Dads can be the real MVPs sometimes. As kids, our dads seemed to be the ones that always let us get away with the weirdest stuff, and in fact would sometimes even encourage it. But what happens when mom finds out? These Reddit dads will tell you.
u/HumblePlatypus asked: Dads of Reddit, what's your best "Don't tell mom" story?
Worth it.
I'm the son in this story, but one time when I was like 14-15, we had a family party at my aunt's house down the street. Eventually, the party just died down, and all the families started to go home. My dad decided to stay, and I asked if I could stay with him. Eventually, it was just my uncles and my dad drinking and telling stories at 2am while I just sat and listened to them. It was the first time that I could remember "staying up with the adults." It was a cool moment.
Anyways, my dad got too drunk to drive us home, and no one else was there. We could have spent the night, but then my dad was like, "No, I know your aunt has bicycles in the garage. We should just ride bikes home. It'll take 10 minutes tops."
So my dad and I rode bikes home, but my dad took a detour at an old park near my house. We started doing wheelies and donuts with our bicycles on the giant grass field (Well, at least we tried. My dad was pretty drunk, so we were having a fun time falling over, basically).
We finally get home at 3am in the morning and we're covered in mud and grass. My dad looks over at me and whispers, "OK, we have to be quiet sneaking back in. Don't tell mom what we did. She's going to be pissed if she finds out we rode bikes while I was drunk." Then he proceeded to knock on the door, and when my mom answered the door, he proceeded to tell her with glee exactly what he told me not to tell her. My mom was indeed pissed.
Happy 4th of July!
GiphyThat the reason the police and the fire department came to our neighborhood was because we were shooting off fireworks before the wife got home.
Solid plan....?
My dad and I were driving on the road at night, after my mom had specifically said I wasn't allowed to. When we pulled up to the street before my house, we switched drivers so it looked like he drove home. When doing that he slipped and fell and cut his head open and had to get stitches down his forehead. My mom still thinks it was from a thorn bush in our front yard.
Wholesome.
When my youngest daughter was about 7, she would help me wash my motorcycle in the garage. She would throw on my helmet and jump on the back and just sit there as I would polish the chrome. One day, I turned on the bike and took her on a quick ride down the alley. I went about 5 houses down and turned back. Our top speed was a neck-breaking 4mph.
She absolutely loved it. We made it our secret. And I had her change clothes immediately so her mom wouldn't smell the exhaust. We finally told her mom when my daughter turned about 13. She's now 18 and still jumps on the back as often as possible.
"Crash".
GiphyMy 15 year old son loved cars and learned to drive on our farm when he was 11. His crazy uncle car nut loved that he loved cars and gave him a racing driving class as a christmas gift. I spent a few months prepping him in my sports car and at the go kart track and then took him to the Nascar race track for the class, even though he had never driven on the street.
He did great in the little formula car, getting up to 180 on the straightaway but towards the end, coming out of a chicane he missed a shift and accidentally put it in first. This locked up the rear and he spun out, going into a chain link fence backwards. All I saw was the dust cloud but he was ok, thanks to roll bar, neck brace, and helmet.
We spent a good part of the drive home rehearsing what to tell my wife and how not to use the word "crash". We told her after he finished college.
Redditors Recount The Wedding Objections They Witnessed | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
Make up your vegetables!
Whenever my mom would leave town for work my dad would tell me and my sisters it was "make up your vegetables" night, and we got have pizza for dinner as long as we told my mom we had vegetables while she was away.
We got busted when each of us answered with a different vegetable than the others did.
Now THAT'S a deal.
When my son was in junior high, McDonald's had an every afternoon special of cheeseburgers for 49 cents. We stopped on the way home from school every day.
So, late 90's? We rocked that deal every day. High schools are why it doesn't exist anymore. It's kinda hard to keep up with 8 stoners showing up and ordering 100+ cheeseburgers. And that was just my friends. 20 other tables in the place.
Let's be real- the mom definitely knew.
GiphyI had a kinda rocky relationship with my dad when I was a teenager. We lived in the east village in NYC.
When the 2003 blackout happened, we spent the evening up on our roof talking for hours. What started off as a little bit of wine ended up being us polishing off about 3 bottles hashing out what our issues were. Our relationship really improved after that, but I still remember the moment we both realized that my mom (who was out of town at the time) would be pissed if she realized we had gone through that much wine.
We concocted a story that he had accidentally dropped a bag that had two bottles in it. As far as I know she never suspected a thing.
We all remember our first R-rated movie.
My dad took me and my brother to see Timecop when I was 12.
Nobody in the house was allowed to see rated R movies, but in retrospect, my dad must have gone out to the movies in secret a lot when he was on the road (made sales calls, territory was the whole state).
When my son was 13 I took him to see Superbad. Standing in line he said "I don't think this is appropriate for me." When we got our seats he said, "I don't think this is appropriate for me." A few minutes into the movie he said, "I don't think this is appropriate for me." After the first inappropriate scene he said, "I don't think this is appropriate for me."
