Tag: parents

Instead of question of the day.

   Remember when I once posted a name game where we had to rename ourselves by smooshing the names of our grandmas? Today I thought we could do the same thing, except with parents. Because this is actually a thing for some families and in some cultures, from what I’ve heard. 

   So, basically, if your name had to be some sort of combination of your parents’ names, what would it be? 

   The only names that I can think of that sound  like they could be legit names and actually are legit names, are  Jan(n)a or Anja. Jana is a Slavic name, but not Polish, as we have either Janina or Joanna, but it still could totally work and I’m sure there are some Polish Janas out there. Plus, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s character Jane of Lantern Hill is renamed to Jana in one of the Polish translations of the book. I don’t like the name at all and can’t imagine myself being a Jana, but at least the Jane of Lantern Hill connection would be kind of nice. Janna looks somewhat better to me because it’s longer and more feminine, but it also looks made-up or like a misspelling of either Janina or Joanna, and I don’t like it either. And as for Anja, I guess it would be most acceptable for me, but it would be super-confusing because my Mum goes by Ania and Anja is also very much associated with her in my mind because it’s part of her email and she’s Anja everywhere online. But if it was like a rule that people have to name their kids after themselves, then I’m sure my parents would be a lot more likely to call me Anja anyway, and my Mum had me before she had her email so she would just never end up going by Anja I guess and people would have to get used to calling her Anna or whatever else so that they wouldn’t mix us up. 

   It would be really lame though if it was a rule, especially for families with multiple children like ours. Sofi would probably end up as Jan(n)a, and Olek would have to be Jan, which is a perfectly normal, very common Polish name just like John is in English, but it totally wouldn’t fit him. 😀 Oh yeah and now the Danish name Naja has just popped into my brain. It’s Danish, and it’s pronounced slightly different in Danish than it potentially would in Polish, but if my parents would have yet another kid, it would do for lack of anything more fitting. Gosh, what a diverse sibset we would be – Anja, Jan, Jana/Janna and Naja, SO creative! 

   Im trying to think of some interesting smooshes that would have more than just Ja- from my Dad’s name, especially Jac- because I like a lot of Jac- names, but I can’t think of anything particularly interesting. Jacena sounds like it could be an English name and it’s very similar to Jacenta which is a super rare feminine form of Jacenty, but it’s not cool and I think in English most people would pronounce it jay-SEE-nuh rather than ja-SEE-nuh, and the latter would make more sense as a name honouring a Jacek, though it sounds almost like dracena or something. If we took onnly an N from my Mum’s name, Jacen could work in the English-speaking world as a khreatyve spin on Jason but it’s extremely unappealing imho. Jacanna would be kind of hilarious to see in real life somewhere in the Anglosphere but it doesn’t look overly attractive. Or Jaca! 😀 I can see Jaca both as a very un-creative feminisation of Jack, or a Polish augmentative/some sort of rural/dialect variation on Jacek in which case it would of course be pronounced YAH-tsa, and I kind of like the latter though not necessarily as a formal name. Jacna is also some sort of an idea, I suppose, but doesn’t sound or look too convincing as a name and more like some sort of Polish feminine adjective. 😀 Oh yeah and not a Jac- name, but if we could stretch it and skip some letters in parents’ names, then Jenna/Jean could be potential options in English, not so much in Polish though. 

   So yeah, that’s about everything that I can come up with. 

   What would you be named if your parents had to do this? 🙂 

Question of the day.

Are you going on vacation anywhere soon? If so, where?

My answer:

Not yet for at least a month, and later I don’t really know for now. My extended family, mainly my Godmother, are planning some trip I believe to Masuria, and I also believe that my parents want to go with them, or at least when my Godmother asked them they didn’t say no and I think they’d be happy to go. They originally wanted to go sometime at the end of May, but then it’s my cousin’s Communion, my other cousin’s christening, and Sofi’s gonna be Godmother for the little one, and my Dad didn’t even know when he could get some time off as his colleague with whom he works alternating shifts will soon need to be off for a good few weeks. Generally it’s too many people I guess to find a perfectly suitable time for everyone involved so I don’t think they’re set on when exactly they’d be going, but I believe in the end they settled that sometime at the beginning of June when things might be a bit quieter for everyone. Also I don’t know if I’ll actually be going with them myself. I like Masuria very much, but I feel like going with so many people all at once and mingling with them all the time would be super overwhelming and I wouldn’t really have fun at all. So we’ll see how it goes.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

How many times have you moved house?

My answer:

Two. The first house we lived in was built by my parents and grandad some time after my parents married. My Dad didn’t really have the best job situation and it didn’t look like it was about to change any time soon, if ever, he also worked a lot abroad, and my Mum was studying before I was born but she didn’t really have the heart for it to begin with. After I was born, she felt she needed to stay at home with me, she started getting the benefits because of being my caregiver, but the strange thing with caregiver benefits in Poland is that they think once you become a caregiver, your only identity and your sole life purpose is being a caregiver, and if you even start working part-time or from home or something, your whole benefits will be taken away from you, even if you make a lot less than what you receive from the benefits. When I went to school the authorities did take the benefits away from her because apparently I was no longer under her care, but, with no higher education aand Olek being born, it would be even more difficult for her to find a job then. So my Dad, me and my siblings got used to the state of things, she accepted the situation and never ended up finding a paid job and has become a home manager as she calls it, and holds this position to this day. Thus, at the beginning of their life together, my parents struggled financially, so it was just a small house, with a kitchen, a living room and a very small bathroom downstairs and one big room upstairs which was my parents’ bedroom, and after my and Olek’s birth it was ours too, there was enough room for three beds, each in a different corner of the room. So I didn’t have my own room until I was 10, which I remember really amazed some of my school friends. 😀 My parents still considered themselves lucky – well, at least I know my Mum did – because they got to live close to my grandparents, they had help with the house building, a huge backyard they could use, they didn’t have to pay any rents etc. just for the heating, which would probably still be a lot less than if they had to move somewhere else and live in a flat or something like that. – My Dad’s financial situation improved drastically after a few years – my Mum often says she brings people luck and here it definitely sounds like it must have been the case, because I’m sure it wouldn’t happen without her intervention. – My parents were thinking about moving somewhere else entirely, but then my grandparents encouraged them that they could just build a new, bigger house on top of theirs. That sounded like a good idea to them so that’s what they started doing, but the whole process got complicated by several things, and also in the end it turned out not to be such a great idea. The family dynamics – with my Mum’s family – have changed in some respects, my Mum’s sisters started their families and decided they’d happily live on the same backyard as well and the more people, the more conflicts y’know. – Also the plan of how my parents wanted this house to be like didn’t fully work out. The whole building process was dragging on forever from what I remember, my parents were very stressed out and I was convinced that it would just never be built. 😀

