When we’re kids living at home, our parents and siblings are pretty much our entire world. We believe what they tells us, we mimic what they eat and say and enjoy, and honestly, we assume that what goes on inside those four walls is pretty much what goes on inside the four walls of our friends’ houses, too.
Once we get old and start to venture into other people’s homes, or establish homes of our own, sometimes we realize that our parents?
Not so normal.
Here are 17 people who found out after the fact that some serious weirdness was going on at home.
17. There are always consequences.
I thought it was perfectly normal that my mom’s occupation was working at a flea market selling counterfeit tapes and CD’s. It wasn’t until middle school I began realizing it was strange.
Even then I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on. She made a pretty decent living, but now she has a felony and can’t get a job.
Crime doesn’t pay (forever).
16. I’m laughing imagining that passenger’s face.
My mom taught me that the safest way to drive over railroad tracks was to accelerate and go as fast as possible to “get it over with.”
The first time I ever crossed railroad tracks with another person in the car, they thought I was trying to kill them, along with my car’s suspension.
15. Loose lips.
Reminds me of the story round where I live of this kid a few years below me at my school who, when asked by the teachers what his parents did for a living, said
“My dad sells weed”
Surprisingly even though the police ended up raiding his house, he’s still in business some fifteen years later. I think they’ve just given up on trying to get him to stop dealing now.
14. Go Granny.
My grandma once told me when driving around a turn, you need to go as far to the inside of a turn as possible, even if it means crossing lanes. Like you’re in a freaking NASCAR race.
She’s nuts and a crazy driver.
13. This is super icky.
Kicking friends out before supper so they wouldn’t have to feed them. It wasn’t a financial issue, they just didn’t want to spend their money feeding the occasional friends I would have over.
I was always surprised when friends parents invited me for supper.
12. Maybe they were thinking of your enamel.
Turns out Orange Juice ‘From Concentrate’ doesn’t mean it’s still concentrated and that we needed to water it down with tap water. We were just poor.
With little kids it’s actually recommended to give half juice and half water to protect their teeth. So in some ways my parents did us a favor.
11. The LIES.
I was born in 1990. For the first 4 years of my life, the cartoons I watched were black and white ones like Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, and Steamboat Willie.
In later years, I started watching color television, and at one point I said something about remembering when TV was just black and white, at which point my mom said “You weren’t alive when TV was still black and white”.
I pointed out the old cartoons, and she said, “Oh. Well, I didn’t like what kinds of cartoons were on TV back then, so I just had you watch old video tapes of cartoons from way back when.”
10. Works like a charm.
My mom whistled for me to find me in crowded places.
I knew the particular sound and always found her easily. Apparently when she did this after taking my friends and I out they felt insulted. They felt that she was treating them like dogs.
Yes, people do this with dogs, but as it happens it is also a very good way to locate people in a way less intrusive than bellowing out their name throughout a store.
9. It’s definitely odd.
An ex-boyfriend and his family used their kitchen sink to brush their teeth, kept toothbrushes and toothpaste next to it and all. They had 2.5 fully functional bathrooms in their house.
When I asked him about it he said they had just always brushed their teeth there.
That is odd, but I can’t really come up with a reason why other than “that isn’t how I do it.”
8. That’s…really something.
My parents never believed in Finland, I grew up to never believe in Finland until I researched it further.
It’s a pretty heated topic in my family.
Well firstly they say that the actual ‘place of Finland’ is just Eastern Sweden. Helsinki is in Eastern Sweden and when people fly there it’s not like they would notice.
World maps are altered as it’s a U.N conspiracy to keep people believing in Finland. And the idea that an entire country is made up seems so bizarre that nobody would ever believe it, making it easy to do.
Finland’s main company, Nokia, is apparently owned by the Japanese and they’re a main player in this.
Now as for ‘why’ people would want to invent Finland as a country that’s a bit more in depth and there’s a few reasons as to why Sweden and Russia go along with it but it’s mostly to do with Japanese fishing rights.
