My mom taught me to sew as a kid, which eventually led me to be able to make my own clothes.
My dad talked to me like a person, even when I was little. A large part of how I talk to my students from him.
Both of my parents gew up fairly poor - dad came off a small sheep farm, worked his way through University to become a geologist and the spent a lot of time working in mines & very remote areas of Australia. My mum was a Japanese POW in WW2 and then came to Australia & worked on the chicken farm her parents strated and she spent a lot of years living in caravans or fields camps with my dad & two small kids deep in the outback.
Eventually they moved to my home-town and had me 
My dad gave me a long lasting love of reading & science as well as bushcraft/camping and how to shoot, hunt, fish etc. As part of his work the whole family spent a month in Indonesia (back in the early 80’s) which was a hell of a way for a small Aussie kid to find out about other parts of the world (I was 10 I think). He also took me along as a field-hand on a 3-week survey trip outside Alice Springs & Mt. Isa when I was 15, which is why I still love going into Australia’s arid-zone.
My mum worked as an adminstrator at a local school/home for disabled kids (both physical & mental disabilities) and would take me along to help out around the place, meet the kids and get to know them as people first rather than the just seeing the obvious disability (this was when I was maybe, 8).
My dad is a big one for personal responsibility. Do something good & you get the full credit, screw up & you wear the consequences. When I was 7 we were down on the farm and my dad & granddad came up to me and handed me a single-shot .22 rifle (iron sights of course) and 10 rounds of ammo and said “Go get dinner.” So I had to go out and shoot enough rabbits to feed 7 people! They were serious too, what I brought back was dinner that night. If I had missed then the only thing we would have been having on our plates was mashed potatoes. 
Both parents are still alive and we seem to come from a long-living family (grandmother is still chugging along at 102!) so hopefully they will be around for a few years yet.
Growing up, my parents made the decision that all of us kids should be able to do pretty much anything around the house, at least at a basic level. So the taught us. There were no gender divisions or “well, that may be too much for you to learn” sort of thinking. That’s why I (and all of us, really) can go from working in the backyard garden to starting dinner with the food we’ve grown, to changing the car’s oil, to sewing up a small tear in some clothes.
As an adult, the most awesome thing they were able to do was float me a no-interest loan so I could buy a new car. My old truck (10 years with her) was starting to get to the point where it would start costing a good bit of money to keep her on the road, but I wasn’t in a financial place to be able to afford something much better. But my dad offered to front the money for a new car and let me pay it back as I can.
Until I was six, we lived in Vermont, and my dad worked as an electrician. He was out on big telephone poles and transformers and in schools and office buildings and everywhere, doing his thing. At that point, I was probably about 5 and had two younger brothers by then. And I went to work with my dad many times. Nowadays I guess you couldn’t really do that, but it wasn’t just one occasion. It wasn’t every day, probably a matter of 'Scott, take your daughter with you, I can’t handler her AND the boys today!".
I loved it. The jail he worked on had color television, when even WE didn’t. 
He climbed transformers while I reached up and tried to play gymnast on the bottom strut. I couldn’t climb the poles with him, but I really wanted to, and those giant telephone handsets he could just plug into the poles were the neatest things! And lunch was usually Chinese. As a family we only ever went out to McDonald’s, and that only a couple times a year, but those chinese lunches were awesome. I think he still laughs at my first reaction to chinese mustard, and to this day I don’t eat it without thinking of those times.
The year the Transformers toys came out, I wanted desperately an Optimus Prime. (This would have been 1982 or 83 I guess). Their were none to be had anywhere as the toy was extremely popular and a rather expensive toy at that time in my parents life. Sure neouhg on Christmas morn, however, there was an Optimus Prime sitting under the tree. I later found out my dad had drive four hours away to get that toy for me after spending who knows how many of his evenings after working long shifts at the dye plant to find it for me. That’s just one of thousands of little things he did growing up.
