I remember watching the news with my parents. Anchor man on the tv starts talking about “Illegal Aliens”, and I’m looking at the television freaking out. Then I looked at my parents faces. They don’t seem to be freaking out over this. WHY AREN’T THEY FREAKING OUT OVER THIS! THE ALIENS ARE COMING… ILLEGALLY!!!
My dad would’ve tried left, then right, then left, then crashed into whatever was straight ahead. Dangerously slow at left and right, but an uncanny sense of cardinal directions. So we’d say “Dad, quick, turn left!” “Turn…left?” “Turn WEST, now!” Screeeeeee…
Re: left and right and one hand making an L, you have to know which way an L goes. And whether to hold your hand palm up or down.
I’ve been able to fake it well enough.
I’m one of them, too. That article doesn’t address this, but I’ve read that it has to do with not crawling when you were a baby. My mother has told me that I skipped the crawling stage. One day I just started to walk (probably not well… I mean probably holding onto stuff). I met another woman who can’t do right/left and told her that theory, and she said that she had skipped the crawling stage, too. <shrug>
Holding out my left hand so the thumb and forefinger form an L helps sometimes, but not if I’m in a hurry. If you’re riding with me and want me to turn, just point. That’s the best thing.
Interestingly (or maybe not…) I have no problem telling north-south-east-west and can always tell you what direction anything is. So telling me to “turn east” will work fine. Except that most people don’t always know where the points of the compass are. I made a new friend in a class I’m attending and she’s like me: can’t do left/right but always knows NSEW.
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As someone said, when the bright light switch was on the floor, I honestly thought it was magic. Then again, I had an uncle who loved telling me that it was magic. He was the “cool” uncle because he would always talk to the kids when the rest of the adults were trying their best to ignore us. While not completely on topic, this is the same uncle that convinced me that socks had a left and right like shoes…I never mastered telling the difference in my socks.
He did help me with the whole left and right when it came to jar lids/ nuts and bolts/ faucets etc… “righty tighty, lefty loosey”, when he said that while demonstrating with a mason jar lid, it clicked and I never had a problem after that.
I, too, learned about sperm and eggs well before I read the article on reproduction in our encyclopedia and learned about how genitals are involved.
In Kintergarten we were caring for the class guinea pigs over winter break. The male and female were separated by a screen. I know that they had to get “very close” to make babies and was concerned the screen wasn’t enough to block the sperm. Which I guess swam through the air or something.
All these folks talking about how they don’t know their left from their right, but can sense NSEW intuitively…
When I was a kid, and found out about the cardinal directions and maps and such, I came to the conclusion that our house faced north. You step out the door, that’s your starting direction, so that’s the way your map’ll be oriented, right? So clearly, that was was north.
The house actually faced south. Nobody ever pointed this out to me, though people did point out east from west now and again - so I had conflicting information about which of east and west is which, for years.
And that’s why I’m completely screwed up regarding the directions, and as a side effect can’t navigate to save my soul. It’s fair to say that I never know which cardinal direction I’m facing, and to this day the only way I can remember which of east and west is which by remembering that the west coast is the California side and the east coast is the Florida side, so apparently west is that way and east is that way, maybe.
I suspect I’m not the only one who thought “midnight” was the deepest, darkest, most mysterious part of the night. I imagined it blacker than black, like you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
When the time eventually came that I happened to be awake at midnight, I recall being pretty disappointed at what it actually looked like.
mmm
When my mother was pregnant when I was not quite four, she decided I needed the facts of life explained to me, even though I had not inquired. She used a book meant for older children (because she was convinced I was “advanced”), and it had very explicit illustrations. I was horrified. Also disappointed that I would never have a baby, because no way was I ever doing that.
A little later, I was watching Upstairs, Downstairs with my parents, and one of the characters got pregnant. She wasn’t married. So that made me wonder if maybe some women just spontaneously became pregnant, because if she wasn’t married, and obviously, from the context of the show, was unhappily pregnant, she must not have had sex, because why else would you do that unless you wanted to have a baby?
