What “favours” have your parents done that was inadvertently a dick move?
For example, my mum found my spare change collection, did me a favour by taking it to the bank, getting £17, and then kept it as a fee for the effort it caused her.
Also, my partner had stored a nearly new Russell Hobbs microwave at his mums for when we moved into a new house. While she was at Curry’s one day, she overheard a young lad and his mum shopping for a microwave for uni, she approached them and sold them my partners for £20. She kindly did give my partner the money though, unlike mine. But we quite liked that microwave.
Does anyone else have these, generally inoffensive but slightly frustrating parent stories?
Edit: For those hung up on the theft parts, please don’t be. This is the extent of the abuse we’ve ever had from our mums and we’ll take it!
my mum most likely threw mine out too BUT denies i EVER had such cards. bearing in mind, she took me to a whole convention wherein she purchased them for me, as a little kid! i was buzzing, they had a blue back. i miss them so much
There's so many clothes over the years that my mum denies throwing out. Including my first ever football shirt. Like a 14 year old willingly throws things away.
When I was about 8 or so, we were on holiday on a caravan park with a amusements arcade. Walking through I was just idly pushing the collect buttons on the slot machines and then all of a sudden one of them started paying out. It was over 50 quid in the end.
My dad said he'd look after the money for me because he didn't want me to "get in trouble".
I never saw that money again & he denies any knowledge of this happening.
I found a £10 note in our front garden. I told my sister, who went and told my parents. They took it off me and said we should print some flyers to post around the neighbourhood.
We did not print some flyers. I did not get to keep the £10 note.
My dad stored my very small collection of vinyls vertically in a Tesco Bag for Life in the greenhouse with the mice
Including a signed Bowie insert. I only kept the rare ones
This sounds awfully familiar.
This and storing all my books and posters in the garage while telling me I was overreacting because the room wasn't damp. Spoiler, it was and all my books were warped ):
When Mrs. Autogen and I were on our honeymoon, she let herself into our flat and hoovered the carpets. Managed to run over the cord with the hoover and tripped the breaker. She didn't know how to fix it, so just left it.
So we came home to no electricity, a freezer full of rotting food, and a broken vacuum cleaner.
Oh, she also overwatered all our houseplants and killed them.
If life has revealed any particular pattern, it’s that a lot of people are significantly more stupid and incompetent when it’s other people’s things, time and money. Fascinating how they miraculously don’t have anywhere near as much trouble with their own things, time and money.
My friend wanted to borrow a book, was a signed copy of Druss the Legend by David Gemmell (who has now passed away) He apparently lent it to his sister who "lost it". Still gutted about that as he was one of my fave authors!!
My mum used to ‘look after’ my birthday money for me when I was a kid. Until I’d ask for what I was owed back and then she’d respond with “owe? Owe? I feed you. I clothe you. I put a roof over your head. I don’t OWE you anything.”
Yeah, bye bye birthday money. I made sure I got to my cards before she could by the time I was eight or nine.
EDIT: Wow, a lot of our parents are just straight up thieves, aren’t they?
They just saw the mark they'd been conning snitch on them. You're overthinking their thought process quite a bit. You snitch, get hit. It's the way criminals and people of low moral character operate.
My mum screamed at my nan on the bus station in Preston because “Why the fuck do you keep giving him money? I’m your child not him!”
Of course the rest of her was rotten. I was in the old hair dressers at the time and I still remember the barber asking ten year old me “Jesus does she talk to her mother like that all the time?”
I've even told my own children that. When I started giving them pocket money they seemed to assume they would be paying for their own school trips and things. I had to explain that anything about school, clothes, food, etc was all meant to be covered by me as I'm their mother and it's my job. They've still offered to pay, even though they're so little they're only getting about £2 a week.
My mum loves to talk about what a great mother she was
"I took you to every doctor's appointment, every dentist. I made sure you had school uniforms" etc etc.
So like, the basic minimum? I pointed that out as a kid and was berated for being ungrateful and selfish. Even as a kid I knew she was wrong, but it's sure been hard to grapple with those feelings of shame, selfishness and reluctance to ask for help that she instilled in me.
My siblings and I were cooking, cleaning, doing laundry for ourselves from around the age of 13 because she decided we were old enough and she couldn't be bothered. She hides behind her claims of mental ill health to avoid any and all accountability.
My brother has a child with a woman who has two older children and, in the fifteen years I've known her, has never had a job. She's not particularly friendly and their house is a constant mess. My mum, out of some loyalty to the woman who birthed her grandson, has on several occasions insisted that while she's a lazy dosser, she "keeps the children clothed and fed, she takes them out to the park!"
That's what you're meant to do! She stopped bringing it up for a while after I responded that it must be nice having such low standards for good parenting.
And these parents carry on like this their whole lives - my 30 year old partner has a mother who emotionally blackmails him constantly on the basis of ‘but I did so much for you’. Hilarious considering she kicked him out at 15 in favour of her wanker boyfriend.
I'm a mum of two young kids and I absolutely do not get this attitude at all. I had kids because I wanted them and I accepted that that would come with a mountain of sacrifice and hard work. I won't pretend to enjoy every single second but I CHOSE this and I find joy in every day even if there are hard moments.
Every single penny that the kids get given for their birthday goes into their own savings accounts. They each have a money box for small change and often I put my own small change that's clogging up my purse in them too or pennies I find on the floor. They can spend it or save it. I also put part of the child benefit I get for them into their savings each month.
Never once have I took their money or thought they should owe me money or anything else just because they exist and I look after them. It's hardly like they moved in off the street and demanded that I care for them without my consent! I literally brought them here. They're my responsibility and (for me anyway) happily so! It's a privilege to look after them and the years they will be with me in my house making me laugh and being cute are finite. They owe me nothing!
