What do you remember from your childhood that you now realise you really misunderstood?

@scalt I think he had told me, but it didn't stop me being scared. That's why he told me a bit of a white lie. Funny how I still believed it long after he'd forgotten telling me it 🙂.

Memories of Maureen Lipman rolling up a sheet of A4 into a very tight long cigarette shape and trying to push it down the phone wires when using a fax machine! It was a very new 'ology' then.
My late MIL would get worked up if a socket was switched on with nothing plugged in, all the electricity was escaping, You're paying for that!

Here's one that got me as an adult. The first time I came over to Maine, to spend time with DH before we got married, it was October and the leaf colours were magnificent. The fire hydrants in the town we were in were painted ochre and red, and I commented how apt it was that the colours went so well with the leaves. He looked me straight in the eye and said "Oh yes, they paint them that way every fall". And I believed him for a while! I am so gullible. I was 51 at the time.

I remember my dad telling me, when I was about five or six, that brown cows gave chocolate milk and black and white cows gave black and white milk. I wondered where all the white cows were because I'd only ever seen white milk.

I hope you also learned that division is repeated subtraction!

My mum used to play the soundtrack for Joseph and the amazing Technicolor dreamcoat quite a bit. In the song Close every door, there’s a line that says “darken my daytimes and torture my nights”.

I was always quietly smug that I would have dealt with that just fine as I would have just slept in the day time when it was dark, and stayed awake at night when all the torches were shining on me. I didn’t get what Joseph’s problem was and thought he was a bit dim for not figuring out he could just change his sleeping pattern 😅

Even though I now know that torture has nothing to do with torches, I still get the mental image of Joseph trying to nod off with a load of torches being shone on him whenever I hear the song…

@Plutotheplanet I asked why there was a sign given honey bees don't sting. He looked at me like I was stupid and said 'Of course they do'.
Ah, but did he tell you that most bees die when they sting, unlike wasps?

Mistaking my dad for an adoption worker. It was the only conversation I ever had with him.

I wasn't allowed to have gobstoppers because I wouldn't be able to eat anything afterwards. When I was 4 or 5, shortly after I started school, a new friend offered me a gobstopper (only partly sucked) and I succumbed to temptation. My terror, as the morning advanced, and I realised that once we went into the dining hall my sin would find me out is something I still remember. I also knew that never being able to eat again would mean I would die.

Oh the incredible relief when I was able to eat my dinner just fine.

But that was the day I realised that loved and trusted adults tell us lies.

My dad shared this childhood misunderstanding. His family had an old fashioned black bakelite telephone (his mother still used it after I was born, so I saw it too). This telephone had a little drawer underneath, and my dad recalls asking what this was for. His father replied that you could put a card in it, and my dad understood this to mean that you would put a postcard in it, and it would be sent down the wires. He had imagined a fax machine. (The purpose of this drawer was far less exciting - it was a place where you could write down useful numbers.)

"What's a fax machine?" ask the children of today.

There was a big disaster in my town when I was young. I had a memory of my parents talking about how my godfather was supposed to have been there that night but for some reason did not attend. On the anniversary of the disaster, I realized he would have had absolutely no reason to be present. I was so confused I called my now elderly parent and asked him about it. He told me that he and my mother were supposed to be there. They had to cancel at the last minute because the babysitter was sick or I was sick. He couldn’t remember which one. Either way, they didn’t end up dead.

they had been telling my godfather the story of how they ended up not dying. No idea why I got it backwards.

OMG me too! I asked my nana one time and she found it so funny!

When I was little I used to think that milk was cow’s wee!!!!

I thought when people paid using a cheque, that that was it, i.e the piece of paper was the payment! I didn't realise that the money actually came out of your account 😂

This one is a bit weird and I have no idea where this came from, but I was well into adulthood when DH had to explain it wasn't true! I had heard conversations about graves 'being dug for 3 people' or similar. I had also heard the reference to people being buried '6 foot under'.
So, I though that if a grave was dug for say, 3 people, the grave diggers had to dig 18 feet (6 feet per person) plus extra so that there was space in between each coffin 😳 it was only when I was arranging internment of my Nan's ashes that it came out and dh explained that this wasn't the case!!

Until my late teens, I thought Sinn Fein was an actual person, not a political party 🤣 because I had heard on the news things like 'Sinn Fein has said....'

I imagined as a child that bank vaults were very dark places, being underground; like a coal mine I had visited which was open to the public, where we all wore hats with lamps.

As an adult, I saw pictures of the Queen in the Bank of England vault, surrounded by gold bars, and it's very brightly lit indeed. I suppose I should have made the connection with the brightly lit stations on the London Underground (although the tunnels are dark).

Not really the theme here but you just reminded me of the time I called my auntie a dildo when I was around 8. I just thought it meant an idiot. She laughed so hard. I just thought she thought I was being cheeky and it was funny. Obviously when I found out what one as a teenager I realised why she was crying laughing.

I was told I had had a wonderful childhood by everyone and why, was I like I was.

It wasn't wonderful at all. It was abusive with the naice family home and refinements to make it look something it wasn't.

I was doing my GCSEs when I realised multiplication was simply repeated addition. If only I'd know that sooner!

My friend who is from rural Nigeria had his parents visit and his mum got really angry when she saw him get cash from a cash point - she said 'why are you sending us so little money home every month when in England you can just get money out of the wall?' He said it was quite hard to explain about cashpoints as the concept was so far from her lived experience with money.

Took me many years to realise that the Drink Mat robbery was actually the Brink’s-Mat robbery …
Couldn’t think why it was such a big deal!!

Me too!

Me too!!!!

My son thinks jingle bells goes ‘bells on bobtails ring, making spirits bright, what fun it is to ride and sing, the snails all unite’

I remember being in secondary school and wondering why the debating club were talking about Youth in Asia…wondered what they had done!

I remember being told that my Auntie had dislocated her leg. When I asked my mum how it happened, she said it happened in bed. I couldn’t understand how you could dislocate your leg whilst asleep…I now realise she wasn’t sleeping when it happened