Is there anything your parents told you that was a straight out lie, or myth that you believed for a long time and what was it?

Oh yeah, Santa Claus, Toothfairy, That I had green eyes because I ate alot of peas, And someday I was gonna be a Princess.

That they were happy. With such a meagre income, my Dad an alcoholic, and too many kids, I finally found out just how miserable they were together. It shaped and motivated me the rest of my life. i still loved them deeply to their death though. They were, in spite of so many flaws, doing the best they could in a very tough world.

Not really. They were always honest with us. We always knew there was no Santa, no tooth fairy and we kinda figured that it was Dad who put the quarter under our pillow.

@chyna : That’s odd. I thought my daughter was the last little girl with golden curls and brown eyes.

I started to doubt Santa Clause at about age 8, but my parents pulled out all the stops. Handwritten notes, recordings of personal greetings, they’d turn on the news to show me his sleigh on radar…had me going until I was 12…made me kind of a punching bag at school, but at least THEY seemed to get something out of it.

My parents used to dial us some freaken phone number every Christmas Eve and when we answered they said it was “Santa Clause”. They stopped doing that about 3 years ago…

They were pretty straight-forward with me. Told me that there was no Santa Claus which caused me to get in trouble at school, no tooth fairy, no easter bunny, and that Jesus loved me very much =)

@Facade Does not compute

@Ivan I’m sure it doesn’t :)

@Ivan – my initial thought was the same as yours (so they DID lie to you!) but then I figure it’s not really a lie if THEY believe what they’re saying.

They told me gays were freaks, blacks inferior, men above women – needless to say, I have told them to shove it many years later

@Simone_De_Beauvoir . You learned from their stupidity, the best way to turn their negative into a positive. Bravo!

@dannyc not even that I learned from their stupidity, I learned from my environment’s sense and logic – I grew up in NYC, I am thankful for that

My dad worked under big scales that they use at grain elevators or cattle yards. He would go under the scales and fix them, etc. When I was young my dad would bring me home rattlesnake rattles from snakes he had killed under the scales. I thought my dad was awesome and tough because he was killing rattlesnakes. I knew he was horribly terrified of snakes, so I guess that’s why I wasn’t surprised he was killing them. I didn’t realized until I was about 20 years old that he wasn’t killing those snakes, but just finding them dead already and cutting the rattles off. I asked him about it and he laughed that I had believed all that time.

Unfortunately, I was raised in a very discriminatory household.and was told just about every stereotype there is, which I later discovered were all wrong.

My mom let me think I was an only child when I really have a half-brother on my dad’s side who is 7 years older than me. My grandmother mentioned his name in conversation with my mom one day when I was 11 or 12, probably thinking it would just go over my head, and I said, “Who is Scott?”

Straight-up lies, eh? Gee, where would I start?

Other than Father Christmas? They never made up a story about the origin of babies, I just thought I knew (I believed that some of the food you eat becomes a baby in your stomach) and they didn’t bother explaining the details until I was 10. They told me eggs make you tall, which is not really wrong, but it’s not only eggs. And that carrots make you see better, which is not true but it’s a common misconception which they probably believe in (like their insistence to this day that all TV sets are powered by nuclear energy).

God is love and Jesus is real. Oh yeah, and prayer works. And we are all God’s children, well except for black people, as they are cursed for defying God’s will a long time ago. and those are the least damaging lies they told me.

My parents didn’t tell me many notable outlandish things, but my father told me how his father told him that there was a japanese city that was re-named Usa, so that they could claim that things made there were “made in USA” and people would buy the products made there, thinking that they were made in U.S.A.; my father believed this until his mid-teens.

“you’ll be ok” when I was being bullied all those years

Santa Claus – my parents made me and my sister write to him and the next day we’d find a reply letter. Years later, I noticed that Santa Claus had the same handwriting as my mom. I told my sister and she cried. =P Nevertheless, I also made my son believe in Santa when he was younger until he figured out for himself.

The Three Kings – I’d place fresh grass and a bowl of water for the camels the Three Kings were riding on. The next morning, I would find treats as a sort of “thank you” from them. But I also stopped believing in them the day I made my mom admit that she was “Santa”.

…oh, and my mom would tell me to keep my milk teetth under the stairs so a rat could find it. When one does, my permanent teeth would be as strong as a rat’s. Thinking about it now…that was really unhygienic.Ugh. I’m sure she threw away those rotten teeth. (I hope)

that ice cubes were polar bear teeth.

@evelyn pet zebra
God is love and Jesus is real. Oh yeah, and prayer works. And we are all God’s children, including black,red,yellow,mulatto,all races people , nobody is damned because their race but they actions choosing/unrepenting of those things opposite of good instituted for us to do by God .
God is real as Jesus as you and me, Im saying it from my 30 yr old life experiences/near death/sincere study of The Word, i’m not a blind believer in anything I test all before commiting something important as most of my life into and my eternal destination.

For many years I was told my birth father abandoned the marriage, my mother and me and I was never allowed to know anything about him, not even what he looked liked. The truth turned out to be my mother cheated on him, he caught her and struck her and then she left him and her family closed ranks on his.

When I was in 6th grade and we moved for the 3rd time in one year, my mom swore that it was the last time we would move. Four months later, we were moving, again. I believed it was something that she didn’t know about for the longest time; however, I caught her discussing it with a relative…she knew that we would be moving again, she said she just didn’t want to deal with our emotions about it…she was tired of hearing us complain.

I moved 13 times in less than 5 years. I know I complained 4 of those times…not a bad track record for a kid, or so I thought.