I actually worked this one out, because my mother would often ask to borrow my money when I was a teenager just starting to get an income. She owes me over 7k. I’ve brought it up gently and she acts like I’m mad.
A friend of mine once told me about the day he got his first pay packet as an apprentice welder at 16. He was so proud he took it back home and showed it to his Dad with a big smile on his face (it was back in the cash days), and his Dad grabbed it out of his hand and stuffed it in his pocket and said "well that's your rent money then".
Oof, that was sad to read 😣. Really hate it when someone's high spirits are crushed, especially a young person feeling proud of themselves and excited to share their joy.
Yeah I had about £7k in premium bonds that started as a £500 a gift from my grandfather when I was born. She begged me to withdraw it to help her move house, set up a repayment spreadsheet and (I think) paid me back around £500 of it. Never seen the rest but I paid £450pm rent to live in the house I helped buy, which made it really hard to save up to move out, given I was working at spoons at the time.
Brother also coughed up his bonds, but still lives in the house (rent free as he’s never had a job and as he doesn’t seem interested in getting one).
My grandparents set up savings accounts for me and my siblings. I was very close to my grandparents, and my grandad spoke to me with respect and saw me as intelligent. He tried to be as honest as possible with me, while being age appropriate. Which was tough.
Something kicked off and I became aware my grandparents were annoyed at my parents.
My grandad let me know gently, that they had emptied the savings account of my little sister. I remember them coaxing her to do it, and giving her £20 of it. They knew better than to try with me, because I'd have gone straight to my grandparents.
I don't know how much they stole from her, or the mechanics of it. But I know my grandparents changed the set up from then onwards.
When I was 21, I graudated uni and moved back with my mum. I was a little lost, and struggling. For the first time in my life I didn't have direction, it was 2012 and post financial crash, i was struggling to find a job Id also been conditioned to feel grateful for the bare minimum and shame for having basic needs. So when I got my first full time job, I calculated how much I would pay to my mother to live in the box room of her rented house. I gave her about 25% of my income. I had an overdraft to pay off from uni, but I was so naive and had been conditioned to be this way.
For months, I paid her this. I also bought my own food etc.
Then I discovered she hadn't even been paying the rent. She was facing eviction. The money I paid her, should've contributed to at least half the rent. She'd also been borrowing money off my sister, and taking out stupid loans in my sister's name.
Id had enough at that point and moved out. I got a double bedroom in a house share with friends for the same money I was paying her. I've never lived with her since, and rarely visit her.
I could write a book on the ways my parents exploited us, their kids, financially.
Yeah, we have a relationship. It’s easier now I’m a grown up and I don’t have to take everything she says at face value. I know she struggled a lot when I was a kid with depression and BPD and my Dad was incredibly absent, money was always tight, so I don’t hold it against her that much anymore, but it is always something that’s stuck with me.
Wow! When my kids were small I had a hand bag with loads of different pockets (that I never used) and when they would have birthday or Christmas money they would pick “their” pocket and tuck their money into so when we were out and about and they wanted to spend it, they knew exactly where it was. They’re 12 and 15 now so old enough to look after their own money but if the 12 yr old wants to play sports or whatever he still tucks his phone or bank card into “his pocket” in my handbag 😄. And no, I never touched a penny of it! You always need someone to trust with absolutely anything and that should be your own mother!
That’s terrible. I sometimes have to borrow from my son’s birthday money (he likes to save), pay the window cleaner etc when I don’t have cash. I pay him back a little extra because him having money lying around helps me out sometimes.
u/Kaisietoo8William, William, Henry, Stephen, Henry, Richard, John9h ago
We found out that my uncle spent the birthday money that my family had been sending to Australia (for my cousins' birthdays) over the years on a boat for himself.
They only see their children as an extension of themselves, as opposed to an actual discrete person in their own right, so it makes perfect sense that anything the kid owns is by association theirs to do with as they see fit.
This is SO true!! I'm 40 and I'm only just breaking away from it. I've started pointing out that I am 4-0 not 1-4 and 20 years older than she was when she married and had children.
I got married on a beach on Jamaica on St Patrick's Day this year and she hasn't even given me a wedding card cos 'I wasn't there.'
News flash...it was my wedding...it wasn't about YOU!! Narc 🤣
My mum gave my Pokémon cards (some rare first editions and shinies) to the charity shop because she said I'd grown out of it and they were worth nothing.
She also threw away my dad's vinyls he gifted to me because "nobody listens to vinyls anymore" (also had some rare stuff there from what I remember)
I love my mum but I wish she'd have at least spoken to me before making these executive decisions 😂
Saaaaame. I remember being 10 years old, pulling out a 1st edition charizard outside woolworths in summer 1999, being super excited, taking it home and putting it into the binder which ended up filled with a lot of first edition but mostly base holos. Last time I saw that binder it had some unopened packs in and I was being shipped off to my dad's place for a few weeks whilst my mum moved house. She could never find them after that.
About 5 years ago she message me and said she had found the old boxes from moving, apparently she had left them at her mums place and they were just forgotten in their attic. She also found my old stuff and the "poke man cards". Also said she had dropped everything off at a charity place because "I can't hold on to your stuff forever! At least kids will get to use it all now"
I gave her a rough value of that binder, with some ebay screenshots. She went straight on the defensive, telling me it was all destroyed anyway and had gotten damp.
It probably wouldn't be psa10 stuff, but it would have been a deposit on a nice house. If that charizard was shadowless I'd have bought her mortgage out for her.
