What is the dumbest thing you believed as a child?

I thought that a woman would menstruate every time she had an orgasm.

My father told me my Aunt was in the hospital for a broken arm. She was really in a mental hospital in Camarillo.

A blow job was when a woman pursed her lips and blew on your cock.

I used to watch reruns of I Love Lucy. I used to think that they were actually in some studio performing the show live. I mean, people were laughing so they had to be doing it live, right? Like Wonderama.

I thought feminine napkins were napkins that only ladies used at the dinner table.

R3, eight year old neighbor Lori W told me she'd give me one when I was also eight. I pictured her blowing it up like a balloon. Fairly certain her dad was molesting her and her two sisters. All three girls acted out sexually at really young ages.

I thought babies came out of a woman's belly button until I saw an episode of All in the Family where Gloria gave birth. All that pushing with her legs up convinced me babies in face came out of a woman's ass.

i thought adult book stores were normal book stores without the kids section.

fact not face

I come from a family with a lot of bi racial people and I thought race was a completely random thing and that there was no reason you were born white or black.

Until I was around 9 I thought you got a girl pregnant by kissing her while lying on top.

I thought there were tiny people inside the radio doing the talking and singing.

^ ha ha. The first time I saw people on TV was in 1957 (black & white of course) and I thought they were inside the TV and wondered how they got there. I was three years old.

When I was 4 yo I believed the doctor when he said Mickey Mouse was in my throat dancing around and that was why I had a sore throat. When he put the tongue depressor in my mouth and told me to say "Ahh" he pretended to get Mickey out as a way to make me feel better. I was giggling about it. I thought it was so funny that Mickey would come all the way from Disney to visit me and then hide in my throat.

When I first saw my baby brother having his diaper changed, I thought his thingy would eventually fall off or recede to form lady parts.

Same with me r13, I thought there was a man inside the radio too who never stopped talking. When I heard the word "fuck" for the first time I thought it was a dirty word so horrible that it combined all other dirty words into one word--fuck. There was a creek that flowed through our town and parents routinely told their kids to stay out of the creek, that it was dirty. Since this was at the time of polio vaccines being a new thing, especially the Sabin oral vaccine you got in a sugar cube, we somehow connected the creek with getting polio and always called it "polio creek". One of the neighborhood girls who was sort of friends with my sister once asked me, "are you a sissy-boy?". I had no idea what she meant.

My parents told us we had to knock the sparks out of a log before bringing it into the house for the fireplace. They would laugh their asses off while we stood outside knocking logs on the ground.

When I would watch The Wizard of Oz as a kid my father told me Dorothy had to wear orthopedic shoes. The ones she’s wearing before she gets the ruby slippers do look kind of clinical. I believed that for YEARS.

One of my old friends told me she thought the handicap sign with the wheelchair were for the people who needed to use the restroom.

I used to think there was a little man inside the traffic lights changing the colors.

There is someone for everyone. You can be what you want to be.

I thought 2 men could have a baby if one man put his penis IN another man's penis.

Yeah ... don't question the logic... there was none.

I believed my 70 year old great-grandmother was my mother.

When I was about five years old I asked my dad about work and how he got paid. He said a machine printed/stamped a penny out every minute and he stood there and collected it. My stupid child brain tried to picture it in a thousand ways.

I believed my older siblings when they told me a zombie boy lived in the attic and was going to get me. They often locked me in there.

Oh I forgot that telling this to my mom (among many other creative thoughts I had around 7 or 8) got me sent to a child psychiatrist for YEARS.

OH also, I saw this porno my older brother left in the VCR when I was 8 or 9, and the guy was done fucking the girl and came on her - but he kept sticking his dick back in her puss and then pulling out and cumming more (something like that - this was 30+ years ago). Anyway, I thought the cum was being sucked up from her puss by his dick (and I thought it was lotion the puss made) and he then deposited the lotion on the woman to moisturize her like my mom did with her lotions. I thought it was like special moisturizer for after sex.

God that is so weird to type out because it makes NO sense and visually was not what was happening, but that's how my mind made sense of it ... crazy.

I thought that all while eggs would hatch into hens and brown eggs would be roosters.

I thought all dogs were male and all cats were female

The girl across the street and I would practice flying at about age six. We thought w practice you could. I am male. So yeah.

At the end of prime time shows in the 70s, that weird icon showed up and twisted around and I thought it said "brock to, you buy".

I thought Bigfoot and Santa were real.

i remember in middle school this boy that sat in front of me had made a little clay man and a little clay woman and he hid them in his desk. He would take them out during a lesson and have the clay man fuck the clay woman, except the vag hole was a hole between her legs where the clit would be, he made the belly button super close to the hole so it looked like she had two vag holes in front.

That the world is fair.

Work hard and you will be rewarded.

I did too r29, it was years before I realized television programs had corporate sponsors and never put 2+2 together as far as the commercial advertising and corporate sponsorship was concerned. With me I heard it more as brocktyu by--I just thought brocktyu was some strange adult word and that the by was actually buy because they showed some thing they wanted you to buy.

I believed life was fair: 1. Every time something bad happened, something good would happen to make up for it. 2. Every person has someone who loves them.

I thought the phrase "ends meet" (which I'd ever only heard spoken) was "ends meat"....like "they were so poor, they could barely make ends meat" meant they could hardly even afford to buy the very [italic] cheapest [/italic] cuts in the butcher shop.

Also, it was just a few years ago it occurred to me that The Beatles is spelled differently than "beetles". (I'm a terrible speller, and don't think about the word "beetle" that much.) I just always thought of the fab 4 as beetles and didn't dwell on it.

When I got older, I wouldn't eat chocolate or any other candy. Nor would I ever wouldn't cry.

What were you watching r25, the XXX Rated version of "Silence of the Lambs" ?

I thought Thailand was pronounced they-land.

lol - r38 - I have no idea what I was thinking. I know I jerked off around that age but nothing came out. We didn't learn about semen yet (but did learn about sperm - go figure that one). So, I "knew" it couldn't be coming out of his dick because the sperm went into the woman by some process not disclosed to us. This was also the age when I wasn't sure how guys prevented themselves from peeing in vaginas when they had sex (or how they knew "which hole to use" because women pee out of their vaginas, so what happened if he put it in the pee hole?)

I was a fucking mess. I don't think sex ed was taught right back then. You cant teach all the sexual parts and not what an orgasm is. Many years later, I learned the curriculum forbade discussing an orgasm, semen, or showing "to scale" or "realistic" drawings of anatomy. So, the female urethra was shown as gigantic and the penis was depicted as a tiny thing - and I figured it could easily slip in there.

But yeah for many years around that age I was scared I'd grow up and pee in a woman's vag because nobody taught me how not to do it.

i had no idea U Haul actually meant You Haul

My older brother told me that a man puts his penis (or peeny, to be exact) in a woman's anus and somehow pushes a baby into her stomach. You can imagine all the subsequent thoughts this information provoked.

that a boy could impregnate another boy when he pissed up his asshole. we were 9 or ten, and my neighbor who I fukd, said if I pissed in him he could be with baby....

he was soo hot, later on football team, then an alcoholic, dead at 38.

love and miss u Mike.

I thought presidents were all good nice men. Then Nixon happened.

I believed that families who had wall to wall carpeting as well as matching toilet seat/lid covers and shower curtains were very wealthy. My family had hardwood floors, Oriental rugs, clawfoot tubs, and walk in showers. I thought we were poor. Go figure.

Even though I had seen a vagina in magazines, I thought when girls pee, a penis come out (like the alien in Alien) and then goes back in when they are done.

^^ LOL !

Some of these are fucking hilarious.

R46 OMG....this is one of the funniest things I've ever read here!! LORDY!!

I thought JC Penney's was a high end store because all my "wealthy" friends shopped there.