Finally we moved in there shortly after Sofi’s birth, although we were basically forced to move out of our previous house asap so the new one wasn’t fully finished yet. Olek and Me had our rooms downstairs, mine was huge, and my parents had their bedroom up in the attic and after some time a small room for Sofi was added next to it. Sofi, however, didn’t spend much time there beyomd sleeping, as she much preferred playing downstairs close to Mum, and even if she napped during the day both she and Mum much preferred if she was somewhere closer so that Mum, or anyone really, could hear her crying. When she got a bit older Mum was also concerned that she would fall from the stairs or out of her crib when no one would be up there. I don’t remember if that was the ultimate reason why, but eventually, after about four years, we switched rooms with Sofi, to both of us’ euphoria and delight. I actually preferred living up there a lot more. This room had a nicer atmosphere to me for some reason and I made friends with it right away. I liked how it was so small and quiet and friendly and seemed more my style in terms of design, while my previous room was much better suited to Sofi in this aspect. I liked that I had practically my own loo up there – it was a small room inside my parents’ bedroom but they only used it at night, and it was perfect when there were a lot of people downstairs and I didn’t want to have to deal with them just for the sake of ging to the loo. The only downside was that the ceiling in there was very low so for the first few months, the first thing I’d do after getting up was hitting the ceiling with my brain, and sometimes even later on if I’d be too sleepy and forget about it being so low and get up quickly. So I’d often use that with people as a reason for why I’m so weird. 😀 Sofi, meanwhile, was also very happy to live downstairs and have enough space for all her toys and a huge wardrobe for all her clothes, which she always loved acquiring and changing as frequently as possible, or just having them for the sake of having.

The situation with my Mum’s family kept getting hotter, perhaps no dramatic arguments or anything like that, but all of us started to realise that, while family is a great thing to have, it’s also good to have more space between each other, or things can get quite unnerving and people get each other in the way, trying to be the one in charge, lecturing each other’s children and “borrowing” each other’s things indefinitely without the “lender” even being present at home. Such small things, over an extended period of time, can get extremely frustrating, especially if you’re the type of person my Dad is, with a heightened sense of individuality and need for territorial sovereignty. So my parents started thinking about finally buying a house elsewhere. Well, actually, they did almost ever since we’d moved to this second house. At some point they found a house in the town nearby that they kinda sorta liked, nothing special in itself but, in my Mum’s opinion, who is very interested in interior design and people has always envied her the skills in this area that she has and how differently our houses always look from everyone else’s, said that it could be made into something a lot better than it is. This is where we currently live. The whole process of moving here was never-ending as well, due to a lot of formal and familial issues, and rearranging a lot of things inside and out. We would probably also linger with this a lot longer, if not the fact that the furnace in our previous house broke suddenly in late autumn, and we knew we’d be about to move in a few months, so my Dad didn’t feel like buying a new furnace, therefore we used a… gosh, I think I knew how it’s called in English but now I can’t remember, either a compressor or a supercharger I think, anyway, we used that for space heating and that obviously wasn’t ideal as it couldn’t go on 24/7, and even if it would, we’d probably go deaf. 😀 So most of the time it was quite interestingly freezing and that definitely made us move out sooner, after about a week I guess. There is no tradition of naming houses in Poland, but my Mum did call our house Acacia River, since we live by the river, it’s flowing through our backyard, and our street is named after the acacia trees, which inspired my Dad to plant a lot of them here. This is definitely my favourite of the three houses we’ve lived in, although at the beginning I was sure I wouldn’t be able to love a house that other people lived in previously, and it wasn’t just me feeling this way. But of course over time we’ve made it feel ours and I guess it likes being ours too since all the people who’d seen it the way it looked before, when the previous owners lived in here, vs now, they say it’s a lot more beautiful. I like that it’s spacey and has its own spirit, and I love my room very much, and that we don’t have to share the house or the backyard with other people, not even family. I like that we live in a town so it’s close everywhere, yet because we live in the outskirts it’s really quiet here, no traffic, and actually feels fairly rural because it’s very green and there’s a park close to us, plus a lot of people actually do either some kind of gardening or farming here, so we didn’t feel like it was a major transition moving here from the countryside. 😀 But I also think I simply like this house the most because so far, living here has also been the best time in my life.

If you wanted to be exact, you could probablyy say that I moved around a lot more, because I was going between home and boarding school for many years, plus at school I’d also moved buildings in which I lived a couple times while staying there, but, while that contributed very strongly to my feeling that I was constantly on the move which I definitely didn’t like, I don’t think any of that counts for proper house moves.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

What is one thing that your parents taught you, that later turned to be totally wrong?

