How To Get Off Family Sharing

People Share Weird Childhood Memories Involving Their Friends' Families

Photo Courtesy: Virginia State Parks/Flickr

As a kid, you know you've made a real friend when they invite you over to their house. Being invited into their home means they actually care about you. With these visits, however, you encounter the families behind your friends. While some can be nice enough, others can be seriously strange. These people discuss some of the wildest moments shared with friend's family members.

Sharing Is Caring?

I once stayed at a friend's house, and they had this dirty cloth by the sink. It's what I would have used at home as a 'face cloth,' and people would usually use it to wash their faces or hands. It turns out, when they used the toilet, they wiped their bums as normal and then used this damp cloth to get the remnants so that they were "really clean."

Photo Courtesy: Cade Martin/Pixnio

There's a bit of a flaw here — the whole family used this ONE CLOTH between them. I have no idea how often it was washed. Who cares, though — it was covered in tiny little spots of poo and had been used by everyone. It would have been filthy after one use either way. There was also the fact that they decided the best place for it was on the sink!

It was so weird — the rest of their house was clean, and they seemed relatively normal.

roobear

Pass the Remote!

We had a family move in down the street when I was a kid, and they didn't own a TV because the parents didn't think it had any benefit. Whenever the kids came over to play, all they wanted to do was sit in front of our TV. It didn't matter what was on — just any chance to watch the idiot box could not be passed by.

Photo Courtesy: Julian Tysoe/Flickr

Some Horror Movie Vibes

When I was in maybe second grade, I had a friend named Sarah, and her dad managed to give off just about every creepy vibe possible. He would just stand around and watch us play sometimes, but with a very unsettling focus which I recognized even at that age, and other odd things like that.

Photo Courtesy: Pxfuel/Pxfuel

When I invited her to my birthday party, her dad dropped her off and wanted to stay and watch all of us girls play, but it wasn't a house party (it was one of those movie/food/Claire's kind of parties), so he was just going to walk around with us even though no other parents but my mom stayed. My mom recognized his creepiness, though, and got rid of him.

Nothing ever really came from it, but then one day in early fall, my family took my siblings and me to one of those corn mazes, and I somehow became separated from everyone else. I remember wandering the maze scared and looking for my mom when, I kid you not, guess who I ran into?

I swear it was like something from a movie, because he was right in front of me when I rounded a corner, and I remember looking up at him to see he had this really big smile — and this guy rarely smiled. I jumped back, but then my friend ran up from somewhere behind him and said hi and tried to act all normal.

It was just then that my mama bear came barreling around the corner calling my name. (I had heard her from a distance but I couldn't find her just from her voice.) She just glared at him, made very strained small talk and grabbed my hand while we walked back to the rest of my family.

I haven't seen him since that day, but it was definitely the creepiest encounter I've ever had with a friend's parent before, and when I mentioned it recently to my mom, she elaborated on just how creeped out he made her and how she made sure that I was never anywhere alone with him again after those incidents.

rubyred111

The Diary of Jane

I went to a friend's birthday party, and her parents gave her a diary as a present. A week or two later, I stayed the night at her house, and the parents called her downstairs to lecture her on what they read in her diary. Not only did they give her a diary for the purpose of violating her privacy, but they also read out loud something negative she wrote about me. With me there. They were a very strange family, to say the least, and that was the last time I spent time with her.

Photo Courtesy: Pxfuel/Pxfuel

Some Nightly Suffering

When I was in elementary school, I would go to my neighbor's house and play GI Joes with their boy, and I would sometimes stay over for dinner. Some evenings before dinner, I would hear him screaming bloody murder — things like, "Dad, please stop! Please Stop!" "I don't want to do it again!" "No! No! No!" It terrified the hell out of me.

Photo Courtesy: Pxfuel/Pxfuel

After high school, I was talking to his mom when she told me he'd been born without a tail bone, so he had to have an enema almost every night, and he would freak out like that every time they had to give it to him. True story.

PinchItOff

Not How Blindness Works

This is an example of weird punishments being treated as normal. I rode the bus to a friend's house, and she let me know that she wasn't allowed to use the computer in her room because she was being punished for wearing her glasses. Her mom had taken away her glasses to make her blind because she thought it would give her perspective on how "blind" her mother felt at not being able to deal with her being a terrible teenager. She needed her glasses to function, and she'd been caught using her spare set to read a book late at night. Her mom felt that taking all her books and banning her from the internet was an appropriate response. This girl was extremely well-behaved and had a 3.8 GPA. She didn't see why this was a crazy thing to deal with in the slightest.

