This doesn’t qualify as the best decision, but I remember when I was 10 or so, I asked my mother to iron one of my shirts, and she replied, “I can’t because I don’t know how to put up the ironing board.” At the time, I thought she must be really dumb because it wasn’t that hard. She was dumb, like a fox because I learned how to iron my own clothes. A simple life’s lesson that served me well for years.
My parents were both elementary school teachers, and thus knew the value of reading and learning on your own. That was the reason that we did not have a TV in our house until I (the youngest) was a freshman in high school. Of course the four of us kids hated it growing up, but we certainly now see the value of that decision. We all were (and still are) voracious readers.
Making me study music. I had the stereotypical crabby old lady piano teacher, who stopped short of rapping my knuckles with a ruler if I played a wrong note, but yelling was fair game. She wouldn’t let me play anything other than Royal Conservatory music or classical piano—no pop, no rock, no jazz; and certainly no fun. I hated piano lessons with her, but kept on because my parents demanded that I do, and gave me no choice. As soon as I could (i.e. when I joined high school band at about 14 or 15; my parents said that if I joined the band, I could quit piano), I quit with her.
And to my surprise, I found that I loved music! I could read it, and the stuff we played in band was a lot more fun than those dreary Conservatory tunes. Moreover, while I played trombone, I found that I could read music well enough to play our band stuff on piano, to get the feel of the tune. That brought me back to piano, and it was then that I loved it! I joined a garage R&B band with my trombone, and later, I’d pick up the flute and the spoons.
Although I’ve played on pub stages a few times, I’m a realist: I know that I’ll never do anything than jam in informal settings. But music has remained a favourite hobby, and I still play all of the above instruments. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the music!
And though not my Mom, but certainly my Dad: he encouraged me to get out and see Canada. By the time he was 23, he had seen a great chunk of Canada west of Montreal, and up into the near-Arctic as well. Not by air (well, maybe once or twice), but by road and by rail. His stories made me curious, and with his encouragement, I’m happy to say that I’ve been across this country (all 5000 miles) by land, on road and rail. Gosh, what a place we’ve got here! Never would have seen it, if Dad had not encouraged me to see it as he did: from the ground. Mom wasn’t exactly happy (to her, our home of Toronto was the centre of the universe and there was no need to go anywhere else, but if you really want to go to Vancouver for a vacation, just fly), but Dad’s stories won out over Mom’s objections. One of the best things my Dad ever did was to encourage me to go out and see what an extraordinary land we have by ground routes, and I have to say—thank you, Dad!
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I guess at the outset, the best decision they made was to adopt me.
After that they supported my interests and, with some guiderails but little prodding, let me choose my own path in life. My dad once told one of his family members, who was chastising him for not making me go to some prestigious women’s college and study law or something, that if I wanted to go to Notre Dame and try out for football captain he’d help me do just that.
Dad and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but I am forever grateful for that rock solid support.
They moved. They grew up in the midwest. My dad’s first job offer after graduating from college was in the Pacific Northwest, so they moved there, sight unseen. They stayed there.
My mom went to bat for me at elementary school. She made sure I got an IEP for speech therapy. She also made sure that I was allowed to read anything I want, even if my friends’ moms called and complained that I was reading unsuitable material (Judy Blume and Stephen King, for example).
I wrote about the abuse and all, but perhaps the best decision my dad did was to get a government job. A guidance counselor in college recommended that because of his abrasive personality.
A lot of his bosses wanted to fire him, but they couldn’t.
He saved up enough sick leave and annual leave that after he got leukemia, he was able to last out until he could get early retirement, which my mother was able to get a nice annuity.
That set it up that she’s financially stable, so we don’t have to worry about her.
Raising my sister and I without religious belief. My mother was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and hated it, my father is Jewish, we were brought up celebrating the only cultural parts of Judaism (as well as Christmas) without any of the actual God stuff. No Hebrew school, temple, church, etc.
I never had to rebel against it or grow out of it, or search for answers, or any of that. It simply wasn’t there to begin with, which I am so glad about.
Same here. My seventh- or eighth-grade teacher (I remember the teacher but not the year because I had her both years) recommended The Godfather. Yes, that’s right. The teacher of a thirteen-ish-year-old boy in 1970, give or take a year, recommended he read The Godfather because she knew he would think it was a cool-ass book.
So I went home and mentioned it to my mother. The following Saturday, she packed me up in the car and took me to the bookstore, where we found a copy of the book and took it to the cash register. The lady who worked there refused to sell it to us because it came out in the idle chitchat that takes place during such moments that the book was for me, and she, the lady who worked there, didn’t deem it suitable reading for a young lad of my age.
Whereupon my mother decided it was necessary to educate this woman on on the idea that it was none of her business what I read or what she, my mother, wanted to buy or why she wanted to buy it, and that she (the bookstore lady) was indeed going to SELL US THE BOOK. Not ranting and raving, but “measured” and very, very, very assertive.
