I Have Been Lying To My Grown Children For Years. Here’s What They Don’t Know About My Life.

Living alone when you’re my age requires lying. There’s no way around it. It isn’t that I mean to lie; it’s that I want to avoid the conversation that will immediately ensue if I don’t.

My adult daughters — the people who monitor my 86-year-old life — need to feel reassured that I’m eating healthy, exercising and sleeping enough, and being engaged. Engaging means different things to them than to my aging friends, and they are the ones to whom I must answer. Consequently, all these expectations require more and more lying, my form of which is most often that of smiling indirection.

I assure my daughters I eat vast quantities of fruits, vegetables, salmon and chicken. There is rarely any mention of my consumption of popcorn, rum raisin ice cream or pistachios. When we’re having a meal together, I am careful to order a big slab of protein surrounded by leafy green leaves. I demur when offered crackers and cheese and murmur daintily with a downcast expression, “dairy.” Until they read this, I’ll continue to feel confident I’ve gotten away with those lies. 

There are days I don’t want to eat my meals in the prescribed order. What if I want something other than cereal, eggs or toast for breakfast, like leftover Chinese takeout? Well, then, that’s what I do. Sometimes, my disorderly eating leads to the need for Alka-Seltzer, but I keep a supply on hand for such occasions. Do I think my daughters check to see what’s in my medicine cabinet? I’m not sure, probably not. But just in case, I keep the Alka-Seltzer tucked away out of sight. I want to avoid answering questions about why I need it. 

I also lie — not only by indirection but also by omission — about the frequency of my accidents. They include tripping over, stumbling into, brushing against, and, worst of all, falling all the way down.

I try not to bump into anything, but I fail — repeatedly. Even when I rush to the freezer to urgently press an ice cube onto the spot, an enormous purple bruise blossoms under it. 

Slamming into things has also led to many skin tears. Blood requires covering, which results in my arms being festooned with bandages. I have to try to get them on with one hand while holding a cloth over the wound with the other, often ending up with a wastepaper basket filled with false starts and discarded adhesives. My medicine chest currently has a larger supply of bandages of every size and shape, multiple forms of gauze and tape, and tubes of healing ointments than I ever needed when my children were little.

When I go out, I’m met with concerned gazes and the question, “Are you OK?” I smile nonchalantly and joke, “You should see the other guy.” Their amused response allows me to circumvent whatever concrete lie I would have to create to explain my multicoloured, multitextured arms. I have even considered getting those arm sleeves that are intended for gardeners to avoid being cut up by branches or thorns but are now used as accessories. They’re available in a wide range of styles and designs. Some with tattoos might be fun. I could lie and pretend I’m making a fashion statement while covering my ongoing cascade of wounds. 

There are also the moments when the urgent task of keeping my balance eludes me entirely, and I fall all the way down. This is most often the result of me trying to multitask.

My most recent fall was in my apartment building’s parking lot. I was getting out of the car, wheeling my grocery cart with one hand and reaching back to close the car door with the other — a recipe for disaster. I went down onto the concrete, the cart rolling to a stop three feet ahead of me against the bumper of a nearby parked car. My first impulse was to look around — not for help, which would have been the wise thing to do — but to see if anyone saw me fall. I was alone, which allowed me to turn over onto my hands and knees, the way I get up from the ground these days.

The only person (or thing, rather) who knows I fell is my Apple Watch, which dutifully flashed, “I see you fell. Do you need help? Should I call 911?” when it happened. I pressed back “I’m fine,” essentially lying in the language Apple’s engineers have programmed as a response. I hobbled upstairs, hurriedly put the food away, laid down and went to sleep. I have concluded that I’m handling the situation maturely. I’m uncertain if not telling my children that I fell down constitutes withholding necessary information — yet another permutation of lying — but I suspect it does. Why is it anyone’s business? They’ll just worry and offer advice that I already know. Be careful. Only do one thing at a time. Move slowly. Use arnica.

