body parts: general

I used to believe that cuticles (that white part under your fingernails) were an indication of how big a liar you were. The bigger the cuticles, the more lies you told.

When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that if you opened the refridgerator door too long, your face was freeze in the same position for the rest of your life...She even backed the lie with the story of her distant aunt who had her face frozen and her lips stayed curled forever. So I made a serious effort to make my face a pretty as possible so it if it ever froze, I woud still look nice. I did try to avoid smiles however because I feared that I would have a smile on even if I was angry.

when i was a kid my mom told me that when i cut my finger, the food i eat would come out of the wound. one day i pricked my pinky and was actually afraid that my fried chicken would come out of it whole. i believed that till i was six.

When I was little my parents told me that old ladis had no lips because they ate food off the floor and if I ate food off the floor I would lose my lips too...it worked but its silly that I believed that.

When I was very young, one of my mum's very good friends would come round to see us. Me and my sister liked him coming over as he liked to laugh and joke with us and we found him entertaining.

Sometimes he'd be sat on the sofa and we'd run up to him and grab his right leg nad he'd say to us "Careful now, that's my driving leg".

I was convinced that his leg was somehow special or fragile and we should be careful of it because he need it for this mysterious "driving".

It was only when I finally bought my first car 2 years ago (when I was 23) that I remembered and thought about this again and realised how much he'd been having me and my sister on.

when i was young and one of my teeth where lose i was horrified by the idea that i could swallow my tooth while i slept at night, and i was positive that i would unless i hung my head downward over the side of the bed so it would fall on the floor. but between the boogeyman under my bed and swallowing my tooth i slept very uncomfortable night between hiding under my blankets and hanging my head downwards as best i could.

I used to think that maybe people had miscounted, and we actually had 11 fingers. I used to lie in bed and carefully count my fingers over and over, to make sure there were actually 10.

When my sister was 4, my mother told us that my grandfather had to have surgery to have scar tissue removed. She went around to everyone in our neighborhood and told them that our grandfather had to have Kleenex removed from his nose.

I thought your loins were kidneys, and nobody corrected me until I was a teenager

I used to believe that when you broke an arm or leg, the limb was amputated for repair and returned weeks and weeks later. When I was in kindergarten, a girl broke her arm and I never saw it because it was in a sling hidden under a sweater. Imagine my panic when, a year later in the first grade, I was being taken to the hospital for treatment of a broken leg.

When I went to get my ears pierced I cried because I thought the lady was going to stand across the room and point the piercing gun at me from there. If she missed, it could land anywhere-- my nose, my eye. I was eight.

I thought braces were made out of precious metals and that's why they were so expensive!

My grandmother told me that if I didn't get my cuticles pushed back that they would grow over my nails. Our neighbor at the time lost his thumb nail and she told me that was what had happened to him. I had great cuticles as a kid.

My dad had wart-like skin nipples on his neck/shoulder area. When I was very small, I used to point them out and ask what it was. He told me that there were diamonds inside!
I really asked him frequently, if I could have them, if he would cut them out.
It took me to my teens (16?) to realize that it had been mean deception.
My mum and dad probably laughed a lot when I was greedily staring at the warts in the past.
Doh!

I used to think that my soul was my throat.. either located there, or that it actually was my throat... i'm not sure. But i thought you could rip it out, like on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I think I tried this on my little brother, but i'm not sure.

When I first heard that it was possible to break a limb, I thought you could break an arm or a leg right off. I thought you'd grow a new one; it would start growing back really small, and get bigger and bigger until it was normal sized.

I also remember the first time my Dad said 'your eyes were bigger than your stomach', and I thought my eyes did get, momentarily, really huge...