Photo Courtesy: Pikrepo/Pikrepo

The Cat's Meow

When I was younger, I went to my best friend's house to have dinner with him and his family. I'm pretty sure his parents were hippies, because as we were eating dinner, the cat jumped up on the table and began walking around and eating off of people's plates. Nobody said a word about it or did anything. They just let it happen.

Photo Courtesy: Piqsels/Piqsels

A Little Too Perfect

I visited a kid in high school, [and] he lived in what I thought was a very interesting house — a three-story atrium, a kitchen with hideaway appliances — all kinds of cool things. They even had an attached garage that you could get into without leaving the house. Swanky!

Photo Courtesy: Pxfuel/Pxfuel

I noticed that every inch of the house was perfect. Nothing was out of place — every chair and end table lamp was just so. Even a book left on [the] coffee table was placed like it was window dressing for a photoshoot in an interior decorating magazine.

Then I saw the kid's room ... He wanted to show me his butterfly collection, and I noticed that every bit of his room, right down to the line of shoes in his closet and the butterfly collection case under his bed, was just as perfectly placed as every other place in the house.

It just plain weirded me out — probably because I lived in a house with seven kids in it and two working parents, so housekeeping was, shall we say, a bit more informal.

fareven

Broderick Has Looked Better

For my friend's eighth birthday, a bunch of his friends got him Godzilla action figures — the one with Mathew Broderick that had recently come out. We thought it was awesome. Anyway, when I came over to his house a few days later and told him we should play with his new action figures, he told me "Sorry, my parents made me burn them because they looked too Satanic."

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Party in the USA

I was in kindergarten. There was a rich, red-headed kid named Maxwell who was having a birthday party. There was Legend of Zelda on NES and squirt gun battles, and I got into fights with the other kids playing ninja turtles because I wanted to be Splinter. Normal stuff. But then the mom invited us in for presents. There was no cake, but they had diet soda mixed with skim milk. I politely refused. She was eagerly watching all the other kids choke this down and urged me to drink it like it was some ritualistic indoctrination. We argued back and forth until I said I was going to walk home. She said I couldn't leave until the party was over. I left anyway and walked half a block to my home. I've had nightmares about Happy Birthday Jonestown to this day.

Photo Courtesy: Airman 1st Class Tenley Long/U.S. Air Force

Sock It to Me

Growing up, I was probably part of the creepy family, but there was one experience with another family that stayed with me. When we moved to a new neighborhood when I was six, I went over to a kid's house. The first smell I got was something sour, but I ignored it. Since we were boys, we played with nerf guns and stuff for a while. Then it got gross.

Photo Courtesy: Ollebolle123/Pixabay

Out of nowhere, the kid takes off his socks and starts trying to get me to smell them. I could tell they were wet and nasty. and of course, I ran from him. It sounds like typical little kid stuff, right? Until it turned into a weird sock-smelling party with the mom, dad and kid gladly sniffing each other's socks like it was Febreze. The dad cornered me and forced me to inhale his putrid material.

I only went back one other time and left before the socks came out because I could tell this was a daily occurrence, as dirty socks lined the floor everywhere. Weirdos, I swear.

Zena-Xina

Milk It for All It's Worth

It was the late 1960's. A military friend of my dad's and his family got stationed where we were and came over for dinner one night. All the kids had milk to drink. After dinner, the wife of the dad's friend poured all the leftover milk in each kid's glass back into the carton. After everyone left, the mom promptly poured the milk down the drain.

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Walk Like an Egyptian

A girl at my school used to say her mum was the queen of Egypt. Whatever. The weird thing was, whenever I went over to play at her house, her mum would try and convince me that due to distant relations she was the actual, literal queen of Egypt and that the government would come and take her if they knew. Their whole house was decked out in weird Egyptology type stuff, too.

Photo Courtesy: Cory Doctorow/Flickr

A Stunning Announcement

My best friend's parents invited me over to stay one weekend, which was not weird by itself because we spent every weekend at each other's houses. Anyway, over dinner, they told my friend they were getting a divorce and her mom was moving out. Did they invite me over to be there for comfort or something? After that, they left, so it was just the two of us, and we were only 12. We did not have the emotional capacity to deal with that crap, and I was really mad about getting sucked into being the barrier between her and her parents.

