Silly things your mother did (lighthearted)

[RaraRachael]

Trying to lighten my current mood and started to think about things my mother did - and insisted that I do - as they were "the done thing" back in the day.

Turning the clothes inside out to put on the washing line in case a bird shat on them
Lining every shelf in your kitchen unit with patterned greaseproof paper
Stuffing the chicken and then sewing it up with a needle and thread

Suffice to say, I stopped these ridiculous traditions when i realised there was no valid purpose to them

My dm does most of the doolally stuff mentioned on here but one of her most irritating habits is explaining to us all (in the 'old days' of family gatherings) why she is putting on the dishwasher, I think she feels it is very extravagant to have it running twice a day and very possibly 'common'

My mum has always been a little barking mad round the edges, so as a teen I certainly wouldn't have brought a boy home as the process of her trying to make him very welcome would have been mortifying. I was 18 and 3 friends called to the house to start our night out, they were really weird towards me that night, wouldn't touch me when we were dancing in the nightclub, generally odd. Turns out while I nipped upstairs for my coat and lippy she'd grilled them about whether I was in fact a lesbian as she feared as much. She denies it to this day, but it put me on tricky ground with friends at a tricky age. These days it would probably have made me cool to be friends with, but these were different times.

We weren't allowed to watch sci fi - "far fetched rubbish" or American programmes- "noisy American rubbish " or films- "waste of 2 hours".

She used to turn supermarket carrier bags inside out as she didn't want to advertise them.

Pants (clean) on your head like a sort of head scarf holding your hair back whilst you did make up/ cleansed/ moisturised! I still do this!

Buys things in ridiculous bulk so you open a random drawer and find twenty deodorants for eg

Yes to lots of things on this thread.
Lots of things were 'common' too according to my late mum - putting clothes on the radiator to dry, ironing in the living room, wearing any earrings other than small studs, not wearing an under slip with a dress or skirt.

One batshit thing she insisted on though was that you mustn't put a hot tea bag in the bin until it had cooled down incase it set the bin on fire.

One batshit thing she insisted on though was that you mustn't put a hot tea bag in the bin until it had cooled down incase it set the bin on fire.grin

🤣🤣🤣

Dinner always on the table for 6pm. If it’s late the world would end. Big roast dinner on the table for 1pm. You can’t eat anything else on a Sunday.
My dm used to own a twin tub washing machine. It took me until I moved out at 25 and bought a ‘normal’ washing machine, that she actually bought one and realised that laundry wasn’t such a drudge job

Yes to the twin tub washing machine thing. My mother would never have an automatic one because "She'd heard that they went wrong".
Her answer to any query on her batshittery was that "She'd heard.........."

@Shosha1

I still line shelves! Especially the ones that hold food such as oil or treacle.

My favourite of my Mums was after ironing dry clothes, she would then but them in the airing cupboard before they went into into the wardrobes. Why!

My mum does that with the ironing...in fact she's fretting this week as they need a new boiler and - what if they don't have a hot water tank in the house anymore (they will) what will happen to the airing cupboard...Lady down the road has a radiator in theirs.... I've never really thought about her process though, I just iron and put away in wardrobes etc. It will stem from days before steam irons I think but I don't understand the logic..

My mum topped macaroni cheese with crushed ready salted crisps, and eschewed garish ruskoline in favour of crushed weetabix to fry fish with. Hard boiled eggs in fish pie and 'chicken supreme' with mushrooms in, yum!

She was a domestic slattern though. For insane cleaning rituals you need my Aberdeen grannies. Both were also passionate about food packaging which must never be seen. I once actually offended my gran by casually handing her a tub of lurpak. She was unable to use any product until it had been decanted into something else.

@unmarkedbythat

My mum calls things by the same name as everyone else and then adds "as I call it", as if she was the only person to do so. Like, "for tea I'm cooking cottage pie, as I call it". She got really cross with me last year for insisting that everyone calls the holidays where you're all on a giant floating hotel boat "cruises" and she was not unusual to do so. Bizarre.

😂😂 this made me chuckle!

My mother was very keen on keeping up appearances.

We were allowed to wear jeans around the house, but going out, we had to get 'properly' dressed; ie. proper trousers.

