Weird things you believed as a kid.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
161

when I was young,around three or so, my parents had a green Morrie Minor called Stanley. Stanley, I now realise, was a bomb. It has mushrooms growing in the boot for heavens sake! When we moved cities, Stanley did not follow. TJ, an orange Corolla came instead.
I asked where my mate Stanley had gone. My parents told me that he wasn’t well, and had gone to the garage to get fixed. Periodically I would ask if Stanley was better yet, only to find out that he was still being fixed. I forgot about it for a while, untill, aged fourteen I said to my mum ‘Stanley never went to the garage to get fixed, did he?’ She just patted my hand…

My mum is on the short side, like around 5ft3 or so. When I was six I asked her if she was a dwarf. (I’d been reading The Hobbit). Dad had to stop the car he was laughing so hard.
Like a lot of others, I fel guilty if I ignored any of my stuffed toys for too long.

162

I have a few weirdies.

When I was quite young, I must have overheard my family saying something about my grandmother having died (before I was born) of a heart attack. I had no idea what a heart attack was, but there were shows like Combat on TV, and I apparently knew what an attack was.

Skip ahead some ten years, I’m in my teens (and have known what a heart attack was for many years), and I happen to be in a discussion where I mention that my grandmother died before I was born, and that she had apparently died in some kind of battle, possibly in WWII. At this point I realize that it was highly unlikely that an American woman in her sixties would have been in any kind of combat or battle situation, particularly in WWII (and living in Schenectady!). Amazing how the impression lingers on long after the knowledge (or lack of knowledge) on which that impression was based has been rectified, a la the dog getting married.

My mother’s family had an old vacation place with no indoor plumbing beyond spring water piped via gravity to a faucet in the kitchen. The two-seater outhouse was, oddly, 8 sided, and was invariably referred to as the Octagon. I was well into my teens before I realized that Octagon was not a universal euphemism for outhouse.

When I was about five or six, I was taken to visit one of my schoolmates. That family had a dog, which barked when I arrived, and the mother, seeking to reassure me, told me not to be afraid. Apparently I piped up cheerily, “That’s OK; I used to bark like that when I was a dog.” The mother told me this story (laughing her head off) when I was around 20.

I, too, had stuffed animal guilt and rotations, but I was in my 30s! I’d make my then-husband choose which one(s) I would sleep with each night, because I couldn’t bear to hurt any of their feelings by choosing someone else. Did I believe it? Intellectually, no, of course not. But at gut level… We’re human - we project human thoughts, feelings, and reactions on almost everything, including the weather and fax machines. Stuffed animals are at least a little more reasonable, since they vaguely resemble living things.

163

My dad told me the same thing about spaghetti trees! Also, I thought there were fairies in British Columbia and my parents were entertaining them, as I overheard them talking about taking the ferry over to Vancouver Island to have tea at the Empress Hotel. You know the signs on the roads in the mountains that say “Watch for Falling Rocks” and “Rock on Road”? My dad told me that they were Indian names, so I would stare out the window, watching for the Indians (ah, the politically incorrect 60’s!) He also made the mistake of telling me that eating bread crusts would put hair on my chest, so I refused to eat them for years!

164

Let’s see:

I thought Kentucky bluegrass was actually blue. We went driving through Kentucky and I was glued to the window, looking for the blue grass. I thought if I turned away I might miss it. And, on a related note:

I thought if someone was “glued to the TV” they were actually glued to the TV. It worried me because my mother told me:

That I’d go blind if I sat too close to the TV or watched TV with the lights out. Still, when my husband turns out the lights to watch TV, I think “But we’ll go blind.”

I believed that I could drink through my belly button. That it was a direct pipeline to my stomach.

I thought everyone learned English first. If I saw little kids speaking a different language, I’d think, “Wow, they’re so young and already they know TWO languages!”

My dad loved to announce we were going on a trip and we’d all pile into the car. He’d start singing (I may have the words slightly wrong) “Off we go, into the wide blue yonder!” and I always thought the car was going to take flight.

I thought St. Peter’s Basilica had a basilisk.

I thought I could actually dig a hole to China and fall through. But then I’d be upside down. On a related note:

I thought Spiderman was Chinese and that’s why he could climb buildings. He was used to it, growing up upside down and all.

I thought if I drank milk from a brown glass it was chocolate milk.

