9780312364458

Chapter One

Spinning Yarns: Our Mothers’ Lessons

HOW WE LEARNED TO LIE

Our mothers are our role models, our springboard to the world, and their influence upon us, in all areas of our lives, is heartfelt. In certain instances our mothers have shown uswhat to do, as we’ll see in this book, but also what not to do. Whether our mothers kept secrets and lied for the cause or disdained such a path, or openly criticized lies on moral grounds all the while lying themselves, it has impacted us as daughters. Whatever decision our mothers made concerning female deception, the explicit message that came both from our parents and from society at large is that a lie is bad and the truth is good. Yet according to my interviewees, their mothers’ lies, or lack thereof, became evident over time. As the daughters themselves approached womanhood, the ramifications of theirmothers’ actions had an effect.

It may seem a contradiction that a mother, sexless creature that she is supposed to be, a martyr to her children, would have a need for secrets, would yearn for an inner life, for dreams beyond her prescribed reality. It’s a hefty load to carry, no wonder so many women confided in me that the genesis of their lies comes from their mothers. These women lie as mothers, about their mothers, to their mothers, and beyond—spilling into the other parts of their lives. Some women describe the advantage they have in lying because their mothers did it, big and small lies that make it familiar, easier to do. What an admission this is—that our own mothers have shown us how to lie.

The Lies Our Mothers Tell Us

As Jollie, twenty-two, a substitute teacher from Washington state, recalls her childhood, it was continually about her mother’s problems. Jollie has taken her mother’s example as a deterrent.

The biggest secret I’ve had in my life is my mother’s drug addiction. She told everyone she had a serious illness and we believed her. Really she was addicted to painkillers. I had to watch my younger brother and sisters since she couldn’t. I don’t want to end up like my mother.... I’m still ashamed and upset by her. I pity her. My father was in on her secret and fibbed to us, which made it even harder for me. I was older and I ended up being the one who took care of her. We thought she was dying, and we were so afraid. It was sad for her children . . . and I don’t understand why she didn’t think of that, why she didn’t care. Finally, when I was around twelve, I figured it out. Still, my mom lied—she was lying all the time. Now I have my own children and I keep my distance from my mom. My friends have mothers who come to babysit, to help out, but I can’t have my mother come. So I say she’s far away . . . she works ...I won’t do to my own children what she’s done to us.

In Jollie’s case, the shame of her mother’s lie—part survival lie, part designated lie—haunts her. Having a family of her own is a chance to right the wrongs that she suffered at the hands of her mother. Jollie’s determination is to mother her children in the way she wanted to be mothered. Yet she hasn’t disclosed her entire past to her husband or friends.

I got married young and had babies young, and it makes me feel like I have a shot at a healthy life. I don’t say much to my husband about my mother, maybe because I’m so trained to tell her lie, about some grave illness. I still hide her secret, it’s what I know how to do. I used to think I did it for her, but I do it for her and for me. We both needed to lie about her life.

The Lifetime television movie Homeless to Harvard, the story of Liz Murray, played by Thora Birch, is about a family torn apart by the mother’s drug addiction. Murray’s mother, an AIDS-infected drug addict, needed not only to be mothered by her young daughters, but for the daughters’ attempts at normalcy— going to school, having friends—to be cushioned in a lie. Sadly, Murray’s mother dies. Afterward, Murray ends up graduating from high school and winning a scholarship to Harvard, but she’s been robbed of a healthy childhood and is spooked by her mother’s trajectory.

For daughters so burdened by their mothers, there is both the attachment to the mother and the pulling away, as we have seen in Jollie’s case. These survival lies, for the sake of the mother and the sake of the daughters, are shrouded in fear. When Liz Murray roams the streets and subways, homeless at fifteen, there is a terrifying melancholy surrounding her that she is desperate to rise above.

There are our mothers’ lies that aren’t as dark and ominous, but have tremendous influence over how we live our lives as adult women. As Tyne, forty-six, living in Georgia, recalls her divorce, she couldn’t have managed it without her mother’s choice set before her. Like Jollie, Tyne’s decision is in reaction to her mother; she has purposely chosen another kind of life for herself.