A jackalope.

I took a trip to Yellowstone when I was six, we drove and we started seeing signs and Jackalope merchandise. Like most six year olds, I was animal crazy. I would ask all the grown ups about them and do you know, EVERY SINGLE ADULT went on and on about them. I was so mad two weeks later when I got home and didn't see one. Then my brother tells me, "They aren't real."

What I found so amusing as an adult is how no adult I talked with even gave the slightest hint that a jackalope is not real. They all let me carry on as if I could actually see one.

My older brother told me that you could adjust the horizontal tracking on the television while a shower commercial was playing (like for bath soap or shampoo) and you could somehow see the woman's tits or the guys dick. I always wanted the latter, of course.

R14, very cute!

Before I ever had an orgasm, I assumed cum came out through where the pubic hair was. Otherwise, why would they both show up on my body at the same time?

That everyone ends up happy.

I believed old movies were black and white because the world used to be black and white.

I always asked my mom to turn the channel on the television set (the old kind with a dial) because I was afraid the orange light behind it would electrocute me.

When we played records on the stereo console, I thought the musicians were tiny people who hid underneath it, scurrying away every time I looked for them.

When my dad worked for Lipton, I thought his entire job consisted of taking Wish-Bone salad dressing bottles out of a vending machine. (He was an electrician.)

I believed my grandfather (a farmer) when he said all my favorite calves were struck by lightning.

I thought you could be anyone you wanted when you grew up. As in, an existing person. You just took their place when they died. I decided I would be Cher.

I thought one of the vaccines we took came in the form of a sugar cube to make sure children got enough sugar that year... !

I thought as you got older, you got to choose what kind of nipples you’d have.

I thought cartoon characters were real people. You know, kind of like in Roger Rabbit.

I thought that when you turned the radio off, it just stopped right there and would resume where you left off when you turned it back on. Guess I never actually tested that theory!

That there really was a flood in the Bellagio women's room.

When I heard a kid fell out of a tree and broke his arm, I thought it meant the arm literally became separated from the body. I pictured it like if the handle of a coffee mug broke off. And that the cast held the two separated parts back together.

I thought everyone had sex in their ass and that was the only sex there was. An older neighborhood boy told (like 12) said he saw this is a movie and he had a bunch of us younger boys show him our assholes and told us that that was where dads put their dicks in mommy. and I completely believed it ... I wonder whatever happened to that guy he was a perv.

That the Queen didn't go to the toilet and her lack of wee and poo was why she was chosen to be queen.

I thought sex was just kissing nude.

R61 Well, this is the truth, in my exoerience.

As a young teenager, my best friend insisted that holding your penis while you urinated was considered masturbating.

I was ten, and an ad on tv made me think some people get fixed medically speaking, by getting their brain replaced. A kid thing. If you don’t understand something, you fill in the blanks with your own theories. Actually, some people never grow out of that, do they.

I thought it was mean for supermarkets to CHARGE for food!

I thought all advertising on tv was the truth. I assumed someone checked that the company was being honest when they claimed something was good for you or the best around or value for money.

I used to think that any miniaturized version of a person on tv or in a movie was due to a special formula created by a scientist.

Instead of saying "Call me" or "I'll call you", my grandmother would say "Give me a ring" or "I'll give you a ring", I took this literally and thought that my grandmother had a treasure trove of rings that she kept hidden. I spent about a year looking for those rings.

There's a city near me called Thousand Oaks. My dad told me that one burned down so there were only 999. I went around repeating that story.

I was shocked, utterly [italic] shocked, [/italic] when I found a typo in a book once at age 11 or so. I was like, "How could this happen????"

It made me a little nervous, like a law had been broken or something.

I thought a weeping willow could swallow me if I stood under it.

I figured out that when a man fertilized the ladies egg, he did it by peeing in her.

Good thread, by the way.

Me too r68! I was horrified when I saw that two words had been printed without a space in between them. Hadn’t the editor noticed? Weren’t there heaps of people who checked? It was shocking.

Now I have the same feeling when I read the news online. Isn’t anyone checking? It’s full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

R68 I had the EXACT same reaction the first time I "caught" a typo in a book!! I remember running around and showing my parents--and anyone else who was nice enough to listen--to my outrage.

R70 NO ONE is looking anymore. Even the print newspapers are riddled with typos now. It makes me cringe.

^^^ oops...I made a typo myself up there...scratch that last "to" in the first paragraph

When I asked how parents made babies, my father stalled the conversation by saying, "Well, first...both the mother and father have to really want the baby," which had me envisioning a man and a woman both deep in thought. I assumed that at any point, one of the parents could say, "Actually, NO...I don't want one" and the unborn baby would just go poof!

I thought you weren't supposed to do # 1 and # 2 in the same bowl at the same time. Some kid started a rumor that another kid did this and he was disgusting and everyone laughed at him.

I believed this for YEARS.

I thought when a woman went into a hospital for any reason she would always leave the hospital with a baby.

r55

thinks he's Calvin

My parents played on a softball league. I thought the bases were women's purses that they had abandoned on the field for some reason

I also thought race was determined by hair color, not skin color. So I thought my Italian-American uncle, who had very dark hair, was black

I thought that motor vehicles stayed still and the earth revolved underneath them, and that's how you ended up somewhere else when you got out of the car.

I thought that if people got divorced, they had to do the wedding backwards.

I thought women had to get married twice. A sort of starter marriage before they could remarry for real and have kids. Both my mom and my aunt had had brief marriages before they remarried and had kids and I assumed that’s what all women did.

My dad jokingly called hominy corn “harmony” and I believed that was the name for it until I was in my young teens.

For a hot summer, I was convinced my sister was a vampire. I slept with a blanket across my neck so She couldn’t bite me

I thought couples made babies by kissing

I don’t know why but my parents called me by my middle name at home and made me use my first name at school. I thought all the kids did that.

[quote]I was shocked, utterly shocked, when I found a typo in a book once at age 11 or so. I was like, "How could this happen????"

I was like that r68. I was raised in a church going family, so it was pounded in my head weekly that everything in the Bible was true. So I extrapolated that to mean all books were true. When I read in the 1964 Encyclopedia Britannica that Lyndon Johnson was President of the US, I believed it. Trouble is, it was the early 70s and Richard Nixon was President. I was confused. Books are supposed to be true!!

I recall watching a documentary on World War I showing some soldiers marching to the Front . I asked my dad when people started walking more slowly.

We visited my grandfather's grave when I was about 7. Looking at headstones, I decided that the granite cylinder markers meant that the person buried beneath them had gone to hell while the white and grey marble markers meant that they'd gone to heaven.

That just because someone is your parent, that makes them love you and be in your corner. I realized at a young age that even though my parents created me, they did not truly love me (nor know how to love at all) and they sure in the hell didn't care about me. Once I spent a few years being angry about that, and got over it, life got so much better. I gave up on them and never looked back.

I thought that people volunteered to be killed in movies, like westerns. I reckoned that they were paid huge amounts of money so that their families would be set for life.

I thought all dogs were males and all cats were females.

I swear I'm not R27!

I thought "choir" was spelled "quire".

Before 1969, I thought that the Kennedys were perfect, saintly people.

I thought my family would be arrested if we pulled the tags from pillows we had purchased from the store.

I thought the people on TV shows were real and cameras were there to film their lives. I lived in fear that a camera would show up at our house and film my family, we were horrible. I was 10 when my cousin explained actors and scripts to me. I was relieved.

