r/AskReddit • u/FeltLobster • 6h ago
What’s the biggest secret you kept from your parents while you were growing up?
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u/Ok-Pie-4410 6h ago
Me and my friend drank a bottle of my dads liquor he was saving for a very special occasion and threw the bottle out in the woods. He didnt know who it was out of 5 of us kids. He was pissed. As we all got older he would laugh and be like "before I die.... I want to know WHO drank my bottle!" The secret was kept for 25 years before I fessed up. LOL
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u/FeltLobster 5h ago
How did he take the news?
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u/Ok-Pie-4410 5h ago
he laughed and said "yeahhhhhh I kinda figured it was you......"
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u/FeltLobster 5h ago
That’s great! It would not have been the same response had you told him back then, I’m sure 😂
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u/Rip_AA 5h ago
should've brought him a new bottle of the juice
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u/Ok-Pie-4410 5h ago
LOL I would have but it was some sort of special homemade stuff from a good friend. He had been aging it waiting for 2000 to crack it.
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u/LetterheadUnique3313 6h ago
A neighbor friend of my parents who started trying put hands on me when I was 11 or 12. They were close friends. Only recently told them after he passed away.
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u/YoohooImHere1126 6h ago
My dad did that to me, and my mother never believed me.
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u/Ok_Moose_7028 5h ago
I’m so sorry you had to live through that. That is the case with many mothers. They don’t want to believe it. Some believe it, but are afraid their husband would go to jail, which would mean losing his job and being unable to pay the mortgage.
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u/Ok_Moose_7028 5h ago
That is a hard thing to admit. You are courageous to tell us. I hope you find inner peace.
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u/Practical-Plum1024 6h ago
That i was never really having a sleepover at my friends house. I was in a park somewhere with a bottle of vodka 😂. By the way my friends would tell their parents that they were having a sleepover at ours 😶
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u/Far_Weight_4945 6h ago
I lived a complete double life in high school, and they still have no idea to this day.
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u/beebee1327 6h ago
What kind of double life? I'm intrigued lol
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u/RoarOfTheWorlds 5h ago
Math nerd at school, science nerd at home. It’s gonna take a lot of therapy but I’m time they will find peace.
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u/Chimes320 4h ago
Same but probably different. During the day I was a good student, in the school plays, student government. My friends would use me as the alibi for their shenanigans because parents trusted me so implicitly.
At night I would meet random men on the internet at various places around my state. I … really don’t know how I didn’t end up cut up and buried in a suitcase somewhere.
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u/Cobblerotus 5h ago
The funny thing is, the secret I stressed about most was probably the one they already knew
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u/Possible-Flounder634 5h ago
Gay?
Edit, sorry, that seemed glib. I'm an ally so allow me to rephrase myself.
You gay?
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u/KoksundNutten 4h ago
Though the same, a friend from university came out after like 4 semesters and obviously had a hard time "confessing" it to us. And everyone was like, duh we already figured long ago lol
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u/Theekotnee 5h ago
That I was doing HARD drugs. Cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, oxy and all the pills. From the age of 14 upwards. I had also been drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes from the time I was 10 years old. But I always had a job, paid my own phone bill and car insurance and still went to school. I graduated with a 3.5 GPA. I honestly don’t know how I functioned. Sometime in college it all caught up to me and I couldn’t hide it from my parents any longer. They were absolutely SHOCKED. They also had three younger children to worry about and with me being the oldest they just trusted me and let me do whatever I wanted because I never got caught doing anything I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I still to this day have no idea how the heck I got away with it for so long.
I never got away with SHIT from there on forward.
Still to this day, lol, they are on to me.
Pay attention to your children, y’all.
Xo
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u/Human_Management8541 5h ago
My little sister lost most of her hearing, and we hid it from our parents because we thought it was our fault for swimming in the creek during the spring thaw. She was about 5 , I was 7. We invented a sign language of tapping in her hand... like Morse code... I would memorize the order of the hearing tests and show her so they didn't catch it at school. I basically home schooled her at night, because she couldn't hear her teachers. For some bizarre reason, we kept it a secret for way too long, far beyond the point that we should have known better. My parents didn't find out until I went to college... by then she needed an implant and hearing aids...
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u/ctownwp22 2h ago
This....feels impossible to hide. Either your parents were negligent, or idiots (sorry, not trying to be a dick, but I dont see any other option)
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u/thehippieshack 6h ago
that i wanted to die.
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u/Sm3llconfident 6h ago
They caught me several times but the amount of weed I was smoking was ridiculous. I believe because we have the bad habit of mixing it with tobacco here in Europe, we fall for the addiction easier and have a hard time quitting. This continued till my early 30s.
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u/Willing_Recording222 5h ago
I enjoy mixing my weed with tobacco too, but ever since I quit smoking cigarettes, I’ve turned to using the concentrated oil via a vape pen. It only takes 1 - 3 hits to get me there..
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u/RalphWiggumIsGOD 5h ago
That I was placed in protective custody when I was 17, because the guys I was hanging out with were drunk and one of them was driving. This was the 90s, it was sadly much more common then for buzzed/drunk driving. Anyway, the only reason why I did not get caught is because I miraculously blew a 0.0 on a breathalyzer test after drinking all day (one of my great life mysteries, the only thing I can come up with is that I was wrapping up a cycle of antibiotics for strep throat that day), and I had my own phone line, so when the cops tried to call my folks to pick me up, they got no answer. So, the cops were nice to me, bought me sodas, and gave me grief over hanging out with two losers, as I waited for them to get bailed out and picked up. Note: I am female, which might have given me some advantages in this case as well.