If my mother hadn’t stayed married to my father all these years, still today, I wouldn’t have had the guts to leave my own lousy marriage five years ago. I saw her tough it out, her cross to bear, with six children to raise. Her secret was her hope that he’d die or he’d be the one to leave her or her life would miraculously change. I knew her secret because we were so close. She said nothing, but I saw it and felt it, and one day I picked up and left my marriage, blowing wide open my mother’s pretense. I was brave enough to say to the world, my marriage isn’t okay, that’s the truth. Her lie wasn’t my lie, but it sure was my example. She was floored when I did it—not that she said, oh you bad person. I felt absolved, for both of us.

Tyne’s action is proof that her mother’s example, of living a betterment lie, wasn’t enough for her. So what we start as small girls lasts a lifetime; we are entwined in our mothers’ opinions, decisions, and secrets; it becomes a jumping-off point. Although the trajectory of a mother/daughter relationship can have peaks and valleys, 80 to 90 percent of women in midlife, according to Dr. Karen S. Fingerman in her book Aging Mothers and Their Adult Daughters: A Study in Mixed Emotions, claim to have a good relationship with their mothers. According to Dr. Fingerman, adult daughters still seek their mothers’ approval and dislike their disapproval.

In the 1998 film Dangerous Beauty, starring Jacqueline Bisset and Catherine McCormack as mother and daughter in sixteenth-century Venice, Bisset’s character convinces her daughter that she’ll have independence only if she becomes a courtesan. She herself was a famous courtesan, and to this end, Bisset’s character teaches McCormack’s character her secrets. In return, her daughter exceeds her mother’s dreams, becoming a kind of feminist as well as the best of the courtesans. This example shows a mother’s secrets and wiles as a positive force in her daughter’s life.

OUR MOTHER’S VOICE

Modern-day women describe how much their mothers’ secrets and trumped-up tales become theirs. Lisa, thirty-nine, lives in the Midwest and works part-time for a large retailer. She believes that she’s taken on her mother’s habits when it comes to being deceptive.

My mother is a shopper, and from the time I was in kindergarten I’ve watched her hide her purchases from my father, the cleaning lady, everyone. I do the same thing. And I bet my girls will do it, too, since they watch me unload the trunk of the car, and sneak in through the back door, scurrying with my bags into the bedroom. I quickly hang all the new stuff up, just like my mom did. My mom also encouraged me to make my own money and stash it away, do conservative investments, make sure my money isn’t available to anyone but me. I do it and I tell my girls they’ll have to have their own money, any way they can get it, in this world. My mom was always secretive about who she’d meet for lunch in town, and it somehow gives me license to do the same. Who knows who she was with—and who knows who I see at lunch? I know she’d approve.

Who understands our secrets better than our mothers?

As adult women and, for many of us, as mothers ourselves, we continue to look to our mothers for their input. Oftentimes our mothers become our trusted confidantes when we engage in a secret and lie. More than 80 percent of the women in my interviewee pool felt that their mothers were their greatest advocates when it came to their ability to lie. Angela, thirty-four, mother of two, remarks:

My mother supports me no matter what. I’ve been having an affair and trying to figure out if I should leave my husband. My mother even covers for me, babysits the kids, so I can see this guy. She just wants me to make a clean break, or stay in my marriage. Whatever I decide, my secret is safe with her.

Perhaps mothers and daughters are in cahoots not only because mothers and daughters align historically and culturally, but for daughters with their own children, motherhood itself can trigger a few lies. An underlying problem seems to be our society, which doesn’t really support mothers, yet has many preconceived notions of how they are supposed to be. Ann Crittenden, author of The Price of Motherhood, observed that women are diminished as mothers with a "mommy tax," meaning women lose economic security to some extent once they have children. The children suffer as well from this lack of respect for women. And when a third of divorced women, according to her study, go on welfare as primary caregivers for their children, it’s no wonder women will lie and cheat to get what they need, what they deserve.

Daniella, twenty-five, grew up in a family of six; her mother held down two jobs to support the children, and her father saw them several times a year.

My mother was respected in our neighborhood because she could make ends meet. The people who lived around us had more problems than we did, but that’s only because our mother worked hard to avoid them. No one helped her and no one cared; she did it herself. But she used to tell me to get a college degree even if I had to beg and steal for it. And get a job with some respect. I did that, I worked as an intern in a media center and I went to school at night at the local college. No one did this, and my mom didn’t boast about it, she kept it a secret. Today, she still doesn’t say much, she’s afraid people will be jealous. She taught me to lie on my résumé, and she taught me to do it so I wouldn’t clean toilets like she does. I think it was right what she told me to do. I have a job with health insurance now, and I am a manager.

