. What he got was no more than a scratch, but it convinced him I was serious. He left me alone after that.
And, jeez, norinew! :eek:
Dogzilla, it’s none of my business, but I am very curious about what happened to your room. I think we all have a ‘hunch’ about what happened, but don’t want to jump to conclusions until the truth is revealed.
Your decision though. 
Thanks for your concern but…
I don’t know if the truth will ever be revealed. I’d already accepted the idea that I’ll never know what my dad was thinking. He pulled crap like that from time to time. Once he threatened to take all the trash in the garbage can outside (it was all maggoty and had been there about a week in the summer time) and spread it on my bed simply because I forgot to drag the can out to the curb.
Personally, I think my dad is very emotionally immature and tends to react to new situations in a very extreme way. Rational discussion never occurs to him and the punishment rarely fit the crime. Usually the punishment was way overboard in proportion to a minor infraction. He’s not highly educated and has difficulty expressing himself (unlike his overly verbose daughter ). Mind you, my sister and I did not live with him until we were about 11 and 14. He was around until I was about 5 or 6. So there was a period of time where he did no parenting, which was the transition for us from being little kids to being teenagers. I just think the man had no business interacting with teenagers.
He lives 1200 miles away and I might talk to him about once a month. On the off chance I remember this thread next time I talk to him, AND feel comfortable bringing this up… I’ll be happy to come back and let you all know what he said. And, I want everybody to know that he’s not a bad guy at all. Especially since I’m an adult now – he doesn’t feel the need to “teach” me these bizarre lessons anymore so now we get along fairly well.
But since that might not ever happen, you might as well share your hunches and speculations! I’m curious to see what you all think.
Maybe a robber broke in and ransacked Dogzilla’s room, then was frightened off by a noise before he was able to get on with the rest of the house.
No, I don’t think so either.
Okay, I’ll give this to you from the point of view of how my mom was. See, if we asked her for permission to do something, and she didn’t really want us to do it, she would say okay ( ), but then wouldn’t speak to us for three days. When she said okay to something, we never knew if she meant, “yeah, go ahead, it’s fine” or “well, go ahead and do it, but you’ll be sorry”. So my guess would be that when you asked to go to the concert, he didn’t want you to, so he tried to make it so difficult (by setting so many conditions) that you wouldn’t want to go. When you met the conditions and went anyway, his thinking was probably “yeah, she went, but she’ll be sorry!”
Just a WAG, of course.
Dogzilla, I completely understand what it’s like to come home to that.
When I was about 15 or so, I was allowed to spend the week at my grandparent’s house. This was a pretty big deal, even though they only lived about 30 miles away, because we weren’t allowed to do that ever since my mom re-married.
I got home on Friday, went up to my room, and found it completely trashed. All my books torn, my mattress tossed up against the wall off the bed, my clothes thrown around, all of the glass horse figurines that I collected broken and stomped into my writing papers and books.
Nobody had said anything when I had come home, everyone acted like nothing had happened.
I went to my mom, crying, and asked why.
“Oh, it’s not that bad.” She said, “Just pick it up. Peter lost some paperwork that he needed, and he was looking for it.”
I had never touched his work papers, and he had no reason to think that I would. There was no reason for it, other than to destroy what small ammount of things that I had.
The reasons were no doubt different, but it’s such a shock to come home happy and find that you’ve been violated like that.
This is pretty common, so you’re right that it’s not particularly cruel. Too bad the desire to spare you adult pox didn’t work out. 
Dogzilla, my father could be a baby like that too. I knew this by teenagerhood and would try and protect myself by getting assurances from him ahead of time that he wouldn’t be mad or bring something up later that he said wasn’t a problem at the time. I always felt so betrayed when he would bring it up anyway–he promised not too and I fell for it!
I’m still dumbfounded about something in my Mom’s memory. I have a scar on my upper lip which is faint enough that I didn’t notice it until I was ~ten. “Hey Ma, where did I get this scar?” “Oh, that was from ice skating when you were five.” Flash forward 20 years. “Oh your friend didn’t mean to throw that snowball at you and cut your lip.” “Huh?” “You have a scar above your lip where he hit you with a smowball.” OK, revise story in mind, fine.
Bring it up a couple of years later and she looks dumbfounded about BOTH stories and can’t tell how I got this friggin scar!!
