He grew up in the 50s and his dad was, apparently, some sort of insane. They would drive from Ohio to Nebraska once a year to visit his family for their ‘vacation’. During the trip, nobody - not the mom nor friend plus two siblings - could utter a sound. There was literally no stopping until they arrived in Nebraska. Have to pee? That’s what the jar on the floor is for. And the dad would drive 80 mph + down the country roads (no highways yet).
When they arrived, the kids could only speak when spoken to. If offered a snack, drink, gum, or candy, they were absolutely forbidden to accept. They were to sit on the sofa and be silent virtually the entire visit.
We had similar rules but to me, it just would’ve never occured to me that it could be any other way than that. It never bothered me we had to do that, 'cause I assumed that was the way life worked
The stories about wasted food reminded me of something my father used to do. If someone ate the last of the cookies or whatever, my father would throw a fit and say that he’d wanted some. If we had that same food after that and left it for him, it would go bad, and he would say that he was saving it for us.
He was also always late. My mom would just tell him we were leaving earlier than the real time, so it usually worked out all right. A few years ago, we were going to visit my grandma, and my brother happened to be the one running late. My father got so mad that he didn’t even stop the car as my brother was getting into it. When the rest of us told him to calm down because he was usually the one running late, he said, “Well someone always has to be ready last.” His lack of logic is probably what drove me crazy the most.
My Dad is a very good chess player, and if he concentrates, I can’t beat him, even now. I played with him a lot. Of course, when I was a kid, he would “let me” win (but I didn’t realize it at the time.) The one thing that would drive me up the wall would be that he was always humming when it was my turn and I was trying to think. I don’t know if he did it on purpose or if it was unconscious.
When he played chess, he would give his opponent plenty of time to think, but in other games, like Scrabble, Rummikub, MahJongg, or whatever, after 60 seconds he would be saying “Are you done now” or “draw a card, you can’t put down anything” or what not. Drives me up the wall, but I’m old enough now to ignore it! For revenge, when it’s my turn to deal, I always shuffle the cards until he tells me “that’s enough.” I know he’s fuming inside but I keep on shuffling to see how long he can stand it. I figure it’s good to teach him patience in his old age.
P.S. My parents didn’t smoke and hardly ever drink so I didn’t have that problem.
P.P.S. norinew, sorry to hear about what your mother put you through. Did she ever get treatment for her mental illness?
Damn, as a former horse-crazy girl, that’s the most heartbreaking story yet. How were you supposed to contain yourself as a 5-year old? Never mind having the smarts to learn to spell yourself.
I’ve got many stories, basically the same theme. My mom married a douchebag, who she worshipped and believed over me every time. After I went to live with them they started harping on me for my weight. I was about 9 years old and maybe the same number of pounds overweight.
I belonged for a time to a YWCA-sponsored group called Indian Maidens (I wanted to join Girl Scouts, but they were too mainstream for my mom’s taste). One day, the group was having a meeting at our apartment. After they left douchebag stepfather noticed several tootsiepop wrappers in the wastebasket and immediately demanded to know where I got the suckers. I’d never seen them before. No amount of protest or reasoning made a dent. Believe me, if I had suggested they call the group leader, I would’ve got my arse whooped. I finally just lied and said they were mine to end the interrogation.
Making Federal cases out of stuff that warranted maybe a scolding and a day’s grounding in normal households was routine. I once lost $20 that a relative had given me; the rantings went on for days and I was forced to tear apart my room several times over looking for it, all while douchebag, a huge ex-Marine, stood over me and made threats. Can’t say for sure, but I’ve come to suspect he might actually have taken it; he used to raid my piggybank.
The only saving grace I had in those days was my grandmother.
No, she never did. Of course, back then (she died 21 years ago) most mentally ill people didn’t get help unless they were violent enough to draw the notice of TPTB or were crazy enough to think they were Napoleon or something.
In retrospect, I’d certainly arm-chair diagnose her with bipolar disorder, and quite possibly borderline personality. I can certainly remember walking home from school wondering “which mother” I was going to come home to. In a way, it was almost a relief when I came home to The Mother From Hell. When I came home to The June Cleaver Mom, I was completely on-edge waiting for the fall, y’know?
As an adult and a mother, the one thing I’ve tried really, really hard to give my children is stability and the knowledge that I love them, and there’s nothing they could do that would make me not love them. One of my mother’s lines of patter was to mutter on and on about how she never should have had children (about that, FTR, I think she was right; some people just aren’t parenthood material), and she hated her life, and she was going to leave and never come back. . . Ugh.
And more on the annoyance front, rather than from the child abuse angle: my grandmother was another who could make the telephone scream in agony - she did crossword puzzles over the phone with her sister, and sometimes discussed bridge games. Three hours, like someone mentioned above, wasn’t uncommon. I was around 6 yrs old, noone else to play with, and could either watch TV, read, or listen. Sometimes, it was pretty entertaining to listen, though. Anything else had to wait.
Also, the alley in back of her place was tiny, and people often blocked her (huge) car in; and she had no hesitation in telling them off or “bumping” the offending car. I didn’t know whether to be mortified or entertained. I sure as hell don’t have the confrontation skills she did.
Dad got up for work at 4:30 to 5:00 and turned on the radio at full volume. He pounded the pots and pans and stomped a lot too. Nobody was going to sleep if he was up, even if the kids were in grade school. It was his his most dickish inconsiderate behavior.
Party line being I’m looking for and I’ve got for sale on the radio. The DJ keeps reading the stuff for sale when there are no callers. It goes on for hours.
With my dad, it was and is what my little niece pronounces as NapsCar. And he wouldn’t just be lying there with his eyes closed–he’d be stretched out on his side with his back to the television, snoring and as soon as your hand got 0.0005 centimeters from the dial, he’d announce “I’m watching that.” Twenty-five years later, it’s still the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.
