BIRTHING
Bloody clumps cluttered the blue plastic hospital sheet on the floor, but I didn’t
1 care about that just then. I would later when I retold this story, but for now, it didn’t matter. It was apparently pretty normal, from what I had read. In that moment, the doctor handed me a pair of scissor-like tools, and I cut through the tough, shiny, gray umbilical cord and watched my newborn baby girl lie down on my wife’s sweaty, glistening chest and look for her first meal. You would think that this event would take over the whole of my brain, and it did, mostly. I didn’t know it then, but in the back of my subconscious thoughts, my mind was processing and changing this memory. There will always be two memories of this time now, one of what actually happened and another that I will tell people; eventually, I won’t even remember which one is the truth.
I didn’t know it then, but I was already preparing for my role as the father of my child, not in my responsibility to care for her, but in the passing down of our family history. I had been preparing for this role my entire life and hadn’t known it, but when the moment came, I saw. I saw myself telling my mom that Lucy barely pushed for thirty minutes and how it was the easiest thing ever, when it actually took an hour and a half and only ended because the contractions of Lucy’s abdomen muscles thrust the baby out as Lucy vomited into the pink kidney bean shaped plastic tray I held for her.
Even the purest of moments, like the birth of my child or the day of my wedding, were not enough to cleanse me of the stories that I told. People always say that you have to be honest with your spouse, but they must not have been as sneaky as me because I had gotten away with lying to her for nearly three years. Even before Lucy, I had been

getting away with lying. I was always meant to pass down the stories of our family to
2 others, and I took it upon myself to make sure that they were the best family histories that they could be by adding to them or by simply inverting stories because they sounded better, creating my own personal truth. I had always planned to get on the straight and narrow way and get away from the lies, but all that ever came of that were good intentions. Good intentions that would be on their way out of my mouth until I would spit out another fabricated story to someone.
When I held my first child in my arms for the first time, I was silent and listened to her breathing, and months later when she began to babble nonsense to us, I prompted her to “tell me all about it, Wendy.” I thought then about how many stories she would tell. How many of them will be like mine? How many fabricated words would she speak?
Memories of the lies that I have told drifted through my thoughts. I knew that it was only a fraction of them. This happens often, but today they lingered longer, and they settled in.
I questioned them and asked, “Why did I tell that one about knowing how to operate that piece of machinery to the almost stranger, or why did I claim to have read an obscure book to my brother-in-law, who couldn’t care less?” What would be the rationale and the reason for my daughter’s stories?
When Ray asked me if I had ever run a trencher like the one he was about to let me borrow, my mouth opened before I had a chance to challenge what my mouth was about to say. As soon as the question left his mouth, my mind started to work to protect me and my pride. It went straight to thinking, “does he think that I’m incompetent?” I told him that I had used a trencher before and that it was no problem without ever

3 consciously thinking about the lie that had just issued from my lips. I then corrected myself after a few seconds and said that it had been a while since I had used one, but that
I was positive that I could still do it. In truth, I had never used a trencher before. That story was just one of many in which I lied to make myself look better and tricked someone into trusting me when they really shouldn’t have, but that wasn’t the only type of lie that I have told.
Responsibility washed over me, and I thought about how families pass down their stories. Every family seems to have at least one member that takes that role for himself. I knew that the onus was on me, for this was my little new family, but my wife didn’t know the kinds of stories that I have told yet, and she didn’t understand (and neither did
I) that how I created and changed them would be passed down to our children. What became most important was the creation of a truth that I chose to develop, not what actually happened. I looked down into Wendy’s pastel blue eyes and felt her grip tightly onto my red polo shirt as I stumbled over a root rising up through the sidewalk, exemplifying the complete trust that this little child was forced to have towards me. I imagined her being five and telling lies and I told myself that I would not set that type of an example for her.
That was pleasing to tell myself, but the pervasiveness of this sin was entrenched deeper into who I was as a person, as a friend, as a brother, as a husband, and as a father than I had known. Like the time that I was talking to Wendy when she was just four months old. And although it was a small seemingly insignificant lie, it was just one of

4 many. And it was those hundreds of little insignificant stories that I told that lead to telling the big ones.
“Daddy’s gonna grow taller than Mama some day. Just you watch, Baby Wendy.
It’s gonna happen, and you’ll tell everyone that I knew it would happen.” Just then Lucy walked around the corner and jokingly said, “Daddy’s telling stories, isn’t he?”
Immediately, the folds of my memory flipped back into my past, and I watched my mom saying the same thing to me when I was five, seven, twelve, seventeen. This little lie might not have been important on any other day, but on this day, it became so because it brought me to the point of remembrance. Realizing my storytelling ability and facility hadn’t been a recent development. Rather it had been developing from my early childhood. Developing itself until I even am able to almost lie to myself. I tried for years to convince myself through my own stories, my own lies to myself for myself that I didn’t know that my parents were drug addicts. There are many ways and types of lying, and I have been guilty of them all. Small ones, like the ones to Wendy about me growing taller, and bigger ones that lead to more lies and then hurt.

