What's the weirdest thing your parents ever told you...

United States
June 13, 2007 2:33pm CST
... and expected you to believe? Here's mine: I grew up in a very white town. I can only remember seeing two black people before I went to grade school. I knew nothing at all about race. The only black person I knew was a man named Don, who was the head cook at the restaurant where my mother worked. Don was a big, powerful tree-trunk of a man, with smooth, beautiful skin so dark he was nearly blue-black in strong light. He had a lovely baritone singing voice, and I would sit on a stool in the kitchen for hours, coloring while he sang songs and told stories about his boyhood in the South, or funny things that happened to him in the Army. I looked forward to going to work with my mom, so I could see my good friend Don. I didn't realise until much later how very busy he was, but he took the time to keep me occupied and out of my mother's hair. My mom worked the dinner shift and then the bar, so when I got tired, Don would make up the cot in the manager's office and carry me in there with the lights out, so I didn't see the nudie pictures on the wall. I asked my mother once, why is Don's skin so much darker than everyone else's? She told me he had been horribly injured in World WarII, and the dark skin was his scar. She said he was very sensitive about it, and I should never, ever say anything to him about it. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you beat that?
5 people like this
6 responses
@rosie_123 (6113)
14 Jun 07
LOL! Well strangely mine is about race too. I spent a lot of my formative years in the good old English Home Counties, where there also weren't any non-white faces, and my Mum told me that children were born with darker skin because their Mothers ate too much liquorice when they were pregnant with them!! She also told me that if I ate any pips when I ate an apple, then an apple tree would grow in my stomach - LOL!
• United States
14 Jun 07
lol... my mom said the same thing about watermelon seeds. Whenever I would get a bad chest cold, I was always afraid that the vines were filling up my lungs. I didn't get over that one until I took Earth science in school, and learned about photosynthesis. Mom's conversation had already made it clear that the "Sun didn't shine" in there!
• United States
13 Jun 07
My parents always told us you could get pregnant from kissing. We were raised up sheltered so we believed them. When I was fourteen this boy wanted to kiss me and I told him no I didn't want to get pregnant. Yeah I was embareassed when he laughed at me.
2 people like this
• United States
14 Jun 07
OMG, you poor thing! Another embarrassing teen moment, thanks to dear old mom and dad!
@ladyluna (7004)
• United States
14 Jun 07
Hello Gardengrrl, No I cannot beat that! That beats all. You're mother certainly marched to the tune of a different drum beat. OK, enough of that. One thing that my Dad used to tell us when we were little was: That he used to have to walk 10 miles, in the snow, uphill both ways to get to school. It took us a while to figure that one out!
1 person likes this
@ladyluna (7004)
• United States
14 Jun 07
Oh geeze, I almost forgot ... my Father was a real hoot, in a quiet, subtle way. Quite a teaser. One day, my sister got a call to go to the principles office at my niece's elementary school. My nieces went to the same Catholic grade school that I attended, and had the same prinicple. Anyway, when my sister arrived, she was escorted into Sr. Maureen's office, where she was politely told to reign our father in. She'd heard his second hand shenanigans through two generations now. And, although she liked a good joke as much as the next person, our father had crossed the line by telling my niece that: He was the older than Moses ... 864 years old, and that he was the third branch of the Holy Trinity. The Trinity was comprised of God The Father, God the Son, and P-pa, which is what my nieces called their grandfather. Oh boy, did my Dad get an earful when my sister stomped into the house, after getting reamed by the principle, long after she'd graduated. Of course, I just laughed ... and so did P-pa!
1 person likes this
• United States
14 Jun 07
Another big belly laugh, courtesy of your Dad, what a hoot! Thanks for stopping by, ladyluna. I needed that!
1 person likes this
@psyche49f (2502)
• Philippines
14 Jun 07
Mine was whenever there is fire in the neighborhood, or in the city, my mother becomes overreactive and urged us to pack our things and go! Imagine, even if the fire was a kilometer away, she panics and we end up in the sidewalk with our things because she was so afraid of fires! I have experienced packing our things with a fire that was a kilometer away, and I was wondering why our next door neighbors never did pack their things--and yet, they had more expensive things like cars and bigger houses. Today, I realized that what we did as a family was embarassing and totally far out! LOL!That was really weird of us then...Hope my sister gets to read this, and can remember what we did back then...I'm sure she will also have a good laugh...
@butterfly39 (3904)
• Philippines
22 Jun 07
hahahah...how cool then.So now you know that all blacks are all injured during world war II then. I like that..give my regards to your parents okey?
@Katagiri (426)
• Brazil
23 Jun 07
Lol! I remember there was someone in my family who adopted a black child... it's a very old story, my mother told me that, when the other kids asked the father why his son's skin was so dark, he said that the boy was born at night... can you take that? o;O I can't really recall what my parents told me that was that strange... besides I can't sleep till late on Saturdays.
1 person likes this