My Mom Did WHAT?

Have your parents ever done something so outrageous that when re-telling the story, you're not even sure it's real? I'm not talking about lying about Santa or the tooth fairy. I'm talking flat-out un-fucking-believable shit.

Background: My mother has been a nurse for nearly 25 years, has worked the past 8 at a pretty major hospital here in Cleveland, and is about 2 years away from retiring. She's also a judgemental, hypocritical, heartless bitch, but that's not really relevant here - it just seems to come out whenever I mention her. So when she called me about an hour into her shift last week, I was tempted to ignore it - but since I know she can't keep her cell on the floor, I worried it was something medical. She asked me to come pick her up (she was fine) but she wasn't allowed to drive herself home. As I was driving there, my brain couldn't come up with a scenario that made any sense, other than maybe verbally assaulting a coworker or patient. That's as bad-ass as I thought my mom could be.

Imagine my shock when I heard this:

"I've been accused of narcotic drug diversion, and it's true."​

Um, wait, what? Now, she's brought home me syringes occasionally (I have to give myself B12 shots monthly, and usually forget to get them from CVS), and I know she'll find the occasional Ibuprofen 600 in her pocket (which is stupid, since I have a standing script for 800's). Yeah, that's like picking up a penny in a parking lot compared to the shit she's been doing.

My mother has been stealing oxy's and percs from the hospital. She's a real-life Nurse Jackie (which we watched together religiously and she was always so morally offended). She claims it's only been going on for a few months; I believe that she's been doing it at work for a few months, largely because they use Pyxis - which is, among other things, a GPS system for dispensing medication - but do I believe she's only been popping pills for a few months? Fuck, no.

FWIW, I got into a little "trouble" a few years ago for playing around with the DDW, and could have scored her anything she wanted - it's no secret in our house - and she does have legitimate chronic pain, so scoring an opioid script wouldn't have been too tough.

Since drug tests usually came back in about 15 minutes - and HR hasn't called back - chances are the Board is accumulating its case against her. Best case, she's allowed to participate in a drug diversion program: she would have to (temporarily) surrender her license, admit to chemical dependency and be accepted into their drug diversion program - just to keep herself from facing felony charges.

Worst case is prison. If the Board decide she's not a good candidate for the diversion program - or if she gets caught taking god damned sip of NyQuil during the 2-4 year probation period - all bets are off: they'll press felony criminal charges (DEA) and civil charges (the hospital pays a fuck-ton of money when these things happen). There is no in-between or gray area - at least at this particular hospital.

Even if she were to offer to retire (she's 63), without completing the state and federal requirements for drug diversion, she still faces all the bad shit. They might not throw her in jail, but the cases I've seen don't get pleaded down to misdemeanors or anything like that. At best, you get charged with a lessor felony and get probation. At sixty-three mother fucking years old.

FOCUS: How fucked up is your family? Does your dad get a flirty with your friends after too much scotch? Is your sister a BDSM swinger? Do you hand out pencils and toothbrushes for Halloween? Bonus points if it's illegal, unethical, or morally questionably.

ALT FOCUS: What is your opinion on the consequences medical professionals face who get caught with their hand in the proverbial cookie jar? Also, this applies to those who get a DUI off-hours as well - thoughts?

 

Clif note version: my mom is a fucked up mess, see below if you care how

Focus: Lets start with how things are at my parents house and go from there. My dad and I like to drink, but my dad likes to pretend my doesn't know we're drinking, so he hides the beer in the fridge, drinks outside when she's not around and hides his empties. I must follow these rule too. She knows we're drinking so from time to time she'll randomly go into the garage to check in on us, which is her way of trying to bust us for drinking. My mom is an absolute pig. She has a corner that she sits in all day and its filled with random bits of food, magazines, assorted trash and random personal grooming things such as a thing that she uses to take the corns off her feet. Every evening my mom gets really obnoxious. She takes her medications and gets really fucked up like doped up and tries to start fights with people. She doesn't know how to communicate so she'll say inappropriate things to piss people off then gets upset when people get mad. She has no respect for boundaries and does this every night and its really tense. My mom also keeps putting lotion on the dog even though she knows it gives him diarhea because he will lick it off but she keeps doing it even though she knows it makes him sick. My mom won't take the dog for a walk ever because fuck you thats why. My mom also likes to have inappropriate conversations with strangers, she's a terror to take anywhere, she refuses to walk. In steamboat we were literally three blocks from downtown and she refused to walk there to get dinner, she made my dad drive her those three blocks. I finally admitted to someone I almost became violent with her once, I threw a shoe near her because I asked her to leave me alone and she kept pushing and pushing and refused to do anything that I asked to help me calm down. She is a big reason I am in therapy.

