On Loving Communication

My son called me a liar and it hurt my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! There’s no better way to communicate your appreciation!)

I’ve been thinking a lot about lying. According to me, it’s not something I do very often, (obviously what a liar would say). I don’t do it because the thought of being caught in a lie makes my armpits moisten and my bowels churn. Even small lies feel needlessly risky. There’s no greater unforced shame than being exposed for saying you read a book that you haven’t, or that you remember someone’s name when you don’t. I do so many stupid things already, why add lying, which is so easily avoidable, to the mix? What I’m trying to say is, fragile ego that I am, you could hurl myriad insults my way and I’d be inclined to believe you. But call me a liar? On THAT, I call bullshit. Which is why, when my six-year-old accused me of lying — literally screamed “You’re a liar!” — on our walk to school the other day, I felt wronged. I felt misunderstood. I felt overlooked, unknown, seen only as a maternal husk with nary a contour to my personality. Reader, put simply, it hurt my feelings.

We were discussing my children’s holiday vacation, which is a mystifying THREE WEEKS long. The Los Angeles Unified School District generally goes to great lengths to care for its students. They offer access to three meals a day for kids who would otherwise go hungry, have taken a firm stance on protecting undocumented students against ICE raids, and organize so many spirit days of such bizarre specificity that a slightly disorganized mother doesn’t stand a fucking chance. (Years from now, my child will be discussing the unshakeable trauma of me forgetting to dress him in his Hawaiian shirt for Mele Kalikimaka Monday with his therapist.) So it’s surprising that LAUSD would find it appropriate to give children a three week break when a parent generally has to supervise kids when they’re not at school. Someone’s got to make sure they don’t juggle knives or drink cleaning supplies or write their name on my wall in permanent marker and then say it was an accident because their hand just slipped. Since most jobs don’t give parents three weeks off during the holidays, who did LAUSD think would be around to mitigate the havoc children wreak? Now, the district isn’t leaving us entirely out in the cold — which in LA is 68 degrees — because it IS offering an optional “winter academy” for the last week of break. (Interestingly, in some cultures, the word “academy” is interchangeable with “school”.) The point being, on our walk to school, my six-year-old asked me if he’d be attending winter academy, to which I answered, “I’m not sure yet.” Skeptical, he pushed further. “Did you sign me up?” I told him yes, but that I was trying to figure out another childcare solution in the meantime. At that point, he called me a liar and burst into tears.

My children have been doing this a lot lately, saying that I’ve said things I never said then calling me a liar when I contradict what they made up. Since they are both white men, at first I assumed these accusations were just the early signs of their inveterate tendency toward gaslighting women. But upon further reflection, I’m starting to wonder if, in an effort NOT to be a liar, I’m supplying them with TOO much information for their simple 4-year-old and 6-year-old minds to sift through. Maybe, instead of a rich tapestry of how I plan to logistically navigate three weeks without childcare, my children just need a YES or NO.

It’s ironic that over-communicating to my children would be negatively affecting our relationship right now, because the opposite is true with my husband. In the 1990 blockbuster Flatliners, Julia Roberts’ character tells Kiefer Sutherland — re: what he experienced when he had his friends kill him (just for a couple minutes!) so he could see what death was like — “You withheld information, that’s the same as lying.” Evidently it really made an impact, because I was eight when I saw that (rated R!) movie, and the line still haunts me like the paranormal consequences hounding Julia and Kiefer for trespassing on the afterlife. After working from home since our eldest child was 8 months old, my husband recently returned to an office job. I, on the other hand, continue to work from home. The result is that 6 years into co-parenting, we’re confronting the challenges of running a household of four people who are almost always in four different places for the very first time. There have been a lot of arguments over who needs our sole Kia Niro, who’s making dinner, who can take our four-year-old to school and pick him up when one of us has a mandatory work Happy Hour and one of us is freelancing for a random YouTuber who posts four videos a day. The arguments usually spring, not from an unwillingness to cooperate with each other, but from a mutual assumption that each of us is intuitively abreast of the other one’s schedule. They’re compounded by the fact that, along with our schedules, neither one of us is particularly good at communicating our feelings, and AT LEAST one of us is very sensitive. What follows is a lot of tension, silence, and rumination. And if what Julia Roberts says is true, if withholding information is the same as lying, then maybe my son is right. At least when it comes to my husband, I can be a real fucking liar.

I’m not a very intuitive mother or caretaker. I chalk this up to being a youngest child who hoarded my allowance. (A financially independent seven-year-old grows up looking out for Number One, baby!) But the part of motherhood I understand in my bones is the need to cultivate my children’s trust in my unconditional love for them. Maybe that’s because when it comes to my relationships with anyone else, unconditional love feels like a mirage. The easy part of being a mother is that you can’t help but give your love away, even when you don’t get it back. The hard part of being a mother is that you have to have relationships with people besides your kids, and those feel a lot scarier. Kids and adults need information communicated differently, which is a huge fucking pain in the ass for anyone trying to intertwine their lives with both. It’s like cooking each member of your family a separate meal for dinner every night, and I don’t even like cooking ONE meal! But I’m trying to remember that the one thing everyone needs communicated is love. If I’m not doing that, I’m lying, and that’s not who I want to be.