Several years ago, some friends came over to my house for a girls night. At the end of the night I was loaning one gal some clothes for a wedding, and my friends saw my new-to-me pair of gold Christian Louboutin heels in my closet. I modeled them for the crowd and they oogled appropriately. I told them how I had scored them on a facebook-garage-sale website and gotten a great deal. I was starting to feel self conscious (my friends being more practical than I) about the perceived amount of money I had spent on the shoes. “How much?” one friend asked. And I lied.
It was the most ridiculous thing, because I rounded down by maybe $100 dollars in order to make myself appear less extravagant, less impractical, less foolish. To my practical friend I am sure whatever I said I spent still sounded exorbitant, so my goal of seeming thrifty was not achieved. And I was convicted the entire next day as I played phone tag with FIVE girls to confess to them that it was so dumb but I hadn’t been honest the night before. I asked forgiveness. I was so humiliated. Seriously. It pains me to write this, even now.
But I am writing it nonetheless, because it leads into a moment where a major parenting shift took place for me. A few days later I was correcting my (then 4-year-old) son for dishonesty. I was telling him he didn’t make the right choice after he lied, because he lied again to cover it up. I told him that I don’t expect perfection from him — I knew he would lie again, but that the most important aspect of integrity is owning up when you do the wrong thing and confessing quickly. I told him how it’s easy for one lie to snowball, and that in our house it is safe to make mistakes but that you need to own it quickly and try to make it right if possible. This was probably the one thousandth time I had repeated this speech. But this time, almost offhand, I said “mommy had to do that just this week.”
He was stunned.
He asked for the whole story.
I told him.
This is not an endorsement of being your child’s best friend, or telling them everything, by any means. But somehow my child had made nearly 5 years old thinking that I obey all of our rules perfectly. I had previously told him that I make mistakes too, but without the explicit play-by-play it had not sunk in. I had been vague and he needed specifics.
In that moment he got to see that our family value (you are safe to make mistakes) was not just aspirational: even mommy was safe to make mistakes. It was an amazing conversation, and since that day he has never lied to me again!
heh. Kidding, naturally. That day was a shift not in his behavior, but in my belief about the importance of (wise) transparency before our kids, and about the importance of being vulnerable about our own experiences and lessons, and not just preaching at a child in generalities. I was so grateful for this accidental moment.
Of course, like all of my awesome parenting moments this one ends hilariously: with my son telling everyone we encountered for a week that “mommy lies sometimes too.” Great. Thanks, son. Sorry, cashier at Hobby Lobby.
But you know what? I’ll take it. Despite a little bit of embarrassment, that conversation has reaped a huge harvest of “safety to confess” in our house, and it was totally worth it.
And so were the shoes.
