My dad taught English at a junior college; my mom was an art history slide librarian at SF State. I was in junior high school before I figured out that other kids’ parents didn’t get the entire summer off.
I saw a road sign that confused me for a while; I couldn’t figure out what a ped was, or what it meant to xing.
As a kid, I used to think the ferries were on tall pilings that moved on tracks on the bottom of Puget Sound. How else would something that huge and made of metal float, anyway? Besides they weren’t like regular ships. They had a set route they moved back and forth on.
When I was a little, it seemed that adults were very fond of telling kids, “You can be anything you want when you grow up.” I really took that to heart, apparently.
One day, when we were driving down the highway, my mom asked us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I quickly and certainly said, “I want to be a donkey!” My parents’ laughter told me that being a donkey wasn’t really an option.
I was a young child around the Nixon/Ford era, and for some reason, I thought the First Lady stayed in the Oval Office and married whoever the president was. To me, Pat Nixon and Betty Ford looked like the same person.
I thought the Contras were actual gorillas. Thus I thought both gorillas existed in South America and they could use firearms.
Me too!! We used to go to church on Wednesday evenings, and I would announce that the moon was following us home, and my parents would always correct me, and I just thought they were mistaken. It just seemed so obvious to me that that’s exactly what the moon was doing!
Oh, another one I thought of: Because of the “Old McDonald had a farm” song, I thought McDonald’s was a farm and I desperately wanted to go. When my parents finally brought me, I’m pretty sure I was so devastated that I cried and didn’t eat anything.
I thought you said the word ‘three’’ as ‘tree’ ! My dad who was born in Russia and gave me speech lessons and had me count to ‘tree’ . Dad would say " One two tree" then have me say it ,I didn’t have a hearing aid yet so I thought dad was saying the word correct ,he would say " Good girl ! " My older brother and sister would be dying LOL the whole time. To this day I can’t say three the correct way , I had speech lessons when I was older and it didn’t help.
I thought the condensation on water glasses was caused by the water slowly oozing out.
When I was very young, I thought that covering your eyes made you invisible.
I thought that my pet duck really did go to a farm to live out it’s days (there is a tiny chance it did, my parents did give it away to someone). I do have to say that a pair of ducklings is a fun Easter gift, but they do poop and get big. No longer recommended.
One kid told me that “69” stood for “six minutes of fun, and nine months of pain” which kinda shows how much we knew about sex at that age.
Note that in 8th grade I had a classic Roman book that talked about sex. My Dad had no issues with it, this taught my class a lot, and I still have a autograph from a classmate “To Dr Sex with the good book”.
I assumed when you became an adult you figured out all the answers to life and just coasted on your laurels for the last 40 years.
You and every porn supplier ever!
I thought I had algebra figured out when I was in 2nd grade. An older friend showed my his algebra text. After about 2 minutes of looking I announced I had it all figured out - “A+B=C”. So easy. See “A” is the first letter of the alphabet, so it must = 1; “B” is second, so it must = 2; and everyone knows that 1+2=3, ergo “A+B=C”! Want to get fancy? D+F=J (4+6=10)
Didn’t think through the whole “what happens after 26” scenario…
Yeah, except I was wondering about our guys fighting gorillas in Nam.
When I was very young, I thought there was a third day of weekend. Even younger, I though “eleminnow” was a letter.
Thanks to a somewhat confusing video on Where Babies Come From, I thought the answer was: mommy and daddy rub their tummies together.
There was a point when I thought everyone was Jewish. Then I came across a coloring book on Israel, which mentioned Not-Jewish people in Israel called “Muslims”. Thus I learned that there are two kinds of people in the world: Muslims and Jews. How exciting!
But wait, there was more! One of my babysitters was a Mormon, and this led to my mother trying to explain Christianity to me. I’m not sure quite what she said to me, but I came away with a vivid mental picture: a bunch of people are praying around some sort of display case containing the body of a guy who died, like, a whole hundred years ago or something. Which was weird even by my four-year-old logic.
When I was around five we were looking up at the stars, and my sister, who would have been about 11, said that her teacher told them that the stars may look close together, but really even the closest ones were thousands of miles apart. Me, being the proto skeptic, thought, “I don’t think I’m buying that.”
Sometime later, I asked my parents what a credit card was. This was long ago, and credit cards were not that common, and my family certainly didn’t have one. My dad told me that if you were a good customer and paid your bills, the bank may reward you with a credit card that would let you buy things. I asked what could you buy? A car? An airplane? My dad said yes. So for the next several years I had the idea that I wanted to be a good bank customer so that I could get an airplane. My dad never bothered to tell me that you had to pay it back.
My aunt once told a story about getting a warning for failing to dim her high beams when traffic was approaching. My takeaway from the story was that using your high beams was illegal in all circumstances. Every time my parents used their high beams, I was afraid we were all going to get arrested. Somehow I couldn’t convince them that they were breaking the law.
