I hate raw tomatoes, but my grandmother has been offering to make me toasted tomato sandwiches for at least 20 years now. Every time, I tell her I don’t like tomatoes. Her stunned reply (every time, mind you) is: “But you like ketchup!”
I think she’s just doing it to annoy me now, though. I caught her smiling last time.
It took my parents years to digest the fact that I didn’t take butter on my toast. By the time my Mom could finally remember, I’d decided that I liked buttered toast better after all. :smack:
I still haven’t had the heart to tell her that.
My mother always forgets that I hate coconut. I have to ask her very carefully what ingredients are in something before I eat it. She makes this lovely cake with coconut all over the top of it, and always asks me if I want some.
“No, Mom. It has coconut all over it.”
“But I thought you liked coconut?”
She also forgets how old I am, no lie. She still thinks I’m about twenty, which would make me younger than my sister, whose true age Mom never seems to forget.
My younger brother was 11 before he realized my (fairly common) first name wasn’t spelled how he thought it was.
Very easy! You’re both so damn picky, much of it about the same stuff, that when you diverge it’s hard to keep you straight!
My father never could get it through his head that I couldn’t stand stewed tomatoes. He’d insist that my mother use them several nights a week, and then when I’d pick them out act all surprised and order to “Eat them – you’ll learn to like them!”
Yeah, so now I’m a 51-year-old woman who still picks any recognizable bit of stewed tomato out of any food in front of me. Gee, thanks, Dad.
Same here. Only here, it’s soooo easy to tell the difference, though because I’ll eat almost anything, abd my brother’ll onlky eat a few specific things.
My parents are divorced, so technically I have twice as many social occasions with them.
BOTH of them continue to try to get me to eat seafood, even putting their stuff on a fork and saying ‘you should try this, it’s fantastic!’. Um, no thanks. I’m allergic to seafood. Not to the point of hospitalisation, but to the point of definite breathing problems. They both know this, as I’ve been allergic to it since my mid-teens, and this isn’t something that developed after I’d left home.
I also have a problem processing alcohol, so while I rather like the taste of some drinks I’ll only have a few sips- otherwise I run the risk of terrible stomach cramps and spending the rest of the night in the toilet… which I’m sure everyone can agree is not fun.
My parents refuse to understand that. Sure, they nod as though they understand, but if we have an ‘Occasion’ (birthday, family get-together, whatever) one or the other will always pour me a goblet of wine to have with dinner. (Thank god my problem is metabolic and not due to alcohol addiction, is all I can say!) Then when I don’t drink it, they insist I at least try it. As far as I’m concerned, if I’m going to risk that kind of sickness, I’d rather do it for something worthwhile - since I don’t like red wine, I really resent being pushed to drink it as though I’m just being silly.
They only have two children (and my brother has no allergies at all); surely it can’t really be that hard to remember which one doesn’t eat seafood or drink alcohol? Here’s a hint, mum and dad: it’s the GIRL.
Re-reading my own post, it occurs to me that maybe the only thing my parents ever had in common was a secret desire to kill me… 
“I like beef, too, but I’m not going to bite into a raw cow!”
Hey, I have enough trouble keeping up with myself. Maybe you and your brother didn’t pull what my three kids did, but if you were like most kids, your tastes changed as you grew. So it’s not just what you don’t like now, it’s what you didn’t like three years ago, and six years ago, and twelve years ago that gets muddled.
And they would always say that they always hated this or they never hated that when I had witnesses proving them wrong, if not pictures. And then they started dating and bringing home girls who didn’t want cheese on the pizza or whatever and suddenly they’re not eating what she’s not eating. And all of the dislikes are mutually exclusive, so that it’s impossible to cook anything but kraft mac and cheese with weinies and fit everybody and even then someone is going to whine that the weinies are IN the mac and cheese. Or that the weinies have been boiled. Or that they’ve been fried.
Hey. The food is on the table. I gave no thought at all to who wants what. There are frozen burritos in the freezer, if you think you’re going to starve.
They’re out of the house now. Mostly. I vet menus before I cook, if one or more of them are here. Just in case. Don’t even think about getting offended.
