Reddit, what experience/life-event made you grow up really quickly?

1. When I was 15, my dad walked into the garage one night and took his own life. Year and a half later, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She died two years later. So, I went from having 2 parents at 15 to having none and taking care of my 16 year old sister at 18.
   — wslates


2. When I was 11, I pushed my mom down the stairs. We never had much of anything when I was growing up; my parents had never been together, substance abuse was rampant, little support from extended family, your stereotypical poverty situation. But I was blind to all of it; it was just my normal. I loved my parents, i liked picking out my clothes at the Salvation Army, i liked school and had friends. I lived in a naive little bubble and was a really normal, bouncy kid despite everything going on around me. Mom has a lot of mental health issues. Schizophrenia being the biggest of her monsters. It would cause her to fly off the handle randomly. When I was 11, it cane out that a family member had been sexually abusing me for years, and she used that as a way to isolate me from my dad and his family. It broke me, because I loved my dad and even though I was hurt due to the trauma, I didn’t want my happy life to change. So I yelled at her about wanting to go to his house, about wanting everything to be normal again. And she snapped and came at me with a knife. I just reacted and pushed her, not realizing we were right next to the stairs to our basement. I watched her fall, hit the bottom and not get up. And I sat down as it dawned on me that my life was not okay, that none of it was normal, that kids do not live like I did. And I walked down the stairs, tended to her, and put her to bed. She only had a nasty bump to her head, but was okay. She hugged me and apologized and let me see my dad again, but I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was wearing a pink pikachu T-shirt. I never wore it again.
   — eclecticcrow


3. Poverty. Kids who grow up poor generally are going to have to act like adults far too soon. There were years when we didn't have a telephone, weeks where the electricity was shut off and we didn't have heat, and days where we didn't know where we'd be sleeping that night because we got evicted again and again. I worked two jobs in high school. I learned to do as much cooking and cleaning as possible from the time I was 11 or so to try to placate my angry mother and prevent her from sending me to live with my even angrier father.
   — northernspy






4. When my daughter passed away and I had to arrange her funeral, never thought I'd have to do that at the age of 20! (4 years ago)
   — SoundOfTheSiren


5. I had a kid in high school. Ten years later and Mom and I are still married, both have degrees, love in a beautiful house, and I would say fairly successful. High school me was an absolute disaster and I never thought I could do it
   — Rubychest


6. Signing a mortgage, was pretty much a "ok now I can't fuck up for the next 30 years" moment
   — varcas






7. Being a homeless addict and being offered a passed out woman to do what I pleased with because I set up my dealer's mother with her neighbours WiFi password I got with Aircrack-NG. I realised that dealer owned that woman. I realised that despite him being nice to me now, soon he would own me too. Figured I'd either end up dead or in jail. I hitchhiked to a nearby major city, got a YMCA membership, a job and some methadone. Slept behind a wall of shopping carts in a 24/7 grocery store until I could afford a room in a basement. Haven't looked back since.
   — RedEyeBlues


8. During college: "Mom, dad, I'm broke. Can you help me out?" Them: "You can handle it" I sold my guitar. I sold my amp. I canceled the tv subscription. I sold my car. I focused harder on my job to make more money. I didn't go out or drink at all anymore. I came to enjoy plain rice as a meal. I took on an extra roommate. I kept the temperature inside at 85 (Florida) during summer and refused to use the heat at all during winter. The safety net was gone, and I grew up instantly. I'm thankful to my parents for doing that.
   — TheRealHooks


