This was my mom, only with random French and German (she is neither, but speaks both). I didn’t know that “Frere Jacques” had an English equivalent for years and I still have trouble with the words. I also thought it was perfectly normal to announce that traffic had slowed and we were “stecken geblieben” (stuck), or that a positive achievement was “ausgezeichnet.”
I also didn’t know that it was perceived as weird to put ketchup on mac & cheese until we had it at sleepaway camp one year and I looked around the table grousing about the absence of a ketchup bottle and my friends stared at me in horror and asked, “Who would put that on this? Ew!” My whole extended family eats it like this.
My family drops in random Spanish words, including a few very non-standard Spanish words. A common word in my house was “fuchila”, which is, I think, pretty slangy. (It means “gross”. Something moldy in the back of the fridge you forgot about is fuchila.) Neither of my parents are Latino and neither speaks Spanish, but my dad grew up in East LA, which has a very large Latino majority and he drops all kinds of random street Spanish into his vocabulary all the time.
My mother is from Italy and her family was all about wine with dinner so it was no big deal to give us a glass of wine occasionally once we were about 12 or so. Because it was no big deal it ended up being something that we didn’t even really WANT.
Dinner would be after 10pm, sometimes after 11pm, and occasionally after midnight, depending on when my mother got home from work. (My father would do the cooking.)
The street where I lived was known as “The Mango Street.” Every house on the block had a mango tree in the front yard. There were so many mangoes, we couldn’t even give them away. Usually, they rotted on the tree and fell on the street.
Our street was usually covered in rotten mangoes. Slipping on a mango was normal, as was the smell. Kids learned early to walk quickly under trees or you might get brained by a falling mango. Car dents from mangoes were also common.
This, however, wasn’t the unusual part. When mangoes fell onto the street, sometimes cars would drive over them. If you hit the mango just right, the seed (flat and round and about the size of a modern computer mouse) would shoot out like a bullet with a loud “POW!”. If you were lucky, the flat part hit first and you only had to deal with the mess. If you were unlucky, the pointy part would hit and you ended up with a broken window or dent in your car. I think nearly every hubcap in the neighborhood had dents in it from mango seeds.
My maternal grandparents slept in separate bedrooms because my grandfather’s snoring was reminiscent of a chainsaw. I thought it was normal for grandparents to have separate bedrooms.
For a stretch of childhood, ages 4-8 or 9, I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast everyday. It had to be on a particular bread with only one of two acceptable brands of peanut butter. I thought PBJ was a normal breakfast option.
I also would eat vegetables frozen with my dinner. I still eat frozen peas as a snack.
This isn’t mine. I heard it on the radio, pretty sure it was This American Life
Anyways, this one woman was being interviewed and told about how growing up, her and her family had the exact same thing for dinner every night.
Every night.
I don’t remember the details, and my google-fu is weak tonight, but it was always baked chicken plus some veg dish. Same chicken, same veg. Every night.
She made it all the way to college thinking this was perfectly normal. In the dorm, the cafeteria naturally had different offerings every night and she recalled gushing to her friends how cool it was that there was something different to eat every night. They stared at her agape and she finally figured out that her own upbringing wasn’t entirely normal.
The best part was when she recounted playfully confronting her mother. The mother just shrugged and said, “well, you like chicken.”
Except Merry would be a nickname for Meredith, not Mary… But I had a great-aunt Nancy and a great-uncle Jimmy. I’m not sure what Jimmy’s real name was (not James) but Nancy’s real name was Anne. Their grandfather decided he liked Jimmy and Nancy better than Anne and whatzit, so he renamed them and everyone went along with it their entire lives.
My father was a big fan of Spike Jones & His City Slickers. He had a huge collection of records. So the first time I ever heard lots of songs (Holiday for Strings, That Old Black Magic, Begin the Beguine) they were Spike Jones renditions.
Of course, eventually I heard the straight renditions, and they sounded wrong. Come on–why would anybody listen to the straight version of Holiday for Strings?