And, yes, I did hear: “you know I hate bean and cheese burritos!” They eventually hashed out in committee two varieties of frozen burrito that all three of them could stomach. I still think of them as the purple wrapper and the green wrapper.
For over 40 years I’ve been a night person, a late sleeper, and a hater of alarm clocks. Just hate 'em. This is not news to anyone who’s known me longer than a week.
So, every time I go home to visit the parents, what does mom do? “Honey, I’ve got an alarm clock, what time do you want it set for?”
“Mom, I don’t want an alarm clock. I’m on VACATION.”
“Well, what time do you want to get up?”
“Just let me sleep.”
“I can get you up at 5, when my alarm goes off.”
“Mom, just let me sleep until I wake up, OK?”
“You don’t want a wake-up call?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Then how will you know when to get up?”
:rolleyes: “I’ll wake up when I’m done sleeping.”
“But don’t you usually get up early?”
“When I have to go to work, yeah, but that’s because they pay me to be there at a certain time.”
We can go on like this for 40 minutes at a stretch.
Still, she’s not as bad as my best friend’s mom, whose house I’ve stayed in on occassion. After a similar argument the previous night she’ll nudge you awake at an hour so early even a farmer would find it obscene and say something like “I thought you might have changed you mind about getting up early.” The only reason murder wasn’t done was that my eyes wouldn’t open enough to allow me to navigate down the hall after her.
See, now I would have guessed sausage . Can’t blame a person for getting confused.
For the longest time, my best friend kept getting my birthday confused. Here’s the conversation that we’ve had probably 100 times.
“Isn’t your birthday Dec 25th?”
“No, it’s Dec 24th.”
“I thought your birthday was Christmas Eve.”
“It is.”
“Isn’t Christmas on the 26th?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s the 25th.”
“Oh. (look of utter confusion)”
I think he’s finally figured it out by now. Only took 12 years. And just in case he’s reading this… 
Yep yep yep! I’m New Year’s Eve, December 31. I have one brother who calls me every New Year’s DAY to wish me a happy birthday. And every year I tell him thanks, but my birthday was the day before. And every year he says, “I thought your birthday was New Year’s?”
GRAM: “For [insert holiday here], I made you cookies!”
ME: (warily) “Well, I love cookies. What kind are they, grandma?”
GRAM: “Well, let me think. There’s peanut butter snickerdoodles, peanut butter and jelly cookies, buckeyes, and peanut and chocolate chip.”
ME: (tactfully) “Oh. Um, I’ll skip the cookies then.”
GRAM: “It’s okay, I know you’re allergic to nuts, but I didn’t use any walnuts, just the peanuts.”
ME: “No, I’m not allergic to nuts, just peanuts. Peanuts are legumes. Walnuts would be okay. I like walnuts. …did you bring any walnut cookies?”
GRAM: …
GRAM: What if you have peanuts just this once?”
ME: “I’d DIE, grandma.”
GRAM: “You know, I thought I was allergic to nuts for a while, and one Christmas I had some and I realized it had gone away! But I still don’t like to eat nuts, just in case. You never know until you try!”
ME: “You mean I should try a cookie, and you’ll stand over me with the EpiPen?”
GRAM: “Oh, I’ve got a pen in my purse.” ::takes out fifty Kleenex, one lint-covered mint, and a Bic Roundstik::
ME: “Grandma, I can’t eat the peanut cookies. I’m really sorry.”
GRAM: “All right. Did you want a sugar cookie instead?”
ME: (hopefully) “There are sugar cookies? With no peanuts?”
GRAM: “Yes, they’re mixed in with the peanut butter snickerdoodles.”
ME: ::facepalm::
Funniest thing I’ve read all day.
I forget everybody’s name. My grandmother mixes up my mother’s and my aunt’s name on a regular basis. My mother repeats herself every three minutes.
Ahhh, my mother’s side of the family. We’d all get lost in a round room, I tell you.
Hey! You weren’t supposed to see this thread!
But the potato thing, really, how hard is that? If nothing else, I eat them. Happily!
My Grandmother called me by my older cousin’s name, on-and-off, for close to 25 years. Even after he moved 1,000 miles away and she never saw him, but saw me several times a year!