14 People Share Their Family's Most Embarrassing Secrets

If your family isn't insane, count yourself lucky.

Elana

• Published in Funny
• January 4, 2020

Every family has their high moments and low moments. Every family has that "black sheep" type, too. I'm sure we all have a good chuckle at the expense of our family's memories, but no two families are the same so no two "WTF" moments are either.

Reddit user u/LuanGaff turned to the r/AskReddit subreddit where they pined for your family's most embarrassing moments. They asked, "what's the most embarrassing thing a parent has done to you?" Sounds simple enough, right? You'd expect some hilarious answers, surely! But the thread took a darker turn among the thousands of comments. Some families have really been through some deep stuff.

Over 14,500 replies rolled in to this question.

1. I'm a little impressed but I'd be PISSED.

I had a cousin who was addicted to heroin and his parents were always doing stuff to bail him out and keep him from being homeless.

One time they put down a deposit and paid rent for a furnished apartment for him. He ended up selling the furniture to get money for illicit substances.

Another time they rented a mobile home for him and couldn’t figure out why the water bill was so high. Turns out he was charging his homeless friends $1 to take a bath or shower and that was going on pretty much around the clock.

A very enterprising junkie.

2. Not the golden shower they were expecting.

When I was probably seven years old me and my brother would be hanging out upstairs in our room. But there was only one bathroom in the house and it was downstairs and all the way on the other side of the house.

Our solution: pee in bottles and throw them out the window.

Little did we know we threw them out the window to the backyard where my entire extended family was.

3. Wow. I'd rather be rude then.

My grandfather remarried a woman who almost immediately developed Alzheimer’s and forgot who he is. He is now dating his first wife, while his actual wife is confused who anyone is.

He refuses to divorce because the terrible family of his second wife bailed when they saw how expensive she was going to be, and my family had to get her care because she was too much for my grandfather to take care of (he is almost 90).

I called out the relevant members of her family for bailing and was told I was being rude, which might be true, but I’m also darn right.

4. Lowkey Brilliant

My parents always knew when my siblings would sneak out and we could never figure out how they knew.

One time my brother was an idiot and got caught sneaking out of a window from our basement. It was winter. They left footprints.

Every sleepover we had my mom would take a picture of everyone’s shoes that night before bed. If they had changed overnight, she knew they snuck out!

She would only tell us once we’d all moved out.

5. High School Musical

I had my first boyfriend in middle school and brought him home one time.

At one point, my mom made him bring me my clean laundry—and by that I mean a single pair of pink High School Musical underwear.

I cried from embarrassment, but he was actually pretty cool about it and comforted me.

6. Time to punt this sister into the sun.

My sister lied to a social worker to have us investigated for child abuse and neglect, leading to our foster child being removed from our home even though the claims were found to be false. She also spread the gossip that we were being investigated which hurt some friendships.

That foster child who got removed? Not only did my sister mess up that baby’s life, she also destroyed my other kids because one day their sibling was home and the next gone with no warning. We had prepared them for foster kids leaving but this foster child was within weeks of being adopted by us.

To this day my sister maintains that she did the right thing because we “didn’t need more kids.”

7. Night Terrors

When my son was about 5 years old, he started having night terrors.

Eyes wide open, he would stare into an abyss of his own invention and scream with the chilling ferocity of hell itself.

I would hold him and rock his rigid little body until he loosened back to sweaty deep sleep. What I never told my husband or the pediatrician, or even my mother, was that I was afraid of him during those nighttime bouts of what looked and felt like nothing less than possession.

I was afraid of my own sweet child and wanted to run away.

8. A Big Secret

My pawpaw had a secret girlfriend for several decades. We suspect some of her children might be his as well. He had 7 children with my mawmaw, and I guess to escape he’d leave and live with the girlfriend for a couple of weeks at a time.

The woman lived a couple houses down from them, so my dad and his siblings never suspected anything, because he was still around the house a lot during those times. My mawmaw didn’t like it, but she was a very prim and proper woman, and this was during a time when people didn’t air their dirty laundry and they certainly didn’t divorce.

I was told that when the woman died in the early 2000s, my mawmaw sent flowers to the funeral; not sure if it was out of spite or just because that’s the kind of woman she was.

No one talked about it for years and years until my mawmaw started showing signs of Alzheimer’s and dementia in her 70s. She would revert back to that time a lot. It was hard watching her relive it every day.

9. Cotton Wonderland

When I was about eight or nine I was going for a dump and noticed an open box of nice cotton things on a string wrapped in plastic. “Amazing!” I thought and continued to unwrap every single one of them.

I then hung them up around the bathroom in various places (door handle, taps, anywhere they would hang) I even hung them over my ears, tucking the string behind my ear so the nice cotton things sat in front of my ears, like fluffy sideburns.

