Lies My Mother Told Me

    A few weeks ago I was thinking about how different my life as a kid was than the lives of some of the kids I know now. Many things that are very common now, like computers, were unheard of then. There are things that kids do now that would not have been allowed when I was a kid. I started thinking about some of the things I was told when I was younger. I remembered some of the things were clearly not true. I never understood why I was told these things. At the time it just seemed a little weird. Now I think it's funny. Allow me to share with you a few of the less than true things that I was told growing up.
   "Eating raw cookie dough will give you worms." I'm sure we have all heard that one. I never understood it. From the time I was old enough to operate the oven alone, I was delegated the task of baking treats for the family. I didn't mind. I love to bake and I still do. I wondered where the worms would come from. I knew what I put into the cookie dough had no worms in it. I also know that things just don't appear on their own.
  It didn't stop me. I would often taste the cookie dough. You have to when you bake something. If it tastes good unbaked, then it will taste good after you bake it, right? This is assuming that you don't over bake or burn it. For some reason I liked the dough before it was baked better than after. Chocolate oatmeal cookie dough was the best. I suspect that my mother might have known of my fondness for uncooked dough and told me this to insure that I would bake most of the batch.
 "If you eat standing up, the food will fall to your feet and won't do you any good." This is another one I didn't understand. Every little kid knows that they have a tummy and that is where the food goes. For some reason that I can't explain, I believed this one although not for very long. I made sure to sit whenever I ate something because I didn't want to get big feet.
   Before I realized that this wasn't true, I wondered about my grandmother. She was always cooking something. I don't remember her ever sitting down at a meal, she was always bringing more food to the table,stirring something or taking something out of the oven. I know that she ate standing up because I saw her. How come it was ok for her to do this and not me?
   "Eating carrots helps your eyes." When I was in fifth grade I got my first pair of glasses. I didn't like them and I was scared. I knew that once you got glasses your eyes would get dependent on them and then you'd have to wear them all the time. I didn't want to wear glasses. It was one more thing that I would get teased about. I was told that carrots would help my eyes. I ate lots of carrots. During the summer I would pull one out of the garden, wash it off with the garden hose and eat it. I'm surprised I didn't turn orange with all the carrots I ate.
  It didn't help my eyes though. As I feared they got worse and worse. My lenses got thicker and thicker. Eventually I stopped eating carrots because they didn't help. I was not happy.
  "If you put a heavy object on top of an electric cord you will stop the electricity from going through it." I wondered what would happen to the backed up electricity. Would it make the cord swell up? Would it go back into the plug? Would it go into the circuit breaker and blow up the house? I was concerned. My dad, who was an electrical engineer, explained to me that this was not true. He was a little irked that my mother would say such a thing. Putting a heavy object on a cord could damage the cord, but the electricity would still go through it. My mother didn't agree and I think still to this day believes that an electrical cord works like a garden hose.
   I'm saving the best one for last. To be fair, my mother never said this. This was one my grandmother told me. "If your hair hangs in your eyes, you will get hair juice in them and the hair juice will make you go blind." When I was a kid I wondered what "hair juice" was. I wondered if mine would be brown because I had brown hair. I tried squeezing my hair once to see if anything would come out.  Nothing came out. Where did the "hair juice" come from? I never knew. Maybe this was her way of getting me to comb my hair. I'll never know.
  I wonder if my grandmother thought that my glasses were the result of "hair juice" in my eyes? If it is I call tell you one thing, eating carrots does not help.