Photo Courtesy: amarpreet25/Pixabay

To Infinity and Beyond

I met a girl in school and found out she lived two houses down from me. We quickly became friends after that. In class, she would ask me to read her everything, because she couldn't (we were nine). When she came to my house, she would break my toys. I only went to her house once. It was filthy, her toys were all broken, her little brother stunk because he was wearing a nappy the entire time I was there, and her mum gave me a bracelet and necklace as I left. They were probably stolen.

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Yogurt Is Serious Business

My friend's mom got seriously upset when she saw that I was leaving before I finished a Greek yogurt that she gave to us earlier. (I was not a big fan of those). It was in elementary school, and I had never tried Greek yogurt before and didn't know what it tasted like. It turned out I really didn't like it, and I don't to this day. Anyway, I apologized and explained that I was just not fond of it, but she wouldn't let go and tried to make me eat it before I left. I kept refusing and apologizing, wanting to just get out of there. I finally escaped, leaving her seriously angry, but I still don't understand what the big deal was, as this family wasn't poor or anything. I mean, I hate wasting food myself, but geez, I was an elementary school kid who just didn't like the yogurt they got.

Photo Courtesy: ponce_photography/Pixabay

Pray You Don't Choke

I had a friend who was not allowed to drink during meals. It was weird since everybody who went there as a guest could drink, but he and his family could not. I felt pretty creeped out every time I ate there. Apparently, drinking during a meal can slow your digestion, hence the 30 minute wait before and after meals to drink. (I am not sure if this is true, but that is his mother's belief). Other than that, they were a pretty normal family.

Photo Courtesy: Greenstock/Pixabay

Mother Knows Best?

I grew up down the street from a friend who lived with just her mom after her older sister promptly moved away after high school. I know why. The mom was super OCD. She never let anyone into the house except for me, probably because I pretended her behavior was normal so as not to seem rude. They had no furniture whatsoever except some creepy, dusty rocking chairs in the living room and her mom's bed, still in the package, which was left leaning against the wall. However, they both slept in sleeping bags and just piled their folded clothes on the floor. There were stacks of papers everywhere, so you had to stay on the little patch of floor space available, even in the bathroom, which was also pretty dirty. They also never ate at home or did laundry there, even though they had a washer, dryer and full kitchen. The mom claimed everything was broken. She would also drive to Starbucks like five times per day and order the most specific, obnoxious drink. My friend would also get in trouble for the strangest things, like getting the bottoms of her jeans wet if it was raining. She ended up spending most of her time at our house, and I don't blame her. I know OCD is a disease, but imagine having that as your family situation?

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Someone's Missing a Family

I visited a neighbor kid's house to play one afternoon and noticed that all of the family portraits had a kid blacked out with a marker. I asked him who colored the pictures, and he said his mother did it, but wouldn't elaborate.

Photo Courtesy: Staﬀ Sgt. Cody H. Ramirez/U.S. Air Force

A few years ago, I remembered the experience and asked my mother if he had a brother or sister, and she said he had been an only child since we'd moved there. I thought maybe he had a sibling who died or something, but when I think about it, the picture was recent enough that my mother wouldn't have known him as an only child.

Who was the kid? Why didn't the neighbors know them? Why did their family cross them out? It's my unsolved mystery.

bigsie

Got Any Cheese?

When I was younger I had a friend I hung out with at school all the time. I only went to her house a few times, though. They lived in a backcountry house with a side garage and a trampoline out in the back.

Photo Courtesy: Marco Verch/wuestenigel

The first time I stepped into this house, I was there for a sleepover. As soon as I walked in the door, I nearly puked. The house smelled like rotten cottage cheese. There was a basement where we were sleeping that night because it looked like a hoarder was living in her room. Anyway, we walked down the stairs, and the smell went from rotten cottage cheese to the smell of a rotting corpse. I had to sleep in that all night.

I went over two more times with months in between each visit, but there was the same smell. After the third time being there, I ended up making every excuse not to go over again. The friendship soon divided after I showed blunt signs of avoiding her. That smell haunts me to this day.

