11. The Naked Truth
Our weirdest rule was the "Underwear At the Table Rule." Me and my three sisters were big fans of being naked when we were younger, so from ages 3-8 whenever we'd come home from preschool or school, everything would just come straight off regardless of who was home. So my mother instituted the Underwear at the Table Rule, stating that during dinner everyone needs to be wearing underwear at the very least, otherwise no dinner.
This worked for a while and was later complemented by the rule stating that if you have chest hair, you have to wear a shirt (that one applied more to my dad than to us).
12. Get In and Stay In
Once you get home from school, you don't go out. It was like that until I moved out the summer after high school ended. My mom just never allowed it or did it herself, once she got home from work she wouldn't go out to buy anything, ever, no matter how much one of us needed it (new calculator, lined paper, etc). She'd go buy it before coming home after work the next day.
We'd buy ALL our food on Saturday, hundreds of dollars of it, and wouldn't buy a thing during the week. We never had friends outside of school because of that. I still have a really hard time with the dynamic of simply meeting people outside of work/school where we all have to be.
13. Pointlessly Precocious
We weren't allowed to hang posters on the wall, even with the nice poster tac stuff that doesn't leave any marks. My parents were obsessed with preserving the "resale value" of the house. I had the girl room and my brother had the boy room. My room was painted pink (a color I never liked as a kid, even when I was very young) and my brother's was baseball themed.
Brother could have framed baseball posters if my mom approved them. I was only allowed Monet's Water Lilies (also framed) because it was the only art my mom liked that went with the pink color theme. They've lived in that house for almost 30 years and have no intention of ever moving.
14. Look, Don’t Touch
When my brother was born, I wasn't allowed to touch him or be too close to him for several months because my mom thought I would hurt him. I was six when he was born, but my mom shut myself and my cat in my room for most of the day to keep us isolated. It freaks you out as a kid. You start wondering if you're dangerous or a bad person.
15. Who’s Complaining?
My mom didn't let me do laundry until I was 18. I have no idea why to this day. I had seen it done enough times to know how to do it when I was finally allowed to, but, she banned me from doing it. Obviously, this was the only rule I accepted without argument.
16. Share the Love
The weirdest was this: When I was 11 (this was 1990), I was BIG into New Kids on the Block. HUGE. For some reason, those giant buttons were also popular—I'm talking the ones that were 6" in diameter and had an easel so you could stand it up on your desk. Anyway, Mom and I were out shopping one day and one of the stores at the mall had them. I really, really wanted the one with Joey McIntyre, because he was my favorite. Mom would only buy the one with all five guys on it for me, though. Her reasoning: If she bought me the one with just Joey, it wouldn't be fair to the other four guys.
That was 26 years ago, and she still stands by her reasoning. And yes, I let her buy it for me.
17. Oh Brother
In the car, my brother will always sit at the back right and I have to sit at the back left. We're not allowed to swap seats. We used to fight over who gets to sit where. Once my brother made me sit on the sunny side but promised we would swap on the way back. Guess what? On the way back we were going in the opposite direction so I was still on the sunny side. That was the day the rule was born.
We're both in our 20s now and still uphold this rule.
18. Dining for None
We were not allowed to walk through our dining room. Nothing made my mom angrier than having footprints through her OCD vacuum lines in the carpet. It was easier to cut through the dining room from the hallway to get to kitchen. Sometimes after mom was asleep, my brothers and I would sneak through. The older we got, she seemed to get crazier about it.
I remember all three of us being grounded for a week for one of us walking through, since she couldn't tell who was the guilty one. It's so strange because other than this rule, and not being allowed to sit on our beds, she was lenient otherwise.
19. Dietary Madness
My mom was super, SUPER into nutrition. Like to a scary and not scientifically-accurate degree. I was not allowed to eat sugar—EVER. I mean I did not taste white sugar until I was 11-ish and caught on that I could just sneak it other places and she'd never know. I never had candy or chocolate of any kind until then (She sometimes baked sweet things, but it was rare, and she only sweetened them with apple juice). I get that sugar isn't good for you, but jeez.
