Being part of a family is like being part of a cult: you don’t realise just how bizarre an organisation it is, and what arcane rules it is run by, until you finally manage to get out.
Reddit user soy-sauce-sexy discovered this when they left home, as their post on the AskUK page demonstrated:
What’s something gross your family always did that you never realised was gross until later on in life?
So, growing up my whenever my grandma was doing laundry she would always go around smelling everyone’s underwear in the laundry basket and sometimes said they smell fine and make us rewear them. Only realised smelling underwear was not normal at 22 when I moved in to a house share.
Quite the confession there, and it opened the floodgates for plenty of other people to get some strange family confessions off their chests, like these…
1.
‘Ask everyone else in the house if they want your bath water before letting the plug out. We weren’t even that hard up.’
–pimpmychaiselounge
2.
‘Big yellow Tupperware did double duty as both mixing bowl and barf bowl for sick kids.’
–ConsistentPair2
3.
‘We had a pee bucket in the kitchen for emergencies if the bathroom was occupied. When it wasn’t being used as a toilet my parents used the bucket to store potatoes and carrots.’
–CasualGlam87
4.
‘A friend’s sister went for a sleepover at her mate’s house and her friend’s family had ‘cereal milk’. There were two bottles of milk in the fridge. One normal one, and one ‘cereal milk’.
The leftover milk in bowls of cereal was poured back into the milk bottle to be used the next day at breakfast. Hence the name ‘cereal milk’. They didn’t find it weird at all.’
–wordsfromlee
5.
‘My Mam hated the idea of toilet brushes so we never had them. She taught us to leave any smears and skidmarks until she washed the toilet at the weekend. We weren’t to try and clean any marks ourselves, it was ‘too dirty’ for us.
This led to me leaving skidmarks and my first proper girlfriend’s toilet. Needless to say I caught on to cleaning a toilet after use pretty quick!’
–MissingScore777
6.
‘I was brought up by my nan. In some ways the was great, taught me to read at 2/3 years old. She was born in 1898, lived through two World Wars but was very superstitious, a bit of a witch, albeit a nice one. In the mornings she would prepare a fresh bowl of water, wash her face and hands, then she would SPIT IN IT FOR LUCK!!
Then she would wash me and my brothers face and hands, then it was the dogs turn, then the cat. I never felt that we had good luck. The spitting the bowl always disturbed me until I was allowed to fix my own ablutions. Our dogs and cats always had nice clean faces though.’
–missread4ever
7.
‘Not me but my husband’s family (mum, dad, two brothers) used to all share the same bath towel!’
–AngelStar286
8.
‘If my dad spilled his ashtray he’d have a quick look to see if my mum was around, if not he’d rub it into the arm of the sofa. He also pissed in the back garden a lot.’
–cinejam
9.
‘My family would throw rotting food into the garden. Just… throw dodgy herring into the rose bushes.’
–CurlsandCream
10.
‘My mum used to pick earwax out of my ears with her fingernails and then absentmindedly eat it. Thought this was completely normal until a friend saw and got the most horrified look on her face.’
–em_press
11.
‘I’m a bit of a germaphobe and my mum hates Dettol as she says we ‘need a bit of bacteria in us’.
We have The Cloth. The Cloth is made wet with the tap and used to wipe surfaces. It is then left to dry and re-wetted. My mum uses the same cloth to wipe away meat juices and wipe cutting boards for raw vegetables. I despise it and regularly squirt washing up liquid all over our counters and wipe down with hot water and kitchen paper.’
–Imaginary_Fish086378
