When you grow up in a family you’re inevitably conditioned to believe that whatever happens within that family is normal behaviour, and it only once you grow up, widen your social circle, and encounter other family units that you compare your own against and realise that maybe what was once normal to you, is in fact deeply, deeply strange.
Please use this thread to check if your own family practices were commonplace or aberrant, in the following poll format (and obviously, please keep it lighthearted):
Whenever we were about to leave the house to go on holiday, whether it was just an overnight trip to stay with my grandma or a longer trip, my mum would insist that the very last thing she did before leaving the house was squirting bleach down the toilets, so now, decades later, I still associate the smell of a bleached loo with the anticipation of going away somewhere:
To this day i am still some what terrified of bleach due to my mum telling me horror stories of what would happen should i mess with her nice clean toilet.
My uncle was a scientologist and despite deep concern about this within the family, my dad still thought it’d be a good idea to take me and my sister down to stay with him for a weekend in his weird creepy commune
Every weekend we’d have what we called our ‘Saturday Night Party’ which was less of a party and more we’d each get a chocolate bar of our choice with lemonade for the kids, wine for mum and four cans of tennants for dad. Whilst we watched Dallas or Dynasty.
When I had my 18th at my parents house (with a cohort of extreme nerds who hadn’t progressed past drinking WKDs and did not drink to excess), my dad covered the flatscreen TV in bubble wrap to prevent any damage.
The TV does this. She is fucking obsessed with bleaching stuff tbf. She is not, however, obsessed with putting the lid back on the bleach when finished depsite having two small children in the house…
Whenever we went to my nan’s and we all had to go out somewhere, my nan would make us stand and wave at the house with her as we left for a good 5 mins or so. This was to deter any lurking burglars that might have thought about robbing the house but now they think we’re waving to someone who is home!
My family did that!
My family didn’t do that but really it’s quite clever