Pork Chops

When you're a kid, your brain is kind of amazing. You are absorbing information, synthesyzing it and putting it to use more rapidly than you will ever be able to do again in your life. As a therapist, I specialized in Child & Family Mental Health, and one of the most interesting and challenging things about working with kids is that the responsibility for what and how they learn--at least when they are very young--lies primarily with the adults in their lives.

So, you've probably met a lot of adults in your life. Should we really be allowed this much influence on brand spanking new human beings?

Take it from me, we should not.


Thinking about child development and learning reminded me that there are several stratospherically ridiculous and/or erroneous things that I believed as a child. I was a reasonably smart and developmentally mature kid and my parents were actually quite good about being honest, educational, and generally aware of making sure we were learning about the world. The problem is that no adult can ever possibly manage everything in their own life and be constantly monitoring a child's developing mind for misinformation that gets processed as truth. It can't be done. Meanwhile, a kid's brain fills in the blanks with all kinds of creative, imaginative and often highly logical pieces of info all on its own. Additionally, young minds are incredibly flexible and forgiving, which is how more than a third of us ended up buying the notion that a fat, white man in a sleigh can fly around the world in about 8 hours with the same nine reindeer annually for eternity, enter select people's homes and leave gifts while somehow not upsetting the 65% of the planet that doesn't celebrate this holiday. 

Still, when I think about my childhood there are some examples of embraced falsehoods and magical thinking that I attribute less to normal "kid think" and more to my own emerging propensity to jump to conclusions. I was a classic oldest child, often praised for being very bright and independent, so I didn't like to ask adults to explain things unless I absolutely had to. This "no, I'm cool. I've got it" attitude directly contributed to the following mistaken beliefs:


1. Pigs lay pork chops 

If you think about it, it's kind of logical. I knew that pork chops came from pigs because of the word "pork" and its connection to Porky Pig. (See how smart I was?)  And being a Vermonter surrounded by farms, I knew that cows gave milk, chickens laid eggs, etc. So, in my mind pigs copped a squat and squeezed out a pork chop or two each day. The real concern here is not that I believed this, which is actually kind of cute, but that I believed it until I was nine years old. Yeah. Like fourth grade. The only reason I learned that this was not true was because one day when my mom and I were driving to the farm of some people we knew I asked about their "pet" pig and she said "they killed that pig last year." When, in my absolute horror, I asked why on earth someone would kill their pig, my mom gave me an awkward look and was like, "uh, for the meat." When I asked her to elaborate, I learned that not only did pigs not lay pork chops, but that bacon and even ham (ham!) were responsible for these killings. It was a long car ride for me that day.

2. Dan Rather, Bob Barker and Ronald Reagan were triplets

This I attribute to the fact that these three seemingly disparate gentlemen featured prominently into my childhood television viewing repertoire and that they all looked exactly alike to me: tall, white, stately, and graying. I believed that they had different last names because they had either chosen stage names or been adopted out. I loved these men deeply and felt safe when I saw them. Bob Barker was so reliable and always giving away money and making people happy. Plus, he cared enough to remind us to get our pets fixed. Dan Rather had the most strong and reassuring voice I had ever heard and was my lifeline to the outside world, a beacon from far off lands full of exotic things like shopping malls and buildings taller than 4 stories. I watched the CBS evening news with unquestioning loyalty and zeal. As for Ronald Reagan, this was a forbidden love, as my mom thought he was an asshole who "didn't care about regular people". I thought she must be off-base. I mean, who would leave all the glitz and glamour of Hollywood for public service but someone deeply concerned about the well-being of those less fortunate? What a guy! This whole house of cards really fell apart when Bob Barker went completely white-haired while Dan and Ronald stayed more brunette. My foundation of security was shattered.



3. If you put butter and peanut butter together on the same piece of toast or english muffin, it becomes lethal and will kill you. 

This one I am pretty sure I completely fabricated as a way to get my sister not to do this because I found it revolting. But then, as is the danger with all lies, I began to believe this myself and eventually I would not even butter my bread with a knife that I suspected had touched peanut butter, and vice versa. It's possible that I still believe this since I have never since consumed these foods in unison and insist on one-condiment-only knife use in all of my food preparation.

4. You have to have your ears pierced to go to a funeral. 

This little gem originated when my sister and I were about to get our ears pierced, ages 9 (me) and 7 (her). She snuck into my room the night before so that we could talk about all of the amazing opportunities our newly pierced ears were about to bring our way, when suddenly I blurted out that now we could go to funerals! My sister's eyes widdened and she was all, "really??" And I was like, yeah, really! We've never been to a funeral and it must be because we have no earrings, damn it! But now no one will refuse us entry! We can go to any funeral we want!

5. The giant elevated grain conveyor belt at a local grain silo was really an amusement park ride that I wasn't allowed to go on. 

This is actually quite tragic: I spent a good 5-6 years of my youth driving by this thing and thinking that my parents were just telling us it was a grain conveyor belt so that they didn't have to take us to this fun park. I never mentioned it to my friends at school because I didn't want to stand out as the only kid who hadn't gone on the bad-ass ride, or to the amusement park at all. It's also disconcerting that we lived somewhere so ungodly remote that I longed to ride the grain conveyor. (Btw, if you're reading this and you're from the NEK, you maybe know the place I'm talking about. It was on the right just after you get off 91 and head toward Lyndonville, before you come to the railroad crossing. Kinda by the intersection with the Colonade, only on the other side of rt 5. What did you think it was??)

This tale has a happy ending. As an adult,  I have learned to ask a lot of questions and I  try not to fill in the blanks too much without consulting other trusted sources of information.

You know, like Facebook and Wikipedia.