Every family has one

[resonant]

God, you guys, apparently today at work was Tell Your Family's Most Jerry Springer-esque Story Day!

First the White Sheep told me about the time when the kids at school teased her because they'd seen her stepfather, dead drunk, passed out on the way home from the liquor store with a couple of bottles in the basket of his bicycle. (Which he had been riding because he'd DWI'd himself out of a driver's license.)

Then, in an entirely separate conversation, Little Trouble told me about the time she was married to a guy for eight months because the two of them accidentally bonded when they witnessed a shooting together.

I didn't get a chance to tell my family's, but I'll tell you: After I left for college, my mother came home from work one day, unlocked the door, and was confronted by a six-foot teenage boy whom she had never met before. He was a friend of my brother, who had offered the house as a perfect place to hide a drug stash for a while, as long as somebody stuck around to guard it.

(I'm too introverted to have a whole lot of tales of trashy behavior that I personally participated in; probably I'd be less embarrassed to share my entire life story than to let my non-fannish friends get a look at my browser history.)

Now you!

Comments

[swordage]

When I was leaving a loveless abusive marriage, complete with screaming surprise move-out, my dad called to tell me that he was at the jail bailing out my brother for robbing a GameStop.

...yeah, there's not really much I can add to that one. XD

[sara]

...this is my family we're talking about; do you want the one with the cattle prod, the one with the dead squirrels, or the one with the out-of-wedlock baby and the winery? There are also some good ones with horses, and the one about the condoms, and oh yeah, the one where my grandparents skipped out on the overdue rent by throwing all their stuff off the balcony into the back of the convertible, midway through the Second World War.

If we branch out to include my in-laws, I can also tell the one about the time my mother-in-law's car caught fire and she abandoned it by the side of the road.

Jerry Springer At Work Day sounds a lot like Talk About Your Neighbors Day, must say.

[exceptinsects]

My grandmother's mother married my grandfather's father...

[travels_in_time]

My mother-in-law's son married my father-in-law's daughter.

[exceptinsects]

Okay, so how did that work out?
Mine was: my grandparents got married, and then quite a few years later their respective parents found themselves single and fell in love with each other, making their children step-siblings after they'd already gotten married!

[travels_in_time]

My (step) mother-in-law had four children when she married my father-in-law, but only the youngest three lived with her. The oldest, who lived with his dad, would occasionally visit and eventually fell in love with my sister-in-law. The parents went ballistic, all the other brothers and sisters (who'd been basically living together in a huge puppy pile) went "EWWWWWWWW NOOOOOO!" but it didn't make any difference in the end. :D

[krait]

I'm too introverted to have a whole lot of tales of trashy behavior that I personally participated in; probably I'd be less embarrassed to share my entire life story than to let my non-fannish friends get a look at my browser history.

Apparently, I was away at university for all the Springeresque moments of my family's life -- my brother's arrest for drugs possession (the little genius was driving around with his marijuana paraphernalia in the back window of his car!), gun purchase and possible move into dealing, and the time he let his alcoholic friend move into his dorm room (before he dropped out of the college because he was failing, due to never showing up to classes)...

The only incident I can really share is the time I found a condom on the floor of the laundry room, which was slightly traumatic, but not sufficiently dramatic enough to qualify for Springer. *makes face*

My family as a whole is pretty drama-free.... well, my immediate family. Two of my cousins currently have cohabitation and/or nonmarital-children drama going on, but I'm not close enough to the parties involved to have picked up the details.

Honestly, I'm with you on "nonfen viewing my browser history would be WAY MORE AWFUL than my entire life history" boat. I was always The Good Kid; I was quiet and geeky and my youthful angst was the kind that resulted in feelings of superiority and isolation, not the kind that gets you a reality TV show or the evening news. :D Compared to that... if my mother ever found me posting gay threesome fanfic? The reaction would be visible from orbit.

[montanaharper]

It's entirely possible that all the Jerry Springeresque stories relevant to my immediate family are actually about me. >.> I, um. I was the wild child. To this day, my younger brother resents the fact that there was nothing he could do to shock our parents because, in his words, "You already did it all."

[julad]

Oh I have one. My Dad's cousins, most of whom I have never met even though they lived in the next town, have a long running family feud over some inheritance from the 70's or something, that has consumed the whole family for decades. I never met them because my Dad thought the whole thing was ridiculous and stopped speaking to nearly all of them over it.

So anyway, about ten years ago, this happened: One cousin got the other cousin kicked out of the town's lawn bowls club, and his membership revoked, over something the other cousin allegedly said to that cousin's wife during an argument they all got into at the club. So the other cousin protests to the Bowls Club that he shouldn't have had his membership revoked over an argument they were all participating in, gets knocked back, gets a lawyer involved, gets knocked back, sues the Bowls Club, the Bowls Clubs lawyers up and fights back, and the whole thing ends up going all the way to the state Supreme Court. My relatives, in the Supreme Court, over a fight in a lawn bowls club. It's like some quirky Australian comedy-drama movie about small-town life, but I'm apparently related to them.

The Court found that the Bowls Club's decision to kick him out wasn't valid, so the other cousin won that round. But the feud goes on.

(In Night-blooming Heartsease, there's a Snape family feud in the backstory. It was actually based on my Dad's cousins.)

