When do you become your mother?

The other day as I was drinking a cup of tea, I found myself looking out the kitchen window, hand on hip, watching the world go by. It suddenly hit me that that was exactly the same thing that my mother used to do which led to a trip down memory lane as I tried to remember her routines, or perhaps some would call them 'rituals', that I had subconsciously introduced into my own life.



In the middle of winter my mother had the annoying habit of telling me to 'Open your window and let some fresh air in' just as I had snuggled up under a blanket to keep warm and relax while reading a book. Never mind that it was freezing outside! No, we had to have fresh air! Imagine my embarrassment when lately I have realised that I am now saying the same thing.

 

 

Why, you may ask, am I reminiscing about the past and about my family? Probably because I have a class reunion coming up at the weekend when memories will come flooding back as we talk about life in the 1950s and 1960s when we were at school.

 

Growing up in the 1950s was quite different from today of course. People were still getting back on their feet after the Second World War. There was no TV but we had a radio and I remember my brothers making their own crystal sets to listen to radio stations. These were superseded by the transistor radio which was hugely popular.

 

Via Outblush

 

I can't remember any of us ever being bored as we made our own fun and weren't used to being entertained. We would climb trees, swing on tyres hung from tree branches, light crackers on Guy Fawke's Night and generally enjoy ourselves. In Primary School we used to hope that on a hot day  the bottled milk that was delivered to school for us to drink at recess hadn't gone 'off' by the time the bell went. It wasn't refrigerated but was left under the one of the massive trees in the playground!

 

 

School life was pretty straight -forward for me. I was never bullied and wasn't even aware of anyone who ever was. I can't recall teachers encouraging us to work towards a specific career when we left school as jobs were plentiful in the early 1960s in the regional city I lived in and we could take our pick of them so there was no necessity to continue our learning past Junior (the current Year 10) unless we wanted to be a teacher. I believe that all my classmates who left school the same year that I left became employed within a couple of months. 

 



Once our schooling was finished we were only fifteen or so and too young to leave home or to start travelling as many young people did then just like today, so our entertainment centred around weekly dances ( we were taught how to dance at school) and the movies as well as being involved in many sports. There were no drug problems around at that time apart from those caused by over consumption of alcohol.

 

Of course, life then wasn't idyllic. As a child I wasn't aware of the problems that many of the fathers of my classmates would have faced after they returned from the war. I was fortunate that my father wasn't well enough to be sent overseas. I believe that many of the returned soldiers turned to alcohol to cope with what they had seen during the war and I doubt that much has changed since that time.

 

 

The majority of us have lost our parents so now have fond memories of our families and those years which seemed to be so much simpler. We are indeed blessed if we can grow up feeling loved and secure in our family and I hope that I have been able to impart that feeling to my children.

 

I am not quite sure what my mother was thinking when she was drinking her cup of tea with hand on hip and looking out the kitchen window at the world outside. I do know that when I fall into the same pattern now that I start thinking about my mother and the older I get the more I understand her. Isn't life strange?

 

I wonder if anyone else has found that over the years they have started doing things their mother did!