I read all these stories and I am so thankful of the childhood I had. The house was on a dead end street with lots of kids around who would all get together to play street hockey and neighbourhood wide games of kick the can. I remember my older brother building a go-cart and racing it down the hill while the younger kids through crab apples at him. In winter we would flood the backyard and make a hockey rink and in summer we put up a volleyball net and had tournaments.
I was the youngest of three and the only girl. Sure I was picked on a bit, but I was a brat, and really, I deserved it. There were never any rules in my house. We were taught manners from an early age and we knew where the lines were and didn’t cross them. I was never grounded, and I think I was spanked once. We were never given a curfew and would just go to bed when we were tired. My parents trusted us and I guess we knew that if we gave them a reason to, then we would start losing our privileges.
My Mom never really bought junk food so we could snack on what we wanted, I remember going over to a friend’s house and being so excited when we got to have something like Fruit by the Foot. Then my world was turned around by the slurpie. There was a corner sore about a 15 minute walk away and I would save every penny I could find so I could get my Slurpie fix.
Dinners were always eaten together. There were no rules about what you had to eat, or how much. We all just sat around the table talking about our days, and if the conversation was good then we stayed even after the meal. When a child wanted to leave the table we always asked permission to leave, not because we had to, but because we were taught that it was polite too. After dinner the kids would do the dishes and then we would all watch TV together. Aside from the odd puberty driven emotional rollercoaster we all got along great, and still do.
Yep, very little drama around the household. Keep your room picked up. Do the chores as outlined. “As Long As You Are Living Under Our Roof You’ll Live By Our Rules” (ALAYALUORYLBOR). In between meal snacking discouraged “you’ll spoil your dinner”. No TV in the kitchen, ever, that was verboten. “May I be excused” was the order of the day.
Very evil vibe. Cheating and drinking. Eventually Dad killed himself while Mom talked him through it - he earlier had tried to kill me too but obviously it didn’t work. Then Mom took up with one of my teachers - who was married and had a daughter who tried to kill herself, creating a pretty big local uproar. The worst of it was what Mom and I did, which I’m not even going to name. Eventually I heard she was marrying some guy whose wife had just killed herself.
I left home at 16 and it’s been decades since I’ve heard from any of them. I don’t even know if they’re alive, and when asked rather than go into it I just tell people I have no more living relatives. As an adult and husband and stepfather I think I may sometimes be distant or awkward, but I don’t think I’ve done anything really bad. I certainly regret things but overall feel pretty good about what I have (and haven’t) done with what I learned.
We didn’t have much in the way of food, rationing and all that during WW2 but what we did have was eaten and enjoyed because we really didn’t have a choice, it was eat or go without.
My dad was away fighting the nasties so what I can remember of mealtimes is fairly hazy. What I do recall is that there was always people around and I can’t ever recall any harsh words or actions.
After the war my dad came home and divorced my mum(details of why in another thread) and I got a new dad who turned out to be just fantastic.
My childhood after that is nothing but a happy memory, mealtimes even tho’ food was still rationed, weren’t so bad because at least we had more to eat than we had during the war, not much more it’s true but more nevertheless.
It’s fair to say that my brother and myself learned our manners, we never left the table without asking permission and we always finished what we had, we also washed and dried the dishes and the cutlery.
My mother and the man I knew as my dad are now dead, I miss them both and thank them for everything they did and for every effort they put into my upbringing.
A lot of you have been through some real crap, needless to say! And I think it’s pretty cool that for those of you that have, that you’re still hanging tough and fighting the good fight (and winning, no less!) and not letting what happened to you happen to your own kids. It’s amazing that you’ve got the guts to look at your past(s) in the eye and deal with it so smartly.
I hope that with all the emotional/psychological wounds that are being inflicted on our young men and women abroad with all that horror there won’t translate into generations of injured parents destroying their kids. I suspect that it was WW1 and WW2 and Vietnam that caused some of the crap to indirectly (?) make its way into your lives. But thank God, from what you said, it at least sounds like things have gotten better … .
Again, Thanks a million for sharing your very interesting stories!!
Bitterness and hostility, masked by stiff repression that occaisionally burst out in screaming rages. My Mom was (is) suffereing from undiagnosed mental illness which during my childhood was aggravated by some meds (Steroids?) she had to take for a medical condition. My Dad is a weak passive-agressive enabler terrified of conflict. It made for a very tense atmosphere.
