Everybody makes mistakes, even parents. Even though they'd like to pretend to their kids as if they're perfect, parents are really just people, like anyone else. These particular parents messed up really bad in front of their kids. Some of them just messed up in ways that eventually became funny stories for their children to retell, other parents messed up so bad that it's a miracle that their children even still talk to them.
We searched through Reddit for the hardest hitting stories and compiled them all here. Content has been edited for clarity.
At Least He Won’t Remember It
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“My little guy was about 1 year old. He loved playing with Duplos (they’re just big Legos for toddlers). We’d build stuff together almost every day with his Duplos.
One day, I was high on speed. And when I’m on speed, I don’t like to interact with anyone. I was messing around on my computer all day, occasionally hiding in the bathroom to take a hit or two, then coming back out to my computer. And I had the TV on Nick Jr. to babysit for me so the kid would leave me alone. Now it’s 9 pm and I was gonna put the kid to bed when I thought to myself how nice it would be with him asleep because I’d be free to lurk out on my computer and maybe pleasure myself or something once he’s in bed.
I stood up from my computer desk and said to the kid, ‘Okay, buddy,’ and he looked at me, grabbed a Duplo block, smiled and ran to me all excited because he believed I was finally, actually going to play with him for the first time that day.
But nope. He was wrong. I was just putting him in bed so I could keep acting like a tweaker without the guilt of ignoring my kid.
That may not have been the last time I used, but it was one of the last. The kid is 6 now and I haven’t touched the stuff since he was 1. And I MAKE time for him, every single day.”
A Case Of Mistaken Identity
“With our daughter away at college, the wife and I would take advantage of many situations to do the bump-bump. One day I came home from work and I heard the shower running. I went into the bathroom and reached inside the shower curtain and pinched her butt. All of a sudden I hear this voice say, ‘What the heck, Dad?’ Apparently, our daughter decided to come home for the weekend unannounced. I think I was more messed up over it than she was.”
Mom Brandishes A Thick, Purple Secret
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“As my mum is near incapable of using a computer, I’ll share on her behalf.
One night, she got ridiculously turnt and came home. She called me from her bedroom and said she had something to show me, and I reluctantly go to her.
She’s in her bedroom holding a thick, translucent purple adult toy and she says to me in slurred speech, ‘This is what mummy uses when she’s lonely.’
To this day, I don’t know what she was thinking when she did this.”
They Thought Nothing Of That Strange Car Ride Until A Decade Later
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“When I was 13 or 14, my mom was deep into her speed addiction but I didn’t realize it at the time. One night, I had my best friend over and my mom brought us, along with my little brother who was 4-ish with her to pick up money from my stepdad. After we got there and she ran in, she came back out and handed something to my friend and asked her to put it in her bra until we got home since she was driving without insurance and had a suspended license. We got home, my friend gave it back, and we forgot about it.
10 years later, we realized my mom had actually given her the speed to hold onto in case she was pulled over and searched or arrested. So that was something.
My mom is fine now; she hit her three years sober this year so we’re really proud of her. She’s still kind of a mess, but I love her anyway. For all the things she did when I was growing up and the situations she let and encouraged me to get into, it’s amazing I’ve grown up to be the person I am, and same goes for my little brother.”
She’ll Never Forget The Night She Thought Her Mom Would Die
“My parents lost twins to FAS when I was about eight. It sent my mother into a spiraling depression that resulted in rampaging addiction, a new baby that was so coddled he wasn’t weaned from a bottle until he was four, and ultimately, a divorce.
The culmination of this occurred when I was in high school. There was a new stepdad in the picture who was not a nice man, and he took every advantage of my mother’s issues. He got her hooked on opiates and was encouraging her to drink herself to death. She’d been hospitalized for over-drinking several times by this point, but there’s a night I will never forget.
About two in the morning, my mother starts screaming from her room. It’s the scream of someone who is dying. I went in there, and she’d vomited blood all over the bed. Stepdad wasn’t there. I’m not sure if this was during a period when he’d been kicked out, in jail, or had just gone off somewhere (it was before he was murdered in prison; that’s all I remember). I called 911, because what in the holy heck was even going on. Paramedics got there surprisingly quickly and I let them in and stood by, not sure what to do. I stood in the door watching as they tried to get a line in her arm, but for whatever reason they missed, and blood sprayed all over the wall. I honestly believed my mother was going to die right there.
