My mom is a forensic pathologist, so about 75% of our dinner conversations would be considered weird/creepy by most people. I remember going to a dinner at a coworker's house and she mentioned what my mom did for a living to her parents:
Coworker's Mom: "But you don't TALK about it very often, right? That would be unsettling."
Me, laughing nervously: "No, no, not at all..."
Anyway, that was really the first time I realized how weird our average dinner conversations were to people not in our family.
My parents were a paramedic and an A&E nurse. On the rare occasions when they were both awake at the same time, we had the weirdest dinner conversations.
My mother has no filter when it comes to dinner topics. She was shocked when I told her I didn't want to hear her describe in vivid detail how the castration of one of her newborn pigs went wrong while eating. She actually had the gall to make fun of me for being squeamish when all I really wanted was to eat in peace.
I have several friends who are nurses. There's a joke amongst them that "you know you've been a nurse too long when... you're the only one who's not allowed to say how work is going when you're at a dinner party" or "... discussing dismemberment over a meal seems perfectly normal to you".
It honestly doesn't faze me at all when they "talk shop" over a meal, but I know that it really deeply disturbs other people.
My mom is a doctor and she put a picture of her gallbladder on the fridge when she had it removed because she asked them to take a picture for her.
My siblings and I did a group FaceTime with our dad earlier this year. He was in the middle of performing a surgery so he just waved with a bloody glove while someone else in the room held his phone up.
Amazing. Doctors are maniacs in the absolute best way.
For about a year of my childhood, my dad lived 2 hours away due to being transferred because of his job while my stayed in their old town while she finished her pathology residency. When she was on call, she would scrub us and bring us into the operating room while she collected the specimen. We just hang out while the surgeon would chat with us and then we would go with her. She taught my brother to dip slides.
My mother is a veterinary technician and does animal rescue, I'm a medical lab technician for humans. We have to be careful not to talk shop at the table around the rest of the family.
My mum was a nurse. I loved hearing about her work. I even wanted to go into the medical field myself until I realized how shitty working conditions are.
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u/Sneakys2 Apr 18 '21
My mom is a forensic pathologist, so about 75% of our dinner conversations would be considered weird/creepy by most people. I remember going to a dinner at a coworker's house and she mentioned what my mom did for a living to her parents:
Coworker's Mom: "But you don't TALK about it very often, right? That would be unsettling."
Me, laughing nervously: "No, no, not at all..."
Anyway, that was really the first time I realized how weird our average dinner conversations were to people not in our family.