Product of Lies

Product of Lies

My earliest recollection of a lie was at the age of five. It was the Christmas holiday week, and my mom and dad were have an annual Christmas party for friends that included a couple children. The night was a fantasy, like the Nutcracker Suite without dancing. Our house length sunroom, which I always called the ball room was fully decked out in silver and gold garland, hung from each of the recessed lights in the entire room, which made the light refracting off of the tinsel, shimmer and flicker throughout. There was beautifully delicious food laid out and beverages for the kids and the adults. I was going to be a long evening of magical socializing in holiday vignettes.

The magic would not hold up for me, however. This was the night that all my hopes as a child would be dispelled from my reverie. As the evening was coming to an end, there was an excitement building that I didn’t understand. It was palpable in both the adults and the children.

All of a sudden, a big man in a red suit came in and sat down on the chair along the wall that I had not noticed before. The kids, including myself were elated and at their wits end, and the parents all look delighted as well. Santa, in bright candy apple regalia, had come to my home and our party. What were the odds? I do remember thinking that I couldn’t believe he had showed up at the party.

One by one, the other children sat on Mr. Clause’s lap and whispered in his ear. And one by one, they jumped off like they had won the lottery, assured that they would now receive what they had long wished for. My sister and I were the last two, because it was our home and my mom and dad were hosting this gathering. So, it was courteous, to allow all the others to go ahead of us. I was up last, right after my sister. She vacated his leg and I took the position.

All the other sons and daughters, of our friends, had remained assembled, as each of us had taken our turns, with glitter in their eyes the entire time. I was there and ready, to unload my laundry list of wants and wishes, when I looked into his eyes. The beautiful blue color was like no other. They were deep aquamarine color with streaks of indigo and little flecks of cerulean. Stunning, his eyes were stunning, extraordinary. So much so that I had to look again, and that’s the exact moment, life changed for me. I immediately recognized Gerald, my older sister’s best friend. I called him out, calling his name and asking why he was dressed in Santa’s clothes. I remarked that this was not him, loudly, at which point, I was lifted up off of the imposters lap and whisked away up stairs to my parents room.

The walls came crashing in around me. My mom, sister and dad sat me on the bed and knelt in front of me and asked why I said what I said. I told them that I recognized his eyes, which were entirely unique from anyone I had ever met, and so they were etched into my mind.

They tried to no avail to make me believe their story, but I was not fooled and they consequently had to admit that it was in fact Gerald playing Santa. They could have left it at that and said he was helping the real guy out but instead uttered the truth. There was no such thing as Santa and it was a myth.

Questions flew out of my mouth, like a high speed bullet train, about how did we get what we had written to him in our letters, and how the cookies disappeared and the gifts mysteriously appeared every Christmas morning. I cried right then, like someone had taken my favorite doll. Dad began shushing me and told me to stop crying or the others would hear. Then came the prime directive. I was to tell no one, and especially, my sister.

I acutely recall that instant, and how I was confronted with the fact that my own parents had lied to me, for all of my five years. Of course I did not recall the first two and maybe even three years of my life, but it was traumatic just the same. I had lost faith in my perfect mom and dad, and realized that they were liars. Oh, sure, it was a little white lie as they would call them, and yet that little white lie had huge black implications. I did not trust them anymore to some degree. Worse still was the fact that they had now roped me into the lie and made me keep it as well. Essentially I had to lie, so this did not affect my sister. In my mind, I could not do something to hurt my sister and break her heart with the fact Santa was a fraud, so I kept quiet.

Trust. A small word that has big meaning and it was gone in an instant with one little white lie.

I wish I could say that was the end of the liars conspiracies, but then I’d be lying. Fast forward to me at age eleven. It was summertime in New Jersey and hot. My sister and I were inside because the humidity made it feel like a hundred out. My father and mom had separated, or rather, mom had thrown us out, as dad would say, and we lived in an apartment a few blocks from our school. Mom had just come over to talk to dad and it felt weird that we could not go with her at all and not even for a visit. We began whining to dad that we wanted to go with mom and we started crying, as little girls do, when they don’t get their way. Dad was clearly getting agitated and then the explosion would come, as we knew well it would. Boy oh boy, when the big bang hit this time, the black words ingrained themselves in my brain. “You girls cannot go with your mom, because she is not your mom.” I think you could have heard the thud of a snowflake at that moment of truth.

Dad began to tell us a story and it was of him and a woman he had married and had two daughters with. They had married young and our biological mother had had the two of us a year and a half apart. He did not say anything derogatory about her, per se, but then he told us that we were with him because she had abandoned us when I was two and my sister was six months old. He explained, then, that it was the reason he was so strict with us, because he was afraid she would come kidnap us back. I’m pretty sure that if you leave your two children, you are not going not come back or she wouldn’t have left us behind. The anger and hatred in me started back then. Until that point, I was innocent of this emotions. Not anymore.

I hated a mother I never knew, for leaving us, for not taking us, and for never looking for us, which dad had assured us that she never came to find us. What was surprising, as well, was that I began to hate my dad that day. That conversation set in motion the act of questioning my dad’s every word from that point forward. If my trust had not already been broken to some degree already, I might have believed him entirely. But I had a memory flash back in my brain of a night that mom and dad were in their room, at her house, and the fight they were having. It was significant enough of a fight that I stood outside the door and listened to them. I don’t recollect the exact words said at all, though I have tried many times, but I do recall thinking some part of their fight, that whatever had been said, made me say that mom could not be our mother, or whatever came out of her mouth would never have been uttered. I had dismissed it back then and now the memory flooded back to the forefront. It was all so much to take in. My dad had lied, my mom lied, my big sister and brother, who were not even related to us at all, lied.

