Butter. Our family of nine kids couldn’t afford it. My mom would rarely buy it for baking, but on pain of death, it was not for putting on toast.
Spicy, savory food.
My mother’s Irish-American heritage caused her to consider salt just about the only spice that could be used in our house.
Red pepper? Salsa? Hot sauce?
“Oh, you wouldn’t like that…it’s too spicy!” :rolleyes:
Her own deeply seated body image issues (she’s borderline anorexic) caused her to make everything in a mid-1970s, ultra-processed, Good Housekeeping lo-fat, lo-calorie and especially lo-taste version. This in spite of the fact that none of us kids, and certainly not her, were close to being overweight.
I can still taste the manicotti with the plasticy low-fat mozzarella and romano cheeses, and the similarly nasty lo-fat cheesecake that was trotted out for special occasions. Can I just have a smaller piece of real cheesecake that actually tastes good?
So I love spicy cuisines like Mexican, Indian, and Thai. I’m still not big on cheesecake which is probably just as well.
Fresh vegetables. My parents would put vegetables on our plates every night, but except for cabbage, it was always canned or frozen-to-death stuff. As a kid, I didn’t know that you could eat spinach leaves just like you can eat lettuce because I only knew the overly-preserved, textureless canned stuff.
I also enjoy snacking now. If I could name one instance of fucked-up parenting, it would be my mother’s insistence that we not any after school snacks. Like all kids, we would come home to an empty house and be absolutely ravenous. If she came home while we were eating stuff out of the pantry, we would get seriously yelled at. So all afterschool eating had to be done in secret.
I wasn’t allowed to have a Nintendo because it “wasn’t educational.” So now I have a DS, a 360, and a Wii. And a PS2. I hardly even have time to play any games, but damn it I can buy my own consoles.
Spicy foods and especially ethnic foods. I love Indian, Middle-Eastern, and Japanese the most. Unfortunately, my mom’s cooking was Midwestern, German/Polish at best and pretty whitebread when growing up. She learned how to cook only the foods that her dad liked (they lived in a very patriarchal house where he was the ruler to be pleased) and eventually branched out to my dad’s tastes, but none of that ever covered ethnic foods. She would always look at my recipe books and say “Looks pretty, but it probably tastes like crap.”
Granted, most of her food was still good, and I’m grateful that was the worst thing I could come up with.
I would do anything now to have had “a very happy childhood in a loving, supportive family”
But for the material things I must have now because I lacked them as a child:
-plenty of clean towels,
-nice bedsheets (not scratchy low thread count ones)
-comfortable shoes
-soda (we never had it in the house but my grandma who we visited a few times a year would let us drink as much Coke as we wanted)
-Any kind of treats like cookies or ice cream, I think the main reason I’m overweight is that I spent a lot of my childhood thinking “when I’m grown up I will eat that all the time”
-enough clothes to go more than a few days without washing
And the most important thing is to have everything work like the furnace and the clothes drier and the water heater. My main memory from childhood is wearing damp clothes in a cold house and being stranded somewhere when the car broke.
Privacy. My parents were absolutely convinced that if I could lock my bedroom door, next thing you know I’d be cooking meth/running an escort service/plotting global destruction in there. They weren’t big on knocking before entering, either.
I hope that doesn’t sound snarky, Elendil’s Heir. You worded that so perfectly that the minute I read it I felt such a longing for the same that tears are in my eyes.
A cat. I always wanted one (my parents had had one before I was born), but they always said no, because “who would take care of it when we went on vacation”? No, they didn’t have any friends, and it’s wrong–wrong–wrong to ask favors.
I’m proud to say that I now have a dozen friends who would claw down the door to take care of Pudding. She’s so cute.
And that was so poignantly stated that now tears are in my own eyes.
{{{{{SP2263}}}}}
Good fresh fruit. We always had the basics: apples, oranges, bananas but anything beyond that was considered "too expensive’. But fruit is cheaper per pound than almost any candy out there so now I buy whatever fruit I want.
