I am so fucking glad that my mom packed a cooler of food and a thermos of iced tea and one of hot coffee for our road trips, and my dad insisted on stopping every 2 hours for a stretch [and in case of emergency had no problems with us fertilizing the fields in between rest stops]
Actually many of our road trips until we were 10 and 8 years old took place in a honking huge american land tank belonging to my grandfather, and they arranged it so we were traveling after bedtime so they could tuck us away to sleep. My dad always took his 30 days in the summer, prime vacation time for school aged kids. Never saw a winter vacation until he got out of the army when I was 8.
You could try “Parental Arbitrariness: an unfortunate but intrinsic component of the Parent/Child Contract.” It worked for me. Once. When he was three.
The sight of him frowning and shutting up because he refused to admit that he didn’t know those words was priceless. He went on to develop a decent vocabulary.
I have adopted most of the habits my parents had that drove me crazy. In my defense my kids have adopted the habits I used to drive my parents crazy.
The one I did not adopt is my mother’s habit of giving some an insanely early time to make sure people aren’t late. Mom, if you want me there at 11, say 11, not 9:30. The last time I was late was my birth. It is not just me though. She does this to New Englanders!
What’s for dinner always gets some smart alecky remark. This is because when I answered it plainly the response was always “I don’t like that.” Coincidentally tonight is jellied squid eyes served in a calf’s blood reduction on top of stewed maggots. Or spaghetti and meatballs on rotini.
My mom just rolled her eyes and answered “food!” What really drove me up a wall is “Life’s not fair”, though. Oh, and she’d respond to “I’m hungry!” with “I’m Gerry! Nice to meet you!” And then she’d shake my hand.
I guess I don’t have so much to complain about. We took a LOT of car trips, though, because our family was all out of state. When I was little we had to stop a lot because my dad needed to make business calls, so we always went to Shoney’s because they always had a phone. Only he wouldn’t stay one second longer than necessary so we always had the salad bar - I was an adult before I knew Shoney’s had a menu.
Then cell phones happened. Oh god. Better get the small drink, is all I’m sayin’.
To this day, the smell of an Egg McMuffin brings back a whole sensory world of a ten hour car trip - it goes with the sound of the concrete seams on a bridge.
My mom always (and still does) inch out of the parking lot when she turns. Not like moving slowly. Like. . .two inches BRAKE. . .two inches BRAKE. . .two inches BRAKE! It drove me nuts when I was a kid. It still annoys me now whenever I ride with her somewhere, but I don’t let it get to me.
My dad used to limit me to one hour of online access a week. This was back when we had dial-up, though we had a second line specifically for the internet, so I don’t see how it would’ve been a huge deal. This was in the late 90s through about 2001, so it wasn’t nearly the big deal then that it would be to a teenager now, but it still drove me mad. I guess I can understand now why he did it–equal parts wanting to be able to get online himself and thinking that I was spending too much time at the computer–but it still drove me mad.
The “What’s For Dinner” question: I understand those who won’t answer because they don’t want to listen to an hour of moaning and groaning. I never had that problem, too much, because my kids always knew they had an alternative: peanut butter. If I was serving something they didn’t like, they could have a peanut butter sandwich and some fruit.
But I can certainly identify with those who say they get sick of being asked the question six different times. When we lived in a household where I regularly cooked for seven people, I found a magnetic notepad that said “Menu” at the top and had the days of the week listed down the side. On Sundays I would do menu planning, write the dinner plans onto the notepad and slap it up on the fridge. When someone would say “What’s for dinner?” I’d just cock a thumb and say “Fridgerator”, which after a while they understood to mean ‘look at the written menu on the refrigerator’. Duh.
Now that it’s just me and mudgirl most nights, it’s not nearly as big of a deal.
Oh, also we occasionally had “FFY” nights; FFY stood for ‘Fend For Yourself’, meaning whatever you could scrounge.
I share a mother with Brynda. In additions to her gripes, I’ll add a few. Like Miss Woodhouse’s dad, our mom wanted us to just magically know what she wanted done. To this very day, she is not satisfied when I do some task or favor for her, I also have to visibly *want *to do the task, no matter how distateful or inconvenient it is. She also demands this of others around her.
Every so often, Mom would plan a big shopping trip, yay! She’d spin it out for us: we’d get up early, go here, then there, then this other place! However when morning came, she’d act all surprised when we were rarin’ to go. Because of course, we had to spend 4 or 5 hours cleaning a spotless house. I don’t know why I fell for that.
Ah, I forgot the biggest one: My mother spent most of my childhood obsessed about my weight. If I ate seconds of anything other than plain lettuce, she reminded me that I had a tendency to gain weight, just like her. At the same time, she spent hours coaxing my sister and brother to eat more, because they needed it! Mind you, at my heaviest, until I was pregnant years later, I weighed 145 pounds - at a muscular 5’9". Needless to say, I have more than a few “issues” regarding body image and weight! (I can joke now, and smilingly tell people that I have definitely overcome anorexia, but it really wasn’t funny when I weighed 92 pounds at one point in my 20s.)
He’d probably heard horror stories of internet bills. Most internet providers charged per minute back then…and it wasn’t cheap. Some providers had free areas and premium areas, I remember that AOL was like this. So he might have had a decent reason for not wanting you to be online very much.
I remember a few times when Mom drove to town to get gas so she would have enough gas to get to town the next day.
