The Truth as I See It
Until I was ten years old, I lived my life in fear.
I lived in fear of Lucas and Floyd, two madmen who lurked in the woods behind our house. Floyd, who had lost his arm to a combine during an industrial incident, could still grab you with his one good arm. If you went too far into the woods, surely, you’d never come back.
I lived in fear of Cedar Gables, a house where bad kids were sent. The owner was an older, stocky woman who was the most nasty enforcer you could imagine. A parent could send their child to Cedar Gables with one ring of the telephone.
I lived in fear of the Mission Monster, more frightening than any other beast you could imagine. When the Mission Monster was coming, you’d better have found a good place to hide.
In light of all of the horrors that my childhood was riddled with, there were also some wonders. The fact that water towers were actually filled with m&ms or lollipops (rather than water) was neat. Or that Curare, a medicine that could keep you a child forever, existed made me a pretty happy camper.
As a child, my mind was filled with copious amounts of utter lies. You see, developing minds are the ones that can often be manipulated with the most ease. My dad, whether he knew it or not, took complete advantage of that.
Throughout the duration of my youth, my dad constantly made up people and things and stories and just about anything else his mind could conjure up. But these weren’t ordinary tales that a parent would make up to keep their child occupied or to scare them out of doing something devious. These people and things and stories were complete with the smallest details one could imagine. These were full blown fabrications of what I perceived as reality.
“The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to.” says journalist and author Po Bronson in his article Learning to Lie. By this logic, you’d think I would’ve grown up to be the biggest goddamn liar in all of North America. Think about it — my entire childhood consisted of lie after lie, tale after tale, all because of my father’s vivid (one might even say corrupted) imagination. So, by Bronson’s reasoning, wouldn’t I then turn out to be just as much of a liar as my father?
In a sense, yes. I did turn out to be a liar. During my youth I would make up stories. I would pretend to get hurt just for the attention from my parents. I would lie when I had broken a picture frame or a glass. However, these lies, all of which are rather harmless, have not translated over to or affected my character today in any way. I am proud to say that I am not a part of the 98% of teenagers who lie to their parents and “break a few rules” here and there. While, yes, I tell white lies and stretch the truth from time to time, I have never gone behind my parents’ backs and done something they blatantly told me not to do.
Surprising, right? That of all the lies I was exposed to at such an impressionable age I never actually turned out to be a full-fledged liar? Well, I believe that my rather honest nature can be attributed to the type of lies I was exposed to rather than the quantity of lies.
Say, as Bronson mentions, that my father had instead told a lie such as “[telling] the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ ” This here is a lie that I would have been able to differentiate as a lie. Seeing his presence, knowing that he was, in fact, not a guest at our home, and watching him lie to someone is an event that would have taught me how to lie.
On the other hand, the lies that my father actually told me — Lucas and Floyd, Cedar Gables, the Mission Monster — are all clearly fictitious. To me, however, they were as real as the stars in the sky. I could not differentiate these fallacious beings from reality. Just as a child cannot differentiate Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy from reality. And just as lying about Santa Claus is completely harmless, my father’s lying about Lucas and Floyd et al. (though terrifying as all hell) was harmless.
In short, exposing a child to lies doesn’t always result in that child becoming a liar. Think about it. A parent telling their child about Santa Claus won’t cause the child to develop into some sort of compulsive liar as an adult. Rather, a parent telling their child about Santa Claus will inspire the child. It will inspire them with hope. It will inspire them with faith. It will inspire them with the gift of creativity. My father’s teachings did precisely that. They inspired me with hope. They inspired me with faith. They inspired me with the gift of creativity. They even inspired me with a little bit of fear.