9. I was 16, came home from cross country practice to see my Mom waiting in the driveway with my little sisters. She handed me $40 and the keys to the family minivan. "Go to Burger King, don't come home until it's their bedtime." A week or two later I notice the family calendar, hung in the kitchen, has a huge black **X** over the date of the Burger King Mission. I ask my Mom about it and she starts crying and leaves the room. A few moments later my Dad walks in to the kitchen and says, "Hey, freiheitzeit, can you join us outside?" We walk out to the front stoop of the house, my Mom is there, about 6 feet down the walkway, glaring daggers at my Dad. "You have to tell her." "No, honey..." "No. You man up and tell her." And my Dad begins to unload 25yrs of infidelity and lies, beginning before they were married, and continuing on to the Day of the **X**. That was the day my eyes opened to the truth that my Dad, who punished us for lying and always held that Honesty and Integrity were the only values that mattered, was a pathological liar himself. Then the other shoe dropped: "We'd appreciate if you didn't tell your older sister, she's so stressed with school," my older sister was at that time a Plebe at the Naval Academy; "And your little sisters are just too young to handle this. Please don't involve them." At 16 I learned that my Father was and is a liar and was told I couldn't speak of this to anyone in my immediate support system because it was "too stressful" or they were "too young". That's the day my childhood ended.
   — freiheitzeit






10. I was an idiotic 16 year old last year but Sept 11 2016 "haha ironic isn't it" I was told I had ewings sarcoma. It is a very aggressive cancer. I had to step up and actually work for once. I went from drinking every weekend to reading research papers and looking for clinical trials. Now I'm about to turn 18 and I'm cancer free.
    — Azazel1661