My answer:

For me it’s generally so that it’s my Mum who is more of an authority for me than my Dad, and our views on a lot of things are generallyy very similar, which is extremely fortunate since we live together and do a lot of things together so it would be tricky if we were clashing a lot more, and it’s not as smooth for a lot of other families I know, but also when I want to talk to her about something that I don’t agree with her on or confront her about something she’ll be able to have an open-minded discussion, and she’s also not the type of person who would insist on always being right and never was, she is capable of saying things like “I’m sorry, I really thought it was like this but now I know it’s not”, or we’ll simply accept that we’re on totally different pages about something and move on. My Dad, meanwhile, is more of an authoritarian type, rather than authoritative, he has generally a problem with admitting anything wrong on his part in any relationship, so he always insists on being right, but because like I said I’ve always seen my Mum as more of an authority, and Dad wasn’t involved so much in our upbringing and was more the breadwinner, even if he did tell me things that I was supposed to somehow learn or believe in, I would usually take it with a wee grain of salt from quite early on, because Mum was always more right, and sometimes what they were saying was right down contradictory. 😀 It’s not that I didn’t take my Dad seriously, I do for example consider him my go-to expert in geography or the history of WWII, he was just simply a bit less of a role model for me. I remember that my Dad would often say very generalised, stereotypical things about people, from a very narrow point of view. For example, I can vaguely recall asking him about what does a philosopher do exactly, and he said something like that nothing really, philosophers just think all the time, about things that don’t need that much thinking anyway. I think I found it interesting that someone would do nothing but think all the time and about meaningless things and consider it a valid job, so I guess I must have been asking some more questions or something, anyway what I can recall very clearly is that at some point he said that a philosopher is someone with whom it’s really difficult to communicate. I don’t think I know any philosophers, but whenever I think about it now as an adult I find it funny, where did he even get that from? I’m pretty sure it can’t be the case or even if it often might be, it certainly isn’t the fact that someone is a philosopher that makes them difficult to communicate with, or maybe it’s just difficult for the other side to communicate with them because they have a different way of thinking. Anyway, things like these, my Dad has a lot of such assumptions. Often, when you’ll talk to him calmly without trying to impose your point of view, and try to get him to think on his own, he can see beyond them, but some are really deeply ingrained, and yes, that has a harmful potential, because stereotypes can be very harmful, but usually the main reason why I think it’s such a pity is because it makes his thinking quite inflexible, and his view of people must be rather uninteresting, while I think that people, as much as they are a pain to socialise with and totally regardless whether I like them or not, are interesting as such in their diversity and complexity.

How about you? 🙂

Y Trwynau Coch – “Byw Ar Arian Fy Rhieni” (Living On My Parents’ Money).

Hi guys! 🙂

I shared two songs from this 70’s Welsh band in the past, and I thought I’d share another one today. Their career was relatively short and it’s entirely possible that I wouldn’t stumble upon their music if not the fact that the lead singer of the band – Rhys Harris – is also father of one of my faza subjects – Gwilym Bowen Rhys – and so I learned at some point about Gwilym’s dad being part of this band in the past and obviously had to check them out. Y Trwynau Coch (or The Red Noses in English), who were known for their lyrics being generally very much tongue-in-cheek (much like Gwilym’s former band Y Bandana), are the perfect example of how sometimes people take advantage of their language being small and not widely spoken, and write some rather mind-boggling lyrics, because no one’s going to understand them anyway so why not. 😀 To not look too far for examples, Welsh-Cornish singer Gwenno Saunders wrote a song all about cheese in Cornish. Well, I don’t know if that’s seriously a frequent motive behind what minority languages speakers write their music about, but the amount of weird lyrics in smaller languages music makes you think. I’ve come across a lot of such bands and artists in a lot of languages, even though usually they just go for weird or sometimes nonsensical lyrics, which I can’t blame them for because I think I would also feel very tempted to make fun of people in such a way if I were a minority language musician. 😀 But Trwynau Coch, in one of their songs – “Merched Dan Bumtheg” (Girls Under Fifteen) take the weirdness to the next level, and go all the way to where weird turns into creepy. That song was really… ewww, I don’t think anyone in any language would get away with this these days! This was shocking even for the 70’s standards and apparently they were even banned from radio stations who were niche enough to play them until then. Mostly though, from what I’ve heard people had a lot of distance to it, probably because it was a minority language so they mostly didn’t see it as a very big deal. I generally have a lot of distance to things and appreciate cheeky, mischievous lyrics, which is why I do like Y Trwynau Coch overall, but the case of that particular song is really awful and not fun at all imho.

That was just a bit of trivia and obviously I’m not going to show that song to you. The one I chose is, as you can figure out from the title, all about parasitising one’s parents and having the attitude of taking things for granted. 😀

The band didn’t reach higher popularity because they dissolved in the 80’s, probably because of seeking some more stable incomes because doing music in a small language isn’t very lucrative, and you have to live somehow (unless you have parents who let you live on their money and you’re okay with it 😀 ), and so they ended up doing something different in their lives long-term, except for Huw Chiswell, who I’ve heard was also a member of this band and he’s still a singer and songwriter and quite renowned in Wales.

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

Describe to me, what is your family like?

My answer:

Depends which side of the family we’re talking about. My Mum’s family are emotional, exuberant, touchy-feely (my Mum’s is the exact opposite of touchy-feely but the rest of them are), caring, sometimes way too caring about other people’s business and meddling into things that don’t concern them. They are very spontaneous and change their minds all the time, especially my Mum and her siblings, and as a consequence, they’re also very moody. They’re sentimental and almost all of them are easily moved and cry, They have a tendency to impose their own opinions on others but usually aren’t even fully aware of the extend of it and are well-meaning. They say they’re typical eastern Slavs as they have roots in all of the eastern Slavic countries plus Lithuania. They like to dance, have fun and many of them are a bit impulsive. They are all religious and very serious about it and have a very genuine relationship with God. My grandad is a bit of an exception, as he is an introvert, not quite as chatty and much more of a loner, deeply thinking through everything he’s going to say and a bit melancholic, he’s also much less emotional and makes a very haughty and proud impression, which is absolutely correct, but it doesn’t mean he can’t be very loving and caring when he wants to. Most of them are very intelligent and appreciate intelligent conversations, highly value knowledge and have a need for beauty in their lives. They are mostly traditionalists. They have a great sense of solidarity and genuinely like to meet up. They can be quite overwhelming and I don’t feel much of an emotional connection with them, which probably just stems from my lack of sense of belonging in general rather than anything else, but I much prefer my Mum’s family to my Dad’s and have a bit better contact with them. They’re more open-minded and just kinder and more genuine and I respect them far more.

