Everyone in the world has secrets. There’s nothing we tell absolutely everyone, and even if you’re pretty much an open book with your friends and your partner, there’s a good chance there’s at least a few youthful experiences you’d like to hide from your kids.

These 30 moms have some doozies, though, and they’re really keen on making sure their kids never find out the hard way what Mom is hiding!

30. I read this several times to believe it.

Not sure how wild this is, but right before i was born (like 2 or 3 days before hand) my dad’s older cousin had a daughter born severely unhealthy. She wasn’t still born but she wasn’t going to make it past a few days.

So anyway, after I was born my dad’s aunt came into the delivery room and said to my mom “you two are young you’ll have plenty of time to have another child but my daughter can’t. Let me buy this baby off of you.” I only found out about this when I was ~15 because my sister told me.

Apparently my parents never planned on telling me this.

29. Talk about an eye opener!

When my wife let it slip around her mom that she was having a lot of lesbian urges, her mom just waved it off and said “Been there, done that, didn’t like it.”

28. You would die if your daughter met someone from the internet alone.

Back in the 90s I flew to Canada and spent the weekend with a guy I’d been talking to in a chatroom.

27. It’s mostly amazing that she wasn’t murdered.

I met my son’s dad through a post he made on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist. Our families think we met at a sports bar.

ETA: I didn’t get pregnant from a one time thing or an NSA situation; we were together for 6 years.

26. Ouch.

During Vietnam war era my mom had a pretty serious boyfriend and he got drafted and she dumped him for my dad.

25. Not sure anyone could top this

My mom told my siblings and me on Easter when I was 14 that she used to be a child prostitute for the yakuza. She told us because her sister was going to tell us because she felt like my mom had stolen her daughter and was using it as a bargaining chip.

My cousin came to live with us across the country because her mom was in jail for drug abuse.

24. Straight A’s for faking it, Mom.

Growing up my mother was a titan.

She graduated top of her class in her PharmD and chaired several major drug regulation boards. She was always very serious about school and we were told that Bs were absolutely unacceptable because she was a straight A student all through college.

We took that to heart up until I was cleaning out the attic a few years ago when I discovered some old grade reports from college. Guess who got a C in sociology and another one in Linear Algebra?

Tough take mom. Tough take.

23. Not all stories are funny.

Not my mom thank god but an old girlfriend’s.

Her grandma got her mom drunk at the age of 15 and had a guest stranger have s^x with her.

Not quite wild. More dark really. And horribly sad

22. We’ve all, uh, heard.

I grew weed legally, when I did it my straight lace father went on a long speech about growing techniques and tips , about two thirds through he kinda stopped and stared at me and my brother and adds the addendum,

“So I’ve heard…”

ETA through it all my mom was shooting daggers at him.

21. That’s quite a phase.

I was a flasher when I was a preteen living in Italy.

Went through a phase I guess.

I would also prefer they didn’t know about all the raunchy sh^t their future step daddy and I do behind closed doors.

20. Well. That’s illegal.

My mum told me once, while she was tipsy, that my dad was actually her high school teacher and they began a sexual relationship when she was his student at the age of 16.

She said they would often have s^x in her school uniform.

They managed to keep everything under wraps for years, and they got married when she graduated from college and gave birth to me a few years later.

19. The hard work pays off

I’m the dad in this situation, but my wife used to be severely addicted to opiates, which I helped get her out of by moving the family to a new town and letting her spend 2 weeks in bed dealing with withdrawals while I handled every other aspect of the house, including finding work and setting up the kids for school etc.

I just told the kids she was sick and needed to sleep (which wasn’t entirely false).

It was super emotionally taxing but I would do it again in a heartbeat because it worked and she’s been clean for 2 years.

18. Parents have sex! LE GASP!

I just learned that I was likely conceived on Easter, when my mom wore a “crotchless lace onesie” and “teased my dad all night” and then I was born 9 months later. FML

17. Talk about Daddy Dearest.

My mom used to “date” a drug lord in Birmingham, but was practically “his” crack wh^re.

He raped her, she had my brother, and to get away from it all, she joined the military. Dude ended up going to prison at the same time, and was stabbed to death just a few weeks in. My mother didnt tell us or my brother, until he was around 35ish.

Wow, thanks for the silver kind stranger, my first.

16. Inspiration station…

My first born daughter I had at a very young age: I was 18, in grade 12, skipping every single day, partying all the time and “hanging out” with a drug dealer at the time…. that’s her dad.

He and I are not together (I moved on and got married and he is currently engaged) and he stopped dealing shortly after we found out I was pregnant. We co-parent really well actually, and he is now quite the stand up father.

All our daughter knows is that her mom and dad didn’t love each other so we separated, and now she’s lucky to have TWO moms and TWO dads that love her very much. She’s now 7. I’m wondering if itll ever come out later about how her dad and I met ahahahaha.

Edit** love all the positive feedback! And yes, we all co parent really well. It took a little bit of time, but that’s normal I think lol. We just want her to grow up knowing that even though we may not all live together (%100 of the time), that we all talk and communicate and love her the same!

15. That’s a doozy!

That my High School boyfriend and I had a son at 16 years old… We went through Catholic Family Services for an ” open adoption ” we both get updates on how he is doing… even though we are not involved anymore… Also… my son is included in my will…

14. A smile can hide a lot…

My mother always smiled at me. I can’t remember seeing her without a smile. When I grew up I discover she have chronic crippling depression.

Edit: corrected my bad english. Thanks for the gold and silver, I wasn’t expecting that. Well I just visited my parents, I talked a lot with her and told her that she that I’m proud of her, and that she can count on me. I can’t talk about her depression directly but at least I hope that make her feel a little bit better. Despite her depression she’s the strongest person I know

13. Bonus brother!

Just found out last year that my mom got pregnant in college, the guy split as soon as he found out and she never saw him again. She decided to have the baby, avoided going home when she was showing, and gave it up for adoption.