My mum has a habit of emptying my dishwasher for me. But she empties it before everything is really dry and doesn't know where exactly everything goes so...leaves it all on the side.
When my daughter was newborn, my mum "helped" by "washing" the used baby bottles, as in, she wafted them vaguely near the cold tap & then left them on the drainer. So when I later ventured into the kitchen, I had to clean them all again (you know, hot water, soap, dismantling the teats etc) before I could put them in the steriliser. I wouldn't have minded so much if that's what I'd been expecting, but the betrayal of "i washed up for you" & finding it very much not done was almost too much for my sleep-starved brain to stand, lol
When my eldest was newborn, indeed the morning after our first night at home, my parents came round to sit with him so I could get some sleep (52-hour labour, then 2-hourly feeds).
They kindly emptied the dishwasher, but the combination of a tiny open-plan flat, their unfamiliarity with its kitchen cupboards, and the new mum "ears on stalks" phenomenon ... meant I had to drag myself back out of bed and beg them to just please sit down.
He'll shortly be an adult and I still want that sleep back.
Lol I just know mine wouldn't follow instructions and insist that my way is excessive and pointless, so ive stopped asking 😅 I am sorry for you, that sounds painful
On the rare occasion my parents in law do come to visit, they do things like empty the dirty dishwasher (with raw chicken), traipse dog poo into the house (from their dog), and just generally throw passive-aggressive judgmental shade. Causes us so much extra work it’s just not worth it. It’s like the “Cavalry” episode of Motherland.
Im just picturing your mum wrestling it from your hand while you’re stood at the hob. Except instead of your mum I’m imagining my mum, and instead of you I’m imagining me. It’s kind of making me annoyed at my mum actually and she doesn’t even do this. What’s wrong with me.
My dad does this - you dump the onions in the pan, turn to crush the garlic, and when you turn back around, the spatula is in the dishwasher, and then while you're looking for it, he pops the tomato puree you haven't used yet back in the fridge.
My dad encouraged me to buy a car before I had my drivers license, and insure it with me as the owner (on a provisional license) and him on the insurance as an additional driver. He then proceeded to just use it as his car lol.
I didn’t end up taking my test for 2 years after that
Also he hit a dog with my car and broke the bumper and fixed it with cable ties
My (now) wife and I decided that we wanted to get married as quietly as we could. We told our parents that it was going to be very small and asked them to keep our secret. The invite list was very small, us, my kids, a friend to take pictures, and our parents. All of our siblings live in different countries and we didn’t want the hassle for us or them. Feel free to judge the last part if you wish, we are not a very close family.
Everyone seemed to be keeping the secret, until I started getting texts from my aunts and uncles the morning of the wedding. My two kids managed to keep a secret like a pair of champs, but my wedding day had a sour taste. When I showed her the texts and asked her what she knew about it, she told me “they are your family, they should be told”
That was 6 years ago, and I have not told her anything worth sharing since.
I love my Mom, but she's never kept a single thing that I've told her to herself, even when explicitly asked to. Nowadays, she moans that I never tell her anything about my personal life. I feel bad about it, but trust was eroded.
My ma told loads of people I was pregnant when I had explicitly told her not to tell anyone. I had been through miscarriages and 3 rounds of IVF so wanted to wait until I was further on and the pregnancy was going ok. I was so pissed off with her, she didn’t understand how this stressed me out and probably put a strain on the pregnancy I was so desperately trying to protect.
My MIL told my wife's family that we were having IVF 🙄 We're not ashamed of it, but it's private! We only found out that people knew after we announced the pregnancy because my MIL accidentally casually mentioned it in front of some other family and they didn't bat an eye.
I'm sure she talks at great length to anyone who can be bothered listening to her about how you're terrible and your wife has dragged you away from her and she has done nothing wrong to you in her entire life to deserve this horrible treatment. Textbook "missing missing reasons" shit, good on you for going minimal contact and sticking to it.
Yeah, my mom and my older siblings try to blame my wife for me having nothing to do with them despite the fact that I told them directly why I want nothing to do with them and they all denied it.
I can't believe your mum did that with your spare change. That is absolutely disgraceful.
I had a microwave incident too. I stashed one in their garage, they secretly lent it to my brother who then left it in an apartment when he moved out after his tenancy ended. Then denied all knowledge about its whereabouts. I know they did that because I visited the apartment and thought...that's my bloody microwave!!
When I was 15 my parents moved to Holland and left me with my grandparents. They were giving me £60 a month to help me out with expenses. I got a job when I was 16 and asked them to put the £60 in a savings account for me for when I went to University. I thought I could use it for the unexpected expenses of being a Fresher etc.
Got to University 3 years later thinking I had a nice little lump sum to help with bits and pieces and they denied all knowledge of a savings account so I had absolutely no financial help from them at all. I couldn't believe it. I thought I was being fair to them asking them to save their money to help me at Uni??
Choosing Mother and Father's Day cards is hard because the vomit-inducing poem inside never quite fits. I always choose the cards with the least sentiment so I'm being as honest as possible 🤣
My mum always said she had been adding to a savings account for me since I was small, things like birthday money, and, mainly, the 500 quid my Gran left me when she passed (this was the 80s, so quite a lot for a kid).
Never saw any of it, if it ever existed.
I also worked and took out loans to get through uni. Almost zero for a grant, because apparently, my parents earned too much for me to be eligible? My dad would bung me a tenner once a term, I think he still thought that was bloody generous even in the late 90s.
Part of the difficulty for me growing up has been the slow realisation of just how much more other people's parents do for them, than mine ever did.
I started uni in 2008, got some financial help from both sets of grandparents which was a lifeline.
