I am a little girl. I always will be. But as hard as it is to believe, I used to be way little-er. Sometimes I miss it all, you know, this innocence and sweetness. One cannot get away with such foolishness now that one pays taxes and pretends to be responsible. Children… children can say pretty much anything in the entire Universe and all they get is a short Yes, yes, and no one even bats an eyelid.
June is a month for kids in my book. Not only does it start with their day, it is also the beginning of the summer holiday (can I have summer holidays back, please?) in most countries and in general it associates itself in my mind with soap bubbles and cotton candy. It is in June that I come back mostly to the land of I don’t want to be an adult. And when I do, I always end up digging up long forgotten memories and stories too funny to let go of.
We all have these after all, don’t we? Funny stuff we believed as children. Logical absurd and absurd logic. Other people’s childhood stories are probably among the top things I like to listen to – and they are definitely way better than the everyday drama of grocery shopping and traffic jams. And that is why I decided it is high time to bother my friends and friends of friends again and present to you a compilation of the craziest things we used to believe as children.
Our logic was impeccable
There was always a simple, logical explanation to anything we ever encountered. Grownups always knew better but they knew wrong. With their shades of grey and pointless science, they made very bad philosophers.
Take for example simple earwigs. EARwigs. It was only natural to assume they lived in EARS, right? And since they lived in ears, they could only feed via our eardrums. Who needs a biology degree to test that? Logic!
But dreams were ours, right? It only made sense for them to be generated out of the things we thought. And the closer these thoughts in question were to our sleep time, the higher the chance of dreaming about them. Very simple. All nightmares happened because we didn’t care enough about our pre-dream thoughts!
We were skilled linguists, too. We used to associate words no poet would connect, not even the most talented one. For example, that tweed was no longer the most boring pattern in the world, no, it was bright yellow like Tweety’s coat. That made most English gentleman look rather funny in our heads.
Our imagination ran wild
There were some things we simply cannot explain anymore. Like this one, the biggest riddle you’ll ever hear. Like any other childhood riddle it resides in the land of definitions, because defining things and answering questions is what children do best.
And the question is: what is a student? Well, a student is a person that spends its life sitting in manholes. Their job is to lift the manhole cover regularly with their thin rods. Why? Why don’t you just ask a student?
Our hearts were full of hope
We were also told that if we only wanted something hard enough, we could get it. And although some of us still follow this rule, we took it to extremes in our childhood. We closed our eyes and hoped that if we asked enough times, the world would grant us magic powers. We wished on the stars. We left our Santa Claus letters and some of us even baked Santa cookies.
We followed paths of concrete, sparkling in the summer sun, hoping that at the end of this unseen by anyone else road there is a big adventure awaiting us. We investigated the other side of the mirror. We hopped onto the park’s swing as only we knew that it was secretly a teleport to another dimension where everything was very very small.
Our sense of social justice was way higher
As children we used to believe the world was a fair place – blame Disney, if you’d like, but there was something sweet in our conviction that every good deed is rewarded and every crime punished. Wouldn’t we all want to live in a world like that?
If the world was run by children we used to believe, every country in the world would get its own fair share of mountains, lakes and seas, for example. Come on, everyone wants to experience them all without going abroad, right? This thought probably couldn’t have been born in the head of a child who didn’t grow up in a country like Poland, with a full set of terrain wonders, but it still would be the only right way to do it.
Another great idea – what if we make the ATM just give people money? You know, if that was the case, anyone who struggles financially could just go and withdraw more cash. Poof, all of their worries gone.
Our fears were holding more power over us
Some of us believed in the monsters of the night. Robots made out of tin bins, crawling into our rooms as soon as the lights go off. That made perfect sense. If I was a monster, I’d be rocking the tin bin style too.
Some of us believed our neighbours were witches and wizards. We didn’t need much to draw a conclusion like that – a single dead bird in their yard would do a trick. Also, neighbours are evil so it kind of writes itself.
Some of us believed bad, old men lived in our basement, ready to jump out of them and snatch us any time we walked past the basement door. Or was it just an excuse not to take out the trash when asked?
Our parents were trolls
Being so small and often still illiterate, we relied on our parents for all the knowledge we acquired. Almost all. But since back then we didn’t yet know how incompetent people can be – and that having a child does not give anyone magical know-it-all superpowers – we never doubted the things we were told.
Some of our parents though… had slightly mischievous intentions. Their plan – to one day embarrass their child. It could have been years in the making, you know, or never come true, so if anything, we should admire the dedication and patience of troll dads (because for some reason they were always dads…).
A good tactic to troll your own children? Swap the names of existing things and wait till they get into an argument about it years later. Like in this example, when a child was being raised to believe that a budgerigar is a type of a fish, not a pretty little bird. It is bound to pop up one day, who doesn’t like budgerigars? Yet it is obscure enough for a parent to get away with it for years.
On second thought, our friends were trolls too
After our parents it was not books or school that fed us information most often. Not at all. It was our dearest and beloved friends, whose entertainment often came solely from tricking us.
A classic childhood story always starts with: when I was a little child, one of my friends told me that in their house… No kid in the history of the world ever pondered why their friends live in such places full of mystery yet never invited them to come and see their home. And we believed, oh, how much we believed in all the lions under the beds and magical switches which could turn all the house furniture into ice.
Well, our naivety definitely shone
We meant well. We really did. Even if some of us had grown up evil, we had good intentions. We tried our best to perform well in society, even while being its tiniest part.
We all kind of knew that our nans could read minds – what couldn’t nans not do, really? So we thought nice thoughts around them and other mind reading individuals. Not to scare them, you know, but also not to incriminate ourselves.
When someone told us something – we trusted them to a ridiculous extent. Not only in terms of facts, but also things we should really know better. Some of us woke up one day in the morning to a different breed of our beloved dog. What, the old one died? Oh, no, not at all. He is just taking new meds. The meds make its fur go all crazy.
What did you guys believe? I am sure you have some great stories too! Don’t worry, we won’t judge.
(well, maybe just a little)
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