grown-ups: family

When I was little I firmly believed in stuff from the 1950s. Examples include: Every family having to have both a boy and girl child, the wife having to stay home, etc. I also believed that they were boy/girl colors, and you could only like colors in the catering that fit your gender.

When I was very little my grandma once told me that "Exit" meant "quiet" and that you had to stop talking. This worked great for my parents, when we would go places, if I started crying or whining or whatever, they would just point to an "Exit" sign and that would shut me up. But then one day Dad brought home an old "Exit" sign and hung it up in my room, for laughs, I was so upset!!

I was brought up in New Zealand where there was a non-littering campaign telling us to 'be a tidy Kiwi'. My father brought us an icecream at a children's park and lifted us all up, one at a time to put the wrappers in the rubbish bin. The bin had a sign on it which said 'look at the tidy Kiwi' and in the bin was a mirror so you could see yourself being a 'tidy kiwi'. To this day my sister (now 35 years old) believes that my father was showing her that she belongs in the rubbish bin.

I used to believe that, to have kids, you didn't need to do sex. I thought you only had to kiss the loved one some certain number of times and the baby would be made from all the saliva that would be wasted in all the kisses. That's why I used to hate kissing people.

when I was little i used to believe that I had an identical twin somewhere out there that was doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.
I also wondered what it would be like if we ever crossed paths.

AS a child ( my father was 50 when I was born) I truly believed that my dad was friends with George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln ( Not Possible for several reasons)..I thought he had wooden teeth too, because when he and George needed to get new teeth, all they had back then were wooden ones. I used to to tell this story to all of the kids in school...No wonder why I got picked on all the time!

when i was around 7, i thought my parents were trying to kill me so i started acting up. when they took me to a therapist, she asked me to draw a picture of my family, and i purposely left out my father so she would think my parents werent good parents and would let me be adopted into another home.

If I was misbehaving my grandma used to say that if I didn't behave myself a gypsy would come and take me and put me into her bag full of snot! Everytime we went to the shops in town I was on the look out for the gypsies with their snot bags.

When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my mother and I were invited to a baby shower. I asked her why my younger brother wasn't invited and she said it was because boys weren't allowed. I agreed, and said he would probably be embarrassed with all the naked people around. When she asked what I meant she soon understood what I envisioned as a "baby shower" was where all the women invited took off all their clothes and literally showered with the newborn baby.

When I was little my grandma had really long nails. Once I asked her why she didn't trim them and she said she did the day before (but didn't tell me she only trimmed them a little, I thought she had made them short and they had grown that much in one night.) Because of that and the fact that she had kind of hairy arms, I thought my grandma was a werewolf.

My nanna always seemed to know what was going on, specifically if I had been naughty. I once asked her, very wide eyed, how she knew all these things. Her response was that 'a little bird told her'. I was pretty litteral as a child and promptly asked her which one, she pointed to a black bird that just happened to be in her yard at the time and told me that it was him. That he was always watching me and would tell her what I had been doing.

For years my mum pointing out "nanna's blackbird is watching you." was a sure fire way of making me behave. I seem to recall that when she died (I was 7 at the time) my mum told me that the blackbird would keep carrying messages about me to her in heaven. Oddly it was really comforting and the concept of a litteral 'little bird' is still something my mum and I share a smile over to this day (23 years on).

when i was younger my sister and her friends would tease me all the time and make up things that i would believe. one was that my cousin dana wouldn't drink orange juice unless it was out of a shotglass because she hated drinking it any other way. i never questioned why but i figured thats how she did it. i honestly believed this until i was probably eleven when i said to my sister "well she only drinks it out of shot glasses you know that" she looked at me and laughed and told me that they had made it up.

When I was a little kid, I was convinced that the place my mother went to get her hair "done" was the Beauty Saloon. I imagined everybody's mother sitting around in curlers, having drinks at a bar!

When my brother was little he was a very friendly, happy, panty-hose lover! For some reason he loved panty hose so much that when mom wore them he'd pet her legs and coo like they were little kitties. Except they weren't panty hose...oh no..Acording to him they were " Ooooo... Poneytoes...!"

When I was about 6 or 7, I noticed that George Washington wore breeches and Abraham Lincoln wore trousers. Therefore, I concluded that my father, who wore trousers, must have been a contemporary of Lincoln.

When i was a child my Grandfather had me convinced he was a girl before he was a boy! And that if i didnt behave he would make me change into a little boy as well!