They Just Seem a Little Weird: Quirks Inherited from Your Parents

I was closer to my mom than my dad temperamentally--my dad and I were almost complete opposites--but whereas I can't think of any specific habits I got from my mom, there are at least two I got from my dad.

1) This one goes way back and is probably fairly common: I always eat the crust first when eating pie.

2) One that started about 10 years ago: I never have a bowl of just one type of cereal--I always combine two or three cereals.

2) One that started about 10 years ago: I never have a bowl of just one type of cereal--I always combine two or three cereals.

i have NEVER done this, but my lads both do.
go figure.

From mom:

I save rubber bands and paper clips. Periodically I have to throw them out and start a new collection.

I often scrape the last bit of egg white out of the shell with my fingertip, so as not to let it go to waste.

From dad:

I am never without a ballpoint pen in my shirt pocket, or a pocket knife in my pants pocket. Any time I am forced by circumstance to omit either of these items it makes me uneasy.

I am a terrible handyman. I would rather let something go as long as possible before I fix it.

I'm the same. My dad wasn't--but he was also a terrible handyman. So I think my apathy might be preferable. It does get fixed eventually, and correctly.

from my mum, eating the pith of an orange, like scraping it all off with your teeth until there is just a thin orange layer left, I have stopped doing this now, think she has too.

At a point in life when I started eating out with others on a regular basis someone pointed out that I always salted my food heavily before tasting it... it's just what my parents did.

Read the paper back to front - picked that up off both of them.

At a point in life when I started eating out with others on a regular basis someone pointed out that I always salted my food heavily before tasting it

i was told at a young age to never ever let the person who made the food see you doing this.
its often regarded as a massive social faux pas.
taste first, then add your mountains of heart killing chaos.

my mother talks to herself when she's upset/anxious, loud enough for other people to hear. I do this all of the time, and half the time I don't realize people can hear me.

and like my dad, I yell and throw things a lot

my dad : hair loss + love of booze.
my mum : my superiority complex.
both : love of the carpenters.
not quirks as such, just the way i was made.

My dad, my brother and I all talk like Obama - stop in the middle of sentences, think for a long time, and then finish the sentence.

This isn't intentional, so probably doesn't fit, but it is an example of how we all turn into our parents eventually. For about the last decade of his life, I'd sit beside my dad and watch, weirdly fascinated, as he sat in his chair and fell asleep while watching TV--the way he'd snap back semi-lucid for a second or two before drifting off again (all sorts of weird stuff going on above the shoulders when he was in this state). This could go on for an hour.

I can't watch myself, but this is pretty much me exactly the last few years (sometimes in movie theatres, too).

(xpost--quirkiest one yet!)

never ever let the person who made the food see you doing this

Indeed. As soon as my visible quirk was pointed out I quit immediately.

"Oh look at that... it's Swedish." - from my dad.

Typically Romanian body language, especially when mildly inebriated and/or expressing annoyance.

Would love to have been a fly on the wall for dinnertime Obama conversations.

My dad likes to say we come of sturdy pedant stock.

My brother may well show up in this thread to say that no he doesn't do this and what am I talking about.

Should have been a SNL sketch in 2008!

Cant actually think of anything tbh, which strikes me as odd once i think of it

I can think of quirks I inherited from my grandparents but I feel like I maybe only inherited neuroses from my parents.

Oh, I guess when I'm barefoot I tend to pick shit up off the floor with my toes like my mom does.

Typically Romanian body language, especially when mildly inebriated and/or expressing annoyance.

All I can think is of is physical traits like skin tone from my dad who my grandma used to call Omar Sharif and a big aquiline nose from my mum who had such a complex about her nose she used to scratch it out in any pics of her in photo albums, but not any quirks as such. Anything possible quirks I can think of are perhaps just standard human being stuff.

What does this mean?

You'll see.

i can really only think of things i take from my father, other than physical appearance - i look a lot more like my mum, other than my nose and stooped, bad posture.. my dad is very cheery and upbeat, although i suffer form depression and am often the opposite of those things, when im in a good mood i sing and dance around the apartment, frequently, when doing the dishes etc. which comes from my dad (ive never heard my mother sing and she's generally calmer and more placid). i like to constantly tease people, which to be honest is definitely just in the air in scotland just in general but my dad is really into it, and he's not even from there.

oh yes i also have jiggling legs which comes from my dad and his mother before him

Oh i sing, everywhere i go, thats from dad

impulsively crossing small boundaries in order to feel connected to people but instead driving them away? thanks mom

What does this mean?

You'll see.

I'm the kind of guy who uses Romanian body language that's typical
Can't understand what I mean?
You soon will

Exactly.

does a predilection for alcohol and ciggies count as a quirk?

I emulated my dad's accent even though I've always lived in Canada, not England.

Interesting. Only when you were little or have you kept it up?

I've never tried to imitate him, and more than four decades out of the house has taken the edges off, but people still ask where I'm from.

He taught, and at parent/teacher meetings, they would tell him that his students developed accents after a year in his classes.

Hah, now that's charisma.

I once took one of those "where does your accent place you?" quizzes, and it gave me "Philadelphia" and "Northern Virginia" as the answer, which happens to be exactly where my parents grew up, respectively. It was pretty uncanny.

One less passive thing I got from my dad was a love of '50s rock and roll (makes sense) but also his love of reggae (no idea how that got on his radar). From my mom (probably), a tendency toward rambling anecdotes.

i met my mom once and i could see etches of her face's contours in mine

i started talking to my dad as an adult and my stepmom says me and him say a couple of the same phrases, despite never having lived together ever, which i find odd

i could never relate to anyone in my family, though, and i always felt like an alien among them

one funny thing is my best friend is from england, so some of his pronunciation rubbed off on me because we would spend so much time together

Some fifteen years after my mom bought me one as a gift (to which I was indifferent), I started picking up the fountain pen habit. Like her, I'm almost invariably up for an hour or two reading in the middle of the night.

Like my Dad, I floss my teeth in front of the computer before going to bed.