That's when my GF & I looked at each other with an awkward face. After the movie I apologized to him and begged him not to tell his mom. That's when he let me off the hook and let me know his mom took him to it the night before.
Curious to hear examples of this, Redditor TheArchitect_7 asked:
"What’s a thing dumb people say that makes them think they sound smart?"
Some people just want reactions more than a back-and-forth interaction.
Attention-Seeker
"'You wouldn't understand.' Yeah, that's why I asked you for an explanation."
– Appropriate_Donkey18
Fancy Words
"I sometimes use big words that I don't really understand to make myself sound more ambidextrous."
– Alone_Ad1278
Looking At The Score
"The more someone emphasizes their IQ, the less smart I think they actually are."
– rmshilpi
Hackneyed Sayings
"Everything happens for a reason, nothing is actually 'free' as someone has to pay for it, both parties are the same, you may have book smarts, but I have street smarts, common sense isn't so common anymore, but that's how we've always done it!"
"An addition to the previous: 'We will send 40 billion to Ukraine, but we won't spend 40 billion to secure our schools!'"
– humorous_anecdote
Things can get wacky when dealing with someone who is cantankerous.
Futile Argument
"Something along the lines of 'You can’t prove it didn’t happen.'"
"A guy at work tried to pull this one on me. He believed one of those Animal Planet mockumentaries about a giant killer shark was real. When I told him it was all fiction and that there was no real proof of this kind of stuff, he tried to argue back about while he couldn’t prove it, I couldn’t disprove it either."
"There’s a saying about getting into an argument with a stupid person. This was my real world experience with it."
– WongoKnight
Status
"Do you know who I am?"
– FoxFourTwo
The Equivalent Of Winning
"Thinking that getting a reaction out of someone is the same thing as winning an argument."
– bcopes158
Please Define
"My friend once used the phrase 'By its very definition' while we were arguing about something...so I asked him what the definition actually was, while he fumbled with that a bit I told him to stop using weasel words."
– groovyinutah
No Kidding
"'it all depends on how you look at it.' yeah thats f'king obvious."
– psychpopnprogncore
We all love a good malaprop.
Or Intents
"For all intensive purposes"
– p38-lightning
It's Moot, Really
“Mute point”
"Cracks me up every time."
– Ed_The_Bloody
Sometimes, editing yourself a bit in discourse with those who are intellectually out of your league is better than trying to keep up with them in an attempt to win their favor by articulating something you know nothing about.
I would explain better, but you wouldn't understand.
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Curious to hear about some of the more ominous events experienced by strangers online, Redditor IM_Not_A_Robot_10110 asked:
"What have you witnessed that will haunt you forever?"
What happens inside hospitals are full of trauma and heartache, even medical professionals have a hard time processing what they encounter.
The Pediatric Patient
"X-ray tech here, but I was a student at the time. Called to ER for trauma code. Only know it's a pediatric patient. The terror as I walk around the corner and see it's a little boy, same size as my son. We go to take an x-ray and he's making this high pitched shrill wheezing noise. They couldn't intubate enroute so we were doing a chest/neck to see what was going on. His neck was full of air."
"Come to find out the story later, he had tripped and fallen in school and his neck went square on a desk and he had broken his trachea. Believe he was stabilized & flown out. Never found out what happened after."
– ZephyrGrace
Calling Time Of Death
"ER nurse. This won’t haunt me in a bad way, but it’ll stick with me for sure. We were coding a middle aged lady we knew was going to die. We were pulling out the last ditch stuff hoping we’d get lucky, but everyone knew which way it was going."
"Family was there and in the room. When it was clear we had run through all the Hail Marys and it was time to call it, the husband spoke up for the first time. He had apparently been an EMT for a long time so he knew what he was looking at. He said he was going to do the final round of compressions."
"It was very respectfully done. He got up to do his 2 minutes, the nurses quietly started turning things off so there wouldn’t be continuous alarms, we called for a pulse check which the husband did, then we called time of death. He was thankful we let him do that and I was thankful to be a part of it."
– pause_and_consider
Missing Jaw
"Not me, but my roommates fiancé is a flight nurse. She told me this story around Easter."
"They showed up to a scene being told beforehand that there was a patient with a gun shot wound and bleeding bad but that’s all they were told. When they got there they found a woman who was sitting on the ambulance gurney completely lucid and looking around, completely missing her lower jaw. She said you could see down her throat and she looked like a zombie. Her lower jaw was hanging to the side by some tissue and when she looked about it swung around and dangled. She said the woman seemed relatively calm and when she tried to speak what was left of her tongue kinda moved but nothing but gurgles came out."
"It was not a suicide, her boyfriend accidentally discharged his firearm while they were in his car."
"She survived."
