Your parents and their childhoods

Cid

Cid

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    Have you ever asked your parents about their childhoods? Or at least asked the people who knew them as kids? What did you learn? Did it change how you saw them as people? If you haven't, do you wish you have?

    ...

    I know I haven't asked them until just now, especially my dad. Mom's shared a lot of stuff about hers, so I didn't have to ask, haha. But yeah, my dad and I were driving, and I asked him if he ever went to the beach as a kid.

    He said he did. He lived nearer to the shore than where I grew up, after all. He must have had a lot of fun. He said the water was a lot cleaner then, too. After that, I asked if my mom was the same, and he said even moreso; she grew up in an island town, after all.

    That kind of made me imagine them as Sora and Kairi from Destiny Islands. It's a nice thought, thinking of my parents as kids having fun at the beach. Maybe that's why I was drawn to the first Kingdom Hearts? Idk haha

    Anyway, what about you?
     
    honestly i don't know much about my dad's childhood, but he doesn't seem to indicate that it was bad or anything. with my mom it's weird like. i know a lot and yet so little? she didn't have a great childhood and with my grandparents both passing in the past three years, a lot of that has surfaced up in family drama. her biological mom is still alive and she maybe calls her like three times a year and i see her MAYBE once a year, if at all. but i'm not gonna air out all her laundry here i just wish she hadn't alienated herself from my grandparents after she got remarried and i'll leave it right at that. lol
     
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    My mom lived in a catholic school all her childhood life till she graduated on her late teens. My mom said her mother/my grandma never loved my mom and my grandparents divorced when my mom was a child. My grandfather/mom's father was homosexual and during the summer my mom would visit her parents and her parents did not live together. On her late teens, my mom was also in a relationship with a man who was around 7 years older than her.
     
    Yeah it's pretty sad for my family. My mom was abused as a child and my dad was raised extremely religiously. All things considered they turned into fine parents.
     
    My mom has been sick in various ways most of her life, and then spent her teen years rebelling and drinking. Same with her 20's. Her mom was fucking psycho, and her dad got abusive over time.
    She was strangely bad ass, though, and once spin-kicked a gun out of a man's hand that he had pointed at her best friend.

    I've never met my dad, but I hear he grew up in Mexico, and then came to America in his 20's and had a fairly typical retail job.

    Yeah, I never heard much in the way of happy childhood stories. Yikes.
     
    My parents' childhoods weren't happy ones since their home country had underwent genocide and bloodshed. My dad didn't share the personal details, but my mom did. People being overworked and killed. In their late teens/early adulthood they went through a few refugee camps and then the US.

    Before the bad stuff happened, my mom told me stories of the pets she used to raise, and the foods she often ate in the market square.
     
    My mom loved horses as a child, and that's probably the only thing I can think of that she was happy about. She grew up troubled since her parents were going through a divorce that started when she was 16 years old all the way until she was 22. She was forced to go to night school in her high school years because the county would not allow students living "on their own" to attend day school. Other than that, I didn't know much more about her childhood, nor did I ever care to ask her since she was always a dismissive person when it came to the past. She married her first husband at either 18 or 19 and had my brother when she was 20.

    My dad is the youngest of three brothers; his oldest brother was 21 years older than he was. He was born and raised in Virginia, and was always around his family, down to second and even third cousins! He got into playing music at a very young age, with help from his oldest brother and still does to this day. His parents retired and they brought him to Florida when he was 13, much to his disliking. He went to junior and senior high school there and played in several bands while he was in high school and after high school, eventually quitting these bands and then getting married to my mother and having me.
     
    my mom didnt have a great childhood. details are somewhat fuzzy from what she told me, but she got bullied a lot, her mom abandoned her for many years and then was on and off in her life for a while. had a wild life after graduating high school. many other bad things im not comfy sharing

    i know little to nothing about my dads childhood.
     
    My mother and father were both raised relatively poor in West Virginia. My mother's upbringing was poorer because her family's breadwinner (her dad) was a truck stop serviceman and an ex-con, while my paternal grandfather was among the last of the coal miners, and my paternal grandmother ran a beauty salon. As far as I'm aware, my whole genealogy since we've been in the New World has happened exclusively in Appalachia. So we're pretty Irish, but with an American tinge.

    My mother dealt with severe neglect growing up, and some abuse at the hands of her mother, which had various effects on her and her siblings. I believe she came out better than most, all things considered. My father dealt with continuous stepchild abuse, as the coal miner grandfather was his stepfather, and I don't believe he was able to break that cycle though it certainly broke with me. It sure is weird to imagine treating your only kids like stepkids, but when you add in a toxic girlfriend who accentuates the worst in a dad that's, usually how it happened.

    I think it's clear I don't have extensive familial relationships with my own. But I am very blessed to have married into a wonderful family of Indonesians, who reluctantly accepted me along with my husband's choice in sticking with me for life. They did not like us being gay at all, and sometimes in arguments I never had an emotional inclination to hold on, leading me to be absolutely floored when they came and supported me anyways, because it was the right thing to do. I had never been treated that way, unfortunately so accustomed to toxicity, picking sides, destructive relationships… yeah.

    I sure am convinced that there's at least some merit to familial ineptitude as an explanation for poor societal performance in some! Being poor isn't always a blameless proposition. With my second perspective I see so many behaviours, a lot of which I once exhibited, that were and are absolutely trash for anyone hoping to get ahead or get established in life.
     
    My mother was the youngest of two sisters in a farming family in Iowa. Her father, in fact would latter on become the head of the Iowa Grains Committee. She was an introvert (like me) and enjoyed playing the guitar and trumpet. Her sister did have an early marriage that at one point got divorced, but since then they got back together.

    My father was the second of three brothers (technically the third of four brothers, but Dennis died due to birth complications before his older brother even met him (or realized that he existed for that matter) or his younger brothers were even born. They lived in a town in Nebraska that had a population of like a hundred or so, with their mother being the mail woman and their father being the sheriff. The story I remember most from his childhood was how he lost part of his finger in an air compressor when he was twelve-ish years old. His older brother started a family of his own, while on a more somber note, his younger brother committed suicide in is mid-twenties.

    On an off note , both of them had a lot of cats growing up.
     
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