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Childhood Misconceptions

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Less searchable M0rd4nt

18:19 / 16.04.05

That's so perfectly messed up.

18:20 / 16.04.05

When I was five or six years old, I remember listening to the BBC World Service thinking that it was a really mean thing that everyone was ganging up on president Reagan, just because he liked the movie Star Wars. I wrote a very sincere letter to the president telling him so, and saying I liked Star Wars too. Which led to a very interesting discussion with my dad when I asked him to post it for me.

This memory inevitably triggers the more sobering memory of seeing my parents glued to the receiver when the news of the Chernobyl disaster first hit the airwaves and there was some speculation it could have been the start of the nuclear exchange. Makes you appreciate something like the BBC World Service...back then it was really the only reliable news source we had. But I digress.

Grimlockus_Prime

20:53 / 16.04.05

When i were still small and innocent, i tought it was ultra-rare for people to get drunk.

Boy were i wrong...

Tryphena Absent

02:19 / 17.04.05

I thought babies grew out of one's belly-button.

I thought women gave birth through their belly-buttons.

(...yes, I'm really female.)

02:43 / 17.04.05

I used to think that cobras lived at the foot on my bed. I wore socks to bed, year round, for years. My parents thought my feet were just cold, and they didn't find out until I was in my late teens, early twenties. And they were kind of disturbed. Nothing like early OCD to make you enjoy your childhood.

03:23 / 17.04.05

I came up with the concept that mummies gave birth through their rear passage and my mother, bless her timid heart, didn't say anything otherwise til public school sex education tracked me down at the age of 12. Grr.

04:43 / 17.04.05

the concept that mummies gave birth through

I'm assuming you intend that to mean mothers, and not those undead things wrapped in bandages, correct? Please tell me I'm correct.

08:03 / 17.04.05

Thinking of OCD, how about not treading on the cracks in the pavement lest the bears get you?

Polka, that's a perfect example of why parents should think before they speak. One of things this thread has made me very aware of is just how much of what our parents told us we took to be gospel truth - and how dangerous that power can be if abused.

Right then, back to sex. When Pappuce and I were around nine-years-old we would often discuss sex with our friends.
One such discussion revealed powerful terms such as fertilization and intercourse. I was reliably informed that in order to sex a girl you had to insert your penis into her vagina, leave it there - apparently this was very pleasurable - and then, after a while, have a wee. Your wee would do all the fertilization necessary; basically weeing in a girl was good for her, and had nothing to do with babies.

I suppose I was half right.

08:53 / 17.04.05

I think I mentioned it before, but when I was quite small I thought we were still at war with Germany. Well, there were so many war films, and there was Battle Action Force and those teeny comics you got in newsagents with all the "achtung spitfuer tommy schweinhund" stories.

I asked my dad and he looked at me funny and said "no". "Well, who are we at war with then?" I replied. He looked at me funny again and said "well, Russia I suppose, but it's different".

I did try to incorporate Russia into the war stories but it wasn't very successful; I didn't actually know anything about Russia, and there didn't seem to be much of a war going on really, nothing like as good as the one with the Germans.

14:33 / 17.04.05

Yeah, but my mother is a bit fucked up in other ways. Maybe I will tell you about them, maybe not... By the way, she said that thing to me about a year after my grandmother (father´s side) had died -of stomach cancer. That had been developed from breast cancer. I have always been wondering why one needs a license to drive a car, but not to have children...
If somebody wants to know more about this stuff, read Alice Miller. Makes you angry, hopefully in a good way.

15:14 / 17.04.05

I have always been wondering why one needs a license to drive a car, but not to have children...

I give you The Breeding Exam

15:17 / 17.04.05

Speaking of cancer mythologies, when my maternal grandfather died of cancer (not sure what kind, I was too young - liver or pancreatic or both), my mom told us he died because he never ate his vegetables. In a sense she wasn't wrong, but at the time I was like - wow, he wouldn't just buckle down and eat some broccoli, he let it get that bad?

Brigade du jour

15:24 / 17.04.05

Thanks for the tip Polka, I've come to agree with your position in recent years.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:59 / 17.04.05

In my case, nuclear paranoia got tied into the idea of the Rapture (my mum, bless 'er, had decided that seeing as how I was finding church boring, I'd maybe keep going if she sent me to the one my friend went to, where they were all evangelical and fun and stuff, rather than the boring old CofE my dad was a vicar for. And- the bit she didn't really think about, I guess- obsessed with the imminent end of the world. Yes, I kept going to church... I also woke screaming from nightmares seven nights a week... "mummy... I dreamt you'd all vanished in the Rapture. Again.")