So at least there was a little hope for me that I might have a baby, but cripes, now I had to worry about having a spontaneous pregnancy before I was married! Yikes! I lost some sleep over this.
When we went to Pennsylvania to visit my mother’s grandparents, my mother and her parents wouldn’t speak English, because none of her grandparents, other than her one grandfather, spoke English very well. My great-grandparents, as well as my grandparents, all came from what is now Slovakia. They spoke Slovak and Yiddish, but mostly Slovak. My grandparents were really young when they came here, and learned English as children, so they didn’t have accents.
I never really learned Slovak, and I didn’t learn Yiddish seriously until I lived with my aunt, but I knew lots of words that a three-year-old could get by on. My father knew Russian and Yiddish, and got by.
I thought that when you went to a different state in the US, people spoke a different language. So when we went to some other state, I would ask what language they were going to speak there, and my mother would act surprised, and say “English.”
The crawling thing is a myth. An institute in Philadelphia, “The Institute for Human Potential” claimed to be able to cure anything from autism to cerebral palsy with “patterning” and crawling therapy. They had kids who couldn’t walk lying on tables while “patterners” moved their arms and legs in crawling motions for hours, and kids with virtually any issue (lazy eye, dyslexia, literally anything) crawling around on the floor for hours and hours a day, and doing some other motions as well, some brachiating, and some running. The kids couldn’t go to school, because the crawling and patterning and such took up their whole days.
They were at work in the 70s, when a lot of people believed in things like “muscle memory,” and limitless human potential, and a lot of woo, and the Institute got a LOT of press. On of their core beliefs was that it was dangerous for kids to either skip crawling, or to crawl “incorrectly”: scooting, bunny-hopping, military crawling (on forearms), belly crawling, and anything but “classic” crawling was said to lead to problems.
And, of course, any time they got a kid in their program who either skipped crawling, or crawled unconventionally, that became their etiology. Nevermind that those things are really very, very common, so in ANY population, whether is be CEOs, guitar players, gay people, people who can’t tell left from right, dyslexics, 30-year-old virgins, or people who scored over 1450 on their SATs, you will find that about the same percentage of the population either skipped crawling, or crawled unconventionally.
I have two cousins who skipped crawling, and they both have doctorates. One has a Ph.D in microbiology, and is in Texas, on the Ebola vaccination team. The other has a JD, and works for the Illinois state’s attorney’s office. They are both multilingual, and can tell left from right just fine.
The Philadelphia Institutes have pretty much been debunked. For a personal story, I recommend No Time for Jello.
The mom’s friend may have told her this in the first place, and Mom was naive enough to believe her. I’ve definitely heard of abusive parents explaining kids’ injuries by saying that the child rolled off the changing table, fell off his bike, beat himself up, etc. 
I, too seem to have left-right mixed-up-ness while I can figure out directions. The L-R confusion caused problems as a pharmacist because I would mix up D (dextro- or right) and S (sinistra- or left), possibly because I’m left-handed myself. What solved this was when I worked with a fellow left-handed pharmacist whose surname started with S, as does my first name, and he had the same issue himself until he came up with that mnemonic.
I was a Target cashier when I was in my late teens, in the early 1980s. One day, a boy who was about 10 years old ran up to his mother in a panic and said, “We have to call the police! That man over there is going to rob a bank!” Mom replied, “What makes you think that he’s going to rob a bank?” and the boy replied, “HE’S BUYING PANTYHOSE!”
Mom’s response: “That man is not going to rob a bank. His wife probably sent him to the store.”
Ive been trying and trying to come up with something else i could contribute to this thread but I’m stumped. I guess I was just a smart ass kid.
I was offered a “soft drink” by a neighbor. I was 9 years old. I didn’t realize drinks could be soft or hard.
I didn’t know cicadas made that buzzing noise in the trees.
