I had some weird beliefs that were pretty understandable from a preschooler’s point of view–things like “Germs come from Germany.” But I also believed that the toilet was alive and might come after me and flush me down when no one else was around.
And I believed that fairies like Tinkerbell were real. Even in the first grade I hoped my parents would get me one for Christmas. I thought it would be like a parakeet and I could keep it in a cage in my room.
When I started first grade I believed the principal had a paddle with nails in it and if I talked too loudly in class I’d get hit with it. I figured this tale must be true, because some older kids had said it was and of course they wouldn’t lie. (My younger brother heard the story a few years later when he started school, though by this time the principal had abandoned the nail studded paddle and upgraded to an electric one.)
Just remembered that I also believed that all my stuffed animals had feelings. I almost never took my stuffed animals to bed with me, because I was afraid it would hurt all the other stuffed animal’s feelings. haha
Although, there were times when I would sleep with 30 stuffed animals. haha
In a weird way, I still hate to see them in my closet! I feel guilty that they are boxed up and in the dark.
I must have watched too many Toy-Story-type movies when I was a kid.
I was confused by the words “heroin” and “heroine”. I could never understand why people praised “heroines” because clearly they took heroin, and doing drugs was a bad thing. I really didn’t figure out the difference until I was about 12.
One for the holiday season–I remembered this just recently while watching A Christmas Carol.
When Jacob Marley talks about the chain he wears, how he forged it in life, etc., I took that rather literally. As a small child, I thought that he had actually made the chain, that it was his hobby.
When my brother was maybe 3 or 4, I can remember him digging through Mom’s purse while we were driving in the car. He pulled out a maxi pad and said “Hey Mom, what is this? Oh yeah it’s an air freshener!” and proceded to stick it to the window.
My mom had just gone grocery shopping and my brothers and I were putting them away. My youngest brother (age 5) pulled out a box of pads and asked my other brother (age 7) where they went. My brother responded in that authoritative tone that only 7-year-olds have:
“Those are Mom’s fart pads. They go in her bathroom.”
As for myself, I always thought that when someone quit drinking, they quit drinking everything. I could never figure out why anyone would want to do that.
I thought my parents carved their schoolwork into stone when they were kids.
The kids on my brothers football team used to talk about people getting ‘cut’. I thought they literally cut you.
I thought some cars might be a little faster but basically every car on the road could achieve the same speed if you pressed the gas pedal hard enough.
I am from Utah… I remember having a knock down drag out yelling fight with a kid in about 3rd grade. I was INSISTING that Utah was really a square and that it was only on that particular map that Wyoming overlapped part of Utah…
I think I absorbed to many of those “Greenland isnt really this big its only because the map is flat” lectures…
I’m the guy in the Truman Show. I’m 14 and at times I still think it. I tap on my bathroom mirror to surprise anyone who is looking in. I’m just brushing my teeth and then I lean in to get a close look. Then… WHAM! I smack the mirror in vain… or is it?
Hahah…that’s funny. That was one thing that sprung to mind for this subject, but I didn’t really want to post it, but since you took the first step for me…
it was actually the opposite for me. Up until I was around 12 or so, I thought that only women and not men had hair growing in their pubic regions. This was because the only naked male bodies I had seen were of my friends (who were all around the same age as me), and the only female naked bodies I had seen were my mother and some women in playboy (when you’re 10 years old and in the early 90’s, it’s hard to come across anything more hardcore than playboy, which never has any men in it.) On a similar note, I thought that ALL women did…including my classmates. I thought that it was something that came in within a couple days of birth, just like babies who are born bald. Lo and behold the day that I actually get to see one of my classmates…and this was in 9th grade so it created even more confusion for me (I had figured out that the male assumption was wrong by then at least). There are things I still don’t get about women, but that’s a totally different thread
Argh, I guess I didn’t finish the sentence. I meant to say it’s harder to find anything more hardcore than Playboy when you are 10 years old and living in 1990
I’m another one with memories before the age of four. Until I was about 5 or so, I used to think that the vacuum cleaner and the lawn mower worked on the same principle- that the carpet grew and had to be cut, just like the lawn.
I also used to mis-hear things pretty regularly. I also thought it was ‘the smorning’ instead of ‘this morning’. I thought the first part of the US national anthem, “…by the dawn’s early light”, was actually “by the dawnzer lee-light.” And part of the alphabet contained something called an ‘ellamenopee’, whatever the hell that was.
I also used to think that the television also worked as a sort of closed circuit video system. I used to dress up and put on plays and sing songs in front of the (turned off) television, convinced that by doing this, someone somewhere would see me on TV.
I used to think that when I took a bath, and the water went down the drain, it was going to someone else’s house so they could use it for their bath. (Disgusting, I know.)
About sex I entertained many strange notions. I understood the mechanics of the act, but I thought the man peed into the woman. I was completely disgusted with my parents for several years because of this. I also thought that you had to be married to have sex, and that you only had to have sex once in your life to get pregnant. Which is technically true, of course, but that’s not what I mean- I thought that if you had sex once, you were then somehow susceptible to getting pregnant for the rest of your life, regardless of whether or not you ever had sex again.
I, too, thought my stuffed animals had personalities and feelings, and I worried a lot about whether any of them got jealous of each other. And no stuffed animal could ever be on a shelf or bed all alone- they’d get too lonely.
I used to think “drugs” was a person going around harassing children and you had to say “No” to him in order to stop him. I asked my mother if the voice on the commercial asking “any questions?”(after saying "this is your brain on drugs) was “the real Drugs” and she said yes so I yelled “NO” to the TV as hard as I could.
I used to think family members “had the same germs” and thus couldn’t infect each other with anything, which made only familial sharing of food acceptable.
I interpreted the eventually censored line from the song “Arabian Nights” in Disney’s Alladin exactly as the protesters feared people would. Right after hearing “where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face”, I remember literally thinking “Gawd, Arabs are mean!”
I used to think homophobia was strictly a childhood phenomenon and I thought gay marriages happened all the time since it was in fashion at the time for sit-coms have gay wedding episodes. I could not believe that there was actually an adult world political battle over homosexuality.
I also used to think girls peed from their butts.
I used to think that the actors on television were actually inside the set itself. I can remember my dad removing the back of the television for some reason, and me peering inside it and asking him where all of the people were.
When I was six or so I used to think that gravity failing was a natural disaster like earthquakes or hurricanes. I had visions of everything flying off into the sky that wasn’t nailed down.
Sometimes, when an above average amount of traffic would pass by our house, my dad would jokingly say “somebody must have opened the gates”, so I thought that there were big gates somewhere that people would open and close to redirect traffic.
In gradeschool I thought that being suspended meant that the principal would whip you with a pair of suspenders. I don’t know where I got this from, I had never been beaten or even paddled, but this belief kept me from doing anything that might risk being suspended!
I once believed that the world in the “olden days” looked kinda fuzzy, like in old photos from anytime up into the 80s. Like that the sky and everything we see wasn’t as clear as it is now (was then), that it looked kinda grainy and weird or something.