'I was waiting for my mom to get home, and it felt like it was taking an extra long time. I asked my father where she was. His response? 'Probably out getting r**ed.''
As a Writer at BuzzFeed, I write and curate quizzes, listicles, and articles about everything from pop culture and history to food and fashion. Childhood memories are always hazy for me. It's the same for most everyone else, which is why a lot of the things we remember from our childhood are understood much, much later in life as adults.
When I came across this Reddit thread where a user asked,I was incredibly shocked by the responses. I realized how our naive childhood memories can seem innocent, but as we grow up and learn about the world, we realize they are not.Here are 29 shocking and traumatizing childhood memories that people realized and understood much later as adults, and they are quite sad: Disclaimer: The following content has mentions of drug abuse, sexual harassment, death, and other sensitive matters. Reader discretion is advised."When I was about 10 or 11, my friends and I went to a small woodland area in the neighborhood to just explore and everything, though after a while we stumbled across an animal heart. No body, bones or anything we could see nearby, though it was clearly fresh. We later learned a kid in the area was a tiny psychopath and loved torturing animals around there, crucifying their bodies in his shed. He was found out after trying the same thing with his neighbor's new dog." "I was sexually assaulted at 13 while doing a play at a local theater but looking back, there were other moments where I was assaulted by the same person but didn't understand leading up to the 'main event.' For example, he would try to rub my back, and I just thought he was being nice, or he would play and stroke my hair. I didn't know any better, and I didn't like him at all, so I thought if I ignored it, he would just stop eventually. My mom caught wind of what he was like and tried to make sure that I didn't dance with him for the dance scene and stuff, but it didn't change anything. He went on to assault multiple minors. The police never did anything, stating that they had no evidence, even though about five girls, including myself, shared their story. The dude was an ex-worker for Disney and had a fiancé his age ." "I was waiting for my mom to get home, and it felt like it was taking an extra long time. I asked my father where she was. His response? 'Probably out getting raped.' He was abusive and turned into a drug-abusing narcissist who still refuses to acknowledge his wrongdoings. Pretty fucked up, and it's weird to remember these things as a kid." "In grade one, a girl used to finger herself down there and would teach other girls of our class as well. It was an activity that the girls did in secrecy. I knew it was bad because in kindergarten a security guard of my dad’s office building had done the same thing to me. Years later I realized that not only was I molested, but my classmate was also being molested by someone." "When I was five or six, my mom used to never want to get out of bed and just kept saying she was sick. Finally, my stepdad took her to a hospital, where she stayed for nearly a month. I thought it was so cool that her hospital let her do arts and crafts all the time, plus she got better and started doing arts and crafts with me too when she got home. I remember telling her that I wished I could go to the hospital and draw all day. She sat me down and told me that she hoped I would never get sick like she did, but if I do, there's nothing wrong with needing help to get better, even if you have to go somewhere for a little while to do it. It wasn't until I was probably 12 or 13 and didn't want to get out of bed myself that it clicked that the hospital she had gone to was a mental health hospital. But because of her, I've never felt shame about needing therapy when things are getting bad or even just to maintain a healthy mindset." "Finding out that breaking a cup or spilling a drink wasn’t a big deal was quite an eye-opener; watching my girlfriend look at me like I’m nuts while I apologize for 20 minutes about dropping a glass of water made me reevaluate a lot of my childhood." "I wasn't a child, but when I was in college, I lived with my uncle Tom, who was only four years older than me. He used to come home from work with a six-pack of beer and would crack one open as he walked in the door and offer me one. 15 years later, just before he died a meth addict, we talked about the good ol' days when we lived together. He confessed to me that after work he would buy a six-pack and a 40 oz beer. He would drink the entire 40 oz bottle and then walk into the house like he was just cracking his first can of beer. That always stuck with me." "When I was probably around four or six years old, I used to walk my grandma upstairs at her house every time we visited. She said she liked holding my hand. When I went to