To ask what the strangest thing is that you've seen in a family home/life...

[purpleworms]

...that to them was completely normal?

I have just seen someone asked this on an AMA on their Instagram. Their reply was walking around fully naked in front of parents/siblings/any family members.

While this is obviously okay for some, if it happened in a home I was visiting I'd be but that's just because it's not the norm in my family.

I'm racking my brains but I don't think I've ever noticed anything! But people have such different ways/customs within their home lives and routines. We all regard our own as normal without ever really knowing if what's normal to us is strange to others!

Big light on in the evening is definitely weird if you’re watching tv/ reading/ relaxing etc. In fact I think I only use big light if I’m passing through a room or cleaning.

Oh yes to the big light! When I first moved in my dh, I'd often come home from being out in the evening to find him watching tv on the sofa with the big light on, I was like ugh how can you relax like this?! I've trained him into using the lamps and creating some ambience now

I can't stand lamps and low lighting, it really hurts my eyes and gives me a headache. Especially when looking at a screen.

Its winds me the hell up! Dh will use big light all the time if possible and not shut the curtains at night !
I know a family too that are very well off and their house is very clean but it's like a jumble sale everything is kept in plastic bags and stored up the walls !
Plus growing up my mother would never let us have a lock on the bathroom door we were all girls in the house is fine but as a teenager it was hell !

Well, back when the hot water tank allowed for one hot bath at a time, your choice might have been shared water, or no hot bath that night.

That's the set up we still have. We do have a shower over the bath, but the water pressure is crap, and if anyone in our house, or next door, uses taps while the shower is running, the water suddenly turns icy cold, so we tend to have baths instead.

My ex husband's family at mealtimes it was like a feeding frenzy. From the plate landing on the placemats to knife & fork going down on an empty plate was less than 2 minutes, even for a big Sunday dinner, nobody spoke, all you could hear was chewing & cutlery scraping on the plates & there wasn't ever a crumb left on the plates, if you didn't know they had been used, you would have thought they had just been washed. Everyone including ex MIL threw it down like it was the last meal they were getting.

Having the big light on helps my SAD. Doesn’t make me a psychopath .

ShadyLady53 presumably your light is a lightbox rather than a normal lightbulb though? Lightbulbs aren’t anything like natural light so I thought they were inefficient at helping with SAD.

@ShirleyPhallus

No it’s not a light box. I use bulbs that imitate daylight and find that helps with SAD. I buy them abroad but these are similar.

www.amazon.co.uk/iBoutique%C2%AE-Daylight-Equivalent-Sufferers-Photography/dp/B002XWVNI6/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ref=plSrch&keywords=sad+light+bulb&dpPl=1&dpID=51tZcceKfCL&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8&qid=1546964312&sr=8-3

I loathe the big lights on. Overhead lights glaring, hate hate hate. I had a big eye op and find it horrible and I need relatively subdued lighting because of my wrinkles
Who wants to sit in the equivalent of a waiting room with what is like strip lighting?

You can get daylight bulbs to put in lamps.

I can't stand having the main light on either. My ex in laws used to do that, they didn't have any lamps in their flat. No books either. I never felt comfortable there.

ShadyLady53 haven’t seen those before, very interesting. You’re withdrawn from my psycho list then but I maintain it for anyone else with overhead lights

I fully understand the need to share baths growing up - I did it.

I don't accept that - on the whole - there's a need to do it in this day and age.

Quite frankly, those that re-use relative's water that they've bathed their genitals and sweaty ar5eholes in, are lunatics.

I love this thread.

I've always wanted to be a lunatic

Does it help if I explain that we are really quite poor and can't afford the heating on during the day? Also we live in a fairly rural, backward area

I have a dh who likes more lights on than Blackpool illuminations too.
He'll then use the torch on his phone too

I used to have to have a bath after my dm when i was a child. I hated it but she used to come in and check I had actually had a bath. We did have a shower but couldn't use it because it leaked.
We couldn't get it fixed for 15+ years as dm "wasn't ready to decorate her bathroom yet" I used to love going to friends houses to shower there.
Funnily enough once I had dc I wasn't fussed about sharing bath water with them.