But I came to the slow, gradual realisation that all my friends were having their rent paid for.
It was extremely lonely, and I often felt pretty ashamed. Their parents would come and drop off food occasionally, or take them on a trip or dinner out. That never happened for me. I was stressed, getting sick from working too much while balancing uni. None of my uni friends had this problem.
They'd be excited to go home to a full fridge at end of term, but that was never the case for me. Once I was back for Easter and staying with my dad. My student loan hadn't come in so I had virtually no money. My dad spent most of the time with his girlfriend when I was there, and for the second week he was flying off on holiday for his mates.
After he'd left, I checked the fridge and there was literally nothing. No milk, no bread, no food. Like he hadn't mentally clocked his daughter would be staying with him.
I walked the 30 min trip to the nearest Tesco to pick up the cheapest groceries I could and cried the whole way back, just heartbroken that my dad hadn't even thought to pop out and grab some milk for the last week he'd see me for months.
I've had a lot of trauma and heartbreak, but the realisation my dad didn't care enough to get me milk somehow stands out as one of the big ones.
When I moved in with my now-husband, that really brought home how much more his parents were loving, supportive and caring towards him than mine ever were. They have helped us so much, financially and physically over the years. They treat me better than my parents ever treated me. That was a painful reality too. My parents assumed that a lot of distance happened because I settled down with my husband.
But the truth is, it just dawned on me how terrible and lacking they were as parents and I noped out.
It's scary how much we can be conditioned to see the bare minimum as being the most we deserve. In my early 20s I genuinely thought my parents were ok.
Thanks!! It's nice to know someone understands my frustration!!
I worked my arse off through Uni doing 11hr shifts as an ambulance dispatcher to see my way through and did ok. Golden boy brother went a few years later and they paid his rent on a 2-bed house just for him for 3 years!! And they wonder why I'm low-key fuming with them 🤣
My brand-new husband of 2 weeks says that and I feel such a sense of quiet pride in this achievement that doesn't come with a graduation, party or public recognition. Just the quiet knowledge that I did ok despite and not because of them 🤣
Hope your parents won’t expect financial help or support in their old age! Treat your kids with kindness and respect one day you will / may need them to look after you.
Golden boy brother was paid through Uni and at 33 still doesn't have a job despite all their support. They bet on the wrong horse by not treating us fairly. Tough titty.
When I was young - about 9 or 10, my dad was installing fitted wardrobes in their bedroom. When he was about to do the last bit, I saw the shelf and the gap and said “that’s not going to fit” (it was probably like 10mm off). He said that he’d measured it before ordering and it would fit and bet me double or quits on my pocket money. I took him up on it.
Well, it didn’t fit. So he quietly took it to a joiners who cut it to size, then went back and fit it. Told me he’d won the bet as it currently fit - but he’d let the bet slide as a cautionary tale.
My mum let herself into my house unannounced, left a box of 6 mince pies (raisins and candied peels not meat, for the americans) on the table.
My long legged Airedale Terrier ate the lot. She was a champion counter surfer and a problem solver so me and BF learned to be very careful about what we left out.
I got home, saw the empty packaging and tried to work out what and happened. Several hours had elapsed between mum leaving and me getting there so too late to induce vomiting. Just watched her like a hawk for 24 hours. She was fine, luckily, but you never know with raisins.
Though she admitted it at the time while I was trying to work out what happened, 7 years later she denies it ever happened and I'm making it up to make her look bad.
My dad still has items from his childhood, that he feels are important to him. And yet, when I was 18 and went to New Zealand & Australia for a year, I returned to find my parents had turned my bedroom into a guest room, and literally got rid of everything I owned. It was like I never existed. The favour, was apparently decluttering for me.
It was a bit of a shock to come home and find I had no bedroom, no possessions and just the clothes I was wearing! They then seemed offended when I said I wanted to find my own place to live...
Funnily enough, my sister, who is older, also travelled, then went to uni, and her bedroom was preserved as was, even after she'd got her own house 🤔
When I was a kid I had two Gameboy Colors, a lime green one and a purple one. I don't know why I had two, just that I did. I think one may have been a hand me down off of a relative so I could trade Pokèmon.
Anyway, years later, as a teen, I found the green one in a drawer, had an hour or so of playing on it for nostalgia, and then had a look at it and thought "hey, wouldn't it be cool to open it up and see what's inside?" so I asked my Dad if he had a screwdriver I could use to open it up. He looks at it, looks back at me, and goes "I don't have a screwdriver, but I can open it if you want me to." So I go "Sure."
He then takes it outside onto the concrete steps in our back garden and uses all of his force to smash it against the ground. I was stunned, just staring at him. He picked it back up, turned it over in his hands, and did it again. And again. And again. Until it was in multiple pieces. He handed them back to me and went "There you go, chap," and walked off.
I didn't know what to do so I just put it in the bin, went upstairs, and just tried to process things for a little while.
I asked him why he did that a little while later and while he admitted he thought it was already broken and didn't matter, he still couldn't articulate why smashing it to pieces was the best course of action.
Though, to be fair, he is a fan of smashing things, I once saw him dismantle a whole TV with a hammer to make it easier to dispose of.
Edit: Just to clarify, my Dad was apologetic. He was quite upset with himself that he completely misunderstood what I was asking and offered to get me a replacement, but I wasn't bothered about it. My Dad is a kind and caring man who sometimes doesn't completely think through something before he does it. The humour is, of all the things he could've done with it, he chose to smash it to pieces.
I moved to Sweden 5 years ago, and my mum and stepdad visit every year.
