Best Decision Your Parents Made

In My Humble Opinion
1

We have a thread about the worst mistakes your parents made, I thought we should also have a space for the good things your parents have done, when they absolutely got it right.

Mine is incident based. At the time I was probably 1-2 years old, this involves my older brother, who would have been maybe 10. My dad had a 1968 Corvette convertible, he was a car guy for sure. The car is parked and he asks my brother to put the windows up. Bro gets in the car, and turns the key to activate the power windows.

Naturally, since I’m retelling this story 50+ years later, the car starts. As Dad was firmly in the “put the car in reverse when you park it” camp, the car starts off backwards down the driveway. Down the driveway and off the driveway into the woods. Dad runs down to the car, and the first words my brother remembers him saying:

You didn’t do anything wrong.

That’s gold medal parenting, right there. I could sit for an hour and not come up with a better response than he did on the spot.

2

I got a lot of good life lessons from my parents, both from what they said and what they did. Be responsible, pull your own weight (at a minimum), keep your promises, tell the truth, be careful with money (I only sort of half learned that one), probably lots more that I can’t think of. I don’t think I could pull one out to call it the best. I do have a persistent memory of my mother paying bills at the end of the month. She had the stack of bills, a roll of stamps, envelopes, and the checkbook. She radiated such a sense of satisfaction when she was finished, that between them (they both worked) they had gone another month with even a small surplus after the bills were paid. (There was a similar scene in the movie I Remember Mama, involving cash instead of checks.) Who wouldn’t learn from watching that month after month?

3

My mom never bought us soda or sugary cereals. (Grandma was good for a box of Cocoa Puffs now and then). However, we never got in the habit of drinking soda, it was regarded as a very occasional treat. That’s the way I still feel about it, and I’m glad I didn’t ruin my teeth or take in a lot of empty calories every time I was thirsty.
She also let me read any old thing I wanted to. Maybe she just wasn’t paying attention to all of it, but I know she never stopped me from picking up anything I found lying around.

4

Taking me to see Guys and Dolls on Broadway, even though I wanted to see CATS.

5

My parents decided to homeschool me all the way until college. With my ADHD, sleep disorders and partial illiteracy, I would never have made it in public school K-12. I think also that I have a bit of a free mind that would have been partially or wholly squelched if I’d been public-schooled.

6

I complain about my mom a lot, but she was great in a lot of ways too.

I told my mom I wanted to learn piano and she looked around until she found me a piano teacher – we did not live in the most urban place, so the closest one who was any good was about 40 minutes away! I still can’t believe that she took me to lessons. Now that I have my own kids I just don’t think I could schlep them 40 minutes there and back to lessons unless they were, like, piano prodigies. Which I definitely was not, although I still enjoy playing and I find it a very useful skill to have. (I guess I should say that we also went to violin lessons in that same city, and I was a bit of a violin prodigy at least in our non-urban area, so adding on piano was less of a marginal ask. But still!)

Conversely, I took ballet lessons (which I thought I’d enjoy) and I told my mom I wanted to quit after a few months, and although she did make me keep going until the end-of-year recital, she let me quit after that, which I’m still also very grateful for. I was miserable.

Oh this too. And I also think my parents weren’t paying too much attention – but I’m really glad for it. I read a lot of interesting things as a kid, some wildly inappropriate, but all of it makes me me.

7

My dad drilled a hole in the side of our black-and-white vacuum-tube-powered television set, and interrupted the electrical wire leading to the speaker; he ran a long cord out into the room and put a switch on the end of it, and operated the switch from whatever couch or chair he occupied. Commercial comes on, sound goes off.

Good solid lesson: commercials are attempts to brainwash you into buying things, and you should protect yourself against them.

Ingrained behavior for the rest of the family; if he wasn’t watching, one of the rest of us would hold the snapper and kill the sound any time a commercial came on.

8

They made a lot of good decisions, but the hands-down best one, which I took far too much for granted at the time, was saving enough money to pay for both of their kids’ college tuition, including a semester or year abroad, without taking out loans. No strings attached regarding choice of major and no helicoptering, just an expectation that we would get decent grades and finish on in four years. Knowing what I know now after eighteen years of working in higher ed, that’s a life-changing gift that very few students get.

9

I don’t know how she found out about it, probably through my school, but MammaHomie learned that a nearby college was holding a two week summer enrichment program for “gifted” kids, like me. It was to be effectively two weeks of the college experience for kids going into sixth and seventh grade. We lived in the dorms, took classes that were taught by the college’s actual teachers, and even signed up for electives — I took chess and calligraphy.

