{"id":684,"date":"2025-11-26T00:03:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T00:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/?p=684"},"modified":"2025-11-26T00:03:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T00:03:22","slug":"what-was-your-mom-like-when-you-were-a-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/26\/what-was-your-mom-like-when-you-were-a-child\/","title":{"rendered":"What was your mom like when you were a child?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What was my mom like when I was a kid? She was the same mom all through her life. Loving, kind, protective, making sure we had what we needed living on a tight budget. She was a traditional Italian through and through, and raised all three of her children in that traditional Italian way. Traditional Italian culture, like most European cultures, is male-dominated with the women subservient. I have to admit, in the male-dominated Italian culture, the male offspring received much more favorable treatment over their female siblings. Not only was I born a boy\u2014the only son\u2014I was also born last, the baby of the family. So yeah, I was allowed more latitude and got away with more stuff than my older sisters. Not that they resented me for that (ha!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the way of life not only in European cultures, but in the post-war era, where European cultures continued to influence American life. Despite the \u201cAmericanization\u201d of the era, the cultural and social contributions of European immigrant groups became more visible. Men were encouraged and expected to get a well-paying job in an era of growing economic opportunity to support their families while, by and large, women returned to domestic roles. Being a homemaker was highly undervalued and, in my opinion, greatly underestimated. It was very common back then to barely spend time with dads because they went to work all day and left us in the care of moms. Moms pretty much ran the ship. They had to. And without them, \u201cthe whole dang circus would have fallen apart!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, for the most part, dual income families are the norm and the kids are spending more time with nannies or grandparents, or a combination of both. There are more single moms raising children by themselves than ever before. The kids today are exposed to so much more than we were growing up. We had the beginning of the television culture, much more innocent, muted and demure than the digital streaming culture of today. We had three channels. That was it. And those channels went dark at midnight, not returning to air until six o\u2019clock the next morning. We didn\u2019t have cell phones, computers, or video games. We had the blessing of being able to go outside after school and on weekends to ride our bikes and play with friends, most times all day long, and not returning home until dinner time when Mom called our name from the front door. Speaking of friends, my mom wrapped her arms around my sister\u2019s friends and mine, treating them with love, care, and respect as she treated her own kids. At that time, in the fifties and early sixties, racial discrimination was common. Italians could be very guilty of this, especially toward African Americans. My mother was no different. She talked in a racist way that was kind of embarrassing for us later in life, but when I brought my Black friend, Reggie, over to play at our house, she welcomed him with open arms and a giant hug. That\u2019s who she was. While she grew up with racist beliefs in her Italian upbringing, my mother had a beautiful heart and soul, and it NEVER mattered if our friends were Black, white, green, or purple, she embraced them and treated them with kindness and respect because she genuinely cared about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a teenager in the more liberal sixties and seventies culture, I got into music. I wanted to play the drums, but we couldn\u2019t afford them. So my mom encouraged me to take up the guitar. I was obstinate and refused that advice. But Mom knew best. I ended up learning to play guitar, starting with a bass guitar and forming a \u201cgarage band\u201d with my friends. We would practice at our drummer\u2019s house but as our amps got louder, we had to find another basement. My mother actually encouraged us to practice in our basement and it didn\u2019t matter how loud we got. She wanted us to be there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a young teen, I took up smoking. I thought I was hiding it from my parents pretty well, of course, my mom knew. While she would\u2019ve rather I didn\u2019t smoke, she told me \u201cif you\u2019re going to smoke, I would rather you do it in front of me.\u201d She never wanted us to hide anything from her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was my mother who taught me how to drive a car. In the sixties, as domestic roles were changing and in order to supplement the family income, my mother became \u201cThe Tupperware Lady\u201d, selling Tupperware to other ladies at sales \u201cparties.\u201d She was pretty successful at it. Part of her responsibility was not only to sell the product but also to deliver it to her customers. Tupperware had no shipping arrangements with delivery companies, so salespeople had to make deliveries themselves. I used to go with her to help deliver products to many customers at one time, carrying stuff into homes for her and kind of being a \u201cbodyguard\u201d for her as well. Once I got my temporary driver\u2019s license, she would make me drive to deliver to customers. Lots of deliveries all over the city of Cleveland gave me some great experience driving freeways and backstreets alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Cub Scouts involvement, letting me play baseball and football pickup games after school, teaching me to drive, tolerating rock band practices, and later helping to babysit my daughters, and everything in between, my mom was a big influence in my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What was my mom like when I was a kid? She was the same mom all through her life. Loving, kind, protective, making sure we had what we needed living on a tight budget. She was a traditional Italian through and through, and raised all three of her children in that traditional Italian way. Traditional … Continue reading “What was your mom like when you were a child?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pddwuS-b2","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classclownstudio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}