So we went home with the book, and I read it, and indeed I thought it was cool-ass. In the long run, the book itself wasn’t what you’d call life changing, but that incident made a big and lasting impression on young dirtball. Thank you, Mom.
That was another thing my folks did right. They let me read pretty much what I wanted to. Judy Blume was never an issue, but in 5th or 6th grade I brought Catcher In The Rye to school read at free time or on the bus or something, and the teacher called my parents. Teacher was told in no uncertain terms that if I could read it and wanted to read it, anything I had easy access to was fair game. The only time I can ever remember being told that I was too young for a book was when I asked my mom what Fear Of Flying was about (it was on a bedroom dresser). Come to think of it, I’ve still never read it!
I just discovered (rediscovered?) what camera crazy folks my parents were. I have inherited a massive collection of photos that I never really took the time to look at until recently.
Photos have been way too difficult to look at for many years. I even gave a huge box to one of my cousins to go through as it was just too exhausting.
But now I am starting to appreciate their photography and have been sharing carefully selected pictures with family on Facebook.
These small everyday decisions to capture moments in time are greatly appreciated.
They stopped when they got it right.
Three really good things, two major and one seemingly minor but ultimately quite useful:
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Sent me to private school for high school. I was devastated - I wanted to go to the big public high school with all my friends from eighth grade. But I see now that the private school was far better academically and surrounded me with people who valued knowledge, and using that knowledge to help people. The public school was basically a party school; I’d have turned into a total goof off.
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Invited two of my cousins, a brother and sister one year older and one year younger than me, to live with us for a couple of months during three or four summers while we were growing up. I was an only child and really appreciated the chance to experience a little bit of what it was like to have siblings. That’s not why my parents did it; it was to get the cousins out of a bad home situation (alcoholic dad), but it was win-win for everyone.
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Forced me to take typing in summer school between 8th and 9th grade. Probably for wrong, sexist reasons, since this would have been 1972, but with the rise of personal computing in the following decades, it was very useful.
The smartest decision my parents made was to marry each other. My mother’s natural warmth and humor perfectly complemented my father’s Lord Byron-level romanticism wrapped up in a shell of cynicism, and both of them had a work ethic that had been honed growing up during the Depression.
The best decision they made was not to follow almost every one of their neighbors and not run away to the outer suburbs when Blacks started moving into the neighborhood. They felt that living next door to a Black family was no reason to panic. They stayed there for 20 years until my mother died and my father retired.
Convincing me to go to college even though I had the “perfect” job waiting for me right out of high school.
During high school I was enamored with becoming a dolphin trainer after a school outing at a nearby marine park my freshman year. I somehow managed to get a job working there during the summer between my junior and senior year and they said they would hire me full time as a marine mammal trainer as soon as I graduated from high school.
I told my parents that I wanted to work there full-time and if things didn’t work out I could go to college and get my degree, but they insisted that if they were going to pay I would have to go to college full-time but I could work at the park during my summer break and on holidays. I reluctantly agreed, and it turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
I graduated with a degree in Zoology and worked year-round at the park, but soon realized it wasn’t as great a job as I had thought, and the money was lousy. I quit and got a job at a high tech start-up and worked my way up to director of support. That start-up was acquired by a large company and soon I was in charge of a 250 person worldwide customer support operation and make beaucoup bucks.
I really loved working with the animals, but working in the entertainment industry doesn’t pay well unless you are a star, which I never was, and never was going to be.
I’m trying to think about what the best decision was. One thing was encouraging my hobby of genealogy (weird hobby for a kid, but a really good time to start—people are still alive!). They put me in touch with a wide variety of distant relatives, which was neat and useful, and I’m still close to one of these people (most have died by now).
Another was insisting that I choose a college major that interested me, and not think about money. Okay, maybe I should have thought a little bit about money, but in general that was good advice.
There’s also the decisions in the negative: they limited my exposure to toxic relatives and did not raise me in a religion, which (as a gay person) made things a lot easier in my 20s.
You’re clearly the youngest sibling…?
In my family, my parents kept trying and trying to repeat the excellence (5 kids) but it was just all downhill.
My folks stopped when they had one that they liked.
Was my Mom. Divorce my Dad and move the hell out of central ILL to Colorado.
I don’t have to think about it. Maybe not a decision strictly speaking, since it was automatic; when their grandchild (my daughter) came out to them as a trans woman, they immediately voiced their support. Don’t tell me two devout Baptists in their eighties can’t evolve. They loved and supported her until the day they died. Now I’m tearing up from typing it.
That’s beautiful.
Same thing here, when our son came out to us (gay) we immediately supported him. We are Christians strong in our faith. Those extremists who quote selectively from the Bible about Homosexuality Is Wrong and all that, they’re hiding behind those verses and they’re wrong.
God is love. 1 John 4:8b
/hijack