Just because anyone can have a child, that doesn't make everyone a good parent. Some parents can say and do the cruelest things imaginable to their kids. Those words can linger for years, causing them untold pain. These are the things parents said that their children wish they could forget.
She Said What No Mother Should Ever Say To Her Child
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“I was like 12. My mom and I were going school shopping for clothes and we got into an argument about what clothes I should get. I threw a fit and refused to wear what she wanted me to, so we left. During the car ride home this was the only thing she said to me: ‘My good son died a long time ago.’ It was an awkward car ride to say the least. My brother died before I was even born, so it isn’t like I even knew him; he drowned in a pool when he was 2. That was like 15 years ago. I brought it up to her a few years back and she outright denies saying it, but it is the one thing that I will never forget.”
Her Mother Blamed HER For The Abuse She Went Through
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“I have been abused by any boyfriend/husband my mother ever had.
As soon as I turned 18, I left. She came to see me the Christmas after I left to ‘drop off stuff I left.’ The only thing she said to me was, ‘I’m so glad you’re gone. All you ever did was steal all my men and seduce them.’
I was 10-14 and 17-18. No kid ever deserves to feel like abuse is their fault. Getting beaten and forced into acts is never your fault.”
She Was In Such A Vulnerable Place And They Were So Callous
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“After I attempted to kill myself when I was 13, my parents sat me down to talk about it. Their very first question to me was, ‘Now we know how much you love being a drama queen, so it’s only fair for us to ask: did you really do it?’ I don’t think I’ve ever been so hurt.
This was over ten years ago and I’m a happy, well adjusted, and functional adult now. I love my (now divorced) parents, even if what they said hurt. We’re not as close as most families, and I live rather far away from both of them. They’re good people and had a lot on their plate at the time emotionally, financially, and my older siblings were quite destructive as well. Not trying to excuse their response, but I can understand the frustration that led them to question my intent.”
Her Mother Didn’t Even Care That She Had Finally Escaped An Abusive Relationship
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“When I was 19, I left a really abusive relationship. I had pretty much no money, a car payment, and was trying to figure out how to be an adult without a controlling presence in my life. I remember asking my mom for $50 for food to get me through until payday and she told me, ‘You made your choice when you left him.’ My mother thought that since he had been paying the bills for me, that I should have just stayed with him, despite the constant physical and verbal abuse. We have always had a really crappy relationship, but I think that was an absolute turning point for me in realizing really and truly what a horrible person she is.”
His Father Had Never Lost It Like That Before
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“This morning, I was looking for my fishing license so that I could go out with a few friends. I mentioned it to my father and he flipped out. ‘You’re a useless and lazy piece of crap.’ He called me useless, stupid, a piece of crap and everything under the sun just because he helped me buy the lifetime license when I was a teenager. I responded by saying that I don’t really care about fishing and that I only did it to spend time with him. He responded to that by getting up, choking me, pinning me against the wall, and then punching me in the face. I stood there in shock and just looked at him. Then I asked him to hit me again, I don’t know why I did that, I guess I was fed up. He grabbed his cup of coffee and made like he was going to throw it on me, but stopped at the last second. He then told me to leave before I ‘really get hurt.’
The thing is, my dad NEVER hit me or anyone else in my family, ever. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t do any kind of illegal substances. And he never has. As he’s gotten older, I’ve noticed that he gets mad over menial things (fishing license, ice cubes in the freezer, TV remotes, etc). And while he never hit me before, he definitely has tried to ‘bully’ me and my family members with threats and intimidation.
I won’t put the blame entirely on him though. I did give him a hard time after he called me a ‘useless piece of crap’ and whatnot. I don’t think he’s used to people standing up to him and he had a history of violence when he was younger, but I always chalked that up to living in a harsh, crime-ridden city.
The reason why I still love him is because he had a heart attack a few years ago and I opted to stay home and help him out rather than move out. But now, I don’t know. I’m just so fed up with feeling scared as to what mood he’ll be in that I never want to see him again. But I was brought up in a traditional household where you needed to obey and respect your elders no matter what. I guess it’s just a very contradicting feeling.”
