True Lies

Great movie! Never really thought of the meaning of the title and its implications until now. Now as in just the last few days, when the truth seemed like such a foreign concept to my teenager. Because of the nature of the internet and really still believing in the ideals of privacy and my eternal right to it, in total contradiction to my blogging, I will limit the details and go for the feelings. Ahh isn't that what this blogging is about anyways? Feelings...nothing more than feelings.
 My emotions get the best of me. They always do.  There is pain in a lie. There is pain the purposeful deception by those we love. I think there is more heartache and pain when that deception and lying comes from your child. My daughter attempted to lie to me to spare my feelings and to spare an argument. Yes two separate lies, two separate occasions, not the first time. Not wanting to hurt someone, commendable. Not wanting to start or pick a fight, great! I get it. Lying, deceiving and omitting the truth, not the best ways to go about it. How did I handle it? Well I did what all people do with hurt feelings, I festered. I festered in the ideas of whether I was raising a child who would rather lie than deal with the painful truth. I festered in the notion that she was honest with her father, who isn't present daily and not with me; the one here everyday, through thick and thin. I festered in the raw emotion of raising a teenage girl.  Each lie takes on a life of its own, requiring more lies to hide it and spreading to more people to preserve it. Most lies have an exit, a way to out itself and do the least amount of damage, and yet my daughter never took the out. She preserved the integrity of the lie and perpetuated it to her own physical detriment. The lie was outed and the argument was bigger than it needed to be. It always is.
My take away, my lesson to my child, to my blossoming young adult is the following:

   You choose to lie to those you love, a conscious decision. You choose to be deceptive when you lie. Whether by omission or commission you are still practicing to deceive. A lie requires work and more lies to keep it hidden. A lie is a seed that needs to tended to and watched, helped along. She justified her lies in trying to spare me the pain of the truth. I can't say there isn't pain in the truth, but there is more pain in knowing that someone didn't think you worthy of that truth or their honesty.

  I would like to believe that I raised her better, that I instilled a sense of honor and integrity in my child, but then I realized that I am still raising her, job not yet finished, my teen not quite yet done. Teens are governed by laws that are foreign to the rest of the world which don't make sense even in the teen world. Examining how I raised her led me to look at what example I set for her. Oh the hardest of truths and the easiest of lies: the ones we tell ourselves. I set the example for this behavior she used on me. Funny how the lessons we teach by our own behavior are the ones that bite us in the ass later. I have lied on occasions to spare her hide with her dads. I have omitted the truth to not disillusion them about Daddy's Little Girl. I have lied by writing her a late pass when she was late to her 1st period Algebra II teacher. I have lied by allowing her to stay home when she was only sorta sick. I taught her that sometimes the truth is bendable depending on the situation. I gave her a homegrown lesson in selective veracity. She learned well what I taught when I thought she wasn't paying attention. She learned that the sometimes in order to conform to fact, you must express what is false: True Lies.