Sprout torture
My Dad's cooking is legendary in my family, and has left me and my three siblings (one sister, two brothers) with various food phobias throughout the years. He was a military man, and very firm - we ate what we were given, and that was *it*.

Unfortunately what we were given was, on occasion, fucking disgusting. I remember when my parents first got one of those new-fangled blenders - my Dad's idea? Blend a metric fuck-ton of sprouts, boil up and serve. Voila! Sprout Soup! My little brother gagged, and eventually had to eat it cold.

He had a taste for hot and spicy food, which he tried to emulate himself. He made some dish called Nazzi Goreene (or something like that, I've never really been inclined to find out what it's *really* meant to taste like), but accidentally made it much hotter than it was meant to be. He stoically munched it down. My other little brother cried his way through the pain. Tomato ketchup sandwiches were also often considered to be an appropriate meal.

He also called my brother stupid for years, until he found out he was actually dyslexic. After that he still did it, just less often.

However, the worst came when I was relatively old (but still young enough to be permanently emotionally scarred). I was about 15, I guess, so that would make my sister 11ish, and my brothers about 9 and 7. My Dad had recently remarried, and my stepmother was a character most unlike most adults I had ever met. I was used to his RAF buddies, his family (all sons of an RAF granny and grandad), and my mum's family (daughters of another RAF grandma and grandad). I dunno how many of you are military brats, but there's a kind of atmosphere, a kind of person you tend to encounter, on average if you like, in the forces. You live on bases, your friends are kids on the base, and your only other real contacts are via another institution - school. Extended family is usually distant. There's definitely a feel to these kinds of communities that's different to civvie street.

My stepmum was very different. I've gotten to know and respect her over the years, but at the time she was something dangerously out of my sphere of knowledge. Small town family, all living in each others' pockets, wildly different... interests. These are the people who vote on reality TV shows, who see each other in town every Saturday morning, who know and care about "local issues" and so on. Lived in the same area their entire lives, back through generations. Add to this terrifyingly new mix the fact that my stepmum adored musical theatre. I think the fact that she was so different was one of the reasons my Dad fell for her.

I couldn't understand it myself, at the time. Nor could I understand why it was so important, when we went camping with one of my Dad's oldest RAF buddies and his wife (so they could get to know the new most important woman in his life), that my stepmum dress us up in home-made yellow corduoroy dungaree shorts - all four of us - and make us sing "Doe, a deer". In front of a camcorder. My siblings were young enough to not be horrified by this, but I was mortified. Especially for having to do this in front of his mate and his wife, whom I'd always got on with really well (his mate was a dude - took me on my first ever driving lesson when I was about 14-15, getting around the age thing by waiting until the base's airstrip had been shut down for the night and letting me loose on the vast expanse of tarmac - non-public!). Their eyes watered in sympathy as they watched us drone our way through our rendition of the Von Trapps.

Funnily enough, they kind of dipped out of my Dad's life (and therefore the lives of me and my siblings) shortly after that incident.

What horrifies me most is that somewhere, that video still exists. Somewhere secret, somewhere safe. I've never been able to find it, and I'm occasionally still threatened with having it carted out (usually for the benefit of my girlfriend, of course). I did look for it once, slinging suspiciously unlabelled videos into the VCR in the hope of coming across it and destroying it forever. Instead, I came across my Dad's porn stash. So not all bad then.

My mum, though. She was ace. She single-handedly turned me on to sci-fi and fantasy by getting excited by cool sci-fi and fantasy, being unable to enthuse (I assume) with my Dad about how cool they were, so showed me key cool scenes from things she'd just watched (Dune and Highlander stand out for me), exclaiming about how good they were, and then telling me I couldn't watch the whole film 'cos I wasn't old enough. Very canny, mom. It worked.
(kithkill, Fri 17 Aug 2007, 23:24, Reply)