[Bolding mine] I often think that we adults forget what it’s like to be a child, and forget how seriously children take things, including the questions they ask adults and their need for an explanation. My example doesn’t involved something potentially terrifying to me, but when I was a kid I figured the only way to move was to trade houses with another family. I didn’t grasp that there were lots of people moving at any given time, people buying their first house, people dying, etc. I figured, if the Smiths move into the Jones’s old house, and the Jones’s move into the Browns’ old house, and so on down a line like that, eventually there’d be a family who had nowhere to move to! Where would the Browns go? So I asked my mother, “mom, when people move, do they trade houses?” She just said “sometimes.” Which didn’t really do much to correct my misunderstanding.
Another instance where my mother didn’t really understand what was going through my head: in the late 80’s or thereabouts, my parents weren’t doing well financially, and my mother was taking the big step of working outside the home for the first time since I’d been born. She was thinking of taking some retail job, my parents were having a discussion about it, and my father said something like “well, what are they gonna pay you, three eighty-five an hour, four twenty-five an hour, something like that?” I thought he meant $385 or $425 per hour! At the time I was a computer geek and wanted nothing more than a new computer, which my parents had told me we couldn’t afford. I said “wow, at that rate I’d have my new computer in no time!” My mother just sort of smirked and chuckled. She didn’t realize that by “no time” I meant not 3 months, but 5 hours. And it drove me crazy that we couldn’t afford a $2000 computer in a world where part-time department store clerk jobs paid at least $385 per hour. What kind of bills must my parents have if a $385 per hour job is barely going to put a dent in them?
At some point in my childhood a book for children called something like “How Babies Are Made” mysteriously materialized in our house, no doubt in part because my parents were embarrassed about the prospect of a birds-and-bees discussion. In describing the act, it said “the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina.” It didn’t say he kept moving it in and out and that that’s what created the pleasurable sensation. Well into puberty I still thought that when a couple had sex, the man just sort of stuck it in, then they, I don’t know, rolled around like that for a few minutes until some sort of biochemical reaction eventually made the sperm come out.
I also thought a woman got pregnant every time she had sex. I’ve mentioned this before, but I was bewildered by sitcom plots in which a man erroneously thought his wife was pregnant and hilarity ensued. How could he be wrong about whether she’s pregnant? If they had sex, she’s pregnant!
At one point I thought “nipple” was the word for the entire breast. I’d see some busty woman and think “wow, that woman sure has big nipples!”
I thought an “outhouse,” a word I’d heard but never seen in print, was an “owl house.” There was also a man named Al who lived on our block and I thought his name was Owl.
I am 50 and got glasses last year - “I can see individual leaves!” is exactly what I said. I had excellent vision up to about 5 years ago when a slow decline began - I was a frog being slowly boiled, so I didn’t realize how much visual acuity I had lost
We used to call ankle socks “peds” and couldn’t figure out why short socks were banned on the freeway.
I was a voracious reader of history especially about the medieval era. I absorbed the description of what a turnpike was (rope, log, serf who opened and closed the gate).
We didn’t have turnpikes where I grew up, so when, for example, I ran into mentions of the Jersey Turnpike I thought it was a medieval-style set up.
When I was little, I thought if you put too much pepper on something, all you had to do was put an equal amount of salt and it would all be better. You know, like neutralize.
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In Australia letters are posted by putting them in the red postbox on the footpath. I’d never seen one being emptied despite walking past them all the time. I thought my mother just made that up. I was sure that when you post a letter, it must go down through the postbox and into some vast and complicated underground tube system, eventually popping up at the correct address. It was kind of amazing to think of all the letterboxes in the world being connected like that! I knew the postman delivered mail every day too, I decided that was some other mail, like when you have to go to the Post Office to post a letter because you don’t have a stamp. That must be the mail the postie delivered.
I remember being astounded when one day I saw the postie emptying the postbox on the corner. Maybe my mother was right after all.
Somebody up-thread mentioned a one-time event, which reminded me of one of my own.
When I was about 10, we were again visiting my aunt and uncle. Keep in mind, this was around 1981, when attitudes weren’t as enlightened as today. The adults were having a conversation, which I was only half-way paying attention to. Several times, my aunt said something about some guy being “AC/DC.” I kept hearing the name of my favorite band, so I thought she was talking about someone who was into them as well.
So I suddenly piped up with “I’m AC/DC!” My aunt stopped mid-sentence, and stared at me slack-jawed. After a few seconds, my cousin’s wife said “it’s a band, Mom.” My aunt kind of shook her head, like she was coming out of a trance, and went back to her conversation.
I remember thinking that my parents would have had to have sex four times. Maybe more!