Entry #23: TRUTH

George Washington and I have something in common: I cannot tell a lie. I don't even try. I've learned how to keep my mouth shut when the truth would be hurtful, but basically I abhor any kind of deceit. My motto is: Always Go with the Truth - or Play Dumb If Absolutely Necessary.

I do NOT mean to suggest I am any kind of super-virtuous person. Not at all. Really I'm just a simpleton. Little George is held up as a role model for kiddies across America, and he went on to accomplish extraordinary things. I'm just a product of my upbringing, and it's a miracle I ever did anything.

I was raised in a steaming swamp of lies, half-truths, and manipulated information - and I had NO IDEA I was being mislead about virtually everything because it began when I was born. I never knew anything else. I was like a lamb to the slaughter - and it didn't become clear to me until I was a teenager.  I'll tell you exactly when I realized I had a big problem.

My mother was addicted to alcohol, and addicts lie. To everyone. All the time. They lie for no reason. They lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth. They will lie about anything, from the mundane (what time it is) to the important (what the doctor said).  Maybe they lie to themselves so much about their addiction that the truth doesn't matter to them any more. Maybe they are so high all the time that they can't tell the difference between what they imagine to be true and what is actually true. Or maybe they just enjoy wreaking havoc by deliberately confusing everyone around them. Whatever the reason, never trust addicts about anything. No matter how sincere they appear, they're lying.

My mother was not bright, but she was a Machiavellian genius. She knew instinctively that as long as she was the only person who knew all the pieces of a puzzle, everyone in the family would have to keep returning to her to try to figure out what the hell was going on. She told different bits of each story to different people, and ALWAYS presented an incomplete picture of the truth. She would deliberately omit important pieces of information from each person she talked to. She was phenomenally squirrelly and used indirect answers, lies of omission, and purposely misleading statements to keep us all off guard and not fully informed.

My mother’s modus operandi was Divide and Conquer. She pitted my siblings and me against each other. We didn't realize we were being told different stories because she deliberately kept us apart, and we didn’t even catch on. 

When my oldest brother was being rebellious, we were forbidden to speak to him. At the time she said this was “doctor’s orders,” but today I highly doubt it. She told my other brother for years and years that I was stupid and a terrible financial burden. He believed it. She told me for years and years that he was a perpetual student dithering over his Ph.D. and always asking for money. I believed her. Keeping us at odds with each other secured her position of power in the family. No one really wanted anything to do with my mother, but we had to keep returning to her because she was the only one who had access to all the information about our lives. Knowledge is power.

To complicate things further, my mother wanted her only daughter – me – to be a mini-me. She gave me her own full name at birth. She wanted to create someone who would adore her, who would see things exactly as she did, and who would back her up and agree with all her machinations. She went out of her way to create a little person who would be her sidekick forever and ever. It was sick, it was evil, and it worked for a long time.

My mother used to drive around a lot with me in the car. She would tell me things and then admonish me not to tell another soul. She would complain about my father's miserable salary, tell me exactly how much it was, and then tell me never to reveal this information to anyone. She would tell me inappropriate things about the neighbors and swear me to secrecy. And she would put her own unique spin on current events: the Russians were wonderful, Walt Disney was the evil empire, the songs on the radio were ALL about sex, pop music was for perverted mental midgets, etc. The more popular and “normal” something was, the more she demonized it, and vice versa. After awhile I was afraid to say anything to anybody, plus I was terrified of my father, the neighbors, the President of the United States, Bambi, pop music, and every other aspect of modern culture. My only trusted source of information was… my mother.

My mother was the original Luddite, with some very skewed geopolitical ideas thrown in for good measure. Technology – anything electronic, and certainly anything with a screen – was completely unacceptable. The more amazing a technological development was, the less interested she was. When my father expressed interest in buying a desktop computer, she was OUTRAGED. “Oh come on,” she said snidely. “You already have a shortwave radio!”

At the time I thought this was hilarious, but it turns out she was serious. She was so un-interested that she never figured out what a computer was, or what computers did. Ever.

It's hard to believe, but I made it as far as high school before I became aware that everything I had learned from this extremely closed-minded person was false. Everything. Without realizing it, I'd been a chump all my life.

