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When my mother wanted to get rid of me, which was frequently, she'd tell me that one of my aunts wanted me to come stay at their house for a while. The phone call where she asked an aunt to take me was never done in my hearing. I will never know how many times the aunts begged off.
Once she sent me off to camp for two weeks, which was fine with me. I liked camp. What wasn't fine was that she called the camp and arranged for one of the counselors to take me to another aunt's house far from my home -- a few days before I was due to be picked up at the camp. And I was supposed to go on a trip with that aunt to a public campground.
I was 11 or 12 and suffering from undiagnosed depression. The last time I ever saw my uncle he laughed and reminded me of that trip and that they had found me hiding behind a freezer at the camp store. He thought it was funny.
My mother would save bacon grease and keep it in a coffee can in the fridge. I guess that was a holdover from World War II rationing. As a little girl I once asked her what the grease was for, and she said "I'm saving it for the [N-words] in [N-word] Town."
Another time Mom drove to school to pick me up along with some of my friends. As we kids started piling into the back seat, someone shouted, "Last one in is a [N-word] baby!" Mom turned around and told us "You shouldn't say that. [N-word] babies are the cutest babies."
I don't remember any lies because my mom didn't give us advice. Barely gave any I instructions or talked to us about anything. And for a long time I thought I was alone in this though I have three sisters. My youngest sister, the most socially aware, adjusted of us, admitted the same. Relief it was not me.
When I was a kid my mother would never let us ride those coin-operated rides in the supermarkets and similar places. She said she had heard of a kid being killed or losing a leg or something on one of those. I don't know for sure that was a fabrication, but it has subsequently occurred to me that it might have been motivated by her understanding of the burdens of waiting for nine kids to do one of those rides.
The 11-month-old boy from Fuzhou in Fujian province was killed after he touched an exposed wire on the coin-operated car, the Southern Metropolis News reported.
I remembered some things I learned intuitively that were not true.
One was that if you said something, that was it. It's what you meant, no going back. IT was very hard for me to share anything.
Two, there was just one way to live your life. I was hopelessly shy and did not appreciate how my family life was. So I believed I could not have a family. That wasn't true but I didn't know.
Although this isn't a "lie," it IS a misunderstanding that became legend in our family (at my expense, of course). Clear memory of it, though.
Guess I was about 4 years old when the extended family was gathered for a holiday. Dinner had finished and most were sitting in the living room (probably with coffee, Frangelica, or Amaretto - or a combination), and I was belly-down in the center, watching something on television. Out from the kitchen comes Mom with one of her LOUD, dire warnings torpedoed at me: "Get UP off of that Floor!!!! There's a huge DRAFT coming in under the door!!!"
Have you guessed? I thought she said, "There's a huge GIRAFFE coming in under the door!" WELL... I can remember bolting upright in defiance of gravity and charging up the stairway to my room like a "bat outta hell," screaming bloody murder!! The hilarity which ensued downstairs prevented me from rejoining the party since I was so mortified, regardless of everyone's pleas (which were, of course, tinged with sympathetic, choking laughter, so THAT helped ).
Yeah...I had to put up with a decade or so of visiting relatives who could not enter the house in my presence without checking the cracks of the door for huge giraffes.
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IT happened in China
I can remember bolting upright in defiance of gravity and charging up the stairway to my room like a "bat outta hell," screaming bloody murder!! The hilarity which ensued downstairs prevented me from rejoining the party since I was so mortified, regardless of everyone's pleas (which were, of course, tinged with sympathetic, choking laughter, so THAT helped 
).
