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 worked part time as a nurse so worked shifts
Most days she would cook a meal from scratch she loved following recipes she’d find in magazines or getting cookbooks from the library she also liked baking.She liked reading and also went to keep fit classes once or twice a week.Thursday was food shopping day and Friday was cleaning day and if she had a Saturday off she’d go into town for a look around the shops.She’s always had a wide circle of friends who were often popping in for coffee.
To be honest her life’s pretty much the same now apart from she retired a couple of years ago.

She worked PT as a hospital pharmacist and then retrained as a maths teacher so was FT from when I was about 15. She also did a lot of the paperwork for the family business (VAT returns etc). She gardened a lot- she's very good at that. We had a large breed dog so that needed a fair bit of walking. Didnt have a cleaner. Didn't eat ready meals. In the evenings she read and did watercolours and charcoal drawing.

My mum was a nurse in the army, but had to leave the day she got married (1968).

She spent our childhood over-eating, moaning about her lot, walking the dog, croqueting blankets, talking on the CB radios, smoking, reading books/the paper, gossipping with neighbours and allowing us to run feral.

Not a lot of cleaning or tidying got done. She sat around a lot, rarely prepared a meal- it was help yourself to what was in the pantry.

She did not drive so, so shopping was done via a bus into the town and then the boxes of food delivered later (deliveroo before its time!). The veg van, library van, fish and chip van, pop van, coal lorry all came round to demarcate the week.

We did not have a phone. So every Sunday, my mum would walk 1.5miles to the nearest phone box with a handful of 10p's to phone my nan. We got a phone in the mid 80s! (Last in my class to have a phone number!)

In the late 80s mum past her driving test and got a job as a part-time nurse. She then moaned about that and did even less housework! The house was a tip, we could never bring anyone home, and mum was never happy (her glass was half empty until the day she died). My dad worked 14 hour days (7am-9pm) an would come home for lunch and tea and was kind, funny, generous and mean with money (happily pay for a big pub meal but not a landline phone) lazy too, and happy. His glass was overflowing even when he was ill for so many of his latter years.

My mother was a fantastic knitter, she'd taught herself as something to do when evacuated during the War to Monmouthshire (which she hated, a very unfriendly community that resented the incomers, they weren't easily able to mix as they had shifts on the school, and there was nothing to do so she got her mother to send needles and lots of wool).
She'd spend hours knitting very fancy jumpers, absolutely loved Kaffe Fassett and knitted loads of his designs - I still have a few from 20-30 years ago.

Sadly whilst I can sew, I just can't grasp knitting.

My mum never worked, my dad was self employed. So he was working on call outs and different hours. My mum had a another baby when me and my twin brother were 11. Lots of kids in the house,cousins. Mum always running about to relatives, gardening, on the landline.

Woman's realm, woman's world, woman, daily Mail, hours of solitaire.
I wouldn't call my mums knitting a hobby it was necessary. Like my dads veg gardening was.

My mum was always doing something cooking related or gardening.

My mother read a lot, knitted and did the gardening. She had a career until she was taken ill and then she opted for a part-time job to "keep her brain active".

Oh, and Crosswords! She was mad about them (Times and Telegraph) and would have loved Wordle.

Chain smoking and gossiping with the neighbours over coffee.

Your mum sounds lovely

My mum never stopped. The house was immaculate, everything was ironed, every meal was cooked from scratch and every cake was home baked. And everything she did was infused with love. I’ll never stop missing her.

My mum chain smoked and read books lol. I chain drink tea and read my kindle.

Lots of soaps and magazines - she always put her feet up for an hour or so in the afternoon too !

My mum was a wannabe hippy so she’d smoke hash all day long and espouse stuff about saving the world.

I think the drugs have addled her brain. She used to be super intelligent (has read thousands of books has lots of university degrees etc) but now wastes her life on conspiracy theories and big pharma.

My mum was tending to her plants and garden or reading a magazine. She used to take us to the park often snow but she just sat on a bench reading magazines. At some point she got bored and went back to university for a postgraduate degree.