Around that same age, I recall desperately wanting a Member’s Only jacket which where the in thing at the time (This was in the days of yore when Jordache was a brand name for jeans). We didn’t have the money, and my mom told me how much I /could/ spend. She also offered that if I wanted to save up my allowance that I earned doing chores and check with neighbors to see if they had chores I could do to earn money. And that when I had the difference saved up, -then- I could have a Member’s Only jacket if I liked. Again, one of a thousand things they’ve done for me.
I love my parents, I still talk to them weekly and have dinner with them or visit regularly.
When I was six, my parents took me to Disney World. At the time, plane travel was comparatively much, much more expensive than it was today, and my parents had to really scrape for us to go there; they didn’t make much money then and Dad was going back to school. Oh, and my Mom was pregnant. But they wanted to do that for me before another kid came along and made it impossible to do.
It was awesome - indeed, it’s one of the earliest really clear memories I have. I had an utter blast. In the mornings my Dad would get me up early so we could go look for chamelons, or geckos, or whatever the little lizards there are, and then off we’d go to some attraction. Disney World itself was heaven on earth - back then it was just the Magic Kingdom, but that was enough for me - and my folks spared no expense on that day.
Many years ago I had a clueless, and culturally insensitive teacher that required everyone to write an essay about what the Jesus of Christianity meant to them. I earnestly complied. However, my cultural mythology about the Jesus of Christianity was considerably ifferent from hers and she didn’t like so much that there were threats of expulsion unless I rewrote it to something the teacher found acceptable. My father in a truly rare moment of involved parenting showed up for the parent/school conference dressed in his finest suit, most expensive jewelry and with an entourage of not only our lawyer, a guy from the ACLU, and a local news reporter. Needless to say efforts to punish little ZPG Zealot for having non-mainstream spiritual beliefs died a quick death. Looking back, I realize that my father probably saw the lawsuit potential in circumstances, but at the moment when he made his entrance into the principal’s office, fedora still on his head in defiance of the school’s no-hat policy, with lawyers right behind them, he became superman in my eyes at least for that one afternoon.
My dad taught me to read at a very early age and encouraged me to read anything and everything that I wanted. It became SOP around the house that I went with him to the bookstore on Saturday afternoon, and when he got finished with the Book-of-the-Month selection, it went to me and I was the one who put it on the bookshelf after I finished reading it.
I remember being at a parade when I was about 7 or 8. A boy from my school (also from our church) was teasing me about being fat – my mom had walked off somewhere and was walking back to where I was and heard him uttering the words “15,000 pounds” and COMPLETELY went off on the little bastard verbally and scared the shit out of him. It was awesome 
I miss you so much, Mom 
My dad got me a ride in a P-51 Mustang piloted by WW II ace Bob Hoover.
I was a disorganized student, much to my mom’s chagrin, as she has a very orderly mind. Late one night when I was nine, I suddenly realized I had a book report of a biography of my choosing due the next day and I hadn’t even read a book, much less written the report. I was near tears (despite being disorganized, I was still a grade-grubber) when Mom threw me in the car and hightailed it to the library minutes before it closed for the night. We selected the biography of Maria Tallchief, since Mom knew something about her life, and hustled home. She sat with me and showed me how to skim the book and take notes, and we put the book report together from that. We were up past midnight, so she let me sleep in and drove me to school since I missed the bus. Once the ordeal was over, she made it patently clear that incident was my mulligan and she’d never do it again – and I never needed her to.
My dad was what you’d call a character, so there were a lot of moments – spontaneous trips along Lake Shore Drive, intense sessions of teaching and re-teaching things like the formula to convert temperature from Celsius to Kelvin and back or Ohm’s Law or the laws of perspective, really whacked-out and loud games of Pictionary – but the first thing that springs to mind is also kind of – well. Dad had terrible teeth in the years before he died – missing, loose, blackened gums, the whole nine. When I told him I was getting married and I wanted him to walk me down the aisle, he went out and had his teeth pulled and dentures made. I never asked him to do it – I didn’t care, truly, and I know it was a painful, expensive, and probably embarrassing ordeal – but he decided it was necessary and he went out and did it. And at our wedding, my normally hermetic and cantankerous dad danced and smiled and was friendly and gregarious just for me. Jesus Christ, I miss Dad.
