Blog 12 - Draft Essay 2

Layers and Ages of Lying

Lying is something that, as an adult, I have absolutely no tolerance for.  If one of my students does something they are not supposed to, I advise them to at least tell the truth about it.  If it comes from them, the consequence is mild, but if I have to hear about it from someone else, it becomes more severe.  What's worse is that I don't feel I can trust them anymore, so I am always second guessing them - not a good feeling!

I believe we go through stages of lying for various reasons.  Being raised Catholic, I tried not to lie, but only because I would have to go into that scary little room and confess my lies to the priests at my church, who pretended not to know who you were.  I didn't mind confessing when I fought with my little brother and he beat the hell out of me (he was alot smaller and faster than I was, and had a wallop of a punch), or that I missed saying my prayers, but lying was a bad one, and I knew that he knew it was me behind that little screen.

Then we learned about little white lies and fibs, which were actually lying on a lower scale without much consequence, so I figured why not, just once in a while.  Where exactly does the line fall among these classifications of untruths?  As we became adolescents, we lied to try to fit in, and sometimes we lied because someone was bullying us.  Was it okay then?  I thought so.  There are some lies that just stand out in your life as moments you will never forget.  Lying begins to get worse as we approach adolescence.  A nice way to say this is that we are testing our parents as to what we can get away with.  Maybe we find ourselves in situations where we think we must make ourselves into something we are not. 

To this day, every time I go visit my cousin Joanie, who lives in a Union County suburb, one of the worst lies I ever told still haunts me, and I get a really sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I was eleven, and trying to be a bad girl from the city, when some of her new neighbors’ children came out and started to say mean things to me and my cousins. We had started playing a game of box ball, and they thought they would be funny and try to ride their bikes in between our action.  Of course, my response was to use some seriously strong expletives on them, that I had been hearing in school.  Since they were about the same age as we were, I figured they knew them as well, and they were boys after all.  A while later after they left the scene, and we were all back in the house, the door bell rang.  There stood the three boys, crying, accompanied by their parents, and they wanted to speak with the girl who had used such language. 

I denied such a thing ever happened, but everyone knew I was lying.  Some people can lie and some can’t.  In my case, my face totally gives me away.  As soon as I get nervous and flustered, my body temperature hits the roof, and guilt runs across my face in a flood of red and purple.  I didn’t actually get in trouble that day, but it was never spoken about again.  What kind of beastly little child would risk their family member creating a conflict of someone they just moved next door to…..a bad one, that’s who!  It was too scary, I wasn’t good at it, and I swore I would never lie again.

Until next time - there always seems to be a justification for the next time.  I made sure that I was only telling lies that wouldn’t hurt anyone else.  I attended an all girl, private school, and it was difficult to fit in due to the number of cliques.  I went there with some of my elementary school friends, so I figured we would all just keep hanging out.  To my ignorance, they started becoming involved with some of these bully girl groups and I was devastated.  I tried for a while to fit in, and, in the process, had to tell a few lies to get my foot in the door.  Once I got in there, I realized it was so not worth it, so I went back to being my own true self, and whoever wanted to still hang out with me was fine.  No pressure, let everyone make and live with their own choices.  Eventually, they all saw what I had seen only it took them a lot longer and things among our group got back to normal.

  In college, I cut a few classes to hang out.  I don’t know if that is technically lying.  But then, maybe there are times when there are “good” reasons to lie.  One weekend, my Dad was cleaning out his bureau drawers and I offered to help him.  We were super close, and I loved doing things with him.  I had done this chore with him when I was younger, but I was more observant now.  He left the room for a break, and I picked up his wedding ring which he hadn’t worn very much that I could remember, due to his job.  He was a graphic printer, and his hands were always full of ink and chemicals.  I looked inside the ring and saw engraving that I had never noticed before.  It had their initials and a wedding date of November, 1952.  I was immediately surprised and confused, since I knew that they celebrated their anniversary every February 22^nd.  There was even a pretty, wedding event wall plate in our house with the date February 22^nd, 1953.

