Things from your childhood you are still salty over?

[MyCheeryPearlTraybake]

Not winning a running race

I read Malory towers and st Claire's and was also absolutely desperate to go to boarding school. Didn't one of those schools have a swimming pool built into the cliffs....it sounded heavenly

Being told by my teacher that 'titchy' was not a synonym for small. I knew it was, I'd read it in a Roald Dahl autobiography. Still annoyed 40 years later!

Childhood injustices can leave deep scars, @ThisOldThang. Those of us who bear these scars can easily understand how not being picked to be Gabriel can still rankle, even decades later. If you don't understand, maybe that means you are lucky enough not to bear such scars.

No-one is saying that these things are constant thoughts, or they utterly blighted our lives.

Being accused by an aunt of taking a glacé cherry off a fairy cake from a birthday tea all laid out ready in another room. I didn’t even like glacé cherries - still don’t! She refused to believe me.

Worse, when my Dm was in one of her habitual horrible moods (nothing us kids had done) I walked well over a mile into town and spent all my very meagre pocket money on a little bunch of flowers for her.
When I gave them to her she just said very grumpily, ‘I don’t want them.’

I was so pissed off, I took them next door and pretended I’d bought them specially for their old granny.
DM asked me later where the flowers were (I suspect DF had had a go at her) so I said, ‘You didn’t want them! I gave them to Mrs X!’

She was then cross about that, I suspect thinking I’d said I’d bought them for her but she hadn’t wanted them - which would make her look so bad. But I hadn’t.

With DDs of my own, I’ve often wondered how she could have done that.
Despite that, I generally got on OK with my DM, but we never had the sort of relationship I’ve had with dds.

Mary* and the angels were played by pretty girls with long hair, not short haired bespectacled plain Janes. Never them.

*add extra points for blonde hair. Cause TVM was a blonde, obviously. 🙄

Not being allowed the riding lessons I so badly wanted - 7/6d an hour (35p then) - too expensive - when not long afterwards there was enough money for my younger brother to be sent to boarding school.

Funnily enough it never occurred to me at the time to resent how my brother (one boy, 3 girls) was invariably prioritised financially. Not his fault, though - we still get on fine.

Being blamed for leaving the big poo in the toilet without flushing, when I knew it was one of my cousins.

I won a short story competition when I was 11. Was very excited, told my Mum, and she said “Don’t boast, no-one’s interested.” This was a bit of a childhood theme, being told not to boast and not to show off. Our neighbour said to my Mum “But you should celebrate, she’s done really well.” My Mum just said “I don’t want her getting too big for her boots.”

Oh, and was constantly being told I should be more like my extrovert, exhibitionist cousin. Until the day she died, my Mum always described my cousin as “the daughter she never had.”

Yes! The aforementioned May Queen from my previous post was blonde. And tall.

And of course it never occurred to your mum that a bit of praise and encouragement might have helped you be more like your extrovert cousin, of course, @ThePussy! I'm sorry you went through that.

I used to babysit for a toddler when I was about 14. One evening his parents went out with two other couples leaving me in charge of him, his baby brother (c8 months), his friend the same age and a two year old girl from across the road, although the girl's mother stayed home as she had a cold.

The baby woke and started crying, and would not be comforted by me - unsurprising as he didn't know me and I was an inexperienced teenager with no siblings to practice on. I ended up phoning the girl's mother (mid 90s - pre mobile days) who came over and got the baby back to sleep. I was a jelly.

Then the girl woke up and started crying for her parents and screamed louder if I went in to the room so I spent the rest of the evening sitting outside her door singing - that calmed her down but as soon as I stopped she statted crying again. This went on for well over an hour.

Payment hadn't been agreed in advance, but I usually got £5 for a couple of hours with a sleeping toddler. I was given £10 for looking after four under four from 7pm until midnight. I thought I should have had at least £5 from each set of parents! I was really upset because I thought I'd messed up because it was so tough, but looking back I should never have been put in that position (or said yes to it).

