When Did I Get Like This?, page 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Liar, Liar
I have always found it comforting that while my children each have numerous challenging qualities, lying is not among them. My kids have always displayed an inability to tell a lie, even when they know the truth might not, in some particular circumstance, set them free.
ME: Maggie! Did you dump out the hot cocoa powder all over the floor?
Maggie’s face crumples in anticipation of what is to come.
MAGGIE: Ye-essss…(wretched sobbing)
Even if they know a time-out is forthcoming, even in the days when Seamus or Maggie couldn’t talk yet and there was therefore a younger sibling on whom various acts of mischief could be blamed without fear of contradiction, my children have always either said nothing or told the truth. (Except when I ask Maggie if she needs to poop, and she yells, “No! I all better!” while ducking, red-faced, behind the sofa. In that case, however, there is a primal urge at work.)
Until recently, I am not sure my kids even knew the possibility of lying existed, let alone that they might use it to their advantage. Little children, at least mine, are truthful to the point of pain, like when Connor regarded my outfit one morning about six months after Maggie was born and said, “You know, Mommy, it’s funny. Because you don’t have a baby in your tummy anymore, but in that shirt, you still look a little bit pregmint.” It was a new shirt. I thought I looked pretty good in it. Since David loved life too well to ever express such an opinion, I was thankful, even as I dropped the shirt in the Goodwill bag, that I had several tiny truth-tellers in my home.
Then, one recent morning, I called down the hall to Seamus:
ME: Shea, did you brush your teeth?
SEAMUS: Yup.
I ducked into the kids’ bathroom to wipe down the Colgate SpongeBob SquarePants Anticavity Fluoride Toothpaste for Children (Spongy Bubbly Fruit Flavor) that, in my son’s wake, would trail unfailingly across the sink top and down into the bowl. But the sink was perfectly neat, and his toothbrush, usually gummed up with unrinsed turquoise sludge, was completely dry. I went back down the hall and found Seamus playing calmly in his room, arranging his stuffed animal companions on his bed.
ME: Seamus, are you sure you brushed your teeth?
SEAMUS: Yup.
ME: Honey, I know that you didn’t.
He looked up, surprised.
SEAMUS: Why? Were you wooking?
I told him that yes, the eyes in the back of my head could also see through bathroom doors, actually, and that was what had tipped me off. Seamus decided to test these powers by going back down the hall to the bathroom, closing the door, and asking if I could see the toothbrush in his mouth. Since he said it like this—“Maah eee, oo ee uh oo uss ih eye ow?”—I could say, with confidence, that of course I did, and I could tell through the door he was quite impressed.
Connor sometimes asks me if I really, for pinky swear, have eyes in the back of my head, and I tell him that I must, since I can always see everything he is doing behind me. This neat bit of motherly guile has probably been what has kept my children on the level: since they wouldn’t be able to get anything over on me anyhow, they might as well tell the truth. But it occurs to me now that my children’s belief in my mommy superpowers has come at the expense of my own honesty. In perpetuating the old Mom Eyes canard, I have lied to my children in order to keep them from lying to me. It seems only fit that such a parenting tactic might one day come back to bite me on the ass. Perhaps it already has.
Connor overheard me talking to David about his brother’s bald-faced toothbrushing prevarication later that night and, as the eldest, felt obliged to put in his two cents:
CONNOR: Mommy, let me just tell you one thing. If you wonder if Seamus is telling a lie, don’t wonder. Because he lies all the time.
He was being a tattletale, but I couldn’t resist, because frankly this was news to me.
ME: What does he lie about, Connor?
CONNOR: Well. Every time he says I hit him? It’s a lie.
Clearly, Connor was himself turning out to be an unreliable source.
Then, the following evening, Exhibit B. Connor had not seen bathwater in an embarrassing number of days, so I shooed him off to the shower while feeding his sister dinner. Ten minutes later, he emerged, towel around waist.
CONNOR: I took my shower, Mommy!
He was completely dry, except for his hair, which had a few wet spots on top, apparently added in haste from the bathroom sink.
ME: No, you didn’t.
CONNOR: Yes I did, Mommy! Look, my hair is wet.
ME: Your hair is, like, one percent wet. I don’t think you can take a shower and have your hair get only that wet.
Connor’s eyes darted around as he searched for a backup story.
ME: Are you lying to me, Connor?
Connor sighed and turned back toward the bathroom.
CONNOR: Ohhh-kayyy. Fiiinnne.
Just how long had this been going on? I had been letting Connor shower without my supervision for several months, thrilled that the next time I saw him he would be squeaky clean and already in his pajamas. It seemed like the payoff I deserved for the three months of his babyhood when the mere sound of running bathwater made him weep. Now, I had to wonder just how long he and his brother had been opting out of their bathroom routines. Had Connor been wetting his head under the sink for months? Was the rest of him as filthy as I suddenly suspected?
Once you know your kids are lying to you about anything, you have to question what else they’ve been getting away with, and for how long. I was forced to reconsider all the “accidental” destructions of property I had let slide, like the time Seamus assured me that he didn’t mean to groove deep scratches in the kitchen table with his Hess collectible cement truck, but it “zust happened.” I began distrusting everything my children said:
SEAMUS: I bwushed my teef, Mommy.