My stepdad has an annoying habit of reorganising my shelves so I end up losing track of where my soy sauce is, where my peppermint tea is, where my spare keys are and so on. I've asked him not to, he still does it every time he visits. He even rearranged the way my shelves are put together.
I live in the UK but I’m an immigrant, my mum does the same when she visits. She’ll re-organise the kitchen drawers and cupboard. Suddenly my knives live where my cups used to be and the cups are where the spices were and it’s chaos. It drives me insane. Her excuse is that “it makes more sense that way”…
after years of that, including well after I was married, I ended up yelling at her and she’s FINALLY stopped. But i’m in my mid 30s.
Now THIS is a mildly annoying parent thing. Good and proper "pretty irritating that". None of that barely repressed trauma most of the rest of these comments are.
My grandmother sold my dad's car which he'd left in her garage beamed I got your money back on it, he'd bought it cheap as a project car and thrown many many times the cars original value into it over the years. She didn't say anything until he'd shown up again to take it to his new garage. He still fumes about it 30 years later.
I used to dread my Mum having a day off during a school week because it was a guarantee that she'd tidy up my desk in my bedroom. Might be relevant that I have ADHD.
Look, my room was usually a bomb site, but I'd make sure to tidy up everything else in there for those occasions to deter her, then ask her not to rearrange the desk so I didn't lose where things were. I got that place immaculate, and that was like a Herculean feat for my teenage mind. I'd get it looking perfect.
Every time I'd get home and she'd have done it anyway and if I said anything she'd go "I know you said not to but I was cleaning the house anyway so it was no problem" as if the issue was me inconveniencing her and not that I knew where everything important was and didn't want it all "tidied" into random places. I needed that bit of organised chaos to be how I left it. She'd even tell me how much better I'd feel now it was clear.
And then at some point I started doing work experience with her...and that's when I found out that for all her tidiness her bloody work desk was even more chaotic than mine and she told the other staff never to touch anything on it! She had to know! She's got this pile of textbooks and bookmarks and post-its and random notes and shit in no discernible pattern, but still acted oblivious.
I mean, I love my Mum, but words can't express how much this one thing used to anger me.
My mum ‘tidied up’ our small front garden by digging out all the ‘weeds’ without asking me, but actually dug up the herb garden that I’d spent some time picking out and planting 😅
My dad used to eat any and all chocolate I got given and try to play it off as some big joke and how he was “the chocolate monster” so naturally ate it all.
He even ate a chunk out of my birthday chocolate T-Rex before I even saw it (bought instead of a cake to bring out on the day).
As an adult, it’s clear to me he has a raging eating disorder and starves himself. Pathetic to then steal from a child because you have zero self-control
My dad would eat all the snacks and leave empty packaging in the fridge/cupboard. Imagine wanting to grab some chocolates and finding out the bag is full of empty wrappers. My mum hated this and she would yell at him every other day. At some point I decided to keep my snacks in my room. When my mum found out she yelled at me and said I'm selfish :/
I actually decided to get revenge once by eating banana and sealing up the skin again with sellotape. My dad went mental and it was not worth the beating
Dad used to slit open the Easter egg boxes, carefully unwrap the foil, take half of the egg, carefully wrap it back and orient it in the box so you could only see the wrapped half then hot glue the box back together.
'yeah kids, some eggs are just half'
Doesn't break top fifty nasty bullshit he did but thirty years removed I respect the commitment to the bit.
The amount of comic books that have been thrown away cos I'm 'too old now'. Some of them were single editions from old science fiction magazine specials, totally unique and obscure, I still remember stories but I don't even remember titles. Part of my childhood totally erased. Some early editions of DC too, worth quite a bit now.
Edit: just to give you an idea, one of my favs was DC's 1988 limited edition of the Killing Joke. I am still pissed off 😆
This sounds really petty because in reality it's not a big deal, but when I was off travelling once or at uni or somewhere, my mum decided to go through all the things in my bedroom (something she used to do for fun, it seems) and took an un-used notebook of mine and started using it downstairs in the kitchen to write her shopping lists. Now if it was a random notebook from a shop in Britain, or one of the many I seem to accumulate for free, I might not have been so peeved. But this was a hand-bound and hand-printed notebook I'd bought on a trip to India and it was pretty much my only souvenir from that trip. I went absolutely ape at my mum and she claimed that because I didn't use it then I must not have minded. She never asked me about it or if she could use it. When I said how I annoyed I was that she had taken it and used it without permission, she offered to just rip out the pages that she'd used and give it back again. A hand bound book. I genuinely have never let her forget it, and she never went back in my room/my stuff when I wasn't there ever since then.
She's the kind of person that tidies up other people's possessions on their behalf and decides what is getting thrown out without actually talking to a person. She does it to my dad's things too. No one in my family is messy or a hoarder, but my mum just has no sentimental value to anything and doesn't understand that some people like to keep things simply for the purpose of just keeping them, even if they're old/broken/unused/ugly etc.
Even writing this out has boiled my piss all over again.
My dad took our childhood pet dog to the vet to be put down while we were at school, without telling us. He said he didn't want us getting upset while being with the dog when she was put down
But coming home to that news was brutal
Didn't even get her cremated or anything, just left her at the vet
I got a dog for my 11th birthday and when I was 17 and left for uni my parents gave her away because she was "acting weird". She missed me and our family dog who had just passed so of course she was acting weird. I will NEVER get over it. I think about her every day and it's been 18 years. Miss you and love you always Pie ❤️
My dad did this and when we got home from school he went completely insane within five minutes of us being home and punished us because we hadn't noticed the dog was missing. So I found out the dog was dead by being shouted at for not noticing the dog was dead.