She is so selfish. She hasn't bought my dad a christmas gift for the last three years. A couple days ago she was surprised to hear my brother has leukemia. He lives with my parents...

My dads family is filled with alcoholics. His mother was an abuse drunk who would get wasted and make my dad cook and clean, he was like 9 then and the youngest in the family by 9 years. My great uncle murdered the guy he found sleeping with his wife
When my maternal grandmother died, only her children showed up to her funeral and that was pretty much to throw dirt on her and leave. Non of my maternal grandmothers grandchildren or inlaws showed up. My moms siblings all turned out fucked up and one committed suicide with a sawed off shotgun in 85.

 

I more or less had the same conversation with my Mom the other day. Both of my parents are well-adjusted, sensible individuals yet it's taken multiple marriages from each of them to find happiness - well, happiness for now, at any rate.

 

My pops hides candy all over the garage. The garage fridge is 75% frozen candy bars, 25% beer. My mom was fucking nuts through menopause. I think that's about as wild and crazy as it gets. Which makes me wonder if they're secretly the most deviant people I know.

 

My Mom raised me a Jehovah's Witness.

I win.

 

So you don't know how old you are or what it's like to get presents.

 

At least he knows what it's like to have me turn the hose on him when he shows up at my house on the weekend A.M.

My parents are quiet and generous baby boomer conservatives. My dad just turn 70 (he looks more like he's 50) he is the smartest, kindest and most helpful person I've ever known. My mom is a great mom, but her shitty way of thinking out loud in the most passive-aggressive ways drives me up the fucking wall sometimes. But who doesn't get that from time to time? That's parents. I'm an only child and they were great. They never got drunk, never raised a hand BUT we're still intimidating enough to keep me in line. My dad was a great dad, but he was abused horribly as a child by a psychopathic WWII vet and I guess got into some serious shit as a gang member that he still refuses to talk about. So on the very rare occasion that he was provoked or threatened, it set off this hair-trigger ferocity that would scare the fuck out of people because he's always known as such a sweet guy.

 

My dad bartended and did a little managing at a couple of strip clubs for most of my life growing up. He had a physical education degree, but never used it beyond doing some student teaching when he was in his early or mid twenties. I think that my mom married him largely in rebellion against her extremely controlling father. All things considered I had a good childhood, but there were things going on that I wasn't privy to when I was a kid. My dad was basically a functioning alcoholic; he got hammered every night while working and then would make the 30-45 minute drive home. Miraculously, he was never in an accident and never got a ticket. In fact, he even told me a story one time of going through a routine traffic stop while drunk, being polite to the cop, and being sent on his way. But this was back in the eighties and nineties, when the cops probably weren't as aggressive in catching drunk drivers as they are now. He had to quit drinking in 1998, after he woke up one morning throwing up blood after he ruptured veins in his esophagus and then had to spend 4 days in the hospital.

To his credit he quit drinking for good right after that episode, but it wasn't over. I found out when I was in college that he regularly used cocaine, both before and after the aforementioned episode. I am pretty sure that the cocaine use is what led to the blood clot in his small intestine in 2007, which he survived (the survival rate for that is like 20%). But he died in 2013, at age 60, after he had to have scar tissue removed from the blood clot episode.

It's also funny that I lived in constant fear of my dad growing up (he was big, loud, and intimidating), and never acted out in school or tried alcohol or weed until I moved away from home and went off to college. I know now that he wouldn't have cared if I ever had tried any of that just as long as I was responsible about it (not that he would have encouraged me), though he was very anti-tobacco and still would have beat me if he had ever caught me smoking cigarettes or using any other tobacco product.

He never got out of the titty bar business and my mom left him in 2006, after 22 years of marriage, because he wasn't making much money anymore and refused to look for anything better. Dad then moved in with a couple whom he was friends with (they were also into drugs) and lived with them for 2 years, and then he lived with his parents for the last 5 years of his life and worked odd jobs. As for my mom, she moved in with a friend of hers, who is now my stepdad, who is 17 years her senior.