5
WHERE LIES COME FROM
Mom and dad in the garage for long periods of time, doors locked. I remembered all those times, and I also remembered hiding in the corner of their closet while playing hide-and-seek at the age of ten with my younger brother and sister. Leeann pushed the door of mom’s room closed when she came in. Every step she took towards me and my hiding place released puffs of air from my mouth as I tried to arrange the clothes hanging in front of me more densely around my body. I crouched lower behind the pile of boxes in front of me. Each movement brought her closer to me, near enough for me to smell the overwhelming odor of her 99 cent store perfume that caused my nostrils and throat to burn. She flipped the smoke-smelling flannel shirts around in front of me but never touched me. After she had left the room, I began to unstack the boxes in front of my body so that I could escape to the base. I made sure to place the boxes in the exact places they were in when I got into the closet so that mom and dad wouldn’t know that I had been in here. When I placed the smallest shoe-sized box back in its place on the top of the shoe rack in the closet, I heard the chink of glass hitting glass. I peeked in and found a pair of three inch foggy glass pipes, a plastic Ziplock bag full of white powder, and a small propane torch. I had never seen anything like this before, but I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be touching or seeing them.
I began to process this sight and even though I was only ten, I had been around enough strange people to know that there was something wrong with the pipes and I suspected drugs, but I wasn’t sure, and I started lying to myself to try to unconvinced myself of what it was and was successful in placing the seed of doubt for a while. I

6 started telling myself that my mom surely couldn’t be like the people I had seen on
“Cops.” This stuff must belong to one of their friends, and my parents were just storing it for them. Maybe Rex or Mustang Mike. As I made more and more discoveries over the months and years after this, I became increasingly convinced that my dad was one of them, but I held out hope for my mom. She was too normal. She was too good. I blocked the truth out, forced myself to not see what was really happening. I lied to myself and for myself but now I see the truth as an older, more mature adult, but as an innocent kid, I was able to adjust what the truth was for me.
I used lies and still do use them as a defense mechanism, but the innocence with which I did it as a child was for self-protection from a situation that I had no control over.
The lying done for the preservation of my pride and to make people trust me and have faith in me was calculatingly done to put myself in positions of power over people. There is no innocence anymore. That was lost quickly and can never be recovered. I learned how to use those defense mechanism lies and then learned how to turn them into offensive weapons that allowed me to not only protect myself, but also to take control of the situation by creating my own truth for myself as well as for others.
Every night mom and I watched the news together. I would sit next to her and put my head in the crook of her arm, constantly needing to shoo loose strands of her hair that draped across my face, always having to endure the permanent smell of grease, gas, and smoke that were as much a part of her as her eyes. After the show finished, we usually played at least one game of chess. This night we played four, and I lost them all. She

would never let me win. She would tell me that, “The only way to get better at anything
7 was to play against people better than you.”
I told myself that a mom who would do those things with her son as well as show up to every football game, every practice, and every chess tournament couldn’t be a drug addict. I had watched enough TV to know that that wasn’t the way they acted. That changed when one night I needed to put my clothes for school in the dryer before I went to bed. Otherwise it would be another day of “didn’t you wear that shirt yesterday” or
“why do you always smell so bad, Jeffery?”
When I walked up to the garage door, I could hear The Scorpions playing through the door, so I knocked lightly because I knew that they were all in there, but there was no reply. I had been told often enough to leave them alone when they were in there, but I really didn’t want to have to wear dirty clothes again, so I checked the door, hoping that they had left it unlocked. They had. I entered the garage and slipped as silent as smoke through the cracked door, ignoring the “No Children Allowed” sign. Sitting in a semicircle on the far wall were five of them: three of dad’s visitors and my parents. They didn’t notice the entrance of a small ten year old boy over the guitar solo of “Rock You
Like a Hurricane.” I tiptoed over behind the clothes baskets and hunkered down behind them and peeped through the tiny slits. I couldn’t see their faces since they all had their backs to me, but I knew each body. They passed around a smoky, white, glass pipe. As each person received it, they ignited the propane torch and waved it under the glass.
Before they put it to their lips, most of them gently touched the end with their index fingers. My mom and Sean were the only ones who put it straight to their lips. Their

8 bodies flinched as if they had been burnt, but only briefly. Then they inhaled deeply, their shoulders and backs rising until they whispered out the smoky air, which climbed into the rafters and hung like early morning fog over an empty field. My knuckles were white from the clenching of my fingers to the slats that I looked through. My toes curled around an old t-shirt of the cold concrete floor. There was no denying it now. I knew that mom was one of them. I couldn’t protect myself from the truth anymore.
It’s a funny thing about meth addicts. They seem to have larger imaginations than children even though their brains have been destroyed, and they also don’t mind lying.
Although my mother seemed to be normal and a user at the same time, she was also one of the addicts who had developed into a prolific liar, which also made her a great storyteller. She had taken on the responsibility for passing down our history to us kids and the rest of the family as well as anyone that came around. I am next in line as the master storyteller in our family and am expected to continue in the same tradition as my mother, but I must do it differently I tell myself. I don’t know if it is possible.
The rest of the family learned from her example, and we all became storytellers.
It’s what we do and what we both love and hate. Stories of the past, memories, often imagined. No matter what visitors are present at our gatherings, these stories become part of the entertainment. In fact, when outsiders are there, the stories become an even bigger event. They become performances in which one or more of us begin to tell the stories animatedly and embellishing them more than they are normally when it is just family members around. It’s like we try to show off for guests by making our lies bigger. We want to impress them and make them like us, and we lie to do it. This one almost always

