Friday open thread: unlearnt life skills

[dolorosa_12]

Greetings from another Friday on Catastrophe Brexit Island. The mists have rolled back in, I've been swimming this morning, and I picked up a very nice cup of takeaway coffee on the way home, but unfortunately these kinds of small pleasures aren't enough to distract from the ongoing slow-motion car crash that is British politics.

However, life must go on, and so I bring you another prompting question for this week's open thread:

Is there any life skill you wished you learnt (as a child, as a young adult, at some unspecified point in the past) but for some reason never did? How would this skill have helped you in your day-to-day life? (Please feel free to interpret 'life skill' in whatever way you like.)



My answer to this question is sewing — specifically, sewing items of clothing from scratch, using a sewing machine. I grew up with a mother who had never learnt this skill herself (she came from a generation where all girls were taught to sew at school, but proudly told me that my grandmother had done all her sewing assignments/homework for her and she never learnt a thing) and was for this reason unable to teach it to her own daughters. Weirdly, she did know how to knit and knitted almost all the jumpers and cardigans my sister and I wore as small children. She and my dad have fairly basic sewing repair skills (like sewing a button, fixing small tears), and I did learn these things myself, but I can't do them neatly and my RSI makes it very hard to hold and thread a needle.

Obviously I could have learnt how to sew another way, but there was no opportunity at school and therefore I would have had to pay someone to teach me, and do so during my free time, and this never really seemed like a worthwhile thing to do. However, I still regret not knowing how to sew, because sewing my own clothes would be cheaper, and I would be free to make things in styles that fitted me properly and suited me, rather than being beholden to whatever cut of dress or skirt the fashion industry deems in style in any given year. (There have been large swathes of time in my adult life — think periods of five or ten years — when every cut of dress and skirt, and sometimes even jumper or shirt has been deeply unflattering and virtually unwearable. As for trousers, I haven't worn trousers (other than leggings and pyjamas) since about 2004.)

Weirdly enough, I have a cousin the same age as me who is a sewing expert. She has two children and makes all their clothes, and loads of clothes for herself. She was taught by her mother (one of my mother's younger sisters, who is really talented at all kinds of crafts). However, this cousin has often vocally complained that her mother never taught her how to cook, and that she struggles with this particular life skill. For my part, my parents are incredible cooks, my sister and I were in the kitchen basically since we were able to stand up, and have been capable of cooking independently since we were about ten years old. It's funny how life works out — the things you pick up as a child as 'crucial life skills' tend to be the things your own parents value, and the stuff they perceive as tedious and unimportant fall by the wayside.

Comments

[yarnofariadne]

It's sewing for me as well! My grandmother sews and a great many of my outfits as a child were made by her. She never taught any of her children to sew, and in turn my mother never taught me. But I've recently acquired my own secondhand sewing machine and I'm trying to teach myself to use it. It's honestly not going so hot thus far, but I'm determined. I want to make my own clothes and be able to tailor the ones I already have, and that desire is motivating me to keep trying.

[mific]

I wish I'd learned to enjoy doing some sort of regular exercise every day. I grew up before jogging was a thing, or gyms, except for boxing or specific sports clubs, and I never developed it as a habit that was self-sustaining. Doing any sort of regular exercise has always been a struggle, and often hasn't happened.

[blackcatofmisery]

There are so many life skills my generation and younger would've been taught in school, if funding wasn't cut to the arts and specifically home economics courses. Basic cooking, sewing, how to pay bills, managing bank accounts, car maintenance, social etiquette, phone etiquette and writing proper letters... I know it changed a lot over time. It started out as a college course, fun fact, and what remains now is more a cooking class than anything else, but these were still taught in school. Now, kids learn how to do things from their parents or, more commonly in my experience, on the fly as young adults.

=^..^=~

[lilysea]

Emotional self regulation.

These days, a lot of kids learn this from their parents,

but I had to learn it as a teenager/adult from books and therapists.

[pauraque]

I wish I'd been taught anything about car maintenance and repair. This wasn't an area of knowledge for either of my parents (my dad did teach me how to fix a computer, but he was definitely not a car guy) so I grew up without a clue about how to do anything besides putting gas in the tank. I still feel intimidated by cars and it's a big deal for me when I'm able to even refill the wiper fluid by myself!

[nerakrose]

I think wiring, maybe? When putting in a new ceiling light, there's a degree of wiring involved, and I have no clue how to do it. I'm not a particular fan of ceiling lights to begin with, so when I was faced with this issue in my first flat in Copenhagen, I just... bought only floor lamps or table lamps to light the place. I lived like that for six years, lol. Still, it seems like a useful thing to know.