When we were watching movies on TV my dad would often say 'there'll be an ad now' and then there would be. Me and my brother would pester him with 'how did you know that, how did you know' but he wouldn't say. Looking back it seems like this went on for years and I thought it was some sort of magical mystery since he was nearly always right. Then one day he revealed his source: before we were born he'd worked as a projectionist in a theatre and at a certain time little circles would appear on the top right-hand corner of the film and flicker around a bit to let the projectionist know the reel was coming to an end so they'd have the next one ready to roll. The TV stations must have lined up their ad breaks with the end of one reel and start of another for some reason. I don't know why they did that, all I know is he'd say 'time for an ad break' and then there'd be one.

I also thought that there were people inside the TV, probably because if I was watching a Western at my aunt's house she would tell me she'd have to sweep out all the dead cowboys and Indians later on.

R59's friend was Bryan Singer.

How many times did you pull off some tags and call the police on your mother or father, OP.

R97 is for r93, not OP. Sorry.

When I was very young my mother told me that babies came when a father planted his seed. Maybe there was more to the story I didn't catch but for a long time I imagined my father digging a hole in the back yard to plant seeds to get babies. When I explained this to my mother she laughed uproariously at me and gave a better explanation that didn't make much more sense.

That was before I noticed a biology book in the bookshelves that had medical illustrations of male and female anatomy. I spent many hours pouring over that book and acquired quite the scientific explanation over my formative years for reproduction.

I was circumcised and my father was not. So, I thought I'd grow a foreskin when I got older like I'd grow body hair.

My first confession -before my first communion. I guess I'm about 5 years old. I knew I was supposed to confess my sins but I told the priest I didn't really have any. He said that surely there was something I had done that offended God.

So I said, well, I had learned the prayer Hail Mary.

Priest: Yes, my child.

I just found out I was saying it wrong. I thought it was Hail Mary Full of Grapes.

The priest broke out laughing. For a good while.

Then I got a nice lecture on the meaning of "grace" and that it is a special gift of God.

I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. But I do like the word grace. And every time I hear the song, Amazing Grace - I think back to this memory.

Not just me but my sister as well believed that if you took a medicine you didn't need to take you would end up with the disease that it was supposed to cure. I think I ended up telling other kids that at school too.

I used to read Donald Duck comic books and was amazed that nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey were allowed to drive a car. They were obviously children and nowhere near the driver's license age of 16, so why were they illegally driving cars? The fact that they were CARTOON DUCKS didn't enter the picture at all.

My analytical mind also kept me from ever believing in Santa Claus, even at a very young age. Santa was allegedly delivering presents down chimneys all over the world. All I had to do was look at all the houses on my suburban street and realize that he'd be hard-pressed to even manage to get to all of them in such a tight time frame. I also figured that if I questioned this to my parents, the presents to me might stop, so I just played along with the little game until I was seven or eight.

I saw signs on the interstate exits that said "New England". So I was certain that New England was a state despite my father's attempt to persuade me otherwise.

I read a lot and thought the word hyperbole was pronounced hyper-Bowl. I didn't learn otherwise till I was14 and heard another person say it aloud.

I didn't believe that the middle finger really meant anything. So, I showed the recess lady and asked her to make sure. I was young enough that I didn't get in trouble.

I did believe my mother was a virgin - even after giving birth to four children. By second grade all my dreams had died.

Where I come from, rubbers were rubber-like things you put over your shoes to protect them while walking in the rain. When I was 7-8 years old, my older brother and his friends were talking about buying rubbers to use while sleeping with girls. For the life of me, I could not understand why one would need rubbers to sleep with girl.

^ Haha. Funny. I remember when condoms were called rubbers. I used to wonder about that too. When I was ten I overheard my oldest brother and his teenage friends saying they needed to buy some rubbers when it wasn't even raining.

god.

[quote]I saw signs on the interstate exits that said "New England". So I was certain that New England was a state despite my father's attempt to persuade me otherwise.

There was a big city not far from where we lived called "Los Angeles," but I also heard people referring to "going to Ellay," so I thought Ellay was another major nearby metropolis ... probably until I was about 8.

Also thought the Crocker Bank also made Betty Crocker products in addition to its important banking duties.

When I was very young, I used to think the songs you heard on the radio were being performed live by the artists at the radio station.

When I was very little, I wouldn't get changed in front of the television because I thought the people in the tv would see me naked.

I didn’t believe it but I had a theory when I was very young (pre-kindergarten) that everything might be some kind of big play, and that people might only come to life when I am around me and otherwise become inactive when out of sight. So I used to hide behind and under things sometimes for hours waiting for my parents and my sister to “deactivate.” But that never happened, so I became a little less narcissistic and by kindergarten gave up on this theory that the whole world is my world.

I was also afraid of my grandmother. My mom was a tomboy—aside from a pair of high heels in her closet that I never saw her wear and an eyelash curler in the bathroom, she was not a girly woman at all. Her mother wore red lipstick, drew big arched eyebrows, wore a dark wig (her hair was thin), and painted her nails a shade of red. At night in bed I sometimes imagined my grandmother might creep in like Nosferatu and bite me and claw at me because of the red mouth and nails. It didn’t help when my sister told me in a panic that “I saw Grandma take her teeth out!!” without explaining to me what false teeth were.

Also before kindergarten age, I watched a lot of I Love Lucy and I always assumed that the “Spanish” Ricky spoke must be absolute gibberish for comic effect, because it just seemed like it would have been an unecessary amount of work to actually translate anything into Spanish for a TV show when no one watching speaks the language.

My precocious imagination generated a lot of theories.

Throughout my childhood I had a recurring dream that the full moon was blood red and then began to drain, pouring lava down on the Earth. My mom and sister grabbed the dog and drove away every time, leaving my dad and me in the burning house. That wasn’t a belief, per se, but it really haunted my whole childhood.

I thought the language a person grew up speaking was somehow implanted in them at birth depending on where they were born. I remember asking my dad what would happen if a baby were born exactly on the border between two countries.

I thought that wind was created by treetops moving back and forth.

My parents were Catholic and sent me to Catholic school. I believed every thing I was taught in religion class until I was about 15 and it began to dawn on me that religion was all made up.

It only took me 'til fourth grade, r116. If my mother is burning in hell for the rest of time, one of the reasons is that she forced me and my brother to go to Catholic school, even though it was a horrible experience. If my father is burning in hell for the rest of time, it's because it took him so long to rescue us from Catholic school.

this . . .

I thought that during daylight savings time the electric company would send out extra current to make the clocks go forward an hour (this being before digital clocks, and people would have to manually move the hands of their clocks forward.)

And I was deeply confused when I read about unwed pregnant women, as I assumed you couldn't get pregnant until after marriage.

And frankly, why "blow job" is used for oral sex is still confusing to me.

After the Helter Skelter story, I thought The Beatles were in cahoots with the Devil. I wouldn't ever listen to them.

r21 I believe that is called "docking."

I still believe that all dogs are male, all cats female. Because, balls.

R119, I too just assumed that the mere fact of getting married is what caused pregnancy. I didn't learn what really caused it until I was 14.

I also used to believe that I would never grow old...

One morning, remembering where we lived I must’ve been about 5, I found my moms weed. It wasn’t the first time I’d found weed so I asked her about it.

She said they were “special seeds for the garden” that had to be kept near her and safe. She then took me out to the garden and sprinkled a (tiny) bit onto the ground and said we have something special later in the year. I bought this hook, line and sinker.

I asked her about this years later and she said she didn’t remember.

When people talked about "sleeping together" I thought it meant they literally slept together in the same bed.

I remember being appalled when I learned that at about age 12 my niece believed Texas was a foreign country.

[quote]I thought you could be anyone you wanted when you grew up. As in, an existing person. You just took their place when they died. I decided I would be Cher.

Post of the year.

I thought soda was spicy and made of peppers.

I thought that when you grew up you were able to just choose what job you wanted.