My youngest brother got placed in my dad’s custody after that, but since he was only the youngest’s biological father, my other brother and I stayed in that nightmare house until we were out of high school, more or less. Somehow the stepdad was able to get me into foster care shortly after this, and I still do not know how. My grandparents found out when they returned home from vacation a month later and took custody of us until my mother divorced this guy. It took her six months to decide we were worth it.
I can go out and drink at a bar or a party and have a great time, come home, and crash happy. If I have even a cold one at home, it’s not enjoyable and I get really sick after. I’ve had a six-pack of cider in the fridge for months because while I really like that cider, I don’t want to touch it. Apparently, my brother has the same sort of visceral reaction, but hadn’t ever managed to put the two together until last week.”
“Isn’t It A Little Late For That, Dad?”
“This happened to my husband. We had a whole gaggle of teenage kiddos over at our house one Friday night. My husband had a few brews and then snuck off behind the garage to have a smoke. He doesn’t smoke in front of me since I quit. He had bummed a really strong cig, and it made him super dizzy. Just as he was keeling over, a group of teenagers came along the path just in time to see him fall over onto the lawnmower. He pretended to be getting ready to mow, which made them howl with laughter. They still talk about ‘that time Dad fell and tried to cover it up by saying he was going to mow at 11 pm.'”
A Sleepover Gone Wrong
“I remember as a kid I was sleeping over at my best friend’s house. We would have been 7 or 8.
His mother was lovely. Honestly, the sweetest woman in the world. I loved her. His dad was a terrible guy. Didn’t work, drank, would disappear for days on benders, etc.
So this night, we’d had a nice evening, his mum had made a tasty dinner, we’d watched some cartoons, played some video games and at 8:30-ish, we were put to bed.
A little while later, we were woken by a crashing sound downstairs. His dad had come home, off his face. Then there was the unmistakable sound of him beating the crap out of the mum.
I sat up and turned the light on. The look on my friend’s face haunts me to this day. He was crying and terrified. He had a phone in his room, so I rang my parents and tried to explain what was going on as best I could (kinda hard when you’re that young, scared and didn’t really know about domestic violence as a concept).
My mum calmed me down and told us to stay in the room, they’d be there to pick us up shortly. My friend was still in bits, so I climbed into his bed and hugged him tightly and told him my parents were coming.
About five minutes later, we heard sirens and the police barged in. There was more shouting and screaming. We stayed still. A few minutes after that, my dad burst into the bedroom and told us to grab our clothes and that he was going to take us to my house, about a five-minute drive away.
We could see my friend’s dad in the back of a police car. My mum was giving his mum a tight hug when we came out of the house.
About two days later, my friend’s mum came over and brought me a present to say thank you. She gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was a Batman figure.
They divorced not long after that. Years later, I learned more about the story. While his dad had always been a jerk, he’d never really been violent. He’d come home that night stinking of drink and someone else’s perfume, so she confronted him. He lost it and blamed her for his horrible life.
I’ve lost touch with that friend over the years. I sometimes wonder how he is.”
Mom Probably Should Have Kept That Info To Herself
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“I’ll comment on my ex-boyfriend’s behalf. When his sister turned 16, she had a party hosted at her 50-year-old mom’s house.
Her mom got trashed and hooked up with one of the daughter’s 16-year-old male friends.
She told me and my ex this on a visit to England, giggling like it wasn’t a disgusting, horrifying story.”
Dad Shared A Little Too Much Over The Bonfire
“I was a college freshman and had come home for winter break, and my boyfriend had just flown in to visit. He was going to meet my parents for the first time ever. I was out giving him a tour of my hometown when I got a call from my dad. All he said was, ‘PUMPKIN, GET BACK TO THE HOUSE AND CHECK OUT THIS BIG FIRE I MADE!’ I drove us home after he spam called me four more times and kept yelling about how cool the fire was.
