Tell Me Lies

She does it without flinching, without looking away, with such great sincerity that it is almost impossible to discern whether I am being duped.

It is a Monday morning.  I am urging Sophia to please decide whether she is taking Snakey-Pie or Moosey to school and to put him in her nap bag.  Sophie holds up a pastel pink plastic egg from an Easter egg hunt.

“Mom, can I please take this egg to school?”

I am immediately suspicious.  “Why?”

“I just want to show my friends.”

“What’s in the egg, Sophie?”

“Nothing."

“Then let me see it.”

“Two jelly beans.”

“No, Sophia.  You may not take jellybeans to school.  It would not be nice or fair to eat jelly beans in front of your friends.”

“But Mom!  I won’t!”  Oh no I’ve said too much.  I’ve forgot the cardinal rule of dealing with a 5-year-old:  No bargaining. 

“I said no, Sophie.  Leave it here.” 

Fast forward to pick up time.

I am gathering Sophie’s six-hundred and three drawings, which I will stealthily recycle when we get home.  I pick up the nap bag.  A pastel pink plastic egg rolls out.

I have been deceived. 

“Sophia?” I say, holding up the egg, “what’s this?”

“My egg?”

“Is there anything inside the egg?”

“No.”

“Was there anything inside the egg?”

“No.”

“I’ll ask you one more time.  Was there anything inside the egg?”

“Yes.  Two jellybeans.”

“What happened to the jellybeans?”

“I ate them during nap.”

“Sophia!  I told you not to bring it to school.”

“I know.  But it got in there by accident.”

I try to raise one eyebrow, but both go up.

“I swear, Mommy!  I’m telling the truth!”

And then there was last week, after the kindness party.  We were headed home from school.

“So what’d you do at the party?”

“Miss P’s husband came and made animal balloons.  I want to give mine to Madeline.”

“That’s nice.  How come?”

“Because Madeline likes puppies.”

“Okay.  What else?”

“Well…we had strawberries and grapes and M and M’s, but I only ate the strawberries and grapes.”

I find this shocking.  “Really?  Why?”

“Well…actually I had strawberries and grapes and Pirate Booty,” she added, testing the waters.

“Soph, it was a party.  You were allowed to have what they served.” 

“Well…actually I didn’t have strawberries and grapes, just M and M’s and donuts and Pirate Booty,” she admits, coming clean. 

Sigh.  “Sophie, I’m glad you told me the truth, but I don’t like the fact that you lied to me.” 

“I’m sorry.  I won’t do it again.”

Another lie.

And the problem is:  she will.  This lying thing is working out for her.  Sophie has discovered that (because I place a premium on honesty) if she does the thing she knows she should not do, and initially lies about it, but then fesses up, I will be so glad that she told me the truth (or want to encourage future truth telling), that I will let the disobedience slide. 

Genius, really.  Wish I had thought of it as a kid.  But I just told the truth, because of my George Washington Complex, which I still suffer from today. 

Sophie has no such problem. 

What I’m doing?  Doesn’t feel like it’s working.    Kevin thinks that because she has already mastered the fine art of false genuineness, we’re out of time to drive home the importance of simple honesty.  “How can a parent teach honesty when we don’t know the truth?” 

So, despite having contributed to an article on what to do if your child is lying (my advice:  reward the truth, which, we’ve established, has backfired), I decided to seek some professional advice.   

One very non-nonsense psychologist/mom told me this: 

“Do not ask for the truth, whether she did it, or what happened.  If you do, you’re just putting them in a position to lie more, or argue with you, or guilt them into telling you.  None of that is necessary.  Speak as though you know it happened, address it and move on.  Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

Another shared this.  “Oh, lying.  It’s a stage.  She’ll grow out of it.”

This is what I wanted to hear.  Yes.  Tell me it will magically disappear.  That my child is not honing her powers of manipulation for bigger and juicer lies.  Practicing her technique until she can stare me down and lie with a smile, no hint of fear or remorse flickering across her face. 

Tell me that she is merely being careless with the truth.  Experimenting with what she can get away with.  Giving into her id, and asking forgiveness later. 

Tell me that one day, she’ll be honest and forthright.  A model citizen. That unlike most people, who cop to lying at least twice a day, she will be a paragon of truth. 

