Truth, and How I Learned To Tell It; Coming Clean (Part 2)

(Continued from Part I)

At this point I've been unleashed onto the world, and I have no idea how to admit to making a mistake.  I have never made a mistake that wasn't punished harshly.  I've never NOT been yelled at, criticized, called stupid for making mistakes I didn't know existed.  

"Never put metal in a microwave!"  Cool, daddy-o.  Do you think you could have told me that when we got the microwave?  

"I shouldn't have to tell you how this works!"  Um, why not?

"You should know better!"  I heard this approximately four zillion times.  I could never figure out how I should know better, since no one had ever explained anything to me.  

So any time I was in a position to say, "Oops, sorry," I couldn't.  I froze.  I was terrified of being yelled at.  I didn't know what to do.  It's been twenty years since I attended college, but I can think of three classes off the top of my head that I could have gotten credit for taking if I'd gone to the professors and said, "Um, I'm having trouble with the material.  Can you help me?"  A single five minute conversation, and I would have known what to do.  Instead, I let it build until it was too late, and then just ghosted the final class.  I loved the schoolwork, I loved classes, but when I got stuck, I didn't know how to handle it.  In my brain, it was always my fault, and I had to pretend I knew what I was doing in order to be accepted.  After I bailed on the last class, I would avoid that professor for the rest of my life because I knew they hated me now.  

Super healthy, right??

All that to say, not so much with the whole admitting-I've-made-a-mistake dealio.

I worked a crappy temp job after college.  I did a great job, and the boss kept saying she'd hire me as a regular employee, but it kept not being true.  We always had a ton of work, and she was happy to authorize overtime for me to catch them up with different tasks.  I was hired through a temp agency, so I filled out a little carbon postcard timesheet every week, and my boss signed it and we mailed it to the agency.  One Saturday, I forgot that I'd put down overtime hours for that day, and didn't come to work at all.  I panicked when I arrived on Monday and saw my timesheet.  I thought I would just skate by, but my boss called me into her office.  I told her I'd worked the hours, and she asked me what times.  I didn't know what else to do, so I said I'd worked in the afternoon.  She let me go back to my desk, and then called another employee to see her.  Then my coworker went back to her desk.  I tried to concentrate on work, but I was panicked.  I could see this activity from my desk, playing out moment by moment.  My boss called me back in, and said that my coworker had worked during the afternoon, and I wasn't there.  

I was terrified that she would yell at me, that she would fire me, that she would tell me I was a horrible person and didn't deserve to have the job.

She asked me what had happened, and why I said what I did to her.  I told her what happened, that I was really scared, and that I could make up the hours during the week.  She said that we'd fix the timecard and that there wouldn't be any more overtime after that.

That was all.

There wasn't any yelling.  There wasn't any blame.  She even served as a reference for me when I applied for and got a regular position in another department.  She didn't hate me.  It was a mistake, and she probably chalked it up to my inexperience in the workplace.  That's what I would do now, as a manager.  I would probably do a little more behavioral coaching than she did, but that's how I roll.  

What I don't do these days is lie, or hide, or look around for cover or plausible deniability.  I learned from my mistakes.  (No, that wasn't even close to the only one!)  I've developed a healthy relationship with the truth, and, as malleable as the world around us may be, I do my best to see my behavior clearly.  When someone accuses me of doing otherwise, I check myself, and then I look carefully at them.  

That's what life with my mother taught me.

Truth, and How I Learned To Tell It; Or, As You Reap, So Shall You Sow, Dammit. (Part 1)

You may have gleaned that I grew up in a crooked house with weird ways, and my body and soul formed with a permanent list to one side.  I didn't know who I'd find when I walked down the stairs into the kitchen each morning; would it be Affable Dad, or Angry Bastard?  Would it be Neutral Mom, or Critical Angryface?  They say you should choose wisely.  If I'd had a choice, I would have!  Any choice I had was strictly in the land of The Lady or the Tiger, and just as dangerous.

I was always on edge, holding my face in neutral until I found the lay of the land.  I was always going to be at fault, blamed for whatever might happen that day.  My brother would start hitting my sister, I would pull them apart, and I was yelled at.  I was constantly in trouble, or on trial for just being me.  "Can't you fix your hair!"  "Why don't you change into something NICE for a change!"  "What is WRONG with you!"  All non-questions posed as questions, later explained as "Well, I was just trying to HELP.  You said you wanted to make more friends; maybe if you looked better, more kids would want to be friends with you."  Even years later, when I repeated her words back to her, hoping she would apologize, the only response I got was this gem:  "Well you know what I MEANT."

I learned to hide at an early age, to do my best to obscure any- and everything I could.  Any facial expression, any betraying gesture, any word spoken --- they were all calculated for the least possible impact, with no revelation of my actual emotions.  Every one of my reactions was modulated to within an inch of its lives.  

I find myself tap-dancing around the subject at hand, because I can anticipate the voices that still live in my head.  If I say that I learned to become a liar in order to survive, then here comes the onslaught:  "The LIE is that you were mistreated!  I can't believe you would tell all these LIES about our family!  You've always been so overdramatic, and now you're ADMITTING that you lied all along!  You've always been so DIFFICULT."  (If you'd been raised in that house, you'd hear the all caps, too.  #funnynotfunny)

It's taken me a long time to reconcile my life in that house, and understand why I behaved as I did.  For decades, I was broken, I was wrong, I was stupid, I was ugly, and I was their albatross.  ("'Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it."  Yes, I'm a geek.)  I could not do anything right.  With nowhere to hide, I hid in plain sight.  I pretended a lot.  And yes, I lied to my mom to survive.  If I felt cornered, I would look her straight in the eye and lie to her.  

I mean, of course I did.  I was a kid.  I didn't have any other option.  I was trying to make my life bearable.  Sometimes that meant dodging the truth, but other times, I just flat-out lied to make things easier.   

I needed to survive.  But I also watched my mother operate for decades.  My mother knew how to put herself in the most favorable light possible; she preened under the spotlight, loved the attention, and bathed in adulation.  And if someone called her behavior into question, Katy bar the door.  The world might still end before she admits to any wrongdoing; I know I won't see that day.  I watched her bend the truth, I watched her break it, I watched her run circles around people until they didn't know which way was up.  I kept telling myself that she loved me, she couldn't be lying to me, and I was an ungrateful daughter who didn't deserve the roof over her head.  Indoctrinated, sure.  But I also learned her methods:  how to squirm around the question until you were answering a different question entirely.  And maybe the question had only changed in your own mind, not the questioner's.  

Backwards engineering the question was one of her favorites.  If you could change the question to ask for the information in front of you, you could change the entire interaction in your favor.  

So let's say, for example, you've made a bet with someone about a television show, and the answer to the question is back at your place.  They drop you off, you run to the source of the information, you check it out, and find the answer.  

Normally, someone would see it, and figure out whether they were right or wrong.  

My mother would look at the information, and figure out how to make herself right.

(End of Part 1.  Part 2 forthcoming.)