Gross Things Your Parents Did

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Had s*x with each other.

For the win!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My mother lives with us now that she’s elderly and any time I fix myself a meal or bring food home, she gets too close to it to look at it and touches it or picks it up. Drives me insane. Do not touch or breathe on other people’s food.

I recommend you stay out of restaurants!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This thread has made me realize DCUM is mostly a bunch of backwoods hillbillies that pretend to be rich and are too good for their home towns now that they discovered the big bad city.

THIS! I grew up poor and cannot relate to single post. I will say that I had a friend whose house I loved having dinner with when her mom served canned green beans, we never had canned anything and I loved canned green beans.

Me too. There's something about the texture of canned green beans... I never buy them, but when I encounter them in the wild, I truly enjoy them.

[Anonymous]

My mom has always been pretty relaxed about food hygiene, which is ok-- I don't recall a single food-based illness in my life-- but combined with her pack-rat tendencies it's gross. I have taken to cleaning out their fridge every time I go visit. Have found some truly vile things lurking in there.

That said, I never look at a package date, but I do clean the fridge every week before the grocery run. Everything gets a look/ smell, all the spills get wiped up, etc. My mom skips that step. I found a package of bacon in her fridge that was a deep, uniform, matte coal black.

[Anonymous]

To this day, my dad uses a handkerchief. I remember him lending me his at times during my childhood. Ick.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My mother lives with us now that she’s elderly and any time I fix myself a meal or bring food home, she gets too close to it to look at it and touches it or picks it up. Drives me insane. Do not touch or breathe on other people’s food.

I recommend you stay out of restaurants!

My MIL does this at group holiday meals, pausing only to lick her fingers between touches. It's repulsive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents were divorced and my mom had several men over several times a month. I'm honestly not sure if she was getting paid sometimes.

Some women are simply quite “high drive.”

Literally hundreds of times, I have read responses here from other women who do not believe there are any high-drive women. Confirmation bias maybe? But we do exist.

I have a friend who is high drive, and it gets her so many problems. Suggested she monetize this.

My older parents grew up only taking one shower or bath a week, so that's what they did the rest of their lives! They did wash every day.

I knew a lady who would wear vibrator panties out and about. I can’t believe she never got caught.

My g/f has a pair like that with a remote control.
Guess who gets to hold the remote when we go out to dinner?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This thread has made me realize DCUM is mostly a bunch of backwoods hillbillies that pretend to be rich and are too good for their home towns now that they discovered the big bad city.

THIS! I grew up poor and cannot relate to single post. I will say that I had a friend whose house I loved having dinner with when her mom served canned green beans, we never had canned anything and I loved canned green beans.

Me too. There's something about the texture of canned green beans... I never buy them, but when I encounter them in the wild, I truly enjoy them.

We would call them squeaky beans because they really did squeak when we ate them. So gross looking back at it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dad would pour Hawaiian Punch into his beer. This is a man who was raised in Germany with German parents, for Pete's sake!

German here. I actually sort of understand this one. He was making a Radler of sorts. Hawaiian Punch is a bit of an odd choice, but I guess he liked the flavor. I'm guessing you probably lived in a place without the ability to purchase the imports of the real ones (which is what we buy to avoid this )

Married to a German.

Beer can be a mixer in Germany. Lots of delicious drinks to make with beer!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Cheated on my mom and smoked. Mom neglected me and was a functional alcoholic. She drank herself to sleep most nights.

Kinda puts those canned green beans in perspective

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dad would pour Hawaiian Punch into his beer. This is a man who was raised in Germany with German parents, for Pete's sake!

German here. I actually sort of understand this one. He was making a Radler of sorts. Hawaiian Punch is a bit of an odd choice, but I guess he liked the flavor. I'm guessing you probably lived in a place without the ability to purchase the imports of the real ones (which is what we buy to avoid this )

Married to a German.

Beer can be a mixer in Germany. Lots of delicious drinks to make with beer!

