Internet Finds
34 Massive Secrets People Kept From Their Parents That Range From Horrifying To Completely Heartbreaking
Recently, we wrote about secrets people have kept from their parents, and the BuzzFeed Community submitted some of their own anonymous responses. Here’s what they had to get off their chests.*
*We also used replies from these two Reddit threads.
NOTE: There are mentions of sexual abuse, rape, eating disorders, and violence.
1. “I refuse to tell my mom that I caused her and my dad to get a divorce. I love my mom dearly, but my dad was something straight out of the 1940s. He never used to let her go out, and he detested the idea of both me and her working because ‘women don’t do that.’ He was overtly racist and hit my mom all the time when she tried to stand up for herself. My girlfriend at the time was into all the party drugs, so I asked her to buy me some heavy stuff from her dealer (no idea what it was). We were going on holiday in a few days, so just before we headed out, I put some of it in his case and left the rest in his nightstand. He was caught at the airport and arrested. The house got searched, and they found more of it.”
“My mom came clean about the abuse and broke down during the questioning. She filed for divorce, my dad got jail time, and my mom got custody of me. It did break her heart, but she found someone else. I have not seen my dad for about 11 years now. Last I heard, he was out, but other than that, I couldn’t care less. My mum is so much happier — she went to study and is now a trainee veterinarian, which was her dream job that my dad wouldn’t let her do.”
2. “I constantly fantasized about murdering my verbally and physically abusive stepfather and then killing myself when I was a teen. He treated my mom like shit, and one day, he punched me in the face for not washing my dirty dishes, which left a permanent gash above my eyebrow. I was really depressed and wanted to die, so I thought that I might as well take him with me. I always tried to talk myself into finding some way to kill him, but I never could go through with it. The closest I ever came to doing something was when he was asleep on the couch, and my mom was gone to work. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and just stood over him for a few minutes, contemplating if I should do it or not. Of course, I never did. Thankfully, he and my mom separated less than a year after that incident. My depression was minimized tremendously after that.”
3. “I found my dad’s cocaine. I feel like I don’t know him anymore. I never want him to know I found it. I’m still a minor and still live with them.”
4. “I was sexually abused by my cousin when I was eight and he was twelve. Since then, I plotted to kill him for a good majority of my life, training with what I could. Knife skills, usage of long-ranged guns, finding locations to bury his body…When I was 19, I got word that he had been killed in a gang-related incident. My father told me because he thought I was close to him. That’s when I told him what had happened and what I had planned to do. My dad has treated me differently since. He says I was a good roommate and worked well but has said nothing about our family for years until recently. I’m 26 now, and I overheard him call me a disappointment. I packed my bags and started walking. He lives in Maine; I’m now in Virginia.”
5. “I never told them that I was the one who gave grandma the bottle of pills. She asked, and she deserved to die. I watched her chew them, and I brought the OJ when she asked.”
“I was 37, it was a relief, and I didn’t see her last breath. I looked away after she started drinking OJ. She was in agony.”
6. “When I was 14, I was blackmailed by my boyfriend into stripping naked in front of a camera. He also tried to coerce me into sexual acts but before it got to that point I was such an ugly, crying mess that he just left. For a while, every time a camera was pointed at me, I was scared (I still become afraid sometimes), and when I was forced to be in a picture, I would get mad in an attempt to replace the fear. My parents don’t know this happened to me, so they just saw me as selfish for getting mad about being forced into a photo. … I’m not selfish. I just couldn’t deal with the flashbacks.”
7. “The man my mother knew her whole life as her father is NOT. I found this out through 23andme. My grandmother, who recently passed away a couple of weeks ago, must have had an affair. There are a host of reasons why I keep this from her. My mother was with who she thought was her father for quite a while as he was dying a couple of years ago, and also her mother as she withered away in a nursing home and finally expired a few weeks ago. My father agrees that this information would not fall on very accepting ears. I found out since then who my REAL grandfather is (who my grandmother had an affair with), but he passed away years ago anyway. She has a half-sister who I met, and she knows about my mom.”
