Oh, man, my Mom did that too! Amway, Tupperware and some candle company. They were really preying on women to shill their crap and my Mom hated engineering because of the sexism, so this probably seemed like a good alternative. But no.
From what you’ve mentioned previously it sounds like that was kind of a miracle, though.
No shade, my husband was also a miracle. I call him the first great miracle of my life.
What was the wackiest product he came up with, if I may ask? [still quasi on-topic I’d say]
My parents, mostly my dad, believed that only “old people” wore glasses. There was no need for a kid to wear them. I got yelled at for “making faces” (also known as squinting). Any complaint I made about my vision was considered no more than attention seeking behavior.
By the time I was in 3rd grade I was asking my teachers to seat me at the front of the room so I could see the chalk board. In some cases I was allowed to leave my seat to get closer to the board so I could see. Even after the school nurse and principal called my parents in to inform them that I needed glasses, dad still thought I was faking blindness for attention. But they were persuaded to take me to an eye doc who diagnosed me as being extremely near sighted. I was prescribed glasses so all is well, right?
No. I was not allowed to wear them if I was doing any sort of physical activity as my brand new glasses might fall off and break. This extended to driving snowmobile, which would be why I nearly had my head taken off by piece of barbwire placed cross a snowmobile trail. Of course I didn’t see the wire. The resultant multiple surgeries over several years to rebuild my face and mouth cost a little more than the glasses, I’m sure.
I have numerous stories about needless suffering caused by my parent’s blindness blindness, I’ll spare you. But I’m convinced that is why I hate sports. I never learned any hand-eye coordination. I couldn’t catch, throw or hit any sort of ball because I couldn’t see the damn thing. I was the last one picked to join any team. It did wonders for my self esteem.
Something else my parents didn’t believe in… that eyesight changes with age. The glasses that I got in 3rd grade were totally ineffective by 7th grade. But I hadn’t broken them yet so as far as my parents were concerned I didn’t need new glasses. Yet they reluctantly paid for an eye doc to write me a new prescription. I still had to pay for my new specs out of the money I made from mowing lawns.
We weren’t rich but my parents had enough money for beer, cigarettes, twice a week bowling, 3 snowmobiles and two boats. You’d think they could have sprung for my glasses.
I realize that this pales in comparison to some of the parental “mistakes” others have posted so I prolly could consider myself lucky.
At a minimum this is medical neglect. And it resulted in you getting really hurt. That’s really bad, I’m sorry.
I was gonna come in here and say some stuff but then I read the thread. My parents were fine.
No offense taken; you speak (or type) the truth. I the original sense of “something to be marveled at” it was indeed a miracle. Ms. P likes weird; what can I say?
We have a saying in this house: “Totally Normal Humans!”
Used, frequently, whenever one of the three of us does something weird. We were made for each other, and then we made someone made for this family. It’s pretty cool.
Like OP, my parents were deep into a “christian” religion that was hardcore hellfire and brimstone. Wasn’t good for me or my siblings.
The list is looong, but my mother was mercurially violent and emotionally distant, while my father was passive beyond belief and emotionally distant. Both devout Christians.
I think it’s child abuse to teach kids that eternal damnation is real. I’m 42 years old and I’m an atheist Buddhist and I still worry about hell.
That one’s not on my parents though.
Meth.
My parents were on a straight trajectory to upper middle-class living with fairly high-paying jobs that they had each developed unique and useful skills for.
After meth, they were both unemployed and it was years before they got back on their feet, but only in the sense that they could hold down jobs. By that point, their skills were outdated and there were definitely some permanent effects from meth they never recovered from. They both died before minimum retirement age.
I’d have swapped with him in a New York minute.
I’d suppose it was a legacy of his own dad; himself a brilliant inventor who’d been involved in creating the first artificial ruby. But grandpa had gone off on his own to conduct what would be his greatest experiment: that with sufficient alcohol added, anything can be turned into shit.