In other words,

Lie to me. 

  

Life Lesson

In third grade, and then again in fifth, I had Mr. O’Brian for Language Arts.  Mr. O’Brien was different from any teacher I had ever had before.  For one, he was a man with a mustache (it was the 70’s).  But the reason we all loved him is that he stoked the flames of our curiosity. 

One day, he transformed the classroom into a courtroom.  He told us about an incident in the news where some kids had vandalized an old women’s house and then killed her.  We were appalled.  We send the kids up the river.  And after we did—he asked us if the story sounded familiar. 

None of us had recognized it as Hansel and Gretel. 

Whenever you asked Mr. O’Brien the spelling of a word, he always replied, “D-I-C-T-I-O-N-A-R-Y.” 

And then there was the time Mr. O’Brien gave us a lesson in superlatives.  He singled me out, asking, with a twinkle in his eye, “Melissa, who’s your best friend?”

He knew full well who my best friends were.  We sat next to each other.  We did our projects together.  We got in trouble for talking together.  The three of us were inseparable.  “You know.” I told him, “I have two best friends:  Emily and Christine.” 

“No,” he corrected with a sadistic smile, “they might be two good friends, but you can only have one best friend.”

“They are both my best friends,” I insisted, refusing to choose, my eyes stinging with tears.  It didn’t take much to get me going. 

“Best is a superlative.  It refers to the greatest degree of something.   There can only be one best.”

“That’s not fair!” I complained.  (To be more exact, Mr. O’Brien wasn’t being fair.)

Then he said what he always said.  His greatest lesson of all:  “Life is unfair.”

It was frustrating then, this essential, disappointing truth.  And, now a grown-up myself, I carry the responsibility of passing along these painful words of wisdom.

After a strange warm spell, when the mercury climbed up to 60 in the middle of January, a meteorological gesture I can only take as a preview of the increasingly oppressive days to come, it settled back down into the below-freezing range.  Sophia, was as fooled by this sudden warmth as the green shoots that dared peek out from the semi-thawed Earth.  I slipped on my black, floor length coat and handed her a rainbow-colored ski jacket. 

“No, mom.  I want to wear my light, pink jacket.”  It was what I had allowed her to wear a few days ago, when, in anything else she would have broken a sweat. 

“Sorry, Soph, but it’s 28-degrees outside.  You have to put on something warmer.”  Temperature-appropriate is my only clothing requirement.

“But, mo-om!  You’re wearing a light jacket.” 

I begin to defend myself, “No, this is actually one of my winter coats—“

“No, it’s not!”  I realize, once again, I have been tricked into arguing with a five-year-old.  Drats! 

“Put your coat on.  It’s time to go.”  I tell her, and I open the door for emphasis.  A cold blast of air forces entry. 

“My coat is stronger than your coat,” she sobs, shivering, “ITS NOT FAIR!” 

It has arrived.  The belief that all things must be equal.  That life is predictable and makes sense.  That good is rewarded with good, and bad is punished with bad.  That she is entitled to fair. 

I wonder where she has heard these three little words.  Certainly not from me, who stopped long ago railing at the unfairness of life, nor from her father, who expects randomness.  Who once told me he was struck with the sense of his aunt’s response when she contracted a deadly cancer, “Why not me?” 

Is this, perhaps, a developmental stage, one we all pass through, where we come to believe that we should have exactly the same size cake—down to the crumb—as our siblings, have as many Beyblades as our best friends, stay up just as late as parents?  

Or is it a folk belief, handed down from kid-to-kid, much in the way that playground games are mysteriously transmitted from generation to generation, without the intervention of adult stewards.  

Here she is before me, saying what I have said so many times, with great indignance.  I wonder if she will remember this moment, the way I remember mine with Mr. O’Brien, or if it will take many, many more disappointments before the truth of it sinks in.

“Sophia, life is unfair,” I tell her. 

Careless with the Truth

Kevin’s grandmother had a saying he invokes from time to time.  (He says it with the same Southern lilt that she must have had.) 

“Now, don’t go getting careless with the truth.”

It was an admonition to a lying child, or a gentle chiding when someone said, “I’m fine” (and clearly wasn’t). 

