more than you ever wanted to know about my childhood

Several other posts kind of let me wander of into the days back when I was a child. Long long time ago. *g*
Anyway, comparing my own childhood with that of other people, I always wonder whether I had the so-called happy childhood. I didn't grow up an only child. In fact, I'm the third of four. As a kid, I hated that. If I had been the only one, there wouldn't have been clothes from older sister and brother to wear, and much more money to buy the stuff that I didn't have. As I didn't have many friends outside, it probably was good to have brothers and a sister, though. People who grow up with siblings are supposed to have better communication and social skills than others. I think recent research has proven that wrong, and it certainly is wrong in the case of our family. Communication is a problem, and always was. We don't talk much about feelings, or even of our thoughts. Dinner conversation is more likely to center about the benefits of some Roman or Greek law, the results of a Middle Ages or Renaissance peace treaty or the reasons for a modern day political conflict than about what we did during the day.
I'm pretty much the stupidest (read: least educated) kid in the family. My brother-in-law says I'm the nicest to deal with. Which might have something to do with that. Knowing that there is a ton of stuff I don't know, I think I'm better in accepting other people than some parts of my family.
When we play Trivial Pursuit and you don't know the answer to a question, half of the other people will tell you you're the stupidest person they've ever seen. The other half, who doesn't know the answer either, will try to not draw any attention and take note of the correct answer. There are many things that aren't so bad, but failure in school is probably the worst thing that could happen. I used to cry when I didn't get the best marks in tests.
It's not that we were beaten for bad marks or anything. OK, we had our ears boxed, but not because of things like that. More for lying, or stealing each other's stuff. But there always was a general attitude that expected each one of us to be the best. Looking back now, I know tht at least my mother wanted us to try as hard as we could, and "the best" meant reaching the best results we could reach. But back then, it didn't feel like that. The best meant the best in class.
My parents also thought it important to assign tasks to everybody in the family. Considering we used to have a big apartment back in GDR, and now have a complete farm (no animals, though, we used the space to build apartments), I know that was necessary. We couldn't afford having somebody come and do all these things. And some were quite fun, really. Not the general housework, but the things we did to get the house into a state you could live in it. I've pulled kilometers of wallpaper from the walls, I've taken out several layers of flooring in some rooms, I've helped break down walls. There aren't many pre-teens who can claim using a sledge hammer in their spare time. Garden work could be fun, if my dad wasn't near. Otherwise he would critize all the time. The only way to stop him was asking him questions. At 9, I knew more about what's going on in the soil than my gardening teacher (Yes, in GDR that was a school subject).
My parents were rather strict. There were a lot of things we weren't allowed to do. There were strict rules of how to behave, what to do and not to do. But I don't think they really had to punish us a lot to make us do these things. Sometimes, when I see whining kids in restaurants or shops, I ask my mom whether we were like that, too. She says no. Because for once, my parents didn't go out much when we were kids. They didn't take us to restaurants or something, they just didn't go themselves. And if they did, they left us home. In an apartment with a coal stove, with a gas hearth, windows that could be opened wide and unprotected electrical devices. I don't think anything ever happened. At night we slept, and the thought of getting up in the middle of the night to, say, get something to drink never entered my mind. It was so far away that when my cousin stayed with me and asked for something to drink in the middle of the night, it was the first thing I ever heard of that. The idea of being thirsty after bedtime was completely alien to me. And that was when I was something like 14 years old.
We wouldn't be pushed arounf town in a stroller for ages. As soon as we could walk, we were taken for walks. Maybe it was just up and down the road, because that was all we could handle. But I suppose we were tired after that and slept nicely all afternoon. (Except that it is common knowledge in my family that no matter at what time of day somebody approached my baby bed, I would lie there smiling up at them, not sleeping. Whereas my little brother spent every possible moment sleeping.) We didn't go on vacation, either, when we were small. For one, my parents apparently didn't really feel like taking four small kids to our socialist brothers. Also, finding quarters for a family with four kids isn't all that easy. And when, after reunification, it was four kids and a dog it certainly limited the possibilites. Plus, we had the garden, and that needed a lot of work in summer. The first vacation I remember was shortly after reunification. We still had the Trabant, the GDR-excuse for a car (which was never intended to transport six people). We visited some relatives rather close to the former border, and I only remember two things. We got some Playmobil toys and we were the slowest car on the Autobahn. Later, we went to different corners of Germany. We had educational vacations,my parents believing that you shouldn't travel to foreign countries if you didn't even know you own, and that a swimming pool is a swimming pool, no matter where it is. No all-inclusive clubs at the Spanish coast or in the Dominican Republic for them.
Mom says she didn't have many problems with us simply because she didn't expect to have them. My aunt would sit down next to her kids, asking them "Aren't you sick? I'm sure you are sick by now. Are you certain you aren't sick?" until the kid puked all over her. My Mom never asked us much how we felt. If I remember correctly, she knew when we really were sick, and then would apply her main recipe: go to bed and be bored. Nothing heals you faster. If your head was still on your shoulders, no need to have the doctor come. If you thought you were too sick to go to school, see the doctor at six o'clock in the morning so you don't miss out if you're not ill.
Writing this down, it seems horrible. But it wasn't. It was just the way things were, and it seemed to make a lot of sense. It still does, and if I ever have children I'll probably raise them similarly.
Sorry this is a rather confused post. I wrote down whatever came into my mind related to my childhood.

