I am again low on thread ideas, when I noticed that my last post was my 666th post. My Mom is quasi-religious and fairly superstitious, so there were all kind of random rules I had when I was growing up. I was not allowed to: Play D&D Listen to Orff's Carmina Burana Use or own a Ouija board Call a local business whose phone number ended in 0666 And so on. To this day I have never played D&D or used a Ouija board. I do know all the words to Estuans Interius though, but nothing bad has happened to me thus far. FOCUS: To which parental superstitions were you subjected as a child? Were you never allowed outside for fear of abduction? Were you prohibited from hanging out with the goth crowd? ALT FOCUS: Do you have any superstitions? What are they? How do they impact your life?
My mom had all the same devil's playground hang ups -- *anything* that dealt with magic or the occult was off limits. Except for The Wizard of Oz. The ruby red slippers completely blinded her to the witches and she reasoned that the wizard wasn't a real wizard. I kiss my son before every meal. Some people pray, I give him a quick peck on the cheek. Every time. One time when he was an infant he was crying so I rushed to get him fed and because he was gulping so fast he choked on the milk. New mother post partum lunacy, I *immediately* thought it was because I didn't kiss him first. So now it's "a kiss before you eat" always! Since I can't be there during school I put one Hershey Kiss in his lunch and I make him promise on all matters holy that he will eat it before the rest of his meal. Sigh...poor kid will be scoping the cafeteria for matronly co-eds to kiss when he goes to college.
My biggest superstition is that I have a silly concern for "jinxing" myself. If I have some sort of worry or fear about a situation, I won't say it aloud because I think it'll risk it coming true, and if I'm happy with how a situation is going, I won't comment on that aloud either until it's over. I have NO idea why this is.
Im a Catholic and was raised as such. My mother and father were not very strict about it, except I was expected to attend weekly mass. The one thing my mother never let in the house was a Ouija Board. Ironically, my cousins had given me one for my First Communion and my mother flipped the fuck out over it.
As a small child, I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies or play football. Because I had an accident while riding my bike when I was 6 and broke my leg. I've got no fucking idea how that resulted in the scary movie thing - but apparently I was too fragile to play any sport more agressive than soccer. Also Spoiler Hiya Grits!
Damn you, Scootah! For what it's worth, I can now say the iPhone stands up to the thrown across the room in terror test.
My Dad has been a cop for over 30 years now, and as a result of years of exposure to the worst of people, he is slightly paranoid and a hint crazy. He's like a mild version of Dale Gribble from King of the Hill, and attributes his quirks to the reason he's "survived so long" (his words). He refuses to have the light on in his car (his personal car, not the police car). He thinks this will make it harder for people to shoot him when pulled into the driveway. Keep in mind that he works in a fairly small city and I'm not sure there's even been a police shooting there. He will not keep the outside light of the house on for the same reason. He's also told me the reason of this is so people won't see him in uniform entering his own house and know that a cop lives there, despite the fact that he always wears a jumper over his police shirt. Knives may not be pointed towards him when sitting at a table. I can only speculate that he's fearful of a poltergeist situation in which the knife will fly at him. My mum's worst superstition growing up, on the other hand, was not letting us swim for half an hour after eating for a fear that we'd get cramps and drown.
I was never allowed to play hockey because "I'd lose to all the kids who had been playing since they were four" I was seven. Who the hell wants to (be forced to) play soccer.
Wha--? Then how did you watch Dead Calm and see Nicole Kidman nekkid before she want all Eyes Wide Shut on us? In highschool, a buddy and I wanted to show people how silly superstitions are. So, we set up a ladder, walked under it, broke a mirror and spilled salt under the ladder. We were inside, so we also open and umbrella and picked up upside down pennies. There was this one girl we didn't like that was so bat crazy superstitious - we really did it to make her crazy. She spent like 5 minutes saying, "Don't do it! Don't do it!" right before we did our little show. Nothing happened. Or everything bad that has happened to me since was because of that.
