When I was a kid...

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Foodbattles, from the first milk that stressed out mother and me, i suppose it was mutual, the cummulated meat formed balls i couldn't swallow, hot milk with that terrible film on it. Because of a leaking teacup i got accused of messing around for weeks to finally having discovered it wasn't me but the cup.
Some other kids had a creepy sort of skin that disgusted me when holding hands. Strangely i liked to go to school because i liked the teachers, and learning and hearing stories. Cutting grass for the rabbit chore, the rabbit would be eaten at christmas.
We had 'modern comfort' which was still rare, deworming tablets once sorted a nasty creepy snaky thing, uuuggh.
Expansion, the next door place also became workplace, it was not unusual for the girls to work a bit more after marriage and some brought the babies with them, a girls-couple were housed in the extensionhouse.
The large dusty attic, old clothes, old papers, old 78'records, old comic/girly books, dad's modeltrain layout, and what not.
Playing with the pipebender and other mysterious tools when preschoolaged, having always to be polite, because; staff, clients, and so on, never speak unasked, do this, don't do that!!
Giving breadcrusts to the horse of the greengrocer, running past 'dangerous' dogs on our way to school, dogs would bite in the 60s, even cats would scratch if you came near.
I never kept my hair unknotted, the saturday massacre of having my hair combed.
When the aussies lived with us all kids were, once a week, given a bath in a big tub, that was fun.
Next door() was a baker, on the other side the blacksmid, sometimes you saw them at work. A bit further the mean grocery woman, i later came to know she had a softenon-daughter, so that was a sad thing.
Sometimes you were send to old peoples houses with presentsomethings from church, very unpleasant and then you could happen to get a old, soft biscuit that you had to eat ofcourse.
The primitive dental brace for my croocked teeth made me very concious about laughing and speaking, which i minimised from there.

Admitting you had unearned privileges that people who grew into adults much more successful than you lacked is basically the opposite of bragging.



Allowance? What’s an allowance? If I had good enough reasons for wanting something, I’d better have the balls to ask my parents to their faces. Besides, as I grew up, it was obvious there were fewer and fewer things I had any business asking them for, so I resigned myself to a lifestyle more and more ascetic in everything but name. This continued throughout my teen years and into my twenties and early thirties. Yeah, yeah, I know I should have worked to earn my living, but my parents were really not into letting me work while they were still paying for my education, let alone earlier as a minor, so I got stuck like that.



Thinking in a different language than the one everybody around you speaks is a great way to remind yourself of how little you belong with them, innit? I tried it, but, in fact, even when I thought and talked in the same language as them, it was still different enough to mark me as a socially impaired freak. I couldn’t mimic their style even if I wanted to, and, besides, my parents would get angry if they caught me sounding too much like normal kids. They considered it too uncouth.

Until 1977, our family had just one pet at a time. The 1980s became the era of the multi-pet family for us. At the time, we had two dogs and one cat. The cat, Samantha, would live to be 20 years old and was my best friend.

Summers were languid with sensory synaesthesia from smell, sound, taste, touch and sights blurring what was real. The world was like a kaleidoscope because my senses overlapped in the heat.

Winters were stark and frightening, with less sensory input.

I have more concrete memories from winter than summer because there was less synaesthesia or blurring.

- I spent my first five years on a boat
- I lived in a dream world
- I lived in a play fort made of bed sheets
- I had random, unreasonable fears
- I played with my brother and listened to all his music
- I wrote books and poetry and was obsessed with Sesame Street
- I went to speech therapy and had an anxiety disorder
- I believed whole-heartedly in Santa Claus / Father Christmas and magic
- All my dolls were named Amy and I loved their smell

Everything crashed to a halt one by one

My brother and I used to sneak out of the house at night to spy on the "dragon lady" next door, by climbing up the stumps to look through her windows.
We used to think we were very brave, risking being killed and possibly eaten.
In retrospect she was a cranky and lonely old woman and we were two very creepy kids.

Last edited by Raleigh on 09 Sep 2018, 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I was afraid of a neighbour's house as well.
They had a chimney vent thing that moved slowly back and forth (I've never seen one like it again).
My brother and I hid in the bushes to figure out if the house was haunted.