Life in GDR?

cleverusername2 comment to my last post basically is the reason for this one.
This is going to be completely, utterly biased. It is just my personal view, my experiences. And I don't remember much anyway, so I'm going to fill in with stories my family has told me. The basic topic is life in GDR.
First of all, let me make one thing sure. I am no expert on that. I was born much too late to really see much of it and remember. And my family was not very typical for GDR measures. My Mom's family has a white-collar background, about as white as you can get. My father's parents come from farming families. So while one side of my family was the "good guys" in the "Farmer and Worker State", the other side wasn't. Not at all. Also, my mother's family managed to get into all kinds of situations you shouldn't be in as a good GDR citizen. More of that later, only one more general thing. My family is Christian. Not very popular thing to be in GDR, resistance brewed a lot in the ranks of Christians, especially with the so-called "Junge Gemeinde", the people after confirmation, in their last years of school or in university.
First two little stories about how my mom's family's home almost got searched by the Stasi (kind of the internal secret service) two times. One time was when an organization of university professors, to which my grandfather belonged, was forbidden. They had discussed in their meetings about many topics the government didn't like. For some reason, even though it was no secret organization, the university was too stupid to find out who was a member. So even though my Grandparents were careful to get rid of any incriminating materials (including, to my Mom's grief, the Micky Mouse comics some well-meaning west German relative had smuggled to them), the Stasi didn't come.
The second time was when my uncle had been camping at the Baltic Sea. Friends came one evening, coming from Prague, and telling quite interesting stories about how the Red Army dealt with any kind of expression of the free will of citizens (Of course, it was just some mean capitalist subjects starting the demonstrations...) The two boys were gone the next morning. And all their friends, when they were back home, were asked to an interview with a friendly man from an unnamed agency. Fortunately, my uncle got out of it.
But now to some more recent stories, and starting with some positive things. I really liked living in the GDR. At 6 or 7, you don't display much political interest. And there were a lot of fun things going on. We had the Jungpioniere (kind of like Scouts, but without the scouting). We would meet after school on certain days, if I remember correctly, and sing songs or do some crafts. We had uniforms with white blouses and dark blue skirts (pants for the boys) and blue neckkerchiefs that were tied in a certain way (a way I never grasped). That was fun. It also was a little bit of political indoctrination, but it didn't feel like it. And it was far away from any brain washing, I think.
We got free milk in school, coming from a family with more than three kids. You could play in the streets, and there weren't all these cars that are there now. (Great for kids, but not so great if you wanted to go anywhere.) Things were cheaper in shops than after reunification, and some tasted a lot better, rolls for example. If you never had a banana, you don't miss it. And lets be serious, it is possible to live without bananas.
Living in the GDR as a kid, I didn't realize any bad things. I was too young to see that as the demonstrations in 1989 went on, my parents stopped taking my older siblings with them. They stopped to go both at the same time, as they feared the person who went might not come back.
After reunification, I was confronted with a large number of relatives I had nevr seen before. I didn't know that was because they were not allowed to visit, and my mom was not allowed to go see them. Not even when her aunt had to have serious surgery and it was feared she might not survive. My Mom wanted to go alone for a short visit, leaving her three (at that point she was pregnant with my little brother) kids at home. She wasn't allowed to. My Grandmother was not allowed to go to her mother-in-law's funeral. As a teacher, she couldn't travel to capitalistic foreign countries.