I also remember that after reading a story in an Eagle annual that I'd picked up in a junk shop where the twist was that the narrator was actually the kiler but didn't know it- first time I'd ever seen that- I'd always worry when hearing about violent crime on the radio that maybe I'd done it and didn't remember it. This was about the time of the Yorkshire Ripper, so I was blaming myself for LOTS of really bad shit.

23:07 / 17.04.05

Er... out of place amongst all the war stuff, I know, but I just rememberred one.

You remember the band Sha Na Na? They used to have their own TV show... I don't remember anything about it, but I used to watch it every week when I was little. I loved it. My favorite part was after the end credits, where the the Sha Na Na guys all jumped up into the air and then it freeze-framed. With them all still in the air.

I used to spend hours in front of the TV, jumping up and down, trying to stay up there.

I thought Sha Na Na were magic.

11:17 / 18.04.05

When I was about six or seven or so, I was convinced that nobody in the world could ever know what I was thinking, *unless* they were touching me. If, for example, I sat next to my mum on the bus and our knees were touching, that meant she knew exactly and precisely what was going on in my mind. It made me quite paranoid.

Oddly, even now I have a lingering suspicion that it's true even though I know it's not...is it??

11:25 / 18.04.05

I thought that satalites were monitoring us at all times, all of us. I once was in the bath and heard my mum laugh at something on the televsion and was convinced that it was at a satalite feed of me. I was terrified, even as a young teen, to masturbate, convinced that someone would see me with their damned satalites.

Not in the Face

11:51 / 18.04.05

The BBC adaptation of the Triffids scared the crap put of me, especially as my mother had put a big yukka plan in the corner of my room. I suffered a lot of dissonance between rationally knowing it was just a big, green plant and also 'knowing' - generally at night - that it was about to morph into a triffid and kill me.

I resolved the dilemma by placing out of sight behind the long curtains we had in the room, and not incidentally killing the fucker from lack of sunlight.

Even today I will still give all long stemmed plants over 6 foot a wide berth, just in case. So not so young, but still stupid.

I also scan read a Mr Men book once at about age 6, where the main character had stepped on a pot and had had to have a cast put on his broken foot. I didn't pay attention terribly well and for years called leg plastercasts 'pots'. Caused a lot of confusion when my mum ended up with one.

11:53 / 18.04.05

Might have posted this here before, but...

When I was about nine my family bought some brown leather sofas, and my mother told me that "Brown leather turns green if you fart on it, so don't do that."

It was too long, (maybe seven years) before I questioned this statement...

lonely as a cloud...

12:10 / 18.04.05

I had a lot of god-related misconceptions as a kid, due to my catholic upbringing...I thought that rain came after god finished washing the dishes and pulled the plug, and also that the money you give in church (they generally had two collections - one for the upkeep of the local church and priests, and a second which went towards poorer parishes) was actually brought up to heaven in a large helicopter. I pictured people in heaven looking like illustrations from the Book of Kells, or other medieval Celtic manuscripts, picking out coins and going "ooooh!". It never occured to me to wonder what they'd do with the money...

12:30 / 18.04.05

I didn't pay attention terribly well and for years called leg plastercasts 'pots'. Caused a lot of confusion when my mum ended up with one.

You know, I think in some regions plaster casts are called pots. A friend of mine from Yorkshire certainly referred to the cast he once had on his arm as a 'pot'. So maybe you weren't as confused as you thought you were. (Or maybe you are he, and were still confused until pretty recently.)

Haus of Mystery

12:37 / 18.04.05

I remember going to see a performance of 'A Christmas Carol' at the village hall when I was tiny. It was real low quality local drama-club stuff I'm sure, but as a child I was enthralled. So far so good. then came a moment where the ghost of Christmas Past (the girl) 'dissappeared'. Now I'm sure what really happened was that she stepped behind the curtain, and someone threw a handful of glitter in to the air. However the junior old me was thrown into instant turmoil. Where had she gone? I had just seen a woman dissappear in a puff of magic dust BEFORE MY VERY EYES. The rest of the play was a blur. My mind was reeling. I waited till the end before sking my Mum what had happened to the lady. And she, I guess with some notion of not wanting to dispell the 'magic' of the moment, professed she didn't know. Little did she know this was the single worst thing she could have done, and for years I was convinced I had seen
a) A ghost, and
b) Magic
performed right in front of me. What's more no-one else seemed freaked by this, which in turn freaked me out further. Terrifying.

12:41 / 18.04.05

Howard, that business about "pots" is ace.

Okay, although I could go on and on about my childhood misconceptions, I've decided to go a different route.
Still on the sex issue, I was lucky enough to have some very liberal nannies when I was growing up. This meant that I could and did get to discuss sex with adults. These conversations were often very informative.
For example, when I was nine I knew that sex wasn't just about pro-creation - that people enjoyed it and actively sought it out. I also knew that you didn't have to be in love to get a kick out of it. Basically I understood that sex could be good physical fun.
Annoyingly this often led me to get very frustrated with those kids whose parents weren't quite so forthcoming. Most girls I spoke to - and many of the boys - insisted that not only was sex dirty and painful, no one in their right mind would do it unless they were planning a family. And these were just the kids who knew anything about the subject.

