What's Your Most F***ed-Up Family Secret?

r/AskReddit

🏺 AntigoneInTheAgora • 10h

What f***ed up family secret did you only find out about when you were older?

[Serious replies only]

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🍞 Breadcrumbs99 7h

I’ve never met my maternal grandparents. My mom and uncle have always been super close, so it always seemed weird that they didn’t tell us much about their childhood or ever mention the rest of their family. If me or my siblings asked about their parents, they just said they died really young and that was it.

After my uncle died, my mom finally told us the whole story. When they were around 12 and 10 y/o, their dad and stepmom took them deep into the woods and abandoned them. Like, just took off and left them to die in the forest.

After trying to find their way out, they came across this cute little house made of candy. They were super happy thinking whoever lives in a house of candy must be a nice person and is gonna help them out. And obviously they wanna eat some candy too. Anyway, it turned out the woman who lived there was some nasty old witch and she took them prisoner.

The witch locked my uncle in a cage and forced my mom to be her slave. Weirdly, though, she was feeding them well and giving them lots of sweets and tasty food. While cleaning, my mom found a recipe book about how to cook kids…Clearly the witch was giving them all this food to fatten them up and eat them.

One day the witch lit up this huge oven and my mom realized that she’s finally gonna kill and cook her brother. When the witch was next to the oven making sure the fire was catching properly, my mom pushed her in and locked the door. She let my uncle out and they escaped.

Eventually they made it out of the forest, and they decided f**k their parents, they never wanna see them again and they’re just gonna live on their own with some treasure they found in the witch’s house. Kinda not surprised my uncle never wanted to talk about it all.

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🐷JustALilPig 6h

WTF! How could parents do that to their own kids?! They must have been so traumatized :( Your mom sounds like a total badass though!

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❄️Schneewittchen 6h

My mother was always really honest about her awful parents. My grandfather (her father) married so fast after my grandmother died, and his new wife was vain and jealous. She always treated my mother badly, but when she grew up and became really beautiful, her stepmother hired a hunter to take her into the woods and kill her.

My mother begged him to let her go, saying she'd stay in the forest and never return to the city, and he took pity on her. My mother found a house where seven miners were living, and they kindly let her stay in exchange for doing housework.

When her stepmother found out (not too clear on this part, something to do with a mirror?), she devised a few schemes to disguise herself and try and kill my mother. Eventually she succeeded in getting her to eat a poisoned apple. My mother only ate a small piece, not enough to kill her but enough to fall into a coma. The men she lived with thought she was dead though. They put her in a glass coffin and invited everyone to come and pay their respects, because she’d become quite popular in the area.

Here's the really dark part: my father (a prince back then) happened to be passing through the forest at this time and saw my mother in the coffin. Despite being seemingly dead, he “fell in love” with her and decided to take her back to his kingdom.

While she was being carried along the bumpy path through the forest, the piece of poisoned apple dislodged from her mouth and she woke up. She still went to my father’s kingdom and got married, because of course she couldn’t go back to her stepmother, who’d tried multiple times to murder her.

Everyone used to tell it as if it were a really romantic story, but I always thought it was strange. When I was an adult, I found out that the apple dislodging part of the story wasn’t even true – my father had actually kissed her while she was still “dead” and that’s what woke my mother up…

(Sorry for my terrible English.)

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🌷YaGirlThumbelina 2h

Ewwwww! That’s super creepy of your dad, no offense OP. Also, what is up with shitty parents and forests? I’m never going to the woods again! Lol

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😴WideAwake 4h

Girl, are you me?! My parents met almost exactly like this. I mean, swap the evil stepmom and poisoned apple for an evil fairy and curse by pinprick, and this is really similar to my parents’ story. My mom was in a cursed sleep, looking fully dead, and my dad came by and kissed her to wake her up.

That’s what they told me when I was a kid. When I was older, one of my maids who’d been with us since before I was born told me that my dad actually raped my mom, and it was me being born that woke her from the curse. My dad even nicknamed my mom Sleeping Beauty. 🤮

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🥣Goldiii 1h

Omfg that’s so gross. Sleeping Beauty?! Barf.

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😴WideAwake 1h

I know right? I never got on with my dad anyway, so I went full non-contact after I found this out.

