I had cousins who were older who were boys. I thought when I got to be their age I, too, would become a boy. My cousin who was my age thought this, too. (one of them was her brother, who might have been the source of this misinformation). We couldn’t wait! (I think we were about four at the time.) We also thought that when we had reached the advanced age of 7 we, too, would be able to get the basket through the hoop.
I was a competitive and kind of obsessive kid and in 6th grade I decided to become the champion of the sit-up. My mother caught me with my legs hooked under the bed when I was up to about 75 and gave me a stern lecture on how girls shouldn’t do sit-ups because it would do bad things to our bodies. While I believed this–why would my mother lie about something like that?–I continued to do sit-ups but furtively, with the lights out, kind of a guilty pleasure, and “lost” the note my gym teacher sent home praising my fitness level. (I still have no idea WTF she meant although one look at my mother should have convinced even a 6th-grader that she was NOT a good source of fitness information!)
Like another poster, I thought that do not drink and drive meant any kind of beverage. Oh, and that the candy-free checkout line at the grocery store gave out free candy.
I can’t remember if I told anyone about this at the time, since it’s not very flattering, but I thought a little Buddha statue my grandparents had was really a statue of my grandfather. What can I say - I didn’t know who Buddha was, and believe me if you saw a picture of my grandfather you’d understand how I could think that.
I know I thought a lot of weird stuff back then, but I can’t remember anything else right now.
I once thought when the movie, The Wizard of Oz, was made, the moment it switched to color was the exact moment the old '50s TVs became color TVs.
Even though I knew banks charged loan interests, I thought there was no way it could be enough to pay everyone their interest, plus pay salaries, equipment, etc. I was convinced bankers weren’t paid. They must be doing charity work.
When young, not only did I think The People’s Court was real, I also thought all the TV courtroom dramas were too. I wondered why the criminal would confess the crime and laugh at expecting to get away with it behind close doors, but when lying in the court room, why wasn’t the camera man speaking up? I also tried to figure out where they fit in the judicial system. Appeals -> People’s -> Supreme?
Finally, I also was sure that Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was somewhere in my town.
I just thought of something else…When I was…maybe 9 or 10, I heard someone on the radio mention that David Bowie and Elton John were “bisexual”. I thought this meant that they had both girl and boy parts. I couldn’t really understand that concept…ya know…this being a few decades before internet porn and all…and I asked my mother about it. She didn’t really give me an answer, and just got real uncomfortable. I never asked her any sex related questions after that.
Once, at the supermarket, I asked my mum for a Mars bar or something, as we were leaving. She told me she was sorry, but she didn’t have any money left in her purse. I thought this meant our family had run out of money completely, and we’d have to live on the street.
Also (and this is very bizarre) at the supermarket, I saw a dog sitting there, panting, with its tongue lolling out. I thought the tongue was a piece of pink meat, like salami, that dog owners put in their dogs mouth’s to keep them happy. Halfway round the supermarket aisles, I saw a box of dog food that had a picture of a dog with its tongue hanging out, and I thought “Ah! That must be a box of the little bits of pink meat that people give to dogs!”
I used to think that I could see molecules. You know, when your eyes get all weird from looking into the horizon at dusk or into lights and you see all those little tiny dots? Ya, those were molecules.
I also used to think that the shadows from the telephone wires were tire marks on the street. I used to try to find parallel ones and assigne them to cars, the others were from motorcycles. Crazy drivers. . . .
I got a good laugh in kindergarten when we were saying what we wanted to be when we grew up and I announced, “Lion.” Hey, I thought it was a valid career option.
… thought Jesus was born at Christmas and died by Easter, same year. Didn’t quite understand how he grew up and did all that stuff so fast. My gramma tried to explain it to me, but I just didn’t get it. I was about 3 at the time.
When I was in preschool, my father, an avid fisherman told me that a hooker was a person who caught a lot of fish. He additionally always told me to grow up and make a lot of money for Daddy. So, there we were in our Preschool class having the “what do you want to be when you grow up” talk. So, I raised my hand and very sweetly replied “I am going to be a hooker and make a lot of money for my daddy”
Boy did they have a talk with him.
I also used to beleive that the people in the television could see me.
Also, if you turned the light switch on and off and on and off really fast that you would burn the house down (another thing my dad told me)
I also used to think that the Song “Mr. Sandman” was “Mr. Sanchez”
Like others, I believed that admonitions against drinking and driving referred to any kind of beverage.
I also thought that the thing you packed clothes in when you went traveling was a “soupcase”. My dad ate lots of canned soup and used to stash some in the suitcase for fear that there would be nothing he liked to eat where we were going.