When we did start wearing denim outside, she insisted on ironing it.

I spent my entire childhood from 10 onwards, with ironed creases in my jeans, which were hung up on trouser hangers as if they were 'proper' trousers.

@50FootWave

Throwing a strand of spaghetti at the wall (during cooking) - if it stuck, it was done.

No idea why she didn't just taste it!

@Heaviestdirtyestsoul and mine also salutes magpies and asks 'how's your wife?'

That made me really laugh, it cheered me up. Good thread.

@Oneearringlost

@RaraRachael My uncle used to turn carrier bags inside out, he had many principles like that. He would video record everything he watched that wasn't BBC, so he didn't have to see the adverts.

Having bought me a plastic lunchbox, my mum ripped off the Snoopy insignia (she loathed cartoons), and replaced it with a picture made of stickers (balloons, rainbows, animals etc.), with sticky-back plastic over the top. It wasn't exactly cool, but it lasted many years!

If magazines or cereal boxes had a prominent ugly face, my mum would cut it out so she didn't have to see it - the Radio Times was a frequent offender, especially if it had a wide-eyed grinning celebrity. The ultimate evil in this was a red nose, as worn for Comic Relief.

Not my mum, but my aunt: she had "magic story time", which I thought was weird at the time, but now I realise how lovely this was, and how much thought she'd put into it. She'd make sure we children were blindfolded (eyes closed wasn't enough - any peeping would break the magic), and she'd tell us a story, getting us to feel objects related to it, such as coins for pirate gold. Sometimes this was really ambitious, lifting us up and telling us we were flying (with help from other adults).

Silly things (but probably lifesaving) - she would take ages when we had to leave the house (by car) to ensure everything turned off, the gas, cooker etc.

I recall a few times we had to drive back to the house to ensure e.g. the cooker, iron etc was turned off. She was really paranoid about this.

@TwoLeftSocksWithHoles

My mother was horrified that my brother threw away the kitchen bin liner with the rubbish, as she would use one several times.

She also washed clingfilm - although it never 'clinged' again after it was washed. It was so embarrassing when friends came round and saw clingfilm pegged out on the washing line!

Ha, mine did that too

DM repeatedly told (indoctrinated) me it was ‘common’ to allow your bra straps to show so I was always careful with what I wore. Until one day when I wanted to wear a dress with narrow shoulder straps for work (it was very hot) - so I put a bra on, then dress, then sewed the bra to the dress fabric so that it couldn’t move and be seen. Great, it worked perfectly - until I came to take the dress off and forgot I’d sewn my bra to it. I didn’t do that again (and I never wore the lovely dress again).
Sad really because throughout my life I’ve never been able to shake off that voice telling me that some clothes/way of wearing them are ‘common’ or ‘fast’ and it really limited the choices I made.

When we reached the dizzying heights of using a word processor (late 80s), my mum still insisted on planning everything she wrote on paper first: not one word could be typed until she had finalised the paper draft. She tried to make us children do the same; to her, a word processor was no more than a glorified typewriter.

I wasn't allowed to watch ITV as a child either. Last year I told her about a property programme I'd seen which was filmed in the tiny W Yorkshire town where she was born and raised - I suggested she watched it on catch up but she snootily replied 'I don't watch Channel 4'

As children we weren’t allowed to eat sweets made in Thailand, Japan etc because my Grandmother was terrified we would get radiation poisoning.

If we were ill we could only drink boiled water cooled down, not tap water or bottled, tepid boiled water.

Then again there were lovely classic aspects that I really try to uphold - shoes polished every Sunday night, I try to iron everything (not underwear though!) and I try to home cook most nights.

@Fuckingcrustybread

She used to make curry with sultanas and serve desiccated coconut and chopped hard boiled eggs on the side. I'm sure that the recipe came from one of those 1970s "exotic" cookbooks.

A few years ago we ate at a friend's house and she served home made curry with potatoes, egg and sultanas mixed in.

It wasn't spicy at all but it wasn't completely unpleasant. Not a dish I'd request seconds for.

Also we had to unplug the fridge when we went on holiday. No other appliance - just the fridge.