Can you recall any of the hell you put your parents through?

I was an honor student, respectful, and generally good, but I was a major league party animal. We had big parties just about any weekend my mother wasn’t home. The drinking age was 18 so alcohol was easily accessible and we found it.

Basically I was perfect. ;-)

But there were three things…

1. 10 years old. Took $20 out of my mothers purse.
2. 16 me and a friend killed off a liter of J& B
3. 21 got into some drug issues.
4. Married a Psycho. Wait, THAT was my problem.

I was a good kid but I still found myself grounded many times. LOL

we call it ‘raised by wolves’. abandoned at ages 13,14,16 respectively. won’t tell you how we got by but it wasn’t good and I’d die if my daughter did that oops got the question wrong thought it was the other way round sorry

Doing it right now… But not meaning to. We’re speaking different languages to each other, and they’re getting hurt…

I was a perfect child just like Chaz. XD
I wasn’t toopid enough to get caught at the things I did do whaaa haa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa XD

Oh yeah. When I was 13 I stole all the cash out of their wallets, took their ATM card (I’d been able to observe the code), and ran away from home.

Also, I constantly lied and did various other bad things with the bad crowd (breaking minor laws, getting busted sometimes, fighting) until they booted me out shortly after my 18th birthday. I also was extremely argumentative and rude.

I feel bad about it when I think about it and made full amends several years later.

Oddly, it was the three girls and not the one son that caused more angst for our parents. My niche was education. Classes ranged from aced to failed. It just depended upon what was found interesting. The fact that I never finished college after three years of it really bothered them, and for Mom, it still does to a small degree.

Yes, but somehow my dad doesn’t recall the hell he put me through. Tit for tat.

I did a lot of things I would dread my kids putting me through. The biggies though were my medical crisis’s and can’t imagine what my parents went through as they watched my Priest read me my last rites….not once but twice!

I remember the hell they put me through better. Other than telling my father he’s not my father anymore (which he probably doesn’t remember as he was drunk then) and telling my mom I hate her a bunch of times, all I’ve done to my parents is ‘dissapoint’ them by not being a straight girl-acting girl.

About 90% of the gray hairs my parents have can be contributed to my mere existence, I should of come out with a warning label, something along the lines of “does not play by the rules nor play well with others.”

My children paid me back for every grey hair I gave my mom.

I had the gall to think independently and not be exactly like my sister as they told me I should.

Maybe they will disagree, but I don’t think that I put my parents through much hell at all. The worst on my list of transgressions are: forgetting to call home when I was out with friends (this was as a teenager though, not as a child), compulsive lying (but I always fessed up, sometimes immediately), and not getting along with my siblings (we never physically fought with one another, but we went through phases where we yelled at each other nearly every day.)

My parents and I have differing perspectives on whose experience was more hellish regarding my education. They did not know what to make of my introversion, my less-than-favourable interactions with peers, and my inability to communicate these issues with my instructors.

I don’t have many complaints about my parents, nor do they of me.

Yep, and I regret every last bit of it now that I’m staring 40 in the face.

At the time I felt that I was justified in everything I did. Now I realize that no matter how bad I may have had it, I was just being a selfish, spoiled little bitch.

If I did anything really bad as a teen, I don’t really remember. I snuck out of the house to go visit a girl a couple of times. But that was just so I could stand under her window and talk to her. I wasn’t caught. I probably drove too fast, but I was never drunk and never got into an accident or got caught.

I was never drunk or high in high school. Maybe if I had been, I would have liked it better. I got mostly As and Bs. I was, I think, a good kid. If anything, a bit moody. I was pretty miserable from age 16 to 18. It was heaven to end up in college. Hell to graduate. But that’s another story.

I was usually a pretty good kid and I’m not exaggerating. I rarely got in trouble, I wasn’t “rebellious”, I rarely got in fights with my parents or siblings, etc. But there were a few times when I wasn’t so great. There was that one time when I didn’t have a key to the house with me and I was out really late and my mom was ordering me to come home, but I basically refused and got in an argument with her on the phone in front of my friends (embarrassing as hell). And of course when I got home, I was grounded (one of the few times I was ever grounded). Not my finest moment.

I mean, I drank/drink underage as a teen, but my parents were not always aware of when I was doing it; it’s hard to prevent that kind of thing if you don’t come home drunk (which I never did). Besides, my parents did the same thing when they were teens.

Nah. I was awesome. My parents sucked though.

I love that my parents still tell everyone, and me, that I was really a good kid. And somehow, they mean it. I did some absurd things over the years.
There was a period where it was perfectly normal for my dad to wake up at 6am for work and find 20–25 random people passed out alllll over the floor and couches. On a daily basis. How I got away with that one, I will never understand. Throughout the years I’ve done essentially everything a troubled teenager/young adult would be expected to do. The over the top partying, kegs exploded all over the backyard, the promiscuity, the obnoxious music, the shocking clothes and makeup, suicide attempts, and dramatic explosions of emotion whenever someone dared question my actions. I managed to keep a good deal of it hidden from my parents, but at the same time, I was living with them and there is no way they didn’t see what was going on. Maybe they really did understand how mixed up I was emotionally, otherwise I can’t really account for why they didn’t just beat the crap out of me, I must have been a real pain in the ass. :)

I think my family would have preferred to raise a rock. Any time I spoke up for myself, I got smacked, and I wasn’t being disobedient or disrespectful. I was basically asking them to stop hitting/yelling at/poking/screaming at/hurting/inappropriately touching me when they wanted to continue doing so. They counted that as giving them grief.

There’s a huge difference between giving your parents actual grief, as my cousin did when he’d run away form home (even though he had his reasons, his mother was still hurt that he did it) and sticking up for yourself. Funny, they wanted me to stick up for myself and fight back anyone else except them.

