108: Truth and Lies at Age Ten
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At three years old, children have a hard time telling fantasy from reality. By five or six, they operate in both worlds. By the time they're ten, we expect children to be able to distinguish what's real from what isn't real. The process of becoming an adult, you can argue, is a process of learning to tell the truth about the world. But telling the truth is not always so easy. When she was ten years old, Claire switched schools. Moved to a rich suburb, her family didn't have much money. She became best friends with a girl whose family had emigrated from Chile. Claire started to become obsessed with her. It wasn't really like when we would hang out together that I would idolize her that she was like the boss. But, like, I would go home and I would make up these songs about her and I'd like make up songs about the letters of her name, she'd like a really Spanish-sounding name. And her phone number, I would just dial it over and over and over again and I'd make songs about her phone number, because everything about her was golden to me. It was just absolutely, I don't know, perfect and beautiful. Claire dressed like the Chilean girl. We're only the modest jewelry that a Catholic mom would allow. Demanded to go to Sunday school and get first communing like the Chilean girl did. And then Claire started to tell people that she was Chilean herself. She'd say that her family fled a dictatorship. And she went over in America. But her family. It was like a friend's family. I think it was because she was really poor, like my family was really poor. But she was like such a different kind of poor, you know. She was like the good righteous poor, you know. It wasn't her fault or her family's fault that they were poor. It was like political oppression and circumstances that made them poor and they were good, you know, people. You know, in my family it was like there was violence and there was drinking and their family. You know, her mom kept a good house and my family always had like a really messy house and it just wasn't her fault that she was poor. We were poor because we were bad people. Why do you lie? Sometimes you lie because you're powerless to do anything else. And who was more powerless than a 10 year old child? It definitely carried me through that time. It definitely gave me a sense of like a sense of pride. It's so weird, you know, that you could like feel pride in something that you're not. And there was just no other way except to lie about it there were things that were just totally unmoveable and unchangeable which is, you know, because I was a kid and my family was the way it was and there was nothing I could do about it. When Summer, Claire went to a Bible retreat in Wisconsin with her mother and her brother, she befriended a girl from Venezuela. It was so natural, Claire says, you know, her being from Chile and all. Yeah, so I told her that I was from there and that I, you know, didn't speak Spanish
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