her room, she’d always compliment my shirts and be like, 'What’s this on your shirt here called?' And I’d say, 'Oh, that’s Winnie the Pooh,' or whatever I was wearing. And she’d go on to tell me stories about the character or talk a bit about it. When I was 16 I learned she’d been blind for years. She’d ask me to hold her hand up the stairs so that I could help guide her to her room. She’d ask what was on my shirt because she could feel a pattern on it. I don't know why, but that kind of made me feel both sad and very loved. Like she couldn’t see anymore, but she never wanted to let me worry about it and still managed to compliment what I was wearing all the time. She passed away while I was still very young, but those memories stuck like glue." "My really odd babysitter got fired after she broke the glass table. I was playing with her son in another room when we heard a crash. She actually used to lock us in her room a lot. I don't recall much, but I remember a big commotion soon after. I remember my dad screaming at my mom that night about how I was banned from going over there ever again and how it was my mother's fault for letting me go over there . I grew up to find out that the babysitter was shooting up and fell through that glass table. Neighbors had heard the crash and rushed over and found her high as a kite with two kids locked in a room ." "I was around eight years old, and we lived in this mountain town about five miles from the border of Mexico. My best friend and I would take turns staying at each other’s house; most of the time I would stay at his for longer periods of time because my dad was a truck driver and my mom worked two jobs 'in town' . One night my friend's dad came in and told us he wanted to take us night driving so we could see the stars and do some off-roading. As I got older, I realized the timing was weird. It was like two or three in the morning. I mean, a lot of it was weird. Well, we get in their awesome '66 mustang and drive for about 30 minutes. Then his dad turns off the headlights and slows to a crawl. He said we wouldn’t be able to see the stars with the lights on. We could." "All of a sudden we heard what kind of sounded like a plane, but we couldn’t see anything. He started driving through this field a little faster. Off-road time! Well, weird off-road time. We would slide around, then stop; his dad would pick something up, and then back to sliding around. This happened about 10 times. Years later, I looked my friend up online and found his sister. I sent her an email, and she called me. We caught up, and she told me my friend and their dad had been killed in a drug raid a couple years after we had moved. They were collecting packages of drugs in a field, and border patrol had been waiting to catch them. His dad tried to get away and drove off of a cliff. After that I started remembering things like running through their house and stumbling across them trying to heat up a vase. I remember cut-up straws all over the place when we would clean up. It broke my heart to hear about what happened. Because there were so many things I just didn’t understand." "My dad had a rare type of cancer that affected the bones in his face and jaw. When I was five years old, he had a tumor the size of a softball removed from one cheek. They removed his cheekbone, bottom jaw, nerves, lymph nodes, everything. The surgeon did a horrible job with the skin graft and spaced the stitches way too far apart. A couple weeks after his first operation, the wound got infected. I remember my mom and I were coming home after school one day, and it was unusual to see that my dad was also home that early. He was getting out of his car as we were pulling up to the house, and the stitches on his face had started to rip open; the infected gunk and his skin started falling out of his face as he ran into the house. That was just one of the many horrible things that happened while my dad was sick." "Being a kid and witnessing that level of gore so frequently desensitized me to it. I didn't realize how bad it was growing up in a household with a dying parent until I was much older." "My grandma explained to me she had a miscarriage a little while after her last child. I was nine and said it was for the best because my mom, aunt and uncle were troublemakers, so it was better for her. She got extremely mad with me, and I was so confused at the time; I didn’t realize how messed up it actually was." "When I was in 7th grade, a boy from my class got kicked out of the school, the reason being that he had bullied an eight-year-old boy so much that he and his family had to move. A few years later, when I was in high school, I was later told that he didn’t just bully him; he had raped him in the boys locker room." "I went to a friend's house on the weekend to play video games at the age of ten. We had a good time and played a lot of games on the PS2. His mom came upstairs from the basement to ask if we wanted