Lies, Lies, Truth
- May 9, 2022
- 17 min read
For those who want to listen, here's a soundcloud of me reading the story
There’s a picture I love to see on my mom’s fridge. It’s my daughter, who is around two years of age. She’s wearing nothing but a yellow shirt with violet, purple, and lavender wings wrapped around her shoulders. It’s August in Missoula and the pavement is wet from the sprinklers. Stella was born in November, two winters before the photo was taken. This is her first summer on her feet roaming in the dirt. In Montana, winters are long and cold. By the time spring equinox rolls around, the roads are still lined with dirty snow which won’t fully melt until April or May. Vegetable starts go into the ground no sooner than the first week of June and the first frost comes back during the last week of September. This means warm summer days are few and precious and Stella has just found the sweet combination of sun and sprinklers on bare skin. In the picture, her arms are outstretched, and her little bare feet are in midair.
When I see this photo, I imagine the space between me, the one viewing the picture, and Stella, the one running toward me. Each time I see her, I’m always me, right now. And while this little butterfly stays the same age, I continue to transform. She is my reminder that moments aren’t lost simply because I ran from them, they’re just waiting to be explored.
We were both overwhelmed that day. For Stella, it was her first real summer as a separate being, and literally, she flew into it. For me, I was just beginning to reckon with myself. The long arc of this story is about learning to witness the truth through my own eyes. But to understand what I’m about to share is to understand that everything has a purpose, a life of its own, complete with its own origin story. Even those origins have an origin story. There’s a saying, “It’s turtles all the way down.” It comes from the idea that everything comes from something. It’s an infinite series of beginnings guided by a recursive principle. A principle that each outcome begins with an antecedent, with something that came before. An Iroquois creation story begins with Sky Woman falling out of the sky. Turtle offers its back as a place for her to land. What’s underneath Turtle? Another Turtle. And underneath that? Another Turtle.
I didn’t know it at the time but Stella would become the first of five generations in my maternal line to have a grandmother to grow up with. She was born lucky. She slipped out in the caul – a mermaid birth. Cocooned in a bag with amniotic fluid, my brother-in-law and midwife got to see her first. But it was my mom who went running for the mirror so we could both watch her hair float. Even with the soft landing, she was hesitant. She waited exactly 2 weeks past her due date to come out. When she did, the truth of her journey showed up in her elongated head molded by the birth canal, her prune-like skin, and her slivered eyes which appeared to be already weathered by time and gravity. The picture on my mom’s fridge, taken almost two years later, still shows the last vestiges of infancy. Her hair is growing in patches of tumbleweeds next to swaths of barren thick flakey skin where nothing can grow.
Whenever she could Stella loved to take off all her clothes. But during this summer morning, the shirt and the wings stayed on as evidence of her flight. My favorite part of this story is remembering how her trip ends. She grabs my cheeks, demanding eye contact. “Momma! Momma!” These words uttered in insistence continue the long conversation we’ve been having since I was pregnant.
But this moment has happened a thousand times already and will proceed to happen a thousand times more. It won’t be until years later that I realize how much I missed because I was too busy. She grabbed my face and held me so close I could smell sweet bananas and sour milk on her breath. She was just learning to find the words to form her own truth. The undeniability of that moment was so big and she was trying to make me understand.
Stella landed in my arms and settled onto my hip – a familiar spot for the two of us. Wrapping herself around my neck, she reached for my ear on the opposite side and held on. We played well together because she was willing to follow me around. Had she been more independent, I wonder what we would have done.
This was a familiar game. When I was little, my dad would walk us to the college basketball stadium to watch the women play. “Girls! Let’s skee-daddle!” The door would shut before he’d finish and the last sounds were muffled behind the dog barking and the rattle of the door knocker. I thought that’s how the world was - a game of chase always just out of reach. I paused after looking at the picture again. I remember how she flew into my arms – it was her first flight. With two words she said, “Momma, momma!” It was as good as saying, I love you. I just flew. Did you see me? You caught me.
And I think this is what I’m trying to do today. Sometimes I want to grab my own face, with my own hands just to get my own attention. I can’t help but wonder how much I’ve missed. Or am I missing more of the present, by constantly exploring the past? It’s a never ending search for the moment I’m in – to live in it, or reflect on it. It matters which thoughts I use to think thoughts. Each time I look at this picture, I know a new piece of the truth. And each time, I’m searching for what I knew about myself then, with the memories of what happened after.
Another visit to my mom’s and I stand once again in front of the fridge. This time I focus on the space between Stella’s feet and the ground. There’s a puddle she’s leaping over and in the puddle is a flare of sunlight. Another turtle? It was not often that my toes were on the ground either. Flight kept me busy. Much of my youth was trying to make sense of a body that wasn’t mine and stories that weren’t real. Flight was the easiest way to navigate what didn’t make sense.
