Summer Memories from the 1980′s
Written by Helga
Friday, 9 July 2010 05:16
I know this is a blog about trying to be a greener mom and greening my family. But I like for my readers to know a bit more about me, so every so often I throw in something personal.
I grew up in a suburb of Dallas, Texas with my three sisters. My parents divorced when I was in third grade, and my mom worked hard to try and keep it all together. It wasn’t easy for her, she had a high school education but hadn’t worked to support a family of four children until my parents split. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for her, I was caught up in my own kid world as all kids can be.
My mom didn’t make much money at her job and we were just barely treading water. I remember her sitting at the table doing the bills and seeing the utter defeat in her face. We were the kids on the free school breakfast and lunch program, but there was no shame in it back then. Lots of kids were on the free meal program. My mom got the house in the divorce settlement, a one story, 4 bedroom almost 2 bath ranch house (one shower didn’t work) in a subdivision filled with nothing but a sea of the same ranch houses. A house meant upkeep, mortgage, and bills. We were all expected to do our part every single day, though we didn’t always keep up as well as she might of liked. (Lots of yelling if you didn’t keep up) That meant that every day after school you came home and did your assigned chores for the week. For one week you had to clean either the bathroom, living room, tend to laundry, or the most dreaded of chores, the kitchen. We all hated cleaning the kitchen because we had no dishwasher and 5 people in a house can generate a boatload of dishes everyday. We would be thrilled when the end of our kitchen week came and we knew we had three weeks off from it. We ate on paper plates to help alleviate some of the work (the green mom in me now cringes!) and we were mostly in charge of feeding ourselves. My mom made a couple of meals a week but after putting in a hard day at work, she just wasn’t up for cooking dinner every night. Who could blame her?
One of the hardest aspects for us growing up with limited funds (besides having to wear clothes from Kmart, Montgomery Ward or the Goodwill and shoes from Payless) was not being able to afford air conditioning. It can cost several hundred dollars a month,
Summer of 1983. I'm on the left.
extra dollars we just did not have. Try and imagine that – if you are from Texas, then this won’t be difficult. The temperatures in the triple digits, 100 – 110 degrees. Folks, that is hot! Hot enough that if you get into a car and brush up against the metal, you get a 2nd degree burn. My mom used to use towels to cover the steering wheel. Every summer, some news team always cracks an egg on a sidewalk and fries it up to make a point – hot hot hot!
Now try and imagine four teenage girls taking showers, blow drying and hot rolling their hair. Curling irons. The house would get
Yes, that's me & my big ass Texas hair. Circa winter 1986.
steamy, sweat running down our faces. Unbearable. Repeat, twice a day. Your hair wouldn’t hold up in the heat so being a girl in Texas in the 1980′s, you did what you had to do to keep that hair big, fluffy & feathered. Now, try to put make up on! We gave it our best shot, I promise you.
There was no set bedtime in the summer, I think because my mom knew, in that kind of heat, you had to wait until you were truly exhausted and passed out. Most of the time I shared a room with a sister, while the other two got their own rooms. My sister and I would lay in our beds with an oscillating fan between us, swinging back and forth, praying for relief and sleep. We would each bring one of those huge 7-11 Big Gulp cups filled with water to bed with us, and pour the water over ourselves so that when the fan hit us, it was almost – cool. Almost. We didn’t have an ice-maker, we had a few ice trays, and our fridge had to work double time to keep up with the heat, so it couldn’t quite make ice. The water would get cold, form a thin layer of ice on top, but that was it. One of us, or all of us, would sneak into the kitchen after all the lights were finally out, pull out an ice tray and tap a hole into the thin layer of ice. Pour the cold water into our cup, return ice tray back to fridge without refilling it. Steal back to your One of us was always getting pissy because there was never any actual ice when you needed it. Just a shell of an ice cube taken too soon.
Shut up! Shut up already!
The cicadas are loud in Texas in the summer, and even in this video I’ve linked to, you cannot get an idea of how deafening – how irritating! - they can get when they start up as soon as it gets light outside. They make that noise nonstop all day. They blanket all the trees by the hundreds. You feel like you just managed to fall asleep when those suckers would start their buzzing & rattling. I would get so angry, uselessly so. There was nothing you could do.
Don’t get me started on how me and my sisters would angle for invites to spend the night at a friend’s house. Everybody else had AC. One time, my mom turned on the AC for a single night when we had a guest. I turned down an invite to spend the night at a friend’s house because I didn’t want to miss out on this special event.
Summer would pass with plenty of good memories, who doesn’t love summer? But I cannot describe the utter relief we would all feel that first night sometime in late September when the temperatures would finally drop and we would sleep so well, finally.
Zzzzzz…
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Summer Memories from the 1980's, me & my big-ass hair! http://bit.ly/bD5y46
RT @livegreenmom: Summer Memories from the 1980's, me & my big-ass hair! http://bit.ly/bD5y46
Summer memories from the 1980's. Yes, that is MY big ass texas hair. I will admit it. http://fb.me/uZg5Lagb
Summer Memories from the 1980's http://bit.ly/aSVeDS
Summer Memories from the 1980's http://bit.ly/bD5y46
RT @LiveGreenMom: Summer Memories from the 1980's http://bit.ly/bD5y46 Yes that is my BIG ASS TX hair!
RT @LiveGreenMom: Summer Memories from the 1980's http://bit.ly/aSVeDS
Ahhh… the 80′s. the higher, bigger, curlier the better. Aqua Net was my friend. Shutter to think now.
Memories from the 1980's http://bit.ly/bD5y46
Oh my goodness – I am sweating just thinking about this. Ugh! I grew up in a similar situation with my sister and brother and mom working three jobs. We had no air either except a window unit in my mom’s room (lol – smart lady) but all summer long we would camp out in our sleeping bags across her floor! Good memories – you do what you gotta do. We spent our days all summer long from morning until night time at our neighborhood pool. It was like a second home
I just love your post Helga Dee – very colorful images in my head, beautifully written!
“try to imagine that”
as you described your childhood, my mind immediately went to thoughts of my present nieces and nephews lives, who live in Mexico and live like this everyday, every week, and so far, all of their childhood lives. There are 5 of them, 4 tween girls, and live on one parent’s income. I have one comment to add to your story-they don’t have running water for 3+ days, at a time. The water will flow and bubble thru their pipes at 12am and shut off at 5am, and not return for 3 days. The sad truth..much of the world -say Haiti- lives in worse conditions. Can we get any worse than Haiti right now? sure, Africa. worse? yes. “imagine”. the sad thing, most Americans can not.
PS. Mexico just had recording breaking heat 52* Celsius, in July.
Yes, you are right, so many people live in horrid conditions not fit for animals, let alone people. I cannot imagine living like that without knowing when you were going to get water again. I was only reliving a memory from my childhood, when I thought the whole world revolved around me and my needs. I know better now. It is sad. Thank you for bringing it back to my attention. And for taking the time to read and comment.
I love the pictures….I wore my hair sky-high in the 80s! LOL