What little things did your mom or dad do that you realize now are big deals?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

By all accounts, my Dad should have been a terrible father. He had a terrible childhood. His father was a mean, abusive drunk. Regularly beaten up are rarely loved, my father inherited that temper. He couldn’t get through high school and ended up quitting and getting a manufacturing job, which back then you could do and make a decent living, but that was your limit. He ended up marrying my mother too young and they haven’t always had the best marriage, so… abusive upbringing? Check. Family history of alcohol abuse? Check. Dead end job? Check. Wife you don’t get along with? Check. My childhood should have been awful, right?

No. At some point very early on my father looked at himself, saw what he had been raised in, and said “my children will get everything I did not and nothing I did.” In his 30s he went back to school and got a BA from a good school while still working full time; his weeks during exams must have been hell on earth but he did it. He got better jobs, working up the corporate ladder. He started his own company and it was a success. But as much as he worked professionally, it was the personal that was remarkable; he was never abusive, and treated my sister and I like gold. He consciously chose to be a good father when it would have been so easy to not. He told me he loved me, every day, and showed in a thousand times a thousand times over. Where 999 out of a thousand men would have just gone along with their demons, he found the strength not to.

Wait… I guess this isn’t a little thing, is it? But it was all expressed in a million little things. Movies are bullshit, there’s no one big moment when the parent and child have a breakthough. My Dad showed his love a million times over by including me in common errands, playing games, teaching me little things, showing me how to do stuff… all just everyday things, but boy, it adds up. And now that I’m a parent, with the crushing weight of all this responsibility on me, I know how hard it can be. How hard it must have been for him with none of the advantages I had, I cannot imagine.

42

Sounds to me, RickJay, like you saved him. What an incredible person.
Thanks everyone, and thanks Sauron for starting this beautiful thread. I am completely blown away by all these profound stories, every single one.

43

I don’t know if ones’ entire career counts as a “little thing,” but I’ve come to realize how remarkable my parents are just for doing the jobs they did for all those years.

My mom’s career story is straightforward. Middle school special ed teacher. That’s three layers of difficult, often thankless, and not particularly well-paid work that she did very, very well, for 32 years. I hear about the high rate of burnout among teachers and wonder how she did it.

My dad’s story makes him sound like a character in a novel. He grew up in a poor mining town in Pennsylvania, and with his sister became the first generation in their family to go to college. Then he got a Master’s degree, and then a Ph.D. When I was five our family lived in Vienna for a year because on his way to his doctorate, he earned a Fulbright scholarship. Pretty good for the son of a grocer from a dingy town in coal country.

And with his Fulbright-scholar-winning doctorate behind him, he headed for academia, where he would finally be a professor of history, the career for which he went for all that graduate education in the first place. Upon arriving on the scene, he found… nothing. At all. In the years during which he was in grad school, what had been a reasonable job market for history faculty in U.S. colleges and universities completely dried up. (Mainly, such faculty positions as had become open due to the retirement of an ensconced generation got vacuumed up by the end of the G.I. Bill bulge in the student population.) So… all that education, all that hard work, and nothing to show for it in the end.

He did not want to teach high school, which was about the only other thing his degrees could do for him. He ended up selling school supplies. Pens and crayons, desks and cafeteria tables, and everything in between. Driving around central and southern Ohio dropping off catalogs at schools, and spending long hours processing all the orders that came via those catalogs, all by hand (pre-computer era). That’s about as unremarkable a career as there is, but what amazes me is that he absolutely did not convey any sense of unhappiness or bitterness or unfulfillment about ending up doing what he did. He displayed a strong work ethic throughout and always maintained a positive attitude. He was content to do the job because it provided reasonably well for our family. To this day I don’t know how he truly felt about being a sales rep, working a job for which at most a high school education was required. If he was resentful, he sure didn’t show it- the lessons he continually preached, and which sunk in, were that life isn’t always fair, and that you play the hand you’re dealt.

So, those are my parents: the teacher who devoted her life to some of the most challenging of all students, and literally the best-educated school supply salesman there’s ever been. I aspire to be so remarkable.

44

I’m terribly sorry for your loss. All my best wishes and prayers for you!

Neither of my parents are dead yet. I’m only 15. But already I have realized many things that I wish I would have never done, even though some I couldn’t even help if I wanted to.

