1. “One time my mom was at the store and brought home something for herself, my sister, and my dad. 5-year-old me was like, ‘What did you get for me?’ To prevent me from being left out, she reached into the bag and said, ‘Oh, I got you this potato masher.’ For years before anyone mashed any potatoes they came and asked me if they could use it.”
2. “I was convinced that if you crossed your eyes for too long, they would get stuck that way. So naturally, I spent most of my childhood looking like a confused chameleon.”
3. “My mom told me it was illegal to drive with the cabin light on. That was 23 years of bulls–t mom!”
4. “That the dog went to an actual farm. It took about 30 years before the realization hit.”
5. “The microwave will explode if I put my face too close to it while it’s heating food.”
6. “That I was allergic to hamsters. My mom told me I was after I got an allergy test when I was 9. I was about 26 when I put it together that she hated rodents and wanted me to stop asking for a pet hamster.”
7. “Carrots give you superior night vision. Even as a kid, I was OK with being night blind. God, I hate carrots.”
8. “I was born with one kidney and my mom told me it was a common thing, like some people just have one kidney and others have two. Like how some people have curly hair and others have straight hair, or some people are tall and others are short. In retrospect, props to her for making sure I felt normal about it. Good parenting right there. But I believed it until I was 16.”
9. “That the alcohol wipe they do before giving a vaccine is not a numbing solution. Nobody ‘lied’ to me about that, but I did say something along the lines of, ‘Thank god for this numbing stuff’ when I was a kid and nobody corrected me. I learned that I was an idiot at 17 years old when a blood drive came to my school.”
10. “I loved the movie Pretty Woman as a young kid. I asked why people were mean to Vivian, and my mom said because she was a redhead. She was wearing a blonde wig in the beginning, and in real life, kids teased the redhead kids, so it checks out. Years later, I’m 22, and my friend says she wants to watch it. Cool, I loved it when I was little. We start it, and right away, I’m like, ‘OH MY GOD, SHE’S A PROSTITUTE!'”
11. “I always thought it was illegal to watch PG-13 movies below age 13. My brother and I came up with this on our own, but my mom consistently confirmed this ‘law.'”
12. “The longest lie I believed was that I wasn’t capable of achieving my dreams. It held me back for years until I realized I had the power to shape my future.”
13. “I went camping with my dad when I was six. There was a weird smell a few campsites over and my dad said it was a skunk. I would occasionally smell it again, think it was a skunk, and carry on. We lived in the country so it tracked. Fast forward to 19-year-old me wondering why there would be a skunk in my college dorm in the city. It was marijuana the whole time. A+ parenting.”
14. “My mom told us that you can’t make noise while baking a cake or else it’ll go flat. She baked a lot of cakes.”
15. “Everyone has a soulmate. It’s kind of a sweet idea, and I’ve even met a few couples who could be described as soulmates. It’s also a hurtful lie. Why not tell kids that finding love is work like we do with other things?”
16. “That the buzzing sound in the summer is the electrical/telephone wires. It’s cicadas.”
17. “My cat brought a lizard into the house. It was still alive so I decided to build it a terrarium and nurse it back to health. I did and released it back into the wild a few days later. My mom told me the cat immediately went outside and ate the lizard when I was 18. She and my dad knew I’d be devastated, so they lied by omission and didn’t tell me. The way she sat me down to tell me scared the s–t out of me. I thought she was going to tell me something dreadful. I thought I saved that lizard for years.”
18. “That if I went to college and worked hard I’d be successful, get a good paying job, and be financially set for life. I have a PhD, and even with a decently well-paying job I’m living paycheck to paycheck and feel like I’ll never get ahead. I will never own a home, won’t be able to retire, and will never be comfortable. It was all for nothing.”
19. And finally, “My dad at 79 still won’t admit that he was Santa and the tooth fairy. I asked him how he did it all and he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. That was Santa, son. It wasn’t me.'”
Was there a lie you believed longer than you’d like to admit? Tell us about it in the comments!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