Not my parents, but in loco parentis: I went to boarding school in a valley in California that is notable for its east/west orientation. Apparently this means something in many of the various wackadoo spiritual traditions, and thus the place is a haven for hippies, crazies, and random believers of all types. A fair number of Hollywood stars like to hang out there as well, and it has a gorgeous 5 star resort/spa, so it's an interesting mix. (If anyone recognizes the place, yes, I went to "that horse school.") There's an ancient man who has been teaching there since 1952, and is a repository of all manner of school lore. He's a weird, kooky old guy, very particular about student behavior, and while half the students love him all of them are at least a little afraid of him. He also has a very interesting "hairdo," but that is neither here nor there. My BFF had brought a Ouija board to school with her, but since we were constantly busy and tired we never had a chance to play with it. She kept it in the back of her closet and maybe 3 of us knew she had it. Not 3 weeks into the school year, the old man stands up at assembly, and in his most forbidding, serious voice announces: "Will the freshman girl with the Ouija board please see me after the assembly?" Knocking in her boots, my BFF does as she is told. She later reported that the teacher told her that the locals had alerted him to the presence of a Ouija board on campus that was "disturbing the spirits in the valley." (I assume that the deduction from Ouija board on campus to freshman girl was not a large logical leap for him to make...) She FedExed that sucker back to her mom the next day. Ouija boards are still very much not allowed at school.
OH: Spoiler Dude, did we have the same mom? And cousins with a love of Ouija board? I did grow up in CT. My family is Irish, and the Irish have some strange superstitions. Neither of my grandparent's houses had images of birds in them. Not even in a painting or decorative sense. They hated birds because birds are a sign of death. It was exacerbated by the time when one of their brothers was on his death bed, and a bird got into the house. Obviously his death was brought about by this bird. Come to think of it, my mom's house doesn't have any birds in it either.
It was the usual superstitions, but my dad was fanatical over them, especially putting shoes on a table, like after we'd go shopping and one of us got a new pair of shoes and we put them (in the box) on the table with the rest of the bags when we got home. Freaked my father out. I don't know what particular curse was associated with it in his head, but he'd practically break his neck to get them off the table. My mom always attributed it him being Irish.
I don't know if this counts, but I wasn't allowed to read teen magazines. No Seventeen, no Cosmo Girl, etc. My mom found a Teen Beat in my room when I was 14, and I was grounded for a week. I asked her about this years later, and apparently she thought I was going to get into sex too early if I read this stuff. I guess it worked, because I didn't lose my virginity until I was 22. On the other end of the spectrum, my aunt had no problem with her kids watching horror films, dabbling in witchcraft, and getting way too into the Ouija board, but they were not allowed to watch Full House.
My parents were very anti-secular. Well, my father didn't much care - by the time I was old enough to be exposed to anything, he was zoning out at the computer, blasting The Wall through noise-canceling headphones. My mother on the other hand, refused to allow her 12-year-old son to read Animorphs, though she couldn't give a reason beyond "because I just don't like it". A year later I was reading much more secular material in the young adult/adult science fiction which she seemed to be oblivious to. Anyone remember the Addams Family series on ABC? That was off-limits, as were unmonitored internet, movies they hadn't approved of, and the like. Apparently, watching Twister with my parents at the age of 10 was acceptable though. The hands-down worst reaction I heard from my mother was when she caught me and my dad watching the film version of The Wall around the same age...second place goes to watching the film Stargate SG-1 and my mom looking up from her book just as a pair of tits come out. I'm not sure if her reaction caused me to be more embarrassed for her or for me, because she jumped up, started yelling up a damn storm, and preceeded to ream my father about standards, "how could you let him rent this", etc. Generally, I was taught that anything related to sex was bad, (this really made things confusing when I walked in on my parents on the couch, and was screamed at for being out of bed...sorry bout that glass of water, dad. Good hit I guess?) and it shows. I've been in a woman twice and it's done nothing for me. Thanks guys! I don't really have any personal superstitions...I well believe that if you show your back to someone, they'll bury a knife there, but that's human nature. All of that salt over your shoulder and walking under ladders is lost on me. For a while in my mid-teens, I did have a weird kind of issue. If I stepped on the crack between sidewalk squares, I had to keep stepping on every crack, and with the opposite foot each time. And I had to count off in a 1, 2, 3, 4 pattern...maybe more of a simple oddity, but it was fucking nuts. There were a lot of other things I had to do in patterns, but that was the closest to any sort of superstition, though again as I type this out it seems to me to be less superstition than fucking mental.
