Hey Pandas, What’s The Craziest Request You Have Ever Gotten From Your Family?

My uncle once said he liked buffalos (bison). By the time he was forty he had received so much bison merch as presents his house looked like the gift shop at Yellowstone. Shirts, hats, paintings, mugs, socks, towels... I was working on Catalina at the time, this little island off the coast of LA which famously has a herd of bison running around that had been abandoned after a film. So for his fiftieth my mom asked me to bring her a dried bison patty, the sturdiest I could find, next time I was on the mainland. I did as instructed, she covered it in lacquer and that doorstop is what we gave to the man who had everything buffalo

Mom wanted me to give her my kids so she could give them to my cousin who apparently "deserved" them more. Yes, I'm serious. Huge hell no from me, but honestly this is pretty tame compared to some of the things she has pulled on us.

I could write a book about the weird stuff my parents wanted me to do. My mom was a religion-jumper and insisted that I needed to join/change churches along with her. I noped out when she took me to a Pentecostal church for a service and demanded that I join it along with her. The people screaming and crying and rolling around on the floor with their tongues lolling out? Uh, no thanks. Then my dad for years wanted me to "just give Rush Limbaugh a listen," because apparently it would straighten out my thinking. No again. My parents didn't like my cynicism and were offended that I didn't adopt their beliefs. Decades later, I still don't have a single regret about thinking for myself.

I was in my early 20s when I went to be at my maternal grandma's vacation house with her for a week. She was there as well. It was actually the last time I saw her. She spent the entire week telling me how shıt my mum has always been with money (telling me how she'd borrow money from everyone so she could buy me toys as a kid, etc) and how my mum never had any luck with finding a good man (my mum has been married 3 times. First to a man who was very ab-u-sive to her, then to my dad, and then to her current husband). I am not a great fan of my mother's choices in men either, but it just felt so bad inside when my grandma would tell me how stupid my dad was and how she never understood why my mum married him (it was rebellion against my grandma. Because my dad, back then, was a nice dude but looked like a bad boy. My grandma didn't like that, so my mum loooved that). Anyways, my grandma told me every evening not to tell my mum any of thr things she'd told me about during the day.

One of the first things I did when I came home was to call my mum and tell her. Because I felt so extremely hurt by what my grandma had said about my dad. My dad is a weirdo, probably undiagnosed inattentive adhd, and he seems to struggle with having relationships of any kind, even though he's good at hiding it. But he is still my dad and I love him.

My mum was, obviously, very upset but she also told me it was mostly projection by my grandma.

Oh, and when I was about 7yo and on vacation at grandma's she put me on Slimfast as my "lunch" for the week without my mum's knowing. So I came home and gladly told my mum that for lunch every day I had gotten a cup of choco-milk (it was chocolate-flavoured Slimfast). My mum was furious.

My mother's side of the family is toxic. My mum is, too. She had a great teacher in her mum. 😬

A member of my family asked me to donate a kidney to her friend. The guy who needed it had sexually a****d me for 4 years when I was a kid, and she knew that when she requested it.

Not me, but my mother...went to a family reunion when my brother was a baby (maybe 3 months old) and a cousin wanted to swap babies. The cousin had a girl but had really wanted a boy. She teased about it a bit, but it was easy to tell she wasn't joking. She really thought they could just swap babies at the reunion and that would work out for everyone. We didn't go back to that reunion until my siblings were in high school.

Request from my mother, to "just get over it" and "stop acting as if we were strangers".

She was referring to the abus1ve behavior of my father and herself to me (violence, bullying, humiliation, neglect). It led me to a su1c1de attempt (at 10 years old) and to several instances of self harm. As a result of constant living on survival mode, I developed depression, panic attacks and skin rashes. I'm still struggling, even after years in therapy.

And all she can say about it is "just get over it", because "we're not strangers". Breaking news, mommy: you ARE both strangers to me.