Asking your parents
An adult child and an ageing parent. The child wants to know who the parent was before they were a parent, and time is finite.
- Do I seem like someone who dances at weddings? Why or why not?
- When did you last dance in a kitchen, and what was playing?
- When did you last write a letter and put a stamp on it?
- When did you last fix something instead of throwing it away?
- When did you last stay up until sunrise, and what for?
- When did you last get in trouble at school, and for what?
- When did you last burn a meal, and who ate it anyway?
- When did you last sleep in the room you grew up in?
- When did you last miss the last bus or train home?
- When did you last use a paper map, and where were you going?
- When did you last sneak out of a house?
- When did you last quit something on the same day?
- When did you last spend a night somewhere with no bed?
- When did you last go to a dance, and who took you?
- When did you last take a photograph you have never shown anyone?
- When did you last walk down the street you grew up on?
- When did you last stand in a queue for hours, and what for?
- What household job do you do badly on purpose?
- What do you keep in a drawer that you will never use again?
- What did you throw away that you still think about?
- What advice did you give me that you never followed yourself?
- What were you forbidden from doing at fifteen, and did you do it?
- What did you want to be at nineteen, and what did you do instead?
- Which of your mother's habits do you have and complain about?
- What did you leave behind when you moved, and do you want it back?
- What did you get away with at our age that we never could?
- What did you fail at that you are glad you failed at?
- What did you swear you would never become, and how close are you?
- What did you own at twenty that you would hide from us now?
- What job were you bad at, and how long did you last?
- What were you like at ten, and would you have liked me?
- What do you hate doing that you will not let anyone else do?
- What are you better at than your parents, and do they know?
- What did you keep from your childhood bedroom that makes no sense?
- What promise did you break and never regret?
- What appliance in this house has never worked, and why is it here?
- What did you learn from your grandmother that your parents never learned?
- What do you cook without measuring anything, and where did you learn it?
- How do you get a stain out of a white shirt?
- How do you fold a fitted sheet, and who showed you?
- What was your first job, and what did nobody warn you about?
- What did people do on a Saturday night when you were nineteen?
- What is your method for getting back to sleep at three in the morning?
- How do you know when it is going to rain?
- Who taught you to drive, and what did they shout?
- What could your mother do that you never learned to do?
- What tool do you own that nobody else knows how to use?
- What story about our family has nobody ever asked you to tell?
- What plant have you kept alive longest, and what does it need?
- What have you mended instead of replacing, and who taught you the stitch?
- What did you play outside at nine, and what were the rules?
- What were you doing the year before I was born?
- What did you once have to know how to do that nobody needs now?
- Guess what your parents were like at seventeen. Then let them correct you.
- Guess the job I wanted at ten, and why that fits me.
- Guess what I got told off for most as a child. Why that?
- Do I seem like someone who reads the instructions before building it? Why?
- Guess what I would grab first if the house flooded, and why that.
- Guess which food I refused to eat as a child, and how you know.
- Kids: guess what your parents did for fun before you were born.
- Guess the first band I loved, and what gave it away.
- Guess what still scares me, and why you think so.
- Guess who in this family I am most like, and where you see it.