So the questions are, was this just squeamishness of behalf of the kids, or do a lot of parents screw their kids up at a very early age?

12:46 / 18.04.05

I think it's pretty much standard procedure.

12:54 / 18.04.05

In the immortal words of Pop Larkin,

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They do not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were sloppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Perfick!

16:10 / 18.04.05

My dad gave me the birds & bees talk when I was 7, but definitely said it was for making babies. "That's how the seed gets into the mommy" was roughly the gist of it.

Letting parents off the hook for a moment, Sesame Street really screwed up my concept of imagination. Since Big Bird always actually SAW his imaginary friend Snuffleupagus - and so did we - I thought that I was born without an imagination, because I couldn't see anything I thought up like that. I was a very literal child. And I was really upset about not having an imagination. I thought all the kids who had them were having so much more fun than me.

16:26 / 18.04.05

But Ibis, Snuffleupagus was real. Like Harvey.

16:47 / 18.04.05

Ibis: I had the same problem, only with Calvin and Hobbes. I yearned for an erudite stuffed animal companion. My own attempts to construct an imaginary friend (a Viking, he was) were abandoned quickly when I didn't seem to be getting the same results as Calvin.

Also, when I was very young, I took the old 60s Batman show completely straight. As I got older, I started to question the logic of the show ("Why do the Joker and the Penguin wear masks when they invade the UN building? Everybody knows who they are anyway"). I don't remember how old I was when my mum clued me in that it was supposed to be funny, but I remember a brief period of denial followed the revelation.

Goodness Gracious Meme

16:48 / 18.04.05

I thought women gave birth through their belly-buttons.

Me three.

Yes also to the gorillas and to 'falling through the cracks in pavement' - think I only really stopped hopping over them in my teeens

When I was a wee 'un, my darling sister told me that there was a monster under my bed.

And further, that I was safe in my bed as long as I was awake, but that the instant I fell asleep, it would be released and eat me.

I'm still a chronic insomniac, come to think...

Oh, and to give you some idea of my upbringing:

I can distinctly remember being about 8 and being very confused when I discovered that 'vaginas' were what 'ladies used to have sex'. Confused me for ages, that did, mixing it up as I was with 'reginas'(as in Victoria R etc)

17:12 / 18.04.05

OK, one for all the men in the audience. I would like just ONE of us not to have had the misapprehension that vaginas were right on the front hidden under the hair until we encountered one or saw one in a magazine.
Please tell me someone worked it out, as not one man I have ever talked to had.

17:19 / 18.04.05

I can distinctly remember being about 8 and being very confused when I discovered that 'vaginas' were what 'ladies used to have sex'. Confused me for ages, that did, mixing it up as I was with 'regina'(as in Victoria R)

Lol. That's brill.

Cube, similar to what you said, except the vagina was kind of shaped like a slot which the penis would slide into in much the same way that a bookmark fits into a book.

17:52 / 18.04.05

Thank goodness this thread does have also a lighter side

.

I started to think all the mis-thoughts I have ever had, and suddenly realised that I still have some of those. Especially with foreign languages, like english. From the third grade, when I started first to study english, until this day one thing has baffled me. "Booby trap". I know what it is, but what does it MEAN? Is it a trap filled with boobies? Or a trap for boobies to fall in when they roam wild and free in the green pastures?

Tell me, please. You are the Native Speakers of this noble language.

18:03 / 18.04.05

I think... a booby is old slang for a fool, so a 'booby trap' is indeed a trap for boobies...

18:08 / 18.04.05

Polka, the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the "booby" in booby-trap comes from schoolboy slang (ca. 1850ish), meaning "idiot, dunce." A booby-trap was a prank (like balancing a bucket of water atop a partially ajar door) to make someone look like an idiot, set off when the person blundered into it. By the early 20th century, booby-traps were somewhat less amusing, and far more likely to blow bits of you off.

~L

18:14 / 18.04.05

I've possibly mentioned this somewhere else on barbelith at some point but I had a total misconception of meaning of the phrase "a stitch in time saves 9".
I always percieved it as being about a stitch in the fabric of time. Also I never made the connection of the "9" being in any way connected to an amount of stitches i.e. any alpha, numeric entry or even word could have replaced it i.e. it could have easily been "A stitch in time saves triangle" or "Koala bears" or "w".
And now and again I would chime in this phrase during conversation and pull a stupid face as I thought it was just something random and nonsensical people said.

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