You see the Japanese love their sushi but tight fishing regulations and public outcry mean they can’t fish as much as they want. So after the Cold War they agreed with Russia to create a ‘landmass’ called Finland where they could fish. After all, if people thought there was a country there nobody would expect the Japanese to be harpooning whales would they?
The fish is then transported through Russia where a small percentage of the food is given to the population, (they were of course starving at the time of Finland being invented), and then is shipped to Japan under the disguise of ‘Nokia’ products. Japan is apparently one of the worlds largest importers of Nokia products despite the fact that ‘nobody there owns a Nokia phone’ apparently.
The crux of all this however, and my favourite part, is the homage that the Japanese gave to this entire conspiracy theory.
What do fish have? Fins. Therefore they named their imaginary country Finland.
There are loads more that they go on about but I can’t remember it all at the moment.
7. I wish my house had been like this.
We talked among ourselves as if we were in the same peer group. I talked with my mom about all of her life crap, and she talked about all of mine. We’re close enough she trusts me with about everything.
It was crazy for me to go over to a friends house and discover that there are all of these things he’s hiding/not communicating. When asked, “How was school?” He didn’t go into his whole day and complain about people. He just said “Fine.”
Really fazed me.
6. This is just unacceptable.
My parents have carpet in their bathroom.
It makes me shudder. One overflowed toilet away from never feeling clean again.
5. Super interesting.
My whole life, my dad always used the phrase “sneezed on the truth”. Context: If you were in the middle of a conversation with him, no matter what the topic was, and you were to sneeze, he’d respond with “see? sneezed on the truth.”
I literally thought that this was like a normal saying up until last year when I was talking to a friend, who sneezed, and I responded with “see? sneezed on the truth” and everyone surrounding me was really confused and unsure of what I meant.
It’s just not a common phrase like “bless you.” Apparently a sneeze during a conversation reveals the truth of a statement, if you’re the superstitious type.
4. Extreme for sure.
My brother and I shared a bedroom. My mother screwed in a hook at the top of the door and locked us in at night. We were not allowed out in the morning until my mother had time to relax first before having to deal with us.
On Saturdays she would let us out to play at around 10 am. I casually mentioned this to my wife and she flipped out.
3. Perhaps not normal, but yummy.
Ice cream sandwiches made with waffles was something i had almost everyday for breakfast. i still have them often.
2. Well that’s special.
Two things:
We always went to garage sales, and if there was a toy I wanted my dad would tell me to take it up to the people who owned the house and “Jew them down”. I thought that another definition of the word Jew was “to bargain for a lower price”. It wasn’t until I happened to say it once in junior high that I was told that wasn’t a nice thing to say. I tried to argue with them, but when I went home and told my mom she confirmed that “Jew them down” is in fact racist and she reprimanded my dad.
Second, my dad used to take me to vacuum out the car and he would show me how to open up the vacuum bin and dig around in the dirt and items that the vacuum collected. He told me if I ever was stranded and needed a quarter for a pay phone I could always come here and find one. I was like 7, I wasn’t getting stranded but I did think looking for change on the vacuums was awesome.
1. This is honestly goals.
Most people don’t dissect the thanksgiving turkey and giblets before cooking dinner.
Every year my mom would do an age appropriate anatomy lecture for all the kids using the turkey for her demonstration and an anatomy book for clarification as she explained how bird organs and bones differed from human ones. She’d make us name the tendons and ligaments on the bird and point out the corresponding ones on our own arms and legs.
Sometimes, after the bird had been analyzed, stuffed, and placed in the oven, she’d grab the cat and show how his claws retracted and extended and how that correlated to the first joint on our fingers. We then had to point out his major muscle groups as a sort of quiz to show we’d been paying attention and had learned something. We would continue the animal science anatomy lecture until the cat got tired of being manhandled and ran off.
Apparently most people just cook and eat the turkey.
I love all of these stories so much, y’all. People are amazingly interesting.
What’s something like this that happened after you stepped outside your comfort zone? Tell us the tale in the comments!