“Lies”

 

The day I left to come home after a visit with my mother in Florida, I called the airline just before we were leaving to check on the flight status. The plane was delayed by 15 minutes. When I got off the phone and told my mother this, she demanded the phone number of the airline so that she herself could call. “Why?” I asked. “Because I think you are lying to me.” Huh?

(To give you the back story, my mother was dropping me off at the airport and then going on to play in her Sunday golf group. I had already offered to go earlier so that she would not be rushed. She did not want to do that because she did not want me to wait any longer than I had to at the airport.)

As we began to go back and forth, back and forth about her calling the airline to check on the veracity of my report, a timely piece of sanity crept in during our exchange allowing me to ask, “Why would I lie to you about this?” To which she immediately responded, “Because that is what I would do.” I burst out laughing with the relief of no longer feeling like I had to convince another person that I was not, in fact, a liar. More to the point, I could see that I had been gearing up for something that did not have a single solitary thing to do with me and whether or not I was being honest. It had to do with her and how she would have handled the situation. By her own admission, she would have lied to me if the roles were reversed because she would not want me to feel bad about her having to wait longer at the airport. And because she felt as though the lie would in service to me, she would not have even seen it as a lie.

It has left me wondering; “Do we ever truly know who is in front of us? Or do we just believe they are some reflection of who we are, how we do things, along with our beliefs about how people should be?

In the end, I have decided to stay with just figuring myself out. No one else. What I have found is this; there have been more times than I can count where I have tried to convince another person of who I am or am not. Sometimes I have done this face to face with another. More times than not though, I have done it through the fake conversations and arguments I hold in my own mind. I have spent a whole lot of time with something that has never had a single thing to do with me, ever. Even if it looked like it did.