I could not have honey either, because she believed I was allergic because my "hearing got worse" if I ate honey. Not sure how she came to that conclusion, because I never saw an allergist. I suspect I was just a normal kid—even now, if I'm focused hard on something I'm doing, I won't hear you talk to me! She also never took me to the doctor for any reason. I was not vaccinated until I was 18 and went on my own to do it.
I was not allowed to eat the same type of grain on more than one day a week. She had a list on the fridge like "Sunday - Wheat, Monday - Oats, Tuesday - Spelt, Wednesday - Kamut, Thursday - Rice," and I can't even remember the rest. Quinoa and teff were probably on there. Anyway, this was because she believed eating the same type of grain multiple days in a row would cause you to become allergic to it.
Her definition of "allergy" was vague and conflated sensitivities with allergies. She never saw a professional other than a legitimately-quack "nutritionist" who once made her believe she had cancer but NEVER SENT HER TO AN ONCOLOGIST. She did not actually have cancer, as far as I know. She was pretty obsessed with allergies, and she controlled everything I ate very carefully so as to avoid "giving" me more allergies. There were lists other than the grain ones—we also alternated soy, almond, and rice milks. Again, to avoid "creating allergies."
As far as I know, I only ever had one actual possible food-related...thing, and I outgrew it, so I don't even know what it was: until I was around 13, if I consumed anything containing the slightest bit of milk protein, I'd throw up violently not long after. I wish people had taken it more seriously whenever I told them about it, because people thought I meant "lactose intolerant" and tried to give me things without lactose but which contained casein. Or they were trying to be "nice" because they knew my mom controlled my diet hardcore. But my god, if a child tells you "I am allergic to milk," how about err on the side of caution because you don't know what's going on??
I do not know why she got the idea that I'm allergy-prone, because I wasn't and still am not! She made up a medical condition for me and made me eat as if I really had it, but never got me checked by a doctor to be sure. Umm, what else...oh, I wasn't allowed to eat potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, or peppers, because they're part of the nightshade family and nightshade is poisonous and so eating those foods would eventually cause toxins to build up in my body and cause my death. I don't even know where to begin with that one.
Within the last five years, she's stopped this crap entirely. She eats whatever, whenever. She still eats a lot of whole grains and fresh produce—great!—but she also eats potatoes (etc.) and even sugar sometimes. She still talks about her constantly-rotating cabinet of "allergies," but not as often. She thinks the stomach ache she gets from milk is an "allergy." And I'm like no, mom, switch to Lactaid?
She also gets a yearly physical from an actual doctor. And she seems much happier overall.
20. Seems Reasonable
It wasn't the rule itself that was ridiculous, it was the fact that it was the only rule. Don't set the house on fire. That was it. I could do whatever the hell I wanted as long as the house wasn't a pile of ashes when my parents got home.
21. Not the Happiest Place on Earth
For me, it was that Disney films were almost completely banned (I was allowed to watch Mickey Mouse). My mum felt that they were too "saccharin" and that I should not be lied to about the future. We actually all sat down as a family when I was about five to watch Mulan, then read the poem while my mum explained the differences. Jokes on her though, I watched Pocahontas at a sleepover.
Although this does mean that I have not seen The Lion King, Cinderella, etc.
22. Slipping Standards
I had a 10 PM bedtime from age 16 until I moved out. I turned 18 in July and moved out in August. The only exception was if I had work. I got grounded for a week because I was up reading. Five years later my then 13-year-old sister came home falling down drunk around midnight. My mom was mad but my dad just laughed. No punishment.
Being the oldest sucked sometimes.
23. Gotta be Quick on the Draw
To have control over the television you had to say, "Powerpuff Girls, Dragon Ball Z, Ed, Edd, 'n' Eddy,” and a bunch of other Cartoon Network shows that were on television at the time. If you said this before everyone else, you got to decide what we watched on the TV.
24. That Rug Really Tied the Room Together
My dad's big rule was "don't bleed on the rug." It was obviously just a way to de-escalate the bangs and bumps of kids horsing around...he would hear a smash from the other room, then silence, then call out "just don't bleed on the rug!" One time my brother cut himself—he was pretty young, maybe seven or eight—and my dad came in with wide eyes and said: "YOU BLED ON THE RUG!"
Bleeding brother didn't get the dad joke and thought his life was completely over. Started crying hysterically. De-escalation backfired after years of buildup.