My Dad’s family is quite different. They are secretive but in a weird way. They have those strange cliques where someone is talking to X, but not to Y because they had an arguement with Y in 1993. So you’ve got to be careful when inviting people sometimes, ’cause you can end up with a roomful of very emphatically quiet people. They do like to meet up though, nevertheless, and also have quite a strong sense of community, they know a lot about their ancestors and are proud Kashubs (though only my gran can actually speak Kashubian fluently and uses it in daily life in a serious way). They are narrow-minded and not the most subtle people in the world, they even always have such a weird way of talking to each other as if they were constantly mad or unfriendly at best. They are rather superficial in their judging of others or making their opinions on anything, it seems like they can’t have a deeper look into anything, and there is something cold, coarse and I’d even say unfeeling about them. Like, you wouldn’t go to my gran, or not even to my Dad (though he’s quite different than most of his family because of interacting so much with Mum’s family, and has been kind of polished over the years), anyway, you wouldn’t go to any of them if you had some problem and wanted someone to seriously listen to you and be compassionate and comforting. They can’t listen, only talk about themselves. They’re kinda self-absorbed and have a very stereotypical, one-dimensional view of the world and people. Politically, most of them are rightists and some are leftists but in overall views on life they all are very conservative, and not quite like my Mum’s family for whom their traditions are very valuable and of emotional significance but it seems more like some habits they stick to just for the sake of it, and have a hard time making any changes to their thinking or acting. They like to gossip. Sometimes when people gossip, it’s interesting to listen to because even if it’s not true, interesting stories come out of it and it’s intriguing to think of it what of it might actually be true and what exactly are the people about whom they’re gossipping, and sometimes it sounds like some fascinating fairytales, but in my Dad’s family gossipping is much more boring, they can’t even find interesting topics to gossip about, and it has a fair bit of toxicity in it. My Dad and his brothers have a weird common trait that they love to make fun of other people as a way of dealing with their own insecurities. It’s a very nasty habit. If they have a problem with you, something about you they’re envious about, or they feel insecure around you, expect that anything you’ll say will be met with a cynical laughter and some stupid comment that’s supposed to ridicule you. They don’t have quite the same loyalty as my Mum’s family have. They don’t really have imagination –
except for one of my cousins who has been gifted in this area and is generally incredibly different from them also in that she is more sensitive to other people – and most of them don’t even enjoy reading or anything like this, although they’re passionate about watching TV, some 24/7 and if it’s any less they get bad withdrawal symptoms.

As for my most immediate family, we are quite a close family, at least we are closer with each other than many other families I know. We all love and care about each other and I think we spend more time together than most families do these days. But generally we’re a rather typical family I guess and there’s nothing overly unusual about us. We do have our fair share of misunderstandings and a lot of differences between each other but at this point we don’t have any serious family problems or arguments and we get along well with each other. I think though it all wouldn’t be quite as well if not our Mum. She is like an adhesive for us. I often think that if she died suddenly, we would all fall apart in all sorts of different directions. She is often the mediator between us and brings us all together, and I know she sometimes makes big sacrifices and compromises in order for things to stay calm and peaceful, which isn’t always easy with a character like my Dad. Also we are always thankful for the blessing that we have Zofijka here. I often say that if not Zofijka, our house would turn into a Camaldolese monaster – the house would be so eerily quiet and no one would talk. –
And everyone agrees, because while Mum can be very chatty, she gets those moods when she doesn’t talk at all and seems annoyed with everyone, making the atmosphere a bit stale, Dad is generally rather quiet at home and he’s not too talkative, and me and Olek have our own worlds, and our own rooms where we like to spend the time, and are both introverts, plus Olek is at work most of the day anyway. So it would feel really eery over here without Sofi long-term. Though she’s very absorbing and very loud so it’s good to have a break from her once in a while.

What about your family? 🙂

Question of the day.

What personality traits do you share with your relatives/children?

My answer:

I have a tendency to be very suspicious of people just like my Dad, well, actually for him at this point it looks more like paranoia and I can clearly see that he’s getting worse with age so hope that I will not end up like that because it quite bites both for such person as well as perhaps even more so for everyone around. I am also a pessimist like him and generally our worldview is pretty similar, although my pessimism is more defensive than just plain grumpy. I think my sense of humour is also similar to his. We are both introverts and get overwhelmed with things quickly though each of us manifests it in vastly different ways. If the four temperaments theory makes sense, and I think it may, I seem to be something like a rather even mix of melancholic and phlegmatic, and I’ve got the phlegmatic part definitely after my Dad. I think I’ve also got my rational brain after him, like that despite I am generally rather dreamy and imaginative, I can be very down to Earth and sensible when need be, so that my imaginativeness can’t turn into insipid sentimentality and I always keep some distance to things. Although our types of intelligence are rather very different despite that. Ah yeah and I hate changes just like him and neither of us is particularly spontaneous, and we tend to have rather very consistent views on everything that we have views on. We both have some sort of anger issues but each of us of a completely different nature, because while I turn it mostly inwards unless there’s no room, he gets it all out on other people and has meltdowns like a baby, which also get worse with age and due to other factors as well.