11. EDIT: SHIT I rambled. TL;DR: my friend died after we had been in the hospital together. Watched his five year old sister not recognize his corpse. I had a friend when I was 9-10 years old. He was closer to my sister than to me, she was 11-12, he was 12-13 at the time of his hospitalization and eventual death. She was in love with him. He had his first girlfriend at the time. Until I was 7, almost 8, this boy's family and mine had been neighbours. We rode the same bus. My mother made extra money on the side by watching all the neighbourhood kids after school from 3-6, and he had always been one of them. He was ethereally kind, patient, and tranquil for a boy hitting puberty. He played with his four year-old sister every time she asked, even if he had promised to play video games with his own friends. He played everything from pretend to dress-up. I'm physically disabled. Cerebral palsy. When the kids went out for bike rides, I couldn't join. This boy made me my neopets account and read everything for me because I could only read in French, and not well. We moved four hours away. Before we left, the boy had a health scare. He had collapsed, unable to breathe, and his heart stopped, but they brought him back. He had just eaten peanut butter before the attack, so the doctors assumed it was a peanut allergy. About a year after we had moved, he was 13, had gotten said aforementioned first girlfriend, my sister got moody about it but what could she do? We were four hours away. The boy occasionally chatted with me on MSN to give me Neopets tips or help me with my spelling. I had to get a surgery on my legs to help my palsy. I was in the hospital recovering for a few months, and one day my parents said they thought they had seen a truck with the boy's family's business logo on it. Kids from our old town would come to this city all the time because we had the best children's hospital in the country, but they had to be really sick to merit the cost of transportation. So my parents call his. Sure enough, he had another attack, they brought him back. He simply had more allergies than the doctors had previously thought, or so was the diagnoses. He was now also "allergic" to freshly cut grass. Oh, and asthma. He came to visit me. My god, I can't forget his face. His skin was whiter than anything I've ever seen. He was hooked up to a giant machine with tubes in his nose and just walking around with it trailing along, he was smiling. I can't describe how white he looked. I'm trying to think of anything for comparison. I don't even think snow is approximate. The pinkness of his lips was so powerfully contrasted. The darkness of his eyes. And he was just smiling. He brought me presents. I lost them a month later. Six months later, I get the news that he had had yet another attack when his family was at their cottage. Apparently it happened faster than ever before. They thought he was having an asthma attack, gave him his puffer and took him outside, he couldn't breathe, apparently he looked up at his mother, said, "Mom, I'm so scared." and just took a huge gasp before falling to the ground. No pulse. His father tried giving him CPR. An ambulance was called and they took him to our city, four hours away, that children's hospital. He was in a coma on a ventilator. I remember I was learning about comas at that time in school, reading a book about a fictional boy named Kevin who was in one. I remember that Kevin had been breathing on his own in the book and the fictional doctors had remarked it was a good thing. When I learned that my friend wasn't breathing on his own, I experienced stress for the first time. I don't remember how many days it took. I just remember coming home for school every day and asking "Mommy, is X better?" And she would say "come upstairs and sit down." I'd get mad because I knew that meant I was going to have to hear something I wouldn't like. She always had freshly made cookies waiting for me after I had limped my way up the steps and would try to get me to eat them before talking. I always pressured her into telling me. The facts were always grim. "His mom called today and told me he hasn't moved yet and his eyes aren't moving in his sleep." and I would say "Oh." But she always told me we had to think positively and give him all our positive energy so he would get better. So I thought that was easy enough. He'd get better. I'd stress sometimes, but mostly I was fine. Then finally they hooked him up to a machine to measure his brain activity. My mom told me it was going to happen and what the consequences of having no brain waves would mean. Death. She promised to let us know as soon as she knew, but asked us not to message any of the family on MSN because they would tell people when they were ready. We were sitting in the living room watching Fairly Odd Parents. The phone rang. My mom went to the bathroom with the phone and locked the door. It seemed to only take a few seconds. She came in the living room again with my dad and they both looked suddenly extremely tired. They told us to pause the show because they needed to talk to us. I remember getting extremely angry at that point. I hated all the patience and formality around talking about him. I just wanted them to come out and say it. I remember my heart sinking. I remember being furious. I remember how it felt to know what they were going to say before they said it, but not wanting to believe it, wanting them to just spit it out, but not wanting them to say it, and just directing all of my anger toward my parents. I just started asking "What's wrong with him? What's wrong with him?!" over and over. They tried to lead it with some preamble but my mom's voice shook too much so she just said, "X died." Both my mom and dad started bawling. This was a kid that went to our birthday parties, a kid everyone loved. And I had lost my grandmother to cancer before. I knew about death because my twin sister had been stillborn and we talked about what that meant every year on my birthday. I had lost a pet bunny when a stray cat mauled him to death as he was hopping in the yard. But this just fucked with my 9 year-old head and heart. I felt so betrayed. Had I not thought the right thoughts? How could a KID just die?! Doctors had always helped **me** in the hospitals. Why didn't they help my friend?! I didn't voice any of that. I could only cry and I just started screaming his name louder than any sound I had made before. My throat hurt and my ears were ringing but I couldn't stop. My other sisters were crying too, but they were saying, "Emily, stop! Stop it! Shut up!" And I couldn't. My older sister who had been in love with him had been showing symptoms of social anxiety and OCD even at that age. She hated talking to people and had hid at our grandmother's funeral because the body made her panic about germs. The first thing she said between sobs when X died was, "When is the funeral? I need to be there, I have to go." But that wasn't what really broke my spirit. What really did it was attending the wake. I went around the room as a nine year old grieving my friend and telling strangers that I was sorry for THEIR loss when I came to his dad. Never had I seen a more broken face. He took one look at me and before I knew it I was whisked up into the air, my tear-streaked face being pressed against his cheek, and he stroked my hair saying, "Oh little Miss Em...Oh, Miss Em..." And I didn't know what to do so I just stayed quiet while his eyes were closed. I kept mine open and looked over his shoulder. What I saw in the corner haunts me to this day. His little sister. Five years old. She was holding a wallet-sized version of her dead brother's school picture and sobbing the sweetest little sobs. Her mom was kneeling beside her and pleading that she go up to the casket and say goodbye to her brother while she had the chance. She was shaking her head, crying, saying, "It's not X!" I remember thinking my heart had physically broken at that point. I got the shivers. My chest hurt. I had always been a crybaby but right there, I was the most moved I had ever been and I could not cry. My own little sister was five years old and she was his little sister's best friend. I thought about my own little sister mourning **me** like that, looking at a school picture instead of my real face when it was just a few feet away and it was the last chance she'd ever have to look at me. I was put back on the ground. I haven't been the same since.
    — emilyeverafter


