Vinesqueen, let's see if anyone else compares to our circus-freak families.

What was your weirdest punishment as a child?

Mine was MIDNIGHT SHOWERS. My momster drank "Tyrolia" or "Spanada" wine that came in huge jugs. After a couple glasses, she'd wait till us 3 kids were dead asleep, then she'd tip toe in our room and dump the jug of Water all over us while chanting, "Midnight Showers." Then after we were all crying in the dark, she'd cackle all the way down the hall and go back in her room and shut the door, leaving us wet and crying.

Please help me feel a little normal by trying to top that!

Ummmmmmmm, I can't top that personally but I do know a friend who was forced to scrub her gentalia for YEARS (age 13-16) with bleach because her mother and father insisted she was "unclean" when she was caught kissing a boy at school. She was removed from her parents custody and sent to a foster home (where she was raped by another foster brother repeatedly). Her mother and father served NO jail time. Only probation. She is now 37, very successful in life but still has genatalia issues and intimacy issues (she is married now but a bit wierd sexually). She has never spoken to her parents again. She changed her name when she became 18 (first and last name) to remain anonymous to her natural parents if they ever tried to find her.

I guess that is probably the craziest and sickest thing I have ever heard.

However the midnight showers are fairly crazy too.

My family was just "basic" dysfunctional. Not really crazy.

My mom once told me amoung many other things...that I wasn't really her baby...her baby died in the hostpital and the lady in the room was giving up her baby for adoption so they just gave her hers. I think I was about 8 years old. Imagine my disappointment when I found out it wasn't true.

My husband says that when he first met me he noticed that when I spoke with my mom if I was withing arm distance I cringe and shrank as I talked by any movement on her part. This is because I wasn't allowed to have a view on anything....anytime I said something no matter what I was in danger of "talking back". Which if she decided I was talking back, it was usually followed with a slap. I almost failed jr high gym because I didn't dress out as much as I should have....I think the only reason I passed was the gym teacher suspected and took pity on me. Willow switches sting and leave nice straight lines where they strike.

My mom cooked in batches. She would cook a huge pot of stew and we would eat that for the week. Our idea of a after school snack was a hotdog that she cooked up at the begining of the week wrapped individually in wax paper for us to heat up after school. When we got a micowave we finally got to eat more variety...well what was available in micowave meals that is.

My dad...he was just weird but in and enduring way, at least until I wanted to bring friends home. On my first date my dad wrote down the date's tag number, driver liscense number, checked his insurance and registration card, checked the tire pressure in his tires and made sure he had sufficient gas. (all of this data he wrote done in the calander that he kept along with a blue pen, a black pen and a .07 lead pencil in his front pocket of his dress shirt. He did stuff like take pictures of us holding a frame around our face or calculate the perfect distance for the picture to be the best light, etc etc.

There is a small look into my child hood.

Melissa

Worst punishment? Hmmm, that's a hard one. One of the more tramatizing ones was after I spend all afternoon "gardening." I discovered a brick path in our over grown back yard, so I set to work clearing it all the ways tothe bottom of the hill. I was.. maybe 8 I think. When my mother got home, I proudly dragged her outside so I could show her all my hard work, especially the hole I cut through a seemingly gi-normous bush so you could get to the bottom of the stair case. I carefully put all the brush and debres into the compost pile. ...

I did not get the reaction I was hoping for.

She went into a screaming rage because I "ruined the landscaping." She wanted to know what I'd used to cut my way through the plants and I pointed to the paring knife. She proceded to cut my hair all the while screaming at me. I can't believe to this day that she didn't cut me. My sister later told me that our mother hadn't been out to the backyard in probably 7 years.

The other memorable weird beating came the night before I turned 15. My crime? Her grandmother had to get married on her 15th birthday. Of course, the next night she beat me so hard she broke every wooden spoon in the house and started using a heavy gage metal spoon, big round strainer spoon with large holes.

I bled pretty badly from that beating.

When Spud was about 8 I got curious at how hard my mother would have to hit us to break wooden spoons. I took one of mine and proceded to beat a railroad tie with it, but as strong as I am, I couldn't break that wooden spoon.

That said, I didn't have any weird punishments.

I'm an easy going Libra, and I was always afraid of my momster, but my defiant, sister, the fire-spitting Scorpio, got it worst. My sister once found a mayonnaise jar filled with fleas under her pillow. The Momster spent all day picking fleas off of cats and poking holes in the jar to keep them alive.

Other times we came home from school to find our mattresses on the front lawn. Not sure what that signified, but it was a pretty typical punishment. One time my sister came home from school to find her entire belongings piled in an enormous heap on her bed. Don't ask me where the Momster found a manikin, but the naked manikin's arm was sticking out of the pile of stuff holding an eviction notice.

Sorry DeLarla, but the manikan's arm holding an eviction notice made me laugh. I can't imagine what must've been running through her head to make her do that.

The rest of what everyone has said is just sick and wrong. I cannot fathom what all of you poor people have gone through. I commend you all for turning out like the decent human beings that you are though. That is a miracle in and of itself!!!

Don't worry, I think most of us learned to laugh long ago. I used to get locked out in the freezing cold until I wrote some stupid sentence 1000 times. Most kids would write, "I will not leave the lights on." But how the hell was I supposed to learn a lesson when I didn't even know the meaning of the sentence I had to write 1000 times? And if I couldn't spell a word she'd make me look it up. Like, "Allowing pourous wood to soak in water results in dry rot and renders cutting utensils useless." What the hell does that mean to a kid? Looking back, I guess I never let my wooden knives soak in water, but I had no idea what the heck I was in trouble for back then.

