What normal thing in your childhood did you later realise was extremely weird?
A couple.
When I was a kid my dad would take me to the 7/11 for slurpees.
I adored it, because I looooved slurpees.
The only rule was I couldn’t tell my mom I got it or went anywhere.
I didn’t realize until I was about 12 or so that all the times he took me out for slurpees was really just him getting liquor and feeding his alcoholism, and that’s why I wasn’t allowed to say anything.
My mom also slept with me well into my teen years.
It wasn’t until I got into late middle school that I mentioned it and my friends thought it was extremely weird.
My dad told me it was because my mom was a control freak, and that I was putting a
wedge in their marriage by letting her sleep with me, so I finally demanded she stop.
I later found out she slept with me for that long because my dad was a raging junkie/alcoholic and could do some really terrible things while high.
I knew my dad was an addict, but I never knew my dad could do anything like that.
I take care of my mom now.
He died about six years ago and I’ve never seen her happier.
Edit: for those wondering, I am a daughter!
It's a little thing, but it was very surprising to me - that it was my dad and not my mom who stayed home with me when I was sick.
Also, my friends all had stories of their parents trying to get them to go to school even when they were sick.
My parents never did that, and even let me stay home a few times even when they knew I was faking it.
I know it's hard for a lot of working parents to stay home with a sick kid, but all my friends at the time were pretty much from the same middle-class background as I was, and my father was
a hospital physician and the head of his division at the hospital and also saw a lot of patients, so it was not easy for him to miss work.
I guess he handled a lot of stuff by phone (this was before the internet).
It's a little thing, but it really made me feel so cared for and I still associate staying home sick with getting taken care of by my dad who had an excellent bedside manner.
EDIT: I just want to add that I found, later, that my father had kept charts for all my childhood illnesses - tracking fever, symptoms, medications and dosages, etc.
- including the fake
ones.
Burger Roulette: every time there was a barbecue or we made burgers one of the burgers would be stuffed with hot sauce and peppers.
So hilarious and definitely made dinners more exciting, but not a normal thing lol
Edit: Well this blew up—thanks for the awards!
If you’re going to do this, just remember that everyone should know that they’re playing so that you don’t get into legal trouble.
My parents didn’t want to shout our names for dinner or to come downstairs so my Dad installed a literal doorbell in our bedrooms.
So if we were needed in the kitchen we were summoned by the ‘child bell’.
- we lived in a 2 bed semi.
Edit: My Dad passed when I was younger so thank you for the love of his unique idea ✌🏻
My mom taught me and my sister to howl at the moon.
It would get our dog all worked up, and he'd howl too.
It would make my grandma so mad, but my mom found it hilarious.
Random kids living at our house.
I had 9 siblings and my parents always had one or two other kids that had been kicked out of their homes living with us.
Usually friends of my older brothers and sisters, it wasn't until my twenties that I discovered that most had been disowned by their parents for being gay.
Also had no clue that this wasn't normal for the 60's.
Whenever I wouldn’t wanna get shots my mom would say “te lo van a poner en tu cosita si no lo dejas” which means “they’re gonna put the shot on yo dick if you don’t comply” and the doc who didn’t know Spanish was like “yeah en tu cosita”.
I thought that it was normal to expect to be physically harmed when someone was mad at you.
Until I was a teen, my mom would beat me when she got mad, which was pretty often.
Also I thought that mistakes were unacceptable, because I'd be beaten for even the smallest of mistakes
I didn't realize most families didn't have 3 different cars until I shifted to public school.
I didn't realize how well off we actually were because in private school I was one of the poor kids.
My family is upper class, but my friends had literal mansions and servants.
One guy I'm still friends with got an airplane for Christmas from his dad.
Airplane.
When I was 8 our teacher made up a whole story about how he was dating a mermaid.
He showed letters and trinkets and everybody in class believed him (I have to add we lived in a small town close to the North sea and there is a lot of mermaid/merman folklore in that part of the Netherlands)
We must have told our parents, but everybody kept it up.
The teacher managed to stick to this story pretty much the whole school year.
Can't really remember how he told us that it was just a story, but to this day I feel that it was such a weird thing to do.