I used to have these awful night terrors. They have stopped for the most part, although I recently has a bout of it. I have sleep problems, along with anxiety and Aspergers. Not a very good combo. I think to myself now, it would be alarming and scary if I woke up to my non-existant child screaming and clutching their stomach screaming that they were going to vomit all over the place. (I never did, it was just a mix of anxiety and being half asleep.)

Speaking of my Aspergers, I had a very large mental breakdown summer or 2012. I can’t go into detail due to not wanting to dig up the memories, but let’s just say it was bad. After I got better, I had realized what I had said and done to my poor parents. They were heartbroken and although they didn’t say anything, I could tell they were questioning their parenting skills. I knew that they were wondering day and night what they ever did wrong. And I regret and shame myself all the time for ever uttering even one of those words, or taking one of those actions. I don’t think anything is going to stop me, anytime soon. Sure, I couldn’t control it, but they did not deserve to hear or witness any of the shit that came from me. Even now, I don’t think that either of them know how much I respect the living hell out of them for putting up with me, and for not losing hope that I would get better. I still can’t express my gratitude in my own words to them yet, for I haven’t found a way. Aspergers limits me quite a bit, see.

Ah… Enough of the sad talk. I guess a little funny thing I used to do that I wish I hadn’t, was waking up in the middle of the night, getting up, walking to my parent’s room and waking my mother up. Why?

So that she could put me back to bed. Good grief, 6 year old me, good grief.

45

That is very insightful. Thank you.

46

You sound like a kind, insightful person. Could you type out the bolded part, slip it in an envelope and simply hand it to your mom and dad?

I promise you they would be so touched by those simple, sincere words.

47

This is a great thread.

Neither of my parents is perfect, but they both worked hard and did their best. Each of them is remarkable in some ways too.

My mother grew up in an alcoholic household. They were poor, so poor there are no photos of my mother (now aged 64) as a child. So poor her brother had to hunt rabbits and ducks and geese for food. My grandma took secretarial work, and the kids all had jobs. Grandpa got pity handyman jobs from time to time, but he was a drunkard and unreliable. By no accounts was he a violent or mean person. He doesn’t really feature in any of my mom’s infrequent stories of her childhood. He was more like a non-entity, always just in the background letting life pass him by.

They lived in a small town, and everyone knew the score. Different parents of their friends would always try to arrange for meals to be served when my mom or any of her siblings “happened” to be over. It amazes me that she survived and is a well-adjusted adult. She visits a lot of old folks when she is in the area to this day.

My father is regarded by his peers as a very intelligent man. He is not. He is of average intellect at best. He’s now retired, but he had a successful career as an engineer and was very well respected. That man knows how to work.

I remember him bringing home drawings and manuals and diagrams my entire life. I NEVER ONCE SAW HIM READ ANYTHING FOR FUN. However he was always reading. He studied 3 hours almost every night for years at a stretch. He knew every valve on every pipeline in the plant he worked at. His knowledge was encyclopedic. If some fire in document control had destroyed every record of that plant, he could’ve created a new one from memory.

The story goes that he was a fuck up as a kid. Failing, being miserable, etc. One day, around age 14, he was the only one in the house. He used the washroom and noticed new towels. “mm, nice towels”, the thought to himself. Then he wondered “how much do towels cost?”. He didn’t know. Then he left the washroom and saw the couch and thought “how much does a couch cost?”. Again, he didn’t know. He soon realized that he didn’t know anything about anything, and he was flunking Grade 10 Math. As he told me, in hindsight he believes he had a nervous breakdown. It was an anxiety attack unlike anything he’d ever otherwise experienced, anyway.

The outcome was that he decided that he’d better start learning everything he could and virtually overnight became a star student. His teachers didn’t know the hours and hours he was putting in on his own. Whatever the problem was, he wouldn’t let himself leave his desk until he got it.

My Grandma told me her side of this story once which was: “I don’t know what happened. Suddenly everything changed for Ross.” I believe that for some reason my dad was ashamed of this epiphany and the desperation he felt and never told a soul except me.

Whenever our family plays a new card or board game and my father can’t grasp the rules, or he gets lost at the plots of movies, I think of that poor scared crying kid who didn’t know how much towels cost and had the courage to find the strength within himself to push through it all.