8. “I’ve kept a couple of secrets from them. But one of the worst was when I was raped. I’m 15, and I just recently told my mom. I kept it from my mom for eight months, but I told my aunt about three months after. … I absolutely regret not telling my mom sooner because I could have gotten proof from the gyno. Please, if you’re keeping something like this from your parents, tell them. My mom reacted differently than the way that I dreaded. I thought she would have said it was my fault it happened and that she would be mad. Instead, she cried with me while I told her, comforted me, and told me she wished I had told her sooner. It took a lot of guts to tell her, and an entire weight has been lifted from me. We’re still waiting to tell my dad, though.”
—Anonymous
9. “My dad drunkenly revealed to me one night that he doesn’t believe that my siblings are his and said that if he ever found out they weren’t, he would disown them. Sixteen years down the drain. I’ve never told him I know this or mentioned it to my mum. It would break the already shitty ‘friendship’ they have and would destroy my siblings. I love them too much to let them know.”
10. “When I was 12, I saw emails on my mom’s iPod touch. The emails were very suggestive and were between my mother and another man. I never told my dad that I saw those emails. I wish I did because it turned out that she was cheating on him.”
11. “That I have stage 4 terminal breast cancer. I just turned 40 and am the youngest of their three children. My parents are in their late seventies/early eighties with plenty of their own health problems. Worrying about me would serve no purpose. Lying to them sucks, though.”
12. “I just pay escorts to show as my ‘girlfriend’ so my parents will stop telling their friends to hook me up with their daughters. At every gathering, the woman shows up to meet everyone and always has to leave early. I pay by the hour.”
13. “I became a sex worker temporarily because my mother had a spending problem and couldn’t help me financially when I needed it most. She was too busy helping my other brother, who is a freeloader. Oh well. I paid the bills and then some.”
14. “I (16F) have an eating disorder. My parents (mainly my dad) make jokes about me gaining/losing weight, and my dad even gets angry if I have snacks. My mom got mad when my brother (21M) mentioned that I might have an ED three months earlier and played it off. I’ve been starving for two weeks but too scared to tell them.”
—Anonymous
15. “In the summer of 1985, between 10th and 11th grade, my English teacher asked me and two classmates on the last day of school if we would help her move her furniture at her house because she was getting new carpet installed over the summer. Three weeks into summer, she contacted us, and we helped. As we finished moving the furniture back two days later, she fed us lunch, and we chatted for a bit. Somehow, the conversation turned into a sex chat. One thing led to another, and the three of us lost our virginity that day. I kept up the affair with her for several months. … All the while, I was asking my parents to drop me off at her house to get some tutoring so I could be better prepared for college.”
“They would even go to her for quick chats and updates about my tutoring and to ask if they needed to do anything to help me. Little did they know they were dropping me off so I could have sex with my teacher. My parents and teacher have since passed away.”
—Anonymous
16. “I’m gay, and I’ve had a girlfriend for three years, starting in eighth grade. We were best friends all through middle school and started dating at the end of eighth grade. We don’t go to the same school anymore and only get to see each other once a month or so because we live on opposite sides of the city. She’s my best friend, my partner, and the person I go whenever I need to talk. I can’t tell my parents because we live in the South and are from a conservative family, and I’m not out to them. She’s not out to her family either, and I don’t know how my conservative white family would react to their only daughter having a Black girlfriend.”
“My parents have always been super weird about sex, and I’m asexual, which just adds another layer because they think that if you don’t have sex, you’re just messed up. I don’t have a good relationship with my mother; we get into frequent arguments, and my father just pretends like everything is fine. I’m going off to college next year in a different part of the country, and my mother is not happy with that or with what I’m choosing to major in. I am going to cut contact with her when I move out, and I probably will not tell her about my girlfriend because I’ve heard about the way she treated my cousin when he came out, and I’m not going to subject myself and my girlfriend to that.”
