Thursday, June 23, 2011

My Frugal Parents

Our parents make us who we are today...

I grew up with married parents, who are actually stilled married today. The interesting thing is that when I was little I used to wish for them to be divorced, so I wouldn't have to live with both of them.  I would pray to God every night - let them get divorced.  My parents were very strict and frugal - almost to the point of crazyiness.  In the long run it was a good thing, because my siblings, two younger sisters and 1 older brother, grew up as my best friends because we had one major thing in common in our lives - we hated our parents.

One day, our dad told us, when we went potty, we could only use 1 square of toilet paper, and if we happened to go #2, we could use two - that's two squares - a mear 8 inches of toilet paper, you better hope you didn't have diarehhea.  Plus, there was no such thing as 2-ply in our house.  So I grew up "sneaking" toilet paper.  To do this day, in my own home, I have the softest (most expensive) toilet paper in the store and when I use it, I actually wind it around my hand, whether I need to or not - you can say I am officially a toilet paper waster.   

About 2 months later, Dad sat us down, again, and told us, we had to turn the water off in the shower when we shampooed our hair.  Mind you, we had a maximum shower time of 2 minutes, already - and he would prefer us to shower at school (how embarrassing).  To this day my dad shampoos his hair in our kitchen sink - no wonder he can take a shower in less than 2 minutes.  To this day, I take long-hot showers every day, sometimes twice a day, if needed.  I thoroughly enjoy the time to myself.

Just a note, you might be thinking that my parents were just trying to support a family of 6 - did I forget to mention that my dad is a dentist, my mom is a school teacher. Yes, we grew up in a small town, where being a densist isn't the same financially as in a big town, but we were far from the poorest family in town.  

Well until next time...