Kevin’s been saying it a lot more, of late. 

Oh not to me.  I am a terrible liar.   

I feel a compulsion to be honest, even when it’s in no one’s best interest for me to do so.  Most of the time this involves blurting out an opinion, thought or feeling, rather than keeping it to myself, or offering up a polite, innocuous comment.  Like the time I told the high school valedictorian that I thought his speech was pretentious.  Okay, maybe I did, but did I really have to tell him?  I still cringe at the thought.  Kevin calls it my “will to truth.”  That’s generous.  I think I simply lack a filter.

I have long been wary of lies.  From what I observe, once one lies, the lie takes root and grows all up all around the liar, like kudzu; the initial lie requiring more and more lies to obscure the truth, until the liar is hopelessly entangled in his lies, and ultimately caught. 

But some people around here aren’t merely careless with the truth.  In fact, they are very very good at manipulating it. 

Coming back from our trip to DC, Sophie announced that she was hungry.  This was no surprise to me, as it was already an hour past her bedtime and all she had for dinner was half a bag of pistachios. I had no food in the house, so we made a pit stop at the local grocery store to pick up a few essentials.  This was after a long day at the zoo (with my broken foot, before I knew it was broken), and I wanted nothing more than to go home and lay down.  As I grabbed a carton of milk off the shelf, Sophie complained that she had a stomachache and had to go to the bathroom.  Silently, I cursed the pistachio nuts. 

"Just hang in there a little longer, kid."  I told her.  "How bad do you have to go?"

"Just a little bad.  Not a lot bad,” she told me.  So I limped to the check out, got everything in the car, and headed home.

A minute into the car ride home Sophie tells me, "Mommy, I just peed in my panties."

I looked at her in the mirror, "You're kidding, right?"

"No mommy, I really did.  My underwear is wet and so is the seat."  

Now I was picturing having to give her a bath, feed her, and spend the rest of the evening cleaning the car seat.  I lost it.  

"Sophie, you couldn't hold it just three more minutes?"

"I couldn't mommy!  I really had to go!" She insisted.  

"Soph, if you had to go that bad, you should have said so in the store."

"I didn't have to go that badly then."  I felt guilty for not taking her when she asked, so, to assuage my guilt I continued to rant and lecture her about holding it and not waiting until the last minute.  

We pulled into the driveway. I got out of the car, and leaned into the back to survey the damage.  

Sophie grinned at me, "I was just joking on you, Mommy."

That was the first lie.

The second was more harmless, but equally convincing.  We were in Wegman’s having dinner of supermarket sushi.  Sophie ran to get a spoon to dig into her rice.  The spoons at Wegman’s are individually wrapped.  Sophie came back with a naked spoon.

“I found one without its wrapper!” she announced smiling, as she plunged it into her brown rice.

Kevin and I cried out in union, “No, don’t use that!” 

Sophie looked at us slyly.

“I was just joking on you guys.  I took the wrapper off and threw it away.”

Oh she’s good.  She’s real good. 

The thing about it is, she’s not lying about how many cookies she’s had or whether she broke something.  She’s fibbing for the fun of it.  To get us going. 

Part of me admires her ability to dupe me.  She’s a true actress.  But another part of me wonders, why does she get so much pleasure for teasing me in this way?  And if she’s this good now, just think how convincing she’ll be when she’s sixteen:

“We’re just going to be at Leah’s house.”

“I already ate.”

“Of course, I use condoms mom, I’m not stupid.”

“We’re just friends.  He’s like thirty or something.  He could be my dad.”

All the time looking at me with those round blue eyes, not a muscle twitching, a reassuring smile on her lips. 

I’m catastrophizing.  More likely, lying is simply a new skill.  A sudden realization that one can manipulate the truth, without a care.  The horizon of her cognitive ability expanding, freeing her from always having to report things exactly as they have happened, and allowing her to invent other possibilities.  Perhaps she is realizing that one can play with truth.  It can be stretched; it can be spun. 

This awareness will shine a new light on her imagination:  It is the advent of tall tales.  The beginning of fiction. 

Perhaps it’s not so much a carelessness with the truth as a carefreeness. 

Doesn’t mean that I won’t still call her on it.