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

I was at secondary school before I realised penis was pronounced pee-nis and not pen-is. It was the in the first year but before we had 'the talk'

Another one, when I was young we found an injured bird. My mum put it in a cardboard box with a blanket to help to make it better. The next morning it had gone. She said it had got better and flown away. I now know that it had died. :(

I was told sketchily about the birds and the bees just into high school. I heard women saying they didn’t know they were pregnant so. I thought every time a couple had sex resulted in a pregnancy and for the woman not to know sex must happen at night when the woman was sound asleep.??????

That’s amazing @CrowsInMyGarden I wonder if any of those escaped eels made it to a water course somewhere using a sort of ‘homing instinct’. Or as you say did they just survive and live and breed in the sewer system.

My parents both share the exact same birthday so I thought that was a prerequisite for getting married 🤣

Um, they're the Conservatives

Tory is an old insult meaning thief that has evolved into a somewhat neutral term.

Oh I also thought that once you started your periods you'd bleed continually until menopause!

That you don’t have to wait until ‘After eight’ to eat the chocolates.

That the TV magazine was correct the day after the clocks changed. I used to get so confused wondering if the TV magazine knew this and changed the times.

I always wondered why we didn’t watch a boxing match on Boxing Day.

We were looking up words in a dictionary in primary school and my word was "manslaughter". Problem is I thought it was mans-laughter because I'd never heard it before so that's what I declared loudly to the class 😂

I was born in the London's East End where Jellied Eels were considered a local delicacy. When I was really small I can remember thinking they were "Jelly Deals", like some sort of bargain wobbly dessert and was quite shocked to find out that they were actually eels! In jelly! When I was a bit older I used to walk past the stalls in the market where said eels would have their heads chopped off just before they were sold. I was a little vegan rebel at age 11 (weirdo in 1973) and used to cross my fingers and silently cheer on the odd maverick eel that managed to wriggle off the counter, slip along the kerb and slide down the drain. Come to think of it, were there actually little communities of escapee eels living and breeding in the sewers? Perhaps I should write a book.

I went to school with a James James 🤷‍♀️

One thing I still recall from aged 5.
We were vegetarian and I so had packed lunches at school (no veggie choice in the 70s), but that afternoon the teacher said that there was some chocolate cake left over from school lunch and we could all have some instead of it going to waste. I said no thanks as I thought I wasn't allowed to eat it (why did I think a cake would have meat in it?). I am sad for that 5 year old now...

I actually believed that when people left school that they would grow up and start behaving like the decent adults I knew. It was a very rude awakening.

That my father contributed more to the divorce than I realised - thought it was mostly my DMs fault

That we didn’t have much but DM did her v best

There are loads of things I think I didn’t get like social etiquette/norms or wasn’t taught im
not sure.

Did children's books not have pictures of the pig with a basket on his arm, or have I made that up? (BTW why do we all assume that the pigs are male?)

A pub offered me cashback a few weeks ago. Handy, since 2 out of three banks in that shopping area have now gone.

I think this is correct, is it not?!?

It is, it's a play on words

Similar here! Except my dad isn't a nasty person as such, just that my mum had so much burden on her shoulders, life admin, mental load, childcare etc. Dad could just work and then be fun dad at the weekends while actually contributing very little apart from money to the household.

I can't slag him off for it as it's how traditional families were then. But I do also now understand why my mum struggled and might have been grumpy.

That murder meant being roughed up a bit in the park

Do not drink and drive.
As a child I thought it was because you might spill it.

When some kids told me - I was 7 or 8 - that kissing involved tongues. I was distraught - how disgusting - and ran home to mum and dad who reassured me that that wasn't the case (they did tell me a while afterwards but they said I was to distraught initially).

I have an almost identical story, except it was my uncle who we were staying with, and it was a big litter of puppies. He said he was taking them to sell them, they were only a day old. He left two. I thought it was a bit strange because I knew they should be about 8 weeks old before they should be sold, but I knew my uncle didn't really follow the books when it came to animal care so I thought he was just breaking rules.

I was in my 20s before it clicked.

Sorry to hear this. What was that lie that turned you off her?

thought when the shops had a sale it meant everything was free

thought superdrug sold illegal style drugs

When I was about 10 or 11 I was off school sick, and This Morning was on the TV. They were doing a segment about condoms, and the lady on the show said that sometimes men are in a hurry and they don't take the time to put the condom on properly, so women need to make sure that they are fitting it correctly.

I had never seen a condom before so I was imagining this really complicated device, with buckles that needed to be tightened properly, like a horse saddle or something.

I was really surprised when I saw how simple they were a few years later.