Things you didn't comprehend as a child because of autism?

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Hello lawlesslady: Welcome to Wrong Planet!

Yes, I agree with you; probably many, or even most of these stories are common among all children. It´s hard to know what´s a misunderstanding due to autism, or due to being a child. There is a movie about Asperger´s Syndrome, called "Mozart and the Whale", and the main female character talks about how she was "different" because when she was a little girl, her parents were watching the Olympics, and were excited when someone "broke a record". So, she decided to break all the records they had in the house, because she thought "I can do that too". When I saw this, I thought this was a mistake that any child could make if they had never heard the term "breaking a record before"; you automatically associate it with something you know. My guess, anyway, is that this sort of misunderstanding just occurs MORE often with Aspies. (When I was a child I had the feeling, very often, that I didn´t know what was going on, whereas other children did; however, I have no way to really prove this).

I´m glad that so many others experienced the sea monkey problem- now I know it wasn´t due to some stupidity of mine!

Some things I did were over the age of nine such as the cotton candy story but I was nine years old then. Me having troubles knowing what was right and wrong and getting confused about the rules because kids wouldn't follow them. It took me till I was eleven to know what Kevin was saying when he said "Don't flash these babies around here, there could be girls on this floor." and it took me till my teens to figure out what Kate was saying when she told her son, "Say 'goodnight' Kevin."

I heard kids younger than nine know what is wrong and what isn't. They wouldn't copy what a three year old does or what a two year old does. Even kids young as four get into trouble when they copy their little siblings because the parents are trying to teach them to show a good example for their siblings. But it might not work for an autistic child because the child will just be confused and think you are mean or think you are discriminating them and it gives them the hint they are different because to the POV they are being treated different. A normal child would understand their actions and not think those things.

My mother told me I have always been literal but she says I was starting to get literal when I got older but i think she means I have always been literal but it wasn't a big deal then for anyone because all kids are literal when they are young but when I reached my pre teens, it started to show because I was still literal.

When I was eleven I was coming home from the funeral with my mother and she kept telling me to "stop that teasing" so I stopped and did another tease. So for the rest of the way home, i was teasing my mother all day and I kept stopping that teasing and doing another one. I never figured out every tease I did she didn't like so I should stop. My mother never told me she didn't want me to do anymore teasing on the rest of the way home, zero.
For three years I couldn't understand why my mother was telling me to stop that tease if she didn't want me teasing her at all. Who tells someone to "stop that teasing" if they don't want to be teased? So I thought my mother was weird. I never knew I was taking it literal until she told me when I was 15 that stop that teasing means stop teasing. But she had to tell me it five times for me to understand. I think my brothers had troubles understanding it too because I can remember her telling them the same. They were in elementary school then.
I have taken plenty of phrases literal in my teen years.

I remember my ten year old brother taking "Bite your tongue" literal because he said "That would hurt" when mom told him to because he was whining.

The Watergate scandal happened when I was a child. I spent forever wondering how they were able to make a gate out of water.

Your post seems pointless. The original was an example of what was taken literally. An explanation was not asked for that I read.

I remember watching some Superman films with Christopher Reeve. I read in the TV guide at the time about Superman being the 'Man of Steel' I turned to my mother and said, "I never knew he was made of steel" then my mother tells me that isn't what it means.

I do hate people saying they will be 5 minutes, what is so hard for being honest? If I don't know, I try to give "I'll be back, but may be a while"

At work, I like to give times that are at least slightly longer to compensate any probable problems or delays. The problem with this is when someone else gives a wrong time. (Delivery estimates)

I dont think so. He said "I do not get that one" indicating that as an adult, it still perplexed him.

On the next two he said "that seems contradictory to me.", which suggested a little clarification would ease the irksome nature of the contradiction.

Sorry, but who are Kate and Kevin and what is the cotton candy story, what does it mean 'don't flash these babies round here' and why did it matter that there could be girls on the floor (what floor?). Also, what *did* Kate mean when she said, 'say "goodnight" Kevin'?

