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Honestly


Honesty is hardly ever heard

My mother is German and she used to repeat (translate) German sayings to me when I was growing up. My favorite is probably "When you point a finger at other people, there are three pointing back at you."

All of my blogging, but especially my attempts to blog about parenting, have languished for years in part because most people get raised with either a guilt model or a shame model, so no matter how hard I try to say "I am only telling MY story. I'm NOT saying ANYTHING about you." a ton of people get all up in arms anyway and want to know why I am being so judgy and talking trash about them.

I place a really high value on honesty, especially as a parent. I'm aware this is not the norm.

The norm is to tell kids all kinds of cutesy little fairytales about Santa Claus delivering gifts, the Easter Bunny being real, the Tooth Faerie being real and so forth. In some homes, uglier lies get told about who their daddy is for the convenience of the parents or similar.

On the one hand, I'm somewhat fortunate that my circumstances didn't make me feel compelled to lie about who their daddy was for survival reasons or some such. On the other hand, it's not like I had no baggage and couldn't have simply lied for one reason or another.

The reality is that I worked at figuring out how to be honest with my children without it going weird and bad places. I spent a LOT of time thinking about how to address certain things well before those issues came up in conversation.

That pattern of thinking long and hard about what I would say about X or how I would handle X uncomfortable reality began before my first child was born.

I was young and idealistic and didn't want to pollute my body with birth control pills etc and had been using an unreliable rhythm method of birth control that failed on me and resulted in that pregnancy. I had quite a lot of emotional baggage for various reasons and spent my entire pregnancy fretting about how to tell my child he was not planned without making him feel like he was unwanted and even hated.

This was decades ago, so I no longer remember why I felt that it was so hard to separate those two concepts. I no longer remember what phrasing came so readily to mind that I thought you can't say the one thing without it meaning the other, but by the time he was born I felt clear that unplanned and unwanted were wholly separate ideas and it wouldn't be a problem to tell him the truth.

I wanted kids with my husband. It's part of why I married him. I just thought we would start a family later than we did.

My oldest child spent his childhood hearing things like "You were a surprise birthday present from the universe." and "You were unfashionably early. We expected you seven years later." and "Your mom was just trying to have a good time."

When he got old enough to connect the dots on that last phrase and figure out what the heck it meant, he face-palmed and mentally went "MOM! I can't believe you have been saying that to me since I was FOUR."

I have no regrets.

Somewhere before the point where he had his face-palming epiphany, his father sat him down one day when I was out shopping or some such and read him a book about how THE STORK brought him. He didn't buy it because he thought about everything I had told him and concluded "No, this is nonsense. MOM was NOT prank calling THE STORK and ACCIDENTALLY got me delivered. Prank calls are NOT her idea of fun. Nope."

So my policy of being honest with him innoculated him against buying a load of bull even though he still didn't yet know how babies got made.

I felt vindicated when I learned that story some years later. (I also cussed out loud about what his father had done. The NERVE of the man.)

If you are the type of parent who tells tall tales on purpose to your child -- like Santa Claus is real and The Stork brought you -- this may not be the blog for you, especially if you are going to get all up in arms and act like me laying out my thought processes somehow suggests you are a bad parent.

I'm not talking about you and your life. I'm talking about ME and MY LIFE and WHY I chose to do things the way I chose to do them.

You are free to take that seriously as food for thought for how to up your parenting game if you so desire or laugh your ass off at what an idiot I am for working that hard to be honest without unintended consequences when a little white lie could have saved me so much time and effort.

I didn't see it that way. So I didn't handle it that way.

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