Lying to your children? Sometimes

Dear Mother,

It's true that we shouldn't lie to our children, but I've learned that sometimes we shouldn't tell them the truth either! Sometimes, a harmless lie is worth it to help them get through normal developmental stages (which are annoying as hell!), and over time I've been collecting the stories that people tell me and adding them to my library of, let's say, creative liberties about our children's reality!

1. “It’s closed!” The first, and most commonly used (don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise), is the classic “Oh no! The park is closed!” or “I’d love to stay too, but the lady at the back is saying the park is closing and we have to go.”

2. “Mommy is just going over there…” The second is “I’m just going to the bathroom, lie down here for a bit and I’ll be right back”. In this situation, one of two things always happens: either we return after tidying the kitchen and raiding the chocolate drawer to find the child asleep OR the child catches us with their mouth full and asks us why we’re not in the bathroom!

3. Power outage This is what a mother told me, and it guarantees her success. Her children were all glued to the television on a beautiful day, and suddenly there was a “blackout” — which had nothing to do with the mother turning off the meter! The truth is that 15 minutes later they were all playing outside.

4. Happy New Year… at ten o’clock at night I used it for several years and we still laugh about it. When we were little we would celebrate the time change of the country that entered the new year early. The 12 raisins, the clock, the right foot jump and everything else, but at 10pm Portuguese time so we could all go to bed early!

Am I absolved of my lies? Do you want to confess?

Kisses

Dear Anna,

You are very much absolved! And with that I absolve myself too, because fortunately I have lived long enough to know that these lies do no harm. On the contrary, they often become the timeless graces of every family!

I just want to draw a red line, but I suspect mine is much more permissive than yours: lies to truly scare kids, like the one about “The bogeyman is coming and taking you away”, or as you used to hear “The police arrest you!”, are not worth it, even if sometimes it feels like resorting to external forces to combat impotence and fatigue. Threats/lies told by adults at school are also not worth it, like when they tell them, as I once heard, that “there are cameras filming”, to try to keep them quiet.

These costs are high, both when the children believe it and are full of fear, and when they discover that it is a lie and are revolted by the suffering that has been caused to them. Trust is too precious a value to risk losing.

By the way, if the Internet is to be believed, the place where the new year arrives earliest is apparently Kiritimati in the Republic of Kiribati, located in the Central Pacific Ocean. This will be our choice next year.

In Birras de Mãe , a grandmother/mother (and also mother-in-law) and a mother/daughter , of four children, separated by quarantine, began writing to each other daily, to talk about their fears, irritations, perplexity, anger, misunderstandings, but also about the feeling of perfect communion that — occasionally! — invades them . And, after the confinement, they realized that they did not want to lose this channel of communication, in the hope that whoever reads them, mother or grandmother, will feel that they are talking about themselves. The authors write according to the 1990 Orthographic Agreement