Lies My Parents Told Me

[ciphergoth]

meta asks for stories of lies your parents told you, here:

http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=meta&itemid=119465

I thought this was an interesting question worth propogating!

My parent's weren't the sort to lie, but I've come to realise that a lot of the things my Dad told me that I took on faith were a bit misconcieved. He believed that a stitch from running was the result of ribs rubbing up against each other. It wasn't 'till years later that I got a stitch again and realised that it couldn't possibly be that and it felt much more like a muscle cramp...

Now it's your turn. Tell us about a bizarre or stupid lie your parents told you.

Comments

[rainbowskye.livejournal.com]

When I was at Uni my best friend and I were in the kitchen and I was ferreting around in the cupboard for something to eat while we were cooking. I broke off a couple of bits of cooking chocolate and Gail looked horrified as I started eating it and said 'JULIE! you'll get worms..' I looked at her in a puzzled way and asked why, and she said, 'Well my mum always said that if you ate the cooking chocolate before you melted it it would give you worms..'....
Joolz xx

[kyte.livejournal.com]

You can see why they told us some of these things, can't you?

Only such one I can recall is when I asked what a virgin was, and my Dad looked awkward and told me that it was someone who wasn't married yet...

[adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com]

Drinking orange squash and milk would make you vomit - tried it years later when trying to get out of work early, was quite nice.

[booklectica]

The first time I told my mother I was bisexual, she said 'No, you're not, you're heterosexual' quite firmly. This did not have any lasting effect on my life. :)

They did have a go at claiming Father Christmas existed, and when I caught them filling my stocking they claimed to be Santa's little helpers. (Making them subordinate clauses...)

My dad also made a brave attempt to be the Tooth Fairy and even answered the questionnaire I left out for her one night.

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

I remember catching my mum out with the tooth fairy, and then inferring that Santa and the Easter Bunny didn't exist. Damn she had a lot of explaining to get out of that one as I really played it up. 'You mean you LIED to me? You've been lying all this time? How could you?'

I caught her by pretending to be asleep with my hand under my pillow holding the tooth and when she put her hand underneath I grabbed her hand and screamed 'Help' for added effect. I think she seriously thought that I had been scared out my mind

a past conversation. I am 18, my mum 48...

[ajva.livejournal.com]

My Mum: So what do you do with your girlfriend then? (I had just come out to her, she was curious)
Me: Well, all sorts of stuff, like [blah blah blah rough description of some sex stuff...] oh, and not forgetting of course, oral sex.
My Mum (horrified): What! That's Gamahuche! You realise that was the sin for which Gomorrah was destroyed, don't you?
Me (flabbergasted): ...

OTOH, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from anyone came from my Dad. I must have been pretty young when he told me this too, maybe about 8? He said "Well, of course, you shouldn't lie and blah blah blah and I'm not saying you should etc. BUT!!!! If you do lie - LIE TO THE END!"

Sterling stuff from my Dad the realist. Even just the acknowledgement that it was possible to do such a thing and not be a bad person is an unusual message for a little girl to be taught. :o)

Re: a past conversation. I am 18, my mum 48...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Cool, your mum used the word Gamahuche in all seriousness! How's it pronounced? I've been pronouncing it gamm-OUSH...

Have you seen the Red Hanky Panky about it?

[duranorak.livejournal.com]

Oddly my father has expressed similar sentiments about lying. I think it's 'cause he's an actor.
It's stood me in good stead, anyway. ~g~

E.
x

Re: a past conversation. I am 18, my mum 48...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

besides which, we all know that the sin of Gomorrah is unexpectedly playing the bagpipes directly behind someone who is trying to urinate.

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

I think most of the lies my mum told me were religious nonsense, old wives tales or other things that she really believed. Famous examples include:-

• You get piles from sitting on radiators.
  
• You spoil your eyesight by reading in the dark.
  
• Coca cola will dissolve your teeth (ain't happened yet).
  
• If you walk along with your coat over your arm men will think you're a prostitute and proposition you (this when I was 13 and in hideous brown school uniform).
  
• If you tell the secondary school that you've read all the famous five books in your interview they'll think your stupid and won't let you in.
  
• And the most harmful one: "when you get to my age you don't feel happiness any more like children do, you just feel a bit better or a bit worse". For years I thought the symptoms of depression were just ordinary aging.

Oh, and my maternal grandmother told me that if I wore green the fairies would steal me and never let me go home again. I tried it, but it didn't work.

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

But coca cola will dissolve your teeth. I remember doing this as an experiment at school. We dropped teeth in coke to see what would happen and within a few hours they were gone.

Thing is that this only happens if the enamel is broken and the coke is in contact for a reasonable time

[booklectica]

Oh, and my maternal grandmother told me that if I wore green the fairies would steal me and never let me go home again.

That's definitely the best one yet. Do you have any idea why she told you this, and if she genuinely believed it?

[adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com]

Oh, and of course the eternal "Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis."

