Caught in a Lie
This evening my oldest (kindergarten) daughter said something offhand that struck me as odd. It was something like “My friends at school think it is really cool you’re a geologist.” To which my immediate reply was, “I’m not a geologist, have you been telling the kids at school I am?”
I’m pretty sure this is her first experience getting caught in a deep lie. I got her to elaborate: she has been telling her teacher and classmates for a few days now that I’m a geologist, thus so she knows a lot about rocks. This has caused the lie to balloon and grow far beyond her control. She felt obligated to show her expertise, so she made stuff up about rocks to tell the class, told of trips that we would take to the beach to collect rocks for my job, etc.
It has been only a few weeks since we transferred her to a new school. We’re very happy with the school and the decision, but the transition has been hard on her. Apparently her way to try and impress her classmates and make friends was via what surely started as just a little lie, and now she knows what it feels like when a lie gets a life of its own.
She is devastatingly afraid of telling them the truth now — which I’ve insisted she do. The plan is she will take in one of the more impressive rocks from my childhood rock collection (and her teddy bear for comfort) in with her and fess up. I told her to explain that while I do know a lot about rocks, I am not a geologist, and to apologize. Her fear is that her teacher will be mad and all her new friends will not like her anymore.
My advice to her was as follows: Your friends won’t really care about the lie, they will respect you more for telling the truth. Your classmates don’t like you because you told them I’m a geologist, they like you because of you. You will feel much better because it will be over.
There are many milestones in our lives, but until you witness your own child going through it, you don’t think about things like getting caught in your first big lie as one of them. It also gives a new perspective to help coach someone through the situation, and hopefully in the future if something like this happens to me I’ll remember my own advice to her — and have a teddy bear to hold for comfort.