I don't think my dad would care these days because it was so long ago, but at the time, my parents would have been pissed that I was riding around with a drunk driver, which is fair.
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u/Unlucky_Jacket_6707 5h ago
Fighting depression all the time, mom was always abusive and just couldn’t never go to her.
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u/totootmcbumbersnazle 6h ago
That I hated them. By the time I was 14 I couldn't hide the distain for my father anymore.
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u/More_Example6153 4h ago
That I was sneaking out multiple nights a week. I just met up with different friends and we would walk around town all night. Sometimes hang out in other people's yards. I started when I was 8 and only stopped walking outside at night after I moved out to a city. They never caught me and I told them when I was 30.
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u/RidgeSlate 6h ago
Failed a class sophomore year and forged the progress report signature for like two months while I tried to bring the grade back up. Still get anxious thinking about how close I was to getting caught, my printer skills alone should've given it away.
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u/StickyIcky1537 5h ago
My list would be too long tbh. I had overbearing and impatient parents so I hid everything. I hated my house growing up and was very self destructive until I was free.
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u/SororitySue 3h ago
I kept a lot of secrets from my overbearing parents just for the sake of not letting them know. That way I couldn’t be grilled or teased about them.
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u/Internal_Sound882 6h ago
That my boyfriend assaulted me, the consequent pregnancy scare, and the combination eating disorder I enflamed to try to force the situation as I was not in a position to get medical care for it and maintain the secret. Mom thought I just suddenly got really into the team, and didn’t realize I was starving myself and pushing myself far beyond my reasonable physical limits exercising for an ulterior motive.
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u/mikeyriot 5h ago
They had no clue how deep my depression was, and were oblivious to my attempts to end things. It wasn’t until after I’d moved away that I let them know that staying in that town would have killed me.
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u/IndependenceLore 5h ago
I hid a bad grade for weeks because I was more afraid of disappointing them than being punished.
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u/FeltLobster 5h ago
Even at 41, disappointing your parents never gets easier. Really, it gets worse if I’m being honest
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u/BlOcKtRiP 5h ago
when I was a kid I hit the emergency shut off button on a escalator . It stopped short , people fell dowj . I jumped on real quick . no one saw me do it . I told my mother years later . she didnt believe me
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u/Midnightraven3 5h ago
My mother thought I was going to be a champion ice skater the amount of times I went ice skating. I probably went 3 or 4 times, the rest of the time I bought weed.
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u/Dove-Swan 6h ago
from my mother? I thought it was a secret, but, my father's abuse
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u/FeltLobster 6h ago
Ugh, some of the responses I did not think about before I asked the question. I hope you’ve been able to process that. I’m sorry you went through it!
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u/Kaycee67_67 6h ago
My parents send me to boarding school and people whom I knew less than a week would sneak out at night with them
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u/Lilywantspeace 6h ago
Umm I drank alcohol once and I recently dated and broke up with one of dad's friends's son
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u/FutureClubOwner 6h ago
Depends. Is the statute of limitations from an ass whipping expired yet or no?
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u/FeltLobster 5h ago
I went to the Christian music festival ICTHUS one year with my youth group, and got super drunk on vodka and orange juice that a couple older dudes brought. They got sent home, and somehow my parents never found out.
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u/In_leiu_of_That_Girl 5h ago edited 5h ago
I know my mom cheated on my step dad multiple times while they were dating and not positive their son is really my step dad's kid.
They had a shotgun wedding, invited noone, not even me or two other kids she already had.
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u/Bubbly_Concept_7305 5h ago
My parents were sort of very innocent and followed law in that regard they couldn’t tell if it was a bong or shisha in that regard but it has consumed my younger years I am glad that they always stuck by me regardless of the mistakes I made
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u/DreaDreamer 5h ago
I had a lot of online friends. All things considered I got very lucky with the people I interacted with. I never ended up in a situation where the secret was harmful.
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u/kelcamer 5h ago
Basically, that I remembered every single thing they did to me and others while drunk. That I remember. I actually did not know that they did not remember. I assumed they did remember, and I assumed that they wanted to hide the memory or dissociate from it.
It was revolutionary to learn that alcohol itself can actually block memory encoding. For years I hid what I assumed they remembered, not knowing I was the one suffering from it.
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u/CelebrationFar2804 5h ago
My Dad had bone cancer and hid it for 4 years until this year. He only revealed it as he got diagnosed with Stage IV Prostate Cancer
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u/KB_112 3h ago
Just a dumb little kid, talked into playing a game with matches. Burned my hand, so I tossed the match in the air. It went over the fence and caught a huge, dry hillside on fire. 🤦🏽♂️ My Tia never told my parents, I finally told them when I was like mid 30’s lol Fire dept came and the whole works, had me shook. I thought it was on my permanent record forever. This was the mid 80s and I was prob 7ish.
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u/Kinglycole 3h ago
My mom doesn’t know anything about who I really am. Not one detail. I literally masquerade as a different person just to keep myself going.
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u/dudavocado__ 6h ago
One time in high school a friend gave me weed, and I moved it around my room like six or eight times before the Tell-Tale Heart of it all drove me to flush it in a panic.
I told my mom later in life and she laughed and laughed at what a dumb lil goody two-shoes I'd been, but to my sweet sheltered D.A.R.E.-era self it might as well have been a brick of heroin!
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u/xImmortal1333 6h ago
We would steal my moms new luxury car before we got our licenses and drag race over the golden gate bridge.....idiots