I just went to a concert of someone I've been listening to for about 30 years. I looked around, glancing at everyone sitting in their seats, and for a moment I thought, who are all these old people? Then I realized, they're all about my age, and I'm one of them!
Does your age ever sneak up on you like this?
My husband and I took the in-laws out for a nice dinner on Mother's Day. My mother-in-law is a very proper lady and is always insisting on good manners, so this was extra humorous. During dessert, I heard this low rumbling, and looked around, and it was coming from her. Suddenly, she let out the loudest and loooongest fart I have ever heard, it just kept on going, and going, and even the servers in the restaurant looked around for the sound, and then after a while it finally stopped, and there was complete silence around us. She turned red, and said, "Well, excuse me!" And my father-in-law burst out laughing, while I covered my laugh with a napkin and pretended it didn't happen. I felt bad for her so I made sure no one saw me laugh.
But as soon as we got home, my husband and I laughed and laughed about it. That is all.
I learned this from watching Star Trek, and it’s an actual “thing” now in popular culture. It’s a project management strategy of intentionally overestimating the time required for a task to ensure it can be delivered early or on time, thereby managing client expectations and creating a reputation for being a "miracle worker.” The Enterprise starship engineer, Scotty, used to add a 25%-50% buffer to original estimates to handle unexpected issues, sometimes even multiplying the expected time by four. Check out Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, where in a funny scene, Scotty admits to doing this. It’s a great movie too!
Edit: this is obviously for new workers, young people at their first jobs, not meant for professional project managers who already do this.
because they always take things literally.
I was at a bar waiting for my husband, wearing a somewhat low-cut blouse for him because it was our anniversary and we were going out for dinner after.
This was about a year after my double mastectomy for hereditary breast cancer, and my new breasts didn't quite look natural yet as they were just "settling in" and looking boyant.
I heard a group of grown women and men sitting beside me, drunk, not caring how loud they were, commenting on my breasts and saying how they hated women who had fake breasts, and how the women who had them themselves were fake, and on and on.
I finally turned to them and said, "You know what I hate more than fake breasts?" They were silent. "Breast cancer." I said.
They mumbled amongst themselves, and someone said, "Shit, sorry..." and they left shortly after.
My husband arrived, and we had a good laugh. Don't judge, you might not know the whole story.
I was at a bar waiting for my husband, wearing a somewhat low-cut blouse for him because it was our anniversary and we were going out for dinner after.
This was about a year after my double mastectomy for hereditary breast cancer, and my new breasts didn't quite look natural yet as they were just "settling in" and looking boyant.
I heard a group of grown women and men sitting beside me, drunk, not caring how loud they were, commenting on my breasts and saying how they hated women who had fake breasts, and how the women who had them themselves were fake, and on and on.
I finally turned to them and said, "You know what I hate more than fake breasts?" They were silent. "Breast cancer." I said.
They mumbled amongst themselves, and someone said, "Shit, sorry..." and they left shortly after.
My husband arrived, and we had a good laugh. Don't judge, you might not know the whole story.
I spent my youth in a sheltered environment. I was homeschooled, then worked my way through college, never drank or did drugs, worked hard at my career, and have a stable life, partner, and job.
Well, I turned 50, and thought about all the things my friends had done in their youth but that I had missed out on, like partying, dancing all night at raves, and exploring my spiritual side through various substances.
I thought, heck, my brain is very fully developed, I know the risks, and I want to have those experiences! So I bought some home drug testing kits to ensure whatever I bought was safe(ish), and started trying all sorts of natural and unnatural substances, one at a time, with my husband at home in a safe environment. We even calculate safer (none of this is entirely safe) dosages and weigh ourselves on a scale and weigh the drugs to be sure we don't do too much, of course, after testing them to make sure there are no dangerous additives.
We set up a sheet with a projector with cool visuals, and put on groovy music, when we tried mary jane for the first time we put on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and played The Wizard of Oz together, and it really was amazing!
We've experienced many strange and scary and wonderful things together, and I felt like it's brought us closer.
I'm glad I tried all these things now that I'm older, and can cross a lot of things off of my bucket list now. But I do feel a little silly and shameful about it, and would never tell my friends, for fear they might judge me.
Note to kids, don't do drugs! You're not ready for them yet.
She heard rumors of the new boy long before his arrival, mists of myth floating through the dull reality that was her world. There were strings of romance woven between the hard wooden desks, fifth-grade classbooks, and broken pieces of chalk resting below the dusty green chalkboard. In this tiny town nestled between glaciers in Alaska, any new arrival was a sweet relief from the everyday monotony, an exotic mango in a pile of Granny Smith apples.
“There’s a new boy coming to class!” Her best friend, Shara, blurted exuberantly on Monday morning, as they dusted off their snowpants and hung up their coats in the mud room.
