I Used To Believe newsletter: March 2004
hi,
we're considering starting a campaign to encourage parents to speak clearly to their kids: among this month's selection are a lethal playground, an american president helping people out of snowdrifts and a christmas carol about corpses.
visit http://iusedtobelieve.com - the world's largest source of childhood misinformation...
see you next month,
mat.
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I used to only sleep with this one red blanket because I thought if someone broke into our house and tried to kill us, they would think I was already dead and covered in blood. One time my parents sneaked into my room to see if I was sleeping and I thought they wee killers. I screamed "I'm dead leave me alone". They still talk about it.
Anon
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When I first heard of the bubonic plague, my mom told me it was the black plague, for about a year I thought she said "black play" and it was a playground with swings, slides, etc. that were painted black, and if you went on them, you died
Anon
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When I was I kid, my mother used to send me to the store to buy he sanitary napkins. She would give me an envelope with a note and money in it. When I got to the store, the woman would read the note, go in the back room, and come out with a wrapped up box. I thought my mother was a spy for many years!
matthew
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When I was a little girl my dad told me that it wasn't 'air' in the bubbles of bubble wrap, but actually a very poisonous gas. He said if I continued to pop the bubbles, I would destroy the ozone layer and contaminate the oxygen in the world, thus killing the entire world population. It was only a few years ago that I realized he just hated the "popping" sounds and that it actually oxygen in the bubbles.
Kirsty
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When I was young, and we would go in the car with mom, that the way she used to get the car to go backwards, was by turning to her right, and putting her arm across the seat. And as soon as she took her arm off the back of the seat, the car would go forward. Dumb, isn't it.
Yvonne
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When I was little, we would always get in a tube and bounce up and down in the pool to make a "wave pool." When we went to the beach, I thought there was a really really fat person in the middle of the ocean with a really big tube bouncing up and down to make waves!
Anon
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When I was around 4 or 5, I was questioning my mother about babies. She told me that when you were pregnant, you had to watch what you ate because whatever the mother was eating, the baby inside was eating as well. Somehow I translated this to, you have to watch what you eat or else you will GET pregnant! And for what ever reason, I associated that with cheese. I thought that there was a microscopic baby lurking inside all of us, but that they liked cheese and would start to grow if you ate it. I was paranoid of eating dairy for months! My poor mother couldn't understand why every meal would start with me asking, "Is there cheese in that??!!"
Anon
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Until I was about 13 (I was a naive and overprotected child) I thought that men got up in the morning and put on their new clean condom everyday just like they put on their underwear. That way they had it on when they were ready to have sex.
S.L.T.
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I used to believe that if you called the number on one of those Christian Children's Fund commercials they would actually send you a child. I was an only child and always begged my mom and dad to send me a baby from South America.
Holly
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When I was little, we had one of those automatic car washes down the street. This particular one had picture of a donkey next to its name. Being young, I was petrified of sitting in the car as it went through the car wash. So my mother, trying to calm my nerves, told me that there were donkeys in the car wash. I don't think I had ever freaked out so bad in my life! I pictured donkeys lurking up in the machinery, then jumped down and smashing the windows of our car with their hooves!
Anon
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When I was younger, at Christmas time, people would sing this Christmas carol: "Deck the halls with boughs of holly, falalalalaaaa lalalala." I was horrified as I thought they sang: "Deck the halls with thousand bodies, falalalalaaaa lalalala."
Morten Vestergaard
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When my mother was a child, she believed that being a clown was a birth defect rather just makeup. She thought that if you were born with a face like that, you had to join the circus to entertain people. There were no other options.
E. Lee
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My father believed that President Lincoln was famous for freeing the sleighs. Dad hypothesized they must have gotten stuck in a snow drift, and Lincoln went out and got them unstuck. Really.
Marissa
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when I was little, for some reason I was convinced that Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear because he didn't want to hear the traffic outside because he thought it was distracting. it didn't occur to me until much later that he lived long before cars were invented.
Anon
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I used to think that while all the kids were at school, the adults would all come out of their houses and scream curse words at the top of their lungs.
mary
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I used to believe that when people died, they turned into stones. The reason for this is because I saw at the graveyards, people had their gravestones on their graves... sad but true.
Laura
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When I was little I wanted to go to Disneyland as soon as I could, before Mickey Mouse died.
Mary
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When I was little(Around 7).I thought that if you took medicine, and you were not sick. It would make you sick with what it cured. I would try this to get out of school. It never worked. I wished it worked
Anon
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My mother told me that Jesus lived inside me, so I figured the only place he would fit is in my stomach. I imagined a landscape of chicken legs and vegetables where he walked around in his robes...
Anon
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My sister and I used to believe that when our hamsters stopped moving for no reason, that they were "communicating" telepathically with each other.
Anon
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