Thursday, January 13, 2011

Lies Your Parents Told You

Flicking through a magazine the other day I came across an article about the little white lies parents tell their kids.  Some lies are to protect the child: "Fluffy has gone to live on a big beautiful farm with lots of other bunnies to play with", some lies are told to protect the parent "No, Daddy wasn't hurting me, I wasn't screaming, we were watching TV and the lady on the TV kept seeing lots of spiders which were frightening her and making her cry out..." (mental note: this laboured lie probably wouldn't work even if you did have a TV in your bedroom).

It got me thinking - what little lies did my parents tell me as a child?

I couldn't think of any.

Now, I'm not sure if this is because they were particularly clever at formulating their fibs and I still have not unravelled them, or if they simply didn't need to.  More likely it is because the lies I have permanently scarred into my memory are those my older sister told me (sorry BigSis).

For example:  she told me that if I let any part of my body, such as a hand or foot dangle over the edge of the bed while I was asleep, it would go black and fall off.  To this day I still cannot fall asleep with my foot hanging off the bed.

She also told me that if I fall into pigface (carpobrotus: a ground covering succulent plant with pink flowers that would grow in the park opposite our house), or even put so much as a toe into the pigface, I would be swallowed up and never seen again.  To this day I cannot stray within a metre of the stuff and my husband gleefully points it out if we ever happen to walk past some.

The last lie I remember very clearly is that if I hear a buzzing sound from the overhead phone wires, and listen very carefully, I will be able to hear the conversations that people are having on the telephone.  I would stand for ages under the crackling phone lines trying to hear what the neighbours were saying. 

The difference here is that the lies parents tell children are in some way about protection - we bend the truth to protect sensibilities, innocence and sanity.  The lies siblings tell each other are purely about entertainment and torture.

Of course neither compare with the lies that we tell ourselves.  These are the ones that do the most damage.  I was convinced ET was under my bed for most of the 1980s, a decade of very little slumber and the start of some very bad sleep habits.

So in the spirit of interactivity I would love to hear of any lies your parents or siblings told you - the more damaging the better!

5 comments:

  1. Shan, I told my little sister that she was (a) adopted and (b) originally born as a monkey. Because all of us girls looked very different when we were kids and my sister actually had a tiny scar just above her bum (where her tail used to be, obvs), she believed both fibs for years. I believe there is a karmic lightning bolt with my name on it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LOL what a nasty big sister!! Don't tell her I said that :-)

    I loved writing letters to my grandmother who lived on a farm and I always wanted to post them immediately. My mum told me that if I put the letter in our letterbox then when the postman delivered our mail he would also take out the letter to my Nan and get it to her. I believed this for years ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. That's fabulous guys, I especially like the monkey fib complete with real-life scar. Props make the lies so much better.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ha ha this is funny! its hard to remember cause i guess we really believed them! one i do remember is that the car wouldn't start if we didn't have our seatbelts on yet somehow this only applied to the back seats....hmmmmm... and here we are as parents doing the exact same thing to our kids lol!

    ReplyDelete
  5. My Mum reminded me today that as a child I refused to eat fish, and so she would tell me when serving up crumbed or battered fish that it was actually 'Chicken of the Sea'. This and also telling me (as a young adult) that I didn't like smoked salmon simply because she and dad didn't want to have to share it with me, are the only two lies they are so far admitting to...

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...