We Lied to You, Kids

Parenting books fail to mention that the beauty of an empty threat is that it gets the child’s attention to swing in a different direction. They’re useful when the parent has tired of candy bribes. Or when the novelty of doling out crisp twenty dollar bills fresh from the ATM has worn off. “Here it comes, honey! Grab your reward for not whining before the machine sucks it back in!” They warn about making empty threats to your children and spoiling with bribes, but they never warn about filling up their heads with false information to trick them into thinking the world is a much better place than it really is. “Oh, that? That’s just the news, honey. Those aren’t real bullets. Why don’t you plug in that Disney movie again.”

The catered life that I so effortfully crafted for my children since they came into the world – not just cloth diapers, but the softest flannel from organic cotton grown by Tibetan monks on a pesticide-free farm; beds I’ve pre-warmed with a heating pad an hour before bedtime so the mattress is heated all the way down to the box spring; movies where nothing bad ever happens; vending machines in their rooms in case they get peckish in the night – is a tough act to maintain.

I cannot in earnest suspend the fairytale childhood anymore. It’s time for the school-of-hard-knocks reality check. Santa is my visa card. The tooth fairy isn’t flying around with a wad of cash in her apron waiting to hand it out in the middle of the night, so stop putting teeth you’ve already gotten money for back under your pillow to test us. I almost threw that incisor away the other night when I tucked you in. I thought it was a piece of popcorn.

Look, kids. Daddy and I felt it was very important for us to make you think a lot of fake stuff was real. Don’t judge us. We were feeling badly for not raising you with religion so we clung onto false gods the retail industry would validate three months in advance, like Santa and the Easter bunny. You knew the tooth fairy wasn’t real, right? The Easter bunny, too? No? Those baskets in the basement next to the Christmas ornaments 11 months out of the year don’t look familiar? Same crushed, fake grass, same plastic mismatched eggs every year? What did you think was happening? Don’t answer that.

Ever since 9-11 I think it’s important to keep it real. I’ve only been able to act on that realization recently now that you’re taller than me. It seems a natural transition into the real world to tell you everything we’ve taught you about life up until now is erroneous. We lied to you for your own good, for training purposes. We were just seeing if you could tell the difference. It would help you later in life, say, when you’re looking for your soul mate in a dark and smoky bar, like your parents did.

You could discern, for the most part, which is how we knew we weren’t totally screwing you up with these fictitious constructs. When you were in preschool you turned off Barney and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street five minutes into the shows. Wise beyond your preschool years, you didn’t want to watch PBS because “people aren’t really that nice to each.”

Sad but true, precious, innocent children. That’s why it is the job of family to suspend hopes and dreams and make believe, to tip the scales of what is real/ideal, because ideally we’d like your world to change, to be a better place and it takes entire generations of people, and Target and WalMart, believing in that to pull it off.

But we can pretend, right? Fake it ’til we make it? Believe that the glass is half full yet know that it is not always, not by a long shot? That maybe those bullets are real? It seems, by your tie-dye peace sign t-shirt you wear with your camouflage pants, you have managed to grasp that we are living in a mixed up crazy world. Your choice of clothing comforts your father and me greatly. We didn’t heed the advice in any parenting books and so far it doesn’t seem to have come back to bite us in the ass.

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