12. My dad was extremely neglectful and abusive. My sister and I were left alone in an apparent sometimes just for hours, other times for weeks. I learned to cook, use the washer machine and walked my sister and I the 5 miles to school where at least I knew we could get 2 meals. For an 8 year old little legs those 5 miles felt like 50.. But I carried my backpack and my little 6 year old sister's backpack and pretended I was not tired to keep her spirits up.I would sometimes make a meal out of only crackers and peanut butter. The worst part is my father is very rich and could easily afford a nanny and a maid. He just kept us in an apartment because our mom didn't want us in the house because she had expensive furniture and glass decorations. My dad would pretend to take care of us while he went out with his mistress.
    — abyg9






13. 14 years old. I've been saving birthday money, christmas money, anything I could get my hands on so I could buy a $150 N64. Finally had the money. Asked Dad to take me to the store so I could buy it. He didn't believe I had the money. Told him how I'd been saving it for a few years and showed him the envelope of it in mostly 1's and 5's. "How the hell do you have more money than your mother and me?" He didn't take me to get that N64. My mother was the one giving my sister and I cash to buy our reduced cost school lunches and she cut me off since I had the money. She got very strict on when she'd buy me anything for school or anything. My sister was off the hook since she had no savings but I would have to dip into mine. I had to make that $150 last until I could get a job at age 16. Got a job and a car as soon as I could at 16 since my lunch money had run out. Basically only would eat dinner at work on my break at the fast food place I worked. Sometimes I could bring extra cooked stuff home with me but that wasn't often. Between my car payment, car insurance, cell phone, school bills, gas...I really didn't have any money left over even still for school lunches. Sometimes the lunch ladies would sneak me some food or friends would give me what they didn't want to eat. Thankfully I'm not a picky eater. Graduated high school and left home immediately since for all intents and purposes I was a tax paying, hard working, self supporting adult at that point. No sense in having my parent's restrictions (another story) holding me back. I graduated high school at 5'6" 110lbs. I'm male...my little sister ended up taller and heavier than me (not overweight, normal weight) by her graduation. I fully believe that poor nutrition stunted my growth. Fast forward to today and I bought the Switch on the day it came out. Thinking about picking up Mario tomorrow. The nostalgia of thinking back to the SM64 days is strong. As far as finances go I'm looking at a soft retirement around age 35. So I guess it's good that I got forced to grow up early. I missed out on a lot and it's impacted my priorities as an adult for sure though.
    — spyyked


14. Losing my job only 4 months out of college. I had just moved across the state after finishing 6 years of undergrad. New city with no money, but I was eager to get things going. 4 months into my job and suddenly there was a massive cut. 16 people lost their jobs, me included. I kept thinking that they couldn't lay me off. I was 24 and just started and was getting married next month. Nope, walked me out the door anyway. Not a single thing I could have done to prevent it. I learned that no matter position your are in, life can kick you in the ass for no good reason. In the first 48 hours, I filled out like 25 applications. Didn't get a single call back since I had no experience. I was panicking because it had taken my months to get a call back the first time. If it took that long again, I'd have to move home and wouldn't be able to afford a place with my soon to be wife. Luckily, I had stayed in contact with the HR representative who had let me go. He hated having to do it and apparently enough of my previous coworkers had voiced their opinion on letting me go that they offered me a position in a different department that needed to be filled. Same pay and everything, just no anything to do with my old job. I immediately said yes and went back to work the following monday. All of this took place over 4 days. I got extremely lucky. It was essentially a free lesson in how shitty life can be. I made it a point to gain as much experience as I could as fast as I could to avoid that again. 3 years later and I've been promoted once and am in the "inner circle" with the people who make decisions. I've gained some great contacts and am comfortable enough that if I did get laid off again, I would be able to find work relatively quickly with the help of those contact *and* my experience. I've had to create my own safety net.
    — forman98