“How do you know for sure?” Ona asked, her first reaction was always a little cautious, slow to excitement. She felt that if she allowed her heart to jump too quickly, it would be told to sit soon afterward, and that is something she tried to avoid.
“My Mom heard it from my dad, he said that there’s a family moving here, and they’re going to be his new patients, and they have a boy our age!” Shara’s father was the town’s one and only medical doctor, and her mom was the only nurse. Shara clasped her hands against her heart in one of her well-known melodramatic gestures.
“Oh, I hope he’s cute, I hope he looks just like Doogie Howser!” exclaimed Shara, her eyes sparkling as she sat at the desk next to Ona.
Ona didn’t tell her friend how unlikely that would be, or how silly she thought her friend’s crush on the TV’s teenage doctor was. Ona didn’t even have a television, but she had watched the show when she visited Shara’s house. She straightened her pencil so that it was perpendicular to her worn blue notebook and started copying the vocabulary words of the day from the chalkboard.
After school, Ona stayed late, working on the homework she could have done at home. She liked being the last one in the classroom, after all the noisy kids grabbed their bright-colored backpacks and coats and trudged out into the snow. She also liked not being under the eye of her father, the stern fisherman who seemed to yell at her for every little thing, and often followed that yelling by a brisk and hearty spanking. She would rather be here in the silent shelter of school.
“Don’t sleep here all night!” Said the teacher with a wink, and locked the door behind her. The nervous fluorescent lights blinked off, leaving her with the fading, melancholy blue evening slowly painting peace along the walls. When Ona finished her math, she closed up the book and slowly packed up her things to walk down the snowy hill three blocks to her house.
The janitor poked her head inside the room and said, “Are you still here? Go home, dear!” Ona hurried to put on her moon boots, embarrassed that she was caught staying so late. She didn’t really want to go home, at least not yet. But she wasn’t allowed to stay past the janitor’s hours, and she was hungry. Her mother would have a hot halibut dinner ready when she got there.
The trees were black against the graying sky, and the snow so thick that when Ona stopped the crunching of her boots, there was a complete lack of sound. The sky was at dusk, and the mountains blushed a bright pink as silent snowflakes kissed her cheeks and a tiny breeze tickled her ear like feathers. She felt a rushing in her chest, an enormous emotion she could not name. If this were only a small part of the beauty of the earth, she thought that if she ever saw the rest this world had to offer, her heart would burst. How much feeling could a human heart hold, she wondered.
The cold air squeezed her fingers and reminded her to hurry on. She reached home and saw that her father was back from working on his fishing boat, painting and patching it to get it ready for the summer fishing season. Her mother made them halibut for dinner and read her another chapter of The Lord of the Rings before bed.
Before she closed her eyes, she wondered about the new boy and fell asleep dreaming of a tall, dark, and handsome prince like in the fairy tales.
The next day at school, she had barely arrived before Shara grabbed her arm and wailed in a great despondent voice, “Oh dear, the new boy’s not Doogie material, he’s not even cute at all. And he wears glasses!” Ona frowned, as she also wore glasses. Shara went on, “I’ll just have to wait until next year to find my future husband!” and plopped into her seat at her desk.
Ona hung her coat on her hanger and followed Shara into the bathroom. She had to admit she was curious; if Shara didn’t like him, then there must be at least something interesting about the new boy. She had to crane her neck to see him; he sat two desks behind her and to the right.
The new boy sat tensely in his chair, his hands folded adult-like in his lap. His eyes stared down at the shiny new notebook his mother must have just bought him, as if afraid to look up. He knew the looks and whispers about him were no more harmful than curiosity, but they were unnerving nonetheless. The thick, black hair on his head was brushed back in an attempt at docility, but there were stubborn curls popping up everywhere, one landing straight on the top of his thick tortoise shell glasses. He had wonderful golden brown skin, a tone Ona had never seen before. His face was closed and fascinating, soft lips slightly pursed, a cute nose a little wider than hers, and huge, dark, earth-colored eyes that caught her staring and then nervously looked out the window.
Ona felt her heart race, as though a thousand birds were trying to burst from a cage with a door the size of a button. She firmly grasped the door to her heart and slammed it shut; there's no use in too many birds getting loose until they know they have somewhere to fly. But the teacher seemed so boring today, and her mind would drift and flutter.
At recess, it was below zero, so it was too cold to go outside. They were allowed to stay in the gym and play War Ball. The new boy didn’t know how to play, so the teacher had him sit on the bleachers and watch until he could learn the rules. He seemed so fragile, somehow, just sitting there alone. Ona, who usually wins at War Ball, got herself hit in the first round.
She sat next to the new boy, and he clasped his hands together nervously and looked at the floor as if some world-changing event were transpiring there.