9 is the first one told, and it is my mother’s favorite. She has first rights to tell any since she is the mother of all of our stories.
“Let me tell you a story about Jeffery when he was just a little guy. He was playing in the grass outside the kitchen while I was making dinner and doing dishes. I bent down to put away the pan in the cupboard, and by the time that I looked out to check on him, he had disappeared. I looked all over for him until I found his bike on its side on the edge of the empty field next to our place. I was freaking out, so I ran across the field shouting for his name over and over again. I made it all the way across the field and still had no sign of him. By this time I was at the parking lot of the Albertson’s. I ran into the store on a whim, and when I got through the doors, I knew he was in there because people were laughing and pointing at something. I went in that direction and saw a cart loaded down with toys and Little Debbie snacks. It was so full that all I could see were his fingers on the top of the cart, guiding it and his little head poking around the side.
Later, when I asked him what he was doing, he said, ‘it’s for LeeAnn’s birthday. I wanted to get her some presents.”’
I wonder what this story does for my mom and why she always tells it. I wonder if she is trying to take her lack of supervision and make it into comedy so that instead of being criticized for not watching her child, people will be forced to laugh, but she doesn’t realize, and neither did I until Lucy told me about it later that guests are not impressed.
They laugh, but not because it’s funny. They laugh because what else can you do when you are surrounded by the rest of the family who is also laughing. I see my mom trying to

10 use lying as a way to protect herself as well, from herself as well as the judgment of others.
That is the story that she chooses, and no one questions that truth of it. Even now,
I think about it and believe it. I haven’t heard it told by any other members of the family or talked about, so I have no way to know if it’s really truth or not. This is just one of those stories that I am expected to pass down to the future generations of family. I have never questioned if I would or not. Now I look into my daughter’s eyes again and ponder this memory. I have never wondered about the reason for lying in others. If this event never actually happened, why does she tell it, and why does she tell it in the specific way that she does. I think back to when my sister, Tina, told Lucy that my mother never would say a word against me and that I was always a perfect little child according to my mother. As I think of this, thoughts flood me of all the times that I tell myself that I can’t let Lucy down or I can’t let this or that person down because they are depending on me.

11
THE PAIN OF LIES
I always wanted to live with Tina and Nate, and now Mom had finally had enough of Dad and his abuse. She told me that this was the last time that Dad would ever hit her as the swelling grew around her right eye. I was following Mom into her bedroom when she snatched the cell phone off Dad’s dresser and dialed. The number jumped onto the screen. I knew the number; it was Tina’s. She and Nate had been telling Mom that she could come stay with them anytime that she wanted to take us kids and herself away from
Dad. I only heard Mom’s side of the conversation, but I was able to figure out what Tina was saying.
“It happened again today, and I’m really done this time.”
“Yes, I’m sure this time.”
“Thanks so much. I’ll be walking down Elverta, towards Watt.”
“No, it’ll be just me. We’ll get the kids after school tomorrow. It’s late, and I don’t want them up late.”
“Yeah. It’ll be better this way. He won’t be as mad and might not even notice that
I’m gone.”
“Ok. See you in ten minutes.”
When she hung up the phone, she looked down at me and said, “Sorry,” as she shrugged her shoulders slightly. She bustled around the room, throwing things into a plastic Wal-Mart bag. She then sat me down on the bed and got down on her knees so that we were looking into each others’ eyes.

“Jeffery, you’ve got to be strong and be Mommy’s little man, ok? You have to
12 take care of Leeann and Joseph tonight. Can you do that for me?”
“Mmmhmm,” I responded. That’s not what I wanted to say, but what else could a thirteen year old boy say when his mother asks him something like that. I knew that I couldn’t let her or my younger siblings down. I straightened my shoulders and pushed my chest out and nodded. I pushed forward a false bravado and confidence to protect her from the truth of the situation.
“Good. I knew that I could count on you. You always come through for Mommy.
I have to go now.” She began to step out of the room, and I followed her out and opened the front door for her and went out after her. She turned around and looked at me and said, “Not yet, Jeffery. You have to be here for Leeann and Joe. They need you more than
I do right now. Tina and I will get you guys after school tomorrow, ok?” She gave me a brief hug, and I tried to inhale as much of her cigarette smell as I could in that brief second. I didn’t want to stay the night in this house with my father. I was terrified, but I knew that I couldn’t tell her that or show that to her, so I stepped back and told her everything would be ok and watched her walk down the street towards Elverta Road. I knew Joe and Leeann were gonna be looking for help from me when they found out what
Mom had done.
When I walked back into the house, I could still hear Pink Floyd blasting in the garage, and I knew that Dad was still in there, oblivious to the fact that he was home with just us kids for the night. I hoped that I could avoid him and that he would stay in the garage all night, but if he didn’t, I knew that I could lie and tell him that I didn’t know