Don’t get me wrong, I know it could have been worse. There wasn’t any physical violence, and my P and M are still together and seem to have improved in old age (Getting rich and moving to California helped with my Mom’s moods.) Annie-Xmas’ and Napier’s posts put my unhappy adolescence in perspective. But it still sucked.
Dinner was around the table, TV off, random undirected conversations unless one of us was in trouble. If there was trouble M&D would take turns lecturing. Near idyllic compared to some people around here.
I don’t remember snacks being a big deal except the hour or so before dinner. We ate at 5:00, so snacking was usually later in the evening.
Most of the dinners I remember were either lighthearted joking or a technical discussion of the aerospace industry or something, peppered with requests like “Pass the … um, the shake well” (salsa bottle said “shake well” and dad was a bit of an absent minded professor type sometimes). Mostly as teenagers that things got not-so-fun, but even then it wasn’t too bad. My sister might have a different opinion, but I’m a bit clueless sometimes.
The very little I remember of the vibe in our house is general tension. Dad worked out of town and was very rarely home. Mom worked until about 9pm, so us kids fended for ourselves. My older brother or I would make something pretty simple and make sure little sis had dinner. The few memories I have of family dinners are the walking on egg shells type.
I have many more memories of summers spent at our grandparents’ house. We got enough love and attention then to last us all year. Woke up when we felt like it and cleaned our rooms. Ate breakfast if we felt like making something, then did whatever we wanted until it was time for Grandpa to come home for lunch, when we’d meet at the table for whatever Granny had thrown together. Run around doing whatever we wanted until 6pm to meet for supper, which was the major meal of the day. We worked in the garden, took out the trash, washed dishes, and mowed the lawn not because those were chores, but because it would be helpful and we were glad to do it. The vibe in that house was love and affection and respect for each other.
My grandparents taught me what a family is. They celebrated their 60th anniversary last October.
When he wasn’t home, which was most of the time given he was a workaholic and took many business trips, it was a pretty enjoyable place to be. My mom is, and was, pretty free with us, but then we were pretty good kids, with good grades and such. Basically, all the fun stuff would happen when Dad was gone; we’d watch movies together, or play games and be loud and do the things that kids do. I’m sure we were annoying at times but Mom took it all in stride. We’d always eat together for dinner, and Mom was a stay-at-home mom.
When Dad came home - from the moment the garage door opened - we kids would hurriedly take our toys and go downstairs to the (finished) basement and play down there. (I still get a very strong uneasiness with garage door openers, like I need to leave the room and go off someplace by myself.) Most fights and issues would be settled between us as we didn’t want to get Dad involved. We’d send our littlest sister upstairs if we wanted drinks or anything because she was the least likely to get Dad’s ire. Dad was temperamental and definitely a “kids should be neither seen nor heard” type. We still ate dinner on weeknights, but it was tense, especially as I got older and more critical of his behavior. On weekends, they’d go out or eat dinner alone and we’d make ourselves scarce. The only other joint activity was church, where we frequently got in trouble for ‘being silly’ in the car (despite our best attempts to keep things quiet - you know how kids are). Most of my childhood memories are playing in the basement or outside. We had a lot of relatively quiet fun on our own, and would ask Mom all the time when the next business trip was, so we could go to the movies or have fun together. When I reached my teenage years, it got a lot more tense for everyone when Dad and I were both around. Arguments were common and would usually end when I went crying to my room or went for a walk down the street to the woods, where I spent a lot of time on my own.
Now, he’s not a monster or anything, but he’s just an unpleasant man who my sisters and I have no real bond with. As adults, only the youngest sister who I mentioned earlier has any contact with him, and it’s limited largely to a few emails a year (she groused about having to go out for coffee with him when he was in town a few weeks back, and she hadn’t seen him in about 2 years). When my parents divorced, finally, it was fantastic; since then, our family life is still more like the first paragraph. My mom’s a great and loving parent and my sisters, stepdad, and mom have a close connection.
Oh, and I was an overweight kid, and my dad had a huge problem with that, so snacking was mostly limited to sneaking and hoarding food to avoid the inevitable criticism or argument. He absolutely hated to see me eat. With mom when I was a kid, though, there was a set “afternoon snack” after school and then sit-down dinner.