Daniella’s story raises the question if it’s okay to lie because our mothers instructed us this way, to ameliorate the situation, as a betterment lie. It’s as if Daniella’s mother’s voice is ringing in her ears as she forges ahead. According to Wray Herbert, in his article in Newsweek on August 21, 2006, a new study by Anita Kelly, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, found that people with secrets (about families, sex, romance, health) have fewer psychosomatic symptoms than do people with clear consciences. Based on my research for Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets, I recognize the agility with which women lie; if men feel okay about their secrets, women feel convinced of theirs. Our mothers’ secrets have seeped into our subconscious, providing unspoken consent for our own deceit.

There are our mothers’ lies and our own lies.

Whatever style of truth or lie our mothers have, we have our own individual genetic makeup and tendencies. For mothers with more than one daughter, the example they set can be influenced by birth order, the mother’s frame of mind combined with the psyche of each daughter. Was the mother rigid with her firstborn daughter and progressively less so with the daughters who followed— offering more leniency? And how did this affect each daughter’s style of secret telling? Christine, sixty, from a southern city, believes that her two grown daughters were influenced by her moods and the environment of their childhoods.

I didn’t have to teach my daughters not to lie or to lie, it’s in them. My first daughter would lie when the truth would serve her better and my second daughter never lies. I was such a different mother with my first child—I was so concerned about doing the right thing. With my second daughter, I was single and poorer, and I allowed more mistakes, and so she doesn’t tell lies. I cut her a break. Later I had sons and they aren’t the same when it comes to lies. I didn’t care so much about not being wrong with the boys but I had to be right with my girls

I told the girls that lies have short legs but to keep a secret. I taught them that women should always keep something to themselves, don’t tell all. Something has to be sacred. You aren’t obligated to answer questions, you have to learn to be a best friend to yourself. I don’t like the word "lie" and I hope my girls know this, it’s what I’ve said, many times.

For Jasmine, thirty, who lives in New Jersey and is a part-time nurse’s aide with three children, her mother’s lie was similar in nature to her own.

I lie to protect my children when it comes to the real story about their father. He abandoned them and I got a court order. He can see them, but it’s court-mandated. The same thing happened to my mom with my father, and she kept what he’d done a secret from us, and told me when I was twenty. It’s my own life but I see her influence. I do some things like she did and some things I do my way because I prefer it. But I’m thinking of her, of what she’s been through and what I have ahead, with my children.

Unlike Jasmine, Tiana says her mother’s secret has become hers and her sisters’ secret, too. A forty-year-old photographer living in southern California, Tiana can’t recall a time when the family wasn’t enmeshed in her mother’s lie.

Our family is probably too close, it’s just my sisters, our mother, and me. Our mother knows everything about us and we know so much about her. It’s agreed by all of us that we don’t tell anyone the truth about our father, who has nine children and has had several wives. Instead we act mysterious, our mother tells us to, like he’s missing or dead, when people ask. We never mention him or what he’s done to us. Our mother wants it this way. I respect her, but her life has made me not want to be a wife and mother.

Glory, twenty-eight, lives in the Northeast. She views her mother’s secret and accompanying lie as a necessity, yet was encouraged not to lie by her mother.

My mother lied about our religion because we lived in an intolerant area. She wanted us to fit in and thought this was the best way. Then she used to tell me that if you lie about who you are, you’re nothing. She was this really honest woman who never told lies, except this one big lie. It was confusing, but I understood her decision. She was right, there was such bigotry. I moved away after high school—she encouraged us to leave as soon as we could—and have been truthful about myself, who I am, what religion and background I’m from, ever since. I think my mother decided this path and stuck with it, but she wasn’t very happy about it.

The lies told by our mothers and the lies we, ourselves, tell, are a way to get through the labyrinth of life as adult women. While Christine in highly invested in veracity and has gone to great lengths to teach her daughters this, Tiana and Jasmine use deliberate, beneficial lies, and if victory or opportunity is the result, it’s a relief. This applies to Glory’s mother’s lie, too, although the desperate edge to her mother’s choice categorizes the secret as a survival lie, and her mother’s overall honesty is noteworthy.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FEMALE LIE

Our Mothers Set the Stage

It can be reassuring that our mothers have shown us the ways in which women lie and what they lie about. What could be more comforting than to know, when one is lying, that it’s ritualistic, an acquired talent, endorsed by our mothers, and media-driven? After all, our mothers have lied in countless ways—to their coworkers, friends, sisters, husbands, and children—for the options the lies provide, the "seeing is believing" quality it adds to their lives, the wishful thinking it presents, the choices it creates.