13 where Mom was. I had done it before, and made him to believe me, but he never accepted it the first time that I told him. He always badgered me and tried to scare the information out of me, but I was too smart for him.
I went into the back room where Joe and Leeann were, sitting in the same spots as when Mom left, and the first thing that they asked was, “Did Mom really leave for good this time?” I nodded my head with an excited “Yes” and tried to be a strong leader for them and tell them we’ll just have to be patient and not tell dad anything about where she went, otherwise it might mess everything up for all of us.
“Joe, stop sucking on your shirt. You know how Mom hates it when you do that,”
I said.
“Well, she’s not here to stop me. She left us, so I’ll suck on it if I want to,” Joe said.
“Mom said that she was going to come back for us tomorrow so you better behave, especially since we are home with Dad tonight.”
“Yeah, she’ll come back tomorrow the same way that she got me new shoes last week. Look, I still have those stupid Pokémon ones with holes in the toes. They’re so old that the lights don’t even come on when I walk anymore. Dad probably won’t even notice that she’s gone anyways.”
“He’ll notice when he doesn’t get his dinner. You should go tell him and just get it over with, Jeffery,” Leeann chimed in.
I knocked on the door, noticing the greasy fingerprints clearly outlined on the white wood, and was answered by the gruff response, “What? Well, what do you want?”

14
“Mom’s gone.” I just blurted it out to get it over with faster. I had learned that it was much easier this way instead of waiting for the right moment.
“When did she leave? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. I tried to stop her, but she went anyways,” I told him because I knew that he would believe me more if I sounded upset about her leaving. Also, he’d get more mad at me if he found out that I encouraged her to go.
“Why didn’t you come get me?” he said as he rushed to the car and roared out of the driveway in pursuit of her. As soon as he was gone, I grabbed the phone and called
Tina’s phone to talk to Mom and let her know what had happened. I barely had time to complete the call because Dad came back much sooner than I thought. He stalked up the driveway and through the door and sent us all to our rooms, and then after a five second wait, we all felt the garage door slam shut and knew that he had locked himself in there.
My teeth clenched together. I hated disappointing him even though I hated him. I still wanted to please him and thought that I could.
Leeann went to her room while dad was watching, but as soon as the garage door shut, she came into mine and Joe’s. Joe sat in the corner stacking and unstacking his
Lego’s in silence while Leeann bounced around the room in excitement. I knew that they both needed me right now. I could tell that Leeann was really excited about the possibility of leaving and that Joe was angry and resentful and didn’t think things were going to be any different this time.

15
“Everything is going to be just fine, guys. Mom sounded different this time, and I think this is really it. We just have to make it through the night, and tomorrow, everything thing will be better” I told them.
I was surprised that Dad didn’t interrogate Leeann and Joe like he usually did, but this way was better. I would much rather take the brunt of it and have them feel safer.
Also, Leeann was daddy’s little girl and probably would have broken pretty quickly, and he knew that too. He must have really believed me this time, otherwise he would have asked Leeann for sure. I felt my chest swell with pride at the improvement in my deception.
Once we had spent about thirty minutes in our rooms hiding, we snuck out into the living room to watch TV and play the Super Nintendo on silent. We knew that he probably wouldn’t be coming out of there for a while, but just in case we didn’t want to draw his attention to us. All of the sudden we heard him yell from the garage that we had two seconds to “get our asses in bed or we’d regret it until the day we died.” Apparently, he really meant two seconds because we’d barely had time to shut off the TV when he threw open the garage door and turned over the kitchen table, flinging it like it was plastic.
We jumped up and bolted to our rooms. Again, Leeann snuck right out of hers and followed Joe and me back into our room. After a long wait, we started to get hungry, and I knew that Joe would start whining about it and make Dad even angrier, so I cracked the door open, hoping that it wouldn’t squeak and pop loudly like it usually did on cold nights like this one. Tonight, I was lucky, and I began to tiptoe down the long hallway

16 towards the kitchen counter to grab a loaf of bread. When I grabbed the loaf, the package rustled like lightning on a quiet night. My eyes saw the phone sitting on the counter where I had left it earlier, and without thinking I grabbed it quickly. I started to scurry down the hallway back to my room, and then I heard the garage door blast open. I knew
Dad would see me in the hallway because I wouldn’t have time to make it back, so I hurried into the bathroom, but I closed the door softly and casually so he wouldn’t think anything strange was going on, and I stuffed the bread into the bathtub and closed the curtain.
“Who the hell is out of their room?” he shouted.
“It’s just me. I had to go to the bathroom” I said as innocently as possible.
“Whatever, just hurry up and get back to your room. I don’t want to hear another noise from any of you all night. I don’t care if you have to shit yourselves. I don’t want to see any of you out of your rooms. Got it?”
I flushed the empty toilet bowl and started to run some water in the sink so that he thought I was washing my hands. As the water was running, I put the cordless phone into the waistband of my gym shorts and made sure that my shirt covered it so that he couldn’t see it if he was still watching when I left the bathroom. When I opened the door to go back into the room, dad was leaning up against the wall on the other side of the hallway, towards my right. Luckily, I had put the phone on my left hip.
He looked at me and said calmly, “Where is the phone, Jeffery? It was on the kitchen counter when I went in the garage earlier. It’s not there anymore. What did you do with it? Who are you trying to call?”

