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What Would You Know?
Issue 30

Up until a certain point while you’re growing up, no matter what an adult says, you take it as gospel. As far as I knew, adults were full of wisdom and thus I hung off every word. But then one day your bullshit alarm goes off and you suspect that maybe, just maybe Mum’s latest threat linking an attack by the bogeyman with your refusal to eat broccoli may not actually contain any truth.

The moment of clarity happened for me when I was 10. Mum was a huge fan of cautionary tales and would often drag my unwilling Nan into her bizarre stories of wrongdoing and the subsequent loss of limbs.

Let me explain: My Grandmother only had one hand. She had lost the other in an accident way before I was born and her resulting ‘stump’ scared the jeepers out of me! Especially when Nan was angry, when she would put her good hand on her hip and waive her stump at me furiously – when she did this I could never really be sure if I was indeed in trouble, or if she was about to sing “I’m a little teapot”. Either way, it made me fear being in trouble with Nan and to this day experience flashbacks at the mere sight of a teapot.

Mum would often use my Grandmother’s missing hand as an example of consequence. This first occurred when I was 7, with Mum pointing out Nan’s stump saying, “see your Nan’s missing hand? That’s what happens when you pick your nose!” All I could think at the time was, “how the hell did she get her whole hand up there?” Still, if an adult said it… it must be true.

It wasn’t until I was about 8 that my unbridled faith in adults and their teachings began to develop cracks. It was during a sleepover at a friend’s place when my friend’s brother Robert, a teenager at the time, consulted his Dad for some much needed guidance. As I remember it, Robert was having some girl problems… in that there weren’t any.

He approached his Dad at the kitchen bench and said, “Dad, if you were a girl, what would you look for in a partner?” His Dad paused, then said “a vagina” and then giggled for about 15 minutes.

Surely these weren’t the words of a wise man, an expert in life! The only thing Robert’s Dad excelled at was food. He was an eating machine. He once had a pair of pants he would use specifically for when he went to “all-you-can-eat” buffets, which he called his “Sizzler pants”. His “Sizzler pants” looked remarkably like pyjamas.

With my newfound cynicism taking shape, the inevitable occurred when I was 10. It was Christmas day and my whole family were together again in what can only be described as a motley crew of misanthropy.

It was somewhere between lunch and regret that Mum decided to teach me one of her limb-based life lessons. “Hey Daniel. See your Nan’s missing hand? That’s what happens when you play with yourself”. Which is basically my Mum, calling my one-armed Nan a wanker.

This, I decided was too far and undeniably a load of crap. Besides, everybody knew the actual result of playing with yourself was going blind.

As adults we all tell little white lies from time to time. During my Uni days I developed a crush on a girl studying to become a vet. Around the time we met, I had a broken leg in a cast. She asked me how I broke it and because she was an animal lover, I thought I’d try and impress her and said I’d fallen out of a tree, saving a puppy.

When she asked me what kind of dog it was, I got cocky and told her it was a cross breed between two dogs she immediately informed me had never actually been cross bred before. To which I replied, “yeah I know. That’s why I saved it… It looked pretty rare”.

Even though they were blatant lies, I kind of miss Mum’s weird stump-based warnings. Nothing would please me more than to find out she reads J Mag through a text message saying, “See your Nan’s missing hand? That’s what happens when you write articles about me”.