My dad invented a travel case for rifles that nobody wanted because they opened on the end, not like a suitcase. We constructed forts made of them. He created a gunparts company whose name was one letter in its middle different from a major parts manufacturer, and placed ads in gun magazines where the cease and desist letters resulted more than actual orders.
Stressful as that was, when he was employed it was worse. A capable machinist, he inflated on that to take draftsman jobs, and then bestowed a complete engineering degree upon himself. In the time it took for him to clearly overreach and be dismissed at the first ripple of layoffs, every day he’d be flailing and shoving the signs. Each morning he’d leave the house like King Kong leaving the Alhambra theater, and each night he’d return like Christ cleansing the Temple.
So whenever I come up with my own million dollar ideas, inventing tiny umbrellas people could put up their nostrils to scrape out boogers, etc., I just let the dream drift.
My parents did an OK job. I was the 4th kid and think they were just exhausted by then.
I wish they had pushed me to work harder at SOMETHING. I just coasted along on my ability - and did well enough. But to date, I’m not sure I ever really worked my hardest at ANYTHING - bar perhaps a brief period of martial arts in my late 30s.
Mid-50s and now an athiest. I grew up wondering how everyone I saw outside of our church was going to hell and it bothered me that you had to be lucky enough to be born in both the correct country as well as town with this particular church. It was very much an Emo Philips “HERETIC!!!” situation (I can link to this great bit if you are unaware). I’ll reserve my broader comments on religion for elsewhere than this thread.
They would have been better off not to make me, that was their first mistake.
The middle child of 7, I’m the problem. Always was from my birth.
The second mistake was over-coddling and spoiling me. I was a terror. I had endless evil ways to get my siblings into grief with Daddy.
No matter they told him. He already knew and let it stand.
Other than that I think he was nearly perfect. I assume my Mother would’ve stopped my reign of terror had she lived long enough. We’ll never know.
My dad was a drunk who smoked, gambled and abused his wife, and he was fairly succesful at all of them. Mom enabled him in order to keep the family together. She didn’t really get a handle on him until after we were grown and he had health issues (suprise!), which was too late for my older siblings. It took almost 15 years after high school for us to get along. My brothers never did.
All in all I think my parents did pretty well. My mother’s natural warmth did a good job of counterbalancing my father’s introversion.
As I’ve gotten older, I realized how both of them were scarred by growing up in the Depression, and how they were both risk averse. My father was a salesman, and he once noted that he might have earned a lot more if he worked on commission, but he and my mother both preferred the less risky straight salary job he worked at. They had worked their way up to a middle-class lifestyle and didn’t want anything that put that at risk. That probably influenced my sisters and me to settle rather than strive.
OK I’m game.
Here I am, a very bright, independent, shy, and inquisitive young kid who never got into any trouble (OK the serious kind). My father by contrast by his own admission was a street hellion; when a young Catholic priest took him under his arm; my father said it completely turned his life around, eventually leading to him becoming a gifted surgeon.
But what worked for him wouldn’t necessarily work for me, but I nonetheless got shanghai’ed into a Catholic parochial school anyway, run by incompetents. In 2nd grade the teacher got my test papers mixed up with another less intelligent kid, which showed her grading me much more harshly than him (on the same assignments note), because she was trying to hold me to a higher standard.
To hear my mother tell it, during the meeting in question she rarely saw him that furious, banging the table so much it was dancing. But they kept me there anyway afterwards. I unlike him didn’t need structure, I needed inspiration, and in retrospect a private tutor would likely have been my best bet, allowing me to work at my own pace and not be held back by my classmates (both in terms of getting bored while they continued to struggle, and my having to deal with them bullying me). I didn’t need encouragement to learn anything. I’m not sure what kinds of cutting edge schools existed in the late 60’s/early 70’s in Ohio that could have also been a good fit for me.
When we moved to Florida in the 6th grade they STILL insisted on such, only this time it was a C. school out in the boonies where I would get in fights with all the redneck kids every day. I thankfully then went to a college prep school where most of the teachers knew what they were doing, but by then the well had been poisoned and my contempt for authority was well-ensconced.