There are more things that I lie about. Well, not exactly lying. I just never mention them — like losing and forgetting items and words, for instance.

I’m a very tidy woman, and order comforts me. Everything in my home has a clear and obvious spot, so it’s easy to find something when I need it. But even in my carefully put-together home, I lose things. Eventually, they turn up in a pants pocket, at the bottom of a bag or stuck between a pile of papers on my desk. But how that came to be their momentary resting place is never clear.

I lose things outside my house as well. In public bathrooms, I sometimes take the opportunity to check my messages, then carefully balance the phone on the toilet paper dispenser — and leave it there. This has happened five times, and with each one, the kindness of strangers has reunited me with my phone. I’m hoping my luck holds out.

After the inevitable conclusion of my much-too-young marriage, I lost my house keys four times in one week. Sometimes, there is meaning in losing. Not anymore. There are no metaphors to explore here. 

At 86, of course I also forget words; I even lose entire trains of thought. But I remember enough to keep myself interested and do my best to decide that whatever I forgot wasn’t essential or that the thought will eventually return. But when it does, it’s often in the midst of something else where it doesn’t fit, and I don’t understand why I’m remembering whatever it is.

Sometimes, when I lose words, I find others to substitute. Recently, when reaching for the phrase “Secret Service,” I said instead, “Social Security.” My friend looked puzzled by my introduction of this unexpected phrase into our conversation, and I hurriedly switched what I had meant to say.

There has been a new development in my living alone that helps with this and feels comforting, though — talking out loud to myself. It isn’t that I want another person’s voice in my apartment. I just want a voice, and mine does just fine. “I think I’ll watch ‘Hacks’,” I say brightly — and I do just that, getting up from my desk and walking into my living room. It’s a little like having nondemanding company; I enjoy talking to myself and continue to find myself sprightly. However, I’m careful not to do this when my daughters are around because the possibility of seeing their mother speak to nothing but the air in front of her would alarm them. 

My social life being filled with old women (and a sprinkling of old men) is also helpful. When I forget something, I just say, “I forgot,” and they understand. Maybe if I had more younger people in my life, I would have to navigate my embarrassment and their impatience with a lie (followed by my annoyance at my embarrassment and their impatience). But I don’t have to do that with my friends. We’re all in the same boat.

Behind my agreeable face is an old woman holding fiercely to her wavering autonomy. I wonder if the middle-aged children of aging parents yield to parental obfuscations and equivocations — the little lies we tell — because they may not really want to know about the forgetting, falling, creative eating, losing, bumping into sharp objects, and talking to ourselves that define our realities. Would my daughters really want to know what goes on when they aren’t around — the challenges I face every day and all that I go through to be able to live my life the way I want to live it? Do they — and others like them — worry that the more they know, the more they may have to step toward us and our increasingly precarious hold on independence and eventually fold us into their lives? Our lying is buying us time — a precious and limited commodity that we want as our own. And I’ll continue to lie as long as I can get away with it. 

Sandra Butler is the author of five books, each designed to identify something unspoken in women’s lives. “Conspiracy of Silence; The Trauma of Incest” brought attention to the sexual violation of girls; “Cancer in Two Voices” frankly explored how a lesbian couple navigates the death of a partner; and “It Never Ends: Mothering Middle-Aged Daughters” described the intersection of aging and mothering, while challenging the myths around both. In “The Kitchen is Closed And Other Benefits of Being Old,” Butler chronicled her experience moving from aging all the way to old, and with the recent publication of “Leaving Home at 83,” she is now proudly standing alongside and grateful for the generations of women putting their younger, non-arthritic shoulders to the wheel as they work to create the world we need to flourish. She is currently working on her next book, delighting in the richness of her life in Tucson, Arizona, and hoping not to fall. Her website, sandrabutler.net, reflects the books, articles and concerns of the past 50 years.

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