Lies My Mother Told Me

Of course parents sometimes tell little white lies for their children's protection, edification or to make life easier for themselves. Like when they say not to make faces because if the wind changes it will freeze that way. Or you'd better behave or they'd tell Santa not to bring you anything for Christmas.

However, little evil Marie was more hardcore than that. She would say things that haunt me to this day. Things like, "If you continue to bite your lips, one day you're going to hit bone." That terrified me because that was a nervous habit when I was a kid. Do you know it took me until a few years ago to realize that there is no bone in your lips!

Or, "If you eat paper/bite your nails/eat too many sweets you'll get parasites." AHHHHH!!! Frightening! I had to skip many science classes to avoid hearing anything about that subject.

Being a devout Christian woman, she had to hit me with, "If you don't go to church every Sunday, Jesus won't welcome you when the time comes." Seriously: why did she hate me??

But the absolute, most terrible lie she ever told me still sends chills up my spine to this day.  It was many, many years ago. I must have been...maybe 10 or so. I had already gone to bed and had the light out. I didn't have a waste basket, but instead used a brown paper grocery bag for my garbage.

So I'm laying in bed and I hear this tap tap tapping on the paper bag. Huh, that was weird. Tap tap tap. To satisfy my curiosity (remember curiosity killed the cat!), I turned on my bedside light and looked at the bag.

There, shuffling off to Buffalo in its little tap shoes on my garbage bag, was the biggest, blackest spider I had ever seen!  If you can hear a spider walking, you know it's too damn big!  So of course I did what anyone would have done in my position: I threw a shoe at it! But in my terror of course my aim was off and I missed, and the spider stopped to give me a dirty look. That's right: it was big enough for me to see its face! Well, that's how I remember it.  But when it was still on the bag I jumped out of bed and ran out of my room, screaming for my mother.

She came out of her room. "What are you screaming about? What's the matter?"

"There's a giant tarantula in my room!"

"No there isn't."

"Yes it is!" I was shaking. "Please go in my room and kill it!"

"Of course I will. You wait right here."

So Marie, my protector, marched bravely into my room to do battle. A couple of minutes later she came back out. "I took care of it."

"Really? It's gone?"

"Yes it is so go back to bed. Everything's fine."

"Thank you mom!"  I gingerly entered my room. Sure enough: nothing on the bag or my bed and my shoe was by the door. I didn't touch it because I figured there were tarantula guts on it, but I did turn out the light and happily drifted off to sleep.

It wasn't until probably 30 years later that I was reminiscing with Marie about when I was a kid. "Marie, remember that night the big spider was in my room and you killed it?"

"What spider?"

"That big black one that looked like a tarantula. Remember I was scared and you went in my room and killed it?"

A thoughtful expression came over her face. "Oh yes, now I remember. I went in your room but couldn't find the spider. So I just hung around until I figured enough time had passed so you'd think I had killed the spider. But it was still in there somewhere!"

My mouth dropped open. "You lied to me?"

"I had to. Otherwise you would have never gotten to sleep."

Yep: little and evil: that's Marie! But I guess that was a lie I could live with.