17
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have the phone. I haven’t used it all day.” He pushed past me into the bathroom and searched all through it. When he found the bread in the tub that seemed to pacify him. “You better not be lying to me,
Jeffery.” He threw the loaf of bread at me and sent me back into the room.
When I made it back into the bedroom with the loaf of bread, Joe and Leeann thanked me for going and getting it. When I showed them the phone, they both lit up like
Christmas trees, but I whispered to them that we couldn’t call Mom right now because
Dad might be listening on the other side of the door. We all ate our bread and then tried to fall asleep. I gave Leeann my bed, and I decided to sleep against the door to block it. I reminded them that all we had to do was make it through the night and get ourselves to the bus stop in the morning and then everything would be fine. I set the alarm and went to bed.
I woke up the next morning without any problems, which was unusual. I almost always woke up late. I got all of us ready for school and started getting breakfast together. Even Joe was starting to get excited, I could tell. He barely touched his food and only sipped his Kool-Aid. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing that Leeann and I were. This was going to be our last morning in this house. Before we left, we all snuck back into the room, and I dialed Tina’s number on the phone. It went straight to voicemail, which I expected because she probably thought it was Dad calling again, so I left her a voicemail telling her where we would be waiting after school, and then I let Joe and Leeann jump in and say hi to Mom.

18
After a long day of waiting at school, we all walked down the road to the agreed meeting place and waited. We were used to Mom being late, so we weren’t worried, but when she didn’t show up after almost an hour, we knew she wasn’t going to be there.
Now it was too late for us to catch the bus, so we walked home, hoping that Dad would be asleep like he usually was at this time of day. I don’t remember now if he was awake or asleep when we got home. All that any of us remember of this day is that when we were walking up the driveway, we could see Mom’s brown hair sticking up above the window sill as she stood in the kitchen doing dishes. All any of us could think was that she had lied to us, but I didn’t say anything.
Later that night when Mom came and told me the news was starting, so we could watch together like we always did, I noticed that she was wincing with every breath she took. I asked her what was wrong.
“You did your job really well last night, but your Dad knew you were lying to him about trying to stop me from going to him. He got pretty upset with me for having you lie to him so that I would be protected from him.”
I still think back on that memory and wonder why she left us and why she didn’t stay with Tina and Nate instead of being in the kitchen of our house the next afternoon when we got back home from school, but this is something I have always wondered about. Never had I thought about the way that she made me the man of the house and looked to me for strength and how that wasn’t the only time.
Was she protecting us from being forced to live with Dad because she didn’t think that he would let us go with her? No, it was that she was protecting herself again. She lied

to herself and told herself that it was better for us all to be together as a family, or she
19 told herself that living with Tina and Nate wouldn’t work because there would be too many of us in the house or something like that. The real reason was that she was protecting herself from the actual truth, which was that she couldn’t leave him. She couldn’t leave him because he supplied her with her meth. She couldn’t leave him because he was all that she had ever known. She couldn’t leave him because she knew that she couldn’t and didn’t want to quit all of the drugs. She couldn’t accept her inevitable failure.
Now I always try to be the perfect man all the time, or at least make everyone think that I am perfect all of the time. I’m usually pretty successful at it too. I’m able to portray myself in whatever way I want to because of the stories that I choose to tell. In fact all of us kids are able to do this in different ways.
Throughout the whole time Lucy and I were dating, the words that I told her the most were not “I love you” or “I miss you.” They were, “I just need you to trust me.”
That was most important to me, and I did everything I could and told her everything I could to make sure that happened in the short term, but there came a day when things fell apart and the bricks of trust disappeared. I knew what she wanted to hear from me. I knew what could make her trust me. She confided in me about how she was terrified of growing old and ugly and then having her husband leave her for a younger prettier version. From the moment that she told me that, I knew that there was no way that I could tell her about the porn that I had been watching since I was fourteen years old. I don’t know that I ever planned on telling her, but once she had disclosed that to me, I had to

hide it. I lied to myself and convinced myself that it was for the best because now she
20 could be comfortable around me because she was able to trust me and know that I only had eyes for her. I use my stories and words to create myself as a hero and as the perfect guy for her, and I tell myself that I won’t ever disappoint her. It’s said that actions speak louder than words; however, this only works when all of the words are truth.

