What did your parents do that kind of fucked you up even though it wasn't REALLY that bad?

Not me but my mom.

My mom had a really close relationship with her father. She was the middle child and had two brothers and had kind of a weird relationship with her mom, but she was the apple of her father's eye and loved him more than anything.

She got her ears pierced as a young teen and he joked that she "wasn't perfect anymore." She really took this to heart. Did not want me to get my ears pierced but gave in because all the other girls were doing it, and SHE had pierced ears, after all. When I got a second lobe piercing she freaked out at the dinner table, demanded that my father have some opinion about it (he didn't, I believe his words were "ears are for piercing, who cares"), and just was generally extremely upset. I got my bellybutton pierced and didn't tell her; when I got my nose pierced when I was 19 she smacked me upside the head and woke my dad up "LOOK WHAT YOUR DAUGHTER HAS DONE TO HER FACE!" (Dad did not care.) She barely spoke to me for days. She didn't even want to look at me, even though I just had the cute little stud that was popular in the mid-2000s. I got married seven years later and she was still mad about the nose ring ("IT WILL RUIN YOUR WEDDING PHOTOS").

Tattoos were not discussed. She is extremely against them-- not on other people, that's fine, but for her own children it is verboten. I decided I wanted a tattoo for my 30th birthday and I actually had to bring it up with my therapist because I knew my mom would probably faint dead away when she found out and I would have just gotten one by now had it not been for the past 15 years my mom has spent railing against tattoos. I brought the idea up to her and she went completely to pieces in my kitchen, crying about her perfect baby. (She did acknowledge that she had no say in the matter, which was a step in the right direction, and one which I was happy to interpret as "permission," even though I didn't strictly need it.)

My mom isn't crazy. She's honestly a delight 99% of the time and we are very close. But she has extremely strong opinions about body modifications and I think it's because of what her dad said to her all those years ago.

/r/AskReddit Thread