I grew up in a house that shared a well with a few others, and it was driven by an electric pump. So if the power was out for whatever reason, we had no running water. I’m an adult and haven’t lived there for a long time, but I still have to mentally nudge myself to remember that I can get a glass of water, do dishes, or flush the toilet if the power is out.
I spent many many hours as a child hanging around on oil rigs and a golf course that my parents owned. I still have an odd split in my mind between “the oil business as seen on TV” and “the oil business as seen up close and personal as a kid playing by jumping from one oil tank to another or seeing how high I could climb on a derrick.”
I had a big family, a huge family really (I was one of six kids, but I have over 100 first cousins), and never had a close relationship with my grandparents or my aunts and uncles for the most part. There were just too many of us, but my best friend was my cousin so she had the same experiences so we didn’t know how odd we were.
My mother corrected our accents all the time, but I never really noticed until I was an adult that I didn’t sound like my dad (or even like my mom) at all.
We put homemade syrup on cornbread and cinnamon sugar on white rice. Blech.
When I was growing up, we were really poor. We were so poor that we only had two servants. We couldn’t afford a chauffeur, so my mom or dad had to drive me and my brothers around. We also could not afford to have a gardener, but it didn’t matter, because where we lived, we didn’t have a yard to speak of.
I am smiling as I write this, though.
My parents were missionaries, and I grew up in Taiwan and Indonesia. In many Asian countries, having household servants is a necessity, not a luxury. Otherwise, if your house is left empty for 5 minutes, it is assumed that you have moved away and your stuff will disappear. Thus, it was “normal” to have at least two live-in servants, each with different days off. As employers, we provided room, board, and money for clothing and incidentals.
Most of my friends had at least 3 or 4 people working for them: cook, washer woman, gardener, and driver. Many also had a night watchman.
As missionaries, however, we didn’t have a whole lot of money. In fact, in terms of my dad’s salary, we were right at (or even under) what was considered “poverty level” in the United States. However, the household servants were covered under the housing allowance from our church, since it was a normal, household expense.
I don’t know if I can say this without sounding super snooty, but one thing I didn’t realize that was unusual growing up (and I’m really not sure how far it deviates from the norm) was that my family mostly ate pretty healthy foods. My parents are hippies, we lived in California where we had access to fresh fruit and veggies all the time, the closest grocery store to our house was a health food grocery store, and my mom is diabetic. I’ve only rarely eaten canned vegetables (I like canned corn, and sometimes canned tomatoes are good for making sauces), I’ve never had Velveeta, or Miracle Whip or Wonderbread or Twinkies. We didn’t do meat and potatoes and I wasn’t clear on what a casserole was until I was an adult. (It sounded like something that was rolled, like a burrito.) My mom’s idea of a proper dinner was baked chicken with rice and steamed broccoli, or shrimp and vegetables stir-fried in a wok. When my sister, and then I, became vegetarians, my mom was pleased because she thought it would provide motivation for her and my dad to eat less meat.
We also occasionally boycotted foods if my mom was displeased by the politics of them. For awhile we could only eat grapes grown in our yard or friends’ yards (at this point we were living in Sonoma County, so having grapes at home was standard) because my mom didn’t like the way grape pickers were treated.
Maybe I should just say that it didn’t occur to me until I was an adult that not everyone was raised by hippies.
I guess being raised by a Mennonite mother in a Mennonite town would be odd; we were odd back in the day in that town because we were half-breeds - my dad wasn’t Mennonite. Everyone’s mom baked bread and cooked every day, sewed clothes, knitted, made rag rugs and patchwork quilts, canned in fall, gardened (large gardens) every summer, etc. My husband is a couple of years younger than I am, but his parents have never gardened at all, so he doesn’t automatically recognize what a little carrot plant looks like versus a weed. We’ve decided to have a garden here, so I just made a garden. I hadn’t even realized not everyone knows how to do that until I met him.
I did all this too! In the seventh grade at the age of 12, c. 1975. Except I had an afternoon daily, so I could do my route after school, on my bike.
Man I remember how sucky it was filling in the similar holes I dug. But had to do it.
My family had a bar in the house where I grew up. My dad drank, but not excessively. One of the houses we looked at here in Pittsburgh had a bar in the basement.
My parents are pagan swingers so I got to sit off to the side at a lot of their meetings. It took a while to slowly dawn on me that most people’s childhoods are very different from mine.
They also have a severe case of wanderlust, so we moved every 8 months or so. I still can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up in one house, especially to be able to visit it as an adult.
A few things things I was taught the French words for before learning the English words. To me they were just ordinary words, so why didn’t I hear other people using them?
Jumping on the my dad is a jack of all trades with tons of tools of all descriptions bandwagon. 
But add lots of electronics magazines and some ongoing chemistry experiments sitting in windowsills evaporating.
I don’t know how unusual this was but since other posters are talking about how they grew up poor without this or that and since I’ve never met anybody else with this set-up, I’ll mention that we didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was twelve or so.
We had an outhouse and it was quite a ways from the house. Pity you if you had to do number 2 after dark. Most times one of my brother would go with me since they knew I’d return the favor.
