Sweet Little Lies.

"Mama, I don't feel good, I need a doctor."


15 minutes later...


"Mama, I'm hungry. I need some candy."


15 minutes later...


"I need some water."


And the real clincher...


"Mama, I need to check my emails."


My mind was blown at that point that a 2-year-old could come up with that many lies in one night and nearly pull off at least half of them with a look of grave concern furrowing her little brow and only a poorly concealed smirk on her face giving her away...oh, and the fact that she does not have an email account...


At least not that I know of...


After checking to make sure she's not actually sick, cold, hungry, or thirsty, I call her bluff and put her right back to bed. It's easy for a child, even at 2, to figure out how to play on your fears. Hopefully, I'll be on top of my game at sorting the truth from the lies by the time she's a teenager, but I admit, sometimes she pulls one over on me. It made me start realizing that by the time I came around my own mom was already a professional bullshit detector. I was her fifth child and never stood a chance.


The first lie I ever remember telling was a desperate ploy for attention. My sisters had abandoned me to play with their much older, more sophisticated next door neighbor, Kim. I was told to go home. At four years old, I found myself experiencing an emotion I have come to know as strong resentment...An emotion that would move into my life like a silent sibling, taking score and emerging just when I'd been teased too many times or left out of the fun. As I stomped toward home, all I knew for sure was that Kim was the reason for all this misery. 


My mom was in the kitchen, hastily whipping up one of her store-brand staple dinners for our large brood of unruly brats when I entered. I leaned back against the fridge and for a few dramatic moments, stood there pouting, hoping she would notice all the hardship etched on my face and take pity. She darted between the oven and the cabinets, searching for ingredients to spice up whichever soup of the day it was before settling on bouillon cubes. 


"Hhhuuuuuhhh," I forced a long sigh out of my chest.


Either she didn't notice me standing there, or she wasn't in the mood to play along with my exaggerated strife. 


It was going to take something more to get her attention.


My little brain cells began to divide furiously, searching for the best way to explain to my mother in a way that she would understand how dire it was that I was banned from being a part of the makeup and purse party happening 50 yards away in the house behind ours. 


"Kim pierced my ears."


I wasn't even sure where the words came from, but I noticed her slow her pace to the sink. She turned and looked down at me, as if through a fog.


"She pierced my ears." 


It felt wretched to manufacture such an enormous falsehood and I was immediately ashamed that I'd even thought of such a thing, but there was no turning back. My lower lip trembled and my eyes filled with tears. If I was going to speak an untruth, I may as well believe it wholeheartedly.


Mom stepped closer and crouched down to have a look, mild concern flashing in her eyes. My hands shot up to my ear lobes. 


"Let me see them." 


My sisters and I knew that we would not be allowed to pierce our ears until Confirmation, a Catholic sacrament symbolizing the entrance into adulthood in the Church. The pierced ears were part of our family tradition that symbolized the blossoming of a girl into womanhood. Pierced ears were most certainly not for little girls. 


My voice quivered, "She was being mean to me and she held me down and twisted my ear lobes around and around and around and then stuck them with an earring." I spouted out detail after detail so quickly, I'd hardly time to think of the next thing to say. Meanwhile, I twisted my ear lobes around, my hands never leaving them, lest my mother catch a glimpse of my hole-less lobes. 


"I see."


I blinked up at her innocently, my description of the injustice sounding unlikely, even to my own ears. 


"So that's how they pierce ears nowadays...they twist them, huh?"


I began to blush.


"Oh yes. She twisted them around and around so that they would stay spiraled."


Instant embellishment. Never was my strong point.


My hands stayed clamped to my earlobes. There was a long pause and an arched eyebrow somewhere in there.


"Well, that sounds terrible. Go wash your hands. I need you to help me set the table."


That certainly was not the outcome I was expecting. Though I had come in hoping for her to coddle me and vow revenge on that sister-stealing Kim, I felt curiously relieved as I headed to the sink to wash up. It was uncertain to me whether she was on to my little lie or not, but the lack of punishment was encouraging. Rather than seeing it for what it was: a "get out of jail free" card, I decided to chalk it up to my story-telling ability. 


The following are lies I told subsequently throughout my life, as a direct result of my misread calculation of my mastery of deception:

• "I didn't steal half of your milk jug of quarters, Dad. I found them in the street in front of Mrs. Green's house."

• "My teacher, Mrs. Marshmallow, says that I'm already smarter than every kid in your grade, including you." (...To my sister who is nearly 4 years older than me. I was not in school yet. I really liked marshmallows.)

• "Oh yeah? Well my family is moving next week and I'll be going to a new school that has a candy machine in every single hallway and it's free and I'm going to send bags and bags back to everyone except you because you're a fart!"

• "I LOVE Boyz II Men and street hockey! It's not at all because J.T.T. expressed his love for them in an in-depth, probing interview for BOP magazine. It's because those things really speak to my soul. They make me excited for life!"

• "No, Mrs. Smith. No I wasn't trying to blow really hard into my thumbs in an attempt to pass out with my other 6th grade pals. I was just trying to show them how dumb the idea was. Oh this? It's a funny story...I just happened to pass out while I was showing them what a dumb idea it was and cut my chin open on the concrete ledge."

• "Oh, I'm not wearing this black and white Beastie Boys shirt because I'm trying to impress this boy I know who likes them. I'm just really into heavy metal." 

