The First Lie My Mother Told Me

I'll be truthful. Mom may have told me other lies before this one, but this is the first one I remember. That makes it special.

But first a bit of background. I think I was fairly observant at age three. I was able to look around me and draw conclusions. (They may have been wrong, but hey, I was three.)

I observed that my mother, as well as some of her friends and some of my aunts got pretty fat. Then they went to the hospital and they came home with babies. There had to be some relationship there. I mentioned this observation to my mother who helped me clarify my thinking on the subject.

She couldn't tell me the stork brought babies. I'd already observed that they seemed to come from the hospital - so finding babies in cabbage patches wouldn't work well, either. Did she tell me the one about how "daddy planted a seed in mommy"? No. Way more original than that.

She told me that you had to eat a lot of food so you could get fat. Then you went to the hospital and they rolled you over a barrel until you were thin again, and as a reward they gave you a baby.

Admit it, that is a doozy of a story! But at the age of three, I believed it. Why wouldn't I? Everything my mother said was gospel truth.

But that tale conjured up some visuals in my three year old head. I didn't really remember being in a hospital (I still had my tonsils at this point). I may have seen one on TV. I'd also never been in a warehouse, but again, may have seen one on TV. The image in my head was half hospital and half warehouse. There were barrels of flour stacked up all around the room. (You might ask, Why flour? Flour is white and anything else would have stained the nurses uniforms and back in those days nurses dressed in white from head to toe.) So in my mind, Mom was in the room with two nurses who got one of the barrels out and put Mom on it and then they rolled it back and forth for however long it took for her to get skinny again. Then she went into a room with a bunch of babies on the shelf and picked one as her reward.

So when I broke my arm at the age of four and was told that I'd be going to the hospital, I was thinking that they might actually want to roll me over one of those barrels even though I didn't have an ounce of fat on my body. But that was okay, because at that age, I thought it would be great fun to have a baby. Way more fun than any doll I had. (Clearly, I had no clue.)

When we arrived at the hospital and the nurse was helping me out of the car I asked if I'd be getting a baby. A perfectly reasonable question in my mind. I had no idea why the nurse was laughing. Worse still, my mom seemed to be in on the joke. "Not this time, sweetie." said the nurse. I told my mom that I was perfectly willing to be rolled on the barrel. The nurse looked at Mom, who offered no explanation. Mom told me "not this time" and that was pretty much the end of that. I still didn't realize it wasn't the truth.