The two that I remember most (and coincidentally make no sense) are: 1. Don't wash your hair on Wednesdays 2. Don't cut your nails after dark Apparently, it was "bad luck" to do either of these things. I did them anyway and nothing terrible happened.
Don't say "Macbeth" in a theater. I, being the too-cool-for-high-school sophomore, once demonstrated that I was a badass by saying it quite loudly just before a performance. One actor's tie caught on fire during the show; he'd apparently dangled it over the candles too closely. An on-set door somehow got locked (we didn't know it even had a lock), preventing two actors from exiting for about five minutes until a crew member was able to unlock it from the other side. Oh, and one actor did the entire first act with his fly quite visibly unzipped, though that may have been his idea of a joke. I've never tested that superstition since.
Oh hey, I was never allowed to have a Ouja Board either. Not because my mom was superstitious though. It's because she wasn't a huge fan of wasting money on a "game" that you don't even play. You just look at it while 4 different people try to make it say four different variations of the word butt. Sad because you can't have a Ouja Board? Here's a large print magazine, the back of a Monopoly Board, and a Magnifying Glass. Have a fucking blast.
Before my dad became a raging alcoholic, he was super religious. He was a deacon, did death row ministries, dragged my family to multiple different churches, and shoved me and my siblings into Christian school. Until my parents divorced I had an extremely sheltered childhood. I did not know what watching TV was until I was 9 years old. I wasn't even allowed to watch the evening news with them. To this day, I have never seen Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland. Halloween was completely off limits. I have never been trick or treating. I didn't attend a Halloween Party until I was 15. I have never colored an Easter Egg. There was never a santa. We were never allowed out of the house on New Years Eve. We couldn't go to any friends' houses, because they might be a bad influence on us. My parents never cursed or even mentioned the word sex. My sister was not even allowed to talk to boys on the phone until she was 16. I didn't even know the stereo in the car played anything other than tapes. When we were in the car, me and my siblings were not allowed to talk, we had to read. When we were in a store, we had to walk single file according to age. My dad flipped out if I had on nail polish or lipgloss. There is alot more, but I figured I would give you jackals an idea of it.
My mom was pretty bad about a lot of this stuff, especially D&D and any wizardry/magic type stuff. No Ouija boards (not that I cared), I doubt I could have read any of the LotR books, etc. I know there were some specific things she kept me from, but I can't even remember what they were. I also wasn't allowed to watch The Simpsons. The very worst though was when I got this toy one day: Fucking Dino Riders were the shit. Of course my mom didn't realize that the large toe claws on the Deinonychus were historically accurate, she thought that they had added them to the toy to make it look more 'evil'. So she fucking cut the toes off my brand new toy. I still give her shit for that to this day.
Is your last name Von Trapp? Jesus that's harsh. My parents used common sense and taught me the same. I was never in trouble as a kid but a handful of times. I was too busy with school, sports and at 16 working, to get into trouble with anything so limits similar to what's been mentioned in this thread weren't put into place. There was no need. If something needed to be addressed, it was. Far easier than setting and monitoring that these rules were followed. What a bunch of work and overprotectiveness. Let them learn somethings on their own via experience.