What did our mums used to do?

[CantFindTheBeat]

I'm 55

I spend so much of my down time titting around on MN.

I have a great job. Great friends.
But i waste so much time on social media and probably trying to distract myself from reality when I should be doing something productive.

I remember my mum cooking, reading and working but never wasting time.

What do you remember? MN and the like are surely pleasure and curse in equal measure?

My mum cleaned all the time. You could set your watch by which activity she was doing. She dusted daily and hoovered twice a day, bathroom and kitchen deep cleaned morning and night etc etc. If you hadn't had breakfast by the 9am clean, too late, had to wait until lunch! She didn't read, knit, watch tv or do anything that would "waste my time".

I'd rather waste my life on Mumsnet.

My mum used to write poetry on an evening. She had 3 jobs during the day and in a weekend (single parent) so didn't have much free time.

She actually got some of them published. She's very talented.

My mum was a stay at home mum when I was growing up in the 80s/90s. I did wonder what she did all day.
Our house was always spotless, much more so than mine. She had chores that she did on different days of the week.

In her down time she'd read a lot of books, or the newspaper. She did the odd jigsaw. She pottered around in the garden. Every Sunday afternoon she'd do the ironing while Dad watched telly. I never iron anything (maybe 3 or 4 things a year), so that smell of warm, fresh clothes always reminds me of my mum.

When I think back to my mum from my childhood days, my over-riding memory is of her just being around. She was always there, always available.

I'm 35 and didn't have internet at home until I was 21, and it was my own house as I moved out at 16!!

My mum died in 2000 in her late 30s, but I remember her doing a lot of housework and watching TV. She also loved gardening and going to garden centres, and we would visit my granny a lot and sometimes my mum's friends. Often we would all go to Asda or DIY stores or town and just kind of look around the shops.

What a full life she lead! So sad it was cut short. Thanks for sharing this with us, really makes you (me) think how I spend my free time.

😂😂

Reading a daily broadsheet, weekly magazines, watching tv (look at the viewing figure of soaps), gossiping on the phone, long baths instead of showers, reading Jackie Collins, smoking, driving to the pub and back(!), cooking from scratch, washing/laundry without dishwashers/ dryers.

I’ve posted already but just remembered how my grandma would spend her evenings. She would cook dinner ready for when my grandpa would get home for work, they would eat and she would wash up.

Then they would both go water the garden. They lived in the desert in Arizona so this happened every evening for about an hour when the sun would start to set.

Then they would both sit outside in their rocking chairs, smoking and swatting flies. Just watching the sky in silence and swatting flies. When I would visit, I would count all the dead ones. When the clock struck 8, they would head in and go to bed. Both grandparents grew up on farms in the 30s in Arkansas so could never break the habit of bed at 8 and up at 4.

I can’t really imagine me and dh sat on the porch, rocking and fly swatting.

One other thing I remember is re babysitting. All the mums in the local group had a pot of these plastic discs in different colours (ie yellow = 2 hours, red = 1 hour etc).

So, if anyone needed babysitting done, they’d “pay” each other with these discs. Obviously, it saved on spending money which was tight back then, but I guess it also made things a bit fairer - no one could really take the piss with being a CF and conveniently dumping their kids all the time.

Obviously, in an emergency etc, they’d definitely help each other out. This system was a bit more for formal babysitting.