Oh, and a Vellux blanket. I always wanted one 'cause I think they feel so neat but we had perfectly fine old blankets. Plus I think my mom distrusted them for some reason. Now I have a great Vellux blanket.
I hear you on the ethnic foods thing.
My parents have pretty basic tastes in food, so we ate some combination of chicken, steak (both seasoned only with salt), steamed vegetables, rice, and noodles pretty much every day of the week. When we went out to eat it was to Applebees/T.G.I. Fridays-esque places or the odd Italian restaurant.
My favorite foods now are Indian, Thai, Ethiopian, and Vietnamese.
Also, the ability to eat what I want whenever I want. Eating was a fairly tightly regulated affair in my house, so the idea that I can now have a snack at - gasp - 11pm if I’m, you know, hungry is pretty awesome. Still feels like I’m breaking the rules.
Rooms that are not colored green.
Every room in my mother’s house was some shade of green. I refused to paint any wall green for years and years. I now have a green bedroom. But it’s a shade of green she never would have had. (She’s in a different house now, and the rooms are more varied. It must have been a stage.)
Definitely nice bedsheets. I grew up sleeping on polyester and cotton sheets that pilled after the first wash. They were just sheets so mum got whatever was cheapest - which was always the ugly sheets. The sheet didn’t match the pillows, which didn’t match the doona cover - all they had in common was they were garish and scratchy. The pillows were so pilled that if my cheek was itchy I would just rub my face across the pillows for a deep, satisfying scratch.
One of the first things I bought when I had my own household was sheets. Sheets of my choosing - what luxury! The sales assistant had to teach me about flat sheets because I had no idea what they were for. Now I sleep on 100% cotton, high thread count, neutral coloured sheets. I wash them every week and they are soft! And matching!
Hah! I know what you mean. My mother was fanatic about using paper towels like each sheet was the Shroud of Turin. Every time I use one to clean up something so mundane as spilled coffee it gives me a little thrill.
Likewise with chocolate milk for us. My grandparents would always give me this shot glass of chocolate milk with the meal and tell me to “make it last”. Of course I would drink it in 15 seconds and be without a beverage for the remainder of the meal. My parents never allowed it at all.
So naturally, being a full-grown adult, when things aren’t going my way and I feel like to indulge myself, reassure my sense of control, and assert my own independence, a half-gallon of chocolate milk makes it all better.
Well, there are so many things, including the butter and milk (the real milk was to be saved for my mother’s coffee and she would throw a shit fit if there wasn’t any), not to mention the loving and supportive family.
But also…clean air to breathe. My mom was a heavy smoker and it seemed that, once we learned it was bad for you and understood that it stunk, she really enjoyed smoking around us in the car as well as at home and everywhere else. She quit, using Chantix, finally, but it’s far too late and I’m sure she’ll get hers in the form of a painful death, but still…it would have been nice not to be around it and smell like it when I was little.
I also savor living in the same town and, indeed the same house, for nine years and counting. Neither of my parents sees anything wrong with moving kids around for their own convenience.
Bacon… gotta go with bacon here.
Dad was raised by a child of the depression, and he never thought to do anything different.
When cooking bacon he would first cut the package in half, then fry it up (the pieces were spread out neatly in the pan so you could only do a few at a time… like 8 half pieces, maybe a couple more if you squeezed) and we were only allowed four half pieces each. Grandma does this when we eat breakfast at her place, rationing it out.
Dad didn’t think to do anything different until stepmom asked him what the heck he was doing, dumped two full packages into the pan and cooked them all for us to eat as much as we wanted.
Now when I make bacon for the three of us, I make a whole package (I cut it in half sometimes, just cuz) but we can have as much bacon as we want when we eat it (which isn’t often).
sex
Books. When I was a kid, I’m not sure I knew that people could even own books. There were none in my house or my friends’ houses. The library and the school had all the books.
I never thought of owning books. I’m sure mom would have said “Why buy something you can get for free from the library?”
When I was a teenager, I used my babysitting money to buy paperbacks from the drugstore. I can’t describe the feeling of owning books. It still feels special.