And now I don't see or talk to my family as much as I should.

 

Oh man....my dad. He wasn't a bad person, he was just more like a big, horny child. He was married 5 or 6 times that I know of, he cheated on all of his wives and bragged to me about it like I was his buddy. I finally had to tell him I didn't want to hear about it and it hurt his feelings.

When we opened our flea market together, he was a running joke with our vendors and employees. He was shamelessly hitting on everyone to the point that, once again, I had to say something to him before we got hit with a lawsuit. At 60+ years old he was like I was at 20...trying to stick his dick into anything he could. It was embarrassing as hell.

Like I said, he wasn't a bad person, he was just a horny old fucker that wanted to fuck someone who wasn't his wife so he could brag about it I guess.

As far as actual horrible things he may have done....well...while serving in Vietnam he may have been drunk and driving a government issue Jeep and run over a local on a bicycle. The hypothetical said local and bicycle were so mangled that they were insuperable, so both were loaded in the back of the Jeep and taken a bit away from the scene and buried together.

Sadly, I would not be surprised if that was 100% true.

 

My daughter's (redneck trashbox) father was about twelve when he found out that his "dad" was actually the cousin of his biological father. Parents can get away with a lot of shit when the surnames remain the same...

 

Hell mine doesn't sound that bad in comparison. My grandfather moved his family to a small town in MS to live in a tent while he started a farm supplemented by his gambling income. Long story short he was a pro gambler/cheater and we ended up farming 18,000 acres of row crops and 2,000 acres under water for catfish. He ran an illegal casino in my little hometown with off duty deputies and cops playing security. This was actually a great time in my life cause we never wanted for anything. However in 1987 the local fish processor union went on strike. In second grade I got to attend the trial of my father and grandfather for offering the union head $10,000 to end the strike. Apparently the FBI also heard the convo. Luckily we didn't own enough stock so they were acquitted from bribery charges and labeled as concerned citizens. But in 1991 after Mississippi passed the casino bill my grandfather was busted by the FBI. After the raid on his house we lost 2.4 million in cash, 13,000 acres in land to pay fines, and he was sentenced to 8 months at Montgomery AFB federal jail. All in all not a bad thing except when my grandfather was released from prison he was a broken man and developed a crack addiction. In the town I live in everyone knew an never hastened to give me shit about. My father (who is blind) has managed to be elected the county prosecutor and city attorney but rarely a day goes by that my grandfather isn't mentioned in some way. I've actually had people forbidden to talk to me because of my family name. Yet alot of people love us and there are books written about my granddad or mentioning him because of his gambling.

 

I'm still waiting to hear the unedited adult-version of my dad's life, especially his twenties, because from what I've been told I just know there are things he's been leaving out. He spent a couple years living in the Rockies, where he lived in a log cabin in the winter and a teepee in the summer. He spent a summer on this small island off Honduras where he referred to befriending a "medicine man," but I have my suspicions that means he spent the whole summer doing iowaska or something. He lived in Amsterdam "working with tulips" for a while, but I'm completely convinced that really meant "working with tulips and/or marijuana," especially since he's said several times that "Amsterdam is one of my favorite places in the world, and you should really go there someday but, uh, that's a trip you should take without your dad." I also am pretty sure he's been growing his own weed somewhere on his property my entire life. He lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a bit, but he's been suspiciously withholding on any details about that so I've let my imagination run wild that maybe it was something political. Recently, he posted photos of a trip out west on Facebook, and his friend commented thinking he was in Texas and told him to swing by Austin, and my dad said "I'd love to get to Austin again, and this time I won't even have to sleep under a bridge!" A few days ago, he was talking to me about all of the political action stuff I have in the works and pleaded with me to tell all my friends to keep an eye out for agent provocateurs, which he knew "sounds alarmist, but that happened to me," and he moved past it too quickly for me to demand elaboration, so I'm now thinking that when he told me stories about how much he hated being in the south while he was joining in on civil rights stuff he may have had some run-ins with the police for reasons other than "they hated hippies" like he claimed when I was younger. I'm also about 99% sure my parents met in the 1980s NYC kink community for reasons I refuse to disclose, Popped Cherries be damned. He mellowed out when he got older and had me, and has always at least seemed to be a pretty straight-laced normal dude who's always been outspokenly liberal but not super political (although he did go to Stewart and Colbert's Rally To Restore Sanity and I didn't), but this election has gotten him really fired up again and I'm hoping that it will lead to more detailed stories of his Good Old Days fighting the power the first time around.