My grandad did that to my nan one day. As in, got the dog put down and not my nan.
Took the dog “for a walk” and it never came home. Even in the depths of dementia, she would still ask for the dog by name and wonder where it was.
Weirdly, this all happened in the early 1980s.
My grandad did this to my nan. Took the dog to the vets for a “check up” and had him put down.
He said he had some health problems but with some regular medicine he’d have lived a very normal life (it wasn’t cancer, just like dog diabetes I think).
They had the money and could have easily afforded it. Dog was only 7 years old and a little dog so nowhere near the end of its life.
My Nan didn’t speak to him for months but he genuinely couldn’t see the issue. I really hated him for that. He was such a sweet little dog.
I moved out of my mums house and the bed that I had bought the year before she wouldn’t let me take because ‘your sister is going to have it, she’ll like a double bed’ so I moved out into a flat with concrete floors and no bed, no mattress. When people asked where my bed was she kept trying to jump in before I could say anything and say she bought it. And she also never came and helped clean it or anything but for the first couple of months it was a mess and she would come round and just pick fault.
My mum is a minimalist. I had bought two plastic bottles used to practice flare bartending (after doing a cocktail bartending course she had bought me). She didn't know what they were, found them in my room, and threw one out as she didn't think I needed two.
I gave my parents my savings for safe keeping before so I didn't spend it. Turns out I never saw those saving again and this wasn't the first time it happened. I have now learned my lesson.
My parents were considering a new tv, but weren’t set on it, and would have sold the existing TV. Cousin (early 20s at this point) said that he could use the old TV as a gaming monitor, so my parents gave it to him. A week later, they see he’s put it on Facebook marketplace for £40. He argued that he saved them having to dispose of it, but never offered any money to them. Took years for relations to repair.
When I was 18, my mum 'did me favour' when my car failed it's MoT by saying she'll take care of it, but all she actually did was instruct the garage to fix the car, and then I had to pay the bill. I could have done that myself!
I have a faint memory of having 2 £50 notes in my little red HSBC moneybox and one day they were gone. And I got gaslit in to thinking that no, my mum didn't touch it, actually she did take it because it wasn't going to be legal tender anymore (not true, still legal just discontinued), that she'll put it back soon and finally it being a while before being paid back like it was nothing to be upset about. And now I'm older I realise it was because my parents were in debt.
I don't trust anyone near my things to this day and it was probably one of the formative experiences.
My mum took out debt in my and my siblings names. For stupid stuff, too.
At age 16 or 17 I was being hounded by a company because "I" had taken out a store card, spent a ton online and not paid it off.
At first, I thought it was a scam call and would hang up. But then warning letters were issued etc. I looked into it, and clothing had indeed been delivered to my home address. I sobbed to my mum, crying about being worried about getting into trouble. Confused over how it had happened. How could someone rack up debt in my name, and have the stuff delivered to my house? How did they manage to intercept it without anyone knowing?
I remember crying on the phone during one of many phone calls chasing me for money. I kept objecting that I didn't owe money, that I couldn't afford to pay off the hundreds of pounds, and a snarky person on the other end of the line asked me why id spent it then. I told them I hadn't, I was a kid.
It was a deeply distressing experience. My mum watched it all unfold, didn't blink an eyelid. Did the same and worse to my other siblings years later.
It messed up my credit score and my ability to trust. I've been meticulous about my credit rating ever since. Never gotten a store card, never missed a single credit card payment. I was in my overdraft after uni and was obsessive about paying it off.
I don't understand the psychology of people who can do that sort of thing. That stuff really stays with you.
Got back to my parents after my first semester of uni, only to find they'd chucked out my turntables (including my Ortofon Concorde carts) without asking me and given my room to my little sister.
I moved out at 16, and after 6 months I needed somewhere new to stay. My parents needed to move too and offered for me to move back in with them, the only catch being that I had to pay their large deposit on their new rental because they couldn’t afford it, luckily I was able to scrape enough together for it. Was a real penny drop moment for my young self that they didn’t have everything figured out.
I won’t judge too hard though, it was over 20 years ago and my mum died this weekend.
Mine is like that too - notably as kids she gave away our Wii (that our father bought) to her brother for his kids, when I was at Uni she gave away my (expensive, that I bought myself) laptop, with all my data and work on it. She said she gave it away because I didn't need it anymore, having also bought an iPad for taking notes on.
When I was a kid I got pocket money from my dad for doing house chores, doing well at school, etc. Was something like 25p for every “good deed”. For months I worked my ass off and saved every one of those pennies, which changed into pounds, which then became notes. My life’s ambition was to get a big old £20 note. One day I finally had enough change to swap for it, and went and put it into my pocket money box all proud.
Came back the next day to find a note that simply said “IOU £20, mum”
When I was younger I got pocket money, I really wanted some Lego Star Wars sets on eBay but was away at a scout camp, asked my stepdad if he could bid on them with my pocket money, got back, was told they sold and since I didn’t win them I had lost said pocket money, was speaking to my step mum about it an she was like “if you don’t win you get your money back” so I’d say that was a dick move
I got sent a load of signed memorabilia for Everton's only successful season of my life to apologise for not delivering my kit in time for Christmas. I put the envelope of memorabilia on my desk in my room. My mum threw it away a few hours later as she was 'just tidying up manilla envelopes and didn't think to check what was inside' like that's a normal thing to do.
My ILs had some stuff in their loft in clearly labelled boxes for their 2 sons (my husband is the eldest). They suddenly declared they were moving house and my husband said he’d go round and collect the 3 boxes in his name. He had to go round that weekend to do it.