The other thing was that coincidentally, every one of my aunts had a middle name that started with the same initial as her husband’s first name, and the uncles had a middle name that started with the same initial as their wife’s first name. (My mother and father also followed this pattern.) I somehow assumed that it was not really an accident–especially since mostly, it was just the middle initial that was used. Mary J. Smith, and Johnny M. Smith. I assumed that Mary added the J when she married Johnny. Or else, you had to marry someone whose name started with your middle initial. I thought it was a rule.
It worked out pretty well, though, because in the phone book you could assume that Johnny M stood for Johnny Mary, only they were too polite to spell out Mary’s name, since she was a tender female and all.
Naturally one day I realized this was completely silly. I shudder to think how old I was when that happened.
My Dad was able to cook, enough to keep the family fed when Mom was sick. He cooked most dinners (usually dinner was your choice of fried egg or an omelette, followed by milk and cookies; if it was something which got prepared beforehand like breaded fish, he didn’t cook that) and lunch on most Sundays. I was surprised to find out the Dads of most of my classmates were literally unable to fry an egg (the example used in Spain to mean totally, utterly, absolutely unable to cook); the few who could cook would be able to make only paella or calderete and it had to be on an open, outdoors fire. It made me very grateful for Dad’s skills, specially since at the time I was already doing a lot of the cooking - his potato omelettes left part of the kitchen looking like a battle had taken place, but they were very good and if he was cooking, I wasn’t!
We moved from Dad’s hometown of Pamplona to a smaller place when I was 4; Mom’s family lived in Barcelona. We hadn’t sold the flat “back home” and rented. For the first three years (until Mom put her foot down while pregnant with my youngest brother), we’d go “back home” every weekend. This wasn’t so unusual, as many of my classmates went “to the village” in the weekends, what was unusual was that we were from a bigger place and that we’d go to stay with Mom’s parents every Christmas and Easter. A lot of my classmates had never been more than 60km from home except in school trips or to go to the hospital in Pamplona or to Sanfermines by the time we were 14: I went to a place that took as much as 12h’ worth of driving twice a year. I also found out it was unusual to have parents who had been born more than 50km away or so.
We were also unusual in that we went on vacation to different places every year. My classmates would either go to the village (same village as in the weekends) or, and this was generally those with no village to go to, spend every summer vacation in the same place. I’m glad we did it the way we did. I got to see Segovia, almost-die-of-heat during day trips looking at ancient Castilian castles of the kind which aren’t photogenic enough for the movies (bloody hard to conquer, though), bathe in low-occupation beaches all along the Mediterranean coast, walk up from the Covadonga Sanctuary to the Lakes, see my 9yo brother almost faint at the beauty of the view from The Alhambra… while my classmates got to be packed like sardines in a massified beach or to spend summers of botijo and shadow in the same village where they spent every weekend. In Dad’s words, “we live in one of the most visited countries in the world and all they can think of is going to the same place every time! Use your imagination, people!”
We had two houses in the same town. One for summer and one for winter. My Dad had to be on call so during the winter we had a house next door to where he worked. In the summer we had a cottage on the beach but still close enough for him to get to work on a minutes notice.
My mother gave birth to me while she was in college working on a degree in mechanical engineering from a well-respected state university (a woman in this field was a much bigger deal in the 1980s than it is now.) As a single parent, she used to take me to class when she had no other option. So I was raised with the expectation that women can do anything they want to, period. For her example in this matter I am truly grateful.
I remember hearing that! And immediately after was my favorite ‘‘This American Life’’ story of all-time–an otherwise smart, capable woman who didn’t know that unicorns were make-believe until she was at a party and casually asked, ‘‘Are unicorns extinct or just endangered?’’
I didn’t clue in until fairly late in my childhood that it is not standard dad behaviour to install an entire fireplace and chimney by yourself. It took much longer to figure out that most dads do not have a lathe, table saw, or complete set of chisels in the basement.
Even today, I’m amazed that I can impress people with my own rudimentary DIY skills. One of my friends once bought me dinner and made me cookies for installing her curtain rods; another treated me like I was a god for putting his IKEA bed together.