He Still Has A Scar From That Day
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“‘Clean up fast and don’t tell mom,’ said my father after he shoved 12-year-old me through our sliding glass door. Abuse sucks. Please don’t subject your kids to it.
I didn’t tell my mom. My mother knew something happened when she got home and saw a bandage covering the underside of my left forearm. I still have a scar that looks like the eye of Sauron.
He abused her too. They divorced two and a half years later, curiously not because of the abuse, which I guess my mom could endure, but because my father cheated. He ended up running off with the mistress, which actually did all of us – him, me, my brother, and my mom – a big favor. He’s still married to the mistress, going on about 10 years.
She straightened him out quite a bit. He no longer drinks and is very open to working through past trauma. My mother and brother want no part of it, but I’m starting to develop a healthy relationship with my father for the first time in my life. It helps that I’m old enough to not put up with being bullied.”
The Physical Wounds Healed, But The Emotional Ones Lingered
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“I don’t even know where to begin…
‘We don’t want him back in our home, we are much happier without him,’ said dad, not to me, but to my case worker at Division of Family and Children Services. ‘You’re a meathead, dead from the neck up.’ ~Dad. ‘Go make this sheet into a diaper and crawl around on the floor like the baby you are.’ ~Dad; he said this while his friend was over. They proceeded to laugh at me for the better part of an hour. ‘You’re not a human, you’re an animal. Put your dinner in the dog dish and eat out of there.’ ~Dad.
‘I should have gone into that back alley and had a clothes hanger operation.’ ~Mom. ‘We’re going back.’ ~Mom after she left my dad when he beat the crap out of her and cheated on her. ‘He did not beat you, he disciplined you.’ ~Mom, when I was returned home from foster care. Note – they took me to school and my teacher had the school call an ambulance to take me to the emergency room due to the injuries I had. Crap, I could go on like this for awhile. In the end, the physical wounds healed quickly. It was the emotional wounds that took a while to mend.”
He Always Had Body Issues And His Mother Didn’t Make Things Any Easier
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“I’m a male. ‘Do you need a bra?’ was said to me semi-regularly from middle school through early high school by my mother.
I had pretty poor eating habits and was pretty heavy when I was younger. I consumed a lot of soda, and didn’t really know better; there wasn’t a great deal of food education available in my location at the time I was coming up, and my parents didn’t make it a priority.
Right during the time I was extremely insecure about myself and my body, I got this question on a pretty regular basis from my mom, and other similar stuff.
I stay at a healthy weight now, generally, but it’s something I have to focus on daily or I’ll balloon rapidly.
I went to see her after not having seen her for a couple of years. Within the first few days, there was a fat joke made, in public, in front of family I rarely see, and I wasn’t even overweight by BMI. I politely excused myself and left. As I was walking away, I heard her say, ‘Well, he didn’t like that, did he?’
I have to look at BMI and the scale and body fat percentages. I can’t trust mirrors, because I’ve learned that what I see in the mirror is not what others see when they look at me.
I had a very close relationship with my father.
When he was dying and losing his faculties, she called me into his deathbed and roused him (by this time, it was difficult to rouse him), then asked him if he recognized me, for the explicit purpose of having me see him say, ‘No.’
She deliberately constructed one of the most terrible memories I have. I still have no idea why. The last thing I heard my father say, he was denying he knew me. And that may have been the last thing he said at all.”
Even If She Had A Hard Time With Her Other Kids, She Shouldn’t Have Treated Her One Good Son That Way
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“In 1987, my senior year of high school: ‘Come August, you and all your crap will be gone, I don’t care where you go. I am done raising kids.’ My mother, ladies and gentlemen. Now she wonders why I don’t come visit her.
