SOMETIMES LYING IS THE ONLY WAY TO GROW UP

“In a room where you do what you don’t confess,” wrote my friend Dave in an email chain among friends about the goings-on in a motel in a small Iowa town. I knew that line – I don’t usually remember song lyrics – and a quick Google search reminded me it came from Gordon Lightfoot’s 1974 folk rock song Sundown. And Dave knew it enough to use it. But it meant nothing to the other seven in the email chain, all around the same age. Why did this line stick in our memories?

I thought about it for a few minutes and shot an email to Dave, with a hunch. Dave’s answer below confirmed my “it’s because we are Catholics and they are not” guess.

“Sundown is a favorite of mine. I think the Confess line gave me a guilty pleasure. I went to confession weekly for years during grade school and junior high. I confessed impure thoughts and that I didn’t honor my parents week after week. Penance was one Our Father and three Hail Mary’s. I often would hang around when I was finished with my prayers to see how long it took my friends to finish their penance.”

FIRST CONFESSIONS

Dave and I made our first confessions in second grade. Confession is a Sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church and a big deal. I remember mine was on a Saturday, my 40 classmates were all dressed up, and our parents and relatives joined us in church. That is why song lyrics with the word confession made an impression on Dave and me. Especially when the line described above is preceded by “I can see her lying back in her satin dress.” 

Dave’s “impure thoughts” also made my list of sins even though I hadn’t a clue at 8 years old what impure meant. My other regularly confessed sin was “lying to my parents.” I needed to say something in that confessional but truth be told I didn’t lie any more than I sat around thinking lewd thoughts about Becky, the 8 year old daughter of friends of my parents who hung out with me for reasons neither of us understood. The serious-confession-requiring-lying wouldn’t start until I was 16.

FIRST GIRLFRIEND

“You can’t get serious about her, you know,” my mother said to me in 1966 when I told her about Sharon, my first girl friend. Sharon was Jewish. If Sharon had been Protestant, my mom would have said the same thing. My mom came by this thinking in a hard-earned personal way because she had married a Protestant. By the time I was a teenager, I knew the story.

Before they married in 1948, my mom talked my dad into going through the Right of Christian Initiation for Adults program to prepare for conversion to the Catholic faith. My dad loved my mom and so gave it a try but was treated so badly by the priest he eventually said “no more, not ever again.” My dad accepted that his children would be raised Catholic but rarely went to church with us. Mom and dad had a good marriage but even as a kid of 16 I knew religious difference was a source of tension between them. So when mom said “you can’t get serious,” I knew she was serious.

THE LYING STARTS

That’s when I started lying. I also had laid out the welcome mat for impure thoughts a couple of years before and more than a few hung around, with the help of an occasional glance at a drugstore Playboy. It was, however, the lying that I needed because I did not have it in me to openly rebel, to say NO to my mother. And until Dave’s “confession” line got me thinking about this time of my life, I had not accepted that my mother knew all along exactly what I was up to, what I HAD to be up to.

To grow up, we have to grow away from our parents. There is no easy or perfect way to do this. And no way that does not cause guilt. I liked Sharon and without really giving it much thought, I started to lie. At first, it was lies of omission. Occasionally Sharon would drive me home from a date and I asked her to drop me off at the top of East Street, a block from our house and a spot not visible from the windows. Sharon and I dated for almost two years and never once did I tell my mom what I was up to.

My lies of commission were more numerous. I routinely asked my parents to use one of our family cars for Saturday drive-in dates. When asked where and who with, I always replied a movie and buddies. Riding to church Sunday mornings in that same car with my mom always made me feel guilty and more to the point anxious about whether there was any evidence of my deception.

“PAUL, I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE DOING”

As I started writing this blog about lying, a memory of another incident with my mom came to mind. In The Discovery of Being, Rollo May writes “One’s present determines what he recalls from the past.” It is early evening on a weekday because the setting is the #1 Little League diamond in Duck Creek Park in my hometown of Davenport, Iowa. My brother Pat is playing and my mom and dad are sitting in the the bleacher section behind home plate.

I don’t remember where Sharon and I were going that night but I needed a car for a date. They are sitting about 1/3 of the way up and so I step around people to get to my mom. I always asked my mom, never my dad. “Can I have the car,” I asked. “Where are you going?”, mom responded. “Over to Jerry Spaeth’s,” I yammered. Jerry was a high school friend and usually a safe answer. Today, as I recollect this episode, I see my mother turn, look directly at me, and say quietly, “Paul, I know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t.”

At 16, I thought about what my mom said for about 1 minute, the time it took me to walk to the car. Today, I think about what my mom said in a different light. She knew all along about my lying. Despite her religious concerns, she probably knew my first romance would go the way of most first romances as it eventually did. But I think my mom knew something else.

Dody Gardner died in 2017. She was 96. At the lunch after her funeral I met one of only two contemporaries of hers still alive. I had met John Bishop a few times when I was a kid, at bridge parties my parents hosted. John, a physician and life-long bridge player, told me my mom was the finest player he knew. I asked a few of her younger friends, all bridge players, about this and they all nodded their heads. They did not know anyone better. I had no idea. And it gave me this thought.

Good bridge players think strategically. My mom knew my personality. She knew I could not rebel directly. To take the necessary next step toward maturity, toward separating myself from her and my father, I needed to use disreputable means I would eventually discard. That is exactly what happened. Momentarily, at 16, I took her “I know exactly what you are doing” as a warning. It wasn’t a warning. It was a forecast. The skillful bridge player had made a successful opening bid.

I no longer go to confession. But if I did, lying would not be one of my sins. Impure thoughts?, well, I will leave that topic for another blog.