25. And I Didn’t Live to Tell the Tale
Not my parent, but my friend's father had a ton of rules about not doing dangerous stuff. That's not all that unusual, but I always liked the way he justified them. He always said that he once died doing XY. Not almost died. No, he in all seriousness told us he once died. Well, many times actually, because there were a lot of rules.
Example: "Don't swim under the steps that lead into the swimming pool when diving, I once died doing that!"
26. Grub’s Up
My parents never took me out to dinner ever. Not exaggerating at all. In my 18 years living with them, we did not eat out even once. The habit was to have three meals at home. Even when I was older (in high school) and deliberately went out with friends, they still compelled me to eat three meals every day at home. When I got home there was my share on the table and I had to finish all of it no matter what.
That meant I had to hold back when I went out with friends, the reason was always "I cannot skip dinner, sorry, you guys go on without me." As a teenager that was a very lame thing to say, or so I thought.
27. Poverty’s Scars
My father told me that if I went to a friend's house and my friend's parents offered me anything to eat, I was supposed to refuse. I took this rule very seriously. I remember once a friend's mother offered me a slice of cantaloupe, and when I refused, she tried really hard to coax me to eat it. It got so embarrassing so fast.
My father grew up in poverty on a farm in the south, and he lived through the depression. He always had enough to eat, but there were some kids in the neighborhood who didn't. These kids were always hungry, and would try to scrounge food from neighbors. Neighbors would feed them, but they hated having to do it, and they blamed the kids' parents.
So the parents of the hungry kids had a bad reputation; the neighbors assumed they were (and maybe they actually were) alcoholics, or just generally lazy good-for-nothings. So my father's fear was: if I accepted any food from anybody, or if I appeared to be hungry at all, people would think I wasn't getting enough food at home, and therefore my father was a bad provider.
My father, by the way, had lots of paranoid ideas.
28. Too Many Cooks, Apparently
I wasn't allowed to go near the kitchen. In my country, it's common for middle-class families to have maids doing house chores, and my parents said I shouldn't bother the maids doing the job. Also, the kitchen is full of dangerous things. So, I grew up not knowing how to cook anything. Every time I went near the kitchen my mother would kind of mean laugh at me, saying I can't cook so I shouldn't bother messing in the kitchen.
She can't cook herself (having maids her whole life), so that might be insecurity projection or something I don't know. Or maybe she thought if she can't cook and her daughter can, it'll expose her as a bad mother or something. The woman has a lot of that kind of insecurity, there's a lot to unpack there...once I moved out, one of the first things I did was start teaching myself how to cook.
I love cooking now.
29. Bun Swapping
My dad had diverticulosis (pockets in the intestine) and couldn't eat sesame seeds (among other things). When we would eat fast food sandwiches, everyone had to give their bottom buns to Dad, in exchange for his top buns. So all my life I grew up eating burgers with two top, seeded buns. This was never explained, and it was from before I born, so it was literally when I was in college that I realized that it wasn't normal.
I thought it was just a trademarked Dad-Privilege to have two bottom buns.
30. The Two-Day Rule
We couldn't eat ice cream two days in a row. My dad's reasoning for it makes sense. There may be a risk of heart disease in the family, so limiting ice cream means limiting the intake of saturated fat. However, the executing of the rule is questionable? Why two days? Why be so rigid and inflexible? Does having this rule mean the kids look forward to their ice cream days, overall increasing intake?
I'm the youngest and we're all adults now. The rule came up in discussion and my brother came up with a hypothetical, "What if I, eat it two days in a row, but then I don't eat it again for the next three days?" and my dad admitted that would have been a reasonable exception, but he would not have allowed it back then.
I still follow the rule. It's not like I eat ice cream every other day like clockwork; it's a rare treat. I just still avoid two days in a row, but I sometimes make my brother's exception. Another anecdote: My sophomore year of college, a frozen yogurt station was installed in the dining hall. I texted my dad to ask if the rule applies to frozen yogurt.
It does.
31. Got a Light?
No lights. My mother suffered from migraines and couldn't tolerate light so the house was shrouded in darkness. We used candles and kerosene lanterns. Now I literally turn on every single light in my house every morning just to get my day started. I still crave light after all this time. It hurts me not to have it.
