Did your parents lie to you?

My dad told me it was illegal to write a check on Sunday. I believed him. I was in school all week, and worked Saturday, so Sunday would have been my day to shop. This was before ATMs, mind you. Guess he wanted me to save my cash.

When I was very small, our dog bit someone (I think it may have been my mom). My parents told us that our dog was going to go live on a farm in the country. I believed them.

So this is why we become parents, to carry on the tradition of sabotage and deception. Kinda fun, isn’t it?

I’m still stuck on how the convinced me a fat man in red fur slid down a two foot wide square tube every December so he could put free stuff under a plant and drink milk and cookies.

We got the same story, and I eventually came to the usual conclusion that the dog had actually purchased a farm.

However, some months ago my mother brought up the subject again and said something that implied that they did, in fact, find another owner for the dog. So either they weren’t lying at all, or she thinks I still need to be protected from the unpleasant truth 35 years later.
My parents don’t lie much, but they are masters of the belated announcement.

“Hi there, just wanted to let you know that Mom’s almost done with the chemo. Oh, didn’t we mention that cancer thing?”

My mom told me it was illegal to put a stamp on an envelope upside-down. (What were they going to do? Send it back to me?)

Mom also told me that when I was eating lunch in the school cafeteria, I had to eat everything they gave me, including the salad. (Remember the 3 ozs. of shredded lettuce, red cabbage, and tomato slice, drenched in oil & vinegar, in the little pleated paper cup?). I looked forward to going to school until she told me that. I dreaded going to lunch that day (I was a ‘buyer’, not a ‘bringer’), and waited with complete fear that one of the monitors would stop by the table and make me eat the “yuccky stuff” in front of every one [the salads were a little too moist with oil & vinegar). Finally they told us lunch was over and to all to take our trays to the dishwasher window: I noticed other kids were throwing out uneaten food, including the salads. Hurrah, I wasn’t going to get punished for not eating my salad! That began the day I started questioning and disbelieving everything mom told me. I realize now it was a control freak thing she was going through (and trying to get me to try different foods, but in way the wrong way), but at age 6, you don’t know stuff like that.
**(hated salads back then, love them now)

Hi, I’m a dumbass and my dog is dead

No. Many people believed this. It may even have been true at one point (I seem to remember a court case in the 60s where someone got off on fraud charges because the bad check he wrote was dated on Sunday). However, laws have been amended to that’s no longer an issue.

So it’s incorrect information, not a lie.

I dont remember ever believing in Sata…errr, Santa. Heck, even when I wa five years old and I told ppl I didnt believe, they didnt believe me! (Isnt it usually the other way around, kids figure it out and DONT tell for fear of losing the gift flow.)

I believed my mom though about the cat going to a farm. I STILL don’t know if the cat did or didnt go to a farm, because my Mom didnt really make it sound like that great a place, like with rabbits and mice and all that.

My parents told me, and the eye doctor confirmed it, that when I needed to get glasses in third grade, it was just a growing phase I was going through and eventually I wouldn’t need glasses any more. Bastards.

My two older brothers were in high school in the 60’s, when we were living just over the hill from Berkeley. They would smoke dope in their room and burn incense to cover the smell. My mom complained that incense made her sneeze, and could they please not burn incense? So, they stopped doing both.

Fast-forward twenty years. My parents have gone on a trip to Germany and returned with these amazingly kitschy incense burners, which are wooden dolls about a foot tall. You pull the top half off, put a cone of incense right where the stomach would be, light it, and put the top back on. The smoke comes out the doll’s mouth, like it’s smoking. My parents have several of these going 24x7, and give them away for christmas.

Brother: Mom, how come you’re doing this? I thought incense made you sneeze?
Mom: Oh, we just said that to make you stop smoking dope.
Brother: :confused: :eek: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:

Oh, I should mention… It’s actually “Brother, PhD”.

I would think lying to your children would be typical of parents. I know that I wouldn’t want an honest answer as to why my mom and dad were alone in their bedroom for ten minutes and why they both look flushed and a little mussed.

When I was four years old, my dog ran out into the street and got hit by a car. My parents told me exactly what happened. Would that have made any of the rest of you feel better than being told the dog went away to a farm?