I’ve never met anyone who can focus like him.

48

When he found out his child was on the way, my brother thought long and hard about his own childhood and relatives. He’d spent years turning his back on our family (not officially estranged, but a feral dog with a freshly-found bone is more friendly); he started talking daily to our brother, started asking for my opinion on things which I know better than he does, made sure to watch his children when in the company of our dangerous relatives, did his best to protect his kids from the bad ones on his wife’s side, listened to the kids when they did not want to get anywhere near some of these (there is a big difference between a hug and smothering, you know).

And his wife went from having control subscriptions to merely control issues, which is a pretty big deal.

49

I remember Mama - OK, we’re not Scandinavian, but I remember seeing my mother pay the bills every month - she would sit down at the dining room table with the bills, the checkbook (and register) and a roll of stamps, and write out the checks. It wasn’t anything obvious exactly, but I could always tell, even as a child, that when she finished and there was still money in the bank, she was very satisfied.

Both my parents grew up during the depression and they both knew what it was to not have enough paycheck at the end of the month. They both worked; my father put himself through law school at night in his 30’s while working full time. My mother worked full time and also did most of the cooking and cleaning (we kids helped with some things). All of this was done without ostentation or obvious moral lessons, it was just the way things were done. One of my father’s favorite things to say was “you’re not a guest in this house, you know,” meaning that we were part of the family and expected to contribute as well as partake.

So, by osmosis and constant example, we learned the value of responsibility and hard work. There wasn’t a huge amount of warmth in our family, but there was respect, and it went both ways.
Roddy

50

I was 10 and our school team reached the final of fairly prestigious football tournament. I was insanely excited as you are when you are ten.
It was only then that I realised that the family had booked up for a two-week foreign holiday for the weekend of the final. This was a big deal, the first foreign holiday our family had had. There were 4 children, very hard-working parents and not much money to go around so it was a major thing.
Anyhow, I was crushed that I couldn’t play but tried not to show it. A couple of weeks later my dad announced that the holiday company had to change the dates and now “hurrah!” I could play.
How’s that for good fortune? And I did play and did score the winner, yay me!

I never thought about it after that until earlier this year when my dad died (my mother having died nearly 20 years ago). When I was writing my speech for the funeral and listing his many wonderful qualities I realised…like a fool, that of course he’d shifted our holidays to let me play. And of course he wouldn’t tell me because he was quiet and modest and didn’t want me to feel obligated or get mushy on him.
Just one little thing he and my mam did for me among many. Ah, they were a fine, fine couple and I do miss them.

51

This is a great thread. Sauron, that was a good eulogy. I feel for you.

Nice turn of phrase.

My parents are great. My dad is 73. He’s in phenomenally good health for a 70 year old, but just had a health scare this fall. It makes one stop and think a bit.

My dad was a college physical science and physics instructor. He was a teacher, not a researcher. He taught teachers, he taught nurses, he taught engineers. When me and my siblings were growing up, we’d be doing our homework, and inevitably there was math. And I might struggle to understand what we were supposed to be doing, or not getting it right. And I would go to him, and want him to give me the answer so I could see the result. Instead, he’d make me work and think through it. At the time it was frustrating, I just wanted the answer. But he made us learn how to do the assignments, so we learned the skills.

I even took my college physics classes from him.

My mom, she grew up poor. As the 6th child in a family of eight, it was hard enough, but her dad was a worthless drunk. Her mom had a mental breakdown, and then had a stroke and got put in a care center. So she was raised by her older siblings, mostly her eldest sister. She grew up a charity case family, and didn’t have much self esteem and didn’t know social graces or really a lot of things.

She worked her way through college, earned a teaching degree, and worked as a teacher for several years. After having us kids, she needed to work, so she found a job being a social worker. Eventually, she went back to college and ending up earning two Masters degrees in social work to be able to do therapy.

She had to learn how to be a parent, how to take care of us. I remember being spanked when we were little, and being afraid. I remember my parents making a deliberate decision to not do that any more, that it was too easy to react and be angry and take it out on the kids, so they quit spanking us and began using other techniques, like going to our rooms.