There were the countless times I was dragged out of bed, out a dead sleep by my hair to clean the kitchen. Again.

I got in trouble after my younger stabbed me. I was told I shouldn't have made him mad. And this was the second time he stabbed me mind you.

My heart is breaking for you ladies. Which probably wasn't the point of this thread.

My mother was a garden-variety alcoholic. With all the antics, though, she treated my brother and me fairly well. Alcohol addiction doesn't automatically render one sadistic and cruel, thankfully. At worst we were a bit neglected, and my father more than made up for that by being interested, supportive, and unfailingly attentive and affectionate. (Wow, I miss him.)

When I think of my "crazy" mother all I can come up with is her unusual fashion sense. She came to watch me play volleyball in high school dressed in her usual outfit: a sweatshirt, Frye boots, overalls, and a leather peace-sign necklace. She cut her own hair, badly. This was in Manhattan in the '70s, mind you, in the private-school milieu that called for designer sportswear. Shall we say she stood out, a little? :rolleyes

But she came. I do remember that.

never had to do the letter thing, but there you go, took much less effort to hit us. We had to look up everything as well though. I don't make Spud look up anything, which is probably bad for him.

My mom did teach me how to roll the perfect joint when I was 15 though. As you can tell, everything my mom did, I did the exact oppositie with Spudders.

My dad was a very violent abusive drunk. When he wasn't drinking or hungover, he was just the best dad, but well, he only knew that fathers were supposed to be abusive drunks. When I was a kid the other neighborhood kids would come over and ask if Wally could come out to play. In the summer he would play jump rope with us, Water fights, tag... all sorts of street games. My dad wasn't crazy, just an abusive alcholoic. My mother was a lunatic though. I look at her now and wonder when she got sane-ish.

yeah, I think Lisa and I've been hoping that we were not freaks of nature.

My family was just "basic" dysfunctional. Not really crazy.

mine too.

Kelly said it best, you people should be given a special medal for turning out so good.

Anyone ever read a book called, "A Child Called 'IT'" by David Pelzer?

This man was severly abused by his mom - the things she did to him.... horrible.

AND - she was an alcoholic too!

And now there are things I'm learning about the Momster that I never even knew! My sister and I took a trip (and I mean a TRIP) down memory lane last week when I was in California and drove past our childhood house, which has since turned complete ghetto. All the houses have bars spray painted bright green or orange with 12 or 13 cars on blocks. Much to our shock, one family still lived there! And since it was a holiday weekend, the entire family was there! There were 7 kids, who all have kids of their own now, so there must have been 30 people in that tiny house. They were telling us crazy stories about the Momster that we never even knew... apparently, she used to garden IN DRESSES WITH NO UNDERWEAR. Holy crap, the woman would bend over and show the whole neighborhood, and she's not the slutty type, just the obnoxious one that doesn't give a damn what people think. The neighbors told us kids would cover their eyes and run in the house screaming. Now if you can't laugh at that....

Alex, you remind me of the Momsters famous outfit. She doesn't dress for style or comfort, just for warmth, and she'd wear paisly print with checkers. I'm gonna see if I can find the one pic I have of her in the famous outfit, which consisted of polyester flood pants (came above her ankles way before capris were in.) But it's worse, they were bell bottom stretchy fabric with elastic waistband, worn with black go-go boots 20 years after go-go boots went out. Then she wore one of those huge crinolin (sp) fuzzy hats that looks like a giant snowball (so she didn't have to wash hair.) Looked like an enormous cotton ball. Toss in the sun glasses they give you when you get your eyes dilated - why throw them away when they make perfectly good sun glasses?

This thread is actually fun and therapeutic. What did your momsters make you wear? I recall wearing the same clothes for an entire week. She would tease us and tell us we're going school shopping, but then we came home to each find a huge K-Mart bag stuffed with new clothes. Oh how we tore into those bags, desperate for new jeans. But nooooo... men's leisure suits were on sale, the orange/rust color ones, 3 piece (think of Barney Fife's roll doing Mr. Roper from 3's company.) Yep, they were on sale so she bought 3 shopping carts full of the same leisure suits, then divvied them up figuring between the 3 of us we could mix and match. Could you see a kid showing up in school in men's polyester pants and matching vest? And to think I only got beat up once (threatened daily, but only beat up once.)

I had one normal sweatshirt once, but I got a stain on it. So she took out her oil paints and turned the stain into this huge hideous flower (always orange or rust color.) Then she took the only pair of jeans without a hole and turned the bottoms into bell bottoms by sewing in an orange triangle panel, in which she hand wrote my name in the bell. God help me. BUT STILL LAUGHING!

The worst part about all this that makes me sadder than anything, is that as bad as we had it, others had it worse. That's the part that hurts me.

Of course I had to wear weird clothes. My parents would never buy us any clothes either. When I was 15 through 17 I had one pair of pants. When I gained weight I split the seat and had to hand stick them with Patches from other worn out pants.

We went to a private school, so I at least had a uniform so I was the same as the other kids. Well, dressed like them anyway, since there was no way I was like the other kids.... When we moved to a new town, no more private school, and I went to public school in the 8th grade. Mind you, I was tiny, so I was weird and tiny. Not a good combination. The neighbor lady took pitty on me, but she didn't have a clue either. She made me an outfit that was basically a gi (karati outfit) with a really, really wild pattern.

I never got beaten up, but some coward kid decided to hate me to the point that he/she knocked me out with an apple. Apple to the back of the head has the same effect as a rock to the back of the head.

When I was 17, I wore a size 12, but my mother made me wear her cast off purple polyester pant suit that was a size 16. It wasn't pretty.