I rarely ever saw my dad drink when I was growing up. He’d always been hyper-responsible and straight-laced—he’s exactly like Hank Hill, except with a different Southern accent, and he’s a nerdy electrical engineer instead of a propane salesman.
I came home to find my dad and his brother completely trashed, stumbling around a huge bonfire in the backyard looking for more sticks to throw in the pit, holding their own half-empty bottles, and wearing matching cowboy hats. I have no idea where they got the cowboy hats. My then-boyfriend introduced himself. And instead of asking him about how his flight was, how school is going, where we went that afternoon, or any of the normal pleasantries you’d ask your daughter’s boyfriend, my dad blurted out, ‘Have I ever told y’all about the one and only time I ever did an illicit substance?’ He launched into a story about how he did this stuff in a hot tub with the local weather lady at a community theater cast party in the 80s. Then he and my uncle spent hours telling us crazy stuff they did before my cousins and I were born. And then they called my future husband a pansy.”
Speedy, The Devil Pony
“My dad always tells the story of when he was 6 or 7 and his father (my grandpa) came home from a rowdy night. My dad says my grandpa sidled slowly into the kitchen with a rope in his hand and my grandma, who was sitting at the kitchen table, asked what he had done.
He then led a miniature pony into the kitchen.
The pony was named Speedy, he bit, and would never let anyone ride him, and one day he ran off. They lived around a lot of farmland, so we like to think someone took him in and got the devil out of him.”
Mom Partied A Little Too Hard
“An old friend called me and wanted to hang out, so I said sure. I’m not a drinker but occasionally I’ll mess with some other stuff that’s legal in parts of the US. My friend handed me this weird looking pen thing and, thinking it would be like normal, I hit it three times pretty hard.
This was not like normal.
I had never felt this way in my life and my friend saw this and took me home. It happened that my daughter was home (summer vacation) when I got through the door. I went directly to my room thinking I could just sleep this off. Unfortunately, I am one of those people who gets ravenous when I get this way and I was in no way able to cook anything. So I’m thinking about what I had in the kitchen and my brain flashed on cornbread. I could make cornbread. It turned out I couldn’t and I gave up after mixing the ingredients. So I’ve got raw cornbread mix and I’m really hungry, so my messed up brain just said, ‘Oh well. Eat the cornbread.’ And I did.
About halfway through the bowl, my daughter came into the kitchen. There is no way in heck I can hide eating uncooked cornbread, so I looked at her and said ‘Hi! Guess what?’
Her answer? ‘Mom, I know what you’re up to.’
The story is not over.
An hour later, I was still feeling it and watching YouTube makeup tutorials. My daughter is crazy talented with makeup. I am not. She already knew I was out of it anyway, so I asked her to give me a makeover like the one I’d just seen. She did but it turned out terrible. The reason it was so bad was that I turned on my webcam just to watch the transformation during the process. I could not stop laughing at how ridiculous I looked. The longer she spent on my face, the more I laughed, which made her laugh.
She still gives me crap about it five years later.”
They Never Let Mom Live Down Her Trashy Night
“About 3 years ago, I had a few too many one night. My kids were 13 and 16, we’d gone to a relatives BBQ which was walking distance from home. I hadn’t planned on drinking, but that’s the way the night went.
My eldest daughter went home early, so the boy and I wandered back after midnight. I remember play fighting with them in the living room; the next thing I remember is being in bed, feeling sick. I was sick where I lay and tried to get up but couldn’t. I thought, ‘Well, I’ve messed the bed up already, I may as well just carry on here.’ Then I got up to have a shower (opposite end of the house), which woke the kids up. I didn’t have a towel so I ran back through to my room in the buff and collapsed on the floor. I woke up hours later, the kids had covered me up, stripped and cleaned my bed, washed all my sheets, dried them, and remade my bed.
They still bring it up: ‘Remember when Mom was trashed and threw up all over herself?’ Yeah, don’t talk about all the times I wasn’t trashed and was being a good Mom, eh!?
I like to think of it as a deterrent.”
