When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.
I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years
I hadn’t had “the talk” and assembled my own understanding about marriage = “the ability to touch each other’s private parts.”
I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house’s upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and “tag” touch the groom’s crotch and then pull her dress up, and… at that point I didn’t really understand what she would “have” under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically “tag you’re it” style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.
I didn’t have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn’t associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.
I thought ‘tomorrow’ was a day of the week. So when my mom would say we’d go somewhere ‘tomorrow’ I’d ask her every day if it was tomorrow yet, and she’d say no, and I’d keep waiting.
For a while, I thought kissing was how women got pregnant.
It MIGHT have had something to do with getting a half sibling in spite of my father saying he hadn’t had sex with the mother. Religion makes people weird, is it really that big a deal to admit you had sex out of wedlock, when everybody already knows you got someone pregnant?
I believed that for very small creatures (like ants) time was faster.
