When my children were young my husband and I had a story that we told each one of them when they were around five years old. The story started with our first child after he noticed the small mark on the upper part of my left arm as well as his dads left arm and ask us what happened there. 

“The spot our son was referring to was our vaccinations”! For those of you that might be reading this that are to young to remember when doctors were giving vaccinations before children could start school: This was a shot they gave all children, the shot caused the spot to scab over. After it was completely healed it left a mark that never went away.

Anyway back to my story:)

My son was the first of our three children, so after asking me that question I told him that his dad and I were really from mars and that someday we would have to go back there to rejoin our people. He ask if he could go along with us and I told him “of course” that we would never leave him behind. A few days went by and he still was very fascinated with the spots on our arms but wasn’t so sure that he wanted to fly off to mars. He forgot about the story and the mark for quite sometime, never bothering with it and not mentioning it at all. Then one day I noticed that he was looking at me and all of a sudden he ask me  “well mom when can we go back to that place”. I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about because it had been quite sometime since he had mentioned it. His dad and I joked with him a little longer that day and then finally told him that we were only kidding and that it was a story that we had told him just to see what he though about it. His reply was “good I didn’t want to go!

My second child a girl was also told the same story around the same age as her brother was told. She didn’t have much to say about it. It was dropped quickly with her! Maybe her brother warned her about the story.

Our third child was a little girl and just like the other two we told her the same story. She loved hearing the story and began asking all kinds of questions and getting very excited because she thought she was really going to be able to take a trip to mars. She enjoyed the story so much that she wanted to hear it at bed time. Finally my husband and I decided that we needed to tell her that it was only a story. We could tell that she was really believing the story. When she found out that we weren’t from mars and that we couldn’t go there, she actually cried and became upset because she couldn’t go to mars. She didn’t seem to care that her parents really weren’t from mars her only concern was that she wasn’t able to go.  

It is funny because our youngest who is now twenty-four still talks about that story and how she really believed it. We now laugh together about the story as she tells her children that gram and gram pa are from mars and someday they will go back for a visit and maybe just maybe  they will take you with them.