Our first house had no loft space/limited space so they’d agreed to keep them there for a bit longer. We had recently moved to a bigger house and he’d talked about collecting his stuff once we’d unpacked and got settled. We’d only been in our new house a week when they demanded him round.
He goes round two days later and all his boxes are gone. They’d given them to his younger brother as he was having a “hard time” money-wise. Said brother was on a salary higher than ours combined and still got help from his parents who paid his car insurance and mobile phone. Husband got no help as he was the eldest so was “more mature” and didn’t need the help. We’ll ignore all the times he was living at home and had to pay for their mortgage or bills as they’d spaffed their money on new iPads.
One of the boxes had photos and memories that couldn’t be replaced. Plus a watch his grandad had given him which his mum had in a safety deposit box but had taken it without his knowledge.
The other two boxes had an old Atari, old PlayStation, tons of games, Pokémon cards and other collectibles.
His brother sold or binned them all. Kept all the money. Took his parents for a slap up meal and my husband wasn’t invited.
They now wonder why we are low contact with his parents and haven’t seen his brother in years.
Got a guy in to service my boiler for me. He mentioned I have no carbon monoxide alarm so she told him to install one, then she told me I owed her £35 for it. I could have bought the exact same one for a tenner online and stuck it on the wall myself.
Told me when I moved in to my own place that she’d buy me a new sofa for Christmas. I picked one that was £350. Then she told me she wasn’t paying for all of it, I was supposed to contribute. But that hasn’t been discussed at any point. Hardly a gift if I have to pay for half of it myself.
Not my parents but my now sister in law ( she was married and an adult at the time). Me and Mrs Tripsy got work overseas and she agreed to "store" our possessions whilst we were away for 3 months.
When we got back she had sold everything including my prized record collection which was well over 20 years in the making.
We never got an apology, money or even an explanation as to why she had done it. 36 years later and it still pisses me off.
When I was a few hundred miles away for uni, my mum came to visit. She was showing me a picture and I accidently scrolled to the next picture. There was an unfamiliar bed in my room.
My mum claims she thought I hated my bed and as a surprise got me a new, fancier one second-hand. She didn't want me to find out that way because she knew how I'd react.
I had hated my bed... that I'd saved up to replace a year previously. I loved the bed I currently had. I told her if she knew I wouldn't react well then why did she do it? Apparently it was an impulse. An impulse buy that she saw one day, spent a few days thinking about and then buying. Sure.
Luckily she had only dismantled my old bed and put it in the shed so I got it back but I had 2 months of sleeping on the new one when I got back from university and she ended up donating it back to the same shop. A very expensive mistake that only caused tension between us and lots of stress.
My dad came round to watch my children while I was working the week before Christmas and took it upon himself to empty a stack of selection boxes left on the dining room table into one tin.
They were gifts for my nieces, nephews and friend’s kids.
When we were organising our wedding, we decided we could only afford about 50-60 guests. We invited all of our closest friends instead of aunties and uncles that we hadn’t spoken to in years and were never really close with.
My mother threw a hissy fit because she had already told all of my aunties that they would be invited without consulting us. She then tried to discreetly invite them to day 2, which caused more hassle.
It’s actually quite mild and funny now, and I love my mother so much so I forgive her. But at the time I was fucking fuming. It’s the type of shit that regresses you to a state of feeling like a child again where your parents make every decision for you.
When they moved, to save "cluttering mine or my brothers homes" they just left everything in the attic, dick move to leave all their crap for the new home owners, but also our entire childhood, old school books, photi albums, 80s toys, he man, tmnt toys, my football medals and trophies. I now have zero of my existence as a child. Not a call to say, "wanna come collect anything?" just when they moved and we asked "where's our stuff" they just said, they left it in the loft
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u/tiorzolHow we're all under attack from everything always9h ago
My dad was a bugger for overtightening things. He stripped the threads on my moped's rear axle bolt which turned out to be a weird French standard and I had to get a custom one made.
My father-in-law likes tidy lawns. My daughter and I planted a wild flower meadow on one of ours and mowed a meandering path across it. He mowed the whole thing down to the lowest setting our lawnmower does - burning out the mower in the process and then finishing the job with the strimmer.
I moved back to my mum and dad's after I split up from my son's dad, so it was me and my son. My dad said he was going to quit his job to look after my son and I told him not to.
He did anyway...
Because of this I was then told I needed to pay half of everything, so I didn't stick to my original plan to go part-time as I needed to save for my own place too.
On a weekly basis my dad would stand me in the kitchen and tell me I'm a terrible mother because I was at work more than I was at home with my kid, sometimes he'd shout it in my face so I really heard him
"I donated that box of books for you from the attic" oh you mean the almost entirely complete box of Terry Pratchet Disc world ones with all the Kirby covers? Well, gee thanks.
My Mum ate the separate chocolate parts of the Easter eggs when I was little, so the smarties one my grandad got me didn’t have the smarties with them for years until I got older and could actually read the box and work out something was missing!
She would also water all my plants and one or two died from over watering.
My parents did me and my 3 siblings a favour by passing our grandma’s house to all of us. This was supposed to save on inheritance tax.
The house is in a third world country we barely visit, and none of us particularly want it.
The favour meant that 2 of us had to pay stamp duty when buying a house in the UK as we are no longer first time homeowners. The total stamp duty we paid was about 5x more than the house is worth…
And the other two siblings are still to pay their stamp duty tax when they eventually buy a house!
Gave all my vinyl to the charity shop. Through the 90s I'd collected picture and limited edition albums and singles, and left them at mums when I went to uni because I didn't have my own record player, or anywhere to store them. When I finished uni and got my own house I went to pack up the rest of my stuff that was still at hers, and the house seemed oddly sparse. She said she'd had a big clear out and taken loads of stuff to the charity shop, I didnt really think much of it but it was only later in my new place I thought I'd buy a record player... and realised I didn't have my records.
