Sorry to resurrect an old thread (I couldn’t decide whether it is better to resurrect or repost)
I remembered last night that as a kid I believed cats were female and dogs were male (exclusively).
I think I reasoned that girls look different than boys, and cats look different than dogs, so cats must be girls and dogs must be boys.
And while I am at it - I believed the world actually was black and white in the past, and that all the adults I knew were alive when those old fashioned ships with sails were around (roughly during Nelson’s time)
That if I pee’d after I ejaculated I would see my sperm swimming around in the toilet and so when I ejaculated and went pee aftewards I never looked into the toilet because I didn’t want to see my sperm swimming in the water.
One day, when I was about four years old, my mom was telling me about all the things she used to do when I was a baby. She told me about how I couldn’t feed myself, so she had to feed me, and I couldn’t walk, so she had to carry me, and I couldn’t pick up my toys, so she had to hold my little rattle in front of me, and so on. Once she finished with this little list, I started to cry. My mom got worried, and asked me what was wrong. I looked up at her, tears in my eyes, and asked:
"You mean, when I was little, I was just a head?!
Needless to say, that’s one of my mom’s favorite stories, and one I’ve heard much too often over the years. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to know I’ve shared it with the SDMB of my own volition. 'Course, a lot of the comments here are making me feel better, too
Here’s one about sex that I believed until I was…well, I’d rather not admit how old I was, actually!
I thought that when a man and woman had intercourse, the man completely withdrew his penis from the vagina and re-penetrated with each thrust. Of course it is possible to have sex this way and I’m sure many people enjoy it, but it didn’t occur to me until I was mumble years old that it wasn’t strictly necessary. I suspect my confusion was due to descriptions of intercourse as involving a lot of “in and out”. I never thought a lot about this particular topic (it did not play a prominent role in my usual sexual thoughts), and I don’t think I even realized that I held this belief until I realized that I’d been wrong!
Luckily this happened when I was alone. I imagine there must be similarly confused people who suffered through awkward first sexual encounters before they realized that they were making things more difficult than they had to be.
I guess I was about 9 when some mean little bitch my dad’s girlfriend babysat convinced me that if I swallowed watermelon seeds, they would become roaches in my stomach and crawl around frantically trying to get out. I was (am) TERRIFIED of roaches, but I loved watermelon, so I was meticulously careful in not swallowing the seeds… the one time I did, I cried so hard it took whoever was watching me at least an hour to calm me down enough to even find out why I was crying, much less correct my misconception.
I’m adopted, and when all of my friends got mad at their parents, they would say “I hate me parents, I must be adopted” So for some reason I thought my parents lied to me and that I was really their biological child and they didn’t want me to know.
I used to want to be a boy when I was very small [about 4, I think]. My brother got great toys like electric train sets and Meccano, and I just got stupid dolls that got stuck in the back of a cupboard and forgotten. I really, really hated dolls. After some observation of my brother, I decided that the only difference between boys and girls was that boys could pee standing up, and that if I learned to do that I would become a boy.
I must have put a lot of thought into this, because I invented a few things [don’t ask] that I thought would do the trick. I was really disapointed when I tried them out and none of them worked - I just got wet socks.
I got rid of my ‘inventions’ and was too ashamed to tell anyone - I had been looking forward so much to the moment when I would inform my mum that I was now a boy and wanted proper toys.
A friend of mine once told me that when she was little she thought that when she got older she’d turn into a boy. She said she remembers walking past a soccer field with her mom and saying, “When I’m a boy, I’ll play soccer there too!” She thinks it may have been because she had several older brothers and often heard “Because they’re older” and “Because they’re boys” as explanations for why they were allowed to do things that she wasn’t. So she figured that being older and being a boy amounted to essentially the same thing.