—Anonymous
17. “I told them I was doing an extra on-site learning course for my university, in which I would be away for 31 days interstate. My husband sorted out the kids, so he was fine. I actually went to a residential rehab and got clean and sober. I didn’t tell them until I was released. They literally had no idea.”
18. “I moved to China and lived there for five years to get a break from my mom. That was just far enough not to have to plane home for the holidays. She’s in Atlanta. When I moved to California, I was ‘just a few hours flight away’ and terribly guilted into going home. She even paid for the tickets. I’m back in Atlanta again (I thought things would be different…I’m miserable), and now my husband just got an awesome job. She’s 20 minutes away. I’d rather be in rural Europe or Papua New Guinea, far away from her, than be anywhere this close. She’s a miserable, lonely, controlling woman who runs everyone out of her life. There. I said it.”
19. “Due to severe health problems, I ended up dropping out of college five years ago on tuition they had paid for. They were so angry and upset with me that they cut all contact and stopped sending me money of any kind, which would have been fine if my health wasn’t so poor and I was unable to work. After starving for about a month, I ended up having to do sex work in order to eat for a number of months. Eventually they forgave me and let me move back in with them until my health was better but they never asked me how i fared up till that point and I never told them.”
20. “My parents forced me to study a STEM subject, even though I was never good at it in school. I got bad grades, hated every second of it, and started thinking about killing myself a lot. I failed a certain exam twice. While learning for the third and last time, I realized that if I failed again, I would be kicked out. When the results came out, I had failed the last attempt and told my parents that I couldn’t finish my degree. They yelled at me and berated me for days. But here’s the truth: I stared at the exam paper for half an hour, thinking about how I wished this nightmare would end. And then I got up and handed in an empty page. After a lot of yelling, berating, and so on from my parents, I ended up studying the subject I always wanted to study.”
21. “One night, I went out to a party and ended up getting cross-faded. When the cops crashed the party, they found me fucked up with puke on myself, so they called an ambulance to take me to a hospital. They kept me there until I sobered up, and my friend got her brother to drive me to my friend’s place to crash for the night. My parents don’t know I smoke, drink, and somewhat party, let alone that I ended up in an ambulance because of one. Later on, they got a bill for the ambulance, but I just told them that I got knocked out after I bonked my head on the sidewalk trying to cross the street, and my friend called 911.”
22. “That I was held hostage by an older man who was most likely a serial killer. … Long story short: I ran away at 15 and met a cute guy who was much older. I got arrested as a runaway and was bamboozled at 16 into moving across the states to go live with the cute guy. The guy was unwell. He kept me hostage in his house. He was abusive and scary in general, and lots of bad things happened. I screamed my ass off, and he told me neighbors would not help — they’re used to the screams, as I was not the FIRST and would not be the LAST. I escaped by sheer damn luck by breaking the ‘don’t leave the house’ rule (very bad things happened if I ever tried) and running to a house where I could hear a party going on (shocked the shit out of me, as supposedly there were zero young neighbors). Hostess teen knew something was very wrong and saved my lucky ass.”
23. “I make more money than I let on. My parents have been — and will always be — the ‘I took care of you all your life, time for you to pay it back’ type of parent. Except there is no end to this ‘debt.’ So I hide money from them so they can’t take advantage of me.”
24. “The Nintendo Switch ‘my friends put their money together for my birthday’ was actually bought by someone I was selling my nudes to, who decided to buy a Switch for me instead.”
25. “I’m still not over my parents’ separation, even though this happened around five years ago. When my dad moved out, my mom was broken, and I had to be there for her and my little sister all the time — so I didn’t exactly have time to process my feelings or actually tell someone how I really felt about it. It hurts me that I don’t have anyone to talk to, and I feel like no one understands me.”
—Anonymous
26. “I’m pregnant and engaged. I’m due in two months and am finally starting to show a little. My dad died a few months ago without knowing. I still see my mom from time to time, but I haven’t since I started showing. I fully intend to give birth without telling her, but even if she finds out, this baby will never be part of her family. This is her first grandbaby.”