He Roasted Her To A Crisp In Front Of The Whole Family
“At a family BBQ, after the food is all eaten and things wind down, we’ll usually sit in the backyard until the wee hours drinking, joking around and roasting each other while the kids play inside. It was the wife’s turn to DD, so I let loose. My stepdaughter (13) came outside to tattle on one of the other kids. After being told that nothing was wrong and to quit trying to snitch for the sake of being a snitch, she decided to start being a little jerk and started trying to throw shade, which annoyed me. She started saying things like,’You’re a gross jerk and you smell bad!’ type of stuff. Somewhere, a bit of brain that wasn’t fully marinated with what I’d been drinking saw the response coming and begged the rest of the brain to just stop. Stupid brain, which was still in roast-mode disregards the suggestion and warmed up the voice box: ‘Oh yeah? Well, I banged your mom!’
You could hear the record scratch. Everything stopped dead for about 10 seconds. The kid’s face went from a boisterous little teenage sneer to slack-jawed and dumbfounded as it started to sink in. Then one person laughed. Then three. Then, everyone, my sober wife included, just completely lost it. I’d just totally eviscerated my stepdaughter in front of everyone at the party and was so trashed that I wasn’t totally sure why they were laughing because it wasn’t that funny. The kid turned beet red and ran back inside the house and didn’t make so much as a peep for the rest of the night.
So yeah…that’s probably a therapist bill I’m gonna have to pay sometime down the road. She refused to talk to me for a week. Quietest week ever.”
Her Little “Accident” Deeply Traumatized Everyone
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“My partner and I cannot have children, but we babysit a lot for friends and family. Two of the little girls we watch are very sheltered, very shy, and they both get upset easily. But they are otherwise wonderful girls. Anyway, one morning, the girls are on the couch and my partner is reading them a Dr. Seuss book. She has been feeling sort of sick since the night before.
Anyway, the littlest of the two drops a sippy cup on the floor. My partner gets up to grab it, trips on her big feet, lands on all fours like a cat and has explosive diarrhea…in cut off jean shorts…like a foot from these girls’ faces. She basically landed in a yoga pose that cleaned her out like Draino. It was instantly running down the back of her legs and such. I jump up out of my chair and she runs to the bathroom murmuring, ‘Oh god, oh god, oh god,’ and leaving a trail behind her.
I totally admit, I sorta froze in a ‘What do I do now’ kinda moment. Both girls are staring at me with horror on their little faces. And now the smell is everywhere and both of them start bawling. I herd them to the TV room and head back to start cleaning. Then I hear three screams followed by a loud ‘MOTHER FRICK!’ Our house is old and set up in a very odd way. Our bathroom has two doors and one of them leads to our tv room, which leads to our bedroom. She came out of our bathroom buck naked after a shower because in her panic she forgot to get a towel and strode right out in front of two girls she had just almost pooped on. Partner runs to bedroom, I don’t see her again until the girls leave like five hours later.”
A Freudian English Lesson
“I teach 8th graders (13 to 15-year-olds, depending on their birthday). I am normally a history teacher, but this past year I also taught English. I was trying to think of a way of explaining writing a five paragraph essay – you have your Introduction, three paragraph body, and conclusion. After I explained that, I said, ‘Think of it like a sandwich, you can’t leave out your bun or you are just left holding your meat.’
I was horrified. I think I will stick to teaching history, that way I can ask them why they are giggling when I teach them about Watergate and my slideshow says ‘deep throat.'”
Mom Showed Off A Little Too Much On Her Birthday
“My mom had a very mild drinking problem. At least she was a happy drinker. Anyway, when I was about 9, it was her 40th birthday party. My parents threw big parties for the Big 0s. So they had a tent out in the backyard and all their friends were over and after about four hours of heavy drinking and catered food, it was time to start opening the gifts. My mom opens the one from my band teacher (they were good friends and later my sister and I realized she was having an affair with him at the time). It was a music box, which my mom loved, full of rubbers. I guess my dad had just gotten a vasectomy at the time, and so as a rebuttal my mom decided to pull down the collar of her already low cut shirt and flashed the entire audience. I went to bed after that.”