Canadian Olympic gold medallist and Winnipeg mom Jill Officer gives us a twice-monthly look behind the scenes of her dual life in her blog, Jill’s House.
Often Camryn likes to play this little game with me when I pick her up from school. As she is coming down the hallway, she will hide behind these pillars in the hall and sneak from one to another while I am looking through her backpack for that day’s art, teacher notes and agenda.
One particular day, she was sneaking up on me and while I saw her coming, I played along. When she jumped out from behind the last pillar I acted surprised.
“Mom, did I scare you?!”
“You surprised me!” I said.
“But mom, I wanted to….”
I couldn’t understand the rest of what she said because she immediately started to cry, whine and meltdown.
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I knelt down to talk to her and finally after a few minutes of reminding her she needed to calm down because I couldn’t understand her, she sadly told me she wanted to scare me, not surprise me.
Silly mom.
I guess I should have went along with what she said, instead of honestly telling her she surprised me, not scared me. Basically, I should have lied.
While I understand this is a very simple situation where I could have told a little white lie, I guess I haven’t learned to lie to her…yet.
I am not a liar, hate lying and always swore I would never lie to my kid, with the exception of Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy of course. I mean I don’t want to have the one kid who shows up to school and tells the other kids that Santa isn’t real!
But I am learning that there are just some situations where a little white lie will save both my kid and me some grief.
For a period of time early on I would keep all of her artwork or things that she made because when I asked her if I could throw it out, trying to be respectful of her work, she would of course cry, “no!” and take whatever it was from me so that it didn’t make it to the garbage can.
I learned that either I was going to have a huge pile of artwork or I was going to learn to avoid telling her I threw a bunch of stuff in the trash. So, I began keeping things for a period of time and if she didn’t ask about it or mention it, after awhile I would throw it out.
Halloween candy? After giving her some, garbage.
Valentine cards? Keep for a while, then garbage.
I am realizing that eventually I will need to teach her that we need to let certain things go, but for now, these tiny fibs are keeping both of us from having a meltdown!
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