LIES, LIES, ALL LIES

Okay, I’m coming clean. I’m going to confess. I have lied to my children on more than one occasion. Sometimes it is just easier to stretch the truth a little bit. When there is really no other reason than “I don’t wanna,” it gives us more credibility as parents to just make something up. The lies I have told my children mostly involve food or activities I do not want or do not want them to participate in.

I suppose the food lies I got from my mother who told my brother and I when we were little that cheesecake was yucky. I really don’t blame her because cheesecake is expensive and time-consuming to make and you don’t want to share that with anyone who’d be just as happy with pudding thrown into a graham cracker crust. My food lie to my kids involved ice cream. We never had an ice cream truck luring kids into the streets waving crumpled dollars when my daughter was little. We had the music man truck! The music man truck was just someone driving around playing music just to be nice. On summer evenings when we’d hear the tune coming down the road, my daughter would say, “There goes the music man truck.”

And I’d reply, “Yep, there he is goes.” The music man truck scheme worked until my daughter was old enough to notice people coming away from the truck with treats in their hands. At that time, I explained we could buy a whole box of ice cream treats for about the price of one treat from the music man truck. Luckily, my daughter is frugal and I’ve never had to purchase ice cream from the music man truck.

I shouldn’t be surprised at how long it took my daughter to realize the true identity of the music man. I was gullible when I was a child as well. When I was five or six years old, my mom got some cornhuskers’ lotion for my dad and told me that I could never touch it because if I did, I would turn into a giant ear of corn. I’m not sure why she didn’t tell me the truth—that the stuff feels like snot and no little girl would want to rub snot in their skin anyway (unless is came from their own nose, of course), but she didn’t and I believed her. All was well until one day my dad asked me to get him his cornhusker’s lotion. I got the bottle and carried it to him carefully. When he asked me to open it, panic set in but I did as requested, carefully unscrewing the bottle’s cap. As I did, a drop of the lotion fell onto my hands. I immediately started crying and screaming, “I’m going to turn into corn! I’m going to turn into corn!” After my parents pulled themselves from the floor where they were wretching with hysterical laughter they explained I wasn’t going to turn into corn and they just didn’t want me to touch the cornhusker’s lotion because it was expensive. “Oh…”

I’m a charitable person who believes in paying it forward so that’s exactly what I did. When my daughter was little (not sure why all the lies involve just my daughter—maybe I was too exhausted to come up with something when my son came along or maybe I just got mean and used the irrational “because I said so”…)—anyway, when my daughter was little, I did not want to get stuck playing in the play area at restaurants such as McDonald’s. So, to my daughter, playland at McDonald’s was The Birthday Room, a very special place kids could play at on their birthday. When my daughter turned four, she decided she wanted to go to The Birthday Room to celebrate. So we did; we had dinner, took pictures and let her play. She was delighted—she finally got to go to The Birthday Room. Having been there and done that with The Birthday Room, she celebrated differently her following birthdays.

One day two or three years later, my daughter came home from spending the night or an afternoon with her friend. Her friend’s mom let them play in The Birthday Room. When she came home, she told me excitedly, “We got to play at McDonald’s. Mommy, it doesn’t have to be your birthday to play.”

My reply: “You’re kidding me? They let you play when it wasn’t your birthday!!??!!”

At least I didn’t get caught in a lie and diminish my credibility in her eyes. She just decided I was dumb and didn’t know anything a few years early…