You know, for all the problems I had with my mother

[conuly]

I still sometimes see something terrible that people consider just normal for American parents of that generation and I wonder how everybody else got so unlucky.

Comments

[altamira16]

I have noticed that people get uncomfortable when I discuss the amount of physical child abuse that went on in the South when I was a kid.

[kyrielle]

I constantly say my parents were amazing.

And they did things that I absolutely would not consider today. But for what we knew then and their time, they WERE amazing.

[conuly]

Yeah, it's not even that. It's... like, people talk like it's so normal to have parents who were super invested in your weight and... no, there was no body shame in our home. Absolutely no pressure to eat more or less, weigh more or less, dress up or down, date or not date, marry or not marry, have sex or not have sex, have kids or not have kids.

All her many, many personal issues came out in other ways, but geez, at least we were spared that particular pressure cooker.

(Also, no queerphobia at all, and a professed bafflement that other people gave a shit about this sort of thing.)

[silveradept]

Happy families are all alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way?

Although it sounds like, from this bafflement, that many unhappy families were unhappy in similar ways.

[conuly]

Well, at least we can say that my mother's somewhat haphazard parenting with occasional moments of sheer fucked-upedness wasn't boring.