As Moms, it’s our job to protect our kids from the scarier, dirtier, less legal ways of the world – especially the ones we know about firsthand because we walked them before we grew up!

The moms below have some pretty dark secrets in their closets, so I hope their kids never go looking!

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.

Good luck keeping those doors to the past closed, mamas!