That’s not the unusual thing, however. It was the well from which we drew our water. Not only was the water always cool to drink when drawn, the vessel we used for drawing it, which was on a rope, was the four feet long metal tube was about eight inches in diameter and I’m guessing held about three gallons or so. You’d lower it to the water and you could feel a sort of pull or bump letting you know it was full. Once you pulled it up, you’d get the water into the bucket on the ground by pulling this release trigger at the top of the tube. Probably not that rare for poor Southern households, but nobody around had one like it and I’ve never run across anybody saying they had one.
My dad was in a band when I was young, so when I was about 6 and my sister was 3, mom packed us up and we traveled with the band for about a year and a bit. I was homeschooled for the duration by mom. We slept in hotels and spent a lot of time on the road. Then my maternal grandfather died and mom got pregnant almost immediately afterwards, so we settled in a small town and the band kind of broke up, though they still played at occasional gigs once a month or so.
My father did tons of self-sufficency type stuff - he had a big guarden in the country, he made his own maple syrup, he chopped wood (and even had a wood-burning stove in his city house).
In some ways it was cool, but overall I hated it. It involved so very much manual labour and we kids were drafted to do it, right alongside him. While other kids were out having fun on weekends, I was shoveling manure and picking potato bugs off the potato plants. Maple syrup making combined hauling heavy buckets of freezing slush in the early spring, with literally hours of feeding the fire as it slowly boiled. Hauling wood soon got old, too.
My dad owned a Pet Supply company in the 50’s and 60’s. At home, we had pet monkeys, talking birds, an ocelot, box turtles in the basement, spitting fish, dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs and my two brothers.
… in order of importance, right? 
Oh yeah - kids were in no way exempt from their parents’ lifestyle. There’s a reason that I can put in a garden and weed it and bake my own bread and knit myself a sweater if I wanted to. 
My mother always called her sister Mary.
So did my father and Mary’s husband.
When we were in our teens, my best friend got a new stepmom named Merry. I asked the lady, “Oh, is your real name Audrey?”
She looked at me so oddly and answered, “No…”
Come to find out, Mary is not a nickname for Audrey!!
The other 5 aunts have always just called her Audrey.
I think it’s because when they were teenagers, Audrey and Mama ran away from home to Texas and used different names so welfare couldn’t find them.
Now I’m the only one who calls her Mary!
I have two aunts who have their Ph.d–one in some weird math, from Rice, and the other, in Physics, from Yale. They graduated High School in 1962 and 1963. It was a long time before I realized there was an idea out there that girls were bad at math and science.
My parents never entered or left the house using the front door; they only used the side door. They might use the front door if they’re going from the living room to the front porch, but otherwise it was reserved just for special guests or occasions. They treated a front door like many people treat their living rooms when they also have a family room. When they moved to a large house in the suburbs with an attached garage, they came and went through the back door or garage door, refusing to use the front, even if they were just taking a walk.
It wasn’t until I bought my first house that I realized most people really didn’t treat their front door as something reserved for special occasions.
I was taught that if I was visiting friends, always ring or call them from the side door or, if there were two front doors and an attached garage, to use the one by the garage. I still do that to this day, out of habit.
My father: got up, went to work, came home and drank a beer in front of the TV, ate supper, watched more TV, and went to bed. Never talked to me in any meaningful way. Never asked how school went, or what I was reading, or if I was going to the prom, or did I want to ride out to an uncle’s house with him on Saturday. Never took me to the movies, out to breakfast after church, (he did take me to church a handful of times since it was ordered that I be raised Catholic, but then told me to go walk to church by myself since I knew where it was and what to do there), miniature golfing, a baseball game (my brothers got the outings, the fishing trips, helping to fix the car). So imagine my surprise watching TV shows with the nice, funny, wise daddies. Even more surprising to find some of my friends were considered pretty little princesses and were beloved Daddy’s Little Girls. I was confused by this for some years, not quite sure which style of parenthood was the “correct” one. When my best friend’s dad was killed in a car crash, I felt so bad for her of course, but inside I was kind of surprised that she was SO grief stricken. So that’s the odd thing I had in my house growing up, a disengaged father. wah.
OTOH - as a stay at home mom, I had the time and energy to cook from scratch. One afternoon I was making chicken soup, had just taken a homemade pie out of the oven, and was kneading bread dough. My daughter’s little friends were very curious as to my strange activities. “Why are you doing that? You can make soup? Soup comes from a can! What’s that you’re mashing, play dough? Can I try?” Poor little things, I suppose they’re living in McMansions now, picking up bags of take-out food from Applebee’s or The Olive Garden every night. Or maybe I planted a childhood seed and they turned into foodies!
You know, come to think of it, mine didn’t either. We always went out through the garage. People came to the front door to visit, but we never left that way. And they actually built an entry hall in the house. Again, this predates me so I don’t remember how exactly my dad did it–I think he shortened either the garage or the living room some–but my parents’ house has an entry hall the size of a small room (bigger than a bathroom…about the size of a tiny bedroom). There’s one door leading to the garage, one to the utility room, one (the front door) to the outside, and then a doorway leading into the living room. It didn’t occur to me until just now that that is really strange. Why waste perfectly good space like that? All they keep in there are a couple of chairs (mostly used to toss things into) and a tiny credenza with a mirror over it.