Always being a narrator in the plays at primary school and having to wear my school uniform whilst other girls got nice costumes every time. Looking back, I do now realise that quite a lot of the kids in my class were barely literate and that's probably why the same few of us did the reading every year, but at the time I didn't really understand that. I was bullied through much of my schooling and my bullies always told me that I was ugly and to be on the stage you had to be pretty like them, which I believed. It did have long lasting effects on my self esteem and confidence.
Also that when I was picked to sing the opening solo in my secondary school carol service my parents didn't come.

@AgeingDoc That happened to me too: I was narrator, or once "stage manager" at the age of seven, and I didn't actually know what that meant: I didn't connect it to handing props to those on stage. I was also picked to read aloud a lot, and I didn't like that exposure; but I learned later this was because I was good at reading out loud.

@ThePussy I too had a lot of mixed messaging about "don't boast". I was never allowed to say that I was better than my brother, or to "boast" about something I had that he didn't. Yet I was then told I had to sell myself in interviews. The adult world rewards the boastful: being modest doesn't get you through a job interview, for instance. Prime Ministers don't get the job by being modest.

I was in a very small reception class with only about 11 children and 7 of us were girls. One girl had a birthday party at a place very similar to Discovery Zone and invited us all. A few days before her party she came in and spitefully told me I wasn’t allowed to go anymore because there wasn’t a place for me. It turns out her mum had misunderstood the numbers and because she had invited her cousins, she was over the limit. She had asked my friend who she wanted to uninvite and for some reason, she had chosen me. I went home crying but my mum just shrugged and basically said get over it. What made me most upset was when my birthday came round my mum made me invite her to my party, even though she had been so horrible about uninviting me to hers. I refused to write her an invitation but my mum did it behind my back and gave it to her. I am still indignant I should have been allowed to leave her out, nearly forty years later. It kindled a grudge between me and her that followed us all the way through school and we never really got on after that!

As the saying up my way goes, "Shy bairns get nowt."

I have never been quoted so much 🤣 I’m glad I’m not alone in my Mr Frosty sadness ☃️ my husband did once buy me a “party penguin” for much was similar to a mr frosty, it was rubbish like my mum said it would be. But deep down I feel that a Mr Frosty would have been excellent 😂

Growing up in the 1980s I absolutely recognise this....I swear the teachers seemed to put all the blonde girls on a pedestal. As a brunette child I remember feeling really inferior because of it. I was so happy when I got a sindy doll who had brown hair.

There's a Mr Frosty on Ebay for £5.92 at the moment.

Oh this has reminded me. I was at a tiny village primary school and the role of Mary ALWAYS went to one classmate, out of six girls.

I usually got a role as an angel or a shepherd but one year I was the arse end of 'little donkey' in a donkey suit, crawling around with another classmate's bum in my face (the front end of the donkey). And yet there's Joanne, still being Mary and centre stage 😬🤣

Yes, still resentful haa

I wanted a lolo ball. (A ball with a ring round that you bounced on) and a skip it. Wasn’t allowed either, as my mum
said I was too accident prone! Not true, but I did break my ankle holding the end of a skipping rope.

My brother throwing a huge tantrum which resulted in our parents cancelling the plans they'd made for us all for the next day.

You seem like hard work. Do you not recognise when people are clearly being light-hearted / flippant?

The poster says that the child who was picked to play Gabriel was also a girl, so clearly the gender of angels wasn't an issue for her primary school. Much as I've never known it to be an issue in any other primary school.

I played loads of male roles in school plays. There was a huge gender imbalance in my class and sometimes there were simply not enough boys to play all the male characters.

Am I the only person alive who wasn't arsed about getting a Mr Frosty? 😆

Three major house moves to completely different areas of the UK aged 13 - 17, including the beginning and end of 'A' levels. Aced my GCSEs but crashed and burned 'A' Levels and lost my place at Oxford. Only child so no others affected, thank goodness. Parents can be incredibly selfish.

I did get one, and trust me, it was shit! 😅