I don’t lie routinely, but once, at my job, I lied to make someone feel better.
I worked part time in the kitchen at a nursing home. One time I had to go to a special care unit to retrieve some dishes. Along the way a little old lady was pushing herself along in her wheelchair, and as I passed she plucked at my sleeve to get my attention. She told me she’d heard I’d been fighting with my brothers, and for the sake of peace in the family we all needed to make up our quarrels. Now, I have no brothers and she obviously mistook me for one of her family. But if I tried to tell her that the poor gal would have been confused and unhappy. So I just hung my head and said “Yeah, I know, I’ll try and see them real soon and get things worked out.” She wheeled herself away and was happy.
Sure it was a deception, but I prefer little white lies like that to making a senior sad.
I do that. My husband’s wise to it now, so he then gets on my case for, “not really listening, just unloading the buffer when I ask you,” which is totally true. I try not to do it, but sometimes I just space out.
I lie to my mother about how stressed out I am. There’s not like she can do much to help, anyway, so why make her feel bad for me?
This reminds me of other lies or omissions I routinely tell (or don’t tell) my mom. I’ll let her know if something little is stressing me out, like a bad day at work, having a cold, dealing with my son’s tantrums, etc. But if something truly bad happens, I won’t tell her unless it’s absolutely necessary. She takes on others’ personal tragedy, no matter whose it is (even if she doesn’t know them), as her own. If something is going hideously wrong in my life, she flips out completely. I would rather take care of it myself or with my husband’s support than have to soothe her and feed her need for drama.
I guess this is more self-serving than anything. I’m telling her something to prevent her from getting upset, but it’s more because I don’t want to deal with the consequences than out of a genuine desire not to hurt her feelings.
Are we siblings? I always thought I was an only child, but you just described my mother.
Actually, her latest (when I mentioned that I didn’t see a need to discuss something with her that I knew would cause an overreaction - only mentioned because my daughter let it slip in front of her) is that if I DON’T tell her, I’m not “allowing her to be part of the family”. No, I’m just trying to save my sanity and my cell phone from 2-3 calls per day about stuff while she comes up with “solutions”.
Helping other people really does help people feel better about themselves. It sounds like he’s spent his adult life being a provider and looking after his family, and you can’t just switch that off at retirement.
My mother is a person who is shocked – SHOCKED! – at modern pricing. Jeans for $30? Outrageous! A $20 dinner? Goodness no!
Which is ridiculous, because she’s 50, not 90.
So when she asks what I pay for something, I have to lie. I do this so often that I have come up with a formula: Half the real price, plus three dollars.
I just remembered one from my own life! My parents don’t know where I live. Well, they do in that they have my address and all that but they do NOT know that I live in Harlem. As far as they are concerned I live in Sugar Hill, a small neighborhood north of Harlem. My boyfriend has been instructed that he can never refer to our neighborhood as Harlem in front of anyone in my family. If they knew I would get calls every six hours to make sure I haven’t been shot to death and then had a bunch of gang members rape my corpse.