Also, my father was afraid of hospitals so he would refuse to take us even in a relative emergency, and he would be angry if my Mom took us in his absence. (This was after being enraged and put-upon that we would go out and hurt ourselves to begin with.) My brother hit me once and knocked my tooth in; according to Pop we could have fixed that at home and why did we go to the ER?
Jesus. I know this thread didn’t turn out the way the OP intended, but I think it’s a good thread nonetheless. Sometimes just saying these things can help a lot.
My parents were good people, just sort of screwed up. They meant well, but despite being in their 30’s by the time I was born, they just weren’t emotionally mature enough to be parents. They didn’t seem to know how to deal with kids, especially with kids who were, well, kids. It was like they expected little robot babies that just did what they were told and never caused problems, and were shocked to learn that actual kids are nothing like this. Not that I caused problems; I did the usual stupid kid stuff, but I never drank or did drugs or got arrested or anything on that level.
But my mom was probably worse than my dad. Dad took the attitude of “you don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you”, and as long as I got good grades and did my chores and never got brought home by the cops, he was all right. But my mom used to freak out about very trivial things. For instance, I was about 11 years old, and my room was messy. Cluttered with books and drawing papers, that sort of thing. So she trashed the room, burnt all my drawings, locked my books in the attic, and accused me of trying to get her to commit suicide by refusing to clean my room. WTF?
Then there was the time I had a fever of 105 and was shaking, and she slapped me across the face and told me to stop shaking because it was annoying her. When she finally took my temperature, she rushed me to the ER and spent the next hour apologizing and asking me if I wanted her to kill herself. (This was a theme with her.)
When I was 14, my aunt, mom’s older sister, passed away suddenly. She was nearly unhinged with grief. About a year later, I accidentally knocked a photo of my aunt off a side table while vacuuming. It was not damaged in any way, but my mother flew off the handle and started beating me over the head with her fists and accusing me of killing my aunt. I ran out of the house and didn’t come back until my dad got home.
Then there was the time I had food poisoning. I had had diarrhea for 2 days and couldn’t eat anything, and she was so angry with me for “ruining everyone’s day” by being sick.
She also refused to let me play with other kids that she thought were “ugly”, as in, not physically attractive enough for her standards. Even into my teenage years, she would yell at me for being friends with ugly people. (Neither she nor I are exactly what you might call supermodels.)
In recent years, she’s mellowed out and has become fairly well-adjusted, and when I ask her about these things, she either claims not to remember them, claims I’m just making them up, or still blames me for the incident in question.
My dad was a bit different, in that he always treated me like an adult, even when I was in no way ready to be one. During the divorce, he used to regularly unburden his soul to me regarding his relationship with my mother, his own psychological baggage issues, and assorted horror stories about his time spent in Vietnam. I was 12. shrug
My parents were generally pretty normal, well balanced people. However, they were very athletic and both in good shape, as were my siblings. I, on the other hand, was not (nor am I now).
Anyways, one day when I was about 11, my Mom came home from the store and told me she had brought me an exciting present. Out of the bag she pulled…a bathroom scale. She then announced, in front of the rest of our family, that I was on a diet and would no longer be eating dessert after dinner.
This, and several other comments throughout my teenage years, successfully killed my self-esteem and created weird food issues that I’m still tring to deal with.
My parents have been pretty normal, with the exception of one error in judgment.
When I was a sophomore in high school, a friend of mine hanged himself over Easter break. For a couple of days after the funeral, I was pretty happy to lie on the couch and watch TV or talk on the phone, and there was a steady stream of friends in and out of my house. I usually slept over friend’s houses, too, so I wasn’t seeing much of my parents.
Maybe two days after the funeral, my parents decided that we were going out to eat together. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic, but I went. I wasn’t much for sparkling dinner conversation, but my parents were chatting and nagging me to eat more. They started asking me some questions about my friend. For some reason, my parents asked me if he’d hanged himself as some kind of “sexual thing.”
I mean, WTF?!
Sadly many posts in this thread confirm what I’ve been learning during my time as a kindergarten teacher- some people who have kids really aren’t fit to be parents- no way, no how.
As for my own parents- apart from hardly spending any time with me as I grew up because of work commitmants (a very common problem I know), my parents were generally pretty excellent.