ME: No you didn’t. You weren’t in there long enough.
SEAMUS: Mom! I weawy did!
And then I checked the toothbrush, and it was wet, and then I freaked out because by accusing him of lying when he wasn’t even doing it, I was just putting it in his head to do it more, not exactly a concept I wanted to encourage.
My children are not supposed to lie to me! At least, not when they are one, four, and six years old. It is I who am supposed to lie to them! About the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and my utter certainty there will be absolutely no spiders in the basement the next time we go down there. Had they learned dishonesty from me? If so, I was surely to blame, although a parent lies to a child merely to preserve his innocence, to protect him from the world. Are not a parent’s lies merely customary and sort of adorable? On the other hand, how can you tell your child that lying is bad after it has begun to dawn on him that Mommy has been telling whoppers of her own?
Here, I fear, is where my current troubles have begun. There is a stinky sock in every laundry basket, and in Connor’s kindergarten class it is a kid named Jacob, who has an older brother in fifth grade named Leo. Leo is an even stinkier sock, the sort of stocky, thatch-haired kid you can easily imagine growing into his future destructive abilities, and having him for an older brother means Jacob is therefore treated by the other kindergartners with the great deference he deserves. Leo’s words, as handed down by Jacob, are life, and so I should not have been as shocked as I was to hear Connor announce at the breakfast table one recent morning, “Jacob says that Leo says there’s no such thing as Santa.”
I froze, jelly knife in hand. Seamus froze, spoonful of eggs halfway to his mouth. Connor continued eating his Raisin Bran, watching me out of the corner of his eye.
I am going to brain that freaking Leo, was my first thought. Connor was too young to lose Santa, let alone four-year-old Seamus, who had the misfortune to be the innocent younger brother of a kid who had a friend who had a creep of an older brother. It seemed to me, standing there with the jelly knife, that as long as children tell parents the truth always, and parents lie to their children sometimes, all is well. But when parents are forced to tell the truth to their children—which is, in the case of Santa Claus at least, that they have been putting their children on all their little lives—things start going off the rails. Once my children lost Santa, once they knew they could no longer believe everything I told them, some part of their childhood would be irretrievably lost as well. I had to think fast.
ME: Well. In that case, I feel sorry for Leo.
CONNOR: Why?
ME: Because Santa only comes to the houses of people who believe in him. If you say you don’t believe, you don’t get toys.
CONNOR: But Leo says your parents are the ones who really give you the toys.
ME: At his house! Sure! Because Santa doesn’t come to their house.
SEAMUS: (just getting it) Santa doesn’t come to dere house?
ME: Isn’t that sad? But Santa comes to our house, because you put out your stockings. And you believe. Right?
SEAMUS: I bewieve in Santa, mmm-hmm.
CONNOR: Me too! I believe too!
Seamus returned to his scrambled eggs, quite reassured. Connor, on the other hand, was working so hard to re-believe that his eyes were screwed shut, like Shirley Temple wishing her daddy back to life in The Little Princess. Since Connor wanted so deeply to accept my explanation, I think Santa is safe in our house for now. But it is hard to tell, since the closed circle of my logic—that you have to believe in Santa in order to get presents from him—means that Connor would probably never confess to being beyond it all even if he were, if there was a chance it meant an empty stocking on Christmas morn. Just in case Santa is real, he had better keep the faith, or at least act as if he still has it.
Now, in Connor’s head, Santa has become inextricably linked with God, another larger-than-life character with wobbly backstory to which one must claim credence or risk the consequences. Since the dawn of religion, the justifications for God’s existence have actually had some similarity to my Santa cover-up: you have to believe, or else. Faith in God is predicated upon believing in something no one has seen, and going to parochial school, I learned every day that good people believe in God, that one must believe in God to be good, and that good things happen to people who really, really believe in God. Now, when we are in church, Connor takes no chances: he praises the Lord at top volume. “God is real, just like Santa is real!” he announced the last time we were leaving Mass, shocking several of the old ladies saying the rosary in the front pews with this bit of blasphemy. “Yeah, and God even wooks wike Santa!” Seamus chimed in, and he had a point there. But it’s more than the long white beards linking these two affable and possibly fictional old men in my children’s heads. They know that they are supposed to believe in Santa and in God, and so they will continue to at least claim to do so, even when, in their heads, it may make no sense.
I remember figuring out that Santa was a sham when I was six. I read it somewhere, in some book that had yet another snotty older sibling shattering the illusions of the elementary-school protagonist. I never needed to ask my mother if it was true—there it was, in print—but neither was I saddened by my loss of innocence. I felt that I had entered the adult world, an entirely separate sphere where there were many things understood of which mere children knew nothing. I wanted to signal my coming of age to my college-aged aunts and uncles at our Christmas Eve party that year, especially Uncle Marty, who always made everyone laugh but whose jokes usually went over my head. I wanted to show Uncle Marty that from now on, I was one of the cognoscenti, ready to learn the secret handshake. I drew him a picture of a bug-eyed owl saying, “Santa Claus: WHOOOO is this man?” Uncle Marty looked at it. “Uh, okay there, Ame,” he said, and then my father took it away and said if I didn’t stop drawing stuff like that with the little cousins around I was going to get in big trouble. Even though my owl drawing was subtle to the point of inscrutability, I was not supposed to teach children younger than me to question in any way the fictions that they—and their parents—held so dear.