 

Same here. Is that a tie? Did we win something? What are presents?

 

My family is considered strange to normal people, dull and bland by the board's standards.

My mom grew up in a white trash family. Not everyone on that side is white trash, but most of them would loosely fit into that category. My grandparents cancelled their garbage bill because they figured they might as well just toss it in the dumpster at the casino. My uncle lost his house gambling. He's mildly retarded and never figured out that my cousin isn't his daughter, despite the fact that my aunt gave birth to her 7.5 months after they met. Another cousin dropped out of high school. Another aunt is an alcoholic who is in and out of the emergency room and has turned her stomach into an ulcer pit. Yet another aunt hasn't dated in 30 years or so and lives a solitary shut in life. I have one family member on that side, an uncle, that is moderately successful and has his shit together. Naturally, he's the one who doesn't have any kids.

My dad's side of the family is all upper middle class/upper class. The youngest uncle makes well into 7 figures and has some serious connections, including several senators, numerous other politicians and stupidly rich people. He's 'poor' by the standards of some of the circles he runs in. After my dad died he's offered to myself, my brother, and my sisters a few different opportunities and we've all turned him down. I won't get into it, but it's pretty much for the reasons you can think of off the top of your head. The rest of that side of the family makes six figures, and are very down to earth, smart, and just generally fun to be around.

My dad was a wild partier, and did every drug he could get his hands on when he was younger. He was in some ridiculous tough guy gang in the small Iowa town he grew up in. Still cracks me up. My parents had a very good marriage, and since she got over his passing away she's now running her own business and is doing surprisingly well. All of us kids more or less have our shit together now. Not picture perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but our careers are moving sideways and backwards, but mostly forward. The only one who has never had a traditional job by family expectations is my brother, who just got out of the marines. Looks like he's going to go to grad school and is going to be a teacher, so good for him.

 

Yup. I'll third that. There is the source of the continuing emotional damage of my life. I am mostly divorced from those feelings now out of necessity.

The real fucked up one is my father. It doesn't help that I look and sound like him in a lot of ways. He's been a career criminal for the majority of his adult life. When I finally got the courage up to have a come to Jesus talk with him about how he impacted my life for the negative, ruined my wedding day and seems to think that we're buddies who have no trust breaking episodes littering their pasts, he cried and told me that my feelings were my own, that how I felt about him was not his business and that he couldn't help me with regard to my feelings. He said 'Now, when are you sending me a plane ticket so I can come visit you?' That was when I just decided that this man isn't my father. My father died 20 years ago from a drug overdose and this guy is just wearing his skin. Life got a lot cleaner and easier after that

 

My parents house is currently infested with fruit flies everywhere because my mom leaves half full cans of ice tea wherever she goes. She drops food everywhere, like popcorn and chips, and doesn't pick it up. Leaves random bowls of ice cream out for days. My mom is a special lady. Very very very special.

 

Spoiler

My parents are neat freaks. Like I'm talking hospital burn ward clean. I'm talking never forgetting to dust the inside of the lampshades clean. I never threw a party or even a semi-large get-together.

...because They would know. They ALWAYS knew. Christ, we had a garage neater than most kitchens. Tool heads get hung with the head at the top, not bottom! You're killing me!

How many of you guys had parents who had the secret living room that only "company" was allowed to use? Oh sure. You could look at it...from a distance... as if you were at the fucking Ford Museum but shit goes south if you scuff up the perfect vacuum shading.

I think about what my daughter thinks of me and what she doesn't know of me, and I my own past. I mean.....fuck. "Eventful" is a safe word I could balk with. There are a lot of people who would consider some of things I'm NOT ashamed of to be horrific.

 

Update on my mom: she's suspended until 1/11, goes for diversion evaluation on 11/29, and her behavior in between will determine if she gets fired (and then charged). With the immediate fear gone, she's gone back to her soulless bitchy self. She's refusing to "participate" in Thanksgiving because it's just too much for her to deal with. I'd give her a Xanax, but...

(I'm not unsympathetic, I'm just not expecting much - why change after four decades?)