I thought Bill Cosby seemed like a really great guy and wanted him to be my dad

She was kind of right, R126

My greatest fears when I was about 6 were that I would be sent to the electric chair or I would be covered by hot lava from a volcano eruption (in New Jersey, of all places). Also I thought that all you had to do to make a dress from a sewing pattern was to cut out the pictures on the cover of the Simplicity envelope.

I thought movies were filmed in order. I thought casting was based on talent. I thought everyone was nice. I thought pop singers could sing. I thought Halle berry was a good actress.

when i was 4 my older sister told me that any dark parts on the potato chips were made of peanut butter ( which i loved) so she would let me eat all these pieces..even though I never tasted any peanut butter, I kept doing this every time we shared some chips...i did not wise up to this big lie for like 6 months...i was not the brightest bulb and I really looked up to my older sister.

I thought there were only two religions: Catholic and Public. I was convinced all forests were full of quicksand. I thought cunt was pronounced "coont"

I went to catholic school and I thought Bible stories were fairy tales. One of my favorite books was Fifty Famous Fairy Tales and there were talking fish, secret frog princes and princesses locked in towers. In school we learned about Jonah getting eaten and spit out by a whale; burning bushes that talked and a tower full of babbling people. Why wouldn’t I equate the Bible with fairy tales? So I never really believed in religion. I hated mass because it reminded me of The Mummy. The mass was in Latin back then and it was mumbo jumbo to me, just like the things Boris Karloff chanted in The Mummy. Church back then was dark inside, with the only light in the daytime coming from votive candles and through dark stained glass windows.

So I never got into religion at all. It was all fairy tales and 1930s Hollywood horror movies to me.

I thought that all parents truly loved their children and wanted the best for them. That their highest priority was their kids. It was impossible that it was otherwise.

I thought that communists were going to march down our street in suburban New Jersey and take over. Like something out of Dr Zhivago.

That old people had always been old. They had been born that way and had just been unlucky.

That I was a genuinely nice loving person.

Going to a catholic elementary school also screwed me up in terms of marriage/pregnancy. I thought only married women could get pregnant by the husband putting his penis in her vagina.

When a rumor started that an older girl in the neighborhood put a hotdog in her vagina, I thought she would now get pregnant and the family would have to tell everyone the father of the baby was a hotdog.

I thought that when I grew up I would have to hypnotize a man to marry me and dress like a woman also since I thought i was the only boy in the world that liked men lol

^ When I first became attracted to other boys, I figured it was just a phase and that I'd start falling in love with women soon! Nope.

I thought anybody on tv was a special being and that they ALL were rich. If you appeared on tv at all, i thought you were rich and other worldly. Haha.

That the movie THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, was real. When I read the story of Moses and the Exodus in the Bible, I told my parents and grandparents that the Bible was wrong because Nefertiti wasn't in it. They laughed at me. What the fuck did I know about artistic license?

Now that I'm atheist, I don't believe any of that bullshit, but I watch the movie every year for shots and giggles.

I thought my parents grew up together and were always married

In town, a couple of buildings had graffiti on them. There was a drawing of a blobby-looking thing (didn’t know it was a penis) with the word JOB underneath. I thought it was a biblical reference.

There were little people inside the tv and what I was seeing was really happening to them. I asked my mother to tell me how to get inside the tv so I could be part of the story. I promised if she told me how to get in I would come home and not be late for dinner.

I thought all high school kids went on to college, wore cardigan sweaters and carried books that had book covers saying STATE U on them. Also, every college had a pennant that said STATE. Boy was I surprised when I came home from school with college brochures & applications do my mothe4 said, “Who do you think you are? People like us don’t go to college. You’ll get a job when you graduate high school.” My parents had no dreams for me. They didn’t want me to do better than they did in life and were insulted when I wanted to do better.

These were things I was told and believed.

Bidets were for washing clothes.

When you wanted a baby, you went and told your doctor and he gave you a pill.

The steam coming out of the New York manholes came from underground Chinese laundries.

Priests and nuns were saints on earth.

I thought women pooped out babies.

That prayers really worked.

It's incredible to me today that people still say prayers and their rosaries. But I guess it's really just a form of meditation as it always has been.

I thought the only time parents had sex was to make a baby and that the single incidence of sex resulted in pregnancy. At 14 I told my sister, "we know our parents had sex three times because there are three of us." She laughed at my idiocy, and because she was newly married said, "Yeah, three times a night!"

When I was between the ages of 5 - 8 my older brother watched a lot of shoot 'em up Cowboys & Indians Westerns on TV. I thought prior to the actual filming the actors who were going to be shot had agreed to die because once they were shot they were actually dead. I used to feel sorry for them, that they had a job where they eventually had to take a bullet on the job and die.

By the time I was around 9 yrs old I finally figured it out when I saw one of these "dead actors" in another movie and asked my dad how he could be alive when I saw him get shot in a western months earlier. But until then I used to feel so sorry for these poor men lying on the ground bleeding out and full of bullet holes.

That the basement was haunted or inhabited by monsters, naturally.

I thought gay men were more kind and empathetic than straight men.

There's No Place Like Home

R148 I used to think that too. I thought my parents had sex 6 times since there were 6 kids in my family and I would look at the adult relatives and neighbors and figure out how many times they had sex based upon how many kids they had. I had even made a comment to my two closest friends that if I only wanted two children that would involve only having sex twice in my life. They both agreed. We actually didn't learn the truth until we were 14.

R151 has found out that people in general are assholes.

[quote] It's incredible to me today that people still say prayers and their rosaries.

A few years ago, one of my uncles was sick. My mother and her sister became Prayer Warriors and said the rosary for him every day at 3pm. Eventually he recovered. My mother and aunt swore they saved his life with their prayers. I said, “What about Dad? And Uncle Bob? You prayed for them and they died.”

Ah, said my mother. Dad and Uncle Bob had terminal cancer, so prayers would t help them, while Uncle Joe had a chronic disease, so there was a chance prayers could save him...if said enough times by the right people.

Yes, they’re all deplorables. They just make shit up as they go along to fit their narrative.

[quote]At 14 I told my sister, "we know our parents had sex three times because there are three of us." She laughed at my idiocy, and because she was newly married said, "Yeah, three times a night!"

You were 14 and still hadn't figured out people had sex for fun?

I thought cows standing in fields when it was raining were only out there to take a shower. I thought ponies were baby horses. I couldn't believe it when my grandfather told me I was born on my birthday.

I use to think clouds were like pillows. If you jumped out of an airplane and landed on a cloud you would just stay there bouncing up and down. Never occurred to me how you were going to get back down to earth.

I thought the Pussycat Theatre in my neighborhood showed cartoons since they had a picture of Sylvester the Cat posted outside.

I was so afraid when my parents put gas in the car...I thought it went into the tires and if you put too much in the would explode.

I was also afraid of going down the bathtub drain...my mother was a mentally ill narcissist and Im sure my crazy thoughts seemed from a crazy parent

When I was in the car with my parents one day it started to thunder and lightning. I was very scared because a car wasn’t a solid building. My mother told me we were in the safest possible place to be in a thunderstorm because a car had rubber tires and rubber “grounded” the car so that lightning couldn’t hurt us.

Every time there was a thunderstorm after that I begged my parents to get the keys so we could all sit in the car until it was over.

[quote] I was also afraid of going down the bathtub drain...my mother was a mentally ill narcissist and Im sure my crazy thoughts seemed from a crazy parent

I think you’re the mentally ill narcissist because pretty much all children are afraid they’ll go down the bathtub drain.

R156 I was specifically replying to R148, not you. We had just turned 14 when we found out. It was the mid-1960's when we were ages 13-14. Different world.

I thought little boys and girls could get married because I was given a book with illustrations on first communion and that's what it looked like to me.

I was pretty insistent on that fact as a 5 year old despite adults telling me no. My first communion was at the age of 6.

