I wanted a motorcycle of any size or configuration. I wrote up a little permission slip to get a bike, folded the paper over, and to my amazement my mom signed it sight unseen. When she read it she appended a date in the far future. After high school I rode for 50 years. I’d tell Mom: “If you would have let me get one when I wanted one, I would have gotten it out of my system”.
I think I would have liked your mom. She didn’t try to rescind her permission; she just said “when you’re much, much older.”
When I got my driver’s license, I wanted a motorcycle, but my mother nixed the idea, claiming they were too dangerous. In a rare instance of support, my older brother convinced Mom that I should get a cycle (maybe he wanted me out of the picture? 
). It was during the 70s gas shortage , so it made financial sense. I bought a Honda 360t. It was fun for a while.
After earning a bit more money, I upgraded to a used Kawasaki Z1 900. At the time, it was the fastest bike in the world. I took way too many chances on that bike, but it was a sweet ride, with my long hair flowing in the wind.
I miss that bike. I miss my hair.
I wanted a horse. I wanted a cat. My mother kept pointing out that we sent our dog to live with our cousins because I was allergic to animal dander. I still went horseback riding with friends often and finally got cats, plural, when I bought a house. Am I allergic? Yes. Did Mom have a problem with that? Yes. But it was her problem, not mine.
My parents never owned a color TV until they moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire in 1980, after my dad retired. What’s more, they made that fact a point of our family’s superiority to the runaway American consumerism that our neighbors had bought into.
I believed it too, until the Terkelsons got a color set and I went over to their house on Sunday nights and watched Walt Disney.
And here I thought I was the only one! Wouldn’t it have been cool to ride on it as it loped along with its weird gait? However, I was always the kid who got seasick, which I’ve read is something camel riders can experience. (Maybe that’s one of the reason they’re called “ships of the desert.”) So it’s good my parents said no.
A bike. A standard kid’s bike.
Don’t get me wrong. I got a “new” (as in, it was replacing my old bike, which I had outgrown) bike. It was a used adult bike. The guy who owned it before me was 6-foot plus. I wasn’t even topping 5-foot yet. It had a front basket. It had lights. It had side-view mirrors. With tassels. Almost Pee Wee Herman levels of dorkitude; definitely in the same league.
I couldn’t even get up on the bike, or get it moving, it was so tall. Mom’s and Dad’s solution was to put training wheels on it. They also had to get two sets of those blocks you put on bicycle pedals so you can reach the pedals, and I was still riding standing up and pretty much straddling (painfully) the frame just to move it.
“You’ll grow into it.”
Yeah. I got my ass kicked hard because of that bike.
Me too. Odd thing is, my parents were okay with me having a horse. Just not lessons. Pretty sure they thought it would contribute to my getting even more passionate about horses. They thought horses were elitist or something. I started taking lessons at age 59. On my own horse, the first one I’d owned in 40 years. She changed my world.
Fabulous!
Friends. To socialize with kids other than the “approved” kids from the church youth group.
A cat. I always loved them, but Mom refused to allow one in the house. She was, apparently, attacked by a cat hiding under the porch when she was growing up.
I got one as soon as I moved into an apartment my senior year in college. After I graduated, the parents came to visit for a weekend and Mom was not thrilled to be sharing a household with a cat - who at one point tried to jump into the chair with her (something the cat was used to doing with me).
A few years later, my husband and I had two cats. Apparently the second one overwhelmed my immune system and my occasionally-annoying allergies flared into full-on asthma. We couldn’t give up one of the cats, as he had a health condition that made him unadoptable (feline leukemia). My mother snapped “Then just put him to sleep!”. Which was born from her loathing of the critters, I’m sure.
Ultimately though we had to do that, as his health had declined, and then we rehomed the other.
That was the old Jan and Dean song, well, actually it was “Sidewalk Surfing”.
On edit: with the chorus “Bust your buns. Bust your buns now.”
I wanted a minibike. My mom was extremely overprotective, so that wasn’t going to happen.
I wanted one of those bikes with the gearshift and the banana seat and the apehanger handlebars, but I got stuck with a stupid low-handlebarred girl’s bike (I hated girl’s bikes, because I didn’t think they were nearly as cool as boys’ ones). My parents made it up to me when I was 11, though–they bought me a bright yellow men’s Schwinn Varsity ten-speed. It was a little too big for me and I bashed my nether region on the crossbar when I fell off one time, but I loved that bike. Kept it till I was in college.
I wanted an indoor cat. We always had outdoor cats, but they’d “disappear” or “run away” periodically (we lived near a highway). My mom wouldn’t let them inside, though, even though she liked cats. I didn’t have an indoor cat until I graduated college and got a real job and an apartment.
I went through the same thing. All my friends had ten-speed bikes with European names; when I asked for something similar, I got a three-speed Glider (Eaton’s department store’s house brand). Secondhand, because a cousin had got his driver’s license, and wouldn’t be needing it any more. It didn’t have the cool curved handlebars that my friends’ bikes had, it didn’t have a European name, it didn’t have ten speeds. “Pee Wee Herman levels of dorkitude” is a good descriptor of what that bike made me to my friends.
Pretty much nothing. My mother died when I was 1, my Dad was a Korea-era veteran who let his four kids raise each other from then on. Really have thought about this one for a while and I guess there was the time he didn’t want me in the living room when Three’s Company was on. Other than that, we were on our own, did what we wanted.
Neither my sister nor I had any desire to get a moped, but my brother did, and our parents weren’t going to allow this, which led to quite a few shouting matches
UNTIL
one of his classmates died in a moped wreck. He never asked again, and apologized for his attitude.
And these days I don’t even dream of such things. When we are on a long drive somewhere I occasionally tell my wife how I am dreaming of taking long motorcycle rides with the wind in my hair, and she rolls her eyes at me–I am officially prohibited from ever owning a motorcycle.
I have also been banned for life from outdoor running ever since I broke my shoulder on a run last Fall. And that’s a fair call since I have been running for decades: do anything long enough and a one-in-a-thousand event will happen.
This reminds me of my bike story. I was in junior high (70s) and was due for a new bike. The one I had was too small for me (Sears brand, regular pedal bike). I so wanted a 10-speed bike with curled handlebars and a racing seat. All of my friends had them. One day during summer vacation, I came home (from roaming around) and noticed my dad’s work truck in the driveway. That was highly unusual. He never came home for lunch. I walked into the house and there he was sitting in the front room with the biggest grin on his face and a brand new bike standing in front of him. It was brown, a five-speed and it had regular handlebars and seat. I didn’t want him to know that I didn’t like it. A new bike was a big expense for our family. And he was so proud and happy to give it to me. I acted like I liked it and rode that bike until I left home. I remember that day like it was yesterday.