I don’t have brown eyes, they are blue. Don’t let photos of my face or even your own vision deceive you. You’re wrong and I’m wrong. My mom says my eyes are blue and so they are blue.
My third grade teacher was not Mrs. Wilson. I’m wrong about that. My class photo is wrong about that. My fellow students are wrong about that. Only my mom is right.
My mother has also decided that my grandfather did not have cancer.
She is the decider of everyone’s truth. It has always been this way. Hers is the only version of events that cannot be questioned or challenged. It’s a breathtaking spectacle to behold, the confidence with which she will lie in any situation. At a dinner party where she will tell everyone my son’s first name is different from his actual name, right in front of me, the human who named him. She will look me dead in the eye and say so. It’s not a challenge, not a fight. She knows I won’t say a word because I never have and, even after I’ve written this essay, I promise you I never will.
Her lies have been my constant companion since I was a child.
At first I believed everything my mother told me. I believed that the national anthem of Jamaica was Bob Marley’s “One Love” and what’s more, I told my friends at school. I told them that she was an actress in a horror movie from the ‘70s, an Olympian who nearly won Gold in her barre routine, an inventor of a special tint of lipstick. I told them we were moving to Australia, to Hawaii, to Los Angeles. “Goodbye forever!” I called out dramatically on a Friday and then, mortified, slunk back into class on a Monday morning. Still here. Still believing my mom. I wanted most things she said to be true.
She wanted, I think, to know things. To feel important. To be the main character of all our lives. I wonder if perhaps she thought she might manifest these big, impressive ideas. If she was buying time, setting herself a deadline for the possibility that maybe, one day, she might get it right. I will probably never know.
Things shifted a bit when the internet was invented, my mother’s Achilles heel. I privately cross-checked her fiction against the rest of the world’s facts. I felt like I was betraying her every time I opened Google to see if her childhood home did, indeed, burn down or if all the roads around her house were actually closed. I said nothing, certainly never admitted I had been fact-checking her lies. The lies were as small as calling in sick to work and as big as I have a cousin who won an Academy Award. Never room for follow up questions. Never room for doubt.
The real push back came with my kids, where she conveniently removed me from every story and slotted herself in my place. Every birthday cake was baked by her. Every scraped knee kissed by her lips. Every schoolyard bully handled with a few of her choicest words. I whispered “no” to myself and then sometimes to her. Rarely, but sometimes. My kids got older, reminded me they knew the truth. They reminded me that it wasn’t a big deal. They rolled their eyes at her fondly and chided me for my red-cheeked anger because they didn’t know, don’t know, what it’s like to have your life defined and shifted and picked apart every single day by someone who lies.
Pushing back ultimately got me nowhere. She is louder, stronger, more adamant about her version of the story because her version has been the only version for as long as I – and probably she – can remember.
Now I learn to live within her narrative. I understand that she is deeply flawed, that she is terrified of the truth. That she is worried about what would unravel if she were to pull at a single thread of any one of her stories. Worried that perhaps she was not the hero at all. That perhaps motherhood did not come naturally to her. That her mistakes will still exist out in the world, even if she lies about them. That she can’t escape her human failures, her lack.
I have learned to bump along in my life as we are now, layering her stories about who I am over who I might actually be and try to make a kind of sense out of these two people. I have learned to figure out who I am without her. And even eventually, after all these years, who I am with her. I’ve learned how to let her have her version of me and still, impossibly, figure out how to be me when we see each other. Which is not often, but it is enough.
The truth, it turns out, isn’t a simple matter. The truth is I love her; she is, still, my mother. The truth is I will protect the fiction she clings to, the story of us, because maybe this fiction is all she has. Maybe it’s all she wants. Maybe I can live with that.