When I was about 12, she & I were sitting on the front porch and she told me that I have very nice legs. She went on about them being the perfect length, and very strong and proportionate with well-defined muscle tone. She said that if I was a girl, she’d let me start shaving my legs now.
Geez. That’s the first time I’ve ever mentioned that story to anyone. It looks as creepy written out as it was to have lived it.
Otherwise, life was pretty good for me, except for the bullshit that they pulled on each other after the divorce.
My dad also pumps gas to an even number. Drives me up a wall. (He does the same thing calculating a restaurant tip.) Your credit card bill will never be an even number! Anyway, so what?
Well, if your money situation is sometimes tight, maybe they were getting enough gas on the day before pay day to get them into town on pay day, when they would have enough to fill up. That’s all I can think of that makes any kind of sense. Of course, having known my mother, I know for sure that “parent” and “makes sense” don’t always belong in the same paragraph!
OK, old person here, and I can answer that.
It’s just a throwback to days of paying with cash. Gather ‘round, whippersnappers, granny norinew is gonna tell you a story: way back when, we used to pay for gas with this strange lookin’ paper stuff we called money. I know, it seems peculiar to you, but that’s how life was. . .
Back then, you wanted an even number so you didn’t end up with a pocket full of loose change. After you do it that way for many years, it takes a conscious effort to not do it. In fact, I often still have to remind myself “It’s a Visa card; even numbers don’t matter!”
Let’s see, aside from never being told “I love you” and the raging beatings from bare hands or the dreaded leather belt… thinking… and aside from the whole two-parents-smoking-in-confined-places thing… thinking…
Well, I was driven crazy by dinner plates being used as ashtrays. That was always nice.
I guess nothing else really stands out, because I can’t get past the physical/psychological damage from some serious stuff. Yeah, can’t see how I’d say that my dad used to drive me nuts when he’d beat one of us so hard that he needed medical attention for his broken or cut hand.
I love my parents all to bits, even moreso now that I am one myself, but they had their little ways which were - a trifle eccentric. Mostly to do with control and communication.
An example is perhaps in order … my mom ran a pottery business in the basement; my dad had a closet in the basement full of tools. Sometimes my mom needed tools in her business. Rather than buy her own, she would use my dads’. She would not ask, simply take them & put them back.
My dad did not like my mom using his tools. Rather than tell her “you can’t use my tools, get your own please”, he simply - installed a lock on the closet.
Well, my mom wasn’t having that, so she got me to pick the lock (I was working for her at the time, during the summer in HS). I did this by unscrewing the hasp of the lock - my mom would then use the tools all she wanted, put them back, and we’d screw the hasp back on.
This went on for months, but eventually my dad got wise - no doubt because we carelessly allowed the screws to get a bit “stripped”. Again, nothing was said - he simply installed bolts in the place of the screws, epoxied on the inside.
Well, we weren’t stymied for long - my mom came up with a plan: to knock the pins out of the hinges on the closet door … to my knowledge, my dad never discovered this dodge.
Starting when I was 5 years old, my dad would say: “Go clean your room.” I wasn’t allowed to go play or watch TV or do anything else until that room was clean.
I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. I organised my books, I put all my toys away, I dusted, I made my bed, I organised my closet, and I did everything you could do when you are too little to use the stuff with Mr. Yuck on the the bottle. I was a good little girl, thrived on praise from teachers and such. I always strived to do a really good job. When I was finished, I was proud to announced that I was all done cleaning my room!
My dad would look in and say with a voice just dripping with disdain: “That’s a good START.”
He didn’t like boisterous little kids and that was a way to keep me imprisoned in my room. I had cleaned all I possibly could, but it was “just a start” and therefore my room was not clean and I had not fulfilled the requirements that would allow me to go play. I would just sit and look out the window until my mom came home and gave me permission to be set free. My father tried variations of this well into my teens, but I started ignoring him when I was 8.
Reading these stories, my childhood sounds almost magical!
Gah! That’s reminds me! My mother always made sandwiches with gobs of butter/margarine on both slices of bread. PB&J? Yup, with gobs of butter. Bologna & cheese? Yup, with gobs of butter.
This was my dad. He’s insist on watching HIS TV show, and then 5-10 minutes later he’d be sound asleep. Just try and switch channels and he’s inform you that he was only “resting his eyes.” He got so he would actually stay asleep, but only when it was too late to actually enjoy what YOU wanted to see. (pre-VCR, of course.)
LOL! Cool. Mine would just open the door of the room 3 inches, stick in his hand, and turn on the light on the wall. He always made sure there was a nice fresh 100-Watt bulb in that bad boy too. :mad:
Ditto. It was like the opening 9 or 10 notes of the MacNeil-Lehrer Report would make him fall instantly asleep… and when they played them again at the end, he’d startle, wake up, and head up to bed.
I think he was a PBS sponsor for the wake-up calls alone…
Ooooh, this in particular always got to me. (Even if life is intrinsically unfair, that doesn’t seem to justify making it more unfair.) I’m pretty sure that this is a large part of the reason I’m a moral philosopher.
We took a LOT of car trips, though, because our family was all out of state. When I was little we had to stop a lot because my dad needed to make business calls, so we always went to Shoney’s because they always had a phone. Only he wouldn’t stay one second longer than necessary so we always had the salad bar - I was an adult before I knew Shoney’s had a menu.