I have pretty solid and rounded set of life skills, from baking to sewing to cooking to cleaning to mending things - I even learned how to change a car tyre as a child, helping my dad change tyres on our car every season (and ones that had blown, on the roadside). I don't drive so dunno when I would ever need this skill, but hey, if I'm in your car and your tyre blows, I can change it for you so long as you have the tools and a spare. I can build things too, and I don't mean just IKEA furniture - I have built furniture from scratch. I know how to paint a room and put up wallpaper and how to tile a floor and all (or many) manners of home renovation things. We moved a lot when I was a kid, and so I've been involved in home renovations from a young age.

My parents are also both excellent cooks and bakers and let us help in the kitchen from when we were little, and they both sew and mend clothes. My dad taught me how to hem jeans (like me, he has short legs and always has to take up the hem on new trousers to make them fit.) And they taught us how to clean a house. (I have a vivid memory of teaching an American exchange student from Vermont how to clean windows when it was annual deep cleaning day in our student housing, because she didn't know how to do it. Her mum had never taught her how to clean anything because they had a cleaner. it was mind-blowing to 2010!me that such people existed.)

My mum sewed a lot of our clothes for us when we were young since she didn't work (90s rural Iceland didn't lend itself to many job opportunities) and we couldn't afford store bought clothes all the time. I picked up some things from her. Come to think of it, I even learned basic gardening skills, mostly for how to grow root vegetables, rhubarb, strawberries and redcurrants since that's about what we could grow in Iceland, but we did grow it. once we were in Denmark we grew also tomatoes and chillis and other things that can grow in a greenhouse so I learned that too. I learned how to forage for native berries (bilberries, stone bramble, blueberries, crowberries) and how to turn berries and rhubarb into different types of jam and jellies.

I think part of my skillset definitely also comes from school, since most of the schools I've attended have had hands-on classes in several subjects (changing every year or every semester), so I've done basic wood working, leather working, ceramics, cooking, food science, sewing, embroidery, knitting, painting, more wood working, etc. all at school in addition to things I learned at home.

But wiring, man, I never learned how to do that.

(edited for readability)

[likeadeuce]

I wish I'd learned makeup! This seems shallow but the few times I've had makeup professionally done I loved it but have no chance of duplicating it myself.

[sophia_sol]

I wish I had learned a second language while I was still a young enough child that brain plasticity makes language learning much easier and more intuitive. I don't know that this would have any practical benefits to my life, but I value the idea of being multilingual, and it seems like western english speakers are one of the few populations that thinks it's normal to speak only one language. And I just like language!

[chestnut_pod]

Sewing for me as well! I can do the little repair things you mentioned -- buttonholes, busted seams, patching, a bit of darning -- but anything were I have to structurally make or change a piece of clothing? Not a clue. I've never used a sewing machine, even.

[futurism]

I'm suuuuuper jealous of crafty people who are good with their hands. Sewing, building things, fixing them, changing car tires, customizing furniture, you name it, I'm jealous of it all. You could say I grew up fairly sheltered to not having learned most of these things but I'm trying to make up for it ;; though I guess it's hard to come up with excuses to sew things unless nothing actually needs fixing?

My mother never learned how to sew herself for the reasons you mention so I'm dutifully shaking your hand about our shared background. In fact, seems we are both quite similar at this question! I also at least am a good enough cook, but would love to be more crafty as a whole.

[thawrecka]

My parents taught me how to cook and sew, and I spend a lot of time avoiding doing either. 🤣 But I do wish they taught me more about home repair and maintenance. When my mother died I was too young to learn these things, and my father was always too disorganised after that to do a lot of these things, let alone teach me.

[monksandbones]

I wish I'd learned a little bit about machines and how they work and how to work on them. I work in a pretty machinery-heavy environment now, and while maintaining and repairing machinery isn't my job, I still find it intimidating, and it would be useful to be less helpless in the face of machine-related issues (or even able to identify when a machine is having an issue, let alone diagnose it). I'm slowly learning a bit more–I understand how multiple types of valves work now, for instance–but it's hard because I have no underlying framework or understanding for the knowledge to stick to!

[lirazel]

Definitely sewing! Also any foreign language I could have learned as a child. Languages are so hard for as an adult, and it breaks my heart to think I could be fluent in something if I'd started at like 5.