Growing up, I spent most of my time at my dad’s house. Despite there being five females and one male, we rarely talked about women’s bodies or how they functioned. That was a private affair. Masturbation was left to Judy Blume books and fearful stories of hair growing on the palms of the hands who dared to explore the dark. Periods just appeared, breasts grew, and bras showed up in my underwear drawer without explanation. My body was never mine. It belonged to the church we never went to.
“Do you need a pad?” My stepmom asked after I announced that I had started my period. I squirmed. “I’ll send your dad to the store,” she said. The confusing part was that my stepmom acted like she was in control. For a while I believed I could hide from feeling powerless by giving it up rather than having it taken. But it would be more honest to say that I fought for my right to ignore what was uncomfortable, to ignore that I was the sick one because I resisted the truth for lies.
My stepmom used to make up stories with me right before bedtime. Not long before she died she struggled to keep her stories straight. Hers were always opiate laced lies predicated on half truths. Near the end, she was so far from telling anything truthful that she’d often lose track. But when I was younger she was more strategic and I was more willing to believe. One of her favorite mind-bending stories was about my mom. The sequence of events went like this: I’d walk into her bedroom and sit in her lap. She’d craft a story about my mom who was so helpless that she couldn’t care for herself. Every night she’d look surprised by my tears and say, “Oh Kate!” She’d pull me in close with one arm, cigarette in the other. We’d rock back and forth while I’d melt into the rise and fall of her chest. Secretly, I loved these moments. They were better than being in trouble. So I played my part well. I wept and she’d whisper in my ear that I’m too young to carry such heavy burdens.
Truth was always negotiable with her. Yet, hidden in her lies I could find morsels of the truth. In the end, amnesia was contagious and colluding with her for loyalty and safety was a poor exchange for truth and love. Nonetheless, I stopped talking to my mom in honor of an unspoken allegiance to my stepmom. Perhaps too much time had passed since I’d spoken with my mom. So she dropped off a card and a small plant as a way of making amends for something she didn’t know anything about. My stepmom and I watched the plant wither on my dresser for a few days until she said, “Kate, don’t you want to water that plant?”
I don’t have the words to explain how pivotal this question was. To this day I feel regret in my chest, my throat. Sometimes I still want to cry about it. It was the act of colluding with her lie that got me the most. Her question revealed that my allegiance to our story wasn’t reciprocated. My stepmom was loyal to her lies. She crafted a story that served only her. The painful part was that I had willingly agreed to conspire.
I searched for the one thing I had left, the one thing I will always have, myself. I was too little back then to understand, but I know now that it was a radical thing to begin listening to that small voice within – the one which I later have come to know as the quiet truth of my own embodied wisdom. It was this truth that made me run to my mom’s house the next day. I ran knowing I was the betrayer. My mom let me in and never asked why or what happened. It wasn’t until much later that I cried in her arms and asked for forgiveness.
In the retelling of this story years later, I can see how my stepmom’s lies exposed the truth. Showing up at my mom’s house I could tell she was struggling. The women in my family have struggled for generations. Lies are not always found in what we say, sometimes they’re found in what we don’t say. My mom, like our grandmothers, was being asked to choose, herself or her children. An impossible question with no answer. When she divorced my dad, both my dad and her dad wondered aloud how she would make it without a man. Who could she be without them, they asked?
Myself, she replied and changed her name to her mothers maiden name. A blow my grandfather almost couldn’t handle. The unbelievable part, and perhaps the part my stepmom was jealous of, is that my mom chose herself.
I was two when my parents divorced. “I wasn’t going to tell you this because I thought you were too young. But you need to understand. Your mom and I divorced because she had an affair. She lied to me.” I was 11 when my dad told me his version of their demise. It was only a few years after my stepmom started crafting her own stories about my mom. “My biggest fear is that you’ll turn into her, Kate.” He said. I felt like a ping pong ball and my dad had just lobbed me into the game. He threw me over the net to my mom where I landed, waiting to be struck back. Was I like her?
“Oh, I’m sorry he told you that, Kate. Yes, I did have an affair.” My mom told me she was trapped in her marriage, told me he had changed, she just wanted a playmate and my dad was too serious. It was his fault they divorced, she said. I landed back on the other side.
“Your mom smokes weed.” My dad said. “I’m thinking about going to court to get full custody of you girls.” I can’t help but wonder if all the lies were dropped, would I find the truth? Or if all the truths were dropped, would I find the lie? I was too little to know what to do. So I sat on the sideline for a while.
As I look back, the messy part is that truth was used as a weapon, not a tool for understanding. Their stories were true and they were used to gain my allegiance. Today I know that finding the truth is possible, but it’s meant to be done together. Without them, I had to do it alone. And tending to the bruises from the paddle and the dizzying nature of being tossed back and forth, the sideline felt like a reprieve.
