How and Why I Was an Adopted Kid Who Lied

When I was a child, I used to ask my mother to tell me my story. Every detail felt important, like pieces in a puzzle. If my mom told the story and left out the part about the curtains she had just made before the social worker’s arrival sailing out the window, for example, the story would have felt unsettling to me, and I would not feel easeful in my body until she took the time to tell it right.

Who, after all, wants a puzzle with missing pieces? What happiness is there in that—an almost-completed picture? What person, ever, has gone to the store and requested a puzzle with a few missing pieces? The point of a puzzle is its eventual wholeness.

Discovering lies was like finding a pen that could write on air. Once in an early 1970s spring day, my mom was making chocolate chip cookies. She told us three kids that whoever saw a robin first could have the spoon she’d used to stir the batter.

We all ran outside, looking at the trees, the telephone wires, the lawn. I saw no robin, and I desperately wanted the spoon. My mother, I realized, would not know if I had seen a robin or not, but if I told her I’d seen one, she would believe me. I could change the world with the things I said!

What I hadn’t counted on was the look of disbelief on my mother’s face when I ran into the kitchen with the news. “So fast?” she’d asked.

My body felt sick, like the time I’d fallen into the deep end of the pool before I knew how to swim. The only way for me to stay the same person in my mother’s eyes, the good girl, the one who always did the right thing, was to do whatever it took to keep my head above water. “It had a big red belly. It pulled a worm out of the ground and flew away before Sam and John could see it!” I told her. If I could make my mother see the robin, I thought, she’d have to believe I was telling the truth. The robin would live in her head, a real thing now.

I got the spoon, but I also had an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t supposed to be my spoon, and yet I had it. John and Sam believed my story which both did and didn’t surprise me. Part of my history that only I knew was that my other mother was a queen, which meant I was a princess. Someday my mother was going to come back and get me. Until then, I would do the best I could with this ordinary life, but I deserved special treatment. It wasn’t my fault I was a princess. It wasn’t my fault I deserved to be treated as one.

I went into the backyard with the spoon so could lick it clean without having to look at my mother’s or my brother’s faces.

The trick, I’d learn over the years, was to believe the stories I told so that I could get my way but not have to suffer the guilt of knowing that what I said was not actually true.

If I said things were true, I’d discovered, the saying made it (almost) so.

 Slipping in and out of factual reality was very cinematic. Like reading a beloved book. Why have just any old life when I could create a better reality with words? After a while, dealing with reality straight on just didn’t make sense when I knew I had the power to use language and change it.