Читать книгу The Soul Workout - Helen H. Moore - Страница 10
ОглавлениеLooking at the Truth of My Life
I have been a liar all my life. When I was three or four, my mother sent me to our room—we shared one, along with my father and brother, until I was almost eight—with a whack on the backside for some transgression. Today I don't even remember what it was. What I do remember is that once over the threshold, I grabbed and started to swing the bedroom door, to slam it with all my three- or four-year-old anger and might, and as I did so, stuck my tongue out at my mother as vehemently as I could. What I had failed to take into account was that on the back of the door that I was slamming was a mirror. My parents’ dresser, with its own mirrored top, stood against the opposite wall. My mother could clearly see me. I was busted by my own reflection. Fitting, wouldn't you say?
When my mother burst into the room seconds after the door slammed to confront me for my insolence, I compounded the felony by saying, with as much false innocence as I could muster (which was a lot, even back then), “I wasn't sticking my tongue out at you, Mummy! I was sticking it out at the devil! He's the one who made me be bad!” I admit, it's pathetic, but I was only three or four years old. The spanking that then commenced was much worse than the original whack that had sent me to my room. Isn't it interesting that my tongue got me into trouble—as it would continue to do for so many more years?
Whether or not I received spankings, I continued to lie. I lied to my mother, my father, my siblings, my teachers, my employers, my lovers, my husbands, and my friends. Why tell the uncomfortable truth when they won't understand it anyway? A lie is really just a timesaving device, and if it makes me look better than the truth would, so much the better. If it prevents me from laying out cash, better yet. If it gets me whatever I want and helps me avoid some unpleasant reality, that's best of all. At least that's what I used to think.
I lied myself right up to the brink of death and into recovery; even then, in the beginning, I lied to myself about why I was there. Now, a half-century after that tongue-poking incident, I'm finally learning how to be honest. And not just with my words.
I am a recovering member of a twelve-step fellowship; I do what I say I will do when I say I will do it, and I don't say things that aren't really so. And that's how my soul grows.