There is a close identity with other women’s lies and secrets, whether a woman tells the tale or is affected by another woman’s story. In this way, women’s secrets have passed from generation to generation. Consider Jesse, thirty-four, the mother of three young children, who has been married for nine years.

My mother had an affair and left our father for this man. For years this was fine for my mom, but somewhere along the line she started an affair with her high school sweetheart. She still sees him whenever she can. I knew all of her secrets, but my brothers knew nothing. This secret life is the thing that helped her unhappiness. So now I find myself wanting to be with someone other than my husband and I know I can do it, just like my mom did, twice. I wonder which was better, her divorce or the affair in her second marriage? And what about all the gossip—people talk, no question. I know she thinks it’s a secret, but people say things, I can tell.

Even if my mom didn’t care if she was caught in a lie, she tried to keep it a secret. I work for a bank, something my mother didn’t deal with, and I worry about getting found out, about nasty text messages and mean e-mails about me floating around. I feel like I’m becoming my mom without the guts she had, that I need to stand by my lie better.

It isn’t just our media-driven culture but our sophisticated technology with Internet access, news flashes, and instant messaging that create vehicles for gossip and secrets. This kind of easy access not only fuels gossip but underwrites the lies. Gossip is perceived by some as detrimental, by others as a healthy part of social intercourse, and surely we have observed our mothers knee-deep in the game. For females, gossip is a part of the social canvas of our lives, from grade school through old age. Kate Fox writes in her essay "Evolution, Alienation and Gossip" that regardless of negative connotations, gossip has beneficial social and psychological functions.

"You only have to worry when they stop talking about you," my friend Lara, forty-nine, was taught by her mother. Lara regards gossip in a positive light and seems not to care if her female friends are spreading rumors about her. There can be the right results from a lie that’s looped into gossip. This is the case for Nina, thirty-nine, who, unlike Jesse, acted on her emotions and had an affair. She explains how a spilled secret and subsequent gossip created her happiness. The fact that her mother supported her secret was the gravy.

We’re all from this little town where my cousin Sheryl decided to divorce her husband. She called me first and said she was miserable but didn’t want anyone to know. I’d always been crazy about her husband and had a few lunches and quiet meetings in the park with him. We were about to have an affair when Sheryl decided she wanted a divorce. But it wasn’t really a secret by then and women were talking about it. I knew I had to do something. My mom told me to go for it—I think she had her own reasons, and that gave me courage.

I divorced my husband, and got to be with this man. It’s true I used Sheryl’s secret to get what I wanted. It’s true I lied to her as long as possible. Our boys played together while I was listening to her complain about Carlo and at the same time planning my life with him. It worked out for everyone that it happened that way.

Not every mother’s secret and her daughter’s mirroring of it revolves around illicit love affairs. Still, these are common for both mothers and daughters because women continue to be disappointed in their long-standing, monogamous relationships. Thus, the mother’s actions have a direct influence upon their daughters if the younger women find themselves in a similar predicament. The mothers’ beneficial lies are fodder for the daughters’ own lies.

The Good Girl + Power = Female Lies

When we overheard our mothers speaking in code when we were younger, confiding in other women, we emulated their style. It was a way for us, as young girls, to bond—over a shared secret, a form of communicating. Our mothers’ example proved that secrets render us potent in a world were women have fewer auspices than do men. Using a lie to get what you cannot otherwise have is a keenly female trait. A secret that begets a lie is shown to us by our mothers, our mentors, and our female peers as worth pursuing.

So if good girls wouldn’t venture to fool anyone outright, a lie that seems to have no consequence is a throwaway. If a secret makes the day easier, it can’t be all bad. But can’t these "light lies" enable women to lie more easily about serious matters since there is now a precedent? For instance, Louisa, forty, has been taught by her mother to deny any of her cosmetic procedures to her husband and friends.

