As I’ve mentioned before, my cousin was an entertainer and played in clubs around the Cleveland area in the '60s and '70s. When I was a kid we would go to see him on Saturday nights. It was perfectly normal for me when I was 8 or 10 to be sitting in a bar at 2 a.m. talking to a barmaid. I knew what went into almost every drink and could name many exotic liqueurs, a lot of which I’d tasted. And I knew many, many pop lyrics.
I was in my late 20’s before I realized that some people actually made a distinction between step/half/by marriage relatives and their “real” family. My grandfather was widowed twice, the first time when my dad was a toddler, and after he died Grandma married a man who had kids and step-kids he’d raised after their mother died. From the day they got married to the day he died, they both referred to whole conglomerate of us as “our kids.” It wasn’t until I ran across a thread on here where someone was talking about not having to be civil to his step-mother because she wasn’t family that I realized other people saw these situations differently.
I grew up thinking cheese was either white, orange or shaker.
We had a big mental trashcan in the kitchen, the type most people use outside. It was the only place we could put our trash. My father took it out to the curb once a week on trash day.
Maybe it’s a regional thing, but growing up it seems everyone had two refrigerators. One in the kitchen, the second usually in the basement. The one in the basement was typically ancient and referred to as “the beer fridge” although it held things other than beer.
Now, my gf and I have a very nice basement beer fridge. It holds 3 cases without complaint, along with whatever doesn’t fit in the upstairs refrigerator.
I know you didn’t mean to type this but I just love it. I have one too. I am going to use it more.
Very much not common in my family, but I get it. Best sandwich in the world.
Both my parents were teachers before they retired. I really thought everyone had endless holidays. I never got over the shock of how few days off everyone else gets. I now work as a teacher myself…
My dad was a brilliant engineer and could fix anything mechanical or electrical and was also very competent at construction - he took off time from work to hire on as a carpenter when our house was built. Cleanest construction site you’ve ever seen, he’d go around after the rest of the crew had left and sweep, collect loose lumber and nails etc. My grandfather (his dad) was a machinist and mechanic, so I grew up working on cars, doing carpentry work and becoming a shade-tree engineer.
We had a large garden, beef cows, horses, an above ground 24K gallon pool, a milk cow and after my mom’s mother had her house moved to our property, chickens that laid blue eggs! (Auracana’s).
I knew this was not really normal, but my grandparents (dad’s parents) had a 40 acre garden, an orchard and beef cows.
This was in what is now a suburb of Atlanta. In the 60’s and 70’s.
My sister and I always had little bunkers in our closets. We would stack up pillows, bring in a camping lantern and stock up on snacks and hole up in our own little closets for hours while my mom ranted and raved about something or other. It was particularly bad when she stopped smoking. She quit cold turkey one day and screamed for a good three days. We stayed upstairs in our closets for a couple of days and snuck down for food until the third day my mom came up in a rage and destroyed both our closets. That happened periodically. Mom was never violent with us, but she sure was violent with our stuff. I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to sleep in your closet occasionally until I was in my teens.
When we were little, although my mom’s family was relatively loaded cash-wise, my mom didn’t want to ask for money, even though she often came up short since she was a single mom raising to kids by herself (dad was terrible about paying child support). So we lived in a pretty nice neighborhood, but I guess mom used up all her money on the mortgage or something because we used to have crap for food. I would scrounge toward the end of the week, stashing away old hot dog buns, which I would poke holes in and fill with chocolate chips or velveeta, then microwave for breakfast. I would ration them out to last in case she didn’t have a chance to go to the supermarket. It wasn’t until we had enough money for real food that I knew that was a bit odd. (She eventually went to her family and they gave her a stipend for managing the books for the family’s company.)
I also had jobs every single summer from the time I was 10 or 11, even after we had more support from my mom’s family. It was just what the kids did in our family, regardless of how much money was available. We all worked. So I detassled corn and picked berries until I was old enough to watch other people’s children. Then I babysat by the time I was 12 or 13. When I was old enough to drive, I had a full-time job as a museum receptionist in the summer and worked part-time at a book store. I also did odd jobs helping build things, which lots of people thought was strange since I’m female. While I was working, I was usually practicing for volleyball, too - luckily the practices were early enough in the morning it didn’t prevent me from working.
I would go for walks starting when I was about nine or ten. I’m not sure if my mom and grandparents were being neglectful by letting me do so but it didn’t seem odd to me at the time. I would walk blocks and blocks away from home pretty regularly (I love walking to this day). I asked my friends to go with me and they thought I was nuts.