My mother got mark one in all her subjects at school. Even though she had to have an oral exam in Marxism/Leninism as it was feared her political ideas might not agree with that of the govrenment. Which of course they didn't, but she managed to hide that to get her degree. But she wasn't able to study what she wanted. There had been applicants better than her, she was told. That was simply not possible. But hey, who cares. With one sister in West Germany and a father with arguable political views, the only reason she could study at all was a weird contract my Grandfather had with the government, made back when the state was founded and wanted to keep scientist in the country. Basically, for promising they would stay in GDR, the scientists could ask whatever they wanted. My Grandfather wanted all his kids to have the education they were entitled to and able to handle. If it hadn't been for that, my mother would not have been able to study.
When my parents were in school, officials would come and ask the kids questions to find out what TV programmes were watched at the homes. They'd ask whether the clock behind the guy on the news had numbers or just dots, whether it was square or round, how the melody sounded that announced the news.
They didn't do that anymore when I was a kid. That is another reason why I can't really say how it was to live in GDR. I went to a Christian kindergarten, and when I came to school, things were already changing.
Both of my parents have files about them, information gathered about them by the Stasi (that stands for Staatssicherheit - state security, by the way). They never went to look at them, because they don't want to know who reported about them. There are all kinds of stories about family members reporting about each other, and I know that they are true, because a marriage among friends of ours broke up when he found out she had reported every single conversation they had. Including conversations they had in bed.
In Berlin, kids from West Germany could play at the river that formed the border. If they fell into the water and somebody tried to get in to save them, East German soldiers would shoot at them. I don't care what f**king order they followed, this is just plain wrong. No matter what you political ideas are, if you let a kid die you deserve to rot in prison for it.
I know there are many people who say it wasn't all bad in GDR, and who don't like to hear these stories. They say it gives a wrong impression about the state.
I think these stories show what the state really was about. Breeding a bunch of spineless people who'd follow blindly and believe anything the rulers said. (Wait, didn't Germany just had that before?) Fortunately, it didn't work out.
Everytime I see pictures of the demonstrations, of people climbing over the fence into the west German embassy in Hungaria, of people from both sides of Germany sitting on the Wall, I have to cry. I'm not proud of a lot of things I didn't have anything to do with, but I'm proud to belong to this people.
Sorry for becoming all emotional in the end, but this is an emotional topic for me.

Found me out

I found this in mimosa_branch's journal. Who, by the way, is new to my friends list. Welcome!


Category V - The Lone
Wolf

Though you'd be welcome in most groups, you prefer
a more solitary path.


What Type of Social Entity are You?
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Any questions?

OK, I know two memes in a row is bad style. BUt this was too good to pass out on. And this sentence is a grammatical weapon of mass destruction, but anyway, here goes:

What kind of God are you?
Name
DOB
Favourite Color
You earthly time was spent	Raining torrents of blood while sailing over the prostrate masses in an iron chariot
Your throne is	fashioned from thorns and human femurs, surrounded by writhing, howling servants, with a footstool of souls on the sizzling shores of the Lake of Fire
You wear	A humble tunic and robes, belying your inestimable supernatural powers just waiting to shatter the woes of Creation
Your Godly superpower is	A flaming, indestructible sword with which you shall avenge the slain innocents and humble the arrogant
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