16 Oct
Looking back on my childhood, I often wonder two things:
Was my mom smoking crack while I was growing up?
How did I survive my childhood?
For example:
I was encouraged to eat raw ground beef.
They’d buy it from the meat market, bring it home, and serve it to me on a spoon with salt and pepper.
On that same note, my mom kept hotdogs in the freezer.
These were fair game for snacks at any time of the day – we’d snap one off, hold it in a paper towel and eat it uncooked and frozen. She didn’t even cook them for us – so she certainly didn’t take the time to cut them up for us.
She offered to buy me some love with a footlong.
You can read more about that here.
They bought my brother a bb gun.
I was shot repeatedly.
One of our games was to wait until my mom hung the sheets out on the clothesline. I would run back and forth behind the sheets, and my brother would try to shoot me. To this day, most of my mom’s sheets have perfectly round holes in them from his bb gun – and just so you know – it hurts to get shot even if it goes through sheets first.
We lived on a highway.
The speed limit was 55 miles per hour with a double yellow line. In elementary school, I was allowed to walk alone to my grandparents’ house – about a mile away.
On the highway.
Without sidewalks.
I didn’t even have to call when I arrived.
I was allowed to eat Crisco straight out of the can.
There’s not much more to say about that.
There was no seat for me in the car.
We took several long roadtrips with extended family while I was growing up. We had a 7-seater suburban, but on more than one 12-hour roadtrip, there was no seat for me.
Literally.
My official seat was on the floor between the two bucket seats in the middle row. My mom would give me blankets and pillows, and that was that.
I was often drugged on roadtrips.
They called it the “recipe.” You can read more it here.
And more on roadtrips…
We used to go camping in the upper peninsula of Michigan every summer. And to get there, my brother and I would ride in the bed of my dad’s pickup truck. There was a cap on it, but that was it.
My dad would tie a rope down the center of the pickup truck to keep the cap door closed and also so that my brother and I would stay on our side of the truck. My mom would toss in our sleeping bags, some games and our pillows.
There wasn’t even a window looking into the cab of the truck, and we certainly didn’t have cell phones to chat back and forth. So we created a system to make sure everyone was alright.
One knock meant that we were just saying Hi.
Two knocks meant that there was a police officer, and we needed to lay down and be still.
Three knocks meant that we needed to go to the bathroom.
Four knocks meant that we needed to eat.
She screamed at me in 1984
The windows rattled. And she had to go to the doctor afterwards. You can read more about that here.
See what I mean? I think we’re all pretty lucky that I lived to tell about this!
hahahaha!!!! OMGSH.. I also ate “seasoned” raw ground meat as a kid, encouraged by my mom.. OH the HORROR of it now!
We had a station wagon growing up and all of our road trips were spent with the seats folded down and blankets and pillows thrown in the back, where we would slide around constantly. We even had a game where mom would gun it so we’d shoot to the back, then slam on the breaks so we’d go flying forward! It was a BLAST.. but really… it’s a wonder we all survived never being harnessed it.
Your child hood sounds alot like mine! At one point I was dared to touch an electric fence (on a farm)… Think I did it???
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OKAY, SERIOUSLY!!!!!! Your life sounds like a Tuff Mudder contest
I am literally peeing in my pants while falling off my chair laughing…. THIS IS SO AWESOME! Every part is my favorite part.
ps. I love your mom and dad!
I feel like at least half of these were true for me, too. We didn’t freeze our hotdogs, but “raw hotdogs” (ie cold from the fridge) were a normal snack for us, too. Weird.
When my family of 5 moved from Alaska to the lower 48, we drove/camped our way down the Alcan highway for 2 weeks in a regular pickup truck. My sister and I didn’t have seats. The whole time. We rode in the back with a shell on (with a broken door like yours. Wait… is this you, Corey?)
I can’t stop laughing!
We never used seatbelts and bike helmets didn’t exist. I often left the house in the morning on a summer day and my mom never saw me until dinner time. She had no idea where I was at all! We played “King of the Hill” on top of a huge metal dumpster and pushed each other off to the pavement…FOR FUN. We didn’t eat Crisco…but we did eat butter sticks. Oh, I also sat in my dad’s lap during car rips and “drove”.
How did we all make it to adulthood????
The Dose of Reality recently posted..Just Shoot Me
I feed my kids raw hot dogs to this day.
And I think raw ground beef was less dangerous then. I hear a lot of folks like it. I can’t even try.
Your childhood sounds awesome actually. I wish times were that way now sometimes. (although I do like carseats)
Ahhh, this brought back so many fond childhood memories. Like the time I was in bed sick with a cold, and my brother walked in with his BB gun and said “Hey, let’s see if this hurts” and proceeded to shoot me in the leg, thankfully through the covers. Hey guess what, IT HURT! To this day I have a large dent on my upper right thigh from that darn BB. (Yes, I was the little sister and was constant prey for my brother.)
Cold hotdogs. When I was around 4-5 years old, a family friend would occasionally watch. “No Mom! PLEASE don’t make me go to Aunt Joyce’s house!” Aunt Joyce thought the idea of a snack was to snag a cold hotdog from fridge and hand it over like she just gave me a piece of pizza. She never even washed the hotdog slime off the outside. To this day if I make hotdogs, I get the willies when I have to pull them from the package.