One time my dad’s parents were visiting and one of us did something and they wanted to spank us, apparently my folks told them no, that’s not how we do things, so my grandparents left. That’s courage.

I took the opportunity this Christmas to tell my parents how much they mean to me.

52

My mom taught us impeccable manners. Of course, we learned the hard way. God help us if we acted up in public. She would grab me by my upper arm, in what I like to call the “Polish death grip” and hiss something in my ear about not embarrassing her. I cringe even now, when I see kids act up in a store. I’m sure my mom is hiding behind a shelf and her arm will shoot out and apply the death grip. Don’t do it kid!

My mom and dad always considered books and records to be as essential as food. We were rarely denied either.

53

Some very nice thoughts here.

My parents divorced when I was very young, so I have no memory of the three of us living as a family.

So until she remarried when I was 12, it was just my mom and me. I have many good memories of growing up, surrounded by a lot of love not only from Mom, but my aunt (her sister, whom I spent a lot of time with) and my grandparents. That side of the family was very small, so each (including my aunt’s husband) had a big impact on me.

Out of many, there’s one thing that Mom did during my growing-up years that sticks with me…and the realization of how important it was has been with me for a long time.

At bedtime every night, she never just tucked me in, kissed me and walked away. She always sat on the edge of my bed, and we would talk for a few minutes before the lights went out.

All these years later, I can’t remember any specifics beyond random things that had happened that day — though I’m sure there was more than that. But it was a constant in my life that she and I would have that time together at the end of the day.

It made me feel very loved and valued, and instilled the lesson that simple open communication between people was a good thing. It also verified the notion that the most important thing you can give your kids is your time.

54

My mother’s family (sister and parents) lived nearby, so we lived the extended family concept. I would spend at least one night a week with them - Mom claimed it was so she could clean my room without interference. There may have been some justification in this; I tended toward having “science projects” in both the literal and sarcastic senses hidden away. :eek:

We would all go camping in summers, to a Park Service campground about 60 miles away. We would stay an extended period, with registration of the site passing from one to another. Dad, of course, had the usual amount of vacation. So while we would stay in the woods, Dad would commute back and forth to work. This was before the Interstate system was more than a project in progress. Plus stopping by the house as needed on the way back and forth. I never gave it much thought at the time, but that amounted to 120 miles a day driving, plus 8 hours work, plus whatever else - grocery shopping and the like - for weeks at a time, while sleeping on the ground.

55

I remember being maybe 7-8 years old and going a few houses down to play with the neighbors. I didn’t tell my mom where I was going. My friends and I watched some cable TV, played with Transformers, had a lot of fun. I left after maybe 4-5 hours (most of the day) and saw my mom looking frazzled and upset, walking right in the middle of the street. I didn’t realize what the big deal was then.

Now, with three young girls of my own… well, I can imagine the anxiety she must have felt.

56

Reminds me of a story. I was at a Wedding sitting across form a dear childhood friend of mine Linda and her husband. The husbands’ mom was sitting next to him. I had only met the lady once years ago. Quietly I asked him what his mothers name was. “Oh just call her (first name.)”

My friend and I burst out laughing, and he was dumbfounded and asked what was so funny?

Without prompting Linda told him that Mr. Goob was afraid of the lightning bolt that would kill him if his late mother ever heard him address a person of a certain age by their first name without permission. And then told me that her name was Mrs. Smith.

57

These 2 little words are the kindest words I have seen on the internet in a very long time. I am tearing up. :slight_smile:

58

Like in so many other stories, my parents were always behind us kids, always willing to sacrifice their own enjoyment for ours, but always kept a low profile like none of it was a big deal.

My oldest brother went off to West Point when I was 11. He’d been there about 2 months when the first parent’s weekend came along, and of course my parents were going to be there, trusting the rest of us kids to stay at home by ourselves. Except that the week before, I broke my leg in a bike accident and was in a cast from toes to mid-thigh. So, they brought me along and, since I was not yet steady on crutches, Dad pushed me in a wheelchair the whole time. West Point is not exactly flat, but my 40’s dad pushed me up hills for the whole weekend and never complained. This would have been the first time Mom and Dad would have been away by themselves for almost 20 years. That point only occurred to me a few years ago when my kids were finally old enough for us to leave them on their own so my wife and I could enjoy a romantic getaway.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I was invited to join the varsity baseball team (an older brother was a star player) during the state tournament. The semi-finals were 2 hours away, and after winning the game, the team got hotel rooms to stay over for the finals the next day. I was thrilled that I was allowed to stay in a room with four other kids “on our own”. Where were my parents enjoying themselves that night? At a laundromat washing, sorting and folding all the uniforms. I wonder how many of the players, or their parents, ever gave a second thought to how clean the team looked for that finals game?