food. I turned around and said, 'yes please,' and before I could finish saying 'please,' I noticed she had a black eye. I asked my friend what happened to his mom's face, and he said, 'I can't say.' 10-year-old me just said, 'Oh okay,' and we proceeded to play video games. I didn't realize until I was about 19 that this happened." "When I was little, a girl I met on vacation talked about sexual stuff a lot. When my parents found out, they didn't want me to play with her anymore. Now that I'm an adult, it occurs to me that there was probably a reason as to why she talked about that stuff so much..." "My mom used to let me watch cartoons late at night in her room as long as I didn’t turn around or be too loud. I would always hear her flicking a lighter but didn’t think too much about it. Years later I found out she was smoking meth right behind me and blowing it out the window; she would use me as an excuse as to why she was awake if my stepdad woke up and caught her." "My stepdad leashed my brother's dog in our basement so tight that he had to stand on his hind legs to not get strangled. He brought me down there to show me and laughed about it." "I remember having a friend in high school whose parents were practically absent for most of his childhood. We used to make jokes about how jealous we were that he got to do basically whatever he wanted; he could sleep over at anyone's house any day of the week and never had a curfew. We got close, and I started coming over to his house, which was very dirty to say the least. All the food was microwaveable or non-perishable/junk foods; they had a turtle tank in the kitchen between the sink and the stove, dishes were always stacked, trash was everywhere, etc. My friend would jump at any opportunity to stay at our houses whenever our parents allowed, but I had to stop after a while because my friend didn’t clean up after himself often. One day, my mom got upset after he left bread crumbs all over our couch, she said, 'He should know better; what would his parents think?'""I said, 'Well mom, I don’t think they’d think much.' I proceeded to explain the conditions of his house, my mother was shocked and insisted he sleep over whenever he needed, but only if I made sure he learned to clean up after himself and was well-fed." "On a day out with my dad when I was little, I was playing in the park with a girl the same age as me. I didn’t know her, but she was on her own. My dad and I left after an hour or so, leaving the girl on her own again; obviously my dad asked where her parents were, etc. Later on that night there was a big story on the news about a girl who had been abducted, and all my family kept asking me questions about this little girl. It went right over my head at the time, being about five-years-old. 40 years later, I still think about her." "When I was younger, I really never really saw my two oldest brothers because they were always in and out of jail. One day my mom tells me they will both be released on the same day and I’d get to see them when I got home from school . As I got home, I raced to the front door to see them finally, only to see my brother on top of the other one trying to stab him in the face with a kitchen knife on the couch. My body instantly froze, and my mom shoved me out of the way to separate them. I never understood why my brothers would fight like that until I grew up, realizing my brother was addicted to meth and would steal from us to get some drugs, so my brother had confronted him, ensuing the scuffle. I’m 25 now; my brother is still addicted to meth and in and out of jail." "My other brother got his life together and has made a living for himself. It’s not something obvious, but as a child, I didn’t understand why this would happen. I still get nightmares or flashbacks about this fight till this day." "My neighbor's body was just hanging by the window; kids my age got to see it too since we were playing outside." "A guy tried and failed to kidnap our neighbor's baby over a $20 debt. We lived in navy housing in Charleston, SC when I was a kid . We were at the neighbor's house. This neighbor owed someone else in the neighborhood $20 and hadn't paid. While we were all in the living room/dining area, we heard the loud sound of shattering glass come from the baby room. The baby cried out and everyone rushed down, but the guy was gone before we got there. The guy apparently tried to pry open a locked window with a putty knife, and pressure on the frame caused the glass to shatter. The dude left the putty knife and the note he'd written on the windowsill when he took off. The baby was fine. I heard the grown-ups talk about knowing exactly who it was. I also remember them deciding not to call the police and to go deal with it in person." "When I was five, my dad would take me to the park on a Sunday sometimes. Sometimes he would then take me to this woman's house nearby. They would sit me in front of the TV and put on teenage mutant