The class was discussing Modern European History, and I raised my hand and passed along some of my mother's "the Russians are perfectly lovely" nonsense. Today I realize that she actually knew nothing whatsoever about Russia or Russian history, and probably based her pro-Russian bias on some Russian novels she'd read as a girl. She also often talked about having studied the language, but as I never heard her speak a syllable of Russian, this was probably a lie, also. Or maybe she just flunked the class.

My teacher - the wonderful Mrs. Ralph, whom I adored - stopped the history class and looked at me curiously. "Who told you that?" she asked. Class ground to a halt and everyone looked at me.

I mumbled "my mother," and slid down in my chair. I was mortified. As I listened to the facts about the First World War, I realized all of my mother's anti-establishment views about Mother Russia were seriously delusional. She was not being deeply insightful or leading a counter-cultural revolution. She was nuts.

People outside the family may have suspected my mother was a little wacky, but no one knew how bad things really were. When Artiste met my mother, she played the innocent little-old-lady-in-tennis-shoes role to the hilt, and won him over right away. "Why are you so angry with your mother?" he would ask. "All she said was...." This, of course, drove me wild. In time he realized every word that came out of her mouth, no matter how innocent, was calculated to confuse or offend on a deeper level. When she was among family she would drop her pretenses and say things that were jaw-droppingly rude or cruel, but with most people she used an exaggerated kind of politeness that masked her total contempt for the rest of the world.

If you can, try to imagine that everything your mother ever told you was a lie. I felt the ground falling away beneath my feet. I could not be certain about ANYTHING IN MY BRAIN. I had the same feeling I got when I was little and tried to imagine the size of the universe and all the stars within it. That was the enormity of my problem.

What was I supposed to do? Learn everything all over again? How do you do that? How do you separate fact from fiction when you’re already in high school? How do you un-learn lies you were taught before you could talk? I imagine children raised in a cult have a similar problem if they try to leave. How do they ever get rid of all the programming they received from birth?

It turns out that, independently, my surviving brother had a similar revelation. We both came to the realization that my mother was a lying liar, and that we were going to have to re-learn everything. Unbeknownst to each other, we both developed exaggerated habits of verifying every piece of information that entered our brains.

My ex-sister-in-law tells a story about driving along in the passenger seat beside my brother. “STOP!” she screamed, seeing a child on a tricycle. My brother kept driving. “Why?” he asked. “THAT CHILD!” she yelled. My brother kept driving. “Where?” he asked. He was NOT going to stop that car until he personally had verified that yes, there was a good reason to do so. Because other people cannot be trusted, and all incoming data must be verified. My brother is an absolutely brilliant analytical thinker, and will examine every piece of information from 237 perspectives before moving on the next step. You have to have extreme patience with this, but you know whatever he tells you is correct, and his employers value him for that.

My way of dealing with my sudden cognitive vacuum was to start asking questions – lots and LOTS of questions. I ALWAYS have questions. People laugh at me for asking so many questions. People get tired of discussing things with me. But I have to know what is True, and I will chase down a topic to the ends of the earth until I have satisfied myself that I know the Truth, to the extent knowing the Truth possible. I narrowly missed ending up a fact-checker, probably because I am more interested in big ideas than whether Volkswagen introduced round tail-lights in 1972 or 1973.

An unexpected result of having had to build a brand-new brain in high school is that I developed an instinct for the fault lines in other people’s arguments. When something did not add up, I would ask questions. Often people didn’t like it. Often they treated me like I was stupid. But after decades of asking questions, I know in my gut when I’m right, and I won’t back down. This is not an endearing quality, but I truly can’t help it.

An unexpected bonus of emancipating myself from my mother’s lies is that I became an independent thinker. I have no use for authority figures unless they are smarter than I am. And I taught my children to be the same way. They HATED it when I made them research the most difficult paper or pick the most obscure individual to study. But today they are the smartest people I know, and they have reached their own conclusions about what they believe, who they are, and what they will do with their lives. I could not be more proud.

I ask my friends for their forgiveness for those times when I am being obdurate, or when I get stuck on verifying something that seems unimportant. To my psyche, it’s matter of life or death. If I had kept going along as my mother’s mini-me, I would have ended up a stunted, deluded, miserable person with an early intellectual death. Instead, I chose life and jumped the track. Even though my mother swears there is a “secret Nellie” inside me who agrees with her every word, that Nellie is dead. The Nellie you know may be a pain in the ass, but she will always be loyal and true.

"Re-examine all you have been told

at school or church or in any book,

dismiss whatever insults your own soul."

- Walt Whitman