We all know how easy it is to make shit up, just to keep the little one quiet. If you don’t know the answer, you just make it up, right? Fortunately, in the internet age, making things up isn’t as much of a necessary evil as it once was. Google can answer a lot!  But when it doesn’t, what do you do? I wanted to share with you the absolute devastation that comes with realising your parents don’t know the answer!

It has taken me longer than I care to admit that my Dad is not a friggen genius who knows everything, but rather a man with an authoritative, convincing way of talking. If he doesn’t know the answer, he makes it up. Simple. There’s usually a sprinkling of fact in there. He does base his answers on distance knowledge, but my Dad does not know everything about everything. And why would he? Yet I think I always just believed he did.

Next: How do you stick up for your child?

So it is that I spent years roaming this earth and quoting my Dad with total conviction. I’m fairly bullish, so I was adamant I was right, even as I was being proven wrong. This happened a lot. In fact, it happened for years before the penny dropped (I’m so willing to believe people) and it occurred to me that my Dad was full of it. When finally I mentioned it, he smirked. Smirked!  I had spent years quoting the man and all he could do was smirk?! I was traumatised.

I wish I could recall for you the facts that have been disproven, but I cannot. But imagine if you will, you walk around your whole life telling people the sky is blue because of a reflection from the earth’s water. For the most part, people nod when you spout this fact, because they don’t know either. And then one day someone looks at you like you’re the daftest person in the world, and says, “What?!  The sky’s blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun.” A quick Google search confirms this, and you’re made to look a fool.

I think he still thinks of it as his long-game prank on me – in fact, I still have to call him on his bullshit now. I see it as a lifetime of making me look like an idiot!

Thanks Dad – I still love you! x

You might also like: I found myself judging a fellow parent

Advertisement