Me and my Mum are both deep thinkers, are sensitive and emotional and very empathetic and caring, think way too much, like things that most people either don’t know or don’t like or don’t/can’t appreciate, are individualists, overly self-critical, good listeners, like our own company, though my Mum is generally an extrovert, she likes to share her emotions with other people and is very chatty and exuberant, but still at the same time she feels the need for being just with herself sometimes, is not dependent on others and calls herself wild, used to be very shy and doesn’t have many friends outside of family. We both have our passions that we are enthusiastic about, we are very intuitive and introspective, and I’ve got the melancholic part of my brain after her, as she’s sanguine-melancholic.

And I can be quite a catastrophist after my grandma, though she is much worse and her catastrophism is much more contagious I think.

My Mum also says I have a lot of traits after my grandad, and while we get along very well and he’s the only person who has always stood by me no matter what and he often seems to get me better than other people in my family, I don’t personally feel that we have much more in common in terms of personality than that we are both veeery introverted and nerdy loners, as my grandad has very high ego, and despite he’s always been amazing to me, throughout his life it’s been clear that he doesn’t have high empathy levels and has to be the best at everything and even when he is not, he still is. Oh yeah and I’ve got sleep paralysis after him which is not a personality trait but because of its severity and that it’s stuck to my brain since forever until now it has had some influence on who I am. 😀

Oh yeah, and my Dad says that I am as smart as my Godmother, which is not necessarily a compliment, not because my Godmother isn’t smart, she is very much, but because I am smarter than him and authoritarian folks don’t like that. I think we do think a bit similarly with my Godmother, because we both tend to overanalyse a lot of things and sometimes take them a bit too literally, but overall I don’t get along with her that well and find her slightly intimidating.

What does that look for you and your family? 🙂

Question of the day.

How strict were/are your parents?

My answer:

I have asked you this question last year and answered it, but I just thought as I always do in such cases that I’d post it anyway for the sake of those who are new to my blog or haven’t seen that question and woould like to answer it. So I’ll just go the easy way and copy/paste my response from back then.

My parents were definitely flexible! My Dad likes to think about himself as a very strict parent, but he is only very strict with Olek, with whom he doesn’t have the best relationship so that strictness seems to come more from the place of anger and the need to control than care. As weird as it feels to admit sometimes, for me, and I think for Zofijka too, he doesn’t really have much authority. He likes to tell all of us what we have to do in his view but we never care, sometimes we’ll do it for the peace of mind. My Mum is much more of a role model and an authoritative person for me, even though she was a big softy in raising all of us and with a bit of a tendency to be overprotective. Still, she has her rules, and they were always clear to us, and sometimes she can be pretty strict, but not over the top, just for the sake of being strict and tough, but rather for the sake of being possibly fair. She’s always been most flexible with me, using the excuse that I am the most disciplined of all of us, although I don’t think of myself as a very disciplined person and I am not even sure I would like to be one, it certainly makes life easier but also awfully boring, so I think what saves me is that I have some common sense after her, rather than am somehow very disciplined or dutiful or something like that. What was/has been your experience? 🙂

Question of the day.

How big is your family, immediate and extended? Is one parent’s side of the family bigger than the other?

   My answer:

   I guess my family is pretty big, even my immediate family, for today’s standards. Apparently, families with just 3 children or more are officially recognised as “big” in Poland, and we have something called Big Family Card, which entitles members of big families to discounts on public transport or cultural institutions tickets and such. There is my Dad, Mum, me, my brother Olek and my sis Zofijka, and our cat Misha and dog Jocky, but they must cope somehow without Big Family Cards as they don’t travel at all so I guess that’s why they didn’t get them. As for my extended family, well my Dad has four siblings, and my Mum has three, and only one of my uncles on Dad’s side doesn’t have children, all the rest of their siblings do, so in total, on both my parents’ sides, only their siblings’ children/grandchildren, I have… let’s do some counting, it might take a while……… 23 cousins, if I’m thinking right, 27 if you count their spouses since they’re colloquially called cousins too. I think though that my Dad’s family is bigger overall, as his parents have both had many siblings, my gran had like 10 I guess. Or maybe I just have that impression that there is so many of my Dad’s relatives because I don’t know them quite as well as my Mum’s family. I lived with my Mum’s family for most of my life so naturally I’ve seen lots of her aunts and uncles and cousins and all visiting, if not us, then my grandparents, at least so that I know who’s who in theory, but if I’d meet my Dad’s cousin on the street, I don’t think I’d even recognise them, let alone know what their name is or what exactly is the familial relationship between us or what they do for living. My Dad knows all of them though and where they live and what they do, and all the complex affinities. They tend to have kinda unobvious nicknames that they go by, which adds to the confusion, I mean usually Polish nicknames from names are very obvious, but in my Dad’s extended family’s case, their real full names are often quite different from what they’re called, they have a talent for making up very harshly sounding diminutives and spoiling names that are quite pretty in their original full forms. 😀 I guess in a way this must be a Kashubian thing, as my Dad is Kashubian. Somehow though, I have an impression that while my Dad’s side is bigger, it consists largely of middle-aged to elderly people, unlike my Mum’s side where there are weddings and births happening relatively frequently all the time and there are children of all ages. But still, despite being smaller, my Mum’s family is big, quite interesting and spread all over the country, and a little bit abroad. 

   How about your family? 🙂

Question of the day.

Here’s another childhood/family related question I have for you.

Were you closer to one of your parents than another? Has it changed in your adulthood?