Now I was curious.  I waited until no one else was around when I approached my Mom, which I felt old enough to do now.  I proceeded to ask her why the wedding date in Dad’s ring was different than the date they celebrated.  She obviously doesn’t turn purplish-red like me, and she said that she figured I was old enough now to know.  She explained that my Dad had been previously married to a woman in England during World War II.  He was an army staff sergeant over there, and it was one of the many romantic, but impulsive wartime weddings that took place over those years.  Her name was Joan.  When Dad and Joan married, they hadn’t spent much time discussing the details of their life.  She assumed Dad would stay and live with her in England near her family when the war was over.  Dad assumed that she would return with him to his family home in Brooklyn, New York.

Mom said “Come on”, and we walked to the back of the house to a storage closet and pulled down a big flat box out of the crawl space.  When she opened the box, I saw a photographer’s portrait of a beautiful and petite, fair skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed woman.  “This is Joan”.  I found the whole thing really ironic – talk about opposites.  Mom was a bigger woman with olive skin, almost black hair and dark eyes, also pretty.  She went on to say that Dad eventually won the argument and returned home with his war bride at the end of his duty.  He got a job and was busy running with his friends, the lifestyle he was used to before being in military service.  Joan was at home a good part of the day without him, living with his sister and her husband and children.  One day when Dad got home from work and my aunt had been out all day, Joan was gone.  She had been frightfully home sick, and apparently had packed her things and found a ship or plane to get her back to England.  He tried to locate her for a while, but she did not respond, so he gave up.

About a year later, he and Mom met working in a factory in Jersey City, New Jersey, where my Mom grew up.  It was also a very intense and whirlwind attraction between them, however, they were dating for a good three years when they decide to get married.  They set the date for November 1952, a year away.  My Dad was technically still married, so he applied for an annulment here in the United States.  They thought it was going to be no big deal, but then they found out that they were going to have to try and locate Joan, and follow a more complicated legal path.  Dad was obligated to advertise in local newspapers, both in New York and in the area of England that Joan lived in when he knew her.  He would have to do this over a period of approximately six months to try and each her to agree to the annulment.  The paperwork could not get started here until the six months were up.  Joan never responded.  The church and the hall were booked for the wedding, but the annulment paperwork would not be processed in time.  They went ahead with the wedding in November because he was legally single by the actions he had taken, but they could not get married in church.  They were married by a local judge in the reception hall, and when the annulment was finalized early in the new year, they got married in church on February 22^nd, 1953.  We had looked at their wedding album hundreds of times, and saw them being married in the hall by a judge, but it had never hit us…….why not in church?

“Your father didn’t want you and your brother to know because you guys are his whole world and he wanted you to feel secure.  He probably is going to be upset about you knowing now, and maybe we shouldn’t tell your brother.  We believed that this was the best thing to do for your sake”.  In this case, was not  telling the same thing as lying?  I didn’t care because I thought the whole thing was just loaded with romance and some adventure, which I love.  We did wind up telling my brother later that week, and he didn’t have much of a reaction, but I guess his reaction was no different than any other seventeen year old boy would have.  Dad wasn’t thrilled about us knowing, but since we were all okay with it, he adjusted.  I, of course, continued to have lots of questions about the details, and was able to learn some more from discussing it with other extended family members who were involved in the conspiracy of keeping it from us. 

When I graduated college and got a job as a Customer Service Manager, I learned about another necessary kind of lying – to the customer.  However, if you did lie to an irate customer about a shipment going out, you better turn that lie into a truth by making it happen, pronto.  I think this kind of lying was okay, but you had to do it skillfully, with lots of follow-up.  And if you didn’t, you better let the boss know before he hears it elsewhere, because then he’s going to be really pissed.  That’s where I got it from with my students.

Dad passed away in April 1990, on Mom’s birthday.  He always said that if he went first, he would find a way to haunt Mom.  So he did!  A few years later, Mom received a letter from the United Kingdom, addressed to the family of Alphonse James Mauro.  Over fifty years had passed and she had decided she wanted to make peace with Dad before their lives ended.  She was devastated to find out that he was already gone.  We couldn’t believe she had finally tried to reach him, and wondered if we might have a sibling somewhere that we didn’t know about.  It was awkward at first, so we ignored the first letter.  She wrote again because she had to make peace in her heart.  We had a family discussion and wrote back to her, and agreed to help her do this.  Joan was coming to the United States to visit some friends.  Mom said, “So we’ll take her to the cemetery and make her some tea.”  She placed a beautiful bouquet of flowers on his grave and said she was sorry.  She flew home the next day. It seemed like all the untellings and misleading truths were okay now.   I kept the letters.