My beloved nanny was a diabetic who took supremely good care of herself. As such, she was dead set on me becoming a diabetic, so my diet mirrored hers: milk or water to drink, a salad with lunch and dinner, baked/broiled/grilled meats and a large side of cooked veggies and a tiny serving of rice or bread. Fruit and sugar-free jello were dessert, with ice cream as a special treat.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that most people ate from cans, boxes, etc. I remember being horrified that a friend’s mother poured cheese sauce on my broccoli.
One time my nanny was out for 2 weeks, recovering from minor surgery. I had an interim babysitter in the meantime. Babysitter wasn’t the brightest crayon on the box, so when I asked if I could have a tangerine, she didn’t so much as get off of her chair to help me.
I climbed on top of the counter and reached for the bag high up. Since fruit = dessert and kids like to pig out on dessert…I spent the night hugging the toilet after downing a half-dozen tangerines :smack:.
One of my cousins had an old (but still working) one-armed bandit style slot machine in his bedroom. It didn’t have any money in it, we would open the lock and tick over the wheel to give us free turns on the machine.
Didn’t seem so strange at the time - just another toy. But now when I look back at it, its amazing that we didn’t become gambling addicts.
Nudity. My parents were European immigrants, and while my mother was downright prudish in other respects, they had a very open attitude towards nudity. It took me many years to find out that it wasn’t considered normal for your dad to come downstairs in the morning buck naked and have some breakfast while he waited for mom to iron his work clothes.
Our family too, but I didn’t realize until now that this is particularly unusual. I used brown sugar on my cereal until I went away to university. Then I just stopped putting sugar on cereal for the most part, since I couldn’t be bothered buying sugar, and usually had a few packets around for whomever needed sugar for tea/coffee. I still have to have brown sugar or porridge though, since now I am a mom and have a pantry and things, I have brown sugar. I have even brought a small plastic container to have brown sugar in at work, since I tend to eat oatmeal porridge at work in the morning.
My parents used to make their tea in the coffee maker, by putting two or three bags in the basket part and running the water through. I never did that, my best friend gave me a teapot as a going away present and to me steeping my own loose leaf tea became part of my own way of doing things. (Wild rebellion on my part.) I am proud to say my parents are now using a kettle and tea pot for their tea.
Every summertime during the 70s my folks would pack me off to my grandparents’ farm in eastern NC. There were several old sharecropper homes that were literally two-room shacks, usually without running water and/or electricity. They were still occupied by people who worked on the farm or other local, small businesses. The guy who lived on the “back 40” still had a team of mules that he would drive past the house on a regular basis. I spent many an evening on the front porch of the house belonging to two sisters, watching the deer come out of the woods and identifying songbirds. Sometimes I helped them pump water. They had family in town about four miles away but they themselves only went in about once a year, having no car or driver’s licenses.
In 1983 we moved to the farm permanently and I went to the local high school in town. The school bus would make many stops outside homes just like those. It was just no big deal then. Many of those homes are now gone, but the four on our farm are still standing, although only the one belonging to the sisters has been preserved. Two are pretty much ruins and one is in semi-OK shape and appears to have been used by squatters from time to time. Every once in a while someone who grew up in one of those homes will show up and the front door and ask to visit the old place. We always say yes.
I have a distinct memory of this happening to me as a kid. I don’t recall how it happened, but suddenly I found myself lying on my back on the backseat with the door open and my head hanging over the road while the car was moving. My parents insist it never happened and it was all a dream…
My family was the same way but I never thought of it as odd because all of my family and all my friends did the same thing. Even today I only use the back door to enter and exit my own house unless the front door is being kept open for air and I’m only gonna be gone for a few minutes.
On my mom’s side of the family (whom I grew up around; my father’s side lived partially in another state and country, for the most part) no one used titles for each other. My cousins and I knew who our parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents were, but there was no calling people, mom, dad, Aunt ___, Grandpa, etc. It was normal for me, but people in public commented on it, and asked strange questions so often that I knew it was rare, and frowned upon by some, from a young age.
There was a rule that it was impolite to say “what?” if someone called your name, or if you didn’t hear what was asked and were asking the person to repeat themselves. It still sounds wrong to me when people reply like that.
I thought it was normal to keep things spotless at all times, and to clean even if everything looked clean. Floors were mopped daily, even if nothing had been spilled, and even though no one was allowed to wear shoes in the house. Perfectly clean counters were sprayed and wiped down with a bleach solution every day, and the tub would get scrubbed clean after every use - which at the least meant four cleanings per day. A related thing was that there was absolutely no sharing of drinks allowed (I have a sip, then you do etc.).