I have tried to be there for my kids, but I know there’s know way I will ever measure up to my parents.

59

We lived in the suburbs and my dad worked in the city, about 1/2 drive from home, and once I was about 8 or 9years old and my brother was 6 or 7, my mum went back to work as a bank teller. The primary school we attended was at the bottom of our street so we would walk home after school and let ourselves in. No friends over and you don’t go out. The thing I remember though, was that I could call mum at work any time I needed to, even if was just to say hello, and she would always stop and talk with me for 5 minutes. No one at her branch ever complained or got huffy about it, they were always really nice to us. So even though I didn’t see mum until after 5pm, I always felt that she had time for me. The one I really appreciate now is that after working her 8 hour day on her feet, she would come home and immediately begin getting dinner ready, check our homework, and after dinner, do the cleaning up! How lazy were we! There is no way my husband or kids are getting away with that! But I don’t remember my mum ever complaining, it was just how things were.
My dad was a businessman and I loved to visit him at work, which was very rare. I saw him even less than our mum, because of the travel time, but again, he always made time for us. We had some made up games that we played in our back yard; we’d swim and go to the park, occasionally take us fishing and he taught us to ride our bikes. My parents were both avid readers with a large library and they both encouraged us to read and would read to us. Spending time reading books with your kids is an awesome way to build closeness. As a result, everyone in our family loves to read.

60

This thread is delightful to read!

My dad died on April 29, 2013 at age 88. He had been at my house on St. Patrick’s day, wanted his corned beef grilled on rye bread (and don’t be skimpy on the meat), Ate so much, he stepped into the family room to play with his great grandsons, and ended up taking a contented snooze. Since I always send “takeout” packages, my dad wanted another sandwich and a big piece of cake. No problem. We had an 18-lb corned beef.

He called me the next day to say how great it was.

He called the day after that for another sandwich. :smiley:

Two days later, he called me in a panic, “I fell and I can’t get up on my own.” I told him to press his life alert button but he insisted he was not hurt. I got over there, and his left leg was at a grotesque angle to the rest of his body. He had broken his femur.

What made me feel so awful about it was that even though we didn’t want him going down the stairs anymore for laundry or anything, I knew he was smoking. I bitched at him up to the moment I got there. I had told him previously that if he was going to smoke, he would have to smoke at the kitchen sink or outside if it was nice. He thought I’d never discover that he had 2 smoking “stations.” One in the basement next to his dryer (we did his laundry), and one on the landing to the kitchen. He tripped on the top step of the landing after a smoke, ping-ponged all around his little kitchen and his arms were ripped to shreds. He was able to call me because his cell phone was in his pocket.

He had to wait 26 hours to get into surgery. I watched him go from a perfectly lucid, pissed off guy, to a helpless kitten. He had been throwing clots from his break to his head. He got pneumonia during PT after the surgery, and went to a nursing home. On his last day, the nursing home sent him to the hospital with a complaint that he was combative and uncooperative. Turns out he was neither. He stopped talking and eating, and they didn’t want him to die on their census. It was an awful way for my hero to be treated.

He survived 25 years with the Detroit Police Department (and the 1967 riot).

He umped high school baseball and refereed football til he was 70.

He took me shopping with him as a kid, and we’d always make a trip to Sears for some hot cashews. I was the only girl out of 5 kids. Wrapped around my pinkie, he was.

He cared for my mom for the 17 years she was homebound by a devastating heart attack.

My oldest brother (a Viet Nam vet) died just 10 months before him, and he wasn’t allowed to seem him because my brother had C. Diff & MRSA. He wanted so badly to save him.

Wow. That was stuff I hadn’t talked to anyone about. Not even my husband. It was kind of like my little secret for my heart only. Thank you for sharing your story sauron and inspiring others like me to honor their dads.