And if you'd have asked me how I thought I could make that happen, I'd say by trusting them in return.
But lately I'm finding that there is a lot of grey area in that seemingly black and white equation.
My oldest has had her history of little white lies. Reading back over that entry I realized that a couple of years ago I wasn't exactly encouraging her to tell the truth, which is what I have been heavily emphasizing lately. If I punish her for lying there's no telling that she won't just try to get better at lying, rather than start telling the truth. And it goes without saying that if she isn't lying, or that if I don't absolutely know the truth of a situation, and I'm blaming her for it anyway, I'm destroying her trust in me.
So over the last couple years I've been trying to trust her more, so that she'll trust me. At least trust me enough to tell me the truth and not be so fearful of the consequences.
I say that I have been "trying" to trust her more because at times that's a difficult task. This past week has proven so. But it's also proven what will happen if I don't.
We had a couple of little lies this week. The first one was related to a shirt that I found in my daughter's drawer. I was pretty sure it wasn't hers, so I asked her. She just shrugged. So I asked her if the shirt belonged to one of her friends that she is always trading clothes with on play dates. She said she didn't think so. But this time she was suppressing a smile. It was the kind of smile that tells me she's lying.
I asked her one more time and she said "I dunno, maybe" as if this would pass for a decent answer. I very nicely explained that she the best thing to do is to tell the truth and if she was trying to lie to me I was not at all happy. At this point she just shut down a little and said "I guess so" in response to another question about whether or not this belonged to her friend.
I knew that she was lying about not knowing, and I figured it was because she liked the shirt and wanted to keep it. I explained that her friend probably liked it just as much and was missing it. But she still didn't come right out and tell me it belonged to her.
A couple days later when I asked her about the shirt, she readily admitted it was her friends. It was sort of as if she had forgotten she was originally trying to lie about it.
Then later that same day she tried to pull off another little lie. Once again I tried to explain that telling the truth would save her from more consequences than lying would. I still couldn't break through and sell "the truth will set you free" concept.
On Thursday she came home from school and immediately brought me a note that I needed to sign. It was a note her teacher made her write to me explaining that she had kicked a boy in her class because he was "being too loud and not listening to me ten times when I asked him to be quiet."
I asked her what was going on when all this happened, and she said she didn't want to tell me. I said something about it being frustrating when people don't listen to you, and then she just put it all out there. Apparently this boy was teasing her about liking another boy in the class, the aforementioned admirer, and he wouldn't stop saying it over and over to her. So she kicked him a good one.
Now part of me was happy to see her stick up for herself. Don't let the loud mouths of the world keep you down, sister!
But of course I didn't tell her that. I told her the right thing to do was to find the teacher, yada, yada, yada. And then I realized that I was really happy that she just came out and told me the story. No lies, no refusal to explain.
A step in the right direction!
Then later that night we all got in the car to go to our local Farmer's Market. My husband sat in the back with our younger daughter, which means it must have been a full moon on the fourth Thursday of a month starting with "m" because that almost never happens. While back there he found a little doodling on the car. In ink. On the interior of the car.
I was immediately not happy. He seemed to just shrug it off, but for whatever reason this made me really upset. I asked our oldest if it was her and she denied it. But she did get a little smirk.
Aha! I thought I had her cornered so I acted as such.
Not good. Before too long she was in tears vehemently denying it was her.
My husband put the kabash on my investigation, but I had a really hard time letting it go. I figured that it MUST have been her, since she's in that far back seat about 95% of the time when we are in the car, and it was in pen, which she often has in her hands in the car after school, writing notes or lists or what not.
All signs pointed to her. And I was determined to get to the bottom of this.
Yesterday, which was the following day, I went to try to clean off the pen doodle. As I was walking out there I said again that I was upset that she wasn't telling me the truth. My husband very wisely pointed out that we have to trust her if she's going to trust us. I agreed with that, but between me and you, I chalked that up to something I would do after this situation was cleared up. There was no way I was going to trust her with this one, because I knew, without doubt, that I was right about this one.
So I went to scrubbing this little inch or two of ink drawing, that I had thought was an ice cream cone, with an arrow pointing to the cup holder, as if my daughter was labeling what was there. At least that's what it looked like from the front of the car.
But up close I realized that the 'drawing' is much more rudimentary than it appeared from the driver's seat.
Instantly I start wondering if it was someone else in the family.
So while I'm sitting at the car wash with my younger daughter and my son, I casually ask my daughter if she wrote on the car.
Bingo! She says, sweetly and simply, "yes".
I immediately feel the yolk oozing down my face. Remorse starts setting up camp.
I don't react too much and simply say "I guess that explains why you were awfully quiet during that conversation I had with your sister last night in the car". I of course give her a dose of guilt, adding that I'm really not happy with her actions, that it wasn't fair for her to let me keep blaming her sister, and that I expect more from her now that she's five and a half. Which I now realize is a year younger than my oldest when we went through the "Pants on Fire" shenanigans that I wrote of in 2008.
She understands and I leave it at that.
I feel relieved to finally have an answer.
And I begin composing my apology to my oldest.
I tell my oldest later on that day that I'm very sorry for not believing her. I help her understand that I was very wrong and I fully know it. She's happy that I finally know the truth.
Now I have to ask, where are we?
There is just a lot of grey area here. I want to trust my kids, but that trust gets chipped away every time I catch one of them in a lie. I want them to trust me, but that too gets chipped away every time I don't trust them.
This whole 'raising kids' thing can be quite complicated.
Trust me.
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