Old Wives tales - or strange things my mom told me growing up.

Toomuchstuff

Toomuchstuff

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Location
Wisconsin
My mom was a good one for making me listen to her by telling me these strange sayings. " If you don't stop doing this ...xxxxx... this'll happen to you " kind of stuff . I swear , she made up the funniest stuff and being a kid , I believed it ........( sometimes ! ) LOL

Here's a few of my mom's words of wisdom.

Here in Wisconsin , we have these little dragonflies that dart around and hover in the air , us kids would call them "sewing needles" . My mom told me ......"If you lie , the sewing needles will sew your lips shut" .....!!!!!!! My friends and I would RUN away from those dumb bugs because we all knew we lied and we didn't know who the bug would go after !

"Don't sit on the cold concrete , you'll get piles". I didn't even know what "piles" were .( I guess they were hemorrhoids ) Where else do kids sit ? Will I be safer on cold ,wet grass ?

"Don't pick that scab ... you'll get cancer and your ...xxx... will fall off. " Any scab I picked , whether it was on my arm or leg , according to my mom it will get cancer and my whole limb will fall off . LOL I even went through a phase that I bit my lips . You guessed it ... my lips were going to fall off !!!! LOL


Those are the funniest ones I remember . Did your mom tell you her "words of wisdom " , too ? :p
 

Yeah, I was told the one about sitting on cold concrete, but I don't remember from whom.

My mother once told me, when I was a preschooler and crying, that if I didn't stop crying the pressure of crying would grow my then 'outie' navel to grow and end up looking look like a boy's pen... (And I half believed it could be possible.)
 
my mom scared us about the drgonfly also but we use to call them darning needles---if we made a face at my brother or sister our face is gonna freeze like that(i believe it did )lol
 
Granny, I'm glad you think of it as funny, but would you if crying made your navel expand outwardly till it looked like a you-no-what? ;) I can laugh about the stupidity of it now,
 
Moms must have had a thing about navels back then. Mine said if I picked inside my navel I would bleed to death. Years later when I was a teen my girlfriend and I went swimming in the ocean. We stayed the night in a motel and we turned out the lights. I guess when I took a shower earlier I didn't get all the sand out of my navel. I scratched it and my finger felt wet. I guess the delicate skin watered a bit from the sand. I was sure I was on deaths doorstep. I flipped on the light and of course realized what happened. My girlfriend laughed so hard she almost fell out of bed when I told her the story.
 
I was told that if the sun was shinning and it was raining that the "devil was beating his wife". Awful, and as a young kid, I must have believed it.
Who comes up with this stuff? Also, I would never walk under someone up on a ladder. (I can't remember why, but something bad would happen)
 
"Always wear clean underwear when you go out in case you get hit by a truck."

I never could figure out what wearing clean underwear would do to save me if I got hit by a Mack truck.......I'm pretty darn certain tho that if I did get hit by a truck my drawers would definitely be dirty afterwards. :)
 
On pouting: "You keep that lower lip stuck out like that and a little bird will come along and perch on it!"

On biting your fingernails (this came from my 4th grade teacher): "If you bite your fingernails and swallow the bits, they'll go straight to your appendix and your appendix will rupture". (This was the psycho teacher I mentioned earlier)

On having dirty ears: "Your ears are dirty enough that potato vines will grow out of them"

On everything else: Anything we were doing that we weren't supposed to, my grandmother "knew" someone who had done that and got their head knocked off and killed, fell off it and got killed, lost a hand/foot/arm and/or got killed, got an eye poked out and later died, caught some serious disease and died a terrible and lingering death, or just died from the utter shame of not listening to her warning.
 
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Most of our warnings were about talking on the phone, bathing, doing dishes, being alone in our rooms upstairs, etc... during an electrical storm.

Running with scissors or suckers in your mouth, etc...

Going swimming shortly after eating.

and of course wearing clean underwear!!!

We all survived so it must have been good advice!!!
 
Too funny,
The clean underwear one must have been in the Dr.Spock manual or something...seems everyone knows that one...
My personal favorite is,if you break your neck doing...don't come crying to me
 
I was told if you cross your eyes, they might stick that way. Most of us very young kids would lick the white school paste off our fingers. Teacher told us that our tummy would stick together and we wouldn't be able to eat anymore. That one did it for me. :rolleyes:
 
Don't stick your finger in your nose, because it can get stuck.

That one used to strike fear in me, and prompted me to always ask, forever mom? Or... I'll never be able to get it out?
 
Coming from an Italian family my Mom had a lot of Superstitions ,like putting shoes on the table or breaking a mirror etc. But the phrases I remember most were "Don't answer me back or you tongue will fall out." If we were having dinner and I accidently while talking pointed a fork at the person I as talking to my Mother made me leave the table because she said I had put a jinx on the person at the end of the fork.
 
My mom told ghost stories. Don't stray too far from the yard, the headless lady might ride by.
And she'd tell us what might if she did. She coud tell different stories one after the other from
such common incidents that seemed so real or could be.
 
My dad sometimes used the one about sitting on cement causing piles. I never believed it, but I did ask myself, "Piles of what?"
My mom tried to get me to stop biting my nails by telling me "they'll grow in your stomach."
The silliest one was when she found out I liked to break thermometers & play with the mercury: "The mercury will jump into your ears & make you deaf."
She also liked to tell her kids not to do something or go somewhere. When we disobeyed her, she'd hope & pray that something bad happened so she could say "I told you so" again & again. (Maybe many parents do that).
 

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