I taught my daughter to dance and sing in the kitchen in the early afternoons on hot summer days.
I taught my daughter to love her big, curly, mane of hair.
I taught my daughter to use her privilege and Irish aesthetic toward racial equity.
I taught my daughter to be a disrupter, a trailblazer, a kind and loving person who takes care of others.
As we were belting Waitress in the kitchen this afternoon, something everyone should experience with their child at least once, I was floating in a state of just being. There is nothing like the free beautiful abandon of making music and the synergy of familial instruments. The purposeful joy and connectivity ... sharing this kind of intentional, vibrant, creative space ... a shared gentle pride and deep lasting joy. When we are all together, the boys, my daughter, my daughter-in-law, we have a symphony and six part harmony. It floats up from the space between us and the spaces that connect us. It is the only place we can be with each other that all the other shit doesn't weigh us down. Music is our greatest blessing. Music is who we are in our purest form, in my family, and as humans.
We were singing "What Baking Can Do". I was putting a pan in the dishwasher. She was putting silverware away. The lyrics "Make it up and surprise them. Tell them all my secrets but disguise them" and that tight fist of shame rose up out of the center of that joyful space and almost took me out. I stopped breathing... all joy gone. I thought "Fuck. I never taught her to tell the truth".
To be clear. My daughter is nearly angelic in her honesty. She actually doesn't tell lies. She regularly calls me out on the social embelishments I am particularly fond of. I am often deeply embarassed when she calls me out. My children are my honesty police in a very public and painful way. Today, I am choosing to count that among the greatest of my blessings where my children are concerned.
Lying has been a real problem in my life. My husband used to asked me why I lied about things that didn't matter. He was the first person who loved me enough to sit me down and ask me to work on this. He was the only person to try and help me figure out where this pervasive behavior came from and why it continued long into my adulthood. The answer was simple and very painful.
Lying is what abused children do.
I am not going to suggest every abused person is a liar. I don't know that. But I have experienced students, adolescents, since 2006 and my most vulnerable students who fought every day to get through the most basic performances of college, many of them shared this trait. It was often hard to support these amazing humans because the truth of what they needed was hidden beneath layers of untruths...
Lying is a defense, a d-fence, a shelter...
When you know that your life is nothing like what it should be. You go to school every day in dirty clothes, having eaten no breakfast, with bleeding scars on the backs of your legs, with no lunch money... when people ask you how you are... you tell them you are fine.
That is a lie.
And those lies build up. My students would tell me things like "my moms is going to send me money to cut my phone back on tomorrow" or "my grams is going to come see my performance". Those phones and familial support never manifested. And if challenged about untruths, my students would disappear. But when my colleagues called them liars I knew in my bones that this was a gross and fundamentally untrue, unfair and misdirected falsity. They were survivors.
I am part of the reason no one knew I was being abused. I was the secret and kept the secret, daily. When baked goods didn't show up for bake sales... When I had to drop out of cheerleading... When I didn't have homework done... When I stole food from the other kids' lunches... When I didn't show up at the birthday party... When we had to write the vacation narratives in class... When I didn't have the money for the class trip... When projects weren't done... When I sat in front of the high school for hours... When my mother's married boyfriend put his hands around my neck... When the cutting scars would no longer heal... I lied. And, I was good at it. And my life depended on it.
Lying created a world where I had control over what people knew and what I believed about myself. I believed that I was a normal child. And what I suspect, the reason no one ever intervened on my behalf, was because I was just a liar. Liars are bad people, even when they are children, right? I was dirty, socially deficient, awkward, ugly, black, busy, unfocused, and a liar. My value as a human was so low, that my lies were not a warning, they were an explanation.
I still lie. I lie about my upbringing. I lie about my emotional capacity. I lie about how healthy I am. There are still a few lies from my childhood and adolescence that I perpetuate, because the truth is too painful to reveal to anyone - especially me. I lie to survive. I lie to create space and time for my reality to catch up with the lies. There is already so much here that I want to, and will probably, delete before I publish this. Letting go of lying, telling the truth for the purpose of truth, is the most terrifying and difficult thing an adult survivor of childhood trauma faces. And there isn't a support group for this that I am aware of.
Hi. I am Noelle. I am a liar.
I lie to survive.
And if I tell you this, every time I speak - you will always wonder if I am lying. Maybe I am lying now.
"She is imperfect, but she tries. She is good, but she lies."
More soon...
Baby Girl
*Thank you Sara Bareilles for giving us Waitress and teaching us that the broken are beautiful and that self-reflection and honesty heal and "what baking can do"
