Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie: The Truth About Women and Deception - Hardcover

Chapter One

Spinning Yarns: Our Mothers’ Lessons

HOW WE LEARNED TO LIE

 

Our mothers are our role models, our springboard to the world, and their influence upon us, in all areas of our lives, is heartfelt. In certain instances our mothers have shown uswhat to do, as we’ll see in this book, but also what not to do. Whether our mothers kept secrets and lied for the cause or disdained such a path, or openly criticized lies on moral grounds all the while lying themselves, it has impacted us as daughters. Whatever decision our mothers made concerning female deception, the explicit message that came both from our parents and from society at large is that a lie is bad and the truth is good. Yet according to my interviewees, their mothers’ lies, or lack thereof, became evident over time. As the daughters themselves approached womanhood, the ramifications of theirmothers’ actions had an effect.

 

It may seem a contradiction that a mother, sexless creature that she is supposed to be, a martyr to her children, would have a need for secrets, would yearn for an inner life, for dreams beyond her prescribed reality. It’s a hefty load to carry, no wonder so many women confided in me that the genesis of their lies comes from their mothers. These women lie as mothers, about their mothers, to their mothers, and beyond—spilling into the other parts of their lives. Some women describe the advantage they have in lying because their mothers did it, big and small lies that make it familiar, easier to do. What an admission this is—that our own mothers have shown us how to lie.

 

The Lies Our Mothers Tell Us

 

As Jollie, twenty-two, a substitute teacher from Washington state, recalls her childhood, it was continually about her mother’s problems. Jollie has taken her mother’s example as a deterrent.

 

The biggest secret I’ve had in my life is my mother’s drug addiction. She told everyone she had a serious illness and we believed her. Really she was addicted to painkillers. I had to watch my younger brother and sisters since she couldn’t. I don’t want to end up like my mother.... I’m still ashamed and upset by her. I pity her. My father was in on her secret and fibbed to us, which made it even harder for me. I was older and I ended up being the one who took care of her. We thought she was dying, and we were so afraid. It was sad for her children . . . and I don’t understand why she didn’t think of that, why she didn’t care. Finally, when I was around twelve, I figured it out. Still, my mom lied—she was lying all the time. Now I have my own children and I keep my distance from my mom. My friends have mothers who come to babysit, to help out, but I can’t have my mother come. So I say she’s far away . . . she works ...I won’t do to my own children what she’s done to us.

 

In Jollie’s case, the shame of her mother’s lie—part survival lie, part designated lie—haunts her. Having a family of her own is a chance to right the wrongs that she suffered at the hands of her mother. Jollie’s determination is to mother her children in the way she wanted to be mothered. Yet she hasn’t disclosed her entire past to her husband or friends.

 

I got married young and had babies young, and it makes me feel like I have a shot at a healthy life. I don’t say much to my husband about my mother, maybe because I’m so trained to tell her lie, about some grave illness. I still hide her secret, it’s what I know how to do. I used to think I did it for her, but I do it for her and for me. We both needed to lie about her life.

 

The Lifetime television movie Homeless to Harvard, the story of Liz Murray, played by Thora Birch, is about a family torn apart by the mother’s drug addiction. Murray’s mother, an AIDS-infected drug addict, needed not only to be mothered by her young daughters, but for the daughters’ attempts at normalcy— going to school, having friends—to be cushioned in a lie. Sadly, Murray’s mother dies. Afterward, Murray ends up graduating from high school and winning a scholarship to Harvard, but she’s been robbed of a healthy childhood and is spooked by her mother’s trajectory.

 

For daughters so burdened by their mothers, there is both the attachment to the mother and the pulling away, as we have seen in Jollie’s case. These survival lies, for the sake of the mother and the sake of the daughters, are shrouded in fear. When Liz Murray roams the streets and subways, homeless at fifteen, there is a terrifying melancholy surrounding her that she is desperate to rise above.

 

There are our mothers’ lies that aren’t as dark and ominous, but have tremendous influence over how we live our lives as adult women. As Tyne, forty-six, living in Georgia, recalls her divorce, she couldn’t have managed it without her mother’s choice set before her. Like Jollie, Tyne’s decision is in reaction to her mother; she has purposely chosen another kind of life for herself.

 

If my mother hadn’t stayed married to my father all these years, still today, I wouldn’t have had the guts to leave my own lousy marriage five years ago. I saw her tough it out, her cross to bear, with six children to raise. Her secret was her hope that he’d die or he’d be the one to leave her or her life would miraculously change. I knew her secret because we were so close. She said nothing, but I saw it and felt it, and one day I picked up and left my marriage, blowing wide open my mother’s pretense. I was brave enough to say to the world, my marriage isn’t okay, that’s the truth. Her lie wasn’t my lie, but it sure was my example. She was floored when I did it—not that she said, oh you bad person. I felt absolved, for both of us.

 

Tyne’s action is proof that her mother’s example, of living a betterment lie, wasn’t enough for her. So what we start as small girls lasts a lifetime; we are entwined in our mothers’ opinions, decisions, and secrets; it becomes a jumping-off point. Although the trajectory of a mother/daughter relationship can have peaks and valleys, 80 to 90 percent of women in midlife, according to Dr. Karen S. Fingerman in her book Aging Mothers and Their Adult Daughters: A Study in Mixed Emotions, claim to have a good relationship with their mothers. According to Dr. Fingerman, adult daughters still seek their mothers’ approval and dislike their disapproval.

 

In the 1998 film Dangerous Beauty, starring Jacqueline Bisset and Catherine McCormack as mother and daughter in sixteenth-century Venice, Bisset’s character convinces her daughter that she’ll have independence only if she becomes a courtesan. She herself was a famous courtesan, and to this end, Bisset’s character teaches McCormack’s character her secrets. In return, her daughter exceeds her mother’s dreams, becoming a kind of feminist as well as the best of the courtesans. This example shows a mother’s secrets and wiles as a positive force in her daughter’s life.

 

OUR MOTHER’S VOICE

 

Modern-day women describe how much their...