BEGINNINGS OF ACCOUNTABILITY
I slipped into the house and walked to the couch and sat down next to Lucy and
21 immediately dropped my head down and stared at the freckles on her thigh that look like a rose bud about to bloom. We just sat there in silence until finally, my voice made ripples in the air like a boulder dropped into still water, and I said, “I’m so so so very sorry.”
Lucy rose from the couch and walked into the bathroom and closed the door with a soft click and locked it, leaving me on the couch until I moved down to the floor where
I knew that I belonged. I began to pray and was praying so hard that I didn’t hear her unlock the door or come back into the room, and I didn’t hear the shudder of her body or her quivering lips, but I did hear the firmness in her voice when she said to me, “Jeff, tell me everything. I know that this isn’t everything. There has to be more.”
All the previous times that little lies had come out in the past had started to pile up, and Lucy was beginning to figure out what kind of a man she had married and what kind of a father I was going to be, one who was going to pass on stories and story telling to his child. I finally decided to tell her everything (at least I told her this). In my twisted brain, I had already started to plan out the next series of lies to make her trust me again. I can’t tell her everything. It would be too much. She could never trust me again if she knew everything.
I began to tell her about the hours that I had spent on the exact couch that she was sitting on with the LCD light from the computer screen flickering onto my bare chest as I watched other women, while she was asleep in our bed. I told her that I never paid for

22 anything (even though I did, but I thought that it sounded better if I told her I hadn’t). I also told her that this was the first time in my life that I had ever watched this kind of stuff before. I apologized after every story I told her and said how sorry I was for ruining the trust that we had built up. After I spun my silk stories, I finally looked up and into her eyes because I knew that would help her to believe me, and slowly the red on the skin of her neck began to fade out. She looked back into my eyes and then said, “Ok.” My knuckles turned back from the clenched white color that they were to the normal tan, and
I slithered over to her and squeezed her and said again, “I’m sorry, Baby. Thank you for listening and being so great and not yelling and screaming. I appreciate it. Please forgive me. I love you so much, and I’m so so so sorry for hurting you and for violating your trust again.”
I held her. Until she got up and walked into the bedroom and shut the door. I lay down on the floor and put the small quilt, given to us on our wedding day by old Mrs.
Zook at church, around my shoulders, my head resting on my dirty hands, and I breathed a sigh of relief because she had bought it. I tried to remember everything that I told her because I knew that I would have to keep tabs on it because I knew that I was going to have a hard time remembering what I had and had not told her. From the floor I watched her shadows slip under the sliver of space between the door and the floor. I knew that she was pacing around in the room, unable to sleep or even stop moving. She stopped, and the light started spreading up the crack that was appearing in the doorway until her head moved out into the open and looked at me on the ground and beckoned me in, exposing her back to me as she turned and stumbled to the bed. She lifted the comforter up and

23 motioned for me to join her in the bed. I walked over to her and crawled in. She embraced me and whispered like she was afraid someone else would hear her telling me that she is not going to leave me or going away. She held me some more and didn’t just squeeze me, she pulled me in to her body, trying to make us one flesh again and repair the bond that I had broken, and she told me that whenever I felt a desire to look at that stuff again to grab her and have her. Whenever. Wherever.
“And let me show you I mean this right now,” she said.
I woke up the next morning feeling like a new man because I was one, to her. I was still the same, I knew, but what I knew didn’t matter. What mattered is what others thought of me and what I portrayed to them. Lucy asked me to begin to help her learn to trust me again. She wanted me to prove to her that I could break this habit that she thought I had just started, and I did want to break it. I had for a long time, but I never really had a reason to because everyone else thought that I was such a great man. Now that someone else knew some of the despicableness of me, it gave me a chance to begin the change, but only in my sin of lust. The lying couldn’t stop because then everyone would begin to see the real me, and I couldn’t let that happen. There were too many people depending on me being this great man.
However, I did decide to stop lying about things that were happening in the future. I told myself that I would only lie about the dark things from the past that would change how they looked at me.
We rolled out of bed and were walking on sunshine. We told ourselves that today was going to be a better day. We got into the shower to get ready for work. I passed Lucy

the body wash like normal, but she didn’t take it from my hand. She gestured with her
24 head because her hands and arms were crossed, covering her chest from me. She wanted me to set it down on the rim of the tub and then turn away from her. I did it. From behind me, I heard, “I’m sorry. I’m not ready for this yet. Can you get out and let me finish alone?” I stepped out, dripping shame and water on the white and black spotted linoleum.
After we had gotten ready for work, we got into my car and drove to work, where we got to be together all day. I was so glad about that because I could start the process of making her trust me again. I was going to act like the perfect man. I surprised her with flowers and a long, handwritten apology card and showered her with attention of every kind.
“I can’t believe that you lied to me again, and I can’t believe I trusted you,” she said to me as soon as we got into the car to head home. Why are you still lying to me?”
“What are you talking about?” I responded.
“I know that you paid for it. I don’t get why you would lie.”
She doesn’t understand me yet, I told myself. How could I explain this to her in a way that she would understand and believe, without really giving her anything new. I just decided to say that I was too scared of how she would respond and admitted to her that I had paid for it, but only this one time. I didn’t tell her about anything else. She seemed to believe it and got out of the car and led the way up the stairs, again exposing her back to a predator like me.
I lied to her again and again, not realizing that every time I did, it destroyed the chances of her being able to trust me again more and more. I look back now and know

25 that it would have been so much easier for both of us if I had told her everything that very first night, but pride held me back. Pride and a desire to please her and everyone who believed in me. I couldn’t let them all down, I told myself then, but what I failed to realize was that every time I put on the mask that I created, I failed them.
My mind jumps back into the present where I am looking into my daughters’ eyes, and I stare into them and lie to her and tell her I will never fail her that way.
My brother Joe chooses to simply hide his stories instead of fabricating them.
Like the one about how he had an affair with a married woman in the church who had three kids when he was sixteen years old. He never told that story to anyone, and even after it was over and everyone knew about it, he still refused to tell the story or even talk about it. But it didn’t always used to be this way. He used to be more like me and Mom.
But I guess these traditions have a way of passing down differently to each person. He is protecting himself, but his defenses are up to keep out others. He doesn’t lie to protect himself like mom and I. His lies are different. They are omissions of the truth so that he can control the narrative of his life.

