Pets that I picked out myself, and that actually like me. When I was a teenager, my mom had a cat that hated me. I wished I could have my own pet that liked me. Now I have two kitties that love me. I learned years after I grew up and left home that they didn’t pick out their cat, either- someone at my dad’s work foisted it on them, and my dad wasn’t able to say no to a cute little kitten. I learned from that experience and insisted on interacting with prospective cats before making a decision.
The ability to choose to fly to a destination rather than taking a car trip there. I tend to get motion sick, which means I can’t read in the car. That means the 14-hour car trips we would take to visit my cousins in Wisconsin or the 23-hour car trip to Florida was nausea-and-boredom-torture for me, plus being stuck sitting in my seat for that long. If there is a hell, it includes both nausea and boredom. Nowadays, I fly for pretty much anything longer than a three hour drive, and much prefer it.
Religious freedom. I don’t have to go along with my parents to church every Sunday during the school year when I don’t believe in what that church has to say. As an adult, I’m free to find a religion that actually works for me. As most of you know, I chose a very different path than the one my parents did.
Food freedom. If I don’t like something my mom used to cook, I don’t make it (and Mr. Neville and I have a general agreement not to fix dishes the other doesn’t like when they are home for dinner). And now that I’m an adult and don’t live with them, they’re generally willing to forgo stuff I don’t like when we’re visiting them for the few meals where we don’t eat out (we, of course, reciprocate when they visit us). My parents went on all kinds of diets when I was growing up, and those diets included all kinds of food that were either inherently crap or that they had no experience in preparing so they wouldn’t turn out bad. I would have looked for a new cookbook, but the ones they had were the diet cookbooks. No Bittman’s How to Cook Everything back then (usually the first place I go when I’m cooking something unfamiliar), and no Google to look up recipes.
Are your mom and my parents related? My parents have all kinds of odd ideas like this, usually about computers.
I now have the freedom to bring home gadgets that would intimidate my parents. They’re scared of our digital cable box and our Tivo (I have to change the channels for them when they’re here).
Expanding on this is how all the “Lite” products and recipes include instructions like “Put the Egg Beaters into a non-stick frying pan…”. Because god forbid you should use a tablespoon of olive oil!. My folks pretty much kept this regimen right along after I left home. The payback–proving once again that Fate, that old devil, can be a cruel joker–is that my mom had a massive stroke in 98 and has been paraplegic and barely verbal since then, though she is cognitively alert.
My mum, bless her, finally mentioned to me in passing a couple of years ago (aged about 70), “I wasn’t a very good cook, was I?” Well, no, she wasn’t. She tried, though.
I remember soft drinks being a luxury at home (but we could have them when out for some reason). As an adult, I’ve usually got a bottle of coke in the fridge. Frozen family-sized apple pies were a treat for dessert, and I was shocked when I became an adult and did my own shopping, how cheap they were. We coulda had them every night!
On the other hand, Vegemite was a basic. The after school snack staple. I was shocked to find out how expensive that stuff is!
this may sound a little odd, but dinner freedom. We had a few ironclad rules in our house growing up, and the one that was the most odious was dinner. It was at precisely 6:00 PM each and every night. If there was ever a delay of, say, a half hour due to sports practice or something, my father would go into a fuming angry funk. We could receive no phone calls from 6-7, “The Dinner Hour”. We would have steak Wednesdays and Saturdays. Often not good steak, but steak nonetheless. Very regimented, often uncomfortable.
Now, dinner is whenever we feel like, and whatever someone feels like cooking. It could be a roast chicken or a bowl of cereal, anywhere from 4:30 until 11 PM. It’s very liberating.
Same here. I go to church regularly, but not the kind of church that my parents insisted on.
Could be. Back in the 70s, we weren’t allowed to watch TV during a thunderstorm. I’m not sure who decided this, but at least one of my parents was afraid that having the TV on would attract lightning to the aerial antenna.
If the plug wasn’t grounded, it’s at least a possibility, I think. I remember lightning hitting a nearby house when I was a kid (in the 50’s) and the fire department told my mom that the lightning hit the antenna and blasted the TV set.
The set didn’t blow up or anything, but it was pretty much toast.
I still unplug the pricey electronics during thunderstorms.
They were really only words to me until I was well into adulthood. Of course, if you’ve never had them you are unaware you even feel their lack, as a child.
I didn’t find them first try, by any means. Many, many false starts. I am, indeed, proud that I found my way to them eventually.
I think you misunderstood. I didn’t say that we were prohibited from watching TV because lightning MIGHT hit the antenna. Rather, we were prohibited on the grounds that having the TV on would ATTRACT lightning.
I understand that the fire department told your mother that lighting toasted your TV set. Did they say that watching TV is what attracted the lightning, though? I’d be shocked if they made such a claim.
We truck farmed, so we always had fresh or home canned/frozen veggies in plentiful supply, including, in season, a lot of salad with a variety of lettuce.
What we didn’t have was salad dressing.
I remember drowning my iceberg lettuce in Catalina or Green Goddess dressing whenever we ate at my aunt’s house and loving it. At home, the closest we got was “salad oil” (store brand vegetable oil) if we asked for it. Sometimes, my mother would wilt spring leaf lettuce with a bacon dripping-sugar-vinegar mixture (and it was yummy), but greens were usually eaten plain. Even now, my parents can take or leave a salad with dressing.