When I was 9 years old my parents scrimped and saved and sunk themselves into debt in order to take me on a train trip from Toronto to Vancouver & back. We even took a bus & ferry to Victoria for a few days. That was 30 years ago and I still remember going through the Rocky Mountains on a train.
We were poor and when I was 10 years old Cabbage Patch Dolls were all the craze. There were riots in stores to get them. I knew damn well that my parents couldn’t afford one for me and never expected one. One day I came home from school to find a brand-new Cabbage Patch Doll sitting on my bed. Turned out my Mom was in Eaton’s going to buy me new shoes. There was a big commotion and she realized it was over Cabbage Patch Dolls so she turned up a different aisle and her foot hit a box - she looked down and there was a Cabbage Patch that looked just like me. She said her first thought was “Looks like Juicy’s not getting new shoes.” I still have that doll.
I think it was before either Grade 4 or 5, so I was either 9 or 10, and my Mom dropped me off at a hairdressing place for a back-to-school haircut. She left me there while she went shopping for my school supplies. The people at the salon asked what I wanted and I said “Parted in the middle, feathered back at the sides.” (This was in the early 80’s, LOL.) They were all “But is that what your MOTHER wants?” and I said, “It doesn’t matter what she wants, it’s MY hair.” This went on for a while and they refused to cut my hair. I waited for about an hour until my Mom came back and when she did she said “Why is she not done?!” and they said “We didn’t know what YOU wanted.” She said “It doesn’t matter what I want, it’s HER hair! As long as her bangs don’t hang in her eyes I really don’t care!” She was visibly pissed off that they didn’t listen to or respect me. That incident sticks in my mind because I felt like she was acknowledging me as being grown-up and was annoyed that others would treat me like a child.
I can think of two really awesome things my dad did for me.
One was teaching me about sports and cars, upon request, so I could converse intelligently with the boys. It appeared to me that was all any of 'em know how to talk about, so if I wanted to avoid awkward silences and being treated like a mindless little princess, I’d better know a little something about cars and football. He sat down with me through many football games and explained everything, answered all my questions. He did that with wrestling (which was a big deal in my high school) and with cars. He taught me the difference between a fuel injected engine and a turbo engine. Imagine my delight when I corrected a boy on the matter.
The other thing was teaching me independence. He would never just go do stuff for me. He’d make me sit there and think it through, decide what phone calls I needed to make first, for more information, and then help me out if I still couldn’t figure out what was the next step. I remember watching in shock as a mid-20s aged girl once cried and whined at her mom, while they were both on break at work, because she wasn’t feeling well. She wanted her mommy to call and make her an appointment. I was all :eek: “You are 26 years old. You don’t know how to call your own doctor and make an appointment?” WTeverlovinF.
Mostly what I value is the DadZilla driver’s training. He’d spent a lot of time with my sister, three years earlier, teaching her how to drive. He’d gotten much busier by the time I got there, so spent a fraction of the time with me. Consequently, I was a really shitty driver. One day he asked me if I was ever going to get off my duff and go take the test and get my license. I told him I wasn’t so sure about all that because we hadn’t spent much time and I’d already failed it once and didn’t see how I was any better at it.
So he took me off to a high school parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, where there was about an inch of snow on the ground. He made me drive a long straight line across the parking lot (tire tracks in the snow). Then I had to go back to my starting point and drive it again, leaving only one set of tracks in the snow. Then I had to go back to my starting point and do it again, backward, leaving only one set of tire tracks in the snow. Then I drove in a big circle and repeated that, forward and backward. Then I had to drive in a big figure eight, and again, repeat forward and backward. Then he let me drive out into the middle of the lot, accelerate to about 30 mph or so and then slam on the brakes… so I could feel what skidding on the ice felt like and so I’d know how to steer out of a skid. Bonus lesson: I learned how to do doughnuts while we were at it. By the time I’d driven around this parking lot backward in circles for a few hours, I was pretty much the ace parallel parker for life. I can still parallel park, with a stick shift, when there’s only about six inches of space at either bumper.