Good to know! He usually asked for it on hot days after working in the yard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sooo many things.
Mother would walk around the house bare chested because she was hot when my brother wasn’t around. My father was sometimes around though, and I was grossed out as well.
At least he wore his pants.

There’s just too much to list.
After my mother died I got a glimpse into my dad’s disgusting habits because I started coming over to help and later moved him closer to me and now visit regularly. He had this one bowl he eats his slop from. Slop as in mixing everything together - soup, some grains, veggies, whatever he has that day. He then leaves the empty bowl on the table and reuses it without washing. When I visit I make him wash it of course but he doesn’t do it when he is alone.

Why do you think it was gross your mom sometimes walked around topless at home? As someone who breastfed, this doesn't seem like a big deal.

The food bowl thing with your dad is kind of gross, but only because he's not washing that bowl regularly. I don't think it's gross to combine grains and veggies to eat them. I also think you calling it "slop" is making it sound grosser than it is. It just sounds like food to me.

The judgment you have here seems deeply misplaced.

When your kids are WAY beyond breastfeeding years, yes it’s incredibly inappropriate to walk around topless. No one wants to see that.

...what is the problem? This seems oddly prudish. We're talking about someone in their own home, with immediate family. Breasts are not genitals.

And where do you draw the line? What if someone on a hot day wears a light cotton dress around the house without a bra. Is that "incredibly inappropriate"?

I'm honestly baffled by this one. There's nothing sexual or unhygienic about this. No one is objecting to a dad walking around without his shirt off. I'm not trolling, I truly don't get this.

In American society, breasts are private.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents were divorced and my mom had several men over several times a month. I'm honestly not sure if she was getting paid sometimes.

Some women are simply quite “high drive.”

Literally hundreds of times, I have read responses here from other women who do not believe there are any high-drive women. Confirmation bias maybe? But we do exist.

I have a friend who is high drive, and it gets her so many problems. Suggested she monetize this.

My older parents grew up only taking one shower or bath a week, so that's what they did the rest of their lives! They did wash every day.

I knew a lady who would wear vibrator panties out and about. I can’t believe she never got caught.

My g/f has a pair like that with a remote control.
Guess who gets to hold the remote when we go out to dinner?

The waiter?

[Anonymous]

They voted Republican.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My parents did not wash their hands enough. Like they often prepared food or ate food with their hands without washing their hands first, and I only started doing this as an adult when I realized it was unsanitary. They did wash their hands after the bathroom, but otherwise were pretty loose with it.

We also wore shoes in the house and now that seems disgusting to me.

My dad would pick his teeth with a toothpick or sometimes with his fingernails after certain meals. But that I knew was gross -- my mom would give him a hard time about it and ask him to leave the table. Ironically, I have more sympathy for my dad about this now because I have similar teeth and have discovered in middle age that I am very prone to getting things stuck between my teeth during meals. But I excuse myself and take care of it in private, and also carry flossers in my purse for this purpose.

That's it though. I actually don't think this is is terrible. My parents both grew up quite poor, in huge families with minimal parenting. I grew up middle class and it's not surprising there were some manners deficits given their backgrounds. I actually think they did really well considering they really had to work at it. Moving up classes is challenging and requires a lot of attention to detail and and discipline. I didn't appreciate how much my parents had to do to transcend their backgrounds until I was much older.

My parents both grew up quite poor, too, but their parents made it clear that money/wealth had no bearing on manners. My grandmother lived in a house in Ireland with no running water but had impeccable manners. I've met billionaires who are incredibly gauche. I don't think there's a 1:1...

It might not be a 1:1 but there's a strong correlation. It's not a personal failing, it's built into conceptions of class. A lot of manners are not intuitive, but part of a code specifically designed to help upper class people identify one another. So if your grandmother had impeccable manners, she went out of her way to learn that code and apply it, or her own parents did. It didn't just come naturally -- it takes effort. It especially takes effort if someone is raised in a lower class household where that code is an unknown mystery.

Which is also why billionaires sometimes have terrible manners. They have money but they don't know the code because they didn't grow up with it.

You think manners are a sign of a person's inherent goodness but they are entirely separate.

I never said that…