My beautiful lamps are in the garage as my children kept knocking into them. I think the kids are about old enough to be trusted with them in the house again though.
My Mil irons everything. She thinks I am horrendous for not ironing. I chucked out clothes that I would need to iron for me. It was making me sad looking at the basket, seeing them their but no desire or time to do all the ironing so I just got rid. Dh's shirts get done and the occasional special occasion outfit for the rest of us. I'm a great believer in folding after coming out of the tumble dryer when still warm. Very few things look crumpled!

Smeeeeeee

You don't need to explain anything to me. And like I say: I don't think there's a need for it ON THE WHOLE. I accept there are exceptions.

Does it REALLY save that much money? Heating systems are more efficient than they were 20, 30 years ago. Everyone is generally better off than they were 20, 30 years ago ON THE WHOLE.

@ProfessorSillyStuff you’ve just reminded me of a visit to see my aunt and cousins when I was a kid. Her new boyfriend, who was a jw, had moved in and Christmas was cancelled. Looking back, it seemed really harsh as the kids had been used to presents etc before he came on the scene. My parents took a present for each of the kids as they felt really sorry for them. The relationship didn’t last long either - maybe a few years

On the subject of sharing bath water, as a child in the 50s we had no bathroom or running hot water so it was saucepans of water boiled on the stove and a tin bath in front of the fire every Sunday evening. One week my grandmother was there and as my mum got me out of the bath grandmother suggested that she, mum, got in after me. No thanks said mum, she’ll have weed in it. To which my gran replied ‘oh don’t be silly, it’s only maid’s water’. 😂

Maid's water? I like that!

After dinner- the entire family I dined with lined up at the toilet to flush the remains of their meal away

Jehovah's witnesses are bizarre and in my opinion borderline abusive. One of my earliest memories was seeing green patches swirling when I closed my eyes after looking at my lightbulb before my mum turned out my bedroom light at night. I believed they were demons trying to possess me and that if my mind was empty of thought for a moment they would succeed!
I do not think any child should be told what to believe. They should be allowed to explore and decide on these things themselves with unbiased parental support!
Naughty naughty Jehovah's witness boyfriend cohabiting before marriage PixieN! Would be disfellowshipped for that one surely! Lol

it’s only maid’s water

By extensions, how many people here have family who refer to tea that's too weak as "maiden's"? Tho' I'm indebted to the following that for some people, weak tea is husband's tea or blash :

books.google.co.uk/books?id=bn3HoNcszWQC&pg=PT96&lpg=PT96&dq=weak+tea+maidens&source=bl&ots=1lji8MSFFw&sig=uz6iFNSN5N0JPEHUITC4eBiZmB4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjb8_Hlot_fAhWqh6YKHdWTAUEQ6AEwDnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=weak%20tea%20maidens&f=false

but never in a million years would I get in the bath after him with his short and curlies floating around and the potential for dingleberries and God knows what else.

This made my chest hurt.

I've never understood the bathes, you end up sitting in your sweat, dead skin and genital nastiness. Where i'm orginally from, we used to have 'bucket baths'. So you stand in the bath with a bucket of water that's cold if you had devilish parents, or had hot water from a kettle or saucepan. You'd then use a small container to scoop the water out onto your body. That way, the dirty water flows straight down the drain, like a kind of manual shower.

Like Alexa above except I was a child in the sixties; we had pots of water heated and then poured into a tin bath in front of the fire. The bathwater was never deeper than maybe 3 inches.

Once when I was about 5 or 6 I spent a few days in hospital. Saturday was bath day there. I remember a room with about 7 huge baths into which all the kids had to hop one after the other.

I tried to avoid getting into a bath but eventually the nurse made me get in. At this stage I don't know how many others had already bathed but it was enough so that the water was grey. I got in and the nurse barked at me to sit down. Well I'd never sat in deep water and this was up to my neck. I was a very skinny child and didn't have the weight to actually stay sat in the bath. I kept bobbing up to the surface like a cork, grimly clinging on to the edge of the bath for fear of turning over and drowning in this soupy lukewarm grey water. Meanwhile the nurse was roaring at me to sit down.

I was so happy to get back to the tin bath in front of the fire!