My answer:

It was differently at different times. I had a long time as a kid when I was closer to my Dad. He was, and still is, though not to such a degree as in the past, getting along with me the best of all of his children, which, as I later learned, was largely due to the fact that I was blind. I hated it so now I’m no more as close to him personally because I find it a weird reason to favour one of your children more than the rest because she’s blind and not at home most of the time. 😀 But before I found out that little piece of info, and especially when I was a little child, we used to spend a lot of time together, he even played with me, went to the beach just with me, we had quite a lot of things to talk about and were almost on the same wavelength. My Mum was more neurotic at that time, and while I definitely loved her, I wasn’t as much into being around her as she was easily irritated and not as fun to talk to. Then things somehow changed, and that thing I learned did influence it too, and our relationship with Dad became somewhat distant and still is a bit. But I think even without that thing about my blindness, it’s really hard to interact with my Dad, he is a good person, but has a really difficult character, gets incredibly suspicious easily and is very hypersensitive and now it’s him who is way more irritable than Mum, you just have to tiptoe around him, never criticise and always do what he wants if you want things to stay calm, so sometimes it’s better to not interact at all for a while. My relationship with my Mum has deepened a lot since my adolescence but especially in the last 5 years since I got out of the boarding school and we’ve both opened up a lot to each other and, well, are just spending more time with each other now when it is possible. We are in a lot of ways like friends, or in any case best listeners for each other haha, even if we don’t really understand each other in all things. And we always have stuff to talk about. I don’t know if something with me has been going on or if my Dad’s bad traits and annoying habits have worsened over the last year or so but recently our relationship has been really suffering, at least from my point of view. I feel really annoyed by him most of the time, he just pisses me off, so I prefer to avoid him sometimes in order not to let my irritation show too much. I frequently catch myself feeling relief when he’s going to work for a few days, or looking forward to him leaving for longer, and then I feel like a monster for feeling so, because it doesn’t seem to have any particularly strong reason other than he gets on my nerves, sometimes just with his presence.

How about you and your parents? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi guys. 🙂

My question of the day for you is again about your childhood. 🙂

If you were raised by both your parents or more than one guardian, did one of your parents seem more lax and the other more strict?

My answer:

In a way, yes. As I wrote in my answer to yesterday’s question, my Dad likes to make an impression of someone very strict and tough, so you could say he was more strict, or at least much less flexible than Mum. But I think it very much depended on a situation. In some situations my Mum would be much more lax than Dad, while in others Dad would be perhaps not lax as such but he wouldn’t be as involved and wouldn’t care that much what we were doing as Mum would.

How was it in your family? 🙂

Question of the day.

I have some questions for you on the topic of childhood now. Here’s the one I picked for today. 🙂

Were your parents/guardians flexible or strict?

My answer:

My parents were definitely flexible! My Dad likes to think about himself as a very strict parent, but he is only very strict with Olek, with whom he doesn’t have the best relationship so that strictness seems to come more from the place of anger and the need to control than care. As weird as it feels to admit sometimes, for me, and I think for Zofijka too, he doesn’t really have much authority. He likes to tell all of us what we have to do in his view but we never care, sometimes we’ll do it for the peace of mind. My Mum is much more of a role model and an authoritative person for me, even though she was a big softy in raising all of us and with a bit of a tendence to be overprotective. Still, she has her rules, and they were always clear to us, and sometimes she can be pretty strict, but not over the top, just for the sake of being strict and tough, but rather for the sake of being possibly fair. She’s always been most flexible with me, using the excuse that I am the most disciplined of all of us, although I don’t think of myself as a very disciplined person and I am not even sure I would like to be one, it certainly makes life easier but also awfully boring, so I think what saves me is that I have some common sense after her, rather than am somehow very disciplined or dutiful or something like that.

What was/has been your experience? 🙂

Question of the day.

Do you like your parents’ inspiration for choosing your name, or do you think they should have gone a different way?

My answer:

I definitely don’t like it. My Mum made a promise to herself as a young girl that she will call her daughter after her best friend (whose name she really liked at the time). At the same time it was the name of my Mum’s youngest sister. So she did, even though that friendship soon ended and Mum doesn’t even like that name as much anymore. I really love my middle, even though it is so overwhelmingly popular, but I don’t like that they just did it as everyone else in our region and my middle name is my Mum’s first name – Anna. – It is also Zofijka’s middle name, I think it would have been more cool if we had different middles. My Dad wanted Anna to be my first name. I really love Anna, but it is really so very typical and popular in Poland, plus it is as I said my Mum’s name, so I don’t like the idea. And I don’t like the nickname Ania, which Poles use ALL the time, even though Anna is already short and sweet. Ania is so bland and boring. I’d rather be just Anna with no nicks, had it been my name, but that wouldn’t work out with people. So, as popular as it is, I’m glad my first name is not Anna.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi hi guys! 🙂

Today I have the following question for you:

Who taught you to go grocery shopping?

My answer:

I don’t think anyone taught me to do that specifically, like “Come on, I’ll teach you how to do grocery shopping”. I often assisted either of my parents when they were doing the grocery shopping when I was a small child, and actually throughout my childhood and adolescence when I was home for longer. I believe we must have had some learning to grocery shop at the boarding school, or maybe I had that at any of the independent living skills classes when I was little, but I can’t remember anything like that at the moment. Then when I got my debit card and all that my Mum taught me how to use it and showed me in more detail how to do shopping at a grocery store. On a daily basis, I hardly ever need any special grocery items just for myself, and it’s usually my Dad or Mum who does groceries for all of us including Olek and me, but if I do need something extra, I either tell them or get it online. When I’m in need of larger shopping, I do it normally online too, or if there is an opportunity or I’d rather get something physically and see in what condition it is or need something from a local shop we do it together with Mum. But while I’m pretty confident with it at the moment when she’s assisting me, I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi guys. 🙂

Here’s my question for you today.

Do you silently judge someone if they had a kid very young (teenager) or very old (mid to late 40’s)?

