Everyone’s childhood is different and you don’t realize how unique your childhood was until you compare it with those of others.
This happens the first time you go over to a friend’s house and experience the wildly different foods they eat or the peculiar traditions they observe. It happens when you begin dating someone and discover that their family quirks are totally different from your own. It can be jarring to discover something that you assumed was normal because your family does it is actually outside of the norm for everyone else.
This realization is a basically universal experience, so when someone on Reddit recently asked “What was something your family did that you didn’t realize wasn’t normal until you did it in front of others?”…people had plenty of stories to tell.
1.
2.
..That my mother would scream and yell every single night in her sleep.
I legit thought it was a normal thing “My Mom has nightmares!”
Doesn’t yours?
3.
Flush the toilet after peeing. We tried to save water, so we basically peed until someone took a dump.
Then one day I went to a family friends’ house and freaked everyone out because I didn’t flush.
4.
Use assorted German words in casual conversation… which as a child I assumed were English until I got confused stares from friends. My family has been in the US since 1902.
5.
My mom is a yawn-yeller. When she yawns, you can hear it from anywhere in the house.
One time my sister had a friend over, and we were in the basement. My mom yawned upstairs, and my sister’s friend asked “was that a coyote?”
6.
Smoking indoors. I didn’t do it, but my gf at the time had a veritable panic attack when we had my mother over for dinner. It was the first and only time my mother came to visit.
7.
Apparently it isn’t normal to do “grave rubbings”. When I was little and went to graveyards with my family sometimes they would bring paper and crayons to rub old dates and names onto them (like a leaf rubbing). I was reminiscing on this once with my friends and realized that these rubbings weren’t a normal thing to do once they all gave me horrified looks.
8.
everyone in the family, extended family included likes each other and gets along.
one boyfriend commented that my family was weird because everyone got along, no massive fights, screaming and yelling each holiday, bringing up decade old grudges once or twice a year. like he has never met his uncle because his dad and uncle hate each other too much.
9.
My aunt in Texas had a 5 gallon bucket in her freezer of scorpions. They had a lot of them down there on their property and every time she would catch one she’d throw it in the bucket with the rest of them in the freezer. I never could get a straight answer why she didn’t just kill them and throw them in the trash.
10.
My dad jizzed on my siblings and I a lot.
He was born in Iran, so he had a little bit of a language gap even as an adult. And what he would do to mess with my siblings and I is he would use his finger and thumb to punch the tiniest amount of skin on our wrists. And he would call it “jizz”, because I think that’s what he thought the sound of that was if you could get close enough to hear it. So the scene occurred plenty of times where my brother, sister, and I would be running away from him in the house, pleading not to get jizzed on.
Years later, someone explained to me that the noise Iranians think bees make is “jizz”. So therefore, my dad was “buzzing” us. Not jizzing. Thankfully.