26
WHY I MUST QUIT
The contractions were coming every five minutes now, so we grabbed the suitcase and put the final essentials in: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and the other necessary toiletries. We hurried down our apartment stairs and began the long drive to the hospital.
Every pothole and bump in the road caused agony to flash across Lucy’s face as the contractions grew stronger and worse with every red light that we hit along the way. As each one wracked her body, I felt her nails dig into the jeans around my right thigh.
When we arrived in the cold concrete hospital parking structure, Lucy stopped and asked if we could pray before going in.
“Of course,” I said as my hand searched for hers. I prayed.
“Thanks, Baby. Also, before we go in, is there anything you want to confess and get out of the way now? I really want Wendy to come into a healthy and stable family, and that can’t happen if you are still hiding things from me.”
“Let me think for a minute about that so that I make sure that I am telling you the truth,” I tell her and I think about all of the things that I have been hiding like how I have been staying up late after she goes to bed and watching unrated movies, but I know that I can’t tell her these things now, especially right before she is going to birth our child. She needs to be able to trust me through this experience, and I am able to lie to myself that it is better to hide it for now and that I will tell her later. Finally, I answer her and say,
“There’s nothing that I can think of right now, Baby.”
We walked into the hospital and down the long hallway, reading giant posters telling about the research that the medical students have done. I was so jaded I had

27 already stopped thinking about the fact that I had just lied to her again. I almost was able to believe myself that my lie was worth it. We wondered if we would become just a poster to the future doctors that would be treating Lucy instead of people as we squinted our eyes at the rows and rows of bright fluorescent lights lining the hallway. When we finally arrived in the maternity wing, the nurse took down our personal information and led us into the triage room and to bed number two. She told us that the doctor would be right in as she hooked up the blood pressure monitor on Lucy’s right arm. “Please undress completely and put on the gown, Mrs. Pressnell,” she said already walking away from us.
Lucy was already whispering prayers into the silence, “Please, God let me be four centimeters this time. I can’t bear to get sent home again. Please.”
“Jeff, I don’t know what I’ll do if I’ve had all of these contractions for nothing” she says as another one causes the muscles around her uterus to tighten. She rocks back and forth on her hips, trying to distract herself from the pain until Dr. Rooney comes in and checks her. We were both glad to see Dr. Rooney. She was the one who checked
Lucy before, and she was really great.
“Good to see you again, Lucy” she said. “Let’s hope the last two days got you to where you want to be so that we can admit you,” she said hopefully. She snapped a glove onto her medium sized hand and then dipped her finger into the petroleum looking gel and stuck her second and third finger all the way up to the last knuckle into Lucy and frowned. “I’m sorry. You’re still a tight two” was all that she said.
“Dammit,” Lucy said and slapped her eyes tightly shut.

28
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pressnell. We need to continue monitoring you and the baby for about twenty minutes just to make sure everything is ok because your blood pressure is a little bit elevated. We’d also like to do some blood work just to check a few other things.
After that, you can either go home or walk the hospital, and we can check you in two hours, whatever you’d like.”
Lucy was already motioning me to start packing up all of our stuff and get ready to take it down to the car. After the doctor had left, Lucy turned to me and closed her large brown eyes and wiped them. “I don’t understand. Why? I’m having the contractions all the time now. How could nothing have changed?” she asked me. She layed back down on the bed and rolled onto her side so that her back was facing me. I sat in the chair and watched the peaks on the machine showing each contraction happening in unison with her body wincing almost like she was having a seizure. Once we were able to leave and make it home, we let our family know that it was another false alarm.
Before bed, we prayed like always, and we still pray for God to have his way in the birth of our child, but neither of us really wanted it. We just wanted it to be over. I fell right asleep and woke up and stretched. I leaned over to say good morning to Lucy and wake her up so that we can get started with our day, and to my surprise she was already awake. As I leaned in to give her our usual good morning kiss, I saw the red veins in her eyes shining, and I knew that she had been up all night. The other clue was the sweat stained pillows from her trying to rock the pain of every contraction away that came through the night.