32. Grit Your Teeth
My dad was a periodontist. He had me lay on the bathroom counter every night while he did a dental exam and brushed my teeth for me...until I was 12...and any friends who stayed over had to be subjected to the same treatment. Full on dental inspections every night. Gotta say though, I’m 30 and have never had a single dental problem.
33. Dad’s House Dad’s Rules
No TV. This was the 80s. We finally got a terrible, tiny, black and white TV when I was maybe 12. The only thing I could watch without ruthless mocking was the original Star Trek if there happened to be reruns. I can recite them by heart to this day. I was sooooo pop culture illiterate, it was unreal. I had no idea what Saturday Night Live was, or MTV or anything.
In retrospect, I think my dad just hated everything and especially loud noises. I did learn to love reading though. Oh, and also dinner was between 10 PM to midnight. I was a night owl also, from babyhood, so this wasn't the worst thing for me but I do remember being woken up to come eat many times. My father just preferred it that way so that's how it was.
34. All That for Next to Nothing
We all had to meticulously record in a ledger every penny spent on our family cars: gas, oil changes (which we did ourselves), alignments, etc. Each ledger was kept in the glove box. Each entry had to include the date, the mileage, price per gallon (gas) or price per quart (oil) or some other description of what was being purchased, total cost, and a few other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten.
This was super embarrassing if I had to get gas with high school or college friends in my car. I was teased about it. However, I always assumed my Dad had some impressive spreadsheet with which he was tracking...something. Years later, after I bought my own car, I asked my Dad what he did with all of that data, he said, “Not much, really. Occasionally, I’d look to see what kind of gas mileage the cars were getting.”
35. Gotta Play the Game
My adopted grandma (AKA my mom's best elderly friend from community aqua aerobics) would watch my brother and I when my parents were away. Her one household rule was the time you woke her up in the mornings, was the equivalent to your bedtime in the PM. So let grandma sleep till 10, you could stay up till 10. Wake her up at 5, you're in bed by 5.
If you worked the system well, this was fantastic.
36. Only God-Approved Rockin’
Was not allowed to listen to any music that was not Christian. Period. Bands I liked before this rule that they were previously okay with? Banned. Anything not already on the list of approved bands, such as Jars of Clay, had to be thoroughly vetted. Otherwise, they would break the CD in front of you, even if it was borrowed from a friend. Genre didn't matter, as long as they were Christian, which meant bands like Underoath and MxPx were cool.
There were plenty of others, but this is the one that still gets to me over ten years later.
37. Do It for Oprah
We had to be quiet when we drove through Chicago because "Oprah was filming there." I'm guessing it was because I was being too noisy or my parents were trying to concentrate on the directions, but I can't believe I bought into that for years.
38. The Sound of Absolute Silence
I wasn't allowed to make noise. If I spoke above a mumble I was being surly. If I was playing it could not be audible outside of my shut bedroom door. If I was cleaning, which I usually was, then I couldn't make noise while doing it. The consequences varied; usually being screamed at, having something thrown just past my head, or having something I valued taken away.
My brother did not have the same restrictions. He's always been an avid musician. Played video games at full volume. Cracked jokes and was generally encouraged to speak up. The only time he had the same rules was when our mother was on the phone, which was pretty often. I don't resent him for being treated better and he frequently advocated for me.
Now I have some interesting quirks. I can wash dishes in complete silence. I still leave drawers and cabinet doors slightly ajar. I sneak up on people at work by accident. If people are watching TV with me I have to remember to turn up the volume for them. There are days when I can't handle the sound of turning on the shower or running the vacuum cleaner.
I have a decimeter app on my phone and frequently check to see how much noise I'm making. I even sneeze silently. But I blast the radio in my car and through my headphones.
Yes, I'm in therapy.
39. Pavlov’s Dad
Wasn't me but my neighbor. When my dad would come home from work my friend would have to go home. His parents told him that because that meant it was dinnertime and therefore he should come home. Him being a child, didn't grasp that portion of the rule, he only understood come home when my dad gets home. This translated into my friend being terrified of my father.
If he saw my dad turning into the driveway, he would drop whatever we were doing and sprint home. If my dad would make it home and get out of the car, he would cry and run home. Somehow in his head, my father was bad. It took some time before my friend was comfortable around my father.