Of course, that means that I always have at least three varieties going at the same time, as well as the fixings for many more!
I always tell people that I was hug deprived as a child. I can’t get enough hugs from my dh and ds - hug me, da*n it!
Otherwise, please don’t touch me. Really, the only physical contact I had with my family while growing up was the back of a hand or brush. I can’t stand it when people at work or friends try to put their arms around me, or even touch me at all.
All you people savouring your hard-won ethnic foods are going to laugh at this, but … white bread. Aaah! White Bread!
Growing up, my parents didn’t have any trouble at all in the adventurous foods department. We ate italian, middle-eastern, indian … pretty much anything that could be found without too much bending over backwards in suburban 70s Melbourne (well, I suspect that some of the things probably did require a bit of backwards-bending)
But there were a number of things we didn’t have. Fizzy drinks and processed grains pretty much topped the list. Brown rice only, and brown bread only. My dad made it himself and I will admit freely he is in fact an excellent breadmaker and under some circumstances I fully appreciated the results of his art. Hot home-made brown bread just out of the oven slathered with butter … mmmm, I could eat it for hours.
But. Not for sandwiches. Just wrong, wrong wrong. This wasn’t just brown bread, it was dense, heavy, thick brown bread. It completely overwhelmed any filling you put in it. What’s more, Dad’s bread tins are quite small, so each slice seemed to be about 50% crust. At school, we all ate in the gym hall, and they inspected the lunchboxes on the way out to make sure you’d eaten it all. Crust left? Back you go…
I begged, I whined, I pleaded for white bread for my sandwiches. When I was about 14 they finally caved and I was able to sneak a loaf of Sunblest into the weekly shopping. My dad then embarked on a psychological war of attrition, referring to it as “fluff” and “cotton wool”. To no avail. I still love my soft squishy taste-free white bread.
But I also have four bread tins, and my dad’s wholemeal bread recipe. Everything in its place…
A Doper after my own heart! I firmly believe that the sole purpose of bread in a sandwich is to hold the fillings together and nothing more. When I make a bologna or roast beef or ham sandwich, by God I want to taste bologna or roast beef or ham! Not “whole grain goodness”. It doesn’t help that I’m one of those weirdoes for whom things like whole grains (other than oats) taste unbearably bitter. The flavor of whole grain bread completely overwhelms the meat flavor for me.
My one exception to this is rye bread when I’m eating corned beef or pastrami (with mustard!). I discovered fairly late in life that I really like rye bread (something else my mom never bought). The flavor or rye bread actually enhances the flavor of corned beef and pastrami. I also like an occasional grilled turkey & swiss on dill rye.
Pop (as we called it) or soda was a very rare treat for us. When my parents let us have an orange or grape Crush, or root beer, it was a big deal. We only got Coca-Cola when we were sick to our stomachs, to soothe us - it was always room temperature and it was always flat. Urgh. To this day I associate Coke with nausea, and really don’t like it at all. So I guess that worked out pretty well for me!
that’s so funny - the other sort of bread bought in the 'distra household is … dadaaah … light rye! Which I just discovered about 3 months ago we all like. There’s gotta be something in that.
Re: soda - my parents would have never bought fizzy drinks in a million years either. But that was fine by me since I absolutely loathed the bubbles, and became known to all the mums of my little friends as “the kid who won’t drink lemonade at parties and asks for milk”. Or I’d be surruptitiously stirring away with my fork to get the bubbles out.
These days I like the stuff ok, but I’m just not in the habit. So I guess that worked out ok for me too!
I grew up dirt poor. Everything, from food to toothpaste to clean laundry was rationed. Somethings, like grape juice, was for my father only (because it was expensive and it was his) and my brother and I were not allowed to have any. Clothing, toys, shoes and books were bought at garage sales. About the only thing we got new were underwear and socks. “Eating out” consisted of driving through Burger Chef and getting three hamburgers for $1.00 (me, my mom and my brother would all get one each). No fries, no soda, just a plain little hamburger with bun, one pickle and ketchup and mustard.
As a result, today as an adult, I eat out whenever I damn well please. I still buy things used (especially if I find a great deal at a garage sale), but I also won’t hesitate to buy something brand new in the store, just because I like it. I’m not obsessive about things, but I am obsessive about having options, even if I never choose them. I don’t want the option of choosing just one thing–I want the option of choosing four or five, even if I choose the one same thing over and over.
Time out in the country. We grew up in the big city.
We were hurried out of church the moment Mass was over (later, even before the end), as my parents were not communicants. I enjoy visiting with my friends.
We were not poor but we were on a strict budget so things were used until they fell apart including socks. If they got holes my mom would just sew them up.
As an adult I am a frugal person my only debt is a student loan and about $100 on a credit card but I splurge on new socks. About every other month I buy a new bag of socks because as soon as a sock starts to thin it gets sent to sock heaven. Nothing beats a brand new, thick, and fluffy cloud hugging my feet telling them everything is going to be alright.
I wasn’t allowed to have chocolate, my mom replaced it with carob for everything. Carob milk, carob-chip cookies…it was horrible.
I now consume chocolate by the truckload, in any form. I would chew my own arm off to even be able to suck on a piece of baker’s chocolate, I am wholly and enthusiastically addicted.