My answer:

I usually don’t think much about these things because I am not a parent myself, although it does happen that I easily judge very young parents, because I just think it’s a pity to become a parent as early as in your teens, there is still going to be plenty of time for that, and teenagers aren’t usually mature enough for that, it’s a huge responsibility, while teenage years should ideally be a time of only preparing for such responsibilities, in my opinion, and not jumping into deep waters straight away. I also think it’s so often a result of thoughtlessness and lack of knowledge in sexual matters so that’s sad. And other than that being a Christian, from the religious point of view I think it’s wrong. Although I try not to let my first judgments influence my relation to people, because everyone’s situation is obviously very different, sexual assaults and such happen and it would be cruel to judge someone without knowing the background, and also even if such a teenage pregnancy is a result of some wrong decisions, no one of us is perfect and one wrong thing they did doesn’t define them as people, that would be crazy, and they may still be awesome and loving parents anyway. With older parents, well I might be just very surprised hearing about people having a child so late, I honestly don’t know many such people in person, can only think of one couple for whom it was very difficult because they already had many children and that late one was very unexpected, and they were struggling financially very much. I also might be a bit worried as such pregnancies are often more complicated and risky, but I don’t see anything else wrong with it, if you feel OK with it yourself and feel happy to be a late parent then why not, I think it also must have its upsides, despite many people seem to think otherwise.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

Today the question I have for you is about your childhood:

Was there anything you were allowed to do as a kid that most kids weren’t allowed to do?

My answer:

Well I guess that in a way, in our family, I was always the more privileged child in some respect. That was because of multiple things, I think. First of all, I was disabled and I think that in some regards it did impact my parents attitudes towards me. I was also their first child, the first one who was actually born and survived that is, as well as I was my maternal grandparents first grandchild, so that was a big thing, and had both good and bad consequences for me. Another thing was that when Olek was born, he was healthy and able-bodied, and there has strangely been a consistent generational pattern on both sides of my family that fathers are in a constant conflict with their sons, and so is with my Dad and Olek, even though things have eased over the years, but because of that, Dad was always more naturally inclined to me. According to my Dad I learnt to speak very quickly and apparently I was able to speak in sentences before I was a year old, while my younger siblings would learn to speak much later on and I know that my Dad really liked that about me ’cause he could actually get along with me as he says himself, he also always liked to show off with me. 😀 From all the recordings and stuff that they have of me from that time, I don’t think I was particularly special in this regard, and so does my Mum, but my Dad claims I was really different from all the children he’s ever met and more communicative. I don’t think he has more experience with children though, so from his perspective that may be true indeed. 😀 Then when I went to school at the age of 5 so I was about 400 km away from home and when I would come home it was more like I was a guest than anything and it was like a holiday for us and I was treated like a VIP which on one hand was cool because, well, who wouldn’t like to be treated like a VIP, but on the other hand was damn confusing and mesed up a lot of things for me, particularly my sense of belonging and stability ’cause that wasn’t really normal, even though I liked it. My Mum always thought I am so very mature, which she probably confused with me being intelligent, so she would always be much less strict with me than with Olek, who wasn’t much less bright but much more hyperactive and impulsive and that was what people had seen first about him.

It was particularly my Dad who was making a very visible difference between me and Olek. As a little child, I was happy about it, especially seeing how awfully and often irrationally stern he is with Olek, and I thought that I am just so lucky to be Daddy’s little girl and we’ve always got along well, despite there isn’t anything like some deeper understanding between us, we’re in a close but rather superficial relationship, not a very serious one, it’s quite immature.

Daddy woould be real nasty to Olek about something we did together while I wouldn’t suffer any consequences at all, or just a bit of telling off or some grumpiness until he forgets about the whole thing. He always liked to cuddle with me and although he was never the spoiling, doting kind of Daddy, he was close to that with me. I’ve also always had a bit of understanding of people so I knew how to not irritate him and how to convince him to something I wanted, and I guess I still have quite a strong influence onhim if I’ll try. He would buy me lots of yummy stuff just for myself, or take me to the beach and we’d go there just on our own, he would even sometimes play with me, while he never did that with Olek or even Zofijka as far as I am aware, or take me for quite long road trips or I remember that he took me from school in his tanker a couple times and that was always very adventurous and those tanker trips were always very exciting for me and one of my best childhood memories. Only that things have kind of broken a bit at some point, at least from my perspective, because we were once talking with Mum about Dad and Olek having another major crisis, Mum mentioned rather lightly, and probably not realising what kind of impact it was going to have on me, or rather how it’s going to sound, that Dad has always felt more fond of me because I am disabled so he was able to feel like more sympathetic towards me and have a better relationship with me than with Olek or Zofijka, and because I was away from home most of the time. I didn’t react to that, but it really got me ragin’. Maybe I should be a bit more understanding or something, like see the full picture and how it really is from his perspective, (though I’m not sure he’d be able and/or willing to tell me anything constructive) or just let go of that, but to me it sounded really awful and I am definitely not as genuine anymore in relation to him, anymore because knowing him it actually looks very likely. I suppose in some circumstances even feelings such as sympathy can with time grow into something more but then he wouldn’t treat us so unevenly.

I’ve always had a very strong relationship with my Mum, not always that very good, but dynamic and deep and pretty intense, and while she wasn’t as obviously favourising anyone as my Dad did, and has always loved all of us, she has always been very protective of me, don’t know if over- but very protective, and she would often let me do things that she wouldn’t let Olek do. I now know she has a lot of guilt feelings about that I had to be so far away from home, as if she could change much about it, and I think she wanted to compensate that for me in different ways, as well as that I said she just thought that I am so very mature.