R34 That's funny.

When I was about 3 or 4 my aunt had a miscarriage. I asked my mom what that meant and she said that meant my aunt "lost the baby". For many years I pictured my aunt and uncle riding in a pick up truck and the baby rolled out of the back and was lost. I was genuinely afraid for my baby cousins that eventually came. When I found out what a miscarriage really is, it honestly wasn't much of a comfort. How could a baby die in a woman't belly??

[quote]pretty much all children are afraid they’ll go down the bathtub drain.

I never was.

If I swallowed chewing gum it would stick to my liver.

[quote]I thought there were tiny people inside the radio doing the talking and singing.

I thought that the singer was down at the radio station whenever their song was on.

I thought The Millionaire's name was John Bears Fortipton.

I thought movie ratings were part of the title and asked Mother if I could see " Mary Poppins Rated G" and "Sound of Music Rated G"

I thought that a "wet dream" was when someone had a dream that made them wet the bed.

I also thought that for the longest time that the penises on ancient Roman and Renaissance statues were modeled on baby penises. The reason why is that I had no idea about circumcision and didn't realize that the reason why babies' penises looked that way was that they were intact (not because they were undeveloped). It wasn't until I went to art school and saw my first uncircumcised penis (the model was Indian) when my mind was blown.

I believed I could fly! I believed I could touch the sky.

When my parents went to a wake for the first time that I was aware of and told me about death I thought the dead person got up to say goodbye to everyone or else why go see them?

They told me no that's not the way it works. It was confusing.

I never learned what the sex act actually was until I was fourteen and read my Mom's medical book back in the early 1960's, and thought it was absolutely gross. I can't remember what the title was, but it was a large book, like an oversized bible, hardcover, and bound in dark red leather.

Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing mentioned about the homosex. The kids who heard about that "act of perversion" spread the word, but most straight kids didn't believe it was something anyone actually did. The big kids had to be making it up !

I thought Donald Trump was a harmless buffoon

This is a true story. I was about 40 and talking with my 80 year old mother. Something prompted me to remark about how parents will tell their kids when they take their dog to be put to sleep, that they took the dog to a farm where it could play and make friends with the other animals. My mother said that wasn’t always the case, because when she was a child, her mother took her dog skippy to a farm when he got old. Then there was this real, awkward silence, as that set in.

^I meant to add, I still feel bad about that, and it’s been 10 years since my own mother ran away to work on a farm.

R50, "They all let me carry on..."

That's because THEY thought a jackalope was real.

I thought that cheesecake was made with block cheese. Although I liked both cheese and cake, a cake made from cheese sounded absolutely disgusting and I always refused to try it.

I thought that women became pregnant when men kissed them, and something (a seed, perhaps?) traveled from his mouth to hers, down to her stomach, and grew into a baby. Upon further thought it occurred to me that people kissed in movies and on TV, and that my father would kiss my grandmother (his mother-in-law) hello and goodbye, and I could not understand why all of those women would deliberately put themselves in that position and risk becoming pregnant.

When I was in the first grade or so, a kid at my school died from cancer. It was explained that cancer was something that grew inside of a person and killed them (at least, that was how I heard and understood it). I visualized a tree or plant growing in my body, and for years afterwards I was terrified of accidentally swallowing any type of seed.

[quote]Although I liked both cheese and cake, a cake made from cheese sounded absolutely disgusting and I always refused to try it.

I was that way with green peppers. I knew that black pepper didn't taste good, so I always assumed that green peppers would taste like black pepper.

When my mother had instructed us to always spit out the seeds when eating watermelon and never swallow them I thought it was because if you didn't a watermelon would grow inside your stomach and bloat out your tummy. I was around 4 or 5. So every time I saw a woman with a big belly, who was likely pregnant, I thought she must have swallowed the watermelon seeds. I wondered why didn't she just spit them out like mom said. Who wants a watermelon growing inside their stomach.

Like R135, I lived in mortal fear of stepping on sand or light brown dirt in the event that it was quicksand, which would certainly swallow me swiftly. I thought quicksand was everywhere.

After seeing Snow White I became convinced that if I slept on my back the Evil Queen would cut my heart out in my sleep. I still can't sleep on my back (though I don't think anyone will cut my heart out, anymore.)

My bed was against the wall, and I would only sleep with my back to the wall, because I was convinced that if I slept facing the wall that the ghost of Jesse James would shoot me in the back. I blame The Brady Bunch for that one.

My grade school took a class trip to the local TV station and I was bitterly disappointed to learn that Little House on the Prairie wasn't filmed there. We were in Minnesota, the series was set in Minnesota, so I was convinced that I would meet all of the actors on our trip.

My father took a business trip to California, and since he was going to California I was positive he would be on the Sonny & Cher show. My mother told me he wouldn't be, but I was sure she was wrong, and I watched all the way through the end credits convinced that he would be on the show.

My 16 year old sister got pregnant (1970) and it was a huge scandal in my conservative Xtian household. My nephew was born with this birth defect where his esophagus didn't fully form to connect his mouth to his stomach so they operated on him when he was like nine days old to correct it. I took that to mean that all illegitimate babies were born with some type of birth defect because having a baby outside of Holy Wedlock was a sin.

When I was nine I thought Daddy's sperm was "magic milk". Cause he told me so!

For all the posters on this thread, like my sister and me, who thought quicksand was going to be something we’d have deal with on a regular basis as adults.

I thought that the songs on the radio were being performing live by the artists at the station.

R184, I saw that show. He was on it, but just for a second. You must have blinked.

I thought that procreation, i.e. Sex, was accidental. Sometime during the night when the mom and dad were asleep, they sort of inadvertently *rolled over* each other. It was truly a shock to me in the 4th or 5th grade when we had our first smattering of human biology, to learn that sec was in any way intentional.

When I was in first grade our nun told us somebody in our class was going to go to heaven soon. A girl named Theresa Reeve burst out crying because she was convinced it was her. She had just gotten over measles or something.

None of us thought about a cute boy named Georgie who hadn’t been in class lately. I guess we’d forgotten about him...until one day we all received invitations to his birthday party, We were excited to go and see Georgie again. But when we got there, they took us all down to the (unfinished) basement. It was cold and kind of dark and dank. A big fat boy was sitting in a chair up against the wall of the basement. He had strands of hair, but not a full head of hair. We all stood there. “Georgie’s been waiting for you all!”

.Some kids asked, “Where’s Georgie?” He’s in the chair, they said. “That’s not Georgie,” we said.

It was a very uncomfortable party. Nobody wanted to play games in this dark basement that only had a string light in it. The fat boy just sat there. He couldn’t play because he didn’t feel good. If that was Georgie, why was he having a party if he was sick?

Turns out he had leukemia and was being given steroids. Nobody explained any of this to us. It was the 1960s. We didn’t know about kids getting cancer. None of us wanted to stay, but we all had to play pin the tail on the donkey, sing happy birthday and eat cake. It was dismal.

Georgie died later that year. They made us all go to his funeral mass and everyone was crying because the fat boy from the party was in a box on the altar in a white suit, his communion suit. He was sleeping and didn’t move at all. There was a white prayer book and rosary beads in his hands, but they were very still like him, not moving at all. Everyone was really scared. Old people were crying and that set off the whole class who started crying all at once.

What a mean thing to do to little kids. They could at least have told us Georgie looked different before we went to the party.

F*ck That's messed up 191. Poor kid/kids.

[quote]I was also afraid of going down the bathtub drain...

My cousins rold me that there was a drain at the bottom of their lake, and the stopper would come out if I was a crybaby. My aunt tried to convince me that they were lying, but they claimed SHE was lying and I believed them. My aunt was in her 30s and seemed ancient to me. What did an old lady like her know?

