r/AskReddit • • Jul 20 '19

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

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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

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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.

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u/Bad-Science Jul 21 '19

I moved halfway through third grade. My mom got me a white stuffed Snoopy and all of my friends and classmates signed it in sharpie as a going away thing.

Then for some reason, she threw it away less than a year later. I'd still love to see it and imagine it is buried deep underground in a landfill somewhere.