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20 people answer the question: 'what's the most bad*ss thing your parents have done?'

When you&#39;re growing up and inside of the self-absorbed kid brain, it&#39;s easy to forget that your parents are full people who have lived through many lifetimes and a myriad of stories. Some of them have fled oppressive countries, others routinely stand up to bullies, and others know the secrets of building their own life path from scratch.The lucky among us are regaled with tales from our parents&#39; exploits, or get to witness firsthand just what makes them tick beyond the mundane duties of parenting.In a popular Reddit thread, user Vomit_Comet shared a story of their dad being admirably hardcore, and asked others to share stories of their own parents. 1. OP&#39;s dad doesn&#39;t play games. My father used to live in Chicago. He owned a furniture store. There was a large business across the street, and the business didn&#39;t have very good parking. So, this one employee would always park in my father&#39;s parking lot. My father asked him everyday for a week to please stop parking there, because it took parking spots away from his customers.  On the first 4 days the guy says &quot;yah, sure. I won&#39;t park here.&quot; On the 5th day, the guy says, &quot;F*ck off! This is a free country!&quot;  So, my dad waits for the guy to park in his lot again the following Monday. The guy parks in my father&#39;s parking lot, flips him off, and then storms to the business across the street.  So, my father being the natural bada*s he was, sprays water all over the car. Keep in mind this is in CHICAGO. In the F*CKING WINTER.  When the guy comes out from work a few hours later, he finds my dad standing there with a hose, smoking a cigarette, with the douchebag&#39;s car almost completely frozen. The guy flips his shit and tells my dad he&#39;s calling the cops, and my father just says nonchalantly &quot;It&#39;s a free country, isn&#39;t it?&quot;.  The douchebag&#39;s car was frozen in my father&#39;s parking lot for the rest of the winter. It was actually in the news, but I can&#39;t seem to find it on the internet, considering it happened in like the 60&#39;s.  Needless to say, the following spring, the guy didn&#39;t park his car in my father&#39;s parking lot. TL;DR Guy parks his car in my father&#39;s parking lot and refuses to stop doing it, so my father turns the car into an ice cube. 2. PepperAndSalt&#39;s dad could write a book about his exploits. Been a buffalo hunter (which is more like herding than shooting)  Been gored through the leg by a buffalo  Has had a stick fly up whilst hunting and stick him through the leg, at which point he drove himself to the nearest nurse station 100km away and fixed himself up because the nurse fainted when she realised it was all the way through Trekked and ridden a motorbike over some of the world&#39;s highest roads (in India and China, mainly) at the age of 65  Rides a big red Harley Davidson around the town and has to braid his beard to stop it whipping him in the face Survived multiple motorbike accidents Still holds his former college&#39;s tequila drinking record  Perhaps the most bada*s: He had a motorbike accident on a remote country rode, broke his leg among other things, sat around for 3 hours before someone came by, waited another few hours for an ambulance. In the hospital they realized after a few days that he wasn&#39;t crapping his pants and in fact his leg was massively infected. Long story short, they sliced his cast open, it started swelling, they cut his knee open with a scalpel and pus and blobs and disgustingness started spewing out. They realised it was bad news, wheeled him out of the hospital to the helipad but it had been called off to another emergency, so they stuck him in an ambulance and shut down a lane of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to rush him through to the main Sydney hospital. He spent the next year in a hyperbaric chamber in an out of consciousness, they wheeled him into surgery to amputate at least 6 times but decided to leave it. First leg saved through the oxygenation method.  Deep down I kinda wish they&#39;d cut off his leg because then my dad would look more like a pirate. tl;dr: Motorbike, beard, gangrene, Sydney Harbour Bridge. The father in question (beard is tied up in the photo, it&#39;s another 3 or so inches long) 3. torreneastoria&#39;s dad rose from the dead. 3.5 years ago my dad was declared brain dead for abut 3-4 hours with EEG testing. He was given his last rights, and we were saying good-bye to him. As per his standing wishes he was not to live as a vegetable.  I watched the respirator breathe for him, and his pace maker shock his heart every few seconds for more than an hour. At about 2 am the respiratory technician and doctor began to take my dad off of life-support. When the respiratory technician removed my dad&#39;s breathing tube my dad started to choke. It took him about a minute and a half to come to full consciousness. His heart started beating on his own and he also was breathing. Within another half an hour he was talking, telling us how he had an amazing dream about his grandfather telling him that his life wasn&#39;t over yet. His grandfather has been dead since my dad was about 10 years old.  TL;DR - My dad was declared brain dead and while &quot;pulling the plug&quot; he came back. 4. iLuVtiffany&#39;s mom jumped into the pool, jewelry and all, to save them. When I was a kid, there was a birthday party at the pool. One of my friends knew how to swim and went into the deep end. I, feeling jealous, went into the deep end too. I didn&#39;t know how to swim. I started drowning. My mom wearing nice clothes, made up, wearing jewelry and all jumped into the pool and saved me.  