The things your parents said to you...

[Cozzer]

S'funny how things come back to you.
I think I've mentioned before that one of my mother's 'sayings' was "You'll end up at the end of a rope, you will!", which I guess was meant to keep me on the straight and narrow. My old man's was "Be good, and if you can't be good, be careful...".
I admit that it was relatively recently that it struck me what he actually meant!
When my brother had to get circumcised when in his early teens, mother assured him that his foreskin would grow back in time, so her advice/observations weren't always accurate!
Another classic of hers was when it was revealed that her fave movie star - Rock Hudson - was homosexual. She announced "I don't believe that he is, but the bloke he sleeps with might be...."

 

[selectortone]

My dear old Mum used to say to me "Life isn't always a bowl of cherries". She grew up on a farm in Ireland in the 1920s, rising before dawn to help with the work before walking several miles to school. Then she endured the worst of the Blitz in London during WWII so I think she knew what she was talking about.

I love a bowl of cherries now, it seems like pure decadence.

 

[RobNichols]

Everything seemed to "have your eye out" if it went wrong

 

[Phil Pascoe]

There was a fair gap between my children's ages and mine and my sister's. One day my mother said she always intended to have another boy between me and my sister, but that looking back she was glad she didn't. Why do say that, I asked. Because you'd have both ended up in prison.

 

[Distinterior]

If I ever hurt myself when I was little and I went running to my Mum,...She always used to say " Dont worry Son, ...it will be a Pigs Foot in the morning...."

To this day, I've no idea where she got that expression from but I've never forgotten it!
She's 88 now and I'm going to ask her where the expression came from the next time I see her.

 

[Inspector]

......"Be good, and if you can't be good, be careful...".

My wife has a slightly different version. Be good, and if you can't be good, don't get caught.

Pete

 

[recipio]

' I'll cut the lug ( ear ) off you was my mothers threat when we were bold. Quite a barbaric thing to say in retrospect .

 

[mwinfrance]

Don't ..............just that "Don't" ...........I heard it a lot.
Well actually there were sometimes other words added after to make a somewhat normal sentence, but.
I left home early.

 

[Fitzroy]

when my brother or I were doing something daft my father would say "If you break your leg doing that, don't come running to me!" or when copying someone else my mothers favorite line was "If 'so and so' were to play marbles on the motorway would you do the same?". Both things I've caught myself saying to my children, reflecting that they had no impact on my behaviour so why would I expect my boys to respond differently!

 

[Jameshow]

I'll give you something to cry about!!

Said when one of us dropped our silver spoon compared to her council house upbringing!!

Feel like telling my own kids that when they moan about tiny stuff!

 

[paulrbarnard]

Wasn’t so much sayings with my grandmother more an endless progression of superstitions. Not passing on the stairs, not putting two spoons in a cup, walking under ladders, hearing cookoos in the west, numbers of magpies, not walking on the cracks in a pavement. So many of them and still I find myself avoiding the situations fifty years later.

Best saying/advice I received as a teenager was “if your not in bed by 10, go home”

 

[Fitzroy]

I'll give you something to cry about!!

Said when one of us dropped our silver spoon compared to her council house upbringing!!

Feel like telling my own kids that when they moan about tiny stuff!

Great grandfather (committed suicide whilst in the poorhouse) Grandfather (from poor house to own house through hard graft) Father (1st child to go to university, only sibling of 10) Me (university educated with a good career) social mobility in action through family hard-work and fortunate intellect.

I was raised on stories of hardship that my father and his siblings endured, my own upbringing was very middle class with no hardships but some unfulfilled 'wants', my children have no understanding of a hardship or really a want. Bane of my life is how to not raise entitled brats without falsely creating hardships/wants.

You don't know you're born, and i'll give you something to cry about were not unheard expressions in my house, especially when my grandfathers were around.

 

[selectortone]

As well as my Irish Mum, I have Geordie heritage on my Dad's side. We used to go up there (Birtley, Co Durham) twice a year or so when I was a kid back in the 50s and stay with my Nana and Grandad, an ex-coal miner, in their council house. One fruity expression I remember, if I was being annoying was "Do you want a fat eye?"

 

[Phil Pascoe]

When my daughter told me (again) that I am a dinosaur - technologically I am - I reminded her that her great grandmother (whom she very vaguely remembers) had never owned a house, never had an indoor toilet let alone a bathroom, never held a passport, never held a bank account, never driven a motor vehicle and had never used a calculator let alone a computer.

 

[clogs]

my dad said........
u can never trust a bank......how true that turned out.......
if u ever get too much money buy a second matress......hahaha.......
He came from the slums in London........mind u London is an expensive slum now....

 

[Cozzer]

my dad said........
u can never trust a bank......how true that turned out.......
if u ever get too much money buy a second matress......hahaha.......
He came from the slums in London........mind u London is an expensive slum now....

Haha... that's reminded me of another... "Never trust a man with a beard but no moustache..."

Where did they get all these expressions from?!

 

[ian33a]

While not strictly my mum or dad, just as we were enjoying the festivities, my gran would remind us that "this will be granny's last Christmas". Nice mood dampener.

I think we were treated to this statement for at least ten years until she died aged 88 - which was a pretty respectable age back in the 1980's.

 

[Ozi]

My gran had a superstition that if you argued in the house it would kill the spiders living there. She also used to say that people who were superstitious were daft but still wouldn't look at the new moon through glass. Batty old bat.

My Dad used to say "Be good, If you can't be good be careful, if you can't be careful don't give the young lady your real name". I think he had higher expectations of my success with girls in my teenage years than reality warranted.

 

[baldkev]

"Go play with the traffic"

 

[BillHoughton]

"Be good; and, if you can't be good, be careful; and, if you can't be careful, name it after me."

Learned from a girlfriend in high school, who, I later learned, sure hadn't been careful, but was lucky.