My mother taught me that looks are your greatest weapon in this world. She was so panicked over losing her looks when I was in grade school that I always knew that aging was a huge problem. By the time I was in junior high, my mother was on her second procedure, a face-lift, after an eye lift and lots of special facials, whatever they had in those days. She told none of her friends—she even went to California to have the facelift. Instead of looking at my mom and thinking she shouldn’t be lying when her friends asked her what she’d done, I decided I’d be just the same. I got Botox and collagen treatments ahead of anyone I knew.

My mother acted like we’d murdered someone when we went to the doctor’s office together for my first Botox injections. She kept looking around as if the enemy would show up in the person of one of my friends or worse, one of hers. When I had my eyes done a few years ago, I told my husband that I needed it for my sinuses and he believed me. I told my friends another story, that I was only doing my lower lids for a tearing problem. Some of them seemed skeptical but I insisted it was the truth. My mom thought I’d gotten away with something. She said that my father always fell for her excuses when it came to her beauty secrets, and her friends were out to rat on her.

The trickery involved in Louisa’s beauty lie to her friends is an example of how women lie to each other in a separate style from how they lie to a husband, boyfriend, or child. For her friends, Louisa needed to have more details, a more convincing explanation. Louisa is well schooled in lying about this matter, her mother has been a skilled coach.

Similarly, Darren, thirty-three, well schooled by her mother, whose age remains a mystery, is already lying about her age.

On my twentieth birthday I was panicked. I told friends I was eighteen and had skipped a grade to be a sophomore in college. My mom warned me always to be the youngest, and if it wasn’t the truth, just say I was the youngest. She did. I doubt my father, or any of her children, ever knew her real age. She was obsessed with it, with what would happen to her if she was old. It’s weird and sad that she died young, and my aunt says she was lying about her age to the very end. No one could find her birth certificate, but my aunt says she got five years on her tombstone.

So I lie about my age, I say I’m twenty-nine, and before that, when I was younger, I lied younger. I think my mom would like this, she saw no problem in never telling your age—she saw a problem in telling the truth.

On another topic, as equally affecting as Darren’s mother’s influence, is Nora’s experience with her mother. At thirty-six, Nora remarks on her mother’s keen consciousness about her husband’s (Nora’s father’s) status in the neighborhood.

We were poor growing up but my mother came from a fancy family. She was always pretending that things were okay when they weren’t. Our father couldn’t keep a job and that was a secret. My mother kept saying he was at a job that he’d lost three years earlier, and either everyone believed her or everyone knew she was lying. I know people whispered things and she wanted to defend my father. But mostly it was so she still looked like she had this life, the way she’d been raised. And how it was when our father had money, early on.

As disparate in theme as Louisa’s lies (and her mother’s) about cosmetic procedures, Darren’s mother’s lies about her age, and Nora’s mother’s lies about financial status, the impact upon the daughter is the common thread. In these instances, the lies are central to each of the women’s identities and manifest as acceptable lies. The cover-ups for each kind of lie feel necessary; these women instinctively avoid the truth.

Our Mothers’ Secrets Trump Any Other Persuasion

Just as I was finishing up my interviews for this chapter, women began to tell me that their mother’s impact in terms of secrets and lies was the only factor in their decision to do the same. For this group of women, the media and cultural influences were of little importance; since they’d been young girls, an implicit approval for female lies was a direct message from their mothers. The benefit of the lie versus the drawback of the truth was the example set before them. That their mothers’ experience, in the fifties or early sixties, rendered them without a voice only made the daughters more strident in their secrets and lies.

Anya, a fifty-one-year-old mother of two daughters, lives in a suburb in Maryland, where she teaches. Anya believes that her mother taught her all that she knows about lying and circumvention, and was atypical of her time and place.

The way that I am is because my mother had no regard for the truth. She saw the truth as an impediment. Even though she led a traditional life, she was cunning and shrewd and a total rule breaker. She was a navy wife and it was all about conformity, towing the line. Her whole existence was about how to cross that line and I followed her example. It was a training issue for me, I was bonded to her and I admired her.

But when I was in college, I chose a husband whose whole creed of life was about honor, someone who didn’t know how to scheme or cheat. My mother was surprised, she couldn’t understand my choice—she was someone who couldn’t constitutionally tell the truth. Here I was with a husband who believed in the truth, and I tried to be like that, but I’d been led by my mother. I had watched her go to great lengths to be devious, she was very scrappy. In the end I chose my mother’s way and I’ve had secrets all along—my days are not pure as the driven snow. Secrets at work, secrets about money, about other men. My mother would approve of all this.