You don’t say. :dubious:
On my first day of Grade 1, I went home for lunch with a broken heart, full of shame (I still remember the overwhelming feeling) and sobbed to my mother that it turned out that Grade 1 was too hard for me and I was too stupid to go to school.
I had thought that the purpose of school was to test how much you knew. I had somehow not understood that you were also supposed to learn some new concepts and that it was all right if you didn’t already know every single thing. The day started out fine, with the teacher telling us things I already knew and asking us questions I was able to answer.
Then came the moment when the teacher discussed something (I don’t remember what, I just remember the horror) that I wasn’t familiar with. The shock of it filled me. I had failed the test of knowing everything I was supposed to know on the very first day! I had shamed my whole family by turning out to be an idiot who couldn’t even pass the first day of Grade 1.
Yes, i was a smartass kid.
When I first heard the term “soda fountain” I thought it would be like the water fountains at school. Press the button and drink right from the arcing, bubbling stream of Coke or 7-Up.
I like to think I’m good with directions EWNS, but I’m really not. It’s just because I live on a coast, and I know how to get to the beach. If I lived inland, I’d be useless.
I vaguely remember being a really little kid and going up to my sister’s school and seeing a nun and being completely mystified by her outfit. This was before they went all modern and got into shorter dresses and showed their hair. She had that cardboard “forehead” thing and the cotton thing around her face and, to me, she didn’t seem to have any legs at all. I’d never seen anybody in a full-length anything (this is Australia, we wear as little as possible, it’s hot) and I didn’t really “get” that it was her clothes that made her look strange, I thought she was very strange. I was also scared of her, and hid. She was perfectly nice to me, but she scared me.
One day when The Nephew was almost-four, I picked him up from school and we spent some time in a local park. Having already realized that Aunt Nava would sometimes answer questions other adults ignored, he asked me about leaves falling off trees even though it was late spring and according to books and teachers, leaves fall off trees on the fall. I explained that sometimes adults oversimplify; they take something that’s got a bunch of “mostly” and “mainly” and “sometimes” and explain it as if it was “all the time”. He was furious that adults would lie just to make explaining things be less work.
“Too simple” became a sort of key word between us.
His mother is one of those people whose world isn’t black and white as in old movies, with shades of grey: it is either stark black or stark white. Sin City minus the colored blobs. Her first explanations of babymaking were along the lines of “when a man and a woman are married, sometimes God will make a baby appear inside her belly and after nine months they become a mommy and a daddy” (I understand The Nephew did point out that the initial man-and-woman didn’t match the final mom-and-dad, that boy and I are very much related). So, he was mightily confused when someone he knew got pregnant out of wedlock. How come she got pregnant, when she wasn’t married? Why had God put a baby in her belly if she didn’t have a husband? And why was everybody talking as if her boyfriend was now a daddy?
I believe that explaining that what he’d been told was too simple and that you don’t have to be married and that most pregnancies involve the future mother and father doing some hugging and kissing and a special kind of touching called “sex” or “fucking” with each other (just kissing and hugging isn’t enough, you need to do the fucking)… is one of those things for which my sister-in-law has still not forgiven me. But seriously, fuck her sideways with her own ObGyn book.
You know those big electrical boxes that are sometimes on the corner of a street? I remember asking my father what was in them. He said, “bubble gum.” To this day I still kinda think they’re filled with bubble gum.
I thought the loser in a presidential election got to be Vice President. I finally asked my mom what the loser became, and she said, “Nothing.” This didn’t make any sense to me, and it still doesn’t.
We had a Sex Ed class in 6th grade. The teacher explained that the husband’s sperm got into the wife’s vagina. Everyone was content with that fact… except me. I raised my hand and asked “How does the sperm get from the husband’s body to the wife’s body? I don’t think the teacher ever answered that question.
I have a cousin who believes that all dogs are male and all cats are female. The dog inseminates the cat, who has a litter of mixed puppies and kittens. This cousin is not a child; she’s in her 60s.
The exact same thing happened to me. Finally my father jerked me away from the faucet, yelling "I have to do every goddamn thing myself around here!