I was the third of three boys. I also had in the last 4 years added a stepbrother and stepsister. My older brothers were physically abusive, as well as abusive in other ways. Both were in trouble with the law. My oldest brother was arrested in Atlanta when he was 16. We lived in Rockford, Illinois. We had no idea he was in Atlanta until the police called. My other sibling stole my stepdad’s motorcycle and wrecked it, injuring the person in the car he hit, and the friend he had on the back of it. My stepsister got pregnant so she could drop out of high school. My stepbrother, who I don’t blame, ran away to Albuquerque to live with his mother. I was the last one at home, I hadn’t ever been arrested, I had good grades in school and was involved in soccer and track. I lived at home as the last one left for about 8 months when she told me. I was shocked. Prior to her saying that, she would actually introduce me to people as the ‘white sheep’ of her kids, so when she said it it was very hurtful.
Whether she was tired or not, or any other reason she may have had, it hurt.”
She Was A Real Life Wicked Stepmother
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“Me: ‘I want to work hard and go to UC Berkeley for college.’
Stepmom: ‘You will never make it because you’re not smart enough, and even if you do, your father and I would never support you because you don’t deserve it.’
She then proceeded to take away my piano lessons and spend $5,000 on her daughter to go to some stupid acting camp while I worked my butt off as a landscaper or doing other odd jobs. The great thing with having a job at 14-15 years old was also being told I don’t deserve to eat the food she makes because I should ‘buy my own.’ Not only that, I ‘didn’t deserve new clothes,’ and I needed to buy all my school supplies as a freshman in high school. They kicked me out of the house (after literally taking away my mattress and throwing all my stuff around my room) my sophomore year of high school because even though I had a 4.0, held a job down, played jazz piano (because every penny I earned went to piano lessons), I wouldn’t let her daughter copy my homework, and because she read my journal about me saying what a horrible person she is.”
They Should Have Never Left Them With Their Murderous Grandparents
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“My mom and dad have both said a lot of messed up stuff. Like, I know my dad’s favorite position and my mom’s name for his man bits. Ugh, and all the fighting they did, they dragged us into it.
But the most messed up thing was from my grandmother. I was living with them for about 6 months, I should’ve never been there, though. My grandparents are ex-cons. They killed a guy in the ’70s, just to see what it was like to kill a guy!
She got mad about something, I think I had asked her to sign something last minute for school, I was 15-16 at the time. Anyway, the conversation led to her leaning in real close (she’s 6 feet tall) and whispering, ‘You know, they say, it’s easier to kill someone the second time…’
That’s always a nice sentiment from Grandma Dearest.”
She Never Liked The Way She Looked Until That Photo
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“I was always self-conscious growing up about how I looked due to years of being teased. Due to this, I’ve never really had a photograph taken of me because they would come out blurry due to me shyly ducking out of the camera.
Fast forward to my sophomore year in high school. My art teacher (knowing how shy I was) presented me with a candid picture of myself. No Photoshop or anything. I cried because it was the first time I had a picture showing me as what I considered ‘pretty’ in a completely natural setting. My self-confidence soared. So, for Mother’s Day, I presented the picture (had gotten it framed and everything) to my mother. She seemed really happy to finally have a picture of me.
A few days later, she was throwing one of her fits and I was the target. I remember her storming out of the room and thinking it had passed over. Next thing I know, she came in with the picture. Having broken the glass to get it out, I saw there were tears in it already but wasn’t expecting what came next.
She pulled out a knife and with the most disgusted look she said, ‘Why would anyone in the world want a picture reminding them how ugly a person their daughter is?’ She then stabbed into the picture and ripped it to shreds. To this day, there is not a single picture of me in that house.”
They Caused Their Own Problems, But They Laid The Blame At Her Feet
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“‘You are the cause of most of the problems in this family.’
It came out during a depressive episode I had in high school.
My parents are hoarders that are perpetually in massive debt. My grandmother owns their house, one of their cars, all of the appliances, pays for utilities and they expect her and my uncle to provide maintenance on all of it. They were physically abusive, which stopped after an arrest and some mandated anger management classes when I was 13, but are still verbally abusive and the whiniest people I know.”
