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?

Sewing - all sorts from proper dressmaking to curtains and lampshades. Turned sheets sides to middle, turned collars, darned socks.
Knitted and crocheted.
Home cooked from scratch: breakfast, lunch and children's 'high tea', then 2 or 3 course dinner.
Regular home baked scones / rock cakes / biscuits / cakes and puddings.
Made own wine.
Fed the chickens, gathered eggs, plucked and gutted chickens.
Kept the Rayburn going in the kitchen. Made a fire in the sitting room.
Regular trips to greengrocer / butcher / Post Office.
Cleaning: stiff brush for the stairs. Beating rugs outside. Polishing the wooden floor with beeswax.
Grew vegetables and soft fruit and general flowerbed gardening.
Did the crossword.
Listened to the radio.
Smoked while doing all the above.

My mum was a teacher, so she worked in the evenings. And when she didn’t have work to do - weekends and school holidays - she cooked and baked, cleaned, read books, and did her garden. Always busy.

My mum was always making something - patchwork, knitting or making soft toys, especially teddy bears. She created a lot of the patterns herself and taught toy making in local classes. These are just a few of the soft toys she made, several of which I still have.

@RustyBear
Those stuffed toys are amazing! I can’t pick a favourite they are all so full of personality.

Mine worked nearly FT in 2 jobs, helped people out in her spare time eg applications for benefits etc. Did some farming on a smallholding, cooked and baked. Spent an hour every evening on the phone with her demanding DDs, before watching her soaps. Looked after my elderly nan, my increasingly frail DF and my SEN DB, before passing away at a hugely unfair age, only a couple of years after retiring. Life is so fucking unfair.

Our kids will never know the joy of sitting on the stairs to talk on the landline (in my house, after 6pm cos it was cheaper).

My mum now has several people that overly rely on her (she ended up with Power of Attorney for some friends.) She was a social worker so it's like she's ended up doing it again.

I'm a bit like it with my uncle and a friend, but thankfully not as much.

She has to be doing stuff all the time or she feels immoral- she blames it on a Catholic upbringing, she's had therapy to try and not be like that. Thankfully I haven't inherited that.

Watched tv, knitting, crochet any other craft she fancied.
started but never finished long distance courses.
she paid for. Long distance computer course- it came in a massive ring binder or 4 then realised that she needed a computer.
she also must have made time for sex since there’s 7 of us

DS1 was born in 1995. I used to try and time his naps to coincide with the lunchtime showings of Neighbours and Home & Away! I read books, magazines and newspapers when I got the chance. Had to physically go to the shops when I needed anything so that used up a fair bit of time on things I would buy online now. We got our first home desktop around 1998 iirc and I found it absolutely amazing! Tbh I am glad smart phones were not around then as I would have found it hard to stay off mine if I'd had one.

Sewing, knitting, baking , chatting

You say that like that’s a bad thing @Yutes !

Op - the serious answer to this is that before the internet, and to a degree even now, women of all ages largely busy themselves propping up the patriarchy and what suits men. If women want to ‘waste’ their time gossiping, scrolling on their phones and chilling out - good for them!

Kind of - only found out fairly recently and this was the 70s. It did make a lot of sense as remember neighbour hanging around quite a bit during the day.

my sibling has an idealised view of the SAHM thing and still thinks that DM baked all day 🤣

Cook, read, do crosswords, listen to the radio.

Crikey, most of these sound very wholesome like from the 1950s! I grew up in the 80s and 90s. My mum did the occasional short term work project but otherwise she did some cleaning, laundry and watched daytime TV. She read, talked on the phone, watched TV or listened to the radio while ironing, read books and newspapers, had affairs, did a few courses for fun. She cooked dinner, not dissimilar to how I cook. In the evening after dinner she would mostly lie on the sofa and watch TV until she fell asleep.

Oh yeah and she had an 'exit affair' with someone she met through her political activities.

Worked full-time, Looked after the house, cooked, Read, knitted and baked

Never sat down. She's mid 70s and still busy, volunteering and stuff.

My Gran seemed to have a more laid back life.

My mum made phone call after phone call. Most of the calls were bitching about people.

Everything took more time.
Cleaning seemed to take longer - and mum had a lot more ornaments.
Cooking a proper meal from scratch every day.
Used to have to take the bus everywhere instead of just driving straight to places.
See a lot more friends in real life.
Make a lot of clothes from patterns.
Read magazines and books.
Had to physically go somewhere to do stuff you can now do from home (eg shopping, book things in person, go to the bank, pay bills with cheques)
She did some classes that would be online or on YouTube now.

Spent hours on the phone.
Spent hours arguing with my dad.
Watched Crossroads.
Read cookery books and trashy magazines.
Busied herself with helping (interfering) in other people's lives.

Mine used to get up and make us Ready Brek for breakfast and warm our clothes for us, get us ready for school and then my dad would walk us there on his way to work - he worked in the bank at the other end of the village.

She would then get herself ready and start the housework which involved cleaning the whole house from top to bottom every day. She had a quick break at 10.30 for coffee - I'm not sure if she did anything else while drinking it. Some mornings she dragged the big twin tub out to do the washing and always hung the washing on the line unless it was raining.

My brother, dad and I came home for lunch every day so the later part of the morning was spent preparing that.

After lunch she'd light the fire in the sitting room, so it was burning up nicely by the time we came home from school. She often got dinner preparations underway after lunch as well - everything was always cooked from scratch. Then she'd do any ironing that was there- everything was ironed.

On a Wednesday afternoon, she'd go to the nearest town to do the weekly food shop. On Fridays she changed all the beds, which had sheets and blankets at that time.

When we came home from school, she always spent time with us until teatime.

She also did quite a bit of gardening. She was never one to sit down much and still isn't. I remember coming home from school in the summer and finding her sitting out in the sun at the table but still busy with something, either writing letters or sewing or something. In the evenings she'd go out and sweep the gravel and tidy up our toys. My dad used to peel the potatoes for the next day and put them in a bowl of water in the fridge and he cleaned all our shoes every night.

Neither of them sat down much at all. They'd sit a little while in the evenings, mum would watch Emmerdale and Coronation Street and the news. Dad always bathed us and did our bedtime story when we were little, that was his time with us.

Our house was always absolutely immaculate and organised. The washing and ironing was always up to date and put away. All meals were cooked from scratch and my dad did the washing up straight after dinner. Mum would dry when we were smaller then when we were bigger, we used to dry. It felt so safe and secure and comforting growing up in such an organised and clean house. Ours is clean but it's not organised and I'm behind with all the washing.

My parents are now in their late 70s (but could pass for early 60s!) and they still never stop!

I’m 52. I remember my mum reading (Catherine Cookson) and doing watercolour painting in the kitchen in between cooking, washing and visiting relatives.

Oh and I forgot she did a load of baking once a fortnight. A chocolate cake, a Victoria sponge, flapjacks, scones and a chocolate traybake.

My mum always visited friends or they came to her, my mother was also very sociable with all her neighbours, she’d also spend hours on the landline. My mum also did a lot of gardening and she’d do her elderly neighbours garden too! Our house was immaculate and we always had a home cooked meal every day.

I keep forgetting things - I wish there was an edit button!! Every spring she used to properly spring clean the entire house, which was fairly big. I remember the curtains being down for washing, she took the huge bits of double glazing out and cleaned them (not sure why they could come out!), washed all the walls and skirting boards, painted all the white woodwork! I still remember the smell of Flash diluted in a bucket of warm water!

Evenings and weekends, but you had to make sure not to stay on for more than an hour because it would revert to the normal tariff after that.

"Oh! It's nearly an hour. I'll call you right back!"