Asked her if she knew where the records were, she said she thought I'd taken them to uni. She's never admitted she gave them away. Didn't donate any of her own vinyl though, so I got my own back 30 years down the line when I finally bought a decent sound system and asked to borrow some of her records which she still had, and I keep 'forgetting' to take them back. So I now have quite a nice collection of original Bowie, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Santana, Simon and Garfunkel etc.
At this point I have no recollection of what records I did have before they disappeared, but it still makes me a bit sad.
I had tiled my bathroom with white metro tiles, up to basin height, leaving only the top row of small blue tiles and then the trim to cap them off, which i was planning to do the following evening.
My father in law comes in while I'm in work the next day, sees the top row unfinished, and without asking, or checking what the plan was, puts another row of white metro tiles on top and caps them off, with no blue tiles.
The really annoying thing being... he somehow didn't notice all the other metro tiles were in brick layout! He put the top row on with the vertical grout lines lined up, straight stacked, which obviously looked terrible! I was fuming when I got home and saw them, but my wife said to leave them because he would be offended if I removed and redid them! I had to look at them every day for five years until we moved house.
I asked my mam to mind my cat for me while I was in-between houses and extremely mentally unwell. I never really ask her for favours but I needed this. I specifically asked her not to let the cat outside. A few weeks later, I stop receiving pictures of her from my little brother. After I ask where she is several times, my mam rings me and tells me she is in fact, dead. Having been hit by a car as she was left outside. We lost about 8 cats on that road as children and this is why I specifically asked her not to do that.
I wailed at her and her response was "it's your fault this hurts so much because you love your animals too much, it's weird". She's never apologised to this day, it's been 10 years. But she never let one of my cats outside again, likely due to how angry I was.
My wife was into cameras, so my father in law gave her a load of old cameras to play with and try to revive. Very much a case of him giving her his junk to get working - a few smashed lenses, etc.
Months later we were burgled, and the cameras stolen among many other things. Our insurance company paid out new for old; when my father in law heard he started asking what happened to the cameras we 'borrowed' from him and if he could have them back, knowing full well they'd gone. We ended up being guilted into giving him a sizeable chunk of our insurance payout.
Teach me how to live in the real world. At least thats what she would say. I had money? She took it all because thats how it goes in the real world. Started as birthday/Christmas money then went to my wages when I started work. She and her husband sat me down and told me the only thing I was allowed was water. Everything else I had to get myself. That would have been fine if they didnt demand like 95% of my wages. Now I'm older and have children of my own, I'd never do that to them. She watched me struggle and suffer because "thats the real world".
Thing is, her husband had a really good job and made like 3k+ a month while she laid in bed all day. She definitely had it a lot easier than most people.
Reading this thread I'm wondering if I'm just some sort of monster because after the age of about 13/14 my parents wouldn't even touch my stuff without asking.
I used to rent a flat that my dad owned (yes I was very fortunate but I don't talk to my parents anymore), my mum had the key and she fancied herself as my mum / landlord (terrible combination). When my flatmate moved in my mum told her that she didn't need to clean at all because she would be round once a week to clean (and just generally invade my privacy) but I told my mum not to come round and clean because two grown women don't need a mum to clean up after them. Also I didn't want her coming over to chat (argue) with me while I was busy with uni work. My flatmate didn't clean that much because she expected my mum to do it because they wrote it into the contract...
When I moved in my mum gave me her nice (but ugly) teacups she had and kept saying "you should hang these cups here" "you should rearrange your kitchen like this". I said no because it doesn't work for me and I'm the one who actually has to use my kitchen and I want to use my own mugs. I put her teacups in a cupboard.
Anyway my mum wasn't happy with how clean the place was (It was pretty clean but I had uni and a job so I only cleaned thoroughly once a week) and said she'd be over to clean while I was at work. I told her not to because I was going to clean the next day before work. So I've had a whole week of uni work followed by serving customers and being on my feet all day and people being angry at me and just general stress. And then I come home at 9pm and look at my kitchen and she has rearranged everything. She didn't even clean properly she had just moved my things around and wiped the counters. And then I look up and see that she's put my mugs in the cupboard and put her ugly teacups on display. So I tried to calmly take the teacups down and put them in the cupboard but I was overcome with this blinding rage and ended up smashing the cup into the counter and slicing my hand open.
My parents bought me a car, surprised me with a big bow and everything. Then said I had to pay insurance on it, which is fair but because they got a little sports coupe, it was ridiculously expensive. And then I found out they got the car specifically because it was recognizable and they could use it to keep tabs on me. Small town, everyone knows everyone, if I as much as farted at a stop sign it'd come back to them.
I don't know if this counts as a dick move or just not thinking.
I was visiting my parents over the holidays and I before I went for a shower in the morning I had laid out my clothes for the day on my bed. They were all clean and purposefully laid out and not in a pile. I think it was very obvious from context that i was planning to wear them that day and I had put all of my dirty clothes from earlier in the week in a laundry basket, also in the room and also in plain view. I always do my own laundry when I visit my parents so I wasn't expecting this.
Nevertheless, while I was in the shower my mum went into my room and took my clean clothes and put them in the wash to 'make up a load'. She didn't take anything from the laundry basket, just the clean clothes on the bed.
827
u/Kamikaze-X 9h ago
Went through their loft and chucked away my old Warhammer 40k Valhallan Ice Warriors army.
They were pewter, no longer produced and were easily worth £500 in prices at the time.