The next visit to my mom’s I was in my late 40s, reflecting on a moment when I was in my 30s, about a time when I was in my 20s. Once again I'm in front of the fridge looking at the photo of Stella. My first wife and I had just moved into our house. Not long after, Mr. Byle, our 90 year old neighbor, told us the apricot trees inside our fence were really his. This whole street business got in the way of how life used to be, he said. Years had passed while houses, streets, sidewalks, and alleyways moved in. So much had changed while the Byle’s stood still. I liked his spunk. I never knew what it felt like to have a road paved through my yard, but I understood what it felt like to be divided and disjointed. So for a few years we carried over buckets of fruit and my wife mowed their lawn in the summer. In return, Mrs. Byle would feed her bologna sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise and a cup of hot sanka.
There was something about too many generations between us that made it easy to believe we could all get along. Maybe it was youthful hope that led me to imagine the road between our houses was narrow. The last time I crossed the street to the Byle’s it was not long after Mrs. Byle passed away. I brought him a casserole that my wife had cooked. Upon entering his cabin, I found a kitchen full of old food, molding fruit, and dishes piled in every corner. He had just enough counter space to fill a single cup with hot water from the kettle. After washing the last dish, I headed for the door. He snuck in front of me with just enough time to lock the deadbolt and slip his tongue in my mouth. I shuddered at the number of times women have had to dodge this move.
That night I didn’t get angry, instead I cried for dead Mrs. Byle, their 8 children who rarely visit, and for that one time when I was 17 and wanted to leave, but the boy I was with didn’t want me to. He told me it would be ok and that we didn’t have to have sex if I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it. Getting past Mr. Byle was as simple as a swipe to the left, he was frail and his clothes smelled like Fritos and old socks. But at 17, I felt pinned, so trapped that I didn’t fight. Instead I told myself an old lie, it would be easier if I could try to enjoy it. When that didn’t work, I quietly wept. Where was the fighter when I needed her? Before leaving, I snuck into his parents bedroom to look for a pad. When I couldn't find anything, I shoved toilet paper in my underpants to keep the blood from soaking into my jeans.
A few days after leaving Mr. Byle’s house, I got angry. I wasn't ashamed that Mr. Byle tried to trap me in his house, I was angry that I was ashamed. And fearful. How could I protect Stella if I couldn’t protect myself? I was working hard to not raise her with lies to unweave and yet I couldn’t find the truth of my own stories. “The world isn’t that bad, Sweet pea. I promise.” One more half truth to join the cacophony of the rest. The next day, my wife and I took the fruit trees back and we started cooking – apricot pie, apricot crumble, dried apricots, jarred apricots, chicken and apricots. I ate so many apricots I got sick. But I kept eating them. I was taking them back.
I’ve spent a lifetime battling with the truth and today I’m working to undo that story. Unraveling old lies has revealed that many times I’m the one hiding what I’m looking for. The cover story I told was that other people lied to me. It was the perfect tale to avoid challenging my own agency and voice. As a young kid, I often felt defensive, betrayed, duped. I never thought to walk away from the lies, instead I chose to work with them. I developed a sense of intuition so that I could tell when I was being lied to.
My first wife was about to have an affair. After 20 years of marriage I saw it developing and confronted her. I like to think I was patient enough to help her discover the truth – that she didn’t want to be married anymore. But if I were honest, I would have admitted that I didn’t want to be married either. For a week she danced around the truth while I watched her walk into it. I confronted her once again. “It’s not a big deal.” she said. “We didn’t have sex. We just kissed and slept in the same bed.” The truth was hard for both of us to witness.
I wanted her to do something to provoke a divorce and she was waiting for me to ask. We were daring each other into discovering the truth, while neither of us was brave enough to say it. The irony is that I knew the truth yet I still had to ask, and she offered a lie we both knew was a lie. I remember the lesson from my stepmom, lies can also contain the possibility of the truth. But now I think this is just a lie at the root of another lie. We are nothing without the truth.
Lies leave behind a dizzying texture, blurred and frayed at the edges. Yet as a reflection of a lie, truth moves with a vibration that is constantly settling into itself. I was taught to not know myself – to be confused by my truth. Emerging out of that confusion, I understood that I had no need to search, I simply needed to filter what I already knew. Isn’t that how we become anyway? We try on what we imagine fitting only to find it’s too big or too small. Removing the fabric, we search for a glove only to find it constraining later on. In the end, it doesn’t matter anyway because we are never finished with the truth. What matters most is which truths we use to make truths. In a moment of self discovery, I found that my stepmom, my mom, my ex-wife, we all came together to witness the truth – we just ended up witnessing it through lies.
