Clothes and toys, recipes and jokes, advice and prejudice: we all have to handle all sorts of hand-me-downs every day. Tell us about some of the meaningful hand-me-downs in your life.
I’ve experienced hand-me-downs all my life from clothing to recipes to advice, I’ve had it all, from different people in different facets, and it’s quite hard to pinpoint a few.
I think the ones that stand out the most, ironically, are all the lessons I learnt from my father when it came to things like construction – building and power tools. As much as I don’t even want to acknowledge or admit to it, they’re lessons and information that I managed to retain as a child, regardless of the fact that it was so far from ever being of any interest to me whatsoever. Somehow, they’ve stayed within my random, messed-up brain and, let’s face, if I had the resources to, I’d be able to build something like a table, or a fence, or a deck, or (with a little help) he foundations for a house.
It scares me just how much information I managed to retain in my head when I was so completely uninterested and forced to help him with his building-things.
And I feel so frustrated just in admitting that, because it’s information that I can’t unlearn. But it frustrates me because it’s always there in the back of my mind, along with all the rage and hatred and emotion associated with my father. AND I know that if he ever knew any of this information, he would absolutely love it, knowing that he had some kind of, I guess, positive, influence on me.
Maybe I should have a complete career change and become a chippie?
adorablyobnoxious 