Some of the things that I can remember were that Mum let me drink coffee from a relatively young age (guess I was like 8 or 9 years old and I really loved that and it made me feel so grown-up, I didn’t like to think about being a grown-up, but I did like the coffee drinking aspect 😀 hence probably my current coffee troubles hahaha). Now Zofijka is older than me then and would also like to drink coffee, but Mum tells her “No! It’s not for children!”. So I once asked her why Zofijka can’t, but I could, just of plain curiosity, and Mum argument was that “She’s too silly”. Can’t quite make the connection between those things, I know quite a few adult people who are silly and I would even say that’s too light a word and they still drink coffee but OK… Zofijka now is also spoiled by everyone, but in a completely different way as she’s just the youngest and the only child in the family at this point.

A funny thing, that I still consider funny, and a little bit confusing at times, is that my Mum have always asked me about lots of things, that she didn’t know but assumed that I might know. It looked particularly funny when we were somewhere with other people, ’cause which parent would ask the child about things. 😀 Parents always like to be right, and especially don’t like to admit that they don’t know something their child knows, like which spelling of the word repeatedly is correct (in Polish of course). 😀 When I was in my teens, she started to ask me for advice on lots of things, like what she should do in some situation or what she should choose. No, my Mum is not an indecisive person, I guess she just values my opinion or something, and I know she thinks I am a good listener. Now it’s not as weird as when I was a child, but when I was a child it felt kind of not typical in comparison to other families I knew that Mum would ask me what to do. It’s still confusing at times because you actually never know what her reaction might be like when you say something, even if in the end after a few months she’s going to say that I was right. 😀 Somehow though, maybe a little strangely, I’ve never had a problem with acknowledging her authority, it’s with Dad that I’ve always had this problem, and I don’t really consider him an authoritative figure or someone that I’d obey nowadays, for reasons other than to have a peace of mind.

What had been a bit of a problem for Olek when we were kids was that I got a phone when I was 12. It was a spontaneous decision and not really because I wanted it so much. Generally my Mum is against introducing technologies to children too early, and she used to say that she’ll buy us cell phones when we’ll be maybe like 15-16 or maybe even older. But when I was 12, I had to leave the integration school – closer to home – where I was for two years, and there didn’t seem to be much other choice than to go back to my old school. But Mum felt that now I’d need a phone, not only because I was older than when I was going there before, but also because I really didn’t want to go there so she hoped that if I would be able to be in some control of when we are in touch rather than have to wait for her to call the boarding school phone and possibly miss it, I might be more at ease with going back there, and that would just be more practical for me to have a phone. There was no such need for Olek though, so he had to wait some more, despite that he actually wanted a phone much more than I did.

Zofijka was much luckier, because although Mum also threatened her that she won’t have her own phone until almost adulthood, Zofijka was much more persevering, and also the times have obviously changed so it’s harder to stick to such a resolution. So about two years ago, when Zofijka was only 9, and had her leg in plaster, was terribly bored and really making a pain in the but of herself for all of us, Mum one day suddenly bought her a smartphone. She doesn’t have the Internet connection, but even without it, it still continues to make a lot of havoc in poor Zofijka’s mind.

I was also frequently allowed to stay up late, sometimes really late at night. It was well motivated though because my sleep cycle was messed up anyway so after some trials and errors Mum has rightly decided that no point for me going to bed at say 9 PM and waking me up at 7 AM for example if I’m not going to sleep either and am going to be drowsy the next day or be up and about at 3 AM. And it was often a lot of fun for me. I’d watch movies with parents, eat crisps withh Dad, or just listen to music and play or something – the best ideas for plays come to mind at night, just as now I still have the best and most creative ideas at night as well. – 😀

So those are the examples that I can remember now. It was kind of two-sided as you can see, both cool, and quite a bit confusing. And often made me feel not right in relation to my siblings. Like when I was going to the integration school and was thus living at home for two years and still having such a special treatment all the time, I felt pretty much like an intruder or something like this because my siblings weren’t treated like that, and I was afraid they might hold grudges against me because of that, especially Olek. But overall, I don’t consider my childhood particularly happy, – not somehow incredibly bad, but definitely not happy – so in a way I was glad of all that because it kinda made me feel special, in a weird way, but still.

OK so now you let me know how about you? And what was your point of view about that you were allowed those things? 🙂

Question of the day.

What’s something you think your parents did well while you were growing up?

My answer:

I think I’ve got a very good example of how to be empathetic and interested in other people from my Mum, and both my parents are always very helpful for people. I also like the fact that my Dad taught me all the capitals of European countries when I was 5. 😀 He also taught me lots of prayers which I just recently realised. You know, if something feels like you’ve known it since forever, it’s hard to realise how you actually learnt it, but recently we had a discussion with Zofijka about how we learnt different things, and I came to the realisation that Dad taught me most of prayers. Since I am a practicing Christian, it’s important to me, and my Dad was very proud of himself when I recently reminded him of that, he didn’t remember it.

How about your parents? 🙂

Question of the day (29th March).

What was something your parents said repeatedly when you were growing up?

My answer:

Huh lots of things, especially my Mum, she’s very repetitive at times haha. But like really very often? Hahaha the first thing that comes to my mind right now is that Mum used to say a lot that I’m “wild”, meaning that I don’t engage with people as much as expected. That was always very interesting for me, to think that I’m wild. 😀

How about your parents?

Question of the day (25th March).

If you could disinvent one thing, what would it be?

My answer:

School. I’d disinvent it, and then invent it again so that it would have a completely different structure and would stop being brainwashing, as well as, among other things, it would also be optional for parents to send their children to school, home/flexi schooling would be highly encouraged, school would be more of an alternative for those children whose parents can’t or really don’t want to homeschool them, or to gain some additional skills that parents can teach their children but would like them to know, like some stuff that is of a special interest for the child or that they would like to base their career on in future. Schools would also be more of a place where the children could meet and play so that people wouldn’t complain that they don’t grow up together with their peers, and parents would be taught there on how to homeschool their children and just learn about parenting. But in fact I’d rather have someone else do that than do it myself, I don’t fancy dealing with this rotten system. 😀

How about you? 🙂