Except, my Dad has a rather filthy temper and has the nasty habit (which I, unfortunately seemed to have learnt from him) of lashing out when he’s angry and just saying the most hurtful thing he can think of. The thing that he said that still has the abiltiy to stun me with it’s meaness to this day:
(said shortly after a very half-hearted runaway attempt by me) “The next time you decide to run away from home, tell me, and I’ll help you pack your bags”
Bearing in mind that I didn’t come to understand why he lashed out in this hurtful way until years later, and i was about 11 at the time, and you have one pretty big WTF? moment.
I think I had a pretty good childhood, but I do have some WTF moments. Mostly they occured around the same time–when my stepmother-to-be first moved in with my dad (I think she may have been overwhelmed at times and didn’t know quite how to react). Some examples:
-In 3rd grade or so, I had this toy dinosaur and caveman that I used to play with in the snow. I’d leave them on the heating grate (it was an old house that had those 12" square grates in the floor) to dry. My stepmom told me not to do that. One day, she told me that they had melted and that she threw them away. Being a scientific sort even then, I doubted that the heat from the grate was enough to do that, so I asked if I could see them. She refused. About a week later she gave them back to me and told me not to do it again, or she’d throw them out for real.
-Also in 3rd grade, it was a big fad for the kids to write silly messages in pen on their hands. I did, and she told me not to write on myself. So I thought I’d be all tricky and write someplace she couldn’t see, so I wrote on my stomach. Too bad that night she wanted to see how my skirt was fitting (to see if I had grown out of it). I was trying to hold my shirt down, which got her curiosity up. She lifted my shirt a bit (only an inch or 2) and saw the writing. She told me that if I EVER wrote on myself again she’d take a big black permanent marker and draw a bulls-eye on my face and make me go to school like that. I believed her because:
-earlier that year, she made me wear gloves to school and keep them on to try to stop me from biting my nails. She made me take a note to my teacher (to explain what was going on and to ask her if she saw me biting them during the school day) and bring it back with the teacher’s answer to make sure I actually did it.
-Going in the not believing injury thing, I was on the track team my freshman year of high school and got shin splints (the year before I had noticed them a bit during the end of the season, but in middle school we ran on grass whereas in high school we essentially ran on asphalt). The school sports medicine guy diagnosed it, but they didn’t believe me because “he wasn’t a real doctor”. Also, my dad (who had run track and cross country in high school) didn’t believe me, because he never got them when he was a runner. My senior year of high school, I fell down our stairs as I was trying to put on some boots (my parents were leaving for church, I was running late, and if I had missed them, they would’ve chewed me out for missing church) and messed up my right ankle. Later that day I was at work changing out of my boots and into my work shoes and rolled that same ankle (I was standing up, silly me). It got really swollen and bruised (I tried to use my robe’s belt as an ace bandage) but they thought I was being a big baby about it. For months after that it didn’t have the range of motion of the other one.
Wow. Some posts in this thread are just… wow. I didn’t exactly have a happy childhood, but nothing compared to what some of you have been through. One, WTF moment I can remember that fits in with this thread is when I was about ten years old or so, I was just sitting in the living room one evening watching T.V. My mother came out of the kitchen and started yelling at me, and at the time, I wasn’t paying attention to her. She got really frustrated by the time I looked up to see what she was yelling at. Apparently, she was accusing me of stealing chips from the cuboard. I had no clue what she was talking because I don’t think I was even aware she bought chips. Anyway, she was yelling and waving her arms, and I, of course, deny any knowledge. So she started spanking me and told me to quit lying and if I admitted it, then the spanking would stop. I was a stubborn child. Even now, I refuse to admit anything that isn’t my fault. So she spanked me until her own hand hurt. Then, she went back into the kitchen and after five seconds, came back out with a bag of chips in her hands and said to me. “Oh. I found it.” Never apologized. That was definately a WTF?!
Both of my parents have mental illnesses (dad’s bipolar and mom is clinically depressed plus has some sort of paranoia- but not schizophrenia- diagnois) but, medication has worked a lot better on Dad than Mom, so he’s always seemed far more grounded than her.
