It’s time to meet Dad so we can go to his house for the weekend. My brothers and I packed and prepared for the weekend festivities. You would think that the process would be easy for us to get ready but there was so much more to it. While we prepared our “clothing,” we also had to prepare our minds.

You see, our mother knew that she was falling short with the care of her children. She had a fear of children and youth being alerted to the fact that we were not living in a home. If children and youth got involved, she knew we would be removed from her care. She knew it, feared it and made us fear it as well. How could you instill that fear into a young child?

She knew we weren’t receiving the appropriate care that a child needed or deserved. We were, in fact, living in a car or any place we could find for the night. Her fear overcame her and caused poor decisions to be made.

The lies…the boot-camp of lies would begin. It was report time as we knew we had to go meet Dad for pickup. We would be drilled and be coached about the things that Dad may ask us about life and what we were to tell him in the attempt to hide away the “life” that we had. We memorized scripts about this fantasy life that we were to portray to Dad so that he wouldn’t take us away from our mother.

She was right about one thing. We would be questioned. It was in no attempt to ruin hers or our lives but rather to confirm that we were being cared for the way that we should have been. Dad would ask questions and we would return with this elaborate story about how we lived in a house with our own rooms and that life was great.

It felt dirty to lie but also oddly invigorating. We could control the narrative and in our heads “we had him fooled.” Little did we know, he was onto us this whole time. He knew something wasn’t right but he wasn’t sure what it was.

Visit after visit, we had to make sure that we had the story straight and the details the same. If he asked one of us apart from the others then the stories needed to line up. We were trained well in this mission of deceit.

It carried over into all areas of our life. Our friends’ parents suspected…we would lie. Our teachers suspected…we would lie. The lie that we were taught to tell was so ingrained into us that we began to hope and think that it was real. It was in us now and growing with every passing day.

The devil sure pulled on our fear and our mother’s fear in order to continue the path that he desired for our lives. Fear truly is a liar….