• "Oh, hi friend's dad who happens to be the police officer that busted up the 200-count pond party. No, I wasn't here to party. I just came here to leave."

• "This shirt? No this isn't your brand new shirt with the tag still on, sis. This is my friend Julie's shirt. She bought the same one today and let me wear it."

• "Dad, those aren't my beer bottles left by a smoldering campfire you specifically told me not to have. Those belong some guys that I know who took it completely upon themselves to start a fire in our back yard and party."

• "Dad, I'm not pass-out drunk! I'm just laying here because I'm really tired and felt the need to instantly hit the ground and fall asleep at your feet."

• "Mom, it's 'senior skip day.' Everyone's parents call them off and the teachers don't even assign anything because no one shows up."

• "Yes, hi, this is Ruth's mother. She won't be coming in today. She's in bed with the flu. Thanks."

• "Officer, do you have to give me a ticket? Can't you see I'm homeless? I'm living out of my car right now. Why was I speeding? Because I just got off work and it's a long drive back to Wadsworth. What's in Wadsworth, you ask? Oh, I live there at my parents house....DOH!" (Had I not been so dumb, I may have pulled it off. Was moving out of the dorm and back into the 'rents house that night during a school break, so my car was filled to the brim with clothes and boxes.)

• "Honey, your mustard-colored jumpsuit you found at Gabriel Brother's totally doesn't make you look like you play for some kind of 1970's McDonald's basketball team." (yeah...that lie didn't last too long.)

• "Babies. They fart all the time. Heh."

Bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "dropping the kids off at the pool..."

Anyone driving or walking down Marie Avenue in Akron, Ohio on any given day in 1985 or '86 might have heard the voice of a little girl in an upstairs window calling out...

"MOM! I NEED YOU TO COME WIPE MY BUTTHOLE!"

For those people who know me or my family, I'm sure it's completely unsurprising that some of my earliest memories are about poop.

It seems my family's genetics predisposed all four of my brothers, all four of my sisters, and me to senses of humor and comedic timing centered around the toilet. On what chromosomal pairing does poop humor lie you ask? The missing one.

My first memory of poop was very early. I must have been about a year and a half because I was still waddling around in a diaper and my vocabulary was limited to a couple words here and there.

On this particular day, my mother was in the bedroom, folding "Mount Clothesmore," our not-so-fondly-named perpetual tower of laundry. In her distraction, she didn't notice me leave the room. I had a mission I was dying to complete and I would have done it much earlier if the family would just leave me to my own devices for a change instead of constantly picking me up and setting me down away from the objects of my curiosity. I entered the bathroom and headed straight for it. There it was, gleaming in all of its ivory porcelain glory, its upper deck sweating in the hot summer air. The toilet looked more mysterious and magnificent than ever. I eagerly peered over the lid and, to my delight, a lone floater met my eye. Unsure of what it was, but too young to care, my hand shot straight into the bowl to claim my prize.

With each poke, the turd bobbed elusively away from my dimpled hand and I found myself myself reaching further and further into the toilet. My oldest brother entered the bathroom just as I was about to take a nosedive into the toilet bowl, startling the tiny living shit right out of me by shouting, "MOM!"

In a breath, I was being plucked from the edge of my watery fate and deposited in the adjacent sink, elbow deep in soap suds and trying to make sense of the flurry of angry and panicky words coming from my mother's mouth as she scrubbed me clean. I didn't know exactly what she said, but from her demeanor I quickly deduced that toilets were bad, poop was worse, and both were terrifying.

It wasn't long after that I was potty trained, but with a catch...

I was scared to death of falling in the toilet and even more terrified of touching my own poop. Every time I went poop, I was insistent that my mother wipe my butt for me. She accomodated me for a while, but when it became apparent that my fear was turning phobic, she decided it was time to dole out some tough love and stopped responding to my requests...

...But I was a stubborn kid.

I once sat on the toilet and shouted for her to come wipe my butt for an hour straight, while my family sat downstairs at the dinner table ignoring me.

It must have been a couple weeks of this before I gave in and began taking matters into my own hands. My father spent much of 1986 unclogging massive wads of TP from the toilet and barking, "Whoever's using this much toilet paper is in for it," knowing exactly who the culprit was. I never fessed up. The thought of being forced to use anything less than 5 inches of toilet paper border between me and my poop was too frightening to bear. Luckily, he let it go for a while.

My fear of poop came to a head when I was four or five years old.

My parents had some family friends over and I had been swept up in playing house in the basement with a couple of kids my age. I was having so much fun that I ignored my urge to go until it was too late. I attempted to run up the stairs to the bathroom, only to stop abruptly as my last ditch effort at pinching failed miserably.

Red-faced, I found my way up to my room and shut the door. I was wearing cable-knit tights that day, causing my biggest fear to be nestled tightly against my bottom. There was absolutely no way I was going to let anyone know that I pooped my pants, least of all my mother, who I was sure would be beyond upset. I had to face my fear.

I carefully pulled off my bottoms and quickly replaced them with new ones, breathing a sigh of relief that I made the switch before anyone walked in. I was so proud of myself for taking care of my own business and being within such a close range of a turd-out-of-water, that I marched happily downstairs to resume the fine game of playing house. My fecalphobia was, at last, conquered

Later that night, as I was helping set the table for dinner, I heard my mother yell out in surprise from my bedroom. She was in there picking up dirty laundry when she stumbled across my turd, perched like an egg atop a nest of skid-marked underwear and cable-knit tights. Oops.