Keeping Up With the Lies

I've thought about this a lot over the years. Keeping up with all those lies had to be a full-time job.

It wasn't just one or two lies. She lied about making the land and house payments. She lied about why she left jobs. She lied about the details of her embezzlement charges. She lied about the mail delivery. She lied about finances. She lied about documents.

Looking back, it feels like there was a lie attached to almost everything.

What I can't wrap my head around is how anyone keeps track of that many stories. How do you remember what you told one person versus another? How do you keep all the details straight year after year? It seems exhausting.

The truth is easy because you don't have to remember it. It is what happened. But when you're constantly making things up, you have to remember every version of every story and who heard it. Then, when people start asking questions, you have to come up with even more explanations to cover the old ones.

Even today, there are things that we believe she may still be lying to Dad about. After seeing so many stories fall apart, it's hard not to wonder what else is still hidden behind another excuse or explanation.

I also think that if we had lived with them full-time, we probably would have caught on a lot sooner. As kids, we only saw Dad every other weekend. We weren't there day after day. We didn't see the mail. We didn't hear every conversation. We didn't have enough access to notice when the stories changed or when things didn't add up.

When you're only around for small pieces of someone's life, it's easy to miss what's really going on. A single lie doesn't seem like much. Even a few lies can be explained away. It wasn't until years later, when we started putting everything together, that the pattern became impossible to ignore.

What still amazes me is the amount of work it must have taken to keep all of it going. Honestly, I can barely remember what I did last week. I can't imagine spending years trying to keep track of a lifetime of lies.