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!

Being at a family party and asked for a drink. Lemonade was my favourite, on getting the bottle of juice opened my brother took it off me and told my I wasn't allowed any as I was only 6 (it was 7up). I was hysterical but oh how everyone laughed

When I was about six my DM told me that mulligatawny soup was made from dead owls.
I believed it for years. Wouldn’t eat it.

Glad I'm not the only one who thought this.

I was an adult when I realised a female family friend, who had a very, very husky voice, enjoyed building kit cars and was very strapping and sinewy, was actually a man!

I remember being about 5 , just started primary school and one of the older children told me not to do something (can’t even remember what it was!) or I’d be in hot water. For years I thought the head teacher had a cauldron in her office to boil naughty children in! I spent my whole primary school life scared of her. Met her in later years and she was lovely!

I thought this too!
To be fair they did spend their lives collecting rubbish.

That made me laugh out loud. I remember having an argument with other kids at school that God was not called Harold "Harold be thy name" as I was swotty enough to know the word "hallowed".

I thought when you were an adult you were given a house. We were a military family living in various married quarters so that's how it happened for us. I was late teens before something on the news about house prices came up and everyone laughed at me for thinking it. It's stayed with me how shocked I felt that this doesn't happen and how different the world would be if it did.

DD when she was about 4 years old asked me, when you die mummy and go back to being a baby can you come back as my baby and I'll look after you. (Yes I did cry)

DD when she was about 4 years old asked me, when you die mummy and go back to being a baby can you come back as my baby and I'll look after you. (Yes I did cry)

Aw, that is lovely.

My dc thought money from the cash point was free.
If I said we didn’t really have the money for something, she said, just go to the cash point and get some!

I used to absolutely love it when my mum would stop at the garage on the way to school and get me a carton of ribena and some treats for lunch. I've since learned that it was because she was waiting to be paid in the morning and we didn't have enough food in for my packed lunch. I never knew until recently, it's always been a fond primary school memory of having a bit of a treat packed lunch every now and then.

School trip to Stratford on Avon when I was about 8. Man telling us about life in Shakespeare's day said in the winter people were sewn into their clothes. I immediately thought he meant through their skin 🤮. It made me feel so icky I couldn't think about it and it wasn't until I was a lot older I realised he just meant the openings were sewn up to stop drafts. Smelly perhaps but no mutilation involved 🤣. I still can't believe how stupid i was.

My infant teacher said she was getting highlights in her hair. I was very disappointed the next day when her hair looked the same. I thought she'd have fluorescent colour in her hair. As in 'highlighter pens'

I used to think the 10p on top of the Corona pop bottle cap was the price of the pop, not the deposit on the bottle.

I took 10p I found in my nannas garden to the shop, picked up a bottle of Limeade in the Co-op next door and was told at the counter I didn't have enough money. I think I even argued about it. 😳😂

I still can't fathom how I wandered up to the co-op to do a bit of shopping on my own at that age, to be honest. 😅

I've posted abut this before, but I was never the sharpest knife in the box and as a child thought Cabbage Patch dolls were supposed to be dolls with Downs syndrome. I thought it was especially grim they were sold with an adoption certificate.

My mum used to encourage me to try to blow a hole in the tissue when I had a cold and was too small to manage it without her holding the tissue.

I was a LOT older teens before I realised she was surreptitiously tearing a hole in the tissue herself.

I always found those dolls so creepy!

Omg this is just brilliant. Proper crying laughing 🤣 You poor little soul 😂😂

In primary school I had a lovely big ginger cat and I genuinely believed that one day, when he had served his time as a cat he would turn into a human baby.
We also had a back female cat who had six kittens. When they were about two days old we woke up one morning and there were only two kittens. My father explained that a friend of his had a cat whose baby kittens had all died so our cat had generously allowed that poor sad mummy cat to adopt some of our kittens. It was years before I realised that Dad had drowned them. A few years ago at a family gathering I was telling this story to my now grown up DS and suddenly my sister (aged 60) burst into tears. She had never worked it out!!

Nitty Nora checking our head's then telling me to tie my shoelace. 🤣🤣🤣I couldn't understand why she looked in my head just to tell me that.

That's what my dc think 🤣

Omg that must have been awful to realise your dad had done that 😕

I don’t get it 😳

Your post just reminded me! I was an inattentive little thing at primary (since diagnosed ADHD), and I had clearly annoyed my teacher, because she snapped at me "Vroom, what did I just say?'

I didn't realise she wanted me to precis her instructions and then carry them out, because I repeated, word for word, her previous three sentences, which were along the lines of "Now, I want you to - Michael, put that pencil down and listen! - pick up your books, now where's my pen?" Everyone laughed and I didn't know why.

I could absorb what people had said without really seeming to pay attention (as many children do), so I'd heard what she said, but she obviously thought I was away with the fairies and my repeating verbatim what she'd said annoyed her even more!