Likewise, Marie, fifty-one, living in southern Florida, views her mother’s influence as tantamount to her own take on secrets and lies.

Anything my mother did was deliberate and suspicious and at the same time she’d achieved a lot in her life. She’d gotten her college degree during the depression so she cared about how accomplished someone was—she measured them for that. Her view was that it didn’t matter what it took to get there, as long as you got there. She also wanted me to have a better life than she had. She wanted me to marry someone who had a secure income since my father never had that. She liked men to be smart and told me to marry a man with a profession, so I did. And then I lied to him like she lied to my father. And it was okay since my mother had done it. She believed in lying your way into anything that could help you—socially, money-wise, job-wise. She was clever and she taught me how to do the same. I even keep all these secrets from my sister, who never understood what our mother was about, she wasn’t into it. My sister is honest, and not very useful. I’m my mother’s protégée, I’m the one with the moves.

For Ellie, forty-four, who has a twenty-one-year-old daughter, there is disappointment in how little her daughter has been able to glean from both Ellie and her mother when it comes to being disingenuous.

Years ago, when I first read about Machievelli and the idea of people being Machievellian, I didn’t know what the big deal was. I remember thinking, so what’s wrong with what he does? I know for sure that my mother would agree with my viewpoint. My motto is that I lie to get what I want as long as I don’t hurt anyone. This is exactly what my mother told me to do, what she did herself. But my daughter couldn’t survive this kind of life, she can’t cheat or lie or have a secret about anything. She isn’t capable, it isn’t in her and yet my mom and I raised her and she respects us.

My daughter is in a long-term relationship and I watch her be so honest with her boyfriend. My mother and I flinch, neither of us would have done it that way. Since she got to college, my daughter has purposely not been like my mother and me. She’ll ask me how to navigate this relationship or what to tell her boss if she’s going to be late, and then she’ll absolutely reject my advice. In all fairness, she has something I don’t have in my marriage, a loving, reciprocal relationship, but she won’t even cut corners with her studying, it’s not just the boyfriend. She doesn’t see things like my mother and I do, she won’t listen, won’t sneak around.

Blanche, twenty-five, working in a southwestern city in marketing, uses lies less than her mother, and is trying to break free of her mother’s pattern. If my mother hadn’t longed for a good life, and if she hadn’t been so ambitious for me, I’d be stuck where I grew up. I watched my mother and my grandmother lie to my father and my grandfather, to anyone in our hometown. They were so miserable and I was their hope. My mom even wanted me to lie on my college application and my first job applications. So I exaggerated how I’d done at a job and made a two-week internship seem like it stretched out all summer. It helped. There’s no question that my mom’s tactics work. But I’m not good at it.

There’s something to be said for telling the truth and I try to do it. When it gets messed up I think maybe my mother is right. Why tell my new boyfriend that I still see my old boyfriend sometimes? Why tell my boss why I’m really late? But I don’t want to be like my mom, able to lie about things even if her secrets are good for her.

Vicki, thirty, whose mother told all sorts of lies, is like Blanche and considers the truth an option.

As much as I know my mom is smart and has gotten through some pretty awful ordeals, I don’t want to live a life of lies like she has. I watched how she had to lie to my stepfather and to my father about money, about our schools, about our schedules. I watched her lie about work. I know she had to do it, but I want a different kind of relationship with people, even with my boss, definitely with my husband. I want to say it like it is. This doesn’t mean I won’t lie, since I know how to do it really well from my mother. It means I’ll try to be honest, to do it that way first.

These interviews illustrate how impressive mothers are and how the modeling of a mother can obliterate any other authority. While Anya’s lies are beneficial in nature, Marie and Ellie employ the betterment lie. Blanche’s has a compassionate component, as she enters the gray area that has ruled her mother’s life, and Vicki recognizes her mother’s survival lies as she breaks with the tradition. If a mother sanctions deception, it becomes familiar to the daughter, who then makes her own decisions. It’s the lives that women lead versus the faces they wear that is the trick, the sleight-of-hand.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN AVERAGE FEMALE LIAR

Credit Card Hell—Costco to Bloomingdale’s

Your mother always shopped to assuage her disappointment, she always lied about her purchases to your father, her friends, sometimes herself. In the past few years, you’ve imitated your mother’s pattern, walking into stores every time stress increases in your life.