Now she is retired, she spends all her time playing cards online…

My mum spent most of my formative years
Working
Sitting on a sofa, smoking and reading with her fingers in her ears
Tutting and sighing
Arguing with my Dad.
Doing housework.

When i was child Mum read, cross words, puzzle books, played cards or board games, watched her fav TV programmes. She was sahm, always calm

At 55 she did my steps payroll and work.correspondence. He employed about 50 people at one point. She spent the equivalent of about two full days on it.

She ran a dance class and taught aerobics until she was about 65 (she trained as a ballerina).

She spent a lot of time on the phone and visited my grandmother who was in a home every day.

At 86 she still walks up to the village every other day, cooks, socialises, plays bridge and during lockdown did all her coffee mornings on zoom. I think they even played bridge on zoom.

She's had an ipad for ages for photos and booking holidays, researching stuff of interest.

She has never knitted, sewn, done crosswords, cooked much or cleaned. I was so thankful when I was at school that my school summer dresses were sent to a proper dressmaker. In the days when you could only buy a pattern and the material directly from.school !

My mum smoked joints and listened to her vinyl records. She’d dance around the lounge room and sing along to the Rolling Stones doing her best Mick Jagger impersonation. 🤷🏼‍♀️What can I say, she was a flower child of the 60’s who never grew up.

My mother didn't work (70s & 80s). She used to watch TV. A lot. And read magazines like Take A Break.

My mother didn't work but was constantly busy with cleaning, mowing the lawn (we had a huge area of garden and in Australia grass grows fast!), also she spent a lot of time dressmaking. Also ferrying me to and from school and other places. I don't remember her sitting and reading or relaxing ever!

I'm 66 - my mother had a lot of hobbies some of which I shared with her (kayaking and horses) She was active in local politics as she got older and was a councillor as well as a school governor, samaritan volunteer and she continued to work part time until she died.

Mine didn't do do much housework (in later years she was diagnosed with mental health issues which may account for this). She drank a lot of tea and chain smoked. In the mornings she'd listen to the chat shows on Radio 1 (Gay Byrne and Mike Murphy). When the TV channels started their morning shows, she switched to TV instead. When we were small, she'd walk us to playschool or school in the morning and then collect us in the afternoon.

My parents never had a car. Because they'd no car, we didn't do a weekly shop. So Mam would go to the local shop every day for cigarettes, bread and meat/veg. for the dinner. She'd meet neighbours and friends and have a good natter with them. After dinner, she'd light the fire in the sitting room and spend the afternoon and evening in her armchair. We'd no central heating so we all congregated in the sitting room in winter.

She read a lot in the early years (Catherine Cookson and Barbara Taylor Bradford and lots of Mills & Boon romances). She read magazines like A Peoples Friend. In later years, she watched more TV and read less. She loved Coronation Street and Emmerdale and A Country Practice. She knitted a lot. When we were small, she knitted us jumpers and cardigans. When she got older and her mental health deteriorated, she still knitted a lot but rarely finished things. When I was a child, she went to a ladies club one night a week and took part in some of the shows they put on. But she suffered from depression and would miss the club for several weeks and I think she found it embarrassing having to explain her absence when she was better and went back. So she stopped going.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think my Mam would have been happier working. I think she was quite lonely and isolated as a SAHM and needed some routine in her life. But very few married women worked at that time in Ireland and she'd never have afforded childcare for five children even if creches existed back then. And of course, she had no choice about the number of children she conceived because there was no contraception back then.

My mum was a single mum, I was born at the beginning of the 90s for reference

She worked full time, she talked on the landline a lot in the evenings, usually to either her sister or her mum as they didn't live near us. She read load of books, she was always reading.

She obviously had to maintain our home and do general life admin all whilst looking after me on a weekend. She also used to go out some weekends on an evening with single friends or boyfriends, leaving me with a baby sitter.

She used to say mobile phones were a waste of time until she got a Nokia in the early 2000s and then she talked on that a lot as well. She's now got an iPhone (and has done for many years) and she is glued to it with work calls/emails. She even has an Apple Watch.