Nope.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Wow! I was cracking my knuckles as this arrived in my mailbox, and I'd always believed this. thanks!

lies

[sanjibabes.livejournal.com]

Like being told that eating sugar butties would make potatoes grow behind my ears and so I never ate another after feeling the bumps behind my ears.

Or being told on Xmas Eve that Santa had had a crash with an aeroplane and died.

joy.

Re: lies

[adjectivegail]

*grins* you reminded me. my brother and i grew up with our three cousins; he's the oldest of the five of us. it was a family rule that you finished every meal with fruit, and he used to really upset the littles by telling them that if they swallowed the seeds, the fruit would grow a tree in their stomachs.

well, i mean, would you like a watermelon growing in your stomach? and there are a lot of seeds in a watermelon...

[zotz]

The only one I remember is my Mum saying that eating the crusts of the toast would make my hair curl. She *knew* I was leaving them because I didn't want curly hair, though, and she said it anyway.

Strange.

[sparklegoth.livejournal.com]

My mother (a woman of medical science) told me that getting lovebites would increase my risk of getting cancer when I was sixteen. She hated me getting lovebites though, said I looked like a woman of ill-repute.

[skx.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this counts .. but there were so many times when my mum would
say "Don't go near the edge, you'll fall in.." - which never happened.

Also, I was taught never to say the word 'r a t s' indoors - which made for some
amusing conversions when I was one the phone to my parents discussing my pet
rats.
(Actually I still find that hard to do; I have to make a conscious effort to
say the word when I'm in my flat - elsewhere I'm fine).

Something else which I've inheritted is the absolute preference for walking in places
by the side-door, and not the front door. The front door being reserved for wakes, and
taking corpses out of. I suspect that's a Yorkshire thing though.

.. Feel morbid now :(

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

Yep, it's a Yorkshire thing. I climb into my flat through the living room window as I only have a front door and don't have a 'tradesmans entrance'.

I am kidding here, but I have been known to abseil out my living room window :)

[fire-sermon.livejournal.com]

When I was very little I wanted my parents to take me to the cinema to see Star Wars - I think it was being re-run at the local cinema and some of my friends from school had been to see it and had been playing with their action figures and talking about it a lot. As I was about five and couldn't really read at that point, I was non the wiser when my evil parents took me to see Disney's inferior The Black Hole instead and told me it was in fact Star Wars.

Even at that young age I thought it was a load of dull nonsense and when Empire and Jedi came out, I had no interest at all in seeing it. Only finally when the real Star Wars was on tv one Christmas and I watched it and thinking this was nothing like I remembered, my parents confessed their little lie ...

Eat this....

[volterra.livejournal.com]

"It's just sausages in white sauce...."

*after some poking around: "Mum, I think they forgot to put the filling in."

Whereupon she confesses it was really tripe. Ew!

Re: Eat this....

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of when my parents told me that Calamaris were made of chicken (I didn't understand enough Spanish to know). It was only when I told this to my Biology teacher at school that she said. How do they get the hole in them then? Do they take hundreds of chickens and take a slice from their arse? At which point she was practically rolling around on the floor laughing and told me the truth.

I still eat the things though!

[furrylemming.livejournal.com]

My favourite ones as a kid were...sitting on cold rocks will give you piles, if you pull a face and the wind changes you'll be stuck that way, picking up toads gives you warts, and you'll get a cold if you go out with wet hair.

[adjectivegail]

oh god, my family still tell me the one about wet hair. okay, granted my hair is extremely thick and down to my hips, so it takes forever to dry. but i've gone out with wet hair, gone to sleep with wet hair, etc, etc, since i was 11 years old and LOOKIT ten years on i'm still here, and still healthy :-P
honestly. just because i hate hair dryers :-)

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

We got the usual food myths designed to make you eat things that are good for you such as 'crusts make your hair curly', 'carrots make you see in the dark' (ever wonder about all those squashed rabbits on the roads?), and 'if you don't eat it we'll have to send it to the starving children in [insert newsworthy famine area here].

My favourites were the lies that my Dad told me just to wind other people up:

Small yappy dogs like Yorkshire terriers etc are 'rats in fur coats'

Those red-and-white striped tents you see at roadworks are where Sunderland United players live.

[adjectivegail]

i used to really hate spinach (still am not terribly fond of it, actually), and one day my mom got fed up and blendered it, and then mixed it with the rice. well, we'd had white rice, brown rice, red rice, black rice... now we had green rice.
the funny thing is that i liked it, and kept asking for it. *shakes head* bad me...

[winterthing.livejournal.com]

Not exaxctly a lie, but I still remember my mother's response when she found out a boyfriend of mine was bisexual. She just looked at me with utter horror and said "but then he'll have AIDs".

I think she was a bit upset when I burst out laughing.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Gotta watch out for those bisexuals, you just never know where you are with them!

(nitpick: it takes a capital S. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome...)