Angel of Doubt & PandaBear77, thank you both. It’s one of those things that I know I should let go of, but dammit, the pain was so deep. I’m 50 years old now and have owned 2 horses in my life, but have been horseless since 1986… there is a hole there that simply cannot ever be filled. Somewhere deep inside me is still that little 5 year old girl, who, for just a few seconds, thought she was going to have her prayers answered.
Don’t ever feel you’re under some sort of obligation to let go of, forget or forgive something that jerkish someone does to you, even if it’s a parent, unless and until you’re good and ready. Especially something so hurtful to a child. Who in the world would think it’s okay to withdraw a Christmas promise (or “maybe”) from a 5-year old in that manner, even if it’s accidentally overheard? Can’t tell from your post if your relationship with your folks was ok otherwise, but I can sure say that the repeated little poisonous incidents and remarks from mine, along with the big incidents, ensured that I’ll never really be close to my biological mother.
I have to admit, I had a pretty good childhood, mainly because my grandparents seemed to be a lot like your parents. For example, we never get a crappy gift inside a cool box because my grandma once gave my dad a bunch of underwear in a turntable box.
The only thing that really bugged me was my parents used to host a game night a couple times a month. They would send me to bed early, and then stay up all night talking and laughing hysterically - a whole five feet from my bed room. I could never get any sleep those nights.
Another one with the food issues; most of them got solved as I eventually learned to cook, replaced Mom as the main cook and changed her recipes (from turned-into-a-paste pasta to al dente, for example), so much so that my brothers’ comfort foods are the things I could cook, they way I cooked them. I recently finally learned ways to cook vegetables which work for me; I’ve reached the conclusion that Mom simply doesn’t like veggies, same as she can’t see why her husband and three children consider(ed) it an offense unto God to boil carrots, she can’t see why I like my veggies to have their original coloring.
Dad could be very… definite and, how to put it, hammer-like in his opinions, often stating them as if they were the Word of God rather than the Opinion of James. This became less of a problem when I realized that he actually listened to opposite opinions so long as they were properly reasoned - unlike Mom. One time, we were on vacation in Segovia (easily one of the most visite-able towns in Spain), and eeeevery single day we’d pack into the car and go driving to some old place or other; now, while I’m as fond of old places as anybody in my family and that means “very fond”, I am not nor have I ever been happy about driving 200-300km under the molten-lead Castillian sun, at 40ºC+, in a car with no a/c and sandwiched between two boys who after half an hour were so busy trying to breathe that they couldn’t even bother be rambuctious. On the fourth or fifth day we were there, I put my foot down as Mom and Dad opened the roadmap: no, we are not going anywhere, we’re taking a break from driving and visiting Segovia itself, damnit! We’re going up to the castle and seeing the acqueduct, period. Taking us to different places every summer was good, but he liked driving while on vacation a miiiite too much
When I was young, whenever i got angry at someone, i either said i hated them, or that they hated me. Without fail, my mum would start singing "no body loves me, everybody hates me, think i’ll go and eat worms. long ones, short ones, fat ones thin ones, think i’ll go and eat worms
My sister and I were latchkey kids. We’d come home between 4:00 and 4:30 and be very very hungry. There would be snacks in the pantry, but they were reserved for lunches. And therefore off-limits. And all the other snacks were forbidden as well, for some reason. So there we were, hungry kids forced to sneak to the candy store across the street just to tide us over until dinner.
It seems to me the very least my mother could have done would be to buy some permissible snacks for us. Because I’d get very angry watching the Brady Bunch and watching the kids being greeted with big platters of chocolate chip cookies and glasses of milk, even though Alice would be making dinner at the same time, while we weren’t allowed anything and sometimes have to wait hours for someone to come home.
Wow, that’s pretty screwy! I know when my kids came home from school (and when my daughter who’s still living at home comes home from school), the first thing they’d go for is a snack. I keep food in the house to be used for just this purpose. Hey, she’s a kid. Her lunch time at school is somewhere around 11AM, so by the time she gets home, it’s been a good four hours since she’s eaten anything. We eat dinner around 6PM, so if she doesn’t have an after school snack, you’re looking at a minimum of six hours without eating. Too much time, especially for a kid!
The snacking thing that used to drive me crazy, though in retrospect I understand it, is that sometimes my aunt would spend the night, and she and my Mom would stay up late playing Scrabble. The next morning, we could tell by looking in the trash can what they had been snacking on; it was always stuff like Oreo cookies and other good, brand-name snacks. We got snacks, but it was always the kind of cookies that the grocery store sold 3lbs for a dollar, and generic ice pops. Things like that.
Looking back, I realize that my parents didn’t have much money, and they had five kids, and it was just too darned expensive to buy name-brand snacks for us. It also never occurred to me that when Mom and Aunt Anne were playing Scrabble and gin rummy, Aunt Anne was probably paying for the snack food; I’m sure now that she was.
Of course, another favorite snack of theirs that never made me jealous was pickled pigs’ feet. :eek:
My daughter posts on another board similar to the SD. I occasionally look at their threads trying to pick out her postings…about ME, the Best Mom In The World, IMO! Haven’t seen anything that is definitely incriminating about me - yet . No matter how hard a parent tries, they always have some glaring flaw. Here’s another annoying tidbit about my dear old mom - she would talk on the phone in the evening after supper for hours and hours and hours, tying the line up. (When I got older, I would have liked to talk to friends after supper, too. Or wait for That Cute Boy to call me.) Yak, yak, yak. The thing was, she was talking to her sisters - who lived across the street from us! She could have sat on the front porch and talked to them.