Edit: spelling mistake
Never ever talking about issues as a family.
Apparently most families don't have three children born with only a 1 year age gap between them.
Before university I was convinced that our family was the standard and that siblings born more than 3 years apart were the outliers.
But since coming to college, every time I tell people my siblings are all a year apart I get something to the effect of "Oh my God, your poor mother"
I always wanted candy from the grocery store when we were checking out.
My mom told me it was illegal for the cashier to sell children candy if it wasn't their birthday.
I was in third grade before I realized it was untrue.
Getting honked at, flipped off, and yelled at while driving.
I just thought driving was this extremely aggressive and negative experience that made everyone angry.
Turns out my dad was a serial tailgater who used to ride right up on people's asses in front of us, regardless of the speed we were traveling.
Highways, subdivisions, country roads, didn't matter.
It wasn't until I began to learn to drive myself that it all made sense.
Eating walnut makes your mouth burn.
Every time i eat anything with walnut, was burning my palate, gums and tongue for a while after.
It was like that from day one of my life, and i thought its normal.
You eat cake - your mouth burn, its a package deal.
Never questioned or mentioned that to anyone, i just assumed thats normal.
I was in mid 30's and my brother mentioned that he had alergic rection to walnut, and that his mouth were burning so he had to go to doctor asap...
I took me 30+ years to find out that i have walnut alergy to
some degree.
I still eat it.
My parents used to take me "pop bottle and can collecting" we'd walk around construction sites in the summer and pick up bottles and cans discarded by the construction workers and turn them in for the recycling.
It was always unfinished suburban houses and my dad even used to lower me and my sister down into unfinished basements (no house attached and no stairs yet either) if they had enough bottles or cans.
We would toss the cans and bottles up to him or mom.
We'd have to grab onto his arm while he pulled us back out with a single hand.
We'd end up smelling like stale old beer (surprised how many construction workers drank on site).
But it was a lot of fun and we could
make up to $200 in a single day of collecting.
We usually got slurpies and scratch off lottery tickets after.
It's still one of my favorite childhood memories.
I can say most of my childhood was like this due to being in an abusive home, but one of the things that were straight up weird was the constant hopping from home, to home to home to home.
We wouldn't stay in one place more than a year and apparently that's not normal.
I only found out later that my step-grandfather was wanted for something, and now I wonder if we were ever actually living in those places via rent or if we were squatting.
My mom used to have me practice screaming for help at the top of my lungs before going to friends houses ಠ_ಠ
My mom’s cooking.
She boiled noodles until they were mush.
Her potato soup was boiled onions and potatoes drained then added to warm milk with salt and pepper.
Baked beans were beans, ketchup, and pancake syrup.
The most common meal in our house started as spaghetti, then became chili, and then chili mac.
Vegetable soup was all the vegetables dumped straight from a can with no seasoning and the meat would be hamburger, canned roast beef, or canned corned beef with potatoes.
A lot of the other stuff she cooked was pretty good, but that was only if she followed a recipe.
If she winged it things got strange.
My favorite will always be the grape soda bbq
because she didn’t have Dr Pepper.
My group of friends and I convinced ourselves we were actually possessed by demons and lived like that for months.
It wasn't the "playing light as a feather stiff as a board at sleepovers" witchcraft phase that most girls have.
It's like we made our own little cult, when we got together the Ouija board came out and we "spoke to Satan" in tongues and got half naked.
We told each other about prophetic visions our "demons" told us about people we didn't like dying.
(None of them did).
We didn't sacrifice animals but we would find already dead ones (lizards and birds mostly) and do "ceremonies" around it before burning it.
We weren't goth kids either, we dressed and acted normal most of
the time, we just had this beep up little secret imaginary Satanic thing going on.
I think it's because our environment was unbearably Evangelical Christian and we needed to act out some way.
I assumed others did weird things like that... but I think our group went a bit too far.
My dad kept unloaded shotguns in my closet and told me if I touched them, they’d go off.
I didn’t hold a gun until my 20s.
My mom also told me that razors don’t work “down there” and it couldn’t be shaved.
Thankfully, I figured out that was a lie before my 20s...
I used to bite wooden fences.
Adding sugar to Coke.
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