Hamish’s parents were the same way, and I can’t get over it. His first meal involving soy sauce was at my house; he asked me what it was. He was living in British freaking Columbia and he never had berries in any form other than commercial jam. He never had oranges, grapefruit, pineapple, or kiwi fruit. He never had peppers, celery, lettuce, spinach, beans of any kind, sprouts, or radishes He never had soup until adulthood. It drives me crazy.
They don’t? But then I think my dad had them just to impress others. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that if they didn’t have a tool, John did. He loved his tools the way Imelda loved her shoes.
My sister and I used to constantly fall out of my Mom’s car when we’d go around a tight corner. We didn’t wear seatbelts (late 70s/early 80s) and would lean on the door handle the wrong way… Next thing you know, we’re rolling out onto the pavement.
When I told my wife about this she thought I was making it up. I thought everyone fell out of cars back then.
Motorcycles. My dad raced from about age 16 until his mid-30s. That meant that, when he and my mom had two tiny baby daughters (well, a toddler and a tiny baby), they packed up the babies, the gear, the bikes, the tools, a cooler and some sleeping bags and trucked us all off to the races… Every single weekend until I was about 10 and dad found Jesus. I didn’t know until I was in my teens that not everybody has a dozen motorcycles in the garage in various stages of assembly, and that most little girls under the age of 12 do not know how to mount a motorcycle. I was shocked when I got to college and met people who are afraid of bikes and had never been on one. My first ride on a motorcycle happened in utero, but when I was probably 8-9 months old (old enough to sit up and hold my own head up), they would put me in between them and my sister would sit on the gas tank and we’d go for a family-of-four motorcycle ride. Doesn’t everybody? When I was about 4, I graduated to the gas-tank “seat” (holding on to Daddy’s arms). Finally, around 8, I graduated to being allowed to sit behind him on the bike, properly. My sister and I both have tailpipe burn scars on our calves from dismounting the bike while not paying attention to how close our legs are to the tailpipe.
In other weirdness that I thought was normal, foodie things:
•My babysitter thought brown sugar was better than white sugar for some reason. So grew up eating brown sugar on my Rice Krispies and on the Cheerios. I still love brown sugar on Rice Krispies. I am the only person I know who puts brown sugar on my cereal.
•My grandmother and my mother always made pancakes with Green Giant Whole Corn Niblets® mixed into the batter. Open a can, dump it in, cook the pancakes. I was easily in my 20s before I discovered that this is weird and nobody does it. I made pancakes one morning for breakfast and my roommate thought I’d lost my mind. I dunno whose idea it was originally, if it’s a family thing, or a cultural thing, or an Ohio thing… or if my Gramma was just looking for ways to get rid of extra corn from the garden… But I really don’t like pancakes without corn niblets in them.
That did actually happen to my sister in the late '70s. We were in the back seat of some big behemoth of a car being driven by a relative; she was on the left side, I was in the middle, and one of our aunts was on the right. The driver took a hard right into a parking lot (IIRC) and the left back door popped open. My sister slid out, but grabbed onto the door. I tried to shrink into the seat while my aunt lunged over me and reached for my sister, while the people in the front seat registered what was happening and the driver braked. I think at the time we figured that maybe she hadn’t closed the door hard enough (being a young kid, maybe 5 at the oldest) and her smacking into the door on the turn might have popped it open. I know we were always told to lay off the handles and lock the back doors, so that’s probably the only way it would have happened to us.
Going ice skating and sledding at the local golf course, going on “get lost” rides, having a mother who would start to sing and tap dance at the drop of a hat, or word. :oMy grandmother would come for a 2 month stay and leave 3 years later. She would bake for 6 days straight and on Sunday we went to the bakery for our bread, pies and or cakes. Walking to the store in another town. Grew up in Stamford ,Ct was constantly going over to Greenwich or Darien by foot.
When I was about 4, I graduated to the gas-tank “seat” (holding on to Daddy’s arms). Finally, around 8, I graduated to being allowed to sit behind him on the bike, properly. My sister and I both have tailpipe burn scars on our calves from dismounting the bike while not paying attention to how close our legs are to the tailpipe.