Now you haven’t been shopping in almost a month and you feel extremely virtuous, but you’re also itching to get back to it. Any store that sells women’s clothing, makeup, hair and face care products, and bargain purchases, from computers to cashmere sweaters, will do. Not that you are alone, your girlfriends are your cohorts on these shopping excursions. But they seem to handle their purchases better than you have, especially in the past year or so. It’s been a long haul; your husband was laid off, the insurance company is refusing your daughter’s asthma medication, and the raise that you expected at Christmas was a bonus instead. The tension of your husband being at home, day in, day out, is enormous and he can’t be convinced to pitch in around the house.

During these shopping excursions, your problems are forgotten, albeit temporarily, and you feel lighter, there’s a spring to your step at the mall. When your husband insists you curtail spending, you promise to comply. And for two weeks afterward, you don’t enter a store. Then life became hellish, your children’s needs, usually manageable, became unbearable.

The first time you broke the rule, you felt denied, having returned home with one lousy eyeliner and a new lipstick. After that, you simply lied about your shopping excursions. You kept your secret well, having been approved for another MasterCard, in your maiden name. As the debt escalated from $2,000 to $10,000, you felt a pang of remorse. You promised yourself that you’d scrimp and save to pay the debt, and better yet, give up the stores.

Deep in your heart you consider this a benign secret compared to your cousin who is having an extramarital affair and your coworker who is slowly siphoning money from her and her husband’s joint bank account. Isn’t this what your mother instilled in you?

Demands of Mothering

Your day begins on the wrong side of the bed, and you have slept through two alarms. The children are now late for school and your eight-year-old son is asking about his lunch bag. You give him lunch money and tell him he’s to buy food in the cafeteria on Thursdays from now on. When he seems perplexed, you assure him it’s a new rule.

Your thirteen-year-old daughter cries that she was supposed to be up forty-five minutes earlier to study for her math test. When she becomes hysterical that she’ll fail, you proceed to write an excuse from math due to a long-standing dentist appointment, requesting your daughter make up the math test the next day.

You toss your youngest child into the car in her pajamas, telling her that preschool is canceled and she can stay home with her nanny. The older children give you an odd look and a wave of exhaustion sweeps over you. You know your mother would never have allowed this, she would have been organized and honest with her children. But then, she didn’t have your career and three children, did she?

Once the older children are dropped off at school (they missed their bus), you call your office on your cell and announce that your little one is "under the weather" and you’ll be in as soon as your nanny arrives. Just then your husband calls from Toronto, where he had a business meeting, and you tell him everything is fine. And it is, isn’t it? It’s just that so much is expected of you, the endless responsibilities, big and small. An hour later you drive to work realizing it’s unlikely that the truth would have proven any better. You wonder if the falsehoods you’ve told all morning can be categorized as merely fibs. You push any thoughts of your mother out of your mind.

Behind Closed Doors

For a year you’ve buried a secret, a secret few would believe. To the outside world, you have an attractive, successful husband, two terrific sons, and a great job in fashion that you enjoy. As a family you take interesting vacations, having traveled to Asia and Europe in the past year. Your life appears close to perfection.

But the reality is that your husband has a serious alcohol problem and is abusive when he drinks. Nonetheless, it is the quiet times, when he is "behaving," that get you through the difficult times when his behavior is out of control and you feel demoralized and hopeless. This isn’t alien territory, your own father was an alcoholic, and the worst part is, your mother lived a similar lie to yours.

Three months ago your husband was arrested two states over for drunk driving and disorderly conduct while returning from a sport outing. Not only did you pay a lawyer to make it go away, but you told no one, not even your mother or sister, both of whom had such high hopes for you to escape your past. Now you drive your husband to work and pick him up, since his license has been revoked. Your relationship with your husband gnaws at you, in light of this most recent event. You ask yourself how long can you tolerate this and for whose sake do you pretend? For the sake of the boys, for your reputation in your town, for your own need to have order in your life? You promise yourself one more incident and you’ll blow the lid on this false life. Then you feel your mother’s shadow, she never squealed on your father, she lived the lie.