So I went and aced my driver’s test after that. And still use every last one of those skills in the car, every. single. day. Thanks, dad.
This part goes to the independence thing, but also related to preparing me to be a Driver in a world full of drivers. We were sitting around watching TV one rainy night about 10 pm. The car was parked on the driveway, which was a steep nose-down incline. Dad looks at me and says, “Let’s go change the tire on the car.” Hruh? “But Dad, it’s dark and it’s raining out there!” And dear old says, “Exactly. Kid. You are never going to get a flat tire on a flat surface on a sunny day. Things like that always happen in the dark, in the rain, on gravel, on an incline. Why not learn how to do it under less-than-ideal circumstances so when it happens for real, you already know how to adapt to conditions?” Good thinkin’, old man. So out we went to change the tire in the rain. He refused to help, insisting I could do it. I had to stand on the jack and bounce, but I managed to change the tire, properly. I could barely pick up the tire to get it into the trunk. Then he made me check the oil, add a quart, check the wiper fluid and replace the wipers. Then he gave me a set of keys.
As an infant, my siblings and I were removed from our home and temporarily placed with different families due to neglect and abuse. Eventually the other kids were returned, but the couple who got me said “no way”. I had bedsores and injuries and they weren’t about to let me return to that environment. Bio mom was mentally ill, single with 4 kids, and just not doing well in 1960’s Detroit.
They fought for me, adopted me, and gave me a nice mid-western upper-middle class childhood with more honor and integrity than a Marine DI, and there are a thousand different little things that each one did to make my life easier or fun.
I certainly can’t claim a perfect childhood, but the problems and the bad parts fade after time, and leave you with the good. They both passed away in 1999, before I got around to telling them thanks for all that.
I have something in my eye now.
I can say the same: my mama helped me get my first real job and here I still am.
On my sixteenth birthday, she took me to Daytona Beach for the weekend and even scrounged up one of my old friends to come along. In those pre-Internet days, it was quite a feat and a great surprise.
She gave me my first car. It wasn’t new, it wasn’t pretty, but I sure needed and appreciated it.
When I was around thirteen years old, I found a diary she had started and then abandoned. One of the entries was all about how my sixth grade teacher wouldn’t let me carry my new messenger bag to school because it was too big. Mom was so crushed, and worried that I’d be disappointed. I didn’t remember the incident at all, but I was impressed that she felt so strongly about my feelings being hurt.
She never let us drink soda except on rare occasions, which I think greatly contributed to our health in the long run.
Thanks, Mom!
Me too. What a wonderful story 
This is lovely. Your dad sounds wonderful. I’m so sorry he’s gone. 
Puzzled by your defensive tone. I envy you having had a dad like that.
What a great thread.
My mother used to put notes in my school lunch that said, “Help, I’m being held prisoner in a school lunch factory.” Hehe. She also read bedtime stories to me.
My parents did hundreds and hundreds of big and little nice things for me that I never fully appreciated until I was older. While they were only human and far from perfect, I could never join in when people would bitch about their parents. They did the best they were capable of with little thought of themselves.
One thing that stuck out was a Christmas present I got while in first or second grade. We weren’t poor (middle class-ish), but I was the youngest of 6 and money was tight. My mom found an old glass candy case for sale cheap. She cleaned it up, then went candy shopping. She found a wholesaler and bought a few boxes of candy, just like they had at the stores. In the mean time, my father would hit resale shops and found an old, beat up cash register for cheap. He cleaned it up and got it working. Christmas morning, when most kids were getting whatever the fad toy of the year was, I got a friggin’ candy store!
Oh man, that is cool.