Aesiron if your parents could sneak in the bedroom for ten minutes and come out before their kids beat the door down, they did a hell of a lot better job of running a household than Mrs. Kunilou and I have.

My parents told me that if I ate bread crusts I’d have curly hair, that having hiccups meant I was growing, and that carrots would give me good eyesight.

My hair is stick-straight in all but the most extreme humidity, I’m barely 5’0, and have been wearing glasses/contacts for near-sightedness since I was 10 (I’m 36 now).

And this one, I’m not sure if they were lying, or really believed it: when I first got glasses, they told me I shouldn’t need them by the time I was 14.

Oh, Mom also told me I’d “outgrow” my carsickness (she did). Bahahahahahaha!

My parent’s told me that:

If I swallowed a seed, a plant would grow in my stomach.
My ankles would grow too much if I stomped my feet while walking.
If I made a face, I could get stuck that way.
If I got a bump on my tongue, it meant that I’d lied recently.

They never lied about what really happened to my pets though. My first dog died when I was five. I was upset for awhile, but I got over it.

My older sister hasn’t lived at home for twelve years or more, I was a rather quiet child that didn’t want or need constant parental supervision, and my younger sister has cerebral palsy and was easily engrossed by the television.

They just got lucky.

I had a little red guinea pig named Boopie when I was 5. (Yes, I named him myself.)

Evidently I didn’t take the best care of Boopie (or more likely, his cage.) One day I returned home from a weekend at my grandparents to find that Boopie was gone. i was told he died, and i cried and cried.

Two years ago (I’m 32) my mom told me that Boopie hadn’t actually died, but that he had been donated to the silent auction at my mom’s school for charity. And he was purchased by a farm family.

So my parent’s lie was the opposite - they told me he died, and he ended up on a farm.

Perhaps it wasn’t a lie, but it was an untruth by omission.

My mom only told me years later that she and my dad had once gone to Disneyland without any of us kids. They waited until we were all at school for the day. Now, I always wanted to go to Disneyland with my parents and family, but never did. Once or twice my best friend’s parents took me as part of their own family outing, but I never went with my own family. I was aghast to find out about this deception, and am still rather annoyed. It was as if they just didn’t want to be bothered with us kids.

When I got my driver’s license, my mother told me it was illegal to drive barefoot.
(If I was wearing flip-flops or sandals, I would - and still do - kick them off while driving)
She would always say, “If a policeman sees you driving barefoot, he’ll pull you over and you’ll get a ticket!”
I always countered with, “If we’re both in cars, how can he even see into the car to see that I’m barefoot?”

I don’t think it was an outright lie, but maybe, like the Sunday check-writing, just bad information.

Well, ummm, yeah. You’re right. They didn’t want to be bothered with the kids. (Pssst - they probably actually liked hanging out with each other even before all the kids were born! :eek: )

:smiley:

I swore up and down I’d never lie to my kid about the death of a pet. Until our snake died when we were away for the weekend. (The poor thing dehydrated. It was like snake jerky. I just couldn’t let my 4 year old see him.) So I made up some stupid story about my ex-roommate coming back for him and taking him home with her. Worked pretty well until we saw the ex-roommate about a year later and she asked how the snake was doing! :smack: Never again!

Parenthood: When you stop hiding your stash from your folks and start hiding it from your children. :rolleyes:

My parents didn’t tell me when they were going to have our dog put down (she was really old, and suffering) – I was even quite old. I guess they didn’t want to make me think about it. But she was there when I came home.

But mostly, not as far as I remember. They rock.

When I was a kid we had a corgi that “went to the farm” but I did get to visit him a few times and was notified when he died.

I can’t think of any huge lies that my parents told me. They did forget promises when it was convenient and I have a bit of a promise complex now. :slight_smile:

My parents told me they’d take me out to Showbiz Pizza (think Chucky Cheese) before my third birthday. Little did they know that 24 years late, I would somehow remember this promise and bring it up from time to time … heh heh heh.

Of course, they probably meant it and just never got around to it, so I’m not sure that it counts as a lie.