What's in a lie?
“Are you Santa?”
Fuuuuuuudge. I knew this question was coming. I’d had it on my to-do list to figure out what to say when he finally asked, something warm and fuzzy that could maybe soften the blow. But I never quite got to that line item. Maybe because I didn’t want to think about how devastated he would be to learn the truth. But I think the bigger blocker was that I didn’t want to close that chapter of childhood. Forever.
“Are you Santa?”
A pit opened up in my stomach and my husband’s face drained of color as we looked at each other across the table and then at our son, who was picking at a piece of food, avoiding our eyes all together. My mind raced to figure out what to say and I stammered out something really profound, like “Uh, so, um, you know, what do you believe?” To which my son said, in a tone that let me know he wasn’t into my redirection strategy, “I just want to know if it’s you. That’s all.”
What popped into my head in the moment was something I’d heard at a conference for adoptive parents years ago: Answer the question you’re asked. What the session leader meant was to focus on the question your child is asking and don’t offer up details about things they aren’t wondering about yet. Obviously, he wasn’t talking about Santa. He was helping us understand how and when to share the details of a child’s birth story. But nonetheless, the situation applied. “Are you Santa?”
That was the question. And so the answer I gave was yes. It was a long night after that.
Later after I drowned my own sadness with dark chocolate, another thing the session leader said came back to me: Try not to say anything you’ll need to take back. Because, he said, that will erode the trust your child has in whatever else you’ve told him about his birth family.
Well, awesome.
Clearly, different circumstances. Adoption and Santa are in no way the same thing. But, still. It hits home. For years, we’d strung together a myth about a guy living in the North Pole with a bunch of elves who delivers gifts to every kid in the world on one night. That’s a whopper of a tale to take back.
How many times have I told my son not to lie about things like eating a cookie before dinner or spilling something on the sofa? And now here I was expecting my son to understand the difference between his lies and mine. Maybe I’d do the whole Santa thing differently knowing what I know now. But hindsight is always 20/20, right?
What I do know for sure is that this experience has given me a lot of insight into how I want to go forward, not just in my relationship with my son. But with everyone in my life. Answer the question you’re being asked. And try not to say anything you’ll need to take back.
