I Used to Believe

Mary Katherine Ham pointed out this funny little website that allows people to write about weird things they used to believe when they were children.  She said on her site–

I actually used to believe that you could have a baby by wishing to have a baby, so I always tried really hard as a kid to avoid thinking about babies, which of course, led to my thinking about babies, and then freaking out and parsing whether or not God would think I’d actually made a wish or just had general baby thoughts.

Yeah, those thoughts must keep little girls up late at night.

So I thought I’d share a strange belief I had when I was 4.  I had no real concept of what school was like but knew I was going to be starting kindergarten soon.  I heard my big brother and his friend talking one afternoon about which one of them was going to get to second and third grade first. 

This term “grade” was something I had not heard of before.  I thought I knew what school was, but “grades?”  That sounded ominous.  I envisioned in my head that when you go to school and enter one of these “grades” a child had to sit in a chair in the dark, lit only by a spotlight, and somehow the knowledge would be beamed into the child’s skull.  I had dread and foreboding that it might be painful and boring to sit in that chair in the spotlight all day long.

Its funny in retrospect.  Other than the spotlight, school was painfully boring.