The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The Tooth Fairy forgot to come to our house on last Sunday night. Jack, my oldest, lost a tooth when we were at his grandparents’ house in Tulsa that morning, and by that night, our family was back at home in Little Rock.

When Jack woke up on Monday morning and his tooth was still in the envelope he had taped to the side of his bunk bed, to say he was very disappointed would be a gross understatement. He cried and asked us if the Tooth Fairy has a “good list” like Santa and wondered if maybe he was on the “bad list.”  

I told him that with all of the travel and life that is taking up her brain space, the Tooth Fairy probably just got confused on where he was sleeping that night. And then I set an alarm on my phone as a reminder: Tooth TONIGHT!!!!

The next morning at 1:30 a.m., he jumped into our bed to tell my husband and me about the two gold coins he found in the envelope instead of the one the Tooth Fairy usually brings. She must have been sorry for missing him the night before.

Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

Multiple choices. I know there is my truth, your truth and the truth that falls somewhere in the middle, but isn’t looking at it as telling the truth by selecting an answer based on the multiple-choice list in front of me just weighing my options? Does whichever truth is heavier, easier or strategically smarter influence my decision on how I remember the facts?

I learned a lot about telling the truth in an ethics class in graduate school. I was getting a master’s in communications, and back then, journalism was something that not everyone with a computer just decided to do. We didn’t even have personal computers back then, and the Pandora’s box of social media was just beginning to open.

There was a lot of time spent on how to find the truth and report on it, spinning the narrative and the possible pitfalls of that behavior and how to use real, actual research to find answers. None of it prepared me for the ethics of parenting, though.

“Is the green light on?” we ask our daughter Ellie at 3:37 a.m. when she tries to sneak in our bed. There is a traffic light-style night light in her bedroom that is red until it turns green at 6:30 a.m., the time we set it to signal to her that it is time to wake up.

“Yes,” she whispers, but we all know that story is not true.

“Did your daddy say you could do that?” “Did you wash behind your ears?” “Did you practice ALL of your scales?” “How many cookies did you have today?” “Have you washed your hands yet?” All of these are real-world examples of questions we ask the kids, knowing full-well that we will hear what they think we want to hear, not necessarily the truth.

We tell our kids about the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and soften the blow when bad news is coming. When pulling a splinter or cleaning a wound, we tell them it won’t hurt. Broccoli is good, you will like it. If you swallow your gum, it will stay in your stomach for seven years. Little Rock doesn’t have a Chuck-E-Cheese anymore; it closed. This fishbowl-sized frozen margarita is really spicy, you wouldn’t like it.

These little stories, that are just lies, we believe are somehow ok to tell our kids. We all do it. They are stories we tell ourselves and them every day in order to survive, sleep or find 60 seconds of silence.

At what point, though, does the lie from their parents become harmful? I wondered after the Tooth Fairy had stealthily come and gone. The conclusion I came to was the intent of the lie: is it intended to help or to hurt?

This morning, at 4 a.m., when I asked, “Is the green light on?” in unison, all three of the kids whispered, “Yes,” as my husband and I twisted and contorted to make room for our living wake-up calls.  

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