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Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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Childhood! What's that?
Pure hxll, but nothing compared to what was coming age 18 - 50 (caring for parents).
If I wouldn't have had grandparents (tho they were 12 hrs away), I would have never made it to age 10. My parents hated kids.
The only thing worse was High School. What a waste.
Thankfully, I have survived and been blessed, but there will be no tears shed when I finally get to depart this temporary life. Hopefully before tomorrow! Maybe on one of my 737 flights, that would be a nice and quick and scenic way to go !
Pure hxll, but nothing compared to what was coming age 18 - 50 (caring for parents).
If I wouldn't have had grandparents (tho they were 12 hrs away), I would have never made it to age 10. My parents hated kids.
The only thing worse was High School. What a waste.
Thankfully, I have survived and been blessed, but there will be no tears shed when I finally get to depart this temporary life. Hopefully before tomorrow! Maybe on one of my 737 flights, that would be a nice and quick and scenic way to go !
StealthRabbit, I never would have guessed that you went through what you did -- talk about a turnaround!! You now sound so happy and successful!!
Growing up was not good. Father was a borderline alcoholic. Neighborhood was full of kids that were either criminals or criminals in training. The only peaceful summer I had growing up was when the neighbor kids (teenagers) were all in jail. A kid on my little league team grew up, got involved in a contract murder and was executed. High school sucked. I finally got away to a state school for college at age 19, and the sense of relief was huge.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,825 posts, read 81,804,326 times
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Miserable, I couldn't wait to get out, which I finally did at 19 while in college. I worked almost full time from age 14, partially just to get out of the house. My Mom was fine, but my father was mean, strict, and beat us regularly using either a 2" wide thick leather belt or a paddle that he fashioned with a handle out of 1" thick wood. Today, he would have been arrested many times a month, back then no one ever reported such things. Our role as kids was homework and work around the home, no playing.
My dad continued to work until NCR's mandatory retirement age of 70, because he really loved what he did and was fiercely loyal to the company. Went to work for them right after being discharged from the Army in 1943 at age 24 and stayed there. Although he was never management (he fixed cash registers and later, bank check processing machines), when his office became unionized (to which he fiercely objected, calling it "disloyal") and later went on strike, he was one of the few workers who crossed the picket lines. The only reason he retired was because company policy forced him to; I believe he'd have kept working till the day he died if they'd have let him. He did get a pension and Social Security but I have no idea how much. I honestly don't know if he got a Veterans benefit because I never paid attention or asked but I assume he probably did. He had a GI mortgage on the house they bought in 1950 for $9000; it was paid off at some point in the 1980s and they never lived anywhere else. Never re-mortgaged it or had any desire to move.
My mom only ever worked as a salesgirl so only got minimum wage. She too kept her part time job until he was in her 70s but that was because she firmly believed that a woman should always have some money of her own, separate from whatever her husband might give her as the weekly allowance. Whatever she didn't use, she kept in a safe deposit box or squirreled away in various hiding places in the house. She died at age 78, three years before my dad did (she was older.) Before she died she told me about the bank box and hiding places because she wanted me to have that money; when everything was collected it came to about $10,000. I also found two shoeboxes full of losing NY Lottery tickets which made me sad because to me such things are just money thrown away. I know it was my mom who bought them because although my dad's philosophy was "money is for spending", he was very anti-gambling in any form and used to call the state lottery "a scam".
After my mom died my dad took two major vacations: one to Australia where he'd spent time during the war, and another which was around the world. My uncle, whose wife had also recently died, went with him on the world tour and as far as I know they split the cost. That trip took a couple of months, if I recall. My dad died suddenly of a heart attack at age 76 while on a long weekend vacation trip to Maryland.
Had a great childhood. Very GenX. Both parents were conservative middle class Christians and were usually fair and loving. About the only gripe I had at the time was the 80's and if you recall demon's were in board games and metal music. ...and I loved board games and metal music. High school was rough. Not attractive and scrawny. So no dating. Was the typical nerd that got picked on (before being a nerd was kewl) but in the end it didn't scar me. But outside of that I had a great childhood. Ran all over our rural western PA town on our 20" bikes. Very much like a Spielberg movie. Glad to have been a GenX'er.
I grew up in a beautiful small town set in a lovely rural area of farms and woods. The town was small, but its primary and high schools were superb. My first eight or nine years were were wonderful - lived near a creek and woods, lots of playmates. Lived with my mother and father, and my mother's widowed sister who worked. We were lower end working class, money sometimes ran out....but I was largely unaware of these difficulties. My father worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week at his own small, physically demanding business.
In the late Forties, my aunt remarried, we had to move and ended up in a very shabby house with no heat and desperately needing fixing up. There were very few kids, and I was disliked for our religion. My father had more time now at home - he and my mother began a very tense and unsatisfactory part of their marriage that only ended with his death, and my father was extremely remote and often disapproving of me this hardly changed up to his death. But sex discovered me and we fell in love despite it being the Fifties, I liked both the academic and social aspects of school (which was close by now), I discovered underage drinking with older friends, had a beautiful steady girlfriend. I worked before and after school, so I had money of my own. My mother's sister became a mentor and surrogate parent and the best friend I had in my life. I disliked being in the company of my parents and did my best to stay under their radar.
Bottom line for the second half of childhood was that I couldn't stand my parents, but I loved the rest of my life and really liked learning to know adults on my own and not because they were the parents of playmates or friends of my parents. My parents were unreasonable, immature people and very quick to anger, but the rest of life was swell...and it was still a beautiful town.
The most miserable time of my life. Absentee father (for work), subservient mother who relinquished my upbringing to her mother and older, bitter, spinster sister. This was Europe in the 1950's and '60's where corporal punishment was perfectly acceptable, and boy was I on the receiving end from both those b*tches, while my mother looked on and did nothing. I could go on, but I can feel my blood pressure rising!
I got the hell outta Dodge as soon as I turned 18.
I had a wonderful childhood, the happiest time of my life. And looking back, I'm happy I can remember the 1960's because America was so great to grow up in those days. Riding bikes, collecting baseball cards, the great TV shows then. I miss it!
Just want to add more to my earlier post, which I can’t edit.
Even though my childhood was marred from very early on by parental problems, they were not constant conflicts. Thus, I have good memories of stereotypical Americana such as summers filled with swimming at the town lake, bicycling all over the place including to The Old Country Store (and via a dirt path shortcut before the highway was blasted through!), starting most days by playing squareball with a bunch of neighborhood kids, dashing out mid-supper for the Ice Cream truck (sometimes to my parents’ annoyance but tolerated by them), and in general just making the most of School Is Out.
Whenever I see childhood scenes in Stephen King small-town settings, I smile, because so much of what he shows (though not the gory stuff) really does reflect what childhood was like in earlier decades.
We moved out of the big city I was born in when I was young. That was the best thing that happened in my childhood, one I am grateful they did.
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What's that?
Maybe on one of my 737 flights, that would be a nice and quick and scenic way to go !
