All families are unique, but I’ll just talk about mine, in the vein of “minding my own d*** business.” My parents had two families together. I was born 1 1/2 years before my sister and we grew up best friends/worst enemies (friends most of the time, enemies lasted about five minutes). My brother is seven years younger and the final sister, 11 years younger.
Born in 1958 and 1960, we were raised in my father’s type of strict German/Swiss style. It was a different world back then. I learned to read at five, and taught my sister so she would stop talking and let me read.
As we started school we got an allowance of $.50 per week for our daily/weekly chores. We had to make our beds immediately upon awakening and help set the table/do dishes every day, but every Saturday we took an equal number of slips of paper out of the “job jar” to tell whether we had to dust, vacuum, fold diapers for the little ones, things like that. The worst jobs were “ask Mom” and “ask Dad.” Then, they could make up anything, like help lay 3,000 bricks around the new pool.
The real worst one was when I pulled both “asks” until I learned how to play the game. One week Mom made me weed the garden. Then, sweaty, grimy and out of breath I asked Dad what he needed done. “Hand me that Phillips screwdriver. Now go play.” Whew!
One thing I remember vividly between school and extracurricular activities (violin, piano, ballet, choir) was that we were fined a nickel of that precious allowance every time we called each other a bad name. Names like stupid or idiot or crazy were fined (of course racist or sexist epithets were verboten and never uttered). We just learned other ways of speaking to each other and working together so we didn’t let our spat get to that point. I’m going to venture a guess that a certain ex-president never learned that lesson.
The second generation of kids in our family were born in the late 60’s in a much more laissez-faire environment. There was no job jar, no forced extracurricular activity and no fines for bad words.
One time I returned from college and heard Mom ask my little brother to set the table for dinner. He said “wrongo, Moose Breath!” And she laughed!!! I looked at my dear sister of my generation as we both wondered silently if we were in the right house.
Sadly, my husband and I married late and I was unable to bear children so we didn’t get to punish kids with our separate views on child-rearing. After all, he grew up on a dairy farm. When I asked what he did besides school as a kid all he said to me was “milk cows.” What fun we could have had, though! Just some thoughts early on a Saturday morning. Make sure you’re registered and VOTE! Dee
Cooking with Dee 