A Lie, A Ladyslipper

I really, really, REALLY don't want this to turn into a parenting blog mostly because I want to be writing about things other than parenting. I guess on some level I don't want to feel like my world is really that small. But sometimes my world really is that small. Or maybe it's more generous to myself to say that in a day in which other, often interesting and outward-looking things do in fact happen to me, the parenting still looms largest of all. Ah, the preamble. Even the Constitution has one.

So Lily and I were walking the dogs the other day, when I suddenly realized that three out of Sadie's four paws had been colored red with magic markers. "Lily?" I asked. "What happened to Sadie's paws?" I wasn't actually mad; in fact, I was trying not to laugh, as it occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be very good for Sadie to have to lick all that marker off. I also had thought we had finally absorbed the "only on paper" rule when it came to magic markers. The drawings she glued to the walls this morning made me realize the "only on paper" rule had uncharted waters still.

She shrugged dramatically, her shoulders hunched up by her ears, palms upstretched, eyebrows practically waggling. She looked like a miniature Marx brother. "I can't imagine," she said. "I just don't know." We kept walking. "Do you think I colored Sadie's paws?" I finally asked? No, she said. "Daddy?" No, again. "Annika?" Not her either, she said. She sounded like she was enjoying this a little too much. I, on the other hand, was starting to feel a little annoyed.

"Lily, I know you colored Sadie's paws," I said. "I don't like it when you don't tell me the truth. Can you please just admit that you did it?" Uncharted waters again, but in a way that couldn't be fixed with spray-on cleaner. I felt uneasy about what I was saying, my irritation, but I didn't know where else to go: she had lied to me, was digging in her heels as we continued the argument.

"No, Mama," she said, stopping on the sidewalk with an angry glare. "I did not do it. I think Sadie did it all by herself." I resisted the urge to shout, "The dog does not have opposable thumbs!" It seemed undignified. And I was mad at this point, at her and at myself. We argued all the way upstairs, and for a little while longer. I finally got her to acknowledge some role in the coloring of the paws, but she never fully owned up to it, and she made it seem like she was just saying what I needed her to say to get me to let the subject go.

I'm not sure why I couldn't. It was funny--the red paws, the lie itself, the idea of Sadie making red strokes on her white fur with the marker held between her teeth, I guess, in some distorted dog version of a manicure. And I knew the lying itself was developmentally appropriate. I had once come home from preschool and told my mother I'd spilled paint all over the floor on purpose. My mother, mortified, called the school. I'd made it up. Kids lie to test you, to be made to feel safe in spite of the lie, sometimes just because of a burgeoning imagination, and they do need to be told that you know they're not telling the truth. But arm-twisting a begrudging confession is bad parenting. I knew it as I was doing it. Sigh.

But the whole exchange made me think of something, something else, something I haven't thought about in a long, long time. It must have been almost thirty-five years ago. I was very young; we were at my grandparents' house, which is--as Lily likes to point out--in the woods. It's on a corner lot in an increasingly developed suburban neighborhood, yes, but undeniably surrounded by a very small patch of woods. I was playing in the yard by myself. Mostly I stayed in the grassy yard by the house, but this time I had ventured a little way down the driveway, where the grassy yard met the decaying leaf covered floor of the woods, and then I saw it: a ladyslipper. For some reason, this had been drilled into me since birth. It was illegal to pick a ladyslipper. I knew that for some reason, not sure why, now that I think about it, my mother really cared about this law. It was serious business. They were endangered, I guess; it was actually illegal to pick them. (Or so I have always assumed; now I will do some online research and find out if this was a sham, although I can't imagine a motive for it.) I sat in front of it. It was white tinged pink, otherworldly. It looked like an enormous, elegant insect; a fairy pod. I knew more than I knew almost anything else that I could not, must not, pick it. And then I did.

I was found out. Did I confess? Was I caught? I don't remember. But I will never ever forget picking that ladyslipper.

This seems related to me to Lily's paw-coloring. Maybe it's just because I have so few memories in which I can so vividly conjure up an emotion from being her age. I think I remembered it for a reason.