It was done to protect us and to give us a real sense of family, he told us. What was real, anymore?

At the end of that dramatic exposure, of the den of lies we lived in, dad did reassure us that we never would have to meet our mother until we were of age and could decide for ourselves, if we would even want to. Trust was gone now, with my dad and now mom and that was a forever consequence of little white lies. But now entered hate and anger, betrayal, and hurt for the abandonment to begin with. Abandonment, a word that would haunt me my entire life. Betrayal a word that was my life.

At twelve years old, dad had moved us to another state and I had been enrolled in a new school with my sister. We were in sixth grade and fifth grade respectively, and we had been attending for six months. One fine day, we come home and dad sits us down to have a talk. Now a talk is always a bad thing right? Yes. It is always a bad thing.

Unbeknownst to us, dad had contacted our bio mom and made arrangements to send us to her, had booked the short notice flights and even started packing for us. Another betrayal, they came so easy now, lies, betrayal, doubt. It was an afterthought a lark, not a big deal. Well not for my sister and me. For us it was earth shattering. He had promised us he would not leave us or let us go until we were legal adults. And now he was going against his word to us. Oh, but he promised us if we didn’t like it with her we could call and he would immediately come get us or fly us back home. More lies.

It was six months of begging and crying before he would bring us back. Six traumatic months, months we spent at our grandparent’s home because we wanted to leave and come home so badly, and only had that option at that time. You would think that this much deception would have been the end of it, but no luck. It was the tip of the titanic iceberg.

Now, in high school, in yet another state, dad had begun dating this woman and often would go on dates for hours. He had not been dating this woman long, when he said he wanted us to meet her and her son. So, we met her. My sister and I didn’t really have much of an opinion of her, because lets face it, you need to know someone or at least meet them a couple time before you can formulate a decision on a person’s character. But that didn’t happen. One day dad comes in our rooms and tells us he is going to go for the weekend to her house and that he would not be home until Sunday evening.

The weekend was uneventful, or so we thought. Dad walks in with a suitcase, that neither of us had seen him pack and waits until after we have dinner to sit us down at the table for a talk. Yup, you guessed it. The talk is never a good thing. At our dining room table, dad informed us that he and this woman we had met once, had gotten married. Married. I still can’t look at that word and think, immense happiness. It may have been for the couple but not his children and no doubt her son either, though he had been informed beforehand. We had not been granted that courtesy by the one person in our lives we should have been able to trust exclusively. More lies.

The lies in my life were racking up quite a tally.

Is there a word stronger than hate? Maybe loathing is a good word, because that’s how I felt, and my sister was now devastated and wanted out like I did. I think we would have lived alone if we could have supported ourselves back then. Needless to say, things hidden, lies to cover things and the complete loss or faith or trust in a deceitful person, never gets better. The consequence to the liar is insignificant to them because they didn’t care enough not to lie to us so why would they care about the landslide of damage it would cause?

I grew up not trusting anyone, not having faith in what people said, in any way, unless I could prove what they were saying. My sister, also had these same hurdles with people. It affected all of our relationships in the future. Our marriages, friendships, and any relationships, were all marred by doubt. If your own parents can lie so easily to you, then it’s far easier for those not blood related.

At the ripe old age of twenty-three, I married a man that I probably should never have been near, all in order to get away from my parents deceptions. I married a man who, you probably already guessed, lied to me. He cheated on me and one day in our short marriage disappeared to another state with a woman he would have a child with and leave as well. Liars.

My entire life was lived under the umbrella of lies and the people that thought nothing of being deceptive. It cause deep wounds and scars that still seep blood to this day. They can’t be undone or even forgotten. It’s amusing how forgetting truths is so easy and readily happens, but forgetting untruths you have experienced, stay with you and mould you and how you relate with people. The repercussions to the victims are vast and by no means singular. Many, I imagine, suffer lasting emotional damage, while some may drink or do drugs to forget, which then can cause physical manifestations of the consequences of deceit.

While I have chronic trust issues, abandonment issues, and hurt, I did manage to make life changing decisions. I choose not to lie to people, after the experiences in my first marriage. I saw how repeated broken trust can affect the person on the receiving end of falsehoods, I also saw the integrity of the perpetrators marred and destroyed with their falsities. I didn’t want to be either part of that equation. I made the choice to live by truth, no matter what. It may upset people that don’t like to be confronted with it, that prefer to not know the truth, but at least they can confront it knowing it’s real. There is no way to deal with a lie, something that does not exist in actuality.

I put those experiences in the past and have not become bitter. I forgave it all because, really, I won’t let them continue their assault on my trust, and I won’t let it make me bitter by holding on to it.

Irony. It’s a word that explains me now. It’s ironic that I now write and make up stories that aren’t true. I create entire perceptions and worlds with little truths about the real or unreal.

I suppose now a person would have to ask if any of this story was true or a lie. Was it partial truth or complete fabrication? I will leave that secret, up to the reader to decide.