the things they told me

When I was very young a neighbor girl, I thought she was much much older, but she was probably 12is, I wasn’t quite 4 yet, was with me. We were looking through her fridge and I spied the ReaLemon awesome plastic lemon shaped lemon juice dispenser.
“what’s that?”
“it’s poison”
hmm, poison. I spent a lot of time mulling that over. I’m talking years spent thinking about this. Why would they sell poison in the produce section? why would they put poison in a food shaped container? Why would people need poison?
Where was the Mr Yuk sticker????
Around the same time I was told the bottle of Karo syrup in the cupboard was medicine. This also perplexed me, but to a lesser extent. Medicine wasn’t strange, I could accept that. I was the kid who frequently climbed on the kitchen counter to chug the Pepto-Bismol. It was pink and awesome! Also, I had a sister who got frequent colds and ear infections, the children’s prescription pink medicine…also chugged.
wait…Flintstone vitamins? eaten at every chance! Children’s aspirin! AWESOME!! Vaseline? peculiar but edible. Bowls of mayonnaise? Not what I was expecting but better than Vaseline. Dish soap? NOT AWESOME!
Why did I have so much free time? I mean we didn’t helicopter parents then, we were often left to play on our own. But, man, there was a lot of unstructured time there. I guess it’s lucky I didn’t overdose on something…I guess that’s why we have helicopter parents now.

9 thoughts on “the things they told me

  1. You chugged my antibiotics???? no wonder I was always sick. And you would pinch my nose till it was bruised every night when I coughed.
    Geeze I need more therepy. ha.
    And why at that age were you looking for mr yuk stickers? We didn’t know what those were
    Also things people tell you when your young and don’t realize the truth till your a lot older….
    You told me when I was VERY little about brain hemoridges. you said if I pooped too hard my brain would explode. Talk about 10 years of a fear of putting too much effort into taking a dump. and you told me if I ran out of hair jell to use grape jelly??? I could give you a list of what you told me.
    But I wouldn’t change it fo notin

  2. I used to eat the orange flavored Vit. C ’cause they were yummy.
    But about ReaLemon. I had someone told me that you just had to use that and water and you would have lemonade. Yeah…um, they forgot about the sugar part. That was some nasty stuff. It took me YEARS before I could drink lemonade again.

  3. Not surprising your sister is as funny as you! I remember being told that perfume was flamable–and being afraid that that meant my mom’s dresser was going to catch on fire. I had a lot of childhood fears. My mom was a little manic about things going bad in the fridge, so I got to worrying about the food on my plate being poisonous–my dad would take a bite, grab his throat and pretend to die dramatically. Talk about being sensitive to children’s fears!

  4. OK-I tried to comment, and you can assume I had something clever to say, but it didn’t work… But anyway–hilarous post, and your sister is so funny too!

  5. OH. My goodness. Too funny. I started laughing at Mr Yuck and didn’t stop for five minutes. I see you and your sibling have much in common…I hope you guys live a good distance apart so you don’t cause a rift in the space/time continuum by an explosion of hilarity.

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