Every family has their own traditions, their own quirks, and their own specific way of doing things that no one else is really privy to – and because we spend almost all of our time as young kids with only our family, we often don’t find out until later that other families don’t do things the same way.
Which is also when people like these 16 realize that their parents might be a little off – not always in a bad way, sometimes in a fun way, but definitely not like everyone else.
16. What if that doesn’t cut it?
We were told not to be wasteful and only use 4 squares and wipe only once.
15. It’s not the worst advice.
If we got lost, instead of looking for a cop or store owner or something, we were told to look for a mom with lots of kids, because they wouldn’t want another one to deal with, so they wouldn’t steal us.
I added to this that the mom should be fat, so that even if she did want us, she couldn’t catch us. So on multiple occasions I got lost, and on those occasions I would go straight past the help desk to the fat mom with lots of kids.
14. God bless therapy.
Did illegal drugs daily in front of me/with me in the room.
Once I realized the situation I stopped bringing friends over cause I didn’t want them to go to jail. They also regularly had screaming matches and physical fights with in front of me.
Lots of therapy to fix that s*%t. But overall I am a pretty well adjusted kinda guy.
13. This is fairly common, I think?
“Chili” at my house meant chili and rice. Up until high school I didn’t know that rice was not a part of chili and that very few people eat chili with rice.
I can still hardly eat it without rice, it’s so good that way!
12. That teacher’s face must have been priceless.
Squatting on the toilet. Kind of embarassing, but my mom is from India and everyone there squats over the “toilet” (usually just a hole in the ground)….
So I was potty trained to sit with my feet on the toilet seat. I didn’t realize that my way wasn’t the way normal americans do it until kindergarten.
11. I do this but with comfy clothes.
My mom always made us change our clothes from normal clothes to our pajamas whenever we were home.
So if we went grocery shopping and came home at like 2pm we’d immediately go to our rooms and change into our pajamas even though it was the middle of the day.
Most people just stay in the same clothes all day and change right before they go to bed. I learned this when I went to college and my roommate questioned why I kept changing.
10. Apparently…
Apparently kissing your immediate family on the lips is weird. Never thought of it as weird, then I read about it on reddit on threads like this all the time.
9. This is a lot to process.
We do all kinds of weird in our house.
Apparently, people don’t usually eat grilled cheeses with forks.
We LOVED (still do) cheez-it sandwiches (cheez-its and mayo on bread) or just mayo sandwiches.
Tomato biscuits-Mom’s homemade biscuits, tomatoes, and mayo.
We only use one specific pot to boil tea in. And that’s its purpose. It’s not even an actual teapot. Just a normal pot.
We were kinda poor so we got our movies at goodwill and apparently we got the only copies in the world because no one else remembers our favorite movies.
I’m still finding out the things that are weird about my childhood.
EDIT: I FORGOT ABOUT SPAGHETTI SANDWICHES! We love spaghetti sandwiches. Cold leftover spaghetti on plain white bread with butter or ranch.
8. Blew his mind.
I marinated chicken one night for dinner and my roommate was complimenting on it. He asked my secret and I started to describe the process.
He goes “oh, so you let the chicken sit in marinade first and then cooked it?” I looked at him for a second and said “yeah, I marinated it…”
That night I blew his mind because apparently his family thought marinade was strictly for brushing on top and cooking, not for… well… marinating.
He said his mom was just as surprised as he was.
7. Those are always the kinds of things we learn in junior high.
I learned in junior high that tucking your blouse into your panties before pulling on your jeans is a fashion faux pas.
6. I hate this so much.
I didn’t realize that the beatings I got weren’t really very normal until well into high school. I thought it happened to everyone but no one talked about it.
This is a bit harder to explain but I also didn’t realize that how secretive our father insisted that we be about our family wasn’t normal and the regular meltdowns of my father that would result in family “discussions” where he would basically tell us that we were all going to hell and none of us deserved him as a father and the family he had before he divorced his first wife and married my mom was better and more deserving.
He was also a pastor and very religious so we read the bible as a family every night. He was very legalistic and literal about the bible. He believed 100% that demons were a real and regular threat and it terrified me as a child.
5. Why, though?
We put salsa in our spaghetti. That’s all I got.
4. I refuse to believe it.
Apparently most families actually cook food everyday instead of eating out.
3. OK she should stop, though.
My mom picked my nose as a child, and would get some kind of sick satisfaction from it. I figured it was normal when I was little because sometimes blowing my nose just wouldn’t do it.
But my little brother is six now and she still does this to him, much to his dismay. When he tries to get her to stop or starts crying because he doesn’t like it, she even says she’ll buy him a toy if he lets her do it.
It’s a sickness, I tell you.
2. Classic Dad move.
The biggest “Damn it dad!” moment of my life came when someone pointed out that the phrase is actually, “A little bit nippy,” referring to the cold of course. I had been saying, “A little bit nipple-y,” my dad’s take on the phrase.
Apparently it sounds enough like the original that I was able to go un-noticed for almost two decades.
Someone then caught it and was like, “What the f**k did you just say?”
I innocently responded, “Nipple-y… You know, because your nipples get hard when it’s cold.”
1. What a sweet memory.
As a child I loved helping my mother make breakfast in the morning. Most of the time we’d make those really yummy Pillsbury flaky biscuits. According to my mom the trick to the best biscuits was poking a small dent in the center of each biscuit.
Imagine my surprise as a freshman in college when my friends informed me poking each biscuit wasn’t necessary or essential to the biscuits rising.
Looking at the posts below this is tame but guys I’ve never felt so hoodwinked in my life.
I mean, I say who wants to be like everyone else, right?
Be unique and create some fun traditions for your kids to freak out about later in life, too!