– New_Hand_Luke
AIDS Epidemic Era
"Retired RN. I was working in the PACU and helped another nurse take her patient to his room. As I was adjusting something by his head, he grabbed my hand and started crying. He kept saying I don’t want to die. He was barely 20. In an isolation room. I looked into his eyes and tried to comfort him as he sobbed. This was in the early days of the 'AIDS epidemic.' He died within a week. To this day I still see his eyes and hear him sobbing."
– Tkay906363
Traffic accidents can be some of the most gruesome scenes no one should ever have to witness.
Accident Victim
"I live next to a busy street, inbetween lanes is a tram station. Teenager wanted to cross and got run over by a tram. Well, partly run over, he ended up with his body squeezed in between the tram and the tram station wall, with his legs stuck under the tram. It took about 1,5 hours until they had the equipment to lift the tram to get him out of there. They managed to reanimate what was left of him but he died in the hospital."
– ir_blues
Dangerous Road
"It was Easter Sunday about 5 in the afternoon. I was driving home from the lake with a friend of mine on a country highway that’s pretty well traveled. It’s one of those single lane coming and single lane going where the speed limit is 70 roads. The intersections are far and few between so instead of an overpass it’s just a blinking yellow caution light. In what literally felt like the blink of an eye the car driving in front of me is struck on the drivers side door."
"The impact pushes both cars off to the road and onto the shoulder. I hit my brakes and was able to stop to help render aid. My friend and I get out of the car and run over to help. The drivers side door is crushed inward, driver has been pushed into the passenger side. It was a younger lady, maybe mid 30s. The impact pushed her out of her seat and into her daughter."
"You ever see movies where a dead body jump scares someone and it just stares at the with wide eyes and mouth agape….. yeah. The girl is ok but very confused. She has no visible injuries and is freely looking around so we unbuckled her and pulled her out of the car so she didn’t realize her mom was laying on her. As we do it I look at the mom and I can see a little life is left in her, so I said the only thing we could say. 'She’s alright.'”
"You could see the light in her eyes fade and she passes away. More cars stop and help out. As more people are here to help I start to realize that someone has been screaming, at me. In the back seat is her son. He must have been knocked unconscious and he’s now yelling, not out in pain but asking 'Is mom okay, is she okay?' I had no words for him, he was maybe 6. His sister was about 9. Thankfully about 4 of the cars that stopped were off duty first responders so they quickly took over for me. This was about 20 years ago, I was 17 at the time and I just saw a mom die in front of her 2 kids. I’m crying now thinking back on it and to this day I still refuse to ever take that road again."
"They finally build an actual stop light a couple years back. The area isn’t more crowded so I can only imagine what the motivation to improve that intersection was."
– Boothulu
Pedestrians
"I was designated driver at my friend's 30th birthday party. Had just dropped off my last friend and I was heading home. Little blue car zipped by me going maybe 10 over. Maybe a block ahead of me I see the speeding car hit two 20 yr olds who were running across the street. They were running to McDonald's across from the nightclub they were partying at and didn't wait for a red light. I'll never forget the girls blond hair in the bright headlights as she got hit. One thing that isn't ever correct in tv shows when people get hit by cars is how much damage it does to a human body. I distinctly remember his legs laying like 2m from his body. Both died right when paramedics got there."
– SuchAGeoNerd
PTSD
"Getting hit by a car really is ugly. My girlfriend accidentally stepped on the street while we were having a minor disagreement and bam she was gone in a moment. I have ptsd, I can still see all the blood, her trying to breathe and the moment she gave up."
– More-Masterpiece-561
You never know when a friend or acquaintance is going through an extremely rough time–even though they present themselves differently in public.
All we could ever be as fellow humans is to always be compassionate.
Prolonged Guilt
"I found my roommates body in our apartment when I was in college. He had suffocated himself with a helium tank and a plastic bag over his head. That fucked me up pretty good, especially because I knew he was struggling with his mental health. He was cutting himself too, he tried to hide it but I noticed. And I didn’t say a word, i didn’t offer a helping hand. I could have done something to help him, but I didn’t. That guilt is still there, 10 years down the line."
– Jon__Snuh
What The Taxi Driver Witnessed
"I was driving Taxi once and I picked up someone who said he thinks he just saw a dead body. Said someone had jumped from the top of the parking garage. There was already an ambulance and what not on the scene. I remember briefly thinking of my friend Willzo, but dismissed it, I didn’t even think he was depressed like that. I found it odd that I would even consider such a thing out of nowhere. But I dismissed the thought and went about my work night. Couple days later I got a call from a mutual friend. 'Hey buddy, did you hear about Will? He jumped off the parking garage a few days ago.'”
– Everywhere-Danger
These Redditors' stories are a lot to take in.
However, they are good reminders about the brevity of life and how we should always strive towards being the best versions of ourselves while we're still alive.
Because you never know when you or someone close to you will have their last breath.
If you or someone you know is struggling, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
To find help outside the United States, the International Association for Suicide Prevention has resources available at https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/
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