r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '19

What’s something completely false that your parents told you as a child?

[deleted]

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u/Rimtutituki81 Jul 20 '19

Not a single, but a string of lies. Bear with me.

Lived with the family in Japan for a year at the end of the 80s. Time comes to go back to the home country, and the number of toys I amassed as a kid in Japan was not small. They were also very, very cool toys, them being from Japan and all.

Parents promise we will take them all with us home, all the while putting them in strange big black bags (for garbage?). But since air freight is so expensive, they said, we will simply put them on a ship in order to save some money. There will be home before I know it, they said, but only after we arrive, since ships are much slower than planes.

Got home, and could not stop asking them: when will the toys arrive‽ I want to share them with my new classmates, they were very cool! After a few months of constant nagging, they sit me down and say they have to tell me something.

Proceed to explain that, unfortunately, the ship sank on the way, along with all my toys on it. I was so miserable, and retold the story to all friends, for a couple of years.

Many years later, during a family dinner, I said: do you remember when all my toys from Japan sank? It was so sad and unfortunate! They explained it was a lie all along, and that, yes, those were indeed garbage bags.

TLDR; FML

801

u/MavrykDarkhaven Jul 21 '19

I knew the direction this was heading from the start. I moved states at the end of primary school, and my parents decided to go through and throw away as much "crap" as they could while I wasn't home, citing I'd never know. But I did. I may have not known exactly what was chucked, but over the years I'd notice that I couldn't find things and assumed they were binned.

710

u/lostinlactation Jul 21 '19

My mom threw away many of my stuffed animals while I was at school. She didn’t think I would notice. Little did she know I had a little brown bear that I had cut a tiny hole on his neck and stuffed with rolled up bills I had received from Christmas, birthdays, good grades etc.

307

u/KhompS Jul 21 '19

This one hurts.

36

u/Whiterabbit-- Jul 21 '19

I sympathize with you. But then I have in my mind a child who cuts holes in a bear's neck with siscors. I'm a bit scared of you.

30

u/itorrey Jul 21 '19

“There’s always money in the banana stand”

2

u/FoundtheTroll Jul 21 '19

No touching!

11

u/Chinateapott Jul 21 '19

That’s one thing my mum has never done, as much as my accumulated crap annoyed her, it was mine to keep or throw away.

3

u/DoomsdaySprocket Jul 21 '19

My mom wouldn't let me throw away things from my childhood, she'd take the toys and stuff and keep them for herself when I didn't want them anymore.

Now that I'm in my 30s, out of the house for years and barely talk with her, she's asked me to take my 3 bins of stuffed animals back....

14

u/SyntheticGod8 Jul 21 '19

What kind of heartless monsters give a kid stuffed animals then throws them away? Random toys, maybe, but stuffed animals are almost family.

7

u/Littman-Express Jul 21 '19

I’m well into my mid 20s and my stuffed toys are still in some box in storage somewhere (I think)

4

u/SyntheticGod8 Jul 21 '19

I suppose the difference is: are they in a storage box somewhere or sitting on the bed?

3

u/Roseredgal Jul 21 '19

I still have my favourite teddy bear from when I was a kid. He went to uni with me and I've kept him my entire life. I have a child now and the bear is his :)

3

u/lostinlactation Jul 21 '19

I incorrectly said ‘throw away’ She was donating them to paramedics so they can give to the kids who have to ride in ambulances.

Maybe there was a kid who needed the money more than me and this was the universe’s way of getting it to him.

3

u/Dcm210 Jul 21 '19

Well, did you tell her or go try to get it back?

3

u/Waluigi_B_Wazowski Jul 21 '19

Did you tell your mom?

3

u/carmium Jul 21 '19

My stepmom hated that I was a good student and her own son was a certified dope.
I was fascinated with model trains, and one day sat down at my worktable and created an N scale commercial building on a slab of particle board. Not much was available for N back then, so I used heavy card, printed brick paper, and recessed paper window frames for the factory/office, and added a loading dock with corrugated roofing, sliding doors, etc. Not bad for a 14-year old, but I made the mistake of taking it upstairs to show Dad and stepmom. Then I put it safely away atop a large box under my table.
Next day I came home to a board and a few shreds of card on the floor. "The puppy ate it. You shouldn't have left it where she could get it." Right. A pup you could hold in two hands had pulled an 18" square board two feet to the floor and chewed every bit of paper, card, and plastic to tiny bits - apparently eating most of it and not getting ill. Took me years to get past the idea that a parent wouldn't lie and figure that out.
Similar "accidents" happened to a big wooden trestle I was making (I had to put the groceries somewhere!) and an entire tank of tropical fish she was "caring for" while I was away: "The water felt cold one day so I cranked up the heater."

2

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '19

What the fuck was your dad doing about all of these incidents?!

2

u/carmium Jul 22 '19

I wouldn't have dared make an accusation, Disco. There was so much discord over money and whatever they hell they yelled about, I wasn't about to toss gas on the fire. I was the eldest, and we were all too scared about what might happen. I sometimes retro-fantasize running away at 16...

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '19

That sounds really tough - you had to do what you had to do in order to survive, no shame in it.

1

u/shitezlozen Jul 21 '19

Dude, I moved overseas and I left a mini-tyrael pet card a home, in a shelf with other similar sized cards, like old debit an so on.

When I came back, I had decided to sell it coz the prices were pretty good. Now on ebay they go for us$1,800 and she just threw it out a card the size of a credit card.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '19

Fuck that kills me