Telling The Truth

As a minister’s daughter, I thought being a good Christian meant you had to avoid hurting others at all costs. I didn’t know that when someone asked me out, I could say no. There were times when I found myself lying in bed with a man, wanting to be anywhere but there. Sometimes I made excuses that helped me exit, but I never told the truth.

On my wedding day, I looked up into my husband’s face as I recited my vows, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. A dark thought arose: What have I done? We had fifteen years and three children together before he initiated the divorce.

Years later I bought a house with another man. I knew within a week of moving in that something was wrong. My son knew it too. After five years he could no longer tolerate my partner’s dictatorial behavior. The next night my son called me from his dad’s house and said, “Mom, I love you more than anyone in the world, but I won’t live with him anymore.” That Friday night I sat down before my partner — with whom I’d spent hours in therapy, trying to get to the truth — and told him that no part of me wanted to work on the relationship anymore. I offered no false hope, no softening of the blow. I was leaving.

Since then I’ve doggedly told the truth, no matter what the cost. What’s most important is to tell myself the truth, to see the world as it is, rather than how I want it to be.

Maggie H.
San Jose, California

One hot summer day when I was a girl, tired of television and board games, a friend and I got into my parents’ photo albums and began flipping through the pages. One album was thinner than the rest and faded with age. I had never seen it before. I opened it to find pictures of myself as an infant. In one photo, I was lying on a plaid blanket, using a crushed beer can as a teething ring. Another picture showed my mother sitting in a lawn chair and cradling me in her arms. There was a dark-skinned Latino man sitting next to her, holding a can of beer and playfully shaking his fist at her.

That evening I showed my mother the photo and asked her who the man was. “Just a friend,” she said. A few days later she called me into her bedroom, where she was getting undressed. As she pulled off her stockings, she said, “You remember that picture you showed me?” I nodded. “Well, that’s your father.”

My mother continued undressing, taking special care to avoid my eyes. I got up and left the room in shock. In the hallway I looked at the framed photographs of my mother’s wedding, at which she’d married the man I now knew to be my stepfather. I had seen those photographs for as long as I could remember, but that day they told a different story.

Name Withheld

When my husband and I sold our home, we planned to rent for a few months before we bought another house. I found a real-estate agency specializing in month-to-month rentals, but our rental application was rejected. The manager made it clear that our planned short tenancy was the problem.

When we found an ad in the paper for another month-to-month rental, my husband and I agreed in advance to be vague about how long we’d need to rent. I felt bad, but the need to find a place to live outweighed my guilt.

Our application was approved. The manager who called to give us the good news asked, “Do you think you’ll be able to mow the lawn?”

I hesitated; it was unlikely the grass would need mowing before June, and we would be gone long before then.

“Um . . . we do have a push mower,” I said.

“Great,” she replied.

I hadn’t lied outright, but I felt terrible about my lie of omission. I began to reexamine instances in my life when people had lied to me. I had always assumed that dishonesty was an integral part of their character. I decided I would be a little less judgmental in the future.

Cheryl Morgen
Bend, Oregon

I park in front of my friend Tanya’s house and turn off the engine. My seven-year-old son, Jake, is testy, but he’ll do his best to be polite, because he knows how important this visit is, especially to Tanya, whose life has been shortened to precious days.

I take his hand and lead the way to Tanya’s back deck. She is curled up on a lounge chair, her once-athletic body a faint outline under her favorite blanket. Chemotherapy was not an option for her, so her hair is still thick and curly.

I lean down for a gentle hug. Tanya slides her sunglasses off to show me that her eyes have turned yellow, like marigolds. She slips the glasses back on, gives me a brave half smile, and shrugs as if to say, What can you do?

“You look beautiful, sweetheart,” I say. “And you’ve baked cookies today. You’re doing great.”

Tanya says to Jake, “There’s a bag of ginger cookies on the table with your name on it.”

Jakes smiles and whispers, “Thank you.” He takes the bag of cookies and returns to my side.

As we’re driving home after our visit, Jake gently says, “I don’t really like ginger cookies.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes it’s OK not to tell the truth,” he says.

“It is? When?”

“When your friend is dying of cancer.”

Mary Jane Taub
Ashland, Oregon

I come by my alcoholism honestly. For generations, every male in my Irish family has been alcoholic, and those who didn’t go into recovery often died from drinking. During my teens and twenties, my ambition, education, and professional training kept me from becoming addicted to alcohol, and I hoped I would be the exception to my family’s rule. But my mother’s sudden death in the last year of my psychiatric residency triggered a ten-day binge that blossomed into addiction.

For the next few years my wife and I fought about my drinking, and I made many vows to cut down or stop, but I broke them all. I discovered during this period that lying about my drinking came as naturally as breathing.

I went on the wagon when my son was born, and I managed to stay sober for the next eight months by white-knuckling it. When I relapsed, I kept it a secret, and for nine years I hid my alcoholism.

Eventually I slipped up and came home too drunk to hide it. Seeing the sense of  betrayal on my wife’s face is the worst agony I have ever felt. It is also one of my strongest incentives not to drink.

John Ruark
Portola Valley, California

Anytime I’m late, I think of ingenious excuses; I invent circumstances to explain a forgotten promise to a friend; I lie without hesitation to an organization whose deadline I’m going to miss.

This propensity for lying is a legacy of my childhood. Telling the truth was not a family value in my home. When my father and I stopped for ice-cream cones on the way back from running an errand, he’d tell me not to tell Mommy, so she wouldn’t feel left out. Once he lied to a grocery-store clerk to get me some circus-themed playing cards that he insisted had been left out of our bag.

One day in my junior-high math class, I hadn’t done my homework, and I told my teacher I’d left it in my father’s car. I assured her that if she called my father, he’d verify my story. I knew he would cover for me, because we had an unspoken agreement: he would confirm any of my small lies in exchange for my hiding one big truth — that my father had claimed my body for his sexual gratification.

Name Withheld

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