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. 

  

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. 

The Girl Who Cried "Bathroom!"

“Mom, tell me the story of the Sophie who cried 'bathroom,'” I sigh, and begin to tell Sophia, for the umpteenth time, the story I “invented” to teach her a lesson about lying to escape dinner.

I am a victim of my own success.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t want to sit at the table and eat her dinner....”

“…Sophia. Her name was Sophia.” Sophia interrupts.

“Her name was Sophia. And Sophia got a brilliant idea. She thought if she said “Bathroom!” she could get down and go play instead of finishing her chicken.

“She could go read a book…”

“Who’s telling this story?” I ask.

“You.”

“Okay then. She could get down and go read a book. So she said, “Bathroom!” and her mother, who didn’t want her to have an accident, let her down. But did Sophia go to the bathroom?”

“Nooooooo.”

“No she didn’t! She went to the living room and picked up a book and began to read. This made her mommy very angry. Her mommy said, ‘Sophia, if you don’t get yourself to the bathroom by the count of three, I’m going to bring you there myself.’ So Sophia trotted off to the bathroom, but did she have to go?”

“Noooooo.”

“No, she did not.” So her mommy made her go back to the table and finish her dinner. The next night, again, Sophia decided she would rather play than eat her dinner. So after a couple of bites, she announced, ‘Bathroom!” again. This time, Mommy and Daddy were both skeptical—do you know what that means.”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“It means we doubted you. We didn’t quite believe you. But we—I mean, Sophia’s Mommy and Daddy gave her the benefit of the doubt and let her down from the table. And do you know what she did?”

“She ran to the living room to get a book!” Sophia cried out gleefully.

“That’s right. She did. And this time mommy was very angry. And again, she said if Sophia did not go to the bathroom by the count of three, she was going to take her there herself. So Sophia went to the bathroom. But again, she didn’t have to go. And again, Mommy made her go back to the table to finish her supper. Finally, on the third night, Sophia was eating her dinner when she realized she really did have to go to the bathroom. Again, she said, ‘Bathroom!’ but this time Mommy and Daddy did not believe her at all and told her she could not get up until she finished her dinner.”

“’But I really have to go,’ Sophia begged. Still, her Mommy and Daddy would not let her go. And do you know what happened?”

“She had an accident!” Sophia’s face bore a look of demonic pleasure.

“Yes she did. She pooped and peed in her pants, right there at the table. Poor Sophie. She was so uncomfortable. But she had said ‘bathroom,’ so many times when she didn’t have to go, that her parents didn’t believe her when she was telling the truth. And do you know what the moral of this story is?”

“I don’t know.”

“You shouldn’t tell lies, because people will think you are a liar and won’t believe you, even when you are telling the truth.”

“Again!” cried Sophie.

Kevin says she gets it. I am less sure. Still, I tell it. Because stories have a way of boring into the unconscious, of staying with us in ways of which we are unaware. If we tell ourselves a story over and over again with great conviction, over time the story becomes an integral part of our reality.