My grandparents never knew (they died a few years ago) and I found out due to an ancestry.com DNA test. My half-brother contacted me and we pieced it together. She was relieved that it all came out in the end, it had been weighing on her all these years (She’s in her 70s, I’m 40 now, and my new half-brother is 52 or so).

Needless to say, it was a huge surprise, I never in a million years would have guessed at that.

EDIT: Just to clear up any confusion. My mom had my brother in college, and had me in her 30s.

EDIT: Also, no, this isn’t an advertisement, it really happened and I only mentioned the site because that’s how he found me. Otherwise I don’t think we’d have ever found out. My mom was relieved that it came out, but was too scared to have ever come out with it on her own.

12. Just a small little oops…

When I graduated college, my mom casually dropped the fact that she, a tiny little Asian woman, used to deal large quantities of marijuana when she was in high school, and once had to skip a basketball game because she accidentally took a duffel bag full of weed to school instead of her gym bag.

11. My ceiling is their floor. Poetic.

I don’t want my kids to know anything about how I was raised. I really don’t.

Like, I can’t watch anything family themed without crying. Most know kid movies leave me with a lump in my throat so big I could choke on it. And as they get older it’s harder to turn my face far enough for them not to see and twice as hard to not cry.

My ceiling is their floor and I really just don’t want them to have to handle grown up problems until they are grown ups.

My wild secret is that’s why we go for walks as a family rather than the movies. The movies are somewhere my husband takes them for special one on one time so it’s still a special thing that they get to do. But I won’t make them sit through their mom having a f*cking break down over some “Ohana means family and family means nobody gets left behind” line.

10. It’s all about perspective I guess.

One Thanksgiving, my Grandmother confessed to the family that her father had run a Speakeasy, and that she would tend bar/mind the shop while he was out on liquor runs.

I think she was pretty ashamed, but I think everyone found it pretty cool and didn’t understand why she kept it a secret so long.

9. The ID is the best part of the story.

When my girlfriend (wife now) and I were first together, she was gone all summer, came back to town and we got it on. However, it was also noon. And the windows were open. And she’s a screamer. We stopped in the middle because she saw some light dancing around on the ceiling. Looked down and a cop was shining a light in.

Luckily he let us off with a warning to close the windows, however, due to her height he did have to ask for her ID to verify that she was old enough (she was 22). My kids probably never need to know that.

EDIT: To answer all of the questions of “why would the cops show up?” It was a noise complaint. Our rental was super close to a bunch of apartments so the open windows and the close wall made for a perfect echo chamber.

8. It’s a family tradition.

How much of my teens I spent high. But now weed’s socially acceptable in most cases, that’s not even a thing. I’m disappointed. It’s almost fun in a way to have something to shock your kids with.

My own Mom is really vanilla and is very old school. Bet she’s probably hiding the fact she runs a local swingers club or something.

7. A lot to unpack.

That I met their dad on World of Warcraft when I was 16, and ran away to be with him two days before I turned 18- he is 11 years older than me. They can know the overview but boy the details of it are real shady, especially when I am going to have to teach them internet safety and online stranger danger.

I am now divorced and their dad has moved away, and we have a positive coparent relationship and though he’s not very involved we both just want the best for the kids. Which leads me into the fact I don’t want them to know how I feel about the relationship looking back and the manipulation and emotional abuse.

I don’t want my daughter to know that I wanted to abort her because I was 20 and in college and knew there was no way we could support her- and that I was HEAVILY guilted into it by their dad because of his age (at 31) “being his last chance”.

We used to sell weed by the pound out of Grandma’s basement.

Dad loves all kinds of drugs, and I have sampled most just not the heavy ruin-your-life ones. Truly I just want to be a stoner at heart.

6. Not slingers.

It is our current situation, but we are swingers.

5. Some secrets are better off buried, if you ask me.

Daughter of a mother with a wild secret, my dad was abusive, an extreme alc*holic and hit her regularly so she kicked him in the ball$ so hard that he couldn’t have kids (after me, obviously).

He’s dead now (drunk driving, he took 4 people with him). My aunt got tipsy and told me everything.

4. PTA qualified.

I used to be an escort. If being an escort doesn’t make me a member of the PTA, nothing will.

EDIT: Thank you so much for my first gold!

3. I’m not sure how this would make me feel.

Both my parents were very honest through out most of my life but but over the summer when I was 17 my mom had mentioned that before I was born that my dad wanted to get an abortion.

I had figured out on my own why my dad wanted an abortion was because we didn’t make enough money to support another child. But my mother fought for me. So my dad ended up stop drinking and smoking to be able to financially support me.

2. I’m not sure that’s genetic.

This will get buried and this story is from my dad. When I was ~19 and visiting home from college, my dad and I stayed up getting piss drunk.

When I told him about my love for psychedelics, he clapped and said, “I knew it!”. I asked why and he stated that, “…Your mom was the acid queen, and we learned she was pregnant with you when she was 4 months in. We were tripping for your first couple of months.”

1. Nothing to be ashamed of.

I guess that I was a stripper for a while, and worked at a bank the same time. Don’t think I would share that, but if I heard them talk down about strippers I’d probably educate them on what it’s really like.

I did what I had to do to put food on the table and give them a good life. My immediate family knows, except my step dad, and my children’s dad knows. We sometimes talk about it but not really.

I mean, listen. I don’t judge other moms and you shouldn’t either!

Are you keeping a secret you hope you take with you to your grave? Spill the tea down in the comments!