It’s not
just the expected parental untruths either. I expected I’d end up saying that
carrots help you to see in the dark and crusts make your hair curly. What I
didn’t expect was how good I would get at lying on the hoof. "No! Of
course I'm not taking that bag of toys to the charity shop. I was just
gathering them together so that I could put them somewhere safe."
I’ve heard
it said that the Queen thinks the world smells of wet paint as everywhere she
visits has just been redecorated in her honour. In the same way, my children
think the world is full of children’s rides which are out of order, sweet shops
which are closed and ice cream vans which have run out of ice cream.
Then there
is the Father Christmas/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy lie. Now, before you strike me
from your Christmas Card List, I am not suggesting we tell the truth about our
imaginary friends a moment before we need to (although I wouldn't mind getting
a little credit for the hours I spend looking for good stocking presents.)
However, the lengths some of us go to in order to perpetuate these magical
myths (footprints in flour, scraps of torn red cloth in the door jamb,
‘dropped’ gifts on the lawn etc.) are on a level of subterfuge of which the CIA
would be proud.
Research tells
me that I should not be lying to them at all, but my parents told me the odd
tall story as a child and I still trust them now. When we were young, my sister
and I were given a dead (smelly) seahorse by an old couple who had found it
washed up on a beach in Cornwall. By the time we arrived home from our holiday,
the seahorse had magically disappeared from the boot of my parents’ car,
allegedly to seahorse heaven. Surely this was a far more palatable story than
the truth of him being rudely ejected by my dad somewhere along the M4?
Sometimes the truth is just too tricky. When we lost my dad last year, William (aged 4) was very upset at the prospect that, one day, he would lose me too. I lied that I had fixed it so that he and I would live forever. Although child psychologists would gasp in horror and tell me that I should have met his questions head on with gentle, considered explanations, I just didn’t have it in me. My instinctive lie was what he, and I, needed to hear right then.
Therefore,
whilst I will endeavour to be truthful as often as possible, I am not going to
feel guilty about the odd fib. As they get older, the important subjects will
be discussed and the less important, such as what really happened to William’s
ridiculously large collection of pinecones, will be remembered as family myth.
Honestly.
