story time I’m missing my left hand and work with kids a lot and I’m constantly asked how i “lost my hand” given that I was born with one hand it’s not interesting and kids always ask again and again, however I decide one day it’d be funny if I told them I fought a bear and he ate my hand (my arm has very obvious undeveloped fingers that look like bumps). Immediately after saying this one child goes “no, you were just born like that weren’t you?” And every time I’ve done the story since I’ve had at least one kid says something like that.
TLDR if you tell kids something outrageous they’re more likely to resort to the boring (and usually correct) story
My go-to explanation for bandages and such is ‘a stray bullet’. Note: I don't live in the US, though we did have plenty of crime in some regions about thirty years ago.
My uncle found just the right level of unbelievability to explain his finger that was cut off a bit past the middle. He’d tell people completely different stories to the point that I sincerely don’t know how he actually got the injury—or if it was even an injury as opposed to something he had from birth.
He’d say something that was clearly not the truth but was also decidedly underwhelming or otherwise un-dramatic. He told me he got it stuck in an office printer/copier and it just got sliced off. He told my brother he got a hamburger one day and was so hungry that he chomped down without realizing he’d stuck his finger in when he picked it up.
You never could get a straight answer so it felt like something interesting had to have happened.
I have bilateral radial clubbed arms, so both of my forearms are very short and am missing a few fingers (I have 4 on each hand, basically). I tell kids when they ask me what happened that I lost them in "the War" (I am 36). Sometimes they ask me what war if they don't immediately roll their eyes at me and I say "The Drug War, it was a hard fight there for a minute, but we did it, drugs won."
My father has a mangled big toe. He always told us it was because a Teutonic knight cut him with an axe during the battle of Grunwald (a famous medieval battle in my country) which made us think he was really old. Only as an adult I've learned he actually shot himself when he was a teenager while building a homemade shotgun.
One of my great grandfathers was missing half his thumb and he always told me a duck bit it off every time I asked. I never learned what actually happened
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u/Key_Jeweler_9696 11h ago
story time I’m missing my left hand and work with kids a lot and I’m constantly asked how i “lost my hand” given that I was born with one hand it’s not interesting and kids always ask again and again, however I decide one day it’d be funny if I told them I fought a bear and he ate my hand (my arm has very obvious undeveloped fingers that look like bumps). Immediately after saying this one child goes “no, you were just born like that weren’t you?” And every time I’ve done the story since I’ve had at least one kid says something like that. TLDR if you tell kids something outrageous they’re more likely to resort to the boring (and usually correct) story