I ate that shit up. Two of the best weeks of my life, full stop. Yes there was some homesickness but come on, I was 12. Also, that was the summer that girls stopped being icky and started being attractive to the little pubescent Homie.

That must have cost Mom a fortune, at a time when we were unambiguously lower middle class. I’m glad she scraped up those couple hundred bucks.

10

When I was a teenager and had my first real summer job, working at a fast food restaurant, my dad made me do my (very simple) tax return by hand, on paper. So that I would know what every relevant line on the tax form was for, and how the math all worked. Just to get the little bit of withheld taxes refunded.

11

One of the hardest things with my Mom is how much she did right.

She let me see the value of education, as a single mother, graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering. She gave birth to me at age 19 over Spring Break. Never missed a class, which I find mind-boggling. My earliest memories involve sitting under her desk coloring while she took night classes.

She both demonstrated and taught me that my gender didn’t have to limit my life and that the path toward my own liberation was education. And she was right.

She made it clear that bigotry based on race, religion, etc was unacceptable. I know that seems like a low bar but in my community it really was taking a stand.

She supported me in my own interests even though she did not understand or share them. She let me go to writing camps, bought me a fancy-ass jazz trombone even though we didn’t have much money, and I was free to do whatever extracurriculars, every kind of band, theater, you name it, I at least tried it. She always told me she didn’t care what I did for a living as long as I was happy.

She let me read and watch whatever I wanted which greatly influenced my development as a young writer.

As for my biological father, we weren’t exactly close, but he encouraged my intellectual development to some extent, taught me how to play Scrabble and do jigsaw puzzles and learn new words in the dictionary. He taught me the National Anthem and was very proud of my intelligence. He was a surprisingly bright man for someone who barely graduated high school.

12

When I got my first full-time job that offered a 401K my father insisted, insisted that I enroll and never ever touch or borrow from it until I retire no matter how down on my luck or in debt I might be. Had my share of financial success and struggles the past 37 years but followed his rule.
I have friends who’s jaws drop when I tell them how much money I have saved for retirement.

13

My mother moved the family from Jugoslavia to Canada (where she and her first husband had lived before for three years) when I was one. She suspected there would be ethnic conflicts there. A decade later, those predictions came true and horrible wars started in the old country. By that time, my family was long safely out of harm’s way.

14

My father never really had much formal education, he dropped out of high school, got a GED and joined the army right at the tail end of vietnam as a medic…

However as an army medic and later a civilian paramedic he had a lot of friends and co-workers who did have a lot of college degrees and it was something he passed onto me and my siblings: the importance of seeking education… As a result all 5 of us finished at least a bachelors and a couple of us have masters and advanced professional degrees. We’re all also at least middle class.

15

Huh.

If only my parents had taken me to see the Broadway musical Oliver! which they didn’t think I’d like so the rest of the family went and left me home.

Instead, I got dragged to see the off-Broadway show America Hurrah, a searingly satirical but cosmically boring takedown of American consumerism and other sins written by some French guy in the form of three one-act plays, including Motel which featured a man and woman wearing giant papier-mâché heads pawing at each other, a dull but embarrassing skit that apparently was more interesting in the Australian production.

  • Wikipedia

(for some reason (the dreadful obscenity involved?) I can’t link directly, but the horrid scenes can be viewed by clicking a secondary link (Play - America Hurrah!).

16

My parents were far from wealthy, but they scrimped and saved and in addition to always owning their own home, they bought a country cottage because they thought it would be good for my older brother and me to spend summer in the country. They were so right!

Summer at the cottage instilled in me a lifelong love of nature and brought so many fond memories. I loved the faint smell of pine trees which were so abundant in the area, the sound of a whippoorwill late at night, the marvelous aroma of fresh bread when the truck from the village bakery arrived and flung open its doors, the crackle of the fire in our wood stove. I was mostly there with my mom as my dad worked most of the summer, but he’d arrive every Friday bearing gifts and goods from the market. It was such a totally different world from city living that when summer came to an end, returning to the city felt surreal to little me, like arriving on another planet.

I’ll always be grateful to my parents for that cottage.

17

My parents made (at least) two best decisions.

First, they emigrated from the Philippines to the US. 3 of 5 siblings, including me, were born in the Philippines, and the last 2 were born in the US. I’m so glad that we became Americans. I remember when I became a US citizen. I can hardly imagine my parents leaving the country they grew up in, their home country, to live in an entirely new place. I get it — a lot of people do it, but still…

Second, after growing up in the northeast US they moved the family to California (specifically, to San Francisco). I love it here in the San Francisco Bay Area and in California.