A LEGACY OF LIES AND WHISPERS

The recent film Because I Said So, starring Diane Keaton as a single mother who raised three daughters and Mandy Moore as her unmarried daughter, addresses how far-reaching the mother/daughter connection is. With the best intentions, Keaton’s character decides to advertise online for a lifelong partner for Moore’s character. Not only is Keaton not honest about her meddling, but when two men both fall for Moore, Keaton steers her daughter toward her favorite of the two, without any disclosure as to how it all came about. Since Moore prefers the other man, she ends up a two-timer, lying to both men in order to please her mother. This is a film where the secret unravels in order to clean up the mess, but the underlying theme is that of a mother’s strong influence over her daughter.

In speaking to the women who answered my ad on craigslist, I heard of more secrets that were kept than were revealed. The majority of women claimed their mothers were responsible for their ability to have hidden agendas. What we have learned from our mothers covers the gamut from lying to our husbands, children, and friends to hiding a drug addiction, to embellishing our children’s achievements, to squandering money, to buying lottery tickets. Women confided that they’d been sexually and emotionally abused, others had lied to save their reputations, some had lied to survive, still others to protect their families.

In justifying their secrets and lies, more than 80 percent of the interviewees reported their mothers’ effect, and some adult daughters were not very troubled by their own actions. For example, Charlotte, a thirty-five-year-old woman who found herself tearing up credit card receipts from restaurants and hiding her purchases, felt the genesis of her acceptable lie was her mother’s blessing.

There’s nothing in my life that is so huge I can’t get away from it. I can escape any of my lies, but I choose to lie instead; I go shopping and don’t tell my live-in boyfriend how much I spend, I go to a bar with girlfriends and tell him I’m at the movies. It’s just easier. I don’t want to be judged, but I want to do what I want to do. I sometimes wonder if I had another kind of boyfriend if this would be any different, but I doubt it. I’ve always lied to whatever guy I’m with. No one seems to get me. I figure a lie is easier than the hard work of trying to explain. The only person who knows what I do is my mom. Sometimes she thinks I could get a better boyfriend, but she also understands that I do this to make life easier.

BURDENED WOMEN: HOW SOCIETY ORCHESTRATES FEMALE LIES

Our mothers have endorsed our secrets, even coached us in deception; the culture fosters a climate where women choose to lie.

Let’s face it, lying is instinctive, a part of the hard wiring in both genders. Yet female lies go deeper, reflecting societal expectations and used as a method to defy the construct. When a woman is adept at dishonesty as a way to keep afloat, she feels in control in the midst of her complicated life. It’s ironic that as options have expanded for women, the need to lie becomes more central and more prevalent.

There are a few ways in which female lying not only aces male lying, but can be viewed as necessary and distinctive.

Female Lies Can Be Trite or Significant

If women lie to their male partners about the price of clothing, face creams, and shoes, it’s easy—it affords them material goods without anyone in their lives passing judgment. But what of the more serious lies, the ones that have greater reverberations? Regardless of the scale of the secret, I found women such as Janine standing up for the decision to lie.

For Janine, a thirty-two-year-old administrator, an extramarital affair meant she had to lie to her husband and two sons about her whereabouts for more than a year. As with other interviewees, Janine confided in her mother, who encouraged her daughter to use the affair to shed light on her present situation. Janine’s secret tryst was an eye-opener; she used a compassionate lie to put this into effect.

Excerpted from Little White Lies by Susan Shapiro.

Published by St. Martin’s Press.

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Introduction: Enduring Tales: Enabling Choices	p. 1
The Myth of the Truth	p. 15
Spinning Yarns: Our Mothers' Lessons	p. 17
Sex, Love, and Buried Secrets	p. 49
Cashing In: Money and Lies	p. 73
Through Glass Darkly	p. 95
Mothering as Myth: Ambivalence and Lies	p. 97
Family Matters: Shattering Secrets	p. 117
Facing Our Lies: Addictions	p. 144
Living the Lie	p. 183
Lying to Win: Competitive Lies	p. 185
Born Again: Lying to Ourselves	p. 214
Bold Secrets: Lies That Make or Break Us	p. 234
Conclusion: The Female Talent for the Moral Lie	p. 251
Acknowledgments	p. 263
References	p. 265
Index	p. 277
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets : The Truth about Women and Deception

0312364458

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program