Anywhoo, so I had been having an excellent time for about half an hour at a guess, and my mum knocked on the door to see why I had been in there so long. I happily opened the door, ready to show my mum my beautiful creation of hanging nice cotton-things.

She found it funny, although wasn’t as appreciative as I had hoped she would be.

10. Happily Divorced

Thankfully, my family never brings up my wedding day.

It was a six-month marriage to an emotionally abusive woman that ended with infidelity, depression, and homelessness.

I’m totally fine now, but I don’t ever mention it. So no one else does.

My grandpa has brought the wedding up a couple of times for necessary reasons, but refers to it as, “that time we met you in the park.”

11. Darkness

Not a parent but when I was a teenager I used to write bad poetry. I mean really bad poetry, the “broken heart, nobody could ever understand me” kind of poetry.

I kept them to myself and didn’t share them. Fast forward 23 years and I’m helping Mom clean out my childhood home and I come across the entire stack of bad poems tucked away deep in an old box of my stuff. They’re freaking terrible and deeply, deeply personal.

I’m a grown man and I’ve got this stack of papers in my hand that makes me feel 15 years old again. The bad part of 15; the awkward, lack of confidence part of 15, the “holy crap I’m glad I never have to feel that way again” part of 15. I actually try to sneak these papers past my mom to burn them immediately outside. She sees them and asks me what I’m doing. I tell her it’s just some stuff I wrote as a kid and I’m going to burn it quick as it’s personal and I don’t want anyone to read it.

She says “Your poems? Yeah, I really worried about you when I read them.”

Damn it, mom.

12. This mom gets an F for parenting.

When I was a kid, my mom was a pretty messed up person, so I have an endless list of stories that I could offer on this subject. The one that comes to mind right now is the time she sent me to go pick up my younger brother from the pool. I, being an active 13-year-old kid, decide to join him and start playing with his friends instead.

I guess she got tired of waiting around for me and decided to come to the pool to check up on us. She showed up and found me in the pool (yes, wearing my regular street clothes, shame on me!) playing Marco Polo with the guys. She yelled my name, took her slipper off, and threw it at my head in front of everyone there.

Then she started calling me names like promiscuous for daring to swim with boys. Every guy there went quiet. I think the silence was one of the most unbearable things about this situation. It still prickles my skin when I think about it. I was so utterly embarrassed that I didn’t know what to do. I vividly remember that walk home, my head down in shame the entire time.

In hindsight, I can’t believe that I actually thought I had done something horribly wrong. I cried myself to sleep. What’s funny is that she didn’t even ask my brother to come back with us. Screw you, Mom! I’m very glad that our relationship is much better now than it was back then, but you still made my childhood a living nightmare, so screw you!

13. Uh, wow.

I was always told by my family that my biological grandfather on mom’s side died in a rock climbing accident right before Mom was born. I found out last year that what actually happened was, while he was still attending a military college in the South in the 60s, my grandmother discovered that he liked to wear women’s clothing after finding a box of dresses in his size in his closet.

The next day, she came back to find him hanging from the ceiling, and she and two of her brothers had to smuggle his body out of the room and convince a coroner to rule it an accident. I’m honestly not even sure of who all in the family knows the truth, but anyone who does sure as heck doesn’t talk about it.

14. That's shitty. Ba-Dum-Tiss!

When I was like seven years old my entire family was having a barbecue at my house. There were probably like 15 people in total at my house. While enjoying weenies and burgers I noticed my dog dropping a dook in the backyard. For some odd reason, this sparked some kind of mindless epiphany in my head, and I found it would be an excellent idea to follow in his footsteps.

So while everyone was sitting at the table eating, I walked up to the nearest patch of grass and blooped a fat duke in front of everyone right on the grass. EVERYBODY laughed right in my face. It was easily the most embarrassing thing to happen to me. On the bright side though, it was hilarious watching my mom pick up my poop, since she was on the verge of vomiting everywhere.

15. PHONY

We witnessed a faked heart attack. It was very surreal. And her husband was so embarrassed. Here’s what happened.

Grandmother didn’t like my dad very much, and she picked a fight with him, so he decided that he was going home. When grandmother realized that my stepmom (her daughter) was going to take dad’s side and go home too, she yelled a lot and then, as a last-ditch effort, dramatically clutched her chest and collapsed very carefully—it was outside, and I guess she didn’t want to bump her head or muss her clothes.

Dad offered to call 9-1-1, grandfather said it wasn’t necessary, and when grandmother realized no one was taking her seriously she opened her eyes, allowed grandfather to help her up, and went inside with him while fake sobbing.

Normally she was quite nice, but she had her moments and really wasn’t happy that her daughter was grown up and had a life. Holidays usually brought out the worst in her. Which was weird because she loved cooking and celebrating.

Wow. What are your family's most embarrassing moments? Share your thoughts and stories in the comment section now!

Elana