I’m extremely happy they made these decisions.

18

Sending me to live with my (remaining set of) grandparents for several weeks a year. Not only was it good to live for a while in a totally different part of the country, my grandparents were quite different people than my parents. My grandfather especially was very science and computing oriented, despite being in sales for a living. I just did a completely different set of activities with them than at home.

19

Besides the hare brained business misadventures and puffed-up job qualifications mentioned in the original thread, I’m grateful to the OP for this opportunity to solicit the things that I truly admired about those silly people. The former got our utilities shut off and left us eating squirrels; the latter actually put our lives in danger. (And with apologies to those who’ve read all this before. Fuck, I’ve been here a quarter century. Allow me some redundancies).

My parents, 1965ish or so, became involved in the Civil Rights movement. I can only recount this from a child’s perspective, and not an especially Scout Finch one at that.

Dragged along on shopping trips with my mother downtown (when that’s where the shopping was done) midwinter, I’d see Black men in thin Summer shirts being frogmarched from the jail to the courthouse. Of course it would not occur to me to question why the seasons had passed between arrest and eventual trail date for petty crimes with no bail. But my mother took note.

We alternated between Irish and South German Catholic Church services on the white side of town. For obstreperous boys, the difference was that Germans twisted the boys ears while the Irish slapped their faces, and both had Eucharist wafers that clung to the roof of the mouth soggily. A chance visit to a Black Roman Catholic parish on the other side of town was a revelation. They sang and danced and their communion wafers were fried crisp and tasty.

That visit began a friendship between my parents and a Black lawyer married to a white woman, whose kitchen was filled with wonders unknown to our home (see original thread), including abundant fresh fruit, and milk not made from a box of powder. But this man and wife couldn’t buy a house in a neighborhood commiserate with his income.

My parents, in their free time, performed legal paperwork on the kitchen table as amateur paralegals, and engaged in straw purchases of houses in redlined neighborhoods. This lead to parties that we kids would monitor from around the top corner of the staircase, where Black people and whites would sit in a circle and laugh uproariously at the absurdities of the racial divide of 1960s America.

(Warning: I won’t be “***ing” the actual quotes here) so of course the neighbor kids would relay their parents’ concerns “who were those niggers on your porch?” And I’d be swarmed by kids on the playground asking (with the same glee exhibited as when they’d catch a fly and drop it into a spiderweb) “I heard your dad’s a nigger-lover?” (Whatever happened to that particular snarl-word: “nigger-lover?)

1960s “slab-cars:” the Impala, the Galaxy 500, etc.: We’d be playing in the front yard, and they’d slowly cruise past; white guys in greasy rockabilly hairstyles eyeing us. “Those’re his kids” heard uttered. Phone calls were received, curtains drawn, and we’d be ordered to play indoors.

Then came the night, when my mom was not yet finished with her shift at the hospital ward, my dad, having put us to bed and enough time for us to having fallen asleep, was called to the back door by a (white) woman’s face in the window crying for Help. The instant he opened the door a shotgun muzzle was put to his head, and in short order he was blindfolded and wired to one of our aluminum tube and vinyl upholstered kitchen chairs. He was packed into a waiting car and dropped miles away into a snow-crusted Illinois cornfield, alive though thoroughly warned. We kids slept through it all; testimony to a professionalism much, much beyond the local Klan and more befitting law enforcement, intent on persuading such people as my parents to mind their own fucking business.

Thank you for reading my story. To paraphrase Talleyrand, “Whoever did not live in the year 1970 does not know the sweetness of life and cannot imagine what happiness there can be in life.” Believe it or not, the most important part, to me, was me myself, with my face in the staircase railings, listening in on the grownups’ raucous voices. And you should know that because of that, in the last 25 years of Great Debates, Politics and Elections, Cafe Society, etc.: that’s still me.

20

Two things. At the end of first grade, my mother somehow realized I could read anything, and took me to the library and got out a full Jules Verne book for me. Which I could read. I don’t know how she figured that out. I thought it perfectly normal to read at that level, probably another good thing she did. I didn’t realize it was odd until my daughter started to read. By then it was too late to ask.

The second thing was that my father agreed to pay for me to go to MIT (much cheaper back then, but still) though I got into Cooper Union, which was free, and I could live at home for free. Better than free - I had a Regents scholarship which would pay for books also and I’d still come out ahead.
It would not have been the same. My life is so much better going away, not even counting that I met my wife there.