Growing up, I thought my ancestors were great warriors. The women in my family came from Norway, Germany and England. Exploring our cultural background from the construction of Christianity, I struggled to untangle myself with another half truth. We were warriors, only we were connected to war through fighting, killing, violence, theft, theft of land, theft of culture, theft of life. Every generation since my great grandmothers came to the United States, has participated and fought in war – the French Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. The women in my family gave their lives, gave their children's lives, and took the lives of others.
Going back even farther, during the 15th and 16th centuries, the Christianization of Europe led to the loss of millions of lives. The church of Rome set up the inquisition to enforce its will on anyone who wasn’t morally righteous. I settled into my own righteous body once again. It was out of these religious persecutions that came the witch hunts. A hunt for women throughout time who have been healers, wise women, valkyries, and women at the edge of social change. Not only am I a descendant of colonizers, but I’m also a descendant of witches.
There is something at the crux of these two truths. At the site of this injury, I can find a path to surrendering the parts of myself that tell lies, seek truth, and claim innocence at the same time. Yet after all that, I’m still wondering, where did my lies begin? And how many did I tell my daughter? I didn’t call her on her birthday last year. The day came and went, and I never picked up the phone. I think I sent a lame text the next day, “Happy Belated Birthday, Sweet pea!” As if my enthusiasm would hide the discrepancy. But here’s the thing, I thought about her birthday months in advance. I prepared birthday ideas and imagined putting elaborate packages in the mail so that they’d arrive ahead of time. But, oh! I just forgot. Or, maybe it was a silly mistake. “Oh! My gosh, Stella! I’m just so forgetful these days.” But there it is again, that half truth. The real thing is that I miss being a mother. I miss it so much that I’d rather forget that my child is getting older and that another birthday just came and went.
It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t know how to do this part. How do I casually say to this fully formed and separate human being, who used to be the size of a pea, who at one time both shaped and was shaped by my body, “I miss you. I can’t believe I don’t know all the details of each moment of your life anymore. It feels weird to be this far apart.”
I’m still working out how to tell my daughter that the world is hard, and at the same time, let that be a truth from which she can define herself. Too often I have searched for a panacea, a fix-all, so I can be done with whatever it is I want to leave behind. But the real work is being in the constant discovery of truth. And the risk, is the possibility of feeling more deeply. But at what point do we heal? At what point do we do something different? Because I think that’s where the cure lives.
The many sides of my family's stories – the truths, the half truths, the silent lies, the manipulation and collusion – all expose a story of a time before, a trauma re-lived and the recognition of our embeddedness in the world. Our stories serve as a reminder of our journey together. Even though I may want to, I can’t write the truth out of history, but I can grow into it.
A few years before my dad died I was visiting him in Palm Desert with my aunts and uncles. We were eating mixed nuts, drinking jack and gingers and playing cribbage by the pool. Dad said, the Dyna Shore Golf Tournament is coming up. I brightened up and said, “This is when all the lesbians come to Palm Springs to play golf.” Dad laughed, “Why are all those lesbians so ugly, Kate?”
There it was, that grand canyon of a fissure. Only this time the betrayal stung deep. He died before I got to share that with him. Today, I can still feel the pull of my 20 year old self laughing with him and acting out the part of his beautiful daughter who wasn’t like those ugly lesbians. Deceit didn’t start with my birth, nor will it end with my death.
There’s something about truth, innocent lying, volitional deceit and weaponized truth that arises in each of these stories. Perhaps it’s that none of them are ever stagnant. Perhaps the truth is that there’s always some piece of truth out there, it just takes life’s experiences to figure them out. Each time I look at that picture of my daughter I re-evaluate once again. What do I believe? I’m reminded that belief in my family has always been tied to the colonizing disputes of Christianity – a religious practice we only half-way participated in. Belief was tied to morality and morality was always a distraction from a greater peril. One that blinded us into arguing amongst ourselves for who’s truth got to tell the final story. Today I suppose I am pulling on those threads – those unending lists of blunders and disjointed stories of gaslighting as a way of continuing to weave in the truth.
It’s not lost on me that I go to my mom’s each time to reassess and examine this picture of my daughter. In my family, we find each other in our mothers and our mothers' mothers. I know my daughter, her temperament, her likes, her dislikes. We’ve been learning from each other since the very beginning, when she was just thought, an idea. And even before I imagined her, as a little egg she spent time in my body while I was inside my mom. All three of us, linked in body, one informing the other who informs the other. Like Russian dolls, we nested inside the roots of our grandmothers and great grandmothers. Just like me, I know her intensity and determination comes from the strength of our shared stories. So I know her and I know her well. And I like to think about the future she is carrying – the seed of some little butterfly that may come into being. Whoever they are, if they carry an x chromosome will have also spent time with me, being shaped and informed by the me who was waiting for the butterfly to land in her arms that day.
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