Julie

165

Me too only the worst part is that for my first couple of periods that’s how I wore them and it was only when I got so exasperated at how ‘crap’ and ineffective they were that it dawned on me - Eureka! I feel kind of sorry for my innocent young self when I remember that - too embarrassed to ask my mother how to do it. She asked me if I needed help when I first started and I said no…

I also used to believe my mother was 100 until I was about 7. It didn’t seem strange to me even though she looks young for her age and my dad told us he was 41. I just took it as another mundane piece of information and conversations about mother’s ages with friends would go something like this:

A: What age is your mother
B: Mine’s 35
C: oh mine’s 38
Me: Mine’s 100 (deadpan)

166

When I was a pre-schooler, my mom would play the Sound of Music broadway soundtrack all the time. In one of the songs, Maria tells the kids “Once you have the notes in your head, you can sing anything.” So, you know I thought I had notes in my head, right? Not only that, but I thought they were knots.

167

When I was a kid, every once in a while my lower legs would really hurt at night after I’d gone to bed.

I remember that I got up once and told my dad that my legs really hurt. He said they were growing pains and to go back to bed.

So, I figured I was growing. And that I - and everyone - grew one inch every night.

It wasn’t until I was in 5th grade and we learned long division, etc. that I realized that if that were true, I’d be about 270 feet tall.

(I still get those pains. That’s how I know it’s going to rain.)

168

All my blood was contained in a single vast resevoir just beneath my skin, and my organs just kinda floated around in it. I could tell because I always bled no matter where I was cut.

The expression “raining cats and dogs” was based on an actual incident where cats and dogs fell out of the sky like rain.

Baking soda caused cake batter to increase in volume, and was invented to save money on other ingredients.

Summer school not only started the moment the regular school year ended, it had the exact same hours.

Religious factoids like the location of Antioch and the details of Paul’s excape from an angry mob would be important in my adult life.

All heavy metal was exactly the same…mindless screaming and instruments played way, way too loud.

“The father of our country” was just an informal nickname for the current President of the United States.

Police officers could arrest anyone they wanted for any reason.

Drugs were horrible, horrible things, and if you ever so much as sampled one, you’d completely destroy your life without any chance of recovery. (To put this in perspective, I was on medication for about three years.)

Rap music was a colossal scam made up by no-talent hacks who couldn’t sing. All the attitude and image etc. was just a smokescreen.

“Donkey” was slang for gorilla. Oh, and there was absolutely nothing weird about a game asking me how high I could get. :smiley:

I had some karmic connection to Darrell Waltrip on account of having the same first name. Spelling and all! (Oh, and Bill Elliott was the greatest NASCAR driver who ever lived.)

The NFL has a vote every year to decide who plays in the Super Bowl. There certainly wasn’t any “playoffs” involved, because how does a bunch of complete losers like the Patriots make it in '85?

Hank Williams Jr. was some local performer ABC picked up for a new promo.

Star Blazers was an American-produced cartoon that just happened to look a little unusual. (Everyone speaks English, right? And the title and all the captions are in English right?)

The Great Video Game Crash happened in 1985, because that’s when the little game room next to the place my parents shopped went out of business.

The first VCR we ever owned…a top-loading tape player-style box with levers, where you couldn’t rewind or fast forward while playing, and it didn’t have a timer, or even a clock…was the most insanely wicked cool thing ever.

169

S’more that I remembered…

When my stepmom told me to use elbow grease on the dresser she wanted me to clean, I was completely doubtful cuz I’d never heard of that “technique” before, and I questioned it. She ended up actually yelling at me to do it, not understanding that I was totally confused. It seemed like such an odd cleaning agent. I finally took it that she was really serious, and I rubbed my elbow on the black mark, and I sware to god, it worked.
How bout that.
I also thought boogers were a tasty treat indeed. YUM!!

170

It isn’t?

:wink:

171

I thought the word “Jew” was a racial slur along the lines of “N*gger,” and that a more genteel and appropriate term was “Jewish Person.”

And I was maybe 13 before I realized that the word “poop” was a common word, used throughout the English-speaking world, and not just a euphemism used in my family.

172

Not in this bit of the English speaking world. Poop is mostly an American word.

Poo is more british.

173

K, you know how when people… “do it” vigouresly, how the house sometimes shakes? well, when my parents where going at it and I woke up, I’d think, “why is the washing mashine on this time of night?”

ANd I thought that sleeping together was … sleeping together. ANd when someone was raped, I thought it meant someone had raked them with a rake.

I was a stupid child.

174

I would often have crusty dirt behind my ears as a kid. My mom always told me to wash behind there, but I was convinced that it was actually dried up glue that held my ears to my head, and if it got too wet back there my ears would fall off.

Speaking of ears falling off, in a letter my cousin in Utah wrote to me once she said that it was so cold her ears fell off. I don’t know if this is a common expression for having ears go numb or what, but I of course was convinced that this actually happened.