29
“How often are they coming now I ask her?” but I had no hope of a good answer from the look on her face.
“The same. Every five fucking minutes.”
We went to our weekly doctor’s appointment that day as usual and Dr. Kim checked her again and said that Lucy was at two and a half centimeters now, and again I saw the frustration on her face. But that was the only emotion she showed, and I could tell that she had become bitter through it all. I started to try to convince her that it was almost over and just like I try to lie to myself about things, I began to tell her that God surely must be done with this whole thing. And he was. A week after her due date,
Wendy arrived into the world after an uneventful labor and delivery.
I finally told Lucy about all of lies that I chose not to mention in that hospital parking lot when Wendy was six months old, but only after continuing to indulge my wicked heart in women on the screen during those six months. I don’t know what made me decide to tell her at that time.
Again, I am looking into my newborn daughter’s ocean blue eyes and think of the stories that I remember and am telling even now. And I know that there are lies that I’ve told even in this story that I’ve been telling, but I rationalize and tell myself that they are just little lies and are unimportant. I have to look good for whoever reads these stories. I can’t disappoint them.
But I must. For Wendy’s sake. For Lucy’ sake. For my own sake. I would love to tell you that the lies have stopped, and that I have been a faithful story teller all the time to you reader. I would love to say that my daughter has never been lied to. I would love

to say that Lucy and I have the perfect marriage and the perfect bond of trust that has
30 been rebuilt completely, but that would just be more lies.
Throughout these pages, I have tried to make myself the hero, the boy who keeps his brother and sister from harm, and I was, some of the time. But there were many times where I was a coward and wasn’t “Mommy’s little man” like she always thought I was and always told everyone that I was. I left out the time that I walked in to my father choking my Mom on my bed and then slid out of the room and walked down the street to play basketball without telling anyone. I leave out the way that I wasn’t a strong example for them that day when us kids got home from school and saw Mom doing the dishes. I walked into my room without acknowledging her and cried into my pillow while Joseph watched me.
I am exposing these lies now because I have realized that the lies may feel good in the moment, but sooner or later they will be found out, and that experience is never good.
I have felt the shame of having to look into Lucy’s eyes or someone else’s eyes and tell them that I have been lying to them too many times now to want to continue.
Some people like my parents struggle with drugs, gambling, or drinking as their vice like the people in my family. I have seen all of their addictions and thought that I had escaped them until now. Now I see that I have had mine almost as long as they have had theirs. The lies are fewer now than they used to be, but they still pop up here and many other places. I know that I will always have this temptation with me and know that
I must actively fight back against this.

31
All of the events written above happened to the best of my knowledge, but even as I write this, the memories are changing. How does one know what the truth really is in any event? Is the truth of the event the way that I remember it now with all of the understanding of an older, more mature adult that can see the situations more holistically now, or are the innocent memories of a child more accurate? Both depictions are true, and with some memories the mature self and child self remember them the same way.
With the way stories have been told in my family, it’s hard to know which to trust and whose memories are more accurate.
As I think on the history of my family, I wonder, not about what memories are true and which ones aren’t. I question why. Why have certain events been cut out of our story? Who benefitted from their omission? I wonder about why others have been highlighted and retold so often that everyone has the same memory of an event that could be completely fabricated. You’d think that writing down these events would help answer some of these questions, but it has just created more of them.
What are the choices that I have made as the lead story teller in my little family, and how have I created my own narrative that benefits me in the way that I weave together stories and create, alter, or leave out different events? Choices. That is what storytelling is about, which means that is what truth becomes in my storytelling. The choice to lie or the ability tell what actually happened instead of what sounds good becomes the truth for Wendy, for Lucy, and eventually for me when I become too old to remember the original memory and am only left with what I have written down or what I have passed down through the art of storytelling.

The decisions in the past have been made and the stories are out in the world.
32
They can’t be taken back, so much of the story has been told. The truth of those events is what’s been said. It even becomes truth for me because I don’t know what the truth is because of the multitude of lies and embellishments. I now must accept the truth of the past and focus on creating a better truth of our stories, one that my family can be proud of.

33
HEALING
Now that the true identity of me has been exposed, and I have accepted that and embraced it, I can begin to begin the process of healing, both for myself and for those who have been forced into pain because of my storytelling and lies.
For the first time in my life, I am able to not tell someone exactly what they want to hear from me. This doesn’t mean that I always don’t want to fabricate a story and create my own truth again or that I am always able to resist, but there are times where I am successful. There are the times where I am able to not use my lying as a defense mechanism for myself.
Without Lucy, I wouldn’t have been able to begin the healing process for myself or for others. I also would not have had the ability to see clearly the situations involving my mother and other members of my family. It took her giving an outsider’s opinion and exposing the distortion of truth that has been so prevalent within my family circle to allow me to see this disease that has been spreading unchecked. She has allowed me to see that I don’t need to lie to have people trust me. I don’t need to try to explain my way out of things. She showed me that no one really cares why I was late or why something didn’t happen.
She has taught me what I need to do to be the father, husband, man, and friend that I need to be, and that includes being the storyteller for our family. I have not abandoned that role and know that it will always be my burden to bear, but I now know that I must change the way that I approach this responsibility. When we have guests and

34 are passing our stories down to them in our family in the future, we don’t have to lie and embellish.
I am forever thankful to Lucy for sticking with me through all of the pain, all of the tears, all of the sleepless nights where I swore that there was nothing else, no more lies to confess, only to shatter her heart like a flaming brick thrown through a front room window. She has encouraged me and helped me begin to wage war on this. If not for her loving help, none of this would be possible.