And in the end…there is love.

So, I’m stealing this from Mandy, because what a fun idea, to remember things you believed as a kid! I needed a light post today anyway

When I was a kid I believed…
-That every time you hiccuped you grew an inch. I don’t know why, but at some point in my childhood, my mom told me, when I had the hiccups, “Oh, that means you’re growing!” I don’t know where I got the hiccup equation (1 hiccup=1 inch of growth), but I think it verifies that I’m a genius. Well, until the night that I got the hiccups, and they wouldn’t stop, and I started crying because I was afraid I was going to grow into this weird giant child who wouldn’t fit in her bed anymore.

-I was dead. This belief came from a rather dim-witted nurse who told then 6-year-old me that I didn’t have a pulse. Apparently, when I’m sick, my pulse becomes pretty faint, and she had a hard time finding it. “Oh, you must not have a pulse,” she joked. But I didn’t know it was a joke. I thought I was dead.

-There was a pirate ghost living under my closet. I don’t really know where this came from. My stepsister convinced me that she saw a peg-legged ghost near our house. And somehow, in my mind, he had taken up residence in the crawl space under my closet. Every sound that I heard at night, I attributed to that ghost. Arrrr.

-People lived in my walls. Our hallway walls were this wood paneling. And sometimes, I thought I could make out faces in the grain. So, I of course to the conclusion that people lived in our walls. Maybe they were friends with the pirate.

-My failure to know the days of the week was my undoing. One of my most vivid childhood memories comes when I was being tested for my school’s gifted program. It was the end of kindergarten, and I sat with a kind lady who was asking me a series of questions. One of those questions was “How many days are in the week.” I boldly answered five. By the time she moved on to the next question, I realized my mistake. “Seven, I meant seven!” I said. She patted me on the head, and continued her questions. I thought my life was over.

So this fun little blog reminded me of a few things. Namely, I was a weird kid who grew into a weird adult.