How much do you know about your parent's life around the age you are now?

Carighan , 5 months ago

My parents were both hippies through and through, including the clothing and everything. I know my mom had just recently left my biological father and started dating my dad, and they were planning to move in together now that they have a son.

They also stopped engaging in local politics as much, and looked more towards reforming things from the inside with huge swaths of people - all hippies - hiring with the local coal mining agency to change the internal culture around it (which actually worked).

I don’t really know much about their private or leisure life, though. Beyond music and smoking pot and drinking, of course.

LadyLikesSpiders , 5 months ago

I am older now then my mom was when she had me, and I’m a significantly younger of 2 children. I know that my mother was already deeply unhappy in her relationship with my dad, but at the time still believed in trying to salvage it. That’s why I was born, after all

Mom was a leftist for the time, free spirit, rebellious woman who made the mistake of getting impregnated by a conservative and traditionally macho man in a catholic, Latin American country, and found herself marrying because out-of-wedlock pregnancies would be the absolute literal worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone ever, apparently

By the time she was my current age, she had been domesticated (partially through some mid-tier abuse, but also because she did have my sister and I to raise) and worked an entry-level job in a country where her degree didn’t mean shit and she could barely communicate. My dad also worked, having a better-paying job, but also a second weekend job. We grew up poor, my sister basically raised me, and my mom regrets that she couldn’t be there. She also deeply regrets how much of her own personal joys she gave up for my father specifically, joining him for all of his hobbies, while never being able to indulge in any of hers because he didn’t let her. She don’t give a fuck now, though

I have a lot of negative things to say about my parents, but boy did they fucking work their asses off

livus , 5 months ago

Pretty much everything, since I knew them back then.

Pulptastic , 5 months ago

Graybeards and grayperms unite!

livus , 5 months ago

@Pulptastic weirdly I haven't actually gone grey yet... But yes!

Faydaikin , 5 months ago

I’m going to assume you mean when they were young. (As I am not a young person anymore)

Ever read or watched ‘Christiane F: Wir Kinder Auf Bahnhoff Zoo’?

That was pretty much my moms life when she was young.

Monument , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

My dad was my age in 1989. He was a pretty horrible person, but was actually doing alright. My mom’s father had retired and bequeathed a plumbing company onto him a few years prior, which my parents had managed to grow quite a bit. But he was an alcoholic, smoked a lot of pot, and did enough coke to be considered an addict. I’m pretty sure this happened when he was 40 - I was 6 at the time, I think. I remember he took me to the store with his girlfriend to get cigarettes. Mom was at work - this was before they divorced. He had me in the bed of his truck, and he swerved off the road to drive up ‘the back way’ to our house. I wasn’t braced for the sudden maneuver, and I slid and hit my face, getting a nose bleed. A moment later, a police officer pulled into our driveway and saw him standing over me (who was crying), and said they’d followed him from the convenience store - I assume because he was drunk and had a kid in the back of his truck. He got so belligerent that by the end of it, 6 cops showed up and beat him in our driveway before arresting him. His girlfriend slunk off, and my mom had to spring him from jail. After my parents divorced, he lived in a trailer park with a new woman who seemed nice, and he died a few years later of a suspected heart attack in his sleep. I’ve got about 2 1/2 years before I’m older than he was.

My mom was 40 in ‘92. She had divorced my dad, and she told us a lot of things that we probably should have been shielded from. The plumbing business failed - a lot of equipment ‘went missing’ and some of the vehicles started having random maintenance issues. Our own family minivan stopped running after the fuel was tampered with. And a bunch of our pets started dying or disappearing (cats and dogs disappeared, rabbits just had broken necks in the coop, one horse was shot, another poisoned with antifreeze in their water). She had also began using drugs, or at least, was using them at a level where her addiction was obvious. She got a job halfway across the country, and we moved. We were living in a small farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and she moved her boyfriend in, who happened to be her drug dealer. And then one day she was gone. The school truancy officer managed to contact family, who arranged to have us rescued before we wound up in foster care. About a year later, she reappeared in a battered women’s shelter, in rehab, and we moved in with her at the shelter.
What I now know - after having gone through her things a few years ago, after her death - is that she got pregnant, ran away, brought the child (a boy) to term, and gave the kid up for adoption before reappearing and keeping this secret from her family the rest of her life.

So, you know. Fun times all around.
(I’m fine, just a bit weird.)

Damaskox , 5 months ago

I think nothing.

captain_aggravated , 5 months ago

Quite a lot as I was there to see it. I was 6 years old at the time.