“What’s your name?” whispered Ona, who then wondered first why she was whispering, and second, why her voice sounded so frightened. It was, after all, just a boy who sat there, not a grizzly bear.
“Tariq.” he responded, though she could hardly hear him.
“Tariq?” she asked, and he nodded, still not looking at her.
“My name is Ona,” she offered, “It’s Russian. What kind of name is yours?”
Tariq looked up at her for the first time, surprised. “Russian, not English?” he asked.
“Of course, there are a lot of Russians here in the village,” Ona giggled, and then stopped suddenly. Ona never giggles. People like Shara did that and acted silly around boys. What was happening to her?
Tariq smiled for the first time and looked up at her from beneath his glasses. His dark brown eyes met her cornflower blue ones. He said, “Mine is Farsi.”
“What’s that, a country?” asked Ona.
“No, it’s a language. I’m from Afghanistan.” His voice was quiet and soft, yet strong. It made Ona think of the willow stems in the spring, which you may bend and stroke, but cannot be broken with bare hands.
They then sat quietly throughout the rest of the game, silently speaking a partnership of otherness, communicating nothing but the immediate comfort of each other’s company.
Every recess after that, when they were playing War Ball, the two of them managed to get caught quite quickly and spent the remainder of the game sitting and talking quietly. Ona’s teacher said to her, “Ona, I don’t know what happened; you used to be so good at this game,” and he would wink.
In the afternoon, when Ona walked home from school, she would look at the mountains a little longer, and the birdcage door opened a little wider. She could feel her feelings flying, escaping, one by one, and there was nothing she could do to stop them if she had wanted to.
Tariq and Ona began borrowing books from one another. It started when Ona had read two books of a fantasy series and was loudly complaining to Shara that the library should at least own the whole set of a trilogy instead of just the first two, in hopes that the librarian would overhear. The next morning, Ona found a dog-eared copy of the third book on her desk, with “Please return to Tariq” written on the inside cover. A warm blanket of sunrise settled on her heart, and she looked over at him and smiled. He looked down, then smiled back. She suddenly felt as if she were about to cry. One tiny bird had returned with an olive branch and set it in the palm of her hand.
Now, at recess, they chatted loudly about their favorite books, The Black Stallion, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Where the Red Fern Grows. If he hadn’t read one of her favorites, she would bring it for him, wrapped carefully in a paper bag smuggled from the lunch cupboard. He would bring her books she had never heard of. They even traded copies of their holy books; she let him borrow her family Bible from the shelf in the den, and he traded her the Qur’an.
When the snow had melted enough and small patches of green grass sprouted out of the mud, they sat in the corner of the playground, and he showed her how to kiss the cover of the Qur’an with her eyes and her mouth. She closed her eyes and kissed it, slowly and carefully, and felt the textured artwork with her lips. She wondered if Allah would be angry if he knew that, instead of the sacred book, in her mind, she was kissing Tariq.
Ona thought of Tariq constantly and saw him almost as much, now that his father had agreed to work on the fishing boat with her father. Her father had needed a deck hand, and his father needed a job, so it worked out for both of them. She thought of him when she was packaging fish into Ziploc bags, folding laundry, and doing the dishes for the many fishermen who came through the house. Her gaze would slip from the soapy dish suds to the window, where the ocean looked as if it were drawn with a felt-tipped pen, the edges bleeding into the slate-gray sky and the smoky-blue mountains.
Ona lived for the moments she saw him. At the school recital, the people milled about in a quiet chaos. Kids were yelling, parents were bragging about their children’s talents and feeding on the latest small town gossip, yet Ona and Tariq would manage to catch each other’s gaze from across the gymnasium, and they would smile. Their smiles revealed only to each other the feelings they secretly held, yet had no need to talk about. Ona had read of love, and how it was supposed to feel hot and passionate, how lovers burned with sinful desires and plotted elaborate yet unknown sins. But her and Tariq’s love didn’t feel like that. When Ona was with Tariq, she felt purer than she ever had before. She felt as if a clear mountain stream was inside her, cold and full of life, was replenished whenever they were together. Ona wanted nothing more than to stand close by him and know that he was thinking of her, too.
One day, the day after a horrific black storm, Tariq didn’t come to school. He always came to school. And at the same time, her father’s fishing boat had failed to come in on time. Ona sat fitfully at her desk, peering out of the window to catch sight of his curly head bobbing around the corner. But it didn’t come, and that day was the longest of her short life. As soon as the bell rang, she burst out of the school and ran the quarter mile down the boardwalk to the houses that were on stilts. She stopped at the third house, Tariq’s, the red brick one with the orange poppies in the plant holders under the windows. That was when she saw her father in the open doorway, his stained rain gear still on, his black fishing boots scuffing the worn wood on the stairs. A woman was sobbing loudly.
