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

[Carryonrunning]

Was just chatting to a friend about this:

1. Hearing all the boys in class talking about how a girl’s tampon fell out in the classroom. Lived in fear of this for many years before I realised they meant it fell out of her bag, not her body!

2. Opening the door of a sauna with my cousin (which was right in the middle of the spa area, so not private) on holiday in a nice hotel and my uncle inside shouting at us to close the door. I cried for weeks thinking I’d inadvertently seen him naked (although I didn’t actually see anything). Couldn’t look at him for years without feeling sick before I was old enough to realise we were just letting the heat out and annoying the other people in there! No one was naked in mixed sauna in the very public pool area of a nice spa hotel full of people!

That’s horrible

I read lots of magazine articles and booklets about periods.
i genuinely believed that you could only get your period at the start of the month! This was because there would be a diagram showing the menstrual cycle set out over a month, and it would always start at the first of the month.
That being day 1, of course!

I remember a friend talking in hushed terms about a girl we knew who’d started her periods and I said that can’t be, it’s not the start of the month!
Duhhhhh!

I was 12 and intelligent, I just took what I’d read very literally 😂

I didn't discover this one until I was 19. I was at uni and had a blind friend I used to help by reading textbooks to him from a course we were both on, and that word cropped up in the text. He fell about laughing and I felt like an idiot.

@Bodeganights
I knew lots of words because I read so much, but I didn't necessarily know how to pronounce them. So on here a few years ago I found out how to say hyperbole.

Even though I know how it's pronounced now I still see it as hyperbowl 😭🤣

Segue - Seegoo

Melancholy - I thought the ch was the same sound as church

I'm sure there are loads of others 🤣

@Vegemiteandhoneyontoast
@BellaCiaoBellaCiao

That reminds me of something a few years ago - the mother of one of DS's school friends telling me they were going to breed hamsters. I wondered if DS would like one as a pet. No, they were breeding them to feed to their pet snakes.

Ditto my husband

There's a book with that for the title. https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=1789147b0f9118cd9486b525c9a3e7639241fdd39a2d8b833fdd40d3d456bfa3JmltdHM9MTczNzc2MzIwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=2d893548-eb46-63fa-1a7f-207eef4661c5&psq=blessed+art+thou+a+monk+swimming&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYW1hem9uLmNvLnVrL0JsZXNzZWQtQXJ0LVRob3UtTW9uay1Td2ltbWluZy9kcC8wNzQ3MjU4NDcz&ntb=1

That still makes me personally quite squeamish, but at least it's the natural way, albeit assisting slightly, and serves a genuine purpose.

Just flushing for drowning them seems cruel for no reason whatsoever.

I reminded him about it many years later and he'd completely forgotten but he was appalled to think he'd done that, especially with his children knowing.

I only found out segue was the same word as "segway" last year when I was watching something with subtitles and the character said "segway" and the subtitles said segue. It had never occured to me that I'd never seen "segway" written down and had always pronounced it seeg in my head

I was about five at the time and overheard my mum and a friend discussing a neighbour. I gathered that he was not well and needed an operation and it seemed to be connected with his bladder. Being curious I asked more about it.
To shut me up Mum said he needed an operation because he couldn’t wee-wee straight.
I spent the next couple of years worrying about my pee, terrified that it wasn’t coming out straight.

When I was in Year 5 (10 years old) I had my first boyfriend. He gave me a Valentines gift which I know his Mum bought for him to give to me. I thought it was really sweet and cute. It was a china figure of a teddy bear dressed as the devil.
It said"Horny little Devil" on it.
As I got older I realised what it meant but as a child I thought it was relating to the fact it was a devil with horns 🤣
My mum and his mum were good friends so I think they had a good laugh at our expense. 🤣🤣

Mum told me the milk man was my dad. I was so confused for years and didn’t understand it. I was about 14 when I realised my dad was a dairy farmer so it was a play on words ……

I thought this too! Was sure for years they were call the conservatories 😂

My dad was a Paratrooper and one day he got a letter inviting us to a reunion/family day out. For a week I worried about it and finally I burst into tears and said I didn’t want to go. The letter had said, ‘We hope you can drop in. I was 8 and my brother was 4 and we had no parachute training. Thankfully it was explained what ‘drop in’ meant! 😂

That Jingle Bells wasn’t about a mounted killer who got clean away with “one horse, soap and slay” but joyful ride in a “one-horse open sleigh”!