My black friend was convinced that people with blue eyes saw the entire world in blue. She could not be convinced otherwise until she went to junior high.

[quote]R178 ^I meant to add, I still feel bad about that, and it’s been 10 years since my own mother ran away to work on a farm.

I'm surely she's a very happy milk maid or shepherdess at an old folks farm now, too : ) I CANNOT WAIT FOR MY TIME TO COME!

I was convinced my poops helped feed starving fish and sharks in the ocean until I was 5-6. I think that’s how I got potty trained.

R191 - cool story, but where was the "dumbest thing you believed as a child?" part of it?

My friend’s dad told her that if she dried her boogers on a tissue they’d turn to gold nuggets so she had them laid out all over her bedroom.

He also told her it was froggy outside, not foggy.

She told that one at school and got picked on.

People always refer to children as a “Gift from God” so I assumed that any pregnant woman received a gift from God even the 16 year old ones, so I used to be worried that I might get stuck with a gift.

I convinced a friend that black folks don’t fart. Later she told some black folks she wished she didn’t fart like them. When she told them what she thought they laughed at her. Not sure which was funnier, her believing it - or thinking of her telling some black folks that and them looking at her all crazy and laughing. LOL

One year, when I was young, my family (and cousins) went on vacation to Virginia. Since we were going by car, my father explained we would be using the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel but I must have missed much of what he was saying because when we were actually traveling and came to the first tunnel, I thought the car would actually be traveling through the water like a submarine and I kept hoping that the doors and windows were air-tight. I was more than a little disappointed to discover it was nothing more than a regular tunnel like any other.

My father used to go clamming and one day he brought a bucket of steamers home for my mom to cook up. I was seven and had never tasted clams. I thought that piece that sticks out ( the siphon or long foot that gets discarded) was the clams dick. So everyone was eating the corn on the cob my mom bought at the market and enjoying dad's steamers when I was asked why I was only eating the corn and hadn't tried the clams, they are so delicious. I said "because when you eat steak or chicken you're just eating a piece of it, like the sides or something, but when you eat a clam you're eating the whole thing like it's brain, the eyeballs, the heart and the butthole and even the poop inside the butthole, no thanks."

r171, I laughed so hard at your post the tears came to my eyes. I wonder if your mother had to stifle her laughter or else just burst out laughing and couldn't stop.

I remember being ASTONISHED that you had to pay for electricity.

I thought Milli Vanilli sang on their records.

lmao r210. What did they say back??

r201**

When I first figured out I was gay, the one lucky thing I thought about it was that as a guy, I could have sex whenever I wanted to because guys don't say no - only girls say no. S

r142 - I actually thought the 10 commandments were real (and could happen any time) & insisted my parents' get lambs blood to put on my bedroom door. I was a mess. I never should've watched it at that age. They kept reminding me I wasn't even the first born but I was a disaster after watching that movie.

r150 - same

[quote]^I meant to add, I still feel bad about that, and it’s been 10 years since my own mother ran away to work on a farm.

You sent your 80 year old mother to work on a farm?! Who are you, Dorothy Zbornack?

(I’m just teasing you, hoping to bring a little levity since you said you felt bad. I hope you don’t take offense.)

The dumbest thing I believed as a child is the whole Jesus shtick. Virgin birth. Walked on water. Catered a wedding. Rose from the dead. Flew up to heaven. They really fucked with my head with all of that. Thank Miss God my family wasn't Catholic so I did not have a pile of Marian nonsense heaped on me, too.

fuck you faggot

When I was in school we had sex education classes. Different ones for boys and girls and called "health education". The goal of the classes seems to have been to scare the crap out of you because sex is bad.

I became convinced that I had syphilis although I'd never had sex. Walked around for a year convinced I had the syphilis.

I used to,be confused when someone on,the news talked about Georgia as if it were a country and not a state.

R99, you pore over a book, not pour over it.

R213, it was clearly his jizz that he was pouring all over that biology l book. Get a life.

I thought that the Big Bad Wolf was hiding in my bedroom closet

Wait, ponies aren’t baby horses?

R205 Everyone burst out laughing at me. And they just kept on eating. It wasn't unusual for me to come up with things like that so they were used to it. I remember feeling stupid because I was only 7 and didn't understand why they were laughing at me.

But I honestly thought the piece that sticks out of the shell was the clams penis. I hadn't noticed that, along with the shell, they were discarding that. For that reason I didn't start eating clams until I was in my 20's even though my mom served them regularly during clam season every year.

R103 is Sheldon Cooper.

I used to think that everything in the world was in black and white until the color tv came along.

R192 that was so typical of the 1960s. They didn't explain that kind of stuff to us. I guess they were trying to "protect" us. But really, it was a disservice. The kids today are exposed to so much more than we were. Parents and teachers are more open. Plus the internet - there are no mysteries about life for the kids today.

Sorry, ^^^ was for R191

I say we all toast/pour one out for poor Georgie.

R199 you are my kind of people!

(1) I thought world was visually black and white until invention of color televisions.

(2) My mother was a Romanov descendant.

R216 I know, right? They aren't.

I used to believe that dogs were boys and cats were girls.

Before color TV was invented people only saw black and white R219? That goodness someone invented color TV, otherwise we would still be living in a black and white world.

R227

I know right???

Somehow at the age of six I did not associate teachers with being human. I was in first grade when the teacher, Mrs Colette, suddenly announced that she had to go to the bathroom and we were to be quiet until she returned. I was astonished, and I couldn't wait to get home to tell my Mother that teachers were people too.

^ Same here. I remember being shocked one day when the door of the teacher's lounge opened the second I walked by and I got a quick glimpse of my 1st grade teacher biting into a sandwich. So you can imagine my shock when I ran into her in a park near my aunt's home one weekend and she was, 'married with a child', standing there with her husband and teenage daughter.

I NEVER thought my teachers were super-human. Not for a second. The opposite in fact. I thought they were rather inferior.

That milk came from ice cream.

I remember being shocked when I heard a teacher swear in 7th grade. I didn’t think it was legal.

That chocolate milk came from brown cows.

I still feel sometimes watching old movies from the teens through the early 30s, I watch a lot of them, the world really was in black and white. It's hard for me to imagine these scenes were actually in reality in color. If you watch The Women where for a few minutes it turns to color it really is strange.

I went to see The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks Senior at Film Forum assuming it would be in black and white. It was actually a two strip color print and it was gorgeous. Not at all like the washed prints of early color you see on youtube. It really was a revelation.

R97: I wanted to that but grandfather had served 20 years with the local police. So it wouldn't have worked too well for my dad. It's funny didn't find out granddad was a cop until he died in 2005. Then it came out from 1945 to 1965 he was a police officer. That explains why he didn't like my father.

I had an aunt who died at 16 in the 1960s, I ask my mom what she died from she said , "she ate a bad apple and got a burst appendix. " Fast forward 40 years later, my other aunt told me the truth at my mother's funeral that she had a back alley abortion. As a kid I never ate apples.

R229 that reminds me that a couple of weeks ago I was at the supermarket and the kid in front of me, whose around 5, gasps and points to some woman at the end of the aisle. “What is she doing here?” He loudly whispers to his mother. His mother was confused for a second and then says “oh just doing her shopping” and the kid says “doesn’t she just eat in the staff room?” And the mom laughs and says “Mrs Smith doesn’t live at school, she lives in a house like we do and has to do her groceries like we do”

I could almost see the kids mind exploding right there in aisle 7.

r228 is not r219. [italic]I[/italic] am r219. (Bitch, please.)

I believed that all guys were attracted to each other and fooled around. And that all guys found girls "yucky" and thought sex with them was kind of gross, but they did it anyway because...that's just what you did. Gays were men who wanted to be women. I was in my early 20s before I figured out that straight men actually liked and enjoyed sex with women and did not generally have sex with each other.