I was a good kid. AP Chemisty AP Physics, AP Calc. Great grades. But I did like making things go boom. I was about 14 and was working on a device outside on the sidewalk. My PIA younger brother (12) kept riding his bicycle back and forth to bother me. Finally, I gave up. I set it, went inside, and let nature take its course. It blew him right off the bike and shook the house. They were a little peeved.
Another time I mixed up a rather large amount of “stuff” which detonated early before fully curing. It spread itself all across our back yard where it cured in place. That left hundreds (thousands?) of tiny land mines the size of grains of sand in the grass. Later my parents let the dog out to do his business and he quickly got “snapped” in the paws wherever he went. He ran back into the house and for about a month refused to go out and peed on the floor instead. My parents never did find out the cause. Whew!
I was the quiet nerd kid in your physics class that always got the A.and ruined the curve for you.

I was always a pretty good kid,
But my freshman year of highschool
my parents moved: I was a huge grump
and asshole the entire year.
I feel badly about now and have since apologized.
hah

@worriedguy I really enjoyed that story.

A number of incidents come to mind that I won’t go into here but basically I was a nice quiet kid. I remember coming home from secondary school and finding the house empty I helped myself to a few biscuits. Then, mouth full of crumbs I took a couple of swigs from my dad’s vodka bottle. Later I thought my parents must have psychic powers when they told me they knew exactly what I had done.

@flutherother – Well, now, you left the dreaded “biscuit backwash” in the bottle, there, didn’t you? ;)

@aprilsimnel That’s what it was. Vodka first then the biscuits would have worked.

I caused a ton of mischief, including “recreational” street fighting, which horrified my dear mother, but sort of amused my dad.
But if I had done anything as a teenager, that would have dramatically wrecked my future, I would have had to face my dad on very serious terms.
That would not have been good.
He was hard core, with a heart of gold to be sure, but in that case it would have been hard core dad that would have dropped the hammer of Thor on me.
I chose not to get into trouble with a capital “T”.
Later on when I was an adult, and before he died, my dad revealed times I came close to paternal disaster. It was interesting.
By the way, lest anyone get the wrong idea about my dad. He was ridiculously intimidating, but he never actually laid a hand on me in anger. He did teach me how do defend myself, and in that context he flattened me more than once. But never in anger. He was just so scary, I did not want to test it. Plus, I did not want to disappoint him either.

I only put my mom threw hell when she puts me threw hell.

I am the youngest of 4 (the baby) and according to le Mama, I was “a good, little (Catholic girl)”. But, was I? Hell, no. I hid it well. I’d be out drinking/parties, but, Mom thought that I was hanging out with my girlfriends. I snuck one boyfriend in through the basement window.

Although, the first time that I came home drunk outta my skull (15), I staggered into bed (after having consumed a handful of burnt to a crisp marshmallows that I scorched in our backyard fire pit. This all happened after a friend helped me into a cab and paid the cabbie to drive me home – I was curled up in fetal position in the back of the dirty cab)...anyway, I woke up at 4 in the a.m., barfed up a bunch of burnt marshmallows, then went back to bed. Around 8 in the morning, my Mom, who heard me come in early in the morning and could hear me retching in the john at around 4, came into my bedroom with a vacuum cleaner and started vacuuming up near the foot of my bed, lol. No sympathy!

The one thing that I never did was talk back to either of my parents. I was more scared of my Mom (she’d give you a look), and my Dad, he’d jingle his belt (meaning a swat on the ass. None of the kids in my family ever got one, though).

My brothers were both buggers and got caught. And, my older sister was much like me and hid it well.

Up until about 15 years old, it was more about the hell my parents (mainly my stepmother) put me through. After that, I met the wrong people at the wrong time and ended up addicted to several “street” drugs until my adulthood (around 21 years old). At that, point I was staying with my mom ..I was negative and kept to myself. I never stole from or disrespected my parents (no matter what). I was a good kid but with lots of emotional problems.
The worst thing I ever did ..I was 16, I took my bicycle and rode down the dirt road of the little hamlet we lived in. I disapeared for 5 days, ending up in the “big city” hungry, cold and beaten up. During this time, my mom got a phone call from the police to come identify a body that matched my description. I’ll always feel bad about that.

In 8th grade, I got a Saturday School (Which is like 5 hours of sitting in a class room, on a saturday, for punishment). I didn’t mind it. I got a boatload of homework done, and it made me spend some time away from the computer, I wouldn’t have minded doing it again. But Dad yelled at me the night I bought the note home to him, he yelled at me on the drive to the Saturday School, and most importantly, he yelled at me (in the car) in the parking lot, where people on the sidewalk could see it. That embarrassed me into behaving better.

Until that point, through all of Elementary school and most of Middle school, I consistently failed to participate in class, and failed to do homework. More often than not, I stayed after school in After-school Detention as punishment. There were regular phone calls and letters between the school and my parents.
Especially when I was younger and couldn’t read as well, the teacher would just write on my papers and tell me to give it to my parents. A few years ago I was digging through my old school stuff and apparently we had a lot of these saved. All these letters talking about, not how I was failing to understand the subject, not about how I was bullying other kids or otherwise being a dick to them, but letters about how I was doing nothing.

Apparently I was the loudest baby in the world. My parents said they could leave me in the house and hear me from the other end of the street. Maybe I used it all up as a baby because I was a very shy and quiet child.

Yes, I ran off and married a high school dropout after my first year at college.

I was always a quiet person even as a kid but I’ve always been somewhat rebellious and an outcast. Outside of ditching school on many occasions I can’t say I’ve gotten into too much trouble. I was never a follower or a leader but I was always one of them kids that just did their own thing.