27. “I’m bisexual, and even though I’m an adult, my parents don’t know (I’m a woman with VERY conservative and christian parents). The girl they thought was my best friend for years ( from my teenage years until I was 21) was my girlfriend. We had sex in their home while she slept here a lot of times (trying hard to keep quiet). We broke up, and they keep asking about her.”
—Anonymous
28. “My grandmothers (both of them) left me all their money, and since my grandmothers outlived my grandfathers, I get a set amount from two accounts per month to assist in living expenses. Technically, I am not the only one keeping this secret. My grandparents were ashamed of the way my parents treated me, and it was agreed upon by all parties (except my parents) that the money would be left to me due to my health issues and the fact my siblings (older) have more than enough money to help out my siblings (younger) if there is a need. My parents were told that there was nothing left after paying debts and funeral expenses.”
“I have my own will, which splits the money between my younger siblings if I die before it runs out, which is a good possibility considering the amount and the expected range of my life.
Side note: I finally learned today why my parents were always so cold to me. My mother was a surrogate, and after learning of my future health issues, the couple who are my biological donors backed out, not wanting a child with those issues. My mother is Catholic and, therefore, doesn’t believe in abortion, and she thinks that adoption is almost as wrong.”
29. “My sister’s ex-husband touched me inappropriately on the chest. It didn’t seem like that big a deal at the time — nearly 30 years ago — but I realize it is now. No one in the family knows, though they’ve been divorced for nearly that long because of his cheating. The ironic thing is in the ’60s, the same thing happened to my mum with her ex-brother-in-law, but more serious. She’s never talked to me about it, my dad told me. Every family has their skeletons, I guess.”
30. “A friend took a DNA test. There’s a zero percent chance his parents and he are genetically related. He took a different one; there was a confirmed 0% chance he and his parents are genetically related. He did research, and he is not adopted. He suspects he was switched at the hospital shortly after birth. The hospital he was born in had a couple of oopsies with switched babies back in the late ’70s. He doesn’t know how or if he should tell his parents.”
Finally, we’ll end on a few lighter ones:
31. “One day, my mom was having a meeting with the school principal, and I was waiting in the parking lot. I was about 13, and I liked to lie down in the front seat of the car and put my feet on the windshield. Well, I guess I put too much pressure that day, and the windshield broke. Not just a crack. THE ENTIRE THING BROKE. My mom told me thousands of times before not to do it. When she returned to the car, with the principal behind her, I panicked and said younger boys were playing soccer and kicked the ball too hard and that I was too shocked to run after them.”
“It’s important to note that I went to a very expensive private school. She obviously asked to see the cameras, and for some miracle, there weren’t any in the spot where the car was parked. She ended up paying out of pocket and was not happy with the school for a while. I’m 23 and still don’t have the courage to tell her it was me. Perhaps the day I give her a grandchild.”
—Anonymous
32. “My mom told me I was too young to go to a concert and wouldn’t let me see Nirvana. To this day, every time they come up in the news (the most recent being what would have been Kurt Cobain’s 50th), she mentions how bad she feels about making me miss that show, knowing now that there wouldn’t be any other chances. This has been going on basically since he died (which was not long after the show). So either she legitimately doesn’t know I went anyways while sleeping over at my best friend’s house, or she does know and has been low-key trolling me for 25 years.”
33. “When I was 16, I went to the pub and got very, very drunk. One of my friends was 18 and bought all my drinks for me. My mother banned me from ever seeing that friend again. What she didn’t know until recently was that the man I am married to, who has given her her first grandchildren, who she adores like her own son, is that same friend she banned me from seeing 19 years ago.”
34. And finally…”I was a phone sex operator in University. I told everyone I took phone orders for The Bay (a department store in Canada). One day, my dad asked me if they were hiring. Nope. We were not.”
Now, it’s your turn — what’s a secret you kept from your parents? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