I’m sure it’ll sound more reasonable to the older posters here. I was born right on the cusp of the parental hysteria. I’m glad the adults in my life gave me that freedom.
My mom used to hand us a shovel and send us outside “to dig a hole” anytime one or more of us kids was driving her crazy.
(Our holes weren’t allowed to hang around long term though and were usually filled in within a week or so)
My grandfather was a forest entomologist and owned at one time or another a couple of remote properties in Northern Quebec (we still own one) and one in central Ontario (part of which he sold to my father; he still owns that). My dad spent his childhood in the deep wilderness - he didn’t go to school until I think grade 6 or so. He always felt (and still feels) most at home in the remote wilderness and, when I grew up, we spent every available moment up north - mainly working at shoring up the cabins, docks etc., but also on lengthy canoe expeditions on crown land. Often, he’d pick out a route on topographic maps, have us flown in to some remote lake, and canoe out over several weeks.
It was a while before I realized most people don’t do this.
Walking, walking, walking. I remember walking the two miles to our library in the dark. And five miles to day camp and back.
To this day, I walk every day.
It was dogma in my family that beverages were not drunk during meals.
Not even water.
You were supposed to wait until after you were finished, then you could have coffee/tea/cola/whatever.
This struck me as idiotic but the full weirdness of it did not occur to me for quite awhile. Around age 12 or so I began drinking fluids at meals and somehow got away with it.
I was a rebellious child.
As a kid I assumed every adult had a cocktail after work every day and drank alcohol every night at dinner, like my parents did. At one point I went to a friend’s house for dinner and was dumbfounded that their parents not only weren’t drinking alcohol, but a Pepsi. Sodas weren’t for adults, they were only for kids! Parents drink booze! What’s wrong with your family?
I also assumed, for years, that every family sat down to eat dinner together every night where they had a complete multi-course meal- salad, at least one veggie, meat, a side, and some form of bread or rolls. The benefits of a mother that didn’t work outside the house, I guess, and a June Cleaver-style upbringing. One night I finished my dinner early and went to my friend’s house to see if he could play until it got dark, and they were still eating so they invited me in. They were having some noodle/meat casserole thing with a side of peanuts. Peanuts. Just a pile of them on the plate- I thought that was the strangest thing in the world.
When I was 14 the thing to do if you wanted money was to get yourself a paper route. A.M. delivery before school… by bike… rain or snow… in the dark.
And this was no ‘throw the paper on the driveway’. This was going to each house’s door and putting it between the doors.
And to get paid you had to collect money from the customers yourself. From that money you had to payback the newspaper company for the papers you delivered that week.
So at age 14 you had to be a delivery person, accountant, collections agent, supply order person working in the wee morning hours 6 days a week, collecting money from your customers after school all to to hopefully make $60 for the week.
Perefectly normal, fair, and acceptable in 1984.
It’s not? 
That is strange. I’m pretty sure that peanuts are not vegatable.
Yeah, I’m seeing that it’s not unusual to have one in the house, one in the basement or garage. We didn’t have a basement, though–growing up in Southern California, I didn’t even have any friends with basements. They were pretty rare in that area. I probably knew people who had fridges in the garage, but never two in the house (especially not for such a small family).
The family up the street had kind of a cool unusualness, though–they were Mormons, and they had 10 kids all living at home (this was in a suburban tract house about the same size as ours–maybe 1300 sf?) They had converted their garage to a big bedroom for some of the boys (2 girls, 8 boys), but one of the boys had what I thought at the time was the world’s coolest bedroom–it was in the attic, accessed through a closet in one of the other bedrooms, and the walls were insulation covered with silvery material–it was like he lived in a spaceship! I wanted a room like that so badly. Though it did get hot in the summer.
I also grew up in Louisiana (in suburbia, though), and my dad was also a gun collector/gunsmith. Unloaded guns in the garage and on the kitchen table, in all manner of (dis)assembly, was completely normal for us. So was melting down lead on the kitchen stove, and then pouring that same hot lead into molds to make bullets. Then the neo-bullets had to be thrown into a tumbler for a little while to smooth out their finishes. Lastly, my dad had a few simple long-handled gizmos (attached to the workbench in the garage) for clamping copper jackets onto the newly-minted bullets.
One time, some friends of mine from college stopped by my parents’ house. They were English & Irish exchange students. They came in and walked into my parent’s kitchen – my dad had a machine gun partially disassembled on the table. My friends handled the scene politely, but they admitted to being fairly shocked that the gun was just sitting there like that.