I do not understand at all


Hay is dried grass. You can't grow dried grass so you can't grow hay that's why it is said that one makes it.

My soft toys where more alive than people, people where like mist to me.
I gave up my bed one night for my soft toys.
My foster mother told me she had had enough of me and maybe someone else would have me so i went out knocking on doors asking if people would have me because my mother didn,t want me anymore. I had nearly gone around the whole block untill my foster mother arrived in a car because she had been out looking for me.
My foster mother told me on halloween that she was a witch and i believed her and told everyone i could, someone even said 'she just called her mother a witch thats horrible'. I could never work out why that was horrible.
I drempt i could fly and that it was all just about a force i could push against with my hands like magnets. I kept jumping off the steps at school and flapping my arms i even thought i was getting a little further each time then i turned to see everyone in the school mobiles looking out of the window laughing including the teacher .Break time was over and i hadn,t noticed everyone had gone in and i was trying to fly.
I used to wonder if the moment i was in was real or a dream and that i might just wake up at any moment.

i never bothered to watch sport.
i was not even interested in sports people who were skillful.
no human can run as fast as a mediocre horse, and i was not interested in horses racing either.

the best human fighters (in any style) would be ripped to shreds by a polar bear.

the most powerful weightlifter can not lift a fraction of what an elephant can with it's tusks.

the most agile and quick witted basketballer has not nearly the maneuvering capability of a cheetah chasing a fawn.


i was never impressed by the physical feats of humans, as they are weak and slow compared to most of the animal world.




i was talking about my perception of the saying when i was little. i did not see how hay could be "made", because it is dried lucerne that was "grown". i did not think of the fact by "make", they meant "prepared" hay (ie fashioning it into storable bales). that was told to me at a later age.
however, i still had no idea how the saying applied to anyone but farmers.
how does it relate to life in general? i asked again when i was older what it meant, and they said that it means to "do your work while you can because later it may be too late" and they gave an example of "being lazy while you are young, and then getting sick and old and realizing you never made any money and being stuck with it".
(i remember it because i wrote it down).
i still do not know what "hay" has to do with anything.
i never intended to make money from "hay".
the 2 doctor/teachers i had tried many ways of explaining it that afternoon.
i could never make the connection between hay, and life.
i got tired so i joked "the sun always shines.
the sun will shine for another 5 billion years, so i have plenty of time to make hay"



ok. so that is what it means. but what is the significance of uttering that saying to anyone?

it is as significant as me saying "never screw the lightbulbs in before you build the house", or "never turn the hotplate off before you buy the meat ". it seems so obvious, that i can not imagine why anyone would say it.
it is like saying "do not presume all traffic lights will be green as you read your morning paper on the way to work". doyyyyy!

one possibly useful application of the saying maybe to navigators in car rallies. it makes sense to keep track of how many bridges you have crossed, because if you turn left after the 19th bridge, then it is better not to count bridge 18 as bridge 19. ie: have an accurate map and follow the instructions and be carefully observant.


that makes sense to me. thank you for explaining it.



you can not "make" hay either. you just wait for the "grass" to inevitably dehydrate. even if it is not piled up or stored in bales, it is syill "hay".
even if no work is done at all by a human that just watches idly, it will still become hay. so a person does not "make" hay either. he just waits for it to happen, and then he gathers it up and packages it.

but i agree, you can not "grow" hay as it were.
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another adage i thought i understood until only very recently was "a stitch in time saves nine".
i never really questioned people about things i did not understand, so i retained many fallacial beliefs into adulthood because i never checked them.

i always thought that that adage meant that "an astronomically unlikely event may occur to save a crew of people who seem inevitably doomed". in other words, do not give up hope even in the blackest realization of certain disaster, because a "seam" (stitch) in the fabric of time may just "shunt" you off into a parallel universe for a small time and then deposit you back miraculously just after the danger has passed.
i did not know why the number 9 was used, but the adage seemed rather stupid to me so i gave little thought to fitting the "9" into my idea of it.
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"all good things come to those who wait."
why do bad things never come to those who wait?

wait where? how long do i wait? how can ALL good things come?
that would leave the universe empty of good things because they all came to me.

but if someone else waits as well, then they will get "all good things". how is it possible that 2 people get "all good things" when they can only have really half each? what if everyone waited?

no i do not want to scrutinize that one further

i would become super massive black hole if all good things came to me. then i would attract bad things as well and i would not have to wait.