I know that&#39;s something all parents will do, but the fact that it actually happened and she saved me, to me, was the most bad a*s thing my mom ever did. 5. brothergrimm&#39;s dad set the bullies straight. My older brother has a mental disability and when we were little, he was relentlessly bullied by the neighborhood kids. Daily verbal harassment, beatings, getting spit on, etc. My parents were losing their minds over this trying to figure out how to protect him. They both worked long hours and the worst stuff would happen before they could get home. They tried talking to the worst offenders&#39; parents, but they wouldn&#39;t do anything to rein in their little shits. One day, when I was about 10 and my brother was 11, my dad got home early to find out my brother had once again been jumped, but this time the attackers were still outside our house.  My dad flew out the front door with my brother in tow to find them, enraged. I had never seen him so pissed. Several hours later he returned, and my brother told me what happened: my dad found the little fuckers (they were around our age) and got into a screaming match with them in the middle of the street. One of them flipped my dad off. My dad totally lost it, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and hauled off and kicked him in the ass. I should also mention that my dad was a champion tennis player and had legs like tree trunks.  The kid wasn&#39;t hurt badly, but was completely stunned that another adult, a stranger essentially, had physically struck him. He ran home crying. My mom spent the rest of the night freaking out that my dad was going to get arrested. Fortunately no cops were called. I had never been so simultaneously in awe of and proud of my dad.  TL;DR: dad literally kicked my disabled brother&#39;s bully&#39;s a*s EDIT: I should add that my dad immediately regretted doing this and knew he had crossed the line. 6. pok_guy&#39;s mother outswam tyranny. My mother was a teen living in Communist China, and her entire family was being persecuted (Her father was executed by the government). She attempted to escape to Hong Kong by swimming for three days through shark-infested waters. Many others had disappeared in those waters, often being swept to sea by the tides.  Twice, she got caught and put into escapee&#39;s prison twice, one of these prison stays was for more than a year. She didn&#39;t give up, and on the third try, she made it to Hong Kong where she started a new life. She is my hero. 7. stonedpockets&#39;s mother has lived a brave life in honor of their deceased dad. My father passed away when I was 8 years old, with my other siblings being 9 years old, 3 years old and 13months.  My mother has raised us all very well (I think), my elder sister is a pharmacist, I&#39;m studying at university and my younger siblings are still in school. My mother has managed to raise over &pound;100,000 for the disease which took my father, she has travelled to cuba and morrocco to run marathons well into her 50s and this summer she will be carrying the olympic torch. She&#39;s pretty bad a*s to me. 8. ItGotRidiculous&#39;s got in a fist fight with a seagull. While feeding the dolphins at Sea World: My dad is holding seven year old me up so that I can reach the dolphin and pet it before dropping a tasty fish in its mouth. A seagull swoops in and grabs the fish from my hand. My dad punches the seagull right in the beak. Surprised, the seagull drops the fish, and attempts to fly away, but was apparently dazed and ends up corkscrewing into a wall. The dolphins still sing songs of his praises. 9. pygarthepillager&#39;s dad survived the Death March. My dad joined the Army at the age of 13 with a forged birth certificate. He was unusually tall for his age and being the depression era, it was a way to get a roof over your head and three meals a day. I guess documentation was a lot different back then.  Anyway, he ends up in a Coastal Artillery Unit on the Island of Corregidor in Manila Bay, the Philippines. He was there when the Japanese invaded at the outset of WWII. He survived the siege and fall of Corregidor, the Bataan Death March and spent the rest of the war as a POW. He suffered from many chronic health problems related to physical abuse, malnutrition and parasitic infection endured during that time.  Most of his VA doctors told him he would likely not survive past forty. Still, he met and married my mom, raised three boys (of which I am the youngest), and worked until the last year of his life. He passed away at the age of 78. He is a most definite Bada*s in my book. He was and will always be my greatest hero. 10. ApparentlyNotAToucan&#39;s dad is a miraculous multi-tasker. My parents got into a train-wreck in India in the 70s. Luckily they weren&#39;t in the wagons affected the worst, because most people in these died. Nevertheless, injured people everywhere.  So my Dad got out his travel-medipack and begins to bandage a couple of strangers while still inside the derailed train car. After he patched a couple of people up, he almost fainted. That&#39;s when he bandaged his bleeding headwound, while comforting my mom. I hope I can do something like this at least once in my lifetime... 11. MyNameIsChar&#39;s mom is tough as nails. My Mother: Once disarmed a suicidal gunman who was threatening everyone in the house with an arsenal of weapons.  Worked in a Salt Mine for a month, when she was 16, until the mine realized that she was too young and they had hired the wrong person. She worked loading 50-100 pound sacks of rock salt with her bare hands, for 5-8 hours a day.  Moved to Massachusetts to become a female pro wrestler with her sister. Their stage names were going to be Scarlett and Erica America.  