lying | The Qwiet Muse

You ate my garlic bread. I was saving it, for me . . . and you ate it. Not cool. I was actually looking forward to that little piece of garlic bread. I placed it in a plastic bag and hid it beneath the zucchini and the mushrooms in the bottom drawer of the fridge.

I know you didn’t just stumble upon it while searching for baby carrots to snack on, you opened the drawer looking for that garlic bread like a sneaky thief in the middle of the night. That’s just rude. It reminds me of the time my slice of pizza disappeared, and the time that corner piece of cornbread I squirreled away mysteriously vanished.

I am fully aware the cornbread incident was two years ago, but it wasn’t the first missing morsel of yumminess you’ve stolen from me and it certainly wasn’t the last, I have a list. A long list.

It’s not like I’ll starve to death because of what you’ve done, but it bothers me, a lot. It hurts my feelings, pisses me off, annoys me, and disappoints me. I wish I knew how to make you stop.

The thing is, when you take something you know is not yours, even something as insignificant as a tiny piece of garlic bread, it’s an awful thing. It’s sneaking, it’s stealing . . . and then when you deny your misdeed it’s lying. Three things I thought I taught you not to do, three things you only seem to do to me.

My sweet boy, you are a man now, and your choices are your own, I need you to understand this is about so much more than stolen garlic bread.

I really did want that garlic bread.

I have pretty honest kids, I really do. It’s fairly rare I catch them being untruthful . . . one of them though, he blurs the line between honesty and deception every now and then. For instance, my coconut waters go missing, I find the empty containers in his room.

Me: “Stop taking my drinks.”

Him : “I didn’t.”

Me: “I found the empty cans in your room!”

Him: “Those are old.”

Me: “Old as in yesterday?”

Him: “I didn’t know they were yours.”

Me: “They are always mine.”

Him: “You didn’t say that this time.”

See, he gets me on technicalities. Empty cans from yesterday, technically old. I put them on the shelf without specifying they were mine (even though they always are) so technically, I didn’t tell him they were not for him. He is a master word weaver, if I could afford it, I would send him to law school. He would make a great lawyer.

When he was in his mid-teens I busted him mid-fib, I no longer remember what he was trying to deny, cover-up, make light of, or get out of, but what he said in a last-ditch effort to worm out of the situation was epic . . .

“It wasn’t a lie, it was just a subjective variation of the truth.”

My son, the smart, witty, and wonderful troll he is, succeeded. I lost my composure and started smiling. At least it was an almost admission he was practicing the art of deception, just a little.