I thought it was just going to be a fun Instagram reel, musing about funny sayings my parents used in the 1970s and 80s that seem to have disappeared from our vernacular. Those little one-liners that I wasn’t sure were unique to my own family or whether every Australian kid heard them.

‘I’ll give you something to cry about!’
‘Money doesn’t grow on trees!’
‘Because I said so!’

I laughed while I was making it because I could hear my mum’s voice so clearly I almost looked over my shoulder. The saying that sparked the video was ‘Stiff shit’.

She wasn’t a big swearer, which somehow made it funnier. It was simply accepted Australian parenting vocabulary.

So I hit publish not expecting to garner much interest. A week later, the post had clocked more than 300,000 views and over 2,500 comments. Apparently I wasn’t the only one whose parent said ‘stiff shit’.

People who would normally scroll past were stopping and adding their own family sayings. Some told stories of parents no longer here. Every comment seemed to unlock another memory for someone else.

Reading through them felt like standing around a burnt-orange Laminex kitchen bench while Mum brought out crumbed chops (remember when lamb was affordable?), mash swimming in butter and salt, peas nobody wanted and tomato sauce from the glass bottle that refused to cooperate until it all came out at once. The comments made me think of other childhood memories: Dad hosing the garden like water was a cheap and endless resource, Nana on her couch with a biscuit tin full of sewing supplies, my siblings and I racing to the toilet in the ad break so we wouldn’t miss the final song on Young Talent Time.

It made me wonder why something so ordinary had struck such a nerve. The obvious answer is nostalgia.

Here’s a fun fact that might help you win trivia. When the word first appeared in the seventeenth century, doctors used it to diagnose soldiers who became physically unwell from longing for home (we would now refer to this as ‘homesickness’). Imagine your GP diagnosing you with ‘nostalgia’ after you smile at the smell of sunscreen and the sound of the ABC test pattern.

Researchers have since downgraded it from a ‘disease’ to ‘actually quite useful’. Nostalgia helps us feel connected. It reminds us of who we are and where we came from. It steadies us during the bits of life that feel like they’re moving too fast and cost too much. According to expert Krystine Batcho, PhD “nostalgia is an emotional experience that unifies”.

Modern life is A LOT. Everything updates before we’ve worked out the previous version. News arrives every minute and is on a relentless 24/7 cycle. Phones ping and flash for our attention. Even a trip to the supermarket now involves a loyalty card, an app, and a small mortgage for a punnet of strawberries. Sometimes your brain just needs the comfort of somewhere it’s already been. A song, a smell, hearing someone say, ‘What do you think this is? Bush week?’

Memory has a lovely habit of smoothing the edges, though, doesn’t it? It lets the warm moments rise to the surface. Summer evenings, daylight savings, mozzies, a street full of kids on bikes until mothers yelled ‘dinner’s ready!’. Drinking from the garden hose because nobody owned a drink bottle the size of a small esky. Riding in the back of a station wagon facing the car behind you (without seatbelts) while the footy commentary blared on the radio. Fighting with your sibling over who got to wind down the window.

Nostalgia reminds us that people shaped us. Even the ones we spent our entire teenage years insisting understood absolutely nothing.

I also think it gives us permission to slow down. For a few minutes, we stop thinking about everything waiting for us. We wander back through ordinary moments that didn’t seem important at the time. A squashed Vegemite sandwich on white bread wrapped in clingfilm. A cassette tape that unravelled in the car stereo. Sunnyboys that required a degree in engineering and a good set of teeth. The smell of Aeroguard and hot vinyl seats. Watching Hey Hey It’s Saturday like everyone else because there were only a handful of channels.

Memories…

My father and his four wayward children. (Also, look at that couch!)

Some of those sayings from my Instagram post made me laugh because they sound wonderfully ridiculous now.

‘Went to see a man about a dog.’ (In answer to where have you been.)
‘Because y is a crooked letter and you can’t straighten it!’ (In answer to the question ‘why?’)

A few made me wince.

‘She went mad so we shot her.’ (wow!)
‘Go play in the traffic!’
‘Wipe that smile off your face or I’ll do it for you!’

Most of them made me miss someone.

But rose-coloured glasses don’t always camouflage the cracks. As one of the commenters said, ‘There is not one part of ‘70s or ‘80s parenting I’d bring back, even though my entire job exists because of it.’ She’s a therapist. I’ve thought about that comment approximately forty times since.

The seventies and eighties were simpler times. There is a lot about that era that needs to stay in the past and I don’t think feeling nostalgic means we are wishing for everything to return. Instead we are remembering the people and how life felt, of a childhood that existed before emails, doomscrolling and the sixth streaming service we didn’t mean to subscribe to.

Those silly repeated sayings became part of us whether we liked it or not. What I realised was that everyone in those comments was searching for the same thing.

Recognition.

‘Your dad said that too?’ ‘I haven’t thought about that in years.’

Strangers all laughing at the same ridiculous expressions, realising our stories overlap in ways we never notice until someone says the magic words ‘Were you born in a tent?’

Apparently, thousands of us were.

What were some of your parents’ favourite sayings? Join the conversation on Substack.

If I’m honest about … nostalgia

If I’m honest about … therapy