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!

I remember hearing on the news that a criminal was being held in “Custardy” ( Custody ) - thought it was a place.

Also remember asking my Irish mom what was for dinner , and she often said “ cocosal “ or Cat’s malacky “
now know they were slang for donkey poo and cat poo 😂

When I was preparing for confirmation I had to go to church every week for at least a year 🙄
One part of the service I always looked forward to was the Marriage Banns.
The vicar said “I publish banns of marriage between Dave Smith and Jane Jones. This is the first time of asking.
The following week it was read out again, but for the second time of asking.
And the next week.. for the third time of asking.
Except I didn’t hear it as ‘asking’
I heard it as ARSON!!!
I didn’t know what arson was, but I knew it was bad if they were banning their marriage!
But the it wasn’t just Dave and Jane who were having their marriage banned, there could be 4 or 5 different couples having their marriages banned each week. All because of arson…
I eventually asked my dad what arson was and he told me that it was people setting fire to things deliberately.
I sat on this information for a few months, and then genuinely suggested to my parents that we should consider moving house due to the prolific arsonists in our small town.
To say they were slightly hysterical when the whole story came out is an understatement!!
They still remind me of it 40 years later…

I read the signs in shops that said 'no dogs in the interests of hygiene' as 'hydrogen'. Thought the dogs would use the hydrogen up?!

It was only a couple of years ago that I realised that's not true. I'm 48 years old.

I was another product of a Catholic school. The Nuns told us you couldn't have children unless you were married. I had been to a few weddings as a child, and I always wondered which part of the marriage ceremony contained the magic that now allowed you to have children.

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

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

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’

Me too!!!!

Me too!

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!!

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.

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

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.

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 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).

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....'

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

@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?