Yet some of the things he’s said occasionally throw me for a loop by saying something that is completely at odds with his usual pragmatic views. I don’t know if he’s just really open minded when it comes to the paranormal, or what, but… He knows I love the X-Files, and I’ve only recently come to realize that he didn’t know I like them despite not believing in things on the show.
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He tells me that when I was really little, he used to think I was psychic. Why? Because half the time when he’d go to open the door to call me in from playing at supper time, I’d be standing there about to open the door from the other side. Couldn’t I have heard him approaching the door, or have a good sense of time, even before I wore a watch?
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He asked me about a month ago if I believe in aliens and ghosts. I said sure, it’s possible that there’s life on other planets, though I don’t believe they visit Earth, and I think that residual ghosts will probably be confirmed and explained by physics one day, but I don’t believe in “aware” ghosts. He nods thoughtfully, then tells me about the day he and my grandmother saw a UFO…but we didn’t rehash why he thought our old house was haunted and how he looked for footprints in the snow after “hearing” someone in the attic. hmm.
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We got into a discussion about mythical creatures not too long ago - monsters like dragons, werewolves etc- and he was shocked that I don’t think they are, or ever were real. He asks where do I think the ideas came from then, if people never saw them, so I point out that I’ve written a story about food that has a people-like society, and obviously that’s just me using my imagination, so I expect that people also imagined these various monsters. So he tells me that I can only imagine it because I have familiarity with fridges and food
We come to an uneasy truce when I admit it’s possible that there was something that made people imagine said creatures…
My mother just says upsetting things - like after telling me for 2 years how much she loved my dog that they couldn’t bear to part with her etc, that she’d put the dog to sleep if I moved out- not merely baffling ones.
After I was circumcized, my mum put my foreskin in a photo album alongside my baby pictures.
You’d think that after all the looks of horror and revulsion she’d have thrown the damned thing out.
Y’all are lucky I didn’t go all-over JDT.
One day when I was in the third grade, my sister Katie (second grade) and I came home from school as usual. The door wasn’t locked or anything, but that was normal, because we had a stay-at-home Mom.
When we went inside, we found big blood spots all over the kitchen floor. The trail led into the dining room (hardwood floor) and up the stairs (also hardwood). In the upstairs bathroom, Katie and I found that the sink was a bloody mess.
Mom and two baby sisters were nowhere to be found.
At that age, we’d never seen so much blood (though, in retrospect, it wasn’t so very much). And our Mom would NEVER have left blood all over the hardwood floors. Nor would she take off without locking the door and/or leaving us a note.
We were convinced that Mom and our sisters had been stabbed and kidnapped.
So Katie and I went running back out of the house and over to the next-door neighbor. We got her to come to the door, and when she did, we told her what we’d found. And, really casually, she said, “Oh, yeah, your sister Mary cut her thumb, and your Mom took her to get stitches.”
HELLO??? Didn’t anyone think that it might be a good idea to find some way of letting us know this before we stumbled into what looked like a murder scene? (At least, to our sheltered young eyes.)
Mom later admitted that this was kind of stupid on her part. Of course, she was kind of distracted by the fact that Mary, who was 3, got her thumb cut because the idiot neighbor lady was letting Mary and her 4-year-old son play with a jackknife, unsupervised. The jackknife belonged to the 4-year-old and he was allowed to run around with it like it was a kid’s toy.
OK, maybe this is about the neighbor lady’s idiot parenting, and not my mom’s. Now that I think of it, Mom had probably told her to meet us when we came home and tell us what happened.
Speaking of the idiot neighbors, shortly after that, their oldest son (my age) told us that their “mom’s stomach had exploded” and that she’d bled all over their bathroom, and did we want to see? Scared, we went upstairs and saw it. The bathroom looked like a murder really had happened there. The bathtub, toilet, sink, and floor were smeared with blood. It still looked like that several days after the incident occurred (which, in retrospect, I think was probably a really horrible miscarriage). Nobody had bothered to clean it up, and it stayed that way for some time (even though the boys’ grandmother was taking care of them and their dad was around). It stayed that way for some time, and the boys went on showing the neighbor kids, like it was a freak show attraction. The parents did nothing to stop it.
I remember asking my mom about it, but nobody ever gave us a straight answer about what had happened (which is why I think it was a miscarriage). That scared us for a long, long time. I didn’t know someone’s stomach could just explode like that.