Yes, I am old and lived a sheltered life in a rural area.

I adored Lassie and thought she could see me through the TV. At the end of the show (where Lassie stood on a rock while the credits rolled), I would sob and blubber, "Bye Lassie! Come back! BYE LASSIE!"

Jesus.

Nothing will ever come close.

OP, you've got the makings of a book here, maybe with images by Maira Kalman or Gahan Wilson.

Looking at black and white pictures of my parents when they were young I thought the days were always overcast and how lucky we were now that the sun came out and everything could be seen in color.

I heard about KKK cross burnings on the news and assumed that Jesus was nailed to a cross and then set on fire. I thought that was what crucifixion was. It was quite a few years before someone set me straight on that.

Cleanup in aisle 7!

I recall an example of refusing to believe something dumb, but for a dumb reason. An elderly retired boxer who was our neighbour told me that when I died I would live underground and have to eat worms. I didn't believe him - my reason being that at that young age I was immortal and that it was only old people who died. Now that I'm 69 I pretty sure that's not the case although I still don't believe the worm thing.

The nuns told us that when we took a bath we had to be very careful and not directly touch unclean parts of the body while washing, “especially boys.” We were to cover the unclean body part with our soapy washcloth — never touch it directly with our hand — so that we didn’t commit a sin. Since the worst part of the body was BO and BO came from under the arms, I made sure to NEVER touch my armpit with my hand.

R248 You made more sense than the nuns.

When I was about 5 years old the Civil Rights movement was happening and I would see it on the news sometimes and found it very scary. George Wallace was especially scary since he was always yelling and looked like a bulldog. He talked about “outside agitators” (“ajit-tay-tuhs”) coming in and causing trouble. I thought outside agitatuhs meant aliens from outer space. Since they only showed humans when reporting this, I thought the aliens had assumed human form, like Invaders From Mars.

Good God, Almighty - the Catholic Church! **shakes head in dismay**

We need Catholicism today to help us with our problems.

When we took the big family vacation out West in the station wagon I noticed that when we hit Nevada (The Silver State) all the nice restaurants and hotels had signs that said "No Minors".. I worked it out in my head, and it made perfect sense that these classy places wouldn't want those dirty old silver minors coming in after work and wrecking the place. Imagine my shock when I discovered miners and minors were two different things, and they were talking about ME!

R241 Me too!!! I had totally forgotten that. My parents told me that even as a toddler I would cry and cry at the Lassie theme song. Timmy would call her name and I would be terrified she was lost or worse.

When Captain Kangaroo was talking to his audience one time he pointed directly at the camera and said with a chuckle, "Aren't you the cutest little one, happy to have you watch my show" and I thought he could see me and was talking directly to me. I was three.

I had that with romper room. She would say(I think she had a magic mirror or something) I see so and so and so and so and...The problem is she never said my name so she never saw me.

It made me feel really bad.

R256 Me too. :(

[quote]I was in my early 20s before I figured out that straight men actually liked and enjoyed sex with women and did not generally have sex with each other.

It wasn't until probably my late teens that I understood the women like to have sex as much as men.

I grew up with British sitcoms etc...working class women saying things like "Men, they only want one thing!" stuff like that. Men always chasing after women and women fending them off.

R241 Yes, I cried and cried to the Lassie theme at the end of every show.

I somehow believed that the family doctor impregnated my mother with his seed. She always went there for check-ups during her pregnancy, so, why not?

R36 - Well, I didn't know about the Beatles until you just posted it. Feeling a bit stupid now. Beatles for the 'beat' versus actual Beetles.

I always thought it was a strange name for a band but that wasn't so unusual in the 60s.

[quote]It wasn't until probably my late teens that I understood the women like to have sex as much as men.

No they don’t.

I believed there was justice and fairness in the world...

I also used to think bands recorded albums by playing one song, then waited three seconds before recording the next song. Also always thought they were at the radio station and were at hand hand ready to play their songs. This must be common thought at a young age.

R262 get better at it. She might want to fuck you more.

Do people really think women want sex just as much as men? Men are dogs, we’ll have sex every chance we get. There’s an old joke that women need a whole bunch of stuff, men just need a place, and that’s true.

If women wanted sex as much as men, there’d be lesbian cruising areas, hookup apps, bathhouses and all sorts of things. There would also be far fewer closeted married guys looking to hook up with no strings. The reason these things don’t exist is because women don’t think about sex like men do.

When I was a little kid I would hear news anchors talking about "Guerrilla Warfare" I really thought Gorillas were fighting in a war.

With all the activism going on when I was a boy I thought when I grew up the world was going to be a place with everyone living in harmony and no war or poverty.

Agree R268 !

[quote]Feeling a bit stupid now. Beatles for the 'beat' versus actual Beetles.

You make me feel better. I just figured out the whole Men's "Wearhouse" thing yesterday.

I thought that when people moved house, they literally swapped houses with each other. When I was four, my parents sold our house to a family we knew, so I assumed we were going to move into THEIR house and was confused when we moved to a completely different one.

Also, until she was about seven or eight, my sister believed that adultery was illegal.

I thought parents screwed once-a-month for nine months to make a baby.

I'm from New York. As a kid, I thought the 4:30 cameraman silhouette was a frog.

My parents told me the height markings by the door in convenience stores, fast food restaurants and gas stations were so parents could measure how much their kids had grown like the marks on the wall at home. My older brother finally clued me in that they for store clerks to get an idea of the heights of armed robbers as they fled. I suppose my parents didn't want to scare me that the place might actually be held up while we were there. And they always dutifully stopped to measure me at the door. Now I know why the clerks were always trying to hold back a laugh.

My parents told me if you leaned your head back against a movie theater seat, you'd get tapeworms. Not lice, but tapeworms.

FOR YEARS, I never leaned back against the seat.

JERKS!

TAPEWORMS!!! YES!

The science room in elementary school had one of those devils in a specimen jar in formaldehyde. It wigged me out. I ran home from school in third grade and told my mom about it. So she told me that her brother had a tapeworm when they were little. To get it out, the starved the brother for days, then set a bowl of milk on the table in front of him until the tapeworm eventually crawled out to drink it. That imagery haunted me for years. I say, YEARS!

I thought all dogs were male and all cats female.

I thought that old movies in Technicolor was how the world looked before air pollution ruined everything.

I remember thinking Bob Hope and Jack Benny were lookalikes and could never tell them apart. I’m not sure why I thought that since they looked nothing alike.

I had no idea other kids were traumatized at the end of Lassie! It was a combination of the end of the show, the picture of Lassie and the sad music.

When I was four or five I sounded out in the end credits that "Rudd Weatherwax" trained Lassie and I asked my parents if we could go visit Rudd Weatherwax so I could play with Lassie.

"Lesbian cruising areas"

There are, R266, we're just more discreet.

I thought Polly Bergen was Candace’s mother!

R273, OMFG, me too!!

That image brings back memories!

R110 ~ LOL! I love your sweet child self. And I relate to the Crocker Bank confusion.

I thought I was Catholic because my mom told me to say to any Jehovah’s Witnesses who knocked on the door that we are Catholic. I didn’t know the difference between being Catholic and being Irish, which I also thought we were but according to a recent DNA test that’s a small minority of who I am. Anyway, it turns out she said that because she figured Witnesses won’t try as aggressively to convert Catholic people because catholicism is such an immersive cult/culture that people rarely escape.

I thought Shirley Temple Black had changed her race.

I thought the laughter track or audience laughter on television shows was the sound of people laughing at home so would try to get my friends at school to listen out for me laughing REALLY LOUD. I'm sure my parents thought I was insane.

