The Biggest Lie I Ever Believed...

As a child, and still to this day, I pretty much believed anything and everything that my brother or parents told me. This has probably made me the gullible adult that I am today. At one point in my childhood my whole family was in on a story where I was made to believe I was from a family of cows and had been adopted. We would drive by stockyards on vacation and my family would all say, "Hey, Joy! Look! It's your family!" Or the ever famous joke in my family that I was missing my "family reunion" amongst the herd of cattle outside of my window. However, this pales in comparison to a story my family had me believing until I was about twelve. I knew better in my head. I knew that this story was impossible, but they were SO adamant  that it was true, for so long, I honestly believed them.

The story goes like this:

When I was a little baby, around the age of one, and I had began walking, my family was frantically searching the house for me. I had gotten away. My parents worst fears of losing their newly mobile baby had come true. They looked high and low. They looked under my bed, in my closet, in the kitchen cabinets. They called our next door neighbors, who unfortunately had not seen me. They were about to call the police to report me missing when low and behold, they saw me.

Wearing nothing but a diaper, I took off sprinting, my little legs carrying me as fast as they could. I was headed towards the house of the little old couple on the corner directly across from our house. Suddenly, I took a leap, and when I did, I sprang up in a super-hero like fashion, and jumped over their house. My parents ran across the street in amazement of their supernatural baby. I was sitting in the back yard playing with dirt when they approached me.

I know, I know...impossible. Stupid to believe this for eleven years, but I did. I conjured up images of little baby Joy jumping the house. I tried to imagine how this was possible. One scenario is that someone attached a jet pack to my back and sent me flying.

By the time I was going into middle school my family decided to spare me the humiliation of telling this tale to all of my new friends,  and broke down and admitted that I was not from a family of cows, and I hadn't jumped over my neighbor's house.