Lies

This came up on my tumblr dashboard today. Normally I put pictures over there, and the words go here but this just summed up my blog too much to ignore.



I had a hair appointment today, and a different hairdresser than usual, and whilst he was making hairdresser-small-talk with me, I realised he'd been asking about my holiday and I'd lied to him about something not that significant but for no particular reason, what I'd said didn't make me seem a better/worse person, I couldn't have gained anything from it. I hadn't even noticed I'd done it until afterwards.

And it links in with what I've kept thinking about recently: we lie to each other. All the time.

Yesterday I was at my friend's house. She has a brother who is three years old, and we took him to a shop with us to buy him sweets, and on the way we saw a dead sparrow at the side of the road.

"Watch out," she said, "there's a d-e-a-d bird there."

I laughed. "Why did you just spell out dead?" I knew it was for her brother's sake, she was shielding him from something, but it seemed completley stupid to me.

"He's three! You can't teach him what dead is!" She went on to tell me, "The other day, my mum came in crying because she had to tell him that insects are bad."

"What do you mean?"

"He's used to having ladybirds crawl on him, but there was an ant on his hand and Mum had to explain to him that ants are bad and it made her cry."

I can't even explain how much this conversation confused me.
1. Regular brown ants don't bite.
2. By protecting him from things, in these watered down versions of the truth, it doesn't make them go away or even stop them happening to him.
3. I hadn't thought about what age we start to know about death.

"But what would you tell him if someone in your family died, someone he'd know to miss?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Something like "oh, they've gone to be with the angels"."

"But they haven't! And he'd know, I think, a little bit."

"He couldn't understand. You can't explain to a three year old that someone's just gone."

I'm trying to think of phrases you could use to describe death to a small child. Things like, "he's gone to sleep forever, now" and "his body stopped working".

My grandmother is a schizophrenic and an alcoholic and aside from that just a mean person. I didn't know any of that until I was about eleven or twelve, and she babysat me and two of my cousins. She was telling us stories that now I think back had no truth in them, but I didn't quite know whether to believe because I was quite young, and because I'd never been introduced to her as someone not to trust before. But it was explained to me, over time, or it just because obvious. My mum says it's not so much that we were being shielded, but she wanted me to be able to form my own opinion instead of carrying around everyone else's resentment. And I have.

I think that was a good type of lie to tell, but I think lying or shielding someone from the truth also requires a knowledge of how much they already know, especially with a smalll child. There is protective and there's white lies, and I can't really decide which side of the line some of these things fall on.