When my son, Clyde, was five years old I picked him up early from school one day to take him to a doctor’s appointment, where, among other things, he was scheduled to receive a vaccination. When I got to his classroom it was obvious that he had been discussing his upcoming ordeal with his fellow students, and also that they had done their best to work him up into a state of dread. I knew this must have been the case because when I walked over to fetch him the first thing he said wasn’t “Can I have a soda?”
To understand the magnitude of this you must first understand that “Can I have a soda?” had been—and still is—his stock response whenever anyone announces they are going anywhere at all. Anywhere. You could say, “Well, I’m off to plan my own funeral!” and Clyde would glance up from his computer game just long enough to say, “Can you get me a soda while you’re there?” (And don’t think a grumpy reply discourages him any, either: your response to the above scenario could be, “The only flavors they have at the funeral home are despair, regret, denial and Diet Denial,” and Clyde’s reply would still be, “Uh huh: can you get me one of each?”
But yeah, this time when I walked into the room the first thing he said to me was “Is this shot going to hurt?”
I responded with a laugh. “Hurt? Of course it’s going to hurt: they’re poking a sharp piece of metal inside your arm. Why wouldn’t it hurt?”
“Do I have to get it?” he then asked, his voice small and a little bit scared.
“Yep,” I said. “’Fraid so.”
We looked at each other for a moment and then he said, “Okay,” and that was that. He got the shot. The shot hurt. And then, when we were leaving the doctor’s office, he turned to me and said, “Can we stop and get a soda?” And that was it. Or at least I thought it was. Then a couple of weeks ago I ran into an adult who had been in the classroom during the exchange, and she remarked that she had never forgotten the honesty of the exchange between Clyde and I all those years ago, which made me think about my whole philosophy about lying.
Personally, I’m all for lying. Lying’s great: getting what you want when you haven’t really earned the right to have it—what could be better than that? What I’m not so big a fan of, however, is getting caught. Getting caught sucks. Which is why I try to never lie in situations where I’m likely to be found out.
There was no way I could have told Clyde that getting a shot wouldn’t hurt and gotten away with it—especially not when there was only going to be about fifteen minutes between the lie and the pain. True, the shot wasn’t going to hurt very badly, but since pain is subjective I didn’t think it would have been right to hold Clyde to my perceptions of pain. After all: I’ve been through childbirth; of course a shot would seem trivial to me. And besides, the question wasn’t “how much is it going to hurt?’ but rather if it was going to hurt at all.
Like I said, this was a situation that would have been almost impossible to lie my way out of—so I didn’t. Unlike the situation that immediately followed, where I told a whopping big lie and got away with it, because, still and all, five-year-olds are notoriously gullible.
I still can’t believe he bought it when I told him the stores were all out of soda.