I thought gods were real until 12 when I started to realize that they are all made up figures created by assholes to control/kill/dominate/torture/rob/rape/abuse others.

when I was about 10 years old, some kid at school told me that a girl got pregnant after swimming in a public pool.

This terrified me as I spent most summers either swimming in lakes or pools.

This was right around the time I started going through puberty so I started getting a woman's figure with the weight gain.

I was terrified that I had somehow become pregnant from all of my swimming and used to obsessively measure my belly in the bathroom every day.

Oh R289 after I saw “Piranha,” I likewise became terrified of swimming pools even though I could plainly see there were no fish in them. My mind insisted that there could still be giant jellyfish anywhere in the water and so I took a year or so off from swimming.

I believed killer bees were heading towards the U.S. and we would all need to evacuate to Canada.

I used to think I was having little heart attacks, and I would sit perfectly still and hope they would pass instead of killing me. I knew I should tell someone, but I felt like a freak because who ever heard of a kid having a heart attack? I didn’t want to become a medical science guinea pig.

Yep, it was acid reflux.

that the Gulf War was a good idea

That eating raw cookie dough would give me worms

I used to think you got your last name from the priest at your wedding. My father had no local family, but my mother's family was in the neighborhood -- and of course had a different last name. I thought the priest looked in the Bible, picked out a last name, and that was that.

My family wanted wall-to-wall carpeting in the house. I got nervous and cautioned them that it would cost too much to cover the walls with carpet , way too much carpet, and the ceiling and floor! We weren’t that rich. They were confused because I was planning to be a doctor and was pre-med at 14 in school or something but the family got worried that I was actually retarded. They laughed their asses off, told the entire 600 person family while I argued my case. Why don’t they call it floor-to floor carpeting or something clearer?

To this day, whenever I act smart, the words “wall-to-wall carpeting” are asked of me or again shared with strangers while the family rolls on the floor.

As a little girl living in Milwaukee, we would go to Chicago to visit relatives.

From my facing south third grade classroom window , I thought that if I stared at and tried hard enough, I could just. make. out. the skyscrapers of Chicago.

I remember watching The Right Stuff in the movie theater when I was kid and marveling at the part where Dennis Quaid had to give a sperm sample. I knew it was something adult, and as a little gayling he really gave me the hots in this movie so I was really concentrating on the scene. I remember thinking, having no idea where sperm came from, that they were like little lint balls on your ball sack that you had to pick off. I thought he was going into the bathroom to pick sperm off the outside of his testicles. I have no idea where that idea came from. But at the time it was the only one that made sense to me since it would be years before I had my first ejaculation.

The dumbest, by far.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, a classmate believed that each state had its own movie stars; e.g., people who lived in Nevada saw movies starring other Nevadans, etc. We lived in California, so naturally we had a lot of "local" stars, since so many lived here. Other than that, he really wasn't all that stupid.

I was really really young, but I thought all things on TV were drawn. After seeing the Disney movie creators draw people, I thought everything on TV was drawn. I think my older brother planted that idea in my head, jerk.

r300 it’s true!

The neighbor kid was dumb. When I told him we were moving to the west side of town he said we were gonna get killed by Indians.

I believed that if I worked hard, put myself through college while working, I could raise myself up and escape the poverty and class I was born into. I might even become important.

Now I know the truth and it’s too late to go back and enjoy myself for all those years I worked and studied and did the right thing.

Kids, when you work hard, here’s what happens - you get chosen to do the hardest work because they know they can rely on you to get it done. You won’t be praised, you won’t be given raises, you won’t be promoted. Lazy ass rich kids will be promoted over you because they have connections. It will be inexplicable to you how dumb people are given jobs where they do nothing but walk around holding clipboards and drawing fat paychecks while you fruitlessly wonder, “Why can’t I be that person? I can carry a clipboard and would get 10x as much work done.” People will steal your ideas and if you try to say, “Hey I came up with that,” people will look at you as if you are a toad who crashed a picnic.

Don’t work hard. Do as much as it takes to keep your job and do no more. Especially if you come from the lower classes and you were physically impacted by poverty and malnutrition. Don’t tell anyone your ideas for making things better. Just collect the fattest check you can while doing the least amount of work and you will be successful. Don’t expect fairness or equality and always lie to make yourself look better. It works.

When I was still in single digits age-wise and they would show old news films on TV, I thought people really walked that way (extremely fast and making rapid hand movements) . My sister-in-law visited her mother's relatives in Italy when she was 10 and brought a small transistor radio home. She expected it to play Italian music and could not understand why it was suddenly playing stations from our city, LOL!

When I was very young my Grandma told me to eat my carrots. She if I did I would never need glasses, because they were good for your eyes.

Floor to floor carpeting makes no sense whatsoever. What profession did you say you went into?

R306, that’s hilarious and adorable!

And get a hobby or be a volunteer somewhere nice.

Well I would think really old console TVs would play TV shows from that era. It was very strange seeing contemporary shows on those dinosaurs.

The bizarre lies mothers tell their kids: ‘Crying makes your head fall off’

A compilation of white lies moms have told their kids around the world shows that while many fibs were uniquely crazy, there was plenty of common ground

Eric Grundhauser, for Atlas Obscura, Fri 1 Jun 2018 06.00 EDT

r307 Your Grandma was right.

Have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?

When Jackie Kennedy was pregnant with the child that died after just a couple of days, Patrick I believe. I had heard my parents (Republicans) complaining that an entire wing of a hospital was built just for her to have that baby. When he was born, I heard something about a C-section, I thought that section must be the new wing of the hospital.

When I saw on the news that Princess Diana of wales had died I was extremely sad that the “whales” wouldn’t have their princess anymore and wondered who would protect the whales.

OP, I usually go with the earlier info. I figure a record keeper could ask a couple for their census-like data on the birth or baptism of their child, or know via gossip. If, however, someone dies after a long life, there may be no one still alive who knows their birthdate or other census-like data.

Here is a tangentially related tip:

Each year from 1 Jan to 25 Mar, older dates may be written like this: Feb 15, 1760/61. In computerized systems that require a 4 digit year, I enter the later year (e.g. 1761). This can be confusing if someone else uses the earlier year, instead. In such cases, records may conflict, such as a baptism being in the calander year before birth, which is obviously impossible.

See the link for more details.

[quote] Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are terms sometimes used with dates to indicate that the calendar convention used at the time described is different from that in use at the time the document was being written. There were two calendar changes in Great Britain and its colonies, which may sometimes complicate matters: the first was to change the start of the year from Lady Day (25 March) to 1 January...

I used to think angels or aliens were trying to talk to me. While my head was buzzing and I smelled electricity, I was really having minor epileptic seizures.

That my parents loved me.

I used to think that the lady that worked in the drugstore was able to eat as much free candy as she wanted. One day I told my friend that and she heard me and when I came to pay for my candy, she said, "No, I have to pay for it just like you."

A lady who went to our church worked at the "Notions" counter of the local department store. I always thought she had such a glamorous job. For awhile, I thought I would work in a department store until my mother crashed all my dreams by telling me I wasn't right for that type of job. And she was right. I hate standing for long periods of time.

Bump. Luuuuuurvv this thread.

That Jesus taught humanity how to tie shoelaces.

[quote]I too just assumed that the mere fact of getting married is what caused pregnancy.

When I was five, I asked my mother where babies came from. Unfortunately, I then immediately provided her with my theory that when girls turned a certain age, like 16 (seriously!) they just became pregnant.

My weak, lying bitch of a mother told me that yup, that's how it happens! Fucking weak cunt >:(

[quote]I couldn't believe it when my grandfather told me I was born on my birthday.

LOL!

I remember telling my friend that I wished I could have two birthdays, and was confused as fuck when she insisted that was impossible. I somehow could not wrap my little head around "birthday" = "day you were born".