ninja turtles. Then they would go upstairs. I never made the connection they were having sex because I didn't know what sex was. My mother left him anyway when I was older, for being a gambler and a drunk. I think about it now and again about how oblivious I was." "My dad carrying my mom down the stairs when she overdosed on pills trying to kill herself. A few years later she rented a convertible mustang and I wanted to check it out. My dad came out of the house screaming at me to get away from her. She left, and the police showed up. I later learned that she was schizophrenic and had tried to kill me. The reason she tried to kill herself was to save me before she actually tried. Eventually the disease won the battle, and her brain turned to madness." "When I was about 10, my dad offered to buy me candy and stopped at a store to run in. We had a long drive back, and I asked where the candy was. He said it was in the bag in the back but that he’d get it for me when we got home since he was driving. I said, 'It’s okay; I can reach it,' and as I reached for it he slapped me and yelled that I can wait until I get home. My father had never hit me before that and never did again after. The most confusing part to me was the look of utter sadness and shock on his face after he hit me. My dad was an alcoholic and killed himself before my 18th birthday. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood he had bought a bottle of vodka and forgot to place it in its own bag…or that I hadn’t seen him drinking water all those times he disappeared to his truck and I snuck to the window to watch where he went." "When I was five or six, I lived in a complex with eight units. One day, my dad asked to jump through one of the units' bathroom windows, run through the house, and open the front door. I didn’t really want to, as an old lady lived there that I didn't know well and thought I’d get in trouble if caught. Anyway, off I go through the window and make my way to the front door. As I get to the lounge room, she was on a lounge chair slumped with eyes opened, looking straight at me. Scared the crap out of me; it was creepy, but more so I remember thinking I had been caught breaking into her house. Anyway, I opened the front door and ran past my parents and neighbors straight home. The ambulance came not long after, but I didn’t really click what was going on. I later realized in my teens she was dead, apparently having been for a few days." "Everyone in the complex was worried about her, so they used me to get into the house to check on her welfare. 30+ years later, I can still picture it." My uncle was withdrawing from drugs. He was always the fun, loud, crazy uncle. I was around 10, and my mom and I came home from somewhere, and when we pulled up, he was sitting outside and said he needed a place to stay. My mom had to work the next day, and he and I were both hanging out at the house, and I could tell he didn't feel well and was dry heaving. It was really scary. I asked him if I should call 911 and he said no, he'd be okay. I had no idea he had drug problems until I became an adult. He passed away not too long ago from liver failure." "When I was about nine, I went fishing by myself at a fairly secluded spot. Next minute this guy sits down next to me. He starts chatting with me. Frankly, I was a bit annoyed with him intruding on my solitude, and I was a bit surly. Anyway, suddenly he says, 'What's that?' and points to an unopened condom packet that has magically appeared on the ground between us. I say, 'I don't know.' 'It's a condom. Do you know how to use one?' he asked me. I just shrugged and said something like no idea. I did my best to ignore the guy, not because I felt threatened but just annoyed. Eventually he got up and left. Years later I remembered the encounter and realized I'd probably had a brush with a pedophile." "I saw a girl standing on the wrong side of the barrier holding onto the railing when my family drove over a bridge and some people on the path were talking to her. I thought nothing of it and just wondered how she was going to get back on the right side. I used to hang onto the railing and walk on the wrong side of a path at school that was about a meter high, so I just thought she was mucking around in a more extreme adult-level way, chatting to her friends. I didn’t realize until I remembered it randomly as an adult, and I have no idea what the outcome was. There've been petitions to raise the height of the safety barriers on that bridge to reduce the number of suicides, but unfortunately nothing has been done."I cannot fathom how painful it must have been to learn what happened to them as kids. These were incredibly heartbreaking to go through. What is a childhood memory that you thought was nothing but grew up to realize was otherwise? Let us know in the comments.. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center
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