I’m another who grew up with no boxed foods, except cereal, in our home. My mom gardened and canned, or made things from scratch. We also usually had homemade desserts, like cake, or some kind of fruit crisp, or homemade candy available almost every night, instead of as a special treat.
There was a poster who taught in China that had students with kind of the same idea about opening/closing windows as I did growing up. I don’t know if it’s just a quirk with Chinese people but it was normal for us to open the windows during the day no matter how freezing cold it was outside. My mom said it was good for the ying (or yang) and we don’t want too many of one in the house.
However, the exact opposite happened at night. We were never to have our windows open at night for any reason, no matter how hot it was. Excuses ranged from getting permanent arthritis (no fans on during the night either, and god help you if the fan is actually blowing on you!) to spirits coming into the house (for this same reason, we were never to leave clothes drying on clotheslines overnight, spirits would descend upon them)
Or come home from school and discover that you have a new bathroom in the house. Or a couple of new rooms in the basement. Or the house is halfway painted a new colour. Or there’s half a new garage put up.
Where to begin? My father built our first t.v. from a kit before they were commercially available - the picture “projected” on to the living room wall. My siblings and I charged our little friends a nickel a piece to watch the shows with us. IIRC no one had t.v.s in their homes for at least another 5 years.
My mother had a wonderful imagination and I grew up outside of a small town on an “estate” where my grandparents lived in the back house which was a scaled-down model of a castle in Normandy and our house that was called the “gatehouse”.
Most neighbours were farmers and folks in town were more or less middle-class.
We were wealthy, but modest - so I didn’t realize that all kids didn’t have a full sized two storey play house in the valley with a push mower and small garden, regular furniture and an intercom system connected to our real house.
I have two sisters and - each girl had a mock wedding on her fifth birthday. Birthday girl was bride - any cooperative young boy was groom (one year I had to be groom as the neighbour boy got chicken pox - I was not amused) and all the town kids played a role. There was a mother of the bride dress, hat, gloves; a full choir with gowns and caps; bridesmaids dresses, a groom’s outfit, and of course the bridal gown: about 14 little costumes in total. All handmade and fit for a five year-old (or there abouts).
Important people would visit my grandparents in their Rolls Royce or what have you - but of course I thought that was perfectly normal.
My grandparents (not my parents) had any manner of help - mostly the parents of my classmates. The housekeeper companion was from down the street, the gardeners (there were a bunch of them) were led by the father of a school friend and the crew came from older siblings of my friends.
To my parent’s credit we weren’t particularly aware that we had money (we were not new money) so we weren’t overly ostentatious - and I don’t think we were snobs although there were some classmates my mother discouraged friendships with . . .
Me too! My parents bought a house in the country with a well. When the power was out, you were SOL for water too. Now that I’m all citified, I’m still gobsmacked when my toilet or faucet works just fine with the power out.
I was born in '76, but I remember being told as a child to lock the back doors in our car, so the falling out of cars rings a bell for me. Neither my siblings nor I had ever done so, but we had friends who had.
Take the top part and add in a constant glass of whiskey. Stir in having him at home all day starting in high school, while on a farm I couldn’t escape from. And people wonder why I cling to Mom now. My brother, born 10 years earlier, got both Mom staying home and the actual, non-alcoholic father.
It took me a while to realize not everyone had a parent that got home from work and had booze glued to their hand until they passed out at 8pm.
We had a rotary phone until 1997 or so, although by then I had (thankfully) known rotary phones weren’t all that used anymore. I didn’t know this, however, as late as 1992 (when I was 12)…only after I started seeing phones with buttons in other people’s houses did I realize it wasn’t totally common to have a rotary phone anymore.
It wasn’t until I was in high school (early 1980s) that I found out it was unusual for your mom to be the breadwinner and your dad to be a househusband. When the movie “Mr. Mom” came out, I thought it was offensive and stupid that that was supposed to be such a funny premise. So I’ve never bought into the “men are incompetent at raising children” stereotype.
None of my friends shared my excitement when we finally got a color TV in 1981. Their reaction were along the lines of “yeah, so?”
Growing up I had an uncle that had his own company and was well off. We’d visit him at his lakeside house in Wisconsin, but lots of people live on lakes in Wisconsin. Sure, he’d take us out to dinner at fancy places, and give my sister and me $100 every Christmas. He was just a cool, slightly better off relative. He passed away a few years ago, and I was stunned to read in his obituary (sent to me by another uncle) that he had been worth $84 million, all of which he gave to charity. So I guess I grew up with a multimillionaire relative, and thought it was totally normal.
