Lying

My mother has been having a problem with my sister. She (my sister, not my mother) is going through a lying phase. You know, the kind where the parent starts referencing "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Yesterday mother really got upset; my sister insisted she hadn't been the one to take the new hat loom ("I'm serious!"), but after a quick search of the living room I looked on my sister's bed and there it was. She got a long talking to and was rather subdued for a while.

This got me thinking about the lying phase I went through. I don't remember when mine started, but I do know I hit the top when I broke a downstairs window by twirling around in the front yard with a can on a rope and then releasing the rope. My parents weren't home at the time, and when they did come home I tried to blame it on a boy who lived across the street.

They, of course, didn't believe me; I don't think they even mentioned it to the boy's parents. A few days later I sneaked some microwave popcorn while they were out and denied it when they came home, despite the fact that they could smell the popcorn. I eventually admitted yes, I did sneak the popcorn, and they said, basically, that they had known that and it was things like this that really made them wonder if I was telling the truth about the window. And, I don't know, sometime after that I confessed to the window too.

The point is that parents know things. All the time. Kids think they're being sneaky, that their parents have no idea, when in fact their parents are two steps in front of them shaking their heads. I, as the oldest, have been endowed with some of these powers too, and I can tell you I don't know why my parents let me think I was ahead of them for so long. I can tell, from the way a sibling hesitates or changes the tone of voice or something, that they are lying, and yet they think they're being all sneaky. NOT SO, MY GOOD SIBLINGS. We can tell when you haven't really cleaned your room. We can tell when you hurriedly put away the Wii as we pulled into the driveway. We can tell when you've been on the computer half the night. We know who woke up Caiti, who played with my laptop without permission, and who stole the last of mother's poptarts.

And yet they keep trying, and we keep letting them.