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

I love your story Night-blooming Heartsease and I've never forgotten it, although I read it years ago. I have the Theban Band illustration on one of my fan fic notebooks.

[wesleysgirl]

Hm, wow.

Well, this one's shaky on the details because NO ONE TALKED ABOUT IT OMG, but as a young man my grandfather was driving drunk and hit a guy who was walking on the side of the road, and either killed or seriously injured him. There was something about him owing money as recompense to the guy/the guy's family. But no one talked about it.

There was an in-law incident at a child's birthday party where one woman slapped another across the face... eep.

[akacat]

Wait, you can't leave the story of your mom and the surprise six-foot teenage boy just sitting there! What happened? Did he leave quietly, I hope??

My family is a bit too small to be a good source of springer-esque moments. The only one I can think of is the g'g'g'uncle who accidentally became a horse thief, of sorts... then continued on purpose.

The story is, he was heading out with his wagon and oxen to pick up some lumber to sell back home, something he'd done quite a few times before. This time, someone along the way offered him a price he couldn't refuse for the oxen. So he sold them, and headed right back home.

A couple weeks later, he finds the oxen grazing in the front yard -- they'd followed him home.

Rather than returning them, or the money he'd sold them for, he just made sure to take a slightly different route the next time he headed out for lumber. After that he was a bit more welcoming to offers to sell them; he sold them several more times, always figuring that they'd be home in a few weeks.

[travels_in_time]

I deleted my comment because it does make me very identifiable, to anyone who knows my family, but I hope you enjoyed the stories. :D

[wanted_a_pony]

It probably says something about the sub-cultures I raised myself in that the incident in my life which most people would consider most Springer-worthy was fairly unremarkable to me & didn't occasion much comment from my friends.

When my first hubby & I were moving toward divorce, he began an affair with the female half of a couple he hung with a lot. He ended up moving in with them, & eventually she kicked out her hubby in favor of my by-then-ex. A year or so later, at a local convention we were both attending, I suddenly noticed the newly-single fellow who'd been edged out & thought, "My, he's pretty/smart/talented/etc.!" I ended up being engaged to him for 18 months, & still regard him as one of the finest & most honorable men who's passed through my life.

It honestly didn't occur to me for months that my ex & I had essentially swapped spouses with the other couple. It just... it wasn't like that, unless you have that sort of mind-filter.

[grey853]

Well, there's the uncle who shot and killed his wife while their two kids were in the backseat when she was on the way home from church. They were in different cars because she'd filed for divorce that same week. He drove up beside her and shot through the window before he tried to kill himself, but missed. Damn shame, too. So he's spending the rest of his life in prison. Luckily the kids survived. Unluckily, they still have no mother and a father who's a psycho prick.

Or there's the one, a little less traumatic, where I met a brother I never knew I had at a SciFi convention when I was checking in. He said, "I've been looking for you. I think you're my sister." WTF? Turns out we had the same biological father. My brother was part the second family the man had fathered and then left before moving to the third wife and becoming a "born again".

Yep, yep, all true.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Mine are all too actually sad to tell. But I can mention that during WWII my father was given a medical discharge for some psychological problems that were, at the time, unnamed, but would probably now be called Asperger's Disorder or a Personality Disorder. It was kind of amazing when we found his discharge papers, how compassionate they were to him. He just couldn't follow the rules of the Army.

[azurelunatic]

Well, there was the time that my fiancé, who was gaslighting me, was out with his buddies past the point he'd promised to be home, and hadn't called to check in. As an expression of my general rage and disappointment, I proceeded to shave the front half of my head (with his electric razor, ruining it). He had loved my long hair and while I liked it too, I was pissed off enough to not care. And then there were the fights over his cat. And the breakup fight, which was two-part: part 1: a mutual friend who had once kept me from suicide had expressed a wish to be my bridesmaid; I was okay with this; my fiancé's mother heard about it through the "right, I will send you a sample of the fabric I am using for his dress so you can match the ring pillow" and was Not Happy that the wedding would include cross-dressing. My fiancé took his mother's side. Part 2, the guy was too incompetent to get a power supply for his computer, and was using my laptop. He'd installed a game on it that was way big and a timesuck; I uninstalled it. For a vacation I said that he might play the game on the computer, but run it off the discs. I discovered that he'd installed it fully. I uninstalled it, revoked his admin privs, and changed my account and the admin account's passwords. Then he called, upset that he didn't have sufficient privs to reinstall it and that he'd been locked out of the admin accounts. I then figured: okay, if I cannot trust him with root on my box, *why the fuck* am I marrying him. So that was that. It was a bad scene and I'm glad to be out of it.

And then there was my high school best friend Shawn, who I was in love with and who was the one who lost my virginity. (I did not lose it. I gave it to him. He lost it.) There were many other stories, but basically I was functioning as his secretary, his ADHD mitigation coach, and we were having it off every now and then. I introduced him to a friend because I thought they'd make great fuckbuddies. A few weeks later, he thought that 2 hours for me and 72 hours for her was an equitable split of his time. The way he broke things off with me was he let me give him a blowjob and then told me it was over. He didn't return the favor. Oh man, so many of the Shawn stories are worthy. Like his bachelor party. Oh man.

The sweetest one was how my sister and I semi-accidentally dated two of the same people, though not at the same time. I guess we both have good taste!