What were your parents doing when they were your age?

32 -- mom was a housewife in Coronado in San Diego Bay. I was five closing in on six, my sister was approaching her third birthday. She and my dad had to have been talking about buying their first house.

Hm.

When my mom was my age I was one year old. We were living in a big white clapboard house on Gribble Road, in Blount County, Tennessee. They rented it from a guy who lived nearby. (This was the house where they got raided by the FBI late one night in a frightening case of mistaken identity.) One day they found a little shack on the property, off in the woods. They looked inside and found reams of KKK material. It looked like it hadn't been touched in years. There was some old furniture in there, including an old-timey suspension-spring sofa made of metal, which they took. It sits, re-upholstered, in their house today.

Mom was just about ready to have me, and teaching. They were living in the house i grew up in(which they finally put on the market this year), and driving a yellow datsun hatchback.

mum: working part time as a librarian at small town new zealand library. on the brink of an apparently never-eventuating affair with the full time librarian. all other spare hours consumed with caring for 3 daughters - aged 14, 12 and 9.

Of course I've accomplished nothing.

Dad: Married to Mom for almost two years. Awww, newlywedded bliss. Still just some guy working at a construction site, but also learning how to become an electrician, courtesy of his work. Still about a year away from becoming a journeyman.

Mom: Married to Dad for almost three years. Awww, newlywedded bliss. Still just some secretary, but a rather good one, as she WOULD be. Still trying to tame Dad, who was really acting up back then. Starting to look around for that all-important first home.

I wasn't due to come around for a little over ten years.

At 30 my dad was a devil-may-care bachelor type. He was in the TA and hadn't yet met the secretary at the Inverness branch that he would marry in seven years time (given that she would have been just out of school at the time).

Tracer!!! Did you know I went to Drew?

Father at 29 going on 30: in the process of divoricing first and only wife. Being sentenced to 25 years for aggrevated sexual assault of a child, leaving behind two children.

i was actually *just* talking about myself at current age compared to my mother. Hello new thread. . .

Father at 29 - newlywed hotel manager, possibly at the Piccadilly or Rubens hotels in London. By now well settled into his adopted country (after a rather hardcore residency interview to establish whether he and my mum actually knew each other).

My dad at 23--not yet in 'nam (as he is one year older than my mother), but gallavanting around the Phillipines and getting high a lot and buying stereo equipment for cheap. He meets my mother at a party at the U of Nebraska with his old buddy, Pinky Wooliver. Pinky and my mom know each other somehow.

They moved from Weston-super-Mare (rubbish seaside resort) to Sherston (West Country village) less than a year ago, buying the local butcher's shop and large attached home, their first business. Dad was working hard building up custom, mum mostly taking care of their two adopted kids, a 4 year old me and my brother three years younger.

I should ask them more about their motivations during this time; I can only guess that they really liked to travel and that my dad was able to make enough money during some jobs to have time off during the off-season.

We often lived in trailers or even out of our van, and in 1976 (when my dad was 28) they participated with me in the Bikecentennial although they didn't do the whole cross-country route, just the bit in the west. I think we were on the road for two or three weeks? I was only a year old; I thought I remembered parts of it, but I must be remembering other bike trips.

Can you imagine? Three weeks traveling by bike with a one-year-old? Sleeping in tents and under overpasses? I can't even get off the couch to drive to the store this weekend. My dad has asthma and a bum leg from polio, too.

I think it was a year earlier that my father's company had made N.O.W.'s list of Misogynistic Companies, because of their advertising campaign that showed a busty blonde woman next to one of their computers and the slogan "So simple even a dumb blonde can use it!"

I'm not sure which seems more alien to me: having been married six years by my age (seven, by the time my father was my age), or being on my third house, mortgage and all.

Dad - dead for 13 years..
Mom - alcoholic (recovering or active, I can't remember)

Mom: was raising two kids alone in poverty.

Dad: was raising 6 kids in the middle of a swamp in South Carolina where he went to a snake handling church to marry a widow, who rumour had it had been married 4 times before and killed three of them. He didn't send child support but prayed every day (with a snake in each hand, I presume). All the 6 kids were getting Social Security and their previous dad's life insurance payments. Feh.

Surprisingly, this has not soured me on marriage.

Hah! As if I minded. People could look at my little LiveJournal thingy, read one of the entries where I even state my birth date, and courtesy the Power Of Math find out this information, sweet cheeks. ;)

My parents were raising a family of three in upper-middle class comfort: a spacious two-story house and backyard on a tree-lined street on Long Island, two Cadillacs, a collie.

Mom was a housewife, and spent most of the day attending to me and my older brother. (The oldest brother was in school.) There was also housecleaning, cooking, and putting up with her parents. She was on the verge of the subtle personal transformation I've mentioned elsewhere in my writing.

Dad was working the way up the corporate ladder at the company later known as KPMG, and he may still have been going on a series of months-long business trips to places like Costa Rica. (My mother, a possibly biased source, tells me that sometimes when would return from these trips, my brothers, who were three and six years older than I was, would barely be able to remember who he was.)

It sucks the air out of my lungs to wonder where my biological parents were at 32. These are two lives, so crucial to me, that I can't even begin to map out. Let me hazard a guess, based on what little I know: both of them were living apart, in Memphis or thereabouts, mom teaching young children, dad doing the kinds of things engineers do.

Do I feel somewhat irresponsible, like I've accomplished nothing by comparison? Oh yeah.

my mother would have been working as a librarian and living at home with her parents. her mother would have been giving her constant grief about the unsuitability of her boyfriends and telling her they are all strange.

when my mam was 30, i was 9 and my sister 7, she was a library assistant, having gone back to work when my sister started school. we lived in a smallish terraced house in fishburn, county durham, i think they were just about to make the large bedroom into two smaller rooms so me and my sister could have one each.

when my dad was 30, i *think* he was still married to his first wife (this gets no discussion these days), as i think my step-brother is at least 6 years older than me. i believe he was working for Durham County Council, and would meet a young secretary working for the ambulance service in three or four years time.

I just realized that this picture is within a year of my mom being my age. Hard to believe tbh!
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2819/12594268423_cf774472e2.jpg