Once the Pro wrestling thing fell through, she put her supervisor at Texas Instruments (where she&#39;d found a job) - who was about 200 pounds and six feet tall - into a Full Nelson and refused to let him go until he admitted that she should have gotten the promotion he got and call her &quot;Uncle Nancy&quot;.  Was a Machine Operator at Texas Instruments who self taught herself how to fix the machine she operated. She learned how to fine tune her machine to put out more calculators than every before, and she broke every record as far as Quality Control and Output goes.  After her first husband left her, she worked on a fishing boat, in Alaska, Deadliest Catch style. After I was born and her second husband (My Father) left her, she became a foster parent for At-Risk youths that no other homes (besides group homes) would take. Is now a Long Haul Truck Driver who is approaching a million driven miles. She is #1 in her company - ahead of guys who&#39;ve been driving for ten, twenty years - as far as total miles ran per year. 12. Sin25&#39;s dad ate a spider to prove a point. My dad ate a motherfucking spider to prove to my little sister that they are harmless. 13. Gidian9&#39;s dad climbed a mountain in honor of their mom. My mother died when I was six from cancer. 11 years later my father ran the &quot; high adventure group in my boy scout troop. We took a trip to Colorado to hike in the Rockies. ( we are in Memphis TN). The first hike was to a lake in the mountains near Brekenridge that my mother and father used tk spend alot of time when they were newly weds. We camped on bare rock by some old mining shacks in the process of being reclaimed the the mountains. I awoke in the morning to find my father missing. I asked around and was told my father had gone up the mountain.  We were staying on a plateau in a bit of a valley that led up the mountain to the lake. Up the maintain here means a small trail that leads almost strait up another 300 feet. I got my binoculars and began looking. Soon I saw my Dad slogging up the mountain with a huge rock clutched in his hands. He was hauling them up to build a shrine to my mother. It sits there today, 4 feet tall, on the edge of a cliff, by a crystal clear mountain lake that meant a lot to them, overlooking the entire mountain range. He has never spoken of to anyone. TL:DR my Dad built a mountain shrine to my Mom who died of cancer 14. michaelrohansmith&#39;s mom has transformed lives. My mother taught disabled children for 40 years. During that time she taught deaf girls to dance ballet, and educated children who were totally deaf and blind. 15. Jazzspasm&#39;s parents have both made a mark. My Dad is a retired Consultant Paediatritian. I figured out he must have made around 10,000 sick children healthy, saved a lot of lives. In the village where I grew up, people named thier kids after him and me, because they wanted their boys to grow up to be either him or like one of his kids (I have no other idea why my name. I was a right little shit). Apart from that, his eardrums blew when a grenade went off next to him while he was in the Royal Marines. Underwater.  As for my Mum, she&#39;s a playwrite and had the first play by an English dramatist other than Shakespeare performed in the Irish National Theatre. 16. ApesApesApes&#39;s dad is ride-or-die for mom. Dad took a broken bottle to the neck defending my mothers honour in a bar, had a gnarly scar. 17. Alicethelion&#39;s dad helped disassemble the Berlin wall. In 1989 my dad took a road trip around the race circuits of Europe. he ended up in Berlin during November and helped them take down a wall. 18. bubblescivic&#39;s dad has overcome the odds. My dad came to the US in 1975 with nothing. His first years in this great nation were met with difficulty due to the language barrier, racism &amp; crimes committed against him. Through all this, my father managed to:  marry my mother and have my brother and I learn English and become quite fluent work as a diesel mechanic for 18 years until he could save up for his own business  started and ran 25 nail salons for over a decade made sure over 140 employees were well taken care of sponsored over 40 people (~30 are family) to gain residence visas and subsequently citizenship in the US flew to Vietnam and brought my grandfather to the US for medical care, paid cash for it.  adopted an abandoned mentally ill young man who is my older brother, he was born with normal mental capabilities and became mentally retarded after an accident. His father remarried and his stepmother wanted him out so my dad took him in.  has paid for College for my brother and I. Cars, rent, etc. My dad is a bada*s 19. Alpaca3229&#39;s dad took the law into his own hands. Dad turned vigilante awhile back and busted drug dealers and crackheads. I think that&#39;s pretty bada*s. 20. Jukibom&#39;s mom is NOT the one to mess with. We had a chequebook stolen from the family business along with a few other bits. We&#39;d been broken into a ton of times over the summer and the police didn&#39;t / couldn&#39;t do anything so we thought nothing of it, cancelled the chequebook, filed a report and tried to get on with things.  We then got a phone call from a local money shop (the deal in small loans, pawn jewelry, cheques and so on) saying someone was trying to cache a blacklisted cheque. My parents told them to keep him waiting and jumped in the car. When they got there, this guy freaked and bolted - my mum caught him at the door and he pushed her back. She smacked him one but the guy kept running. My mum (in freaking wellies and aged 50) chased this 20-ish guy down the main road, stopping traffic and knocked seven shades of shit out of him, pinning him down until the police got there.  Seriously, don&#39;t f*ck with my mum. 