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simple one: "you sow what you reap"

that is the original saying. i understand"you reap what you sow", but that is another version i did not learn to begin with. in scripture class (i was at a religious school for a few months) they read from the

bible "as you sow, so shall you reap"

that to me meant you sow seeds while simultaneously reaping another crop. like "you reap WHILE you sow".

after i was corrected, i still could not understand, because they said angrily that you "sow what you reap" which meant to me (after their correction attempt) that "you immediately sow what you have reaped back into the ground by plowing it in". so you do not get to eat it.
i was incorrect again. they then said it meant that "what happens to you later in life depends on what you do earlier in life".
doyyyy! again. so if i jumped off a cliff early in life, i would not be a doctor later in life.

if i plant sunflower seeds i get sunflowers. i expect sunflowers unless i misread the packet. the adage has no real meaning to me except that it is an obvious statement that needs not be said.
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other than adage confusion, i had (and have still) an incapacity to see normal sentence staging.
i have a great likelyhood of totally misperceiving the meaning of normal sentences because of it.

recently i was slapped hard on the face by a co-worker because she said her boyfriend was very depressed and suicidal because his father died before he was born.
i laughed because i found the thought funny and she hit me.
that is how fast it all happened. i thought she was making a joke because i could not see how her boyfriend's father could die before he was even born, because he could not have grown up and married fathered her boyfriend if he died pre-term.
but i misinterpreted what she was saying because i have limited theory of mind.

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anyway i will end here because it takes about 9 mouse wheel rolls to scroll past my post. when i read posts that are long and i am not interested, i mousewheel down and after the 11th mousewheel roll i get annoyed.
so this is just under 10 mousewheel rolls of garbage.

Also true. And yet we always put ourselves at the pinnacle of evolution!

I used to hear song lyrics wrong and think it was normal for people to sing gibberish.I thought throwing your voice was a trick people could do that made their voice appear to be coming from some where else like they had thrown their voice to a point in space.
The beano showed a cartoon of someone throwing there voice behind someone so that they thought the person was behind them when they where somewhere else.I always wondered if i could learn the trick.
Also i tryed moving things with my mind thinking if they can do it i should be able to as well and i gave myself a hard time for not being able to do it .

I thought everyone had seen Home Alone.

Do you remember in the second movie Kevin telling Cigret not to flash his underwear because there could be girls on the floor. He meant there could be girls staying on the same floor as him, he didn't mean they could be lying on the floor.
About "Good night Kevin," When Kate told her son to say that, she meant "Say 'goodnight' Kevin." She wanted him to say goodnight to everyone. I just heard it wrong and I didn't figure it out till my teens so it made sense now why she was telling him that.

About the cotton candy story, I told about it in this thread earlier. You must not have read all the posts in here.

The only weird thing I thought was that a drum machine was a little drum playing robot (I was 4) then I googled it and saw it was a little box with lights and buttons)

I didn't learn how to tell time until I was around 12 years old. Still seems a strange convention even now but I got used to it.

According to my husband, at least this one is actually a true unit of measure? I use it interchangeably with 'a few' because I had not understood it to be a firm number but apperently that is wrong and it does specifically mean 2.

lol gary, I am still not very good at it. I can do it well enough to get by now, though.
I also am horrific at telling left from right.

I had many problems understanding jokes. I always took sarcasm/playground jokes seriously and often made myself look stupid when everyone else was laughing and I was upset.