This immediately reminded me of some posts I have seen on social media and the like from current parents of middle/high schoolers. I am always flabbergasted when I see a question along the lines of, “My 15 year old daughter’s birthday is coming up. What are the hot jewelry/denim/cosmetic brands for 15 year olds, I need ideas!” Or “my kid is starting high school this fall, what is a cool backpack brand to get him, I don’t want to get a dorky one.”
When I was growing up, I’d say 95% of my friends parents (and mine) had the attitude of “THis backpack is affordable and practical. Enjoy it!” Or “I’ll buy you Sears Toughskin jeans, I don’t care if ‘Gloria Vanderbilt’ jeans are the latest thing. When you have a job you can overspend on clothes.”
Honestly, my mother annoyed me just by breathing, and to make matters worse all my friends ADORED her. She wasn’t the cool mom, she was just everybody’s mom!
I also had to wear rollers at night up through 3rd grade. Hated them. I was happy when my hair was long enough for braids. In 5th or 6th grade I got a pixie. I loved it, but after that I just let my hair grow and didn’t get it cut until I was in college. i was the only one wearing long straight hair when all the other girls had bouffant styles. Guess I was ahead of my time.
One of the most annoying things my parents did was decide it was me and my sister’s job do the entire families laundry. She moved out when she was 15 (I was 13), so for eight years until I moved out, I did it myself. Wouldn’t be such a big deal, except when I was around 11, our washing machine broke, and my parents bright idea was instead of getting a new one, they would load up our car with a month’s worth of laundry, and drop us off at the neighborhood laundromat. We would take every single washing machine and dryer sometimes, and I got really fast at doing laundry, with people glaring at me. When I turned 16, I drove myself there. Oh, how I hated doing that. As soon as I moved out, they bought a new washing machine and dryer, and I was so irritated. Huge waste of money, and what a pain in the butt.
Sometimes my dad decided he was going to dye all of our socks and underwear the same color, maybe because white gets discolored, who knows. Sometimes he dyed it pink, sometimes lime green. I guess he never just thought to have me use bleach.
My mother’s hair roller torture at least got me this bit of memorabilia. But sometimes we had to play outside, go downtown, etc. wearing them and it was so embarrassing.
The shag haircut. Ugh. Had one 3rd - 6th grade. Growing it out was a whole different awful hair issue. That probably explains why I haven’t had hair shorter than shoulder length since then.
Making us go to church three times a week, every week. And church was way across town. There was no program for kids, so we had to sit quietly through each service. Just ugh.
Also, not letting us wear shorts, go to PG movies, swim with boys, cut our hair, etc., etc.
I told my kids they’re lucky we didn’t make them go to that flavor of church!
My sister had the slightly larger bedroom. When she left to go to college, I entered 7th grade. (Yeah, big gap between us.) We all agreed that I would move into her room.
My mother kept pestering me to move all my stuff, and I said I would. I came home from school one day to discover that she had moved everything for me (not including the pack of cigarettes I had hidden). I was furious. Absolutely furious. I screamed, I cried – she offered to move it all back, but even though I was so upset I knew that was stupid. What was the point??
Very similar situation. Dad took us (4 kids) to mass on Sunday morning, Mom didn’t go. He was raised in the Catholic Church (Italian) , Mom wasn’t. They were married in the Congregational Church but a year later when they wanted my oldest sibling baptized in the Catholic Church they were told no because they weren’t married! So Mom had to take classes, then they had to “marry again”, then baby was baptized. Understandably, Mom never felt comfortable in the Church.
But I hated being “that family” whose Mom was not in church. I found it very embarrassing.
Every summer, my family would go on vacation. Our trips were all over the country, from California to Massachusetts. On Sundays, we would have to find an “acceptable” church to attend - so many specific requirements, like no musical instruments, one cup for communion, divorce/remarriage not allowed, no Sunday school, etc. One Saturday night in Tennessee, somehow my dad realized the church he planned to take us to used multiple cups for communion, gasp. So we drove 200 MILES to go to a different church - now, that was annoying. I think that may have been the point I realized I would be switching churches when I grew up!