They Forced Her To Testify Against Her Will
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“When I was 16 years old and in grade 11, I did my volunteer co-op at a local youth crisis shelter. My supervisor at the shelter abused me pretty much every day that I was there, which was 4 days a week from October – January. When my parents found out (by reading my journal) they told me it was my fault, that I was ‘the other woman’ because he was married, and then forced me to press charges against him by taking everything away from me and yelling at me constantly until I did so. Once the court case got rolling, they would constantly bemoan the fact they had to take time out of their day (they were both retired at the time) to take me to court even though I begged repeatedly not to go as I wanted to go to school.”
When He Couldn’t Get His Way With Physical Abuse, He Turned To Psychological Manipulation
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“‘If you step out of line again, you will know what it’s like to be dominated and beaten by someone of vastly superior physical size and strength,’ from my father, word for word. I was 14, it freaked me out. I wrote it down and kept it in my wallet, so I would never forget why I hated that sucker. It’s not like he hadn’t beaten me before, this was just around my teenage years when he realized the beatings didn’t work, and he had to add psychological manipulation into the mix.
His parents were very old school with physical punishment, as was he. He’s mellowed out with age, and now we have a pretty decent adult father/son/friendship thing, now that we’re both adults. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around how to discipline a child, a small human who is smaller and weaker and is biologically engineered to trust you. But now that our relationship is more akin to peer to peer and not adult to child, we’ve been mostly fine.”
It Was A Simple Problem, But Her Mother Wasn’t Interested In Solutions
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“In 7th grade, I had really terrible stress related dandruff. My mom wouldn’t let me comb my scalp so there was no way to get rid of what was on my head before washing.
‘Mom, today someone asked if I have lice, can I please use a comb?’
My mom, with venom in her eyes and voice, ‘You’re lying! That’s the look your father gets when he lies! Why are you lying?’
Just to be clear, I was not lying. It was humiliating, especially when there was a simple fix that would have reduced the appearance of the flakes if not the root cause.
‘I’m not lying! Ask (my best friend) Stephanie!’
‘You probably lied to her, too.’
WTF, Mom? I honestly wasn’t a big liar (like most kids, I did fib) and anyone could see the flakes in my hair. In retrospect, I have no idea why she wanted me to go around with visible dandruff.
I’ve put a lot of thought into it over the years, and there are only three things that make sense: She either genuinely thought that combing would make the dandruff worse, she was mad about something else and took it out on me, or she didn’t want to concede control, even in a tiny way.
She also really hates my dad and may have been punishing me for looking like him.”
She Actually Tried To Get Him To Run Away
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“Stepmother: ‘I hope you do run away. I’ll call children’s services, tell them we don’t want you back. Then I’ll have your father to myself, we can have our own kid. I won’t think twice about you.’
I told her many years later that I don’t know why she was threatened by me as a child, but that I forgive her. She told me I was awful and made her life a nightmare and that she and my dad would have worked out if I weren’t around…Namaste to you too, precious.”
She Basically Wished That Her Daughter Had Never Been Born
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“‘I wish that I had been a better Christian and not divorce my first husband. I could have stayed with him and made a better family if I had just been stronger and relied on God more,’ said by my mother.
This hurt me because he emotionally and physically abused her and my sister, by her own admission. Not to mention the fact that if she hadn’t divorced him, she would never have met my dad and I wouldn’t exist…at least not as the successful person I am today. She would pepper these kinds of things in after she had just found out I’d accomplished something. Graduated college with a masters, had a great job, etc, diminishing my accomplishments. And she wonders why I moved across the country to get away from her, hardly speak to her and hate religion now.”
She Didn’t Have To Drag Poor Dan Into This
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“My mom is your typical Asian Dragon Lady (I’m Vietnamese). I didn’t excel in middle school. One day, I brought home a C in history class.
My mom said, ‘You’re like Dan. In fact, you’re worse than Dan. Dan has an excuse to get bad grades. You have no excuse. I’m embarrassed to be your mother.’
Dan is my autistic cousin (about 4 years younger than me), who is a sweet and loving boy. At this time, he was about 7 or 8. I don’t know why she had to diss me and then drag an autistic child into it too, just to make sure it felt bad.”