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🥀Throwaway48273 3h

Not using my main account for obvious reasons. My parents also had a messed-up meet-cute lol. They didn’t really talk about it much when I was younger and I only found out the truth when I was an adult. They also told me and my brothers and sisters this really romantic story about themselves.

They said my dad was cursed by a bitter old witch to look like a terrifying beast, but my mum managed to see through his appearance and fell in love with the person inside. When they finally kissed, the curse was lifted and my dad reverted to being a gorgeous prince lol. They were kind of vague about how they actually met though.

Well, it seems my dad was a bit of a bastard when he was a beast, and locked my granddad (mum’s dad) in his prison tower after my grandad picked a rose from his garden. Yeah, one measly rose. And my dad barely ever went outside when he was a beast anyway…

My mum begged my dad to release my granddad and said she would take his place in the tower. After a while, he let her move into the castle with him, and they started eating dinner together, then spending more time together, and eventually fell in love.

Honestly, it’s kind of ruined relationships for me now. How can you still believe in love when the romantic story you’ve heard all your life about true love is a lie? How do you trust a partner when you find out that your own dad is a bloody kidnapper and your mum basically has Stockholm Syndrome?!

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🧚‍♀️FairyGodmama 3h

Aw, OP, I’m so sorry :( Don’t give up on love! Check your DMs, I’ll see what I can do for you ;)

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🐺BigBadWolf 2h

Just wanna point out that your mom's also into bestiality… She was gunna kiss a beast lmao. Where she at now? I’m into milfs (and gilfs) lol

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🥣Goldiii 30m

BigBadWolf? More like SmallSadNeckbeard. Leave poor OP and their mom alone you creep.

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🧜‍♀️UnderTheSea 3h

Ooh, finally I have a story for AskReddit! Also a weird one about my mom and dad that I didn’t learn until I was old! Always wondered about my mom’s parents, never knew them, she never talks about them, no photos of them anywhere. She mentioned once when she was drunk at a family wedding (dad's side) that she had a ton of sisters, but weirdly we never met any of them.

Around age 40 I got really into genealogy and I did 23andMe, found out loads about my dad’s half of the family but literally nothing about my mom's. Very weird if she had like 10 sisters, right? Even if they only had 2 kids each, that’s a lot of potential cousins and whatnot out there.

When my mom hit her 70s she got dementia and kind of forgot where she was and what was going on. She ended up spilling a lot of beans about what happened leading up to meeting my dad. Holy moly, what a story. At first I thought she was just losing her marbles but having heard lots of other strange family tales now, I think she was telling the truth. It's kind of dark but it's also kind of cool from a family tree point of view.

So when my mom was young she used to be a mermaid. Her dad was king of Atlantica and was really strict about security and keeping away from the human world. However, my mom was fascinated with humans and was always collecting all their crap they dropped on the ocean floor. She used to fight with her dad about it all the time.

One day she saves this "cute" guy (my dad) from drowning in a shipwreck and develops a bit of an obsession with him. She makes a pact with the infamous sea witch to give up her voice in exchange for human legs, and goes to live on the shore. She only has a limited time period to make my dad fall in love with her, or she’ll go back to live as some kind of plant in the sea witch’s cave.

Luckily, my dad finds her and I guess recognizes her from the shipwreck? So he takes her in and looks after her. My mom has no voice, so they can’t really talk, but they make it work somehow and decide to get married. This is all in the space of about three days, I might add.

A whole lot of nonsense happened with the sea witch, but long story short, the wedding goes ahead and my mom gets her voice back. So then she was a proper human, which was her dream, but she could never go back to Alantica, which means I never got to know that side of the family.

Like the others posted above, it’s a really weird love story… I mean, how can you fall in love without even speaking to someone? And how could my mom abandon her whole family like that for a guy she's known for three days…? But yeah, me and my kids have always been really amazing at swimming, so it all kind of made sense after I found that out.

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🐰P3t3rRa661t 3h

Oh my goodness, where do you people live?! Why are there so many witches around? These stories are so disturbing. Wish I hadn’t opened this thread. What a terrible day to be literate.

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👩‍🦰 TheRealMerida 2h

Where do YOU live? Lol. You must have lived a pretty sheltered life if you’ve never met a witch. I’m more concerned about all these sick men. Falling in love with dead women and barely-legal girls who can’t speak? Smdh

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😍 LiShangWouldGetIt 30m

Hey, it’s not all men.

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