40. There's Grounded, and Then There's Grounded
Grounded at my house meant something different than what other people’s grounded meant. When I got grounded I could do absolutely nothing. Wake up, sit at the kitchen table, read a pre-chosen book all day that I had no interest in, go to bed. I was once grounded for six months because of a D. I was also made to do an insane amount of yard work. Every weekend was yard work from morning until night, then back to forced reading until bed.
My brother once got grounded and he had to write out the whole bible. He left the house before he ever finished. Also, I once got grounded because my stepmom thought I was worshipping Satan after she found my Diablo II video game strategy guide. I then had to throw away all of my CDs and the book and game.
41. Sock It To Ya
A "sock tax." In retrospect, smart. I hated it at the time. So, I left my dirty socks around the house. I don't know why I would be taking socks off all over the place, I was a damn kid. I guess I was sloppy and it just happened and the socks had to be off right then and there. Parents got fed up with this. And so, to get my dirty socks back, I had to pay a quarter per sock.
Doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but it adds up when you're nine years old. Had to literally nickel and dime my way through a few pairs because I was running out of damn socks, I was kind of a sock deserting addict I guess. Finally got in the habit of picking up my socks for a while and things seemed fine. Then I hit a heavy relapse.
Parents gave me a big box of my dirty socks for Christmas that year and a few pairs of new ones. Got better after that. Typing this is making me smile, I really love my mom and dad.
42. Do NOT Go In There
If you were to visit my childhood home, you'd walk through the front door to find the kitchen on your right, the living room straight ahead, and a carpeted hallway just beyond that. If you were to then follow that carpeted hallway, you'd pass the family room, my father's office, the laundry room, and the bedroom shared by my brother and me, with my parents' room seeming to complete the tour.
There would be another door in that hallway, though. A closed door. A forbidden door.
My parents were somewhat strict while I was growing up—mostly out of necessity, given that I was an incredibly troublesome child—but almost all of their various rules made sense (even back then, I could see the merits in not playing with knives, for example). The only exception had to do with that aforementioned door, which I had been expressly barred from even approaching, let alone actually opening.
Friends who visited me would occasionally ask what was on the other side, and I'd make up wild tales of prisoners, long-lost relatives, and even magical portals to distant lands...but the truth of the matter was that I didn't know. Now, sure, I had vague suspicions about what that off-limits room contained, and I'd even managed to catch a few glimpses from time to time, but it wasn't until one afternoon when I was about five years old that I finally discovered the terrible secret.
On that fateful day, I hatched (what I thought was) a truly diabolical plan: I waited for my mother to distract herself with some chore or another, sent my younger brother off to play "Hide and Seek" with himself, then tripped outside the forbidden door and caught myself on its handle. Having thus "accidentally" opened the door, I peered inside.
I couldn't believe what I saw. That evening at dinner, I recounted my adventure to my parents. "Did you know," I said to them, trying to keep my tone casual, "that there's an empty bedroom in this house?" My father glanced over at my mother with a barely concealed grin. "Really?" he asked. "Where is that?" "It's behind the..." I said, catching myself too late. "...It's behind the off-limits door."
"Did you open the off-limits door?!" my father gasped. "Yes." "Even though we told you not to?!" I folded my arms in the way that I'd seen my mother do it. "Well, you never told me why it was off-limits!" My father pretended to consider this. "You know what this means, don't you?" "N... no?" I answered, suddenly feeling very nervous.
"This means you can have a room of your very own if you want!" At the time, I mistakenly assumed that because I'd discovered the empty bedroom, I was therefore allowed to occupy it. It took far, far longer than it should have—until I was practically an adolescent, in fact—for me to realize the truth of the matter...
By that point, my parents had probably started wishing that they'd never encouraged me to rebel.
43. What a Load of Poop
I wasn't allowed to say fart. Instead of saying fart, my parents wanted to replace it with "poop." One day in second grade I had one of those horrible, once a month, disgusting smelling farts, and I told my friend "I just pooped!" A girl who was also sitting at our table heard me and raised her hand in front of the entire class to tell the teacher I had just pooped my pants.
The walk of shame to the nurse was not fun after having to explain myself to my teacher and the entire class.
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