Her father moved his hands from over his eyes and saw Ona. Ona saw him. And there was only one reason a fisherman came in late after a storm and went directly to a family’s home, and only one reason crying could be heard from far outside the open door. There had been a terrible accident. Tariq’s father had been swept out to sea and would never be coming home.
Ona’s father straightened his back and walked over to where she stood, still as stone. His big, slimy boots made sucking sounds in the soft mud. As he bent down on one knee, his rough, wrinkled, and tanned fisherman’s face looked anxious and sad. She had never seen him this way.
“You’d better go home now, little lady,” he said carefully. “I know you want to see your friend, but now isn’t a good time…” He paused and put a hand on Ona’s shoulder. “His father…the storm…”
Ona broke away, tears streaming down her pale face. She knew for sure now that Tariq’s father was dead. And since there were no other jobs in town besides teaching, their family would have to leave the town forever. God forgive her, for she thought only of herself, as we often do in such times, and that she would never see Tariq again.
Ona stood and felt the air around her. It seemed thick, congealed with time, which had slowed down and frozen. Then she saw Tariq in the doorway, his glasses clenched in his fist and tears falling down his golden cheeks. She broke the air around her and strode to him, and took his hand. It was funny how such an action would have been unthinkable before, because of her shyness, yet came so easily now.
“Please, Tariq, take a walk with me,” Ona said, and he let himself be pulled by her grasp out of the doorway and onto the boardwalk. They walked through the town, on Main Street, where there should have been life but which was barren, except for the crows on the park benches. They walked up the dirt road to the top of the hill, which overlooked the entire town, asleep like in a dark tale.
“I’m not going to see you again, am I,” was a statement, although she wanted to pretend it was a question, one which she did not already know the answer to.
Tariq looked up, and Ona realized it was the first time she had seen him without his glasses. Not one sunset she had seen could compare with the beauty of his eyes. The pressure of the depths of the ocean pressed itself upon her soul.
“My family is going to live with my aunt, it’s our only family over here; they live in Oregon,” Tariq said with a fractured voice, trying ever so bravely not to let her see him cry. Allah forgive him, as he only thought of himself, as we often do in such strange times, and that he would never see her again.
They stood at the top of the hill, clasping hands and staring at the mountains they could not see. He turned toward her, and she lifted her chin. She tasted salt, and he tasted strawberries; it was as quick and eternal as all first kisses should be.
Tariq could not hold his tears any longer and broke away, running down the dirt road. Ona knew better than to go after him. They didn’t say goodbye, because they knew it was so. The sun, wearied from all it had seen that day, fell asleep behind the mountains.
For a moment, there was stillness, then Ona could not ignore the lump in her throat any longer. She opened her mouth and swallowed, as the birds, one by one, flew back into their cage.
I'm not talking about normal household chores. My parents actually told my sister and I that they had us so that we could work for them. They had a fishing and bed and breakfast business up north, and we started working full time at around 9 years old. I'm talking 10-12 hours a day.
We'd get up at 4 am to start cooking breakfast for guests, and make their lunches for the boat, and help them get their gear ready for fishing. Then we'd do all of the dishes for up to 12 people, and clean the b&b, strip all the beds, clean the bathrooms, vacuum, mop, do laundry all day. We'd also drive (yes, we were allowed to drive small vehicles in our small town at that age) to go pick up new guests from the airport.
By that time the boat would come in around 3 pm, and we'd get all of the gear to fillet the fish and clean the boat ready, and drive all of that down to the docks. Then we'd help fillet and bag the fish, which took a couple of hours, and then when our parents went home, we'd stay and scrub the boat clean, inside and outside. If it wasn't sparkling, we would get punished.
Sometimes we wouldn't get finished cleaning the boat until 9 pm, then would go home to have dinner, and then would have to finish doing the dishes from the guests dinner, and start a load of laundry for the next day, get the bait ready, and it was often 11 pm by the time we got to bed.
If any mistake was made, a dirty dish, one speck of fish blood on the boat, we were punished and called lazy, no good ungrateful kids. We were also physically and verbally abused.
We were homeschooled, so we had a bit of a break during the winter months while we were learning, but still had all of the bed and breakfast work to do.
I did this until I ran away at 16, when the physical abuse became too much and I fought back for once in my life, defending myself and punching my dad in the nose. I never apologized. He threatened to end my life, so I ran away.
I moved out the next day with minimal things, and went to live with a friend a few towns away, got a job, and finished high school in a real school. I had good grades and got a scholarship to NYU, and moved as far across the country as possible from them.
I'm ok now. Happy, with a good partner, good job, and three cats. Have had a lot of therapy.
Just wondering, has anyone else been through a childhood like this?
How did it affect the rest of your life? I struggle to do chores because of being overworked as a kid. Sometimes I feel chronically tired.
Do you still talk to your parents?