Even that rebuke did not dampen my enthusiasm for the exhilarating World of Lies I had entered. I was thrilled to have crossed over, to have become part of the side that kept the secrets rather than the side to whom it had never occurred that there were any. Up until then, I had not really understood that deception, even benign deception, was possible. Now I knew I could lie to my parents about all sorts of things, although most of what I kept from them was innocent enough that I probably should not have gone to the trouble.
At the end of my freshman year of high school, I suffered my first romantic breakup, losing my boyfriend to an older woman: a senior. The glamour of their age difference dazzled Doug, blinding him to the inescapable fact that Sharon was kind of a loser. I mean, she was in the wind ensemble. Still, she stole Doug from me without any wavering on his part, and I was informed by a personal note from Sharon, delivered via a mutual acquaintance. “You stay away from Doug or else YOUR ASS IS GRASS!!” Sharon concluded, with lots of underlines. I went home to my room that afternoon and attempted to burn this letter, along with all the notes Doug had ever passed me in algebra during our five-month romance. After a few tries I gave up; the paper sort of smoldered rather than leaping into flame, and the cathartic effects were not what I had hoped. Even so, my mother knocked on the door ten minutes later. I opened it, my face a mask of irreproachability.
MY MOTHER: What’s that smell?
ME: What smell?
MY MOTHER: Like something burning.
ME: I don’t smell anything.
MY MOTHER: Well, I do, and it’s coming from your room.
ME: No, see, my window’s open, so it’s coming from outside. Maybe our neighbors were burning something.
I remember seeing clearly on my mother’s face that (1) she did not believe me, but (2) she was not exactly sure what it was she was accusing me of. So she left. Maybe she thought I was experimenting with cigarettes, and I probably should have just owned up to what I was really doing, which was a good deal less transgressive. By this point, though, I had stopped telling my mother pretty much anything, so she had no idea that Doug had broken up with me. She may not have even been aware, come to think of it, of who Doug even was. To have to start from the beginning and explain his existence, and that now I might have to fight a senior who was saying that my ass was grass, was unthinkable. I lied and called it “nothing,” simply because it was too exhausting to lay it all out.
I wonder now why I was so certain my mother could not have understood how I was feeling, why I had to keep the details of my first heartbreak from her rather than break down and cry on her shoulder. But my first instinct was not to tell her everything; it was to save myself the trouble. This is how, I think, the split between a child and her mother begins. It is less about cunning falsehoods than about little lies of omission, things left out that are not worth expressing, that grow slowly but surely until what you do not share with your mother dwarfs what you do, in a distracted and once-weekly phone call.
In an attempt to keep our family lines of communication more open than this with my own children, I have established a dinnertime tradition over the last couple of years. Each evening, after I heap second helpings of macaroni and cheese on the kids’ plates, I sit down (finally) at the table with them and ask them to give me a show of thumbs on how their days were. We have greatly improved on the original Siskel and Ebert system, because in our ratings methodology, each thumb can go up, middle, or down, perhaps even independently of the other, creating six possible levels of satisfaction on our sliding scale. After giving their daily rating, everyone can elaborate on the reasons for a classification, telling the rest of the family what made it, say, a middle thumb/down thumb combo day.
Connor used to beg to go first. Now he doesn’t want to play at all. “Hucch, I don’t want to talk about it,” he says, and I can see that it’s a mild irritation, that there’s not some deep dark secret he’s keeping, it’s just that none of the kindergarten intrigue seems worth mentioning. Then the next day, his science teacher will see me at drop-off and say, “Did Connor tell you about the chicken we dissected? He got right in there!” and I can’t believe he didn’t race home from Kindergarten M to tell me. He dissected a chicken? That’s a hell of a lot more interesting than anything that happened to me in kindergarten. (Or this year, for that matter.) I can’t help but feel hurt that at six, he is already excluding me from his inner life. But when I was his age, I was similarly certain that the details of my own school day required so much color commentary that they were not worth getting into. Besides, my mother wouldn’t understand any of it anyway. She didn’t really want to know, and if I kept not telling her, maybe she’d stop asking. Now I am my mother, hungering for details of the majority of each day Connor spends without me and getting nothing.
It is strange to realize that Connor has entire days’ worth of experiences he doesn’t tell me about, of which I am completely unaware, and that this is how it will be, more and more, from now on. I lied to Connor to protect him from the world, and someday, he will lie to protect his world from me. I hope that he will tell me when his first girlfriend dumps him, rather than suffer in silence, because kissing boo-boos is what a mother is for. But he may well not, and someday there might even be things he keeps from me not because they are too draining to discuss but because he knows it is his mother’s innocence that needs to be protected.