The vibe around the house was fine. A base allowance was supplemented by doing chores (sweeping the kitchen, loading and unloading the dishwasher, setting the table, walking the dogs, etc.).
Mealtimes were fine. We tended to talk about how our days had gone. It was personal, not intellectual or related to the news as in some of my friends’ families. No TV allowed during the meal and my mother is an excellent cook. “Snack” meant a PB&J or a bowl of cereal or a piece of fruit, though not right before dinner. We had very little money when I was in high school but “real” food was a priority over Hamburger Helper and its ilk. Chicken with rice and broccoli was our modal dinner.
ETA: Both of my parents communicated well and neither had drinking problems or mental health issues. This helps a lot.
Dinner was the best. Attendance was mandatory for all - no excuse of any kind would avail (not that anyone wanted to be absent). TV was simply out of the question. Conversations ranged over nearly all conceivable subjects, with active (intense?) particpation from youngest to oldest.
Since I was brought up this way, I thought it was natural. I was thus puzzled to visit friends’ houses where family members ate by themselves or in near silence.
It was sort of a standing joke how guests would react to our dinners: few had any experience of kids participating in such active and far-ranging discussions. I think we were viewed as a bit quirky because of this.
Growing up, our vibes were somewhat raucous but still mostly cheerful. I have a very loud family, everyone says friendly things, but the volume is insane, and everyone talks at once. At dinner, we talked about lots of topics, but there were some that were not allowed at the table - verboten things included gross stuff, like “I pulled a scab off my knee, and pus came out!” (you know, when I was six, that was the high point of my day) and no bad-talking other people.
Ha, asking for snacks. My mom felt very strongly about healthy eating, and we always had bountiful healthy snacks which we could have whenever we wanted without asking – we didn’t want any, ever.
Obviously each one of you has interesting stories and histories, but I suppose you don’t need me to tell you that.
Can’t help but wonder what I might have become if there had been just one smart, balanced person for guidance and to see as an example when I was growing up. Who knows?, maybe I could have been a contender, or maybe I could’ve been a car salesman, or something. Guess I’ll never know.
I recall once, while going to another institution, that the lady case worker driving me and two of my siblings to the place, stopped at her parents or grandparents place first so that all of us could have a dinner there. And so while the dinner was being prepared, the elderly gentleman sat in a chair across from me and my brother in the living room and engaged us in conversation about the impact that the invention of the machinegun had on WW1.
I was delightfully taken-aback by this simple social event. … actually talking about something that was interesting and that he was sharing his knowledge with us, like it was easey.
Up until then I’d for the most part only been witness to people behaving like jackasses – farting and laughing at wiping their buggers on the wall and just acting nuts. Even the people in the TV acted like asses … and yet here was this little old man calmly talking about a slice of history with us as if by his simple act of sharing letting us know that there are in fact places where people don’t act like fools.
When I was growing up, there was no TV or radio on during dinner, and we had fairly civilized, often lively conversations. I recall when I was 9, I decided to rebel, so I declared at the dinner table that I was going to be a Republican, which sparked a few months of political debate. That was fun.
After my older sisters moved out, my parents and I often lingered at the table for an hour or so, chatting about various topics. It was relaxing and enjoyable. (Well, except for the time period when I was starting puberty and my mother was starting menopause… That wasn’t so pleasant.)
I still try to have a pleasant, sit-down dinner with my kids, but they’re so young that it’s more “Chew with your mouth closed, please,” or “Don’t spit on your brother.” They’re not quite ready for fun political debates. My teen step-daughters are shocked that we turn off the TV and don’t talk on the phone during dinner.
Food was prepared. Sometimes it would be brought to where I was, sometimes I would have to go to the kitchen to get it, but it was very rare that there’d be an actual dinner. When there was an actual dinner, the vibe was ‘nothing’…simply eat and continue on with whatever you were doing before.
There were never any rules in my house. We were taught manners from an early age and we knew where the lines were and didn’t cross them. I was never grounded, and I think I was spanked once. We were never given a curfew and would just go to bed when we were tired. My parents trusted us and I guess we knew that if we gave them a reason to, then we would start losing our privileges.