Whenever I saw the sign “Blind Driveway”, I thought it was the driveway of a person who was blind. It made sense to me that they would warn us innocent passersby that a blind person might pull his car out into the road at any time. I remember being surprised that so many blind people were allowed to drive.
Surely I was not the only kid who thought this…'fess up!
And I got upset when my parents drove anywhere behind construction vehicles that said “Do Not Follow”. So I understand the emotional trauma of the Do Not Pass signs.
I used to think the baritone sax in The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” was really a kazoo. You would not believe how old I was when I found out the truth.
My family was fairly religious and I remember being told that it is a sin to swear. I always thought this meant I shouldn’t say “I swear it’s true” (I already knew I shouldn’t use cuss words). When I was around 15 there was a TV commercial for a razor with a football player saying “I swear by it”. Then his mom says “I’ve told him so many times not to swear”. That’s when it finally dawned on me what they meant.
If we can include misunderstood metaphors…hehehe… Once in Sunday school, the teacher told us a story about a man who lived in a dark cave. One day, he found a way out of the tunnel and into the light. The light was too bright for him, though, so he went back into the dark cave.
Now, as adults, we can see that he was talking about a sinner who saw the light of the Christian way then turned his back on it to be a sinner once again. I took the story literally. I asked “Why didn’t he just come out of the cave at night so his eyes could get used to the light real slow?” The crabby old bastard of a teacher just told me to shut up. Hey, I was like 8 years old:wally
My mom had a set of medical encyclopedias, which were the cause of most of my childhood misconceptions:
Sperm looked like tadpoles, and embryos looked reptillian, so I thought women got pregnant by skinny-dipping in a pond while tadpoles swam up inside of them. The tadpole would turn into a frog first, then into a baby.
Later when I learned that men were somehow involved, I thought the man peed in the woman.
I also had a fear that when I was taking a bath, I had to get out of the tub as soon as the water started draining out, because when the water became even with my pee hole, my bladder would feel with bath water and explode.
I somehow got the idea that anyone standing directly in front of, behind, or next to me could hear my thoughts. So if anyone approached me from one of those directions, I stepped smartly away. It made things a bit difficult until I was able to prove to myself that it wasn’t true by thinking nasty things about the people next to me. I still haven’t broken that habit.
“One day when I had been sent on an errand I went into a sweetshop a mile or more from the school and bought some chocolates. As I came out of the shop I saw on the opposite pavement a small sharp-faced man who seemed to be staring very hard at my schoolcap. Instantly a horrible fear went through me. There could be no doubt as to who the man was. He was a spy placed there by Sim!.. All that day and the next I waited for the summons to the study, and was surprised when it did not come. It did not seem to me strange that the head-master of a private school should dispose of an army of Informers, and I did not even imagine that he would have to pay them. I assumed that any adult, inside or outside, would collaborate voluntarily in preventing us from breaking the rules.”
-George Orwell
When I was in the sixth grade, a fight occured after school. I wasn’t involved in the fight, but probably came to watch it. I don’t remember if the fight ever occured, but I do recall a woman in a car slowing down near where the fight was in the process of happening. She may have said something like “Knock it off, kids.” On the other hand, maybe she didn’t say anything. Maybe she was slowing down to avoid a squirrel.
Nonetheless, a classmate of mine said, very matter-of-factly, that the woman must have been a sort of spy (he didn’t use that exact word) employed by our school, whose job it was to study all of the students’ faces in order to be able to identify anyone who was involved in a fight near the school!
My classmate wasn’t the only one who was paranoid. Much earlier, when we were in the second grade, I lost sleep over people threatening to report me to the principal for various (imagined or real) infractions. Oddly enough, to “bust on” someone was not looked down upon; the person doing the reporting was not branded a “snitch” or a “cry-baby.”
And everyone seemed to live in fear of the principal. You’d really think that people had been told to report to the principal’s office and had never been seen again. I can’t explain the root of this fear, except perhaps that our principal looked a little like the Shah of Iran.
The one time I was ever sent to principal’s office was for fighting. Not fighting with any kind of malice. Just boys being boys. I waited in there for what seemed like hours (it was really probably 20 minutes), then the teacher who caught us gave the principal her description of what happened. The principal told us not to do it again, had us shake hands (a nice touch), and that was that. And yet even after that experience, the threat of being sent to the principal was on par with, I don’t know… the worst thing he could actually do was give the offender a spanking (this was 1985-1986), and I’d never heard of him even doing that (I’m pretty sure he needed parental permission, and possibly a warrant signed by the Governor).
I’m a little embarassed by this. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who had this intense fear.
I never asked her any sex related questions after that.