Road trips. We often went to PA to see family, and I think it was about 4 hours in the car. Dad put the seats down and loaded up the sleeping bags. And it was on. My brother and I used to wrestle non-stop. It was from these trips that I added the phrase “If I have to stop this car…” to my vocabulary.
I think my Dad wishes he had known about the recipe…
And your Mom’s response? Priceless.
Surely you also got to ride your bike, without a helmet, on that highway. We were allowed to do that so we could search for soda bottles to cash in. My parents had an old “hippie van” with only 2 seats. The 5 of us kids sat on the floor or on lawn chairs that would tip over whenever they turned a corner. Also, one word, Dramamine. Just make sure you don’t use the non-drowsy formula. Makes for a very peaceful trip. You can always tell people it’s cause they get car sick.
LOL “You can always tell people it’s cause they get car sick”
Anna, this was great and I too am surprised many days I lived to tell my tale too. We never had car seats and also set in the front seat in the middle of two bucket seats traveling in our car as a child and that was seriously one of the many things about your post that I could indeed relate to!!
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Ummm, yeah. I used to get dropped off at the pool for swim practice at 7am in the summer and then was not expected home until it got dark. No one even wanted me to call. For 12 hours. And I was 10. How are we still alive, indeed.
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I like medium rare steaks but raw ground beef? I think I just threw up a little.
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Anna, Anna, Anna. What am I gonna do with you? The dollar signs are just flying out the window. But this post did give me a thought. Maybe some of these commenters would like to collaborate on a book! Make it twice as big, twice as fast! Ooop…the dollar signs are flying back in!
Hilarious! Count me in as one who survived! And I lived in the country…6 miles to the nearest store. Snakes and such around. ‘Hunted’ each other with the neighbor. Ouch. He could shoot me 6 times in the time it took me to cock my ‘rifle’. Swimming in the irrigation ditch, complete with a pretty good current and no life guard. Yep, electric fences too! Ahhhh…the good ol’ days. Thanks, girl, for the laugh!
I do think a book would be such fun – I would even volunteer to babysit while she writes for free…especially since she is getting a new bed for “Yiayia and Papa’s room” which is probably a whole other chapter! I appreciate you encouraging her
Lets meet for coffee!
I’d love to do coffee! When you comin’ to Arizona? (hehe…isn’t this fun?)
This is HILARIOUS! Except the raw ground beef part- THAT is nauseating!!
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I never ate raw hamburger but my mother always told us that she did when she was a kid. NO way was I doing that. We didn’t freeze hot dogs but we ate them right out of the refrigerator without cooking them. Now I know they are cooked first, so it’s not like it’s totally raw, just not plump. My sister used to STAND on the floor of t he back seat and hold on to the front seat. She actually fell alseep like that once. And who can forget “the way back”? Once we were old enough to be out of car seats, which must have been about 2 years old back then, we were allowed to sit in the way back. Once, our family of 5 and another family of 5 rode in their van to the beach. Like 2 hours away. All 10 of us in a van that had 4 bucket seats and a couch. We drove from Annapolis into DC to go to the zoo in my dad’s pickup with my parents, me and my sister and cousin. At least 2 of us had to sit in the bed– without a cap or anything to hold on to. It was much colder than I expected!!
Imagine if we did any of that stuff nowadays. Jail time for everyone.
sparkling74 recently posted..Wait- Wait- Don’t Tell Me
Okay – I’ve been quiet all day….and I have to object to the raw ground beef comment. That wasn’t me – that was Grandpa Lew! Yes, I do/did eat cold hotdogs – and I realize now looking back – that letting Nick try and shoot you through the sheets on the line wasn’t the smartest decision – but I never dreamed those BB’s would go through or that he would even hit you – he didn’t have the best aim afterall.
I could go on but I won’t – you are welcome
Entirely brilliant because it’s so fabulously true!
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I found your blog from ‘So I Married A Craft Blogger’ and I have to say you are fricken hilarious, you had me in tears laughing. Keep up the great work!!
OMG you reminded me of my child hood lol and I thought this was only Latin Ghetto families who lived like this. Thanks for sharing this took me back and now we are so over protective with our own but thanks to how we grew up we were fearless lls thanks
Ok, seriously, you are killing me…my family actually thinks I’m nuts. Ok, they know I’m nuts, they just ignore it until I read something funny like this post, laugh until I cry and hyperventilate, and then they ask if I’m ok.
Anyhow, I remember the days of eating raw dog (spiced raw ground beef served on crackers at parties) and laying in the back window of my grandparents car on road trips with them and my aunts because I, like you, did not have a seat.
How did we survive?
Oh, and I LIVE in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so riding around in the back of pickup truck with just a cap over the top is very familiar, too. As is riding in the back of said pickup truck, minus the cap but plus a Christmas tree way bigger than will fit in our house on the way home from picking out the tree. You know, just in case the tree falls out. Like my 12 yr old body is going to keep a 14 foot tree IN the truck.