I'm A Liar

by Gail Wickstrom
(Tacoma)

I'm a liar. I've lied and exaggerated all my life.

Looking back, I think as a child I was trying to cover up for a bad home life. There was nothing I could share with friends, outside family, teachers without leaving huge blanks to cover the dysfunction going on in my home.

My mother taught me to hide things from people because she did it constantly. It was my father who we were trying to hide from the rest of the world. From my earliest recollection, my father was a cruel abusive parent and husband. This was confined to inside of our home. Relatives, neighbors and the few friends I remember, all thought he was a nice person. Very seldom, if ever, did he show his true nature.
So maybe I learned my deceiving nature from him.

I hated my father. He molested me and treated me like a sex object with his talk, looks and actions. I constantly lived in fear of being alone with my father.

My first trauma with him was him trying to stop me from using my left hand. Being left handed wasn't allowed by my father. I had a small doll sized refrigerator. The handle of course was on the left. I remember sitting with my father at my side. Every time I would touch the handle with my left hand he would hit me. I wasn't told to use my right hand. He would tell me to open the frig. Well this 4 year old girl took a while. I don't remember how long this torture went on, before my left hand hurt so bad I used my right hand.

Fear was constant and whom do you tell? My mother was just as afraid as I was. The rest of the world must never know what happened in that little house in Tacoma.

I'll just lie and make my life seem better than it is. Now, I just don't bring up my childhood much. I'm 57 now, my father is dead. I could turn this around, but I've lied to everyone I've ever known. The lies I told in my childhood affected and involved my family, friends, school and church.

As a young liar, lies seem to bite you in the butt quickly. My poor mother was always covering for me. I would make up visiting aunties, to neighbors running into them at the corner, telling friends stories about others and breaking up friendships. I had deep regret, but at the time of the lie I felt like I had an audience that was interested in my every word.

Now lies come back to you as you get older. I met Arnold Schwarzenegger when I was about 16 -17. I was involved with a friend of his. They were taking advantage of an underage girl. It was sleazy. I did things I now still cannot mention. But when someone was nice to me it was my life.

Now that was the truth, of course, I could never tell that to anyone. So the lie starts. It went from meeting Arnold, to dating Arnold. Now I told this lie for maybe 20 years and it finally got picked up by my kids. You can't lie about someone famous because people bring up the story years later. My thirty year old son is still telling his friends the story.

This is one of my lies, one of the things that have affected my children. The other lies, have done damage to other people. I used lies to make me feel better. I would like to feel better by releasing these lies.

The hope that they never show their face