My friends and I spent many kindergarten recesses trying to dig the deepest hole ever. It didn’t occur to us that the sandbox actually had a bottom.

Once, at a sleep-over camp, this girl told me about the “rock man” that comes at night. He was like the evil version of the sand man, or something. He would kidnap you in your sleep and you’d turn into those people selling flowers on the street corner. I was skeptical but still a bit cautious.

For a while I also thought that “reproduction” was going to the bathroom. I’m not sure how I came to that conclusion.

For quite a while I thought religion was just something you were born with, like race. My mom is Christian and my dad is Jewish, so that would naturally make me half Christian and half Jewish. It worked out in my favor, I got to celebrate Christmas and have a Bar Mitzvah. Still, it took me a while to realize how silly it is to believe in half a religion.

Along the lines of a skewed version of America, growing up I thought England was stuck in the middle ages. The idea that other countries were modernized like America was hard to absorb.

175

This is embarrassing. I remember seeing the birth of a baby on TV. The mother must have had all her pubic hair shaved and the camera was really close up so it wasn’t obvious from where the baby was actually emerging. I was quite a bit older (ten maybe?) and thought babies emerged from between a woman’s breasts.

176

I used to think that all the food was artificially manufactured. Strange enough, to this day, I am reluctant to pluck an apple from a tree - after all, it doesn’t come from a store…

177

Two bizarre historical things I used to believe:

  1. Abraham Lincoln lived to be over 100. Oh, I knew that he was assassinated, but he was very, very old when it happened.

For years, I had no idea where I’d gotten this strange idea. Then, as a grown up, I saw a movie from the late 1960’s called The Neon Ceiling, which I remembered seeing on TV when I was very small. In this movie, one of the characters says something like “Abraham was over 100 when Isaac was born.” I realized that I had heard this line as a child and, not being a pre-school Biblical scholar, I had translated it into “Abraham (Lincoln) was over 100 when I was born.”

  1. Queen Victoria was beheaded.

I blame this one on an episode of “Bewitched,” which I also saw as a small child. Samantha appears in a dream to one of Darrin’s overbearing clients and tells him, “You know what happens to tyrants,” and then, while dressed as Queen Victoria, he is beheaded. So of course that must have been what happened to her.

178

This isn’t a belief I had, but one that a young child (about six) I knew once had.

He was absolutely convinced that his mother must be older than I (she was about 10 years younger) because she was heavier than I. I finally realized that to a child who gets heavier as he gets older (and who is proportionately older than his younger brothers), this made perfect sense.

179

When I was a toddler my family lived in an apartment building with no real yard to play in. So they let me roam (supervised) in the back parking lot. To avoid me picking up potentially harmful objects, I was told they were “Left behind by the sun” and that I shouldn’t touch them because he’d be very annoyed when he came looking and they weren’t there.

My father was very strict about his children enunciating words properly. We were NOT allowed to “kiddy speak”, every new word had to be learned exactly how it was “supposed” to be pronounced. As a result, nobody can tell where I’m from, despite having grown up just south of Boston, MA. And my entire maternal side of the family has thick Boston accents. When my parents got divorced I ended up living with my mother and her parents. I ended up thinking there were a lot of words that just didn’t have any "r"s. :confused:

We had a cat who’s name was in fact “Stormy” but I always thought his name was “Stawmy” (what the heck kind of word is that? never crossed my mind)

When I was riding in a car in a wooded area, I would imagine there was a wild boy running in the woods alongside the car (or riding a deer or wolf or something). Or if we were driving down the highway, the guardrail was actually a giant snake slithering beside the car. I didn’t actually believe that, but it was fun to imagine.

And I still have all my stuffed animals, and they still sleep with me. (I’m almost 22) :smiley:

180

Ok, now I HAVE to reply.

I thought I was the only kid in the world who was spooked by E.T… Sure, watching the movie is all fine, but as soon as you’re alone in your bedroom thinking about it, it’s not so great.

I used to be deathly afraid that that creepy extendable neck of his would suddenly lift his head into view at the foot of my bed. So much so that I REFUSED to look in that direction. I also thought that the same thing would happen over the rail of the stairway (the railing around the stairs was a solid wall), and in a couple of other places in the house where there was a hidden space that I could see over.

And when I was very young I had a tendency to crawl in bed with my parents in the middle of the night. One time, I was sure that there was a small shark swimming around in the dark. And it would get me unless I kept my eyes closed. So I felt my way to my parents bedroom, running and stumbling down the hall keeping my eyes squished shut as hard as I could. I have no idea where the shark thing came from, I’m surprised that I even knew what a shark was at that age. I must have been watching TV.