Sarahinthesky

They're Out of Order

I knew a family — one of the sons, and later I worked with his dad — where there was this very weird pecking order in the house. I went over for dinner once, and the dad sat at the head of the table, his wife to his immediate left, then the oldest son, the youngest son and then their daughter. When I came over, everybody after his wife moved over one seat to make a spot for me to sit, and it wasn't like I could sit anywhere, no, it was a very specific pecking order.

Photo Courtesy: Phil Whitehouse/Flickr

Now that I think of it, the older son may have outranked the wife.

The husband later divorced his wife, married a late friend's widow and has subsequently moved to the South. His kids basically won't have anything to do with him, either.

DiverDN

Click It Or...Don't?

Whenever my friend's parents were driving us anywhere, they wouldn't let us wear seatbelts. I thought that this was odd, but I went along with it because I was five, and they were adults. When we drove past a police car or police station, we had to duck down so the police wouldn't see us.

Photo Courtesy: Jan Abate/U.S. Air Force

Swapping Pets Like Trading Cards

One of my friends growing up always had at least 10 pets: cats, dogs ducks, chickens, geese, horses, guinea pigs or sheep. As an adult, I think it seems really weird for someone in a suburban neighborhood to have all these pets, but as a child, it was awesome to go over there. After a while, I started to notice that the animals were not always the same — there would be a change in an animal literally every two months. They mostly seemed to change out their dogs. I'll never understand how you can claim to be an animal lover and then continuously get rid of your pets for new ones. I'm pretty sure they had the older pets (hardly ever actually old in age) euthanized too.

Photo Courtesy: Piqsels/Piqsels

Which One Is the Papa?

I had to stay the night at a house infested with roaches when I was about seven. I mean totally infested. When I went to turn on the sink, little roaches came out of the tap before the water. They were in the coffee pot, on the ground everywhere, crawling across the television, and more. The family was totally accustomed to it. They said things like, "Oh just wash your cup before you use it," and would sit on furniture crawling with roaches. It was one of the most traumatic things I experienced as a kid.

Photo Courtesy: Sputniktilt/Wikimedia

There's Room for Everyone!

A childhood friend's entire family slept together in one bed. Three boys, the mom and the dad slept every night in one king-sized bed. All the kids had their own bedrooms with beds.

Photo Courtesy: Piqsels/Piqsels

He would never sleep over at my house. He even promised to one year at my birthday party. He had a breakdown halfway through the party, however, and his parents had to come get him because the thought of sleeping over without his family freaked him out. His parents ended up homeschooling him in fifth grade. By seventh grade, we didn't hang out anymore.

frugalNOTcheap

Click Into Place

I had a friend who made an occasional clicking noise with his mouth. It sounded like a kiss, but it was only through the teeth. This wasn't creepy by itself, but when I visited his family, I noticed that they all did it. Sometimes, between four or five of the family members, they would all do it consecutively. Imagine hearing four synchronized clicking noises before anyone started a sentence. It was honestly creepy at first, but I soon concluded that it was just a social norm that got adopted by the whole family. It was pretty interesting stuff.

Photo Courtesy: White77/Pixabay

Bringing Your Work Home

My Taiwanese friend's family had the first floor of their house set up like a Buddhist temple, minus the kitchen and second floor (which included bedrooms and such). Random Taiwanese families would come through all the time and would meditate and do small rituals there. His parents were religious leaders in the Taiwanese community, but there weren't enough members to rent out a building.

Photo Courtesy: sasint/Pixabay

Always Remember Your First One

I had a friend whose family kept each child's first poop from their potty training days in Ziploc bags. I was in the eighth grade and baffled. I thought they were the most normal people ever, but looks can truly be deceiving. When I asked why, my friend looked at me perplexed and said he didn't see what the big deal was.

Photo Courtesy: Daniel X. O'Neil/Flickr

"They keep it in the fridge."

I was stunned. He backtracked and said it was in a "special" freezer.

mrignatiusjreily

They're So Picky!

One of my childhood friend's mothers used to pick all the skin off of her athlete's foot and just leave it on the carpet. And there was A LOT of this skin. It was in little piles where she had been sitting.

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Ninja Turtles Would Disapprove

I had a friend whose mom would take all the leftovers for the week, put it on a pizza crust and cover it with whatever cheese she had at the time. That was their Friday night pizza, and believe me, it was disgusting.

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