50 Things People Considered 'Normal' While Growing Up, Only To Find Out They're Actually Weird

When I was little I was terrified spiders would eat me while I was sleeping on the top bunk, so my parents had this cool contraption that was a 'spider-trap-setter'. They’d bring it in at bedtime, I’d point it around the room, and click the handle to set a ton of spider traps each night so I could sleep.
Fast forward to my fiancé and I registering for wedding gifts – he scanned a wine bottle opener (with the corkscrew and the arms that go up and down) and I immediately recognized it as a spider-trap-setter. It only then dawned on me that I’d been LIED TO,

In my family, it is a tradition that if somebody bends over they are going to get a swat on the behind. I figured out pretty young that this wasn't "normal" but continued the tradition anyway. At least until my son was about 4 or 5, and we were at the grocery store. A lady in the aisle in front of us dropped her can of pears, and I'll be damned if my lil' rascal didn't run up all excited and swat her on the butt. She spun around with a shocked expression while I made apology after mortified apology. She was cool though. She laughed and said, "It's okay, honey. That's the cutest guy that's swatted me on the butt in a long time." Props to her, but we still discontinued the practice at home after that.

Growing up, whenever I would eat bananas my mouth would always hurt and sometimes go numb. Kind of similar to how it feels if you eat too much sour candy. It wasn't until I was 18 years old that I say to my mom 'Man, I hate the way bananas make your mouth hurt.' She then brought me to understand THAT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. So yeah, turns out I'm allergic to bananas.

When I was a kid I had a tiny Sony stereo for cassettes. I really loved listening to music - and still do - and children's stories. I would however only listen for like an hour or so a day, because I thought people inside the cassettes would become to tired and upset with me.

I was probably 12 or so before I realized that not all kids spend their entire summer vacation farming. I spent my summer days weeding, picking veggies, tending hogs, cattle, chickens and I enjoyed every minute of it!

My mom and aunt were identical twins. My aunt lived with us from the time I was born until first grade. I never realized until I started Kindergarten that not everyone had two moms that looked exactly the same and one dad. What a shocker.

For the first two or three years after I was potty trained, I thought that everyone peed standing up. So there I was, a little girl with impeccable aim.

On long road trips, my parents would tell my brother and I that if we closed our eyes, we'd get there faster. Believing them, we would close our eyes and eventually fall alseep. Magically, when we woke up we were almost there, and parents got a nice quiet drive with no kids fighting! Well played parents. Well played.
Also used to think the windshield wipers magically knew when it was time to clear the windshield. Wasn't til I started driving that I learned about intermittent wipers.

My family poops big. Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's our diet, but everyone births giant logs of crap. If anyone has laid a mega-poop, you know that sometimes it won't flush. Growing up, this was a common enough occurrence that our family had a poop knife. It was an old rusty kitchen knife that hung on a nail in the laundry room, only to be used for that purpose. It was normal to walk through the hallway and have someone call out "hey, can you get me the poop knife"?
I thought it was standard kit. You have your plunger, your toilet brush, and your poop knife.

We used to lift up our table and say "hrrrmp" every day before dinner as a family. I though everyone did it.... I found out it was only us a a friends place for dinner...

I grew up in the country and firmly believed that ice cream trucks were myths and that they only existed on TV shows.

As a child I really loved Green Mint Ice cream sauce. Me and my brother and two sisters couldn't get enough of it and would always ask for more. It wasn't until I was about 25 that I noticed it was always stocked in the alcohol section of the supermarket. When I bought this up with my partner he found it really funny. My beloved "ice cream topping" was in fact Crème de menthe, mint liquor. My parents had been giving us booze, Maybe it kept us four kids quite for 10 minutes!. It will aways be Green Mint ice cream sauce to me!

When I was in kindergarten, I wore my Batman costume to school EVERY DAY! Under clothes, over clothes, rain or shine. Since my mom wasn't the type to crush my dreams of saving Gotham City or to enforce gender roles on me, I was free to be Batman(without judgement) until the middle of first grade when the other girls stopped wanting to play with me.

We lived right outside NYC when I was young and whenever I'd be watching a movie or TV where they can see stars in the sky at night I thought it was fake because, Duh, you can't see stars from the Earth!
We moved to North Carolina when I was 9 and it blew me away that you can actually see stars there. Another fun consequence of NYC light pollution was that I also thought rain and snow clouds were brown at night - because of the orange street lights.

I thought every person who get's killed in TV actually dies on set. I thought people, who weren't happy with their lives, would volunteer to die for the movie.
I always wondered, how they could find so many suicidal people who were also good actors.

I always thought that the menthol in cherry halls was what was making my mouth numb, but none of the other flavours did that. I am studying chemistry, and an instructor brought in a bunch of bottles of ketones and aldehydes for us to smell, all of which are used to flavour food like vanilla or mint. One of them was benzaldehyde, which is used for fake cherry flavoring. I took a whiff and my whole mouth went numb. I asked everyone else if it did the same thing to them and that's how I found out that it wasn't the menthol, I'm actually allergic to fake cherry flavour.

As a kid of nursery school age, I got tired of dressing the same all the time, so I put my arms through my pant legs, wearing my jeans like a bolero vest, and I put my legs through my shirt sleeves and belted my shirt around my waist. I was so impressed with my newly invented way of dressing that I told mom I was going to teach everybody to dress that way when I went to class. She tried to talk me out of it, but finally gave in figuring I'd be embarrassed and change back.

Come the end of the day, she picked me up and there I was still wearing topsy turvy clothes, grinning and happy as a clam.

I have Cerebral Palsy, so I grew up with excruciating leg pain, leg casts, speech therapists, and physical therapists. When you are a kid and have to be shuttled around by various doctors, see guidance teachers to assess your development stages, and take regular medication- you think EVERY kid also goes through it- until you finally realize that your normal ISN'T normal. And that was an eye opener. As a well functioning adult I never bring my CP up, because it makes some people weirdly uncomfortable.

When I was growing up my dad would always yell out 'the phone’s leaking!' whenever the landline rang. I did not realise that this was not a common phrase until I yelled it across the room at work one day to a coworker. Everyone was so confused and worried about the phone.

My whole family drank pickle juice out of the jar after all of the pickles were gone. When I did it at a party, people gave me dirty looks and made rude comments. Apparently, what my family did isn’t normal...