When I was a kid April from Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles was an adult instead of a preteen & the turtles were actually teenagers instead of being preteens who were still being called teenage.

I was being facetious. Where I grew up there were zillions of cookie cutter houses like ours built in the 80's/90's that had air conditioning and heating, including even low rent apartments. There were 2 bedrooms that connected to the bathroom, but I was an only child.

When I was 13 however we moved a thousand miles north to a 100 year old house with no a/c and a boiler for heating. So slightly more primitive.

What exactly is a "boiler" for heating?

We had a wood fuelled hot water system, but obviously we didn't need room heaters.

The house has radiators like this below. The boiler in the basement pumps hot water through them.

I was always a cat lover, but I liked dogs and horses as well when I was a little girl.

In elementary school, I did well in math and liked to do math workbooks as practice for the next grade.

We had a playroom for us kids to play in

My brothers shared a room until we moved into a 4 bedroom house

We didn't have AC in our home. I was an adult when we finally had AC.

There was no social media or youtube, if you wanted to hear a song, you had to wait for it on the radio and record it onto a cassette or go to the store and buy the album.

We had video rental stores, we had no redbox or On Demand or Gamefly or online movie rentals.

Wanted to record a movie or TV show, you had to set a timer in your VCR for it and leave in a blank tape or have someone do it for you.

We had TV guides that would get delivered to our house

We had to pay for the Disney channel separately until the last day in 1997, it was a subscription channel.

Note passing, we didn't have texting then

Pagers

Teens didn't carry cell phones, many people didn't have a cell phone, only business people did

Payphones everywhere

We didn't get a dog until I was 14

We got our first pet when I was 9 and it was our neighbor's cat we were given which was meant to be temporary

We had dial up internet and land line phone

Malls were real popular when I was a kid

You could walk everywhere in the airport and walk your family to the gate or wait for them at the gate

No one was pegged with a medical label if they were weird or an as*hole. You were just an as*hole or just weird.

Needed directions, you either had to call the place to ask how to get there or look in your map book of the area and find the location and drive there days before to figure it out. Oh and stopping to ask someone for directions to how to get somewhere.

When I was a kid, I watched Saturday Night Fever with my parents on a 24 inch TV screen that was built into a wooden console. That's the way that TVs were built back than. I also watched Sesame Street in the mornings and The Monkees and Spider Man in the afternoons. We had to walk across the room to change the channel. My family owned a Quadraphonic stereo system made of steel that had a turn-table and an 8-track tape player. I'd open the flap of the tape player to see all the different lights and fuses that were inside the stereo. My sister and I played with toys that didn't require batteries. My first battery operated toy was a matching game that I received for Christmas at the age of 6 and it was bulky by today's standards. It was still light enough for me to carry around, though. Mick Avory was still with The Kinks until the summer that I was 9 in 1984. I watched the Olympics for the first time at the age of 9. I will never forget Las Angeles 1984. My dad also brought home an Apple computer that had a black and green screen starting in 1984.

I lived in a beautiful area with woods and white wooden bridges in it as there was a river going through this area. Lived in a wooden red house at the end of a long gravel road with birches on both sides of it. I loved that place.

There was a stable next to our house and I saw horses from our tiny yard everyday. One time a wild young stallion galloped right through our yard, I remember getting scared of it.

i do not remember any comforting behaviour or physical contact from mother, around 10yo i thought of her as prudish and cold, i had younger siblings so logically she didn't do much with me when she took care of them.
when i slept over at cousins' my aunt would kiss us goodnight, that made me sad for being happy and sad about that

one christmas i was sick from toothache after the first schooldentist-action, after that i didn't have to go to the schooldentist no more

i couldn't do PE at school and my mother put me on more PE, that was terrible
i had to go to the sundayschool yearly day-out
that was torture too, you had to compete in 'girls' stuff, i even never knew of

I worked so hard on things that didn't matter at all. I studied so hard in school, worked hard to make myself likeable, to say Hi to everyone when i entered class.