Eeyore's name is from the noise a donkey makes, isn't it? What else would it mean?!

I was 6yo black girl at the time. A play group coordinator making me always go last or sit alone at break times - pushing me to the back of every line with the back of her hand, not picking me for activities despite putting my hand up patiently, commenting about my hair being 'too big' - and not in a nice way either.

I then began waiting for all the other children to go infront of me before joining any line, enjoying my time at lunch by myself - no grown up noticed until my step Auntie who was a caucasian woman started working at the same place and asked me why i was alone. I told her. She challenged the coordinator thoroughly and aided my mum to complain. I never saw that cooridnator at play group again.

Misunderstood? I couldnt even fathom what racism was at that age but goodness me - the coordinator was Racist!! My first ever experience being treated differently for no reason and my first experience having someone not the same skin colour as me standing up for me 💕

My family then had more colour than the rainbow and Is the same today. I've never understood racism. Its a terrible disease and even more so when a grown adult mistreats a child for being different.

Big respect for my Auntie to this day. It was because of people like her why racism was even abolished.

When I was 10 and in the last year of primary school, we were informed that we would not now be sitting the 11+, as the government were abolishing grammar schools. I honestly didn't realise that it was just in my area, due to local council voting against them. I assumed it was country wide. When I was about 30 a friend who had moved from up country was talking about his grammar school, I honestly thought he was blatantly lying, because in my head Grammar schools really didn't exist anymore.

When I was a child I lived in a house that had a plum tree in the garden.When people sang the National Anthem ,my child mind heard "Send her Victorias "
I truly believed the Queen wanted our plums !!
Even dafter I was well into my 30 s before I realised what I had been singing had nothing to do with plums !!

I thought all adults had false teeth, based on the fact that both my parents had them. Turns out that by pure coincidence they both had accidents in their 20s that resulted in their front teeth getting knocked out.

Me too!!!

As a young child, growing up in a predominantly white area, there were twins a few years above me with black skin. I was interested as to why their skin was a different colour to everyone else I knew and asked my Mum. She told me it was because they were adopted. I thought being adopted was a medical procedure that turned your skin a lovely colour.

My Dad (probably because I was making a fuss about a bee) told me that honey bees don't sting. I didn't stop believing this until I was in my early twenties. Going around some gardens where they kept bees (with my Dad), there was a sign saying 'beware of the bees'. 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'.

When Nelson Mandela was freed (I think - or he was at least in the news a lot), there was also a lot of coverage of Mad Cow Disease. Much to my parents embarrassment I once declared in front of their friends that I didn’t like Nelson Mandela because he’d brought MCD to the UK. 😂

My Sunday School had an Open Day; parents were invited to come in and see our work displayed. I was very proud of the picture I had pinned up. We had been learning about the journeys of St. Paul in the Acts of the Apostles.
At one stage, he was arrested by the Roman authorities as a troublemaker, and confined to jail, chained to two soldiers.
An angel came in the night, the soldiers fell into a deep sleep, the angel freed him from his chains and he made his escape.
I knew enough from my Child's Illustrated Bible to know that men of that era would be wearing some sort of cloak and tunic, so that is how St. Paul was dressed, but for the soldiers, I drew two sturdy Guardsmen, with red jackets and busbies, straight out of the many pictures of the Coronation I had seen.
I was baffled when my parents told their friends about this, amidst much chuckling.