Lying to your child

     A mother told her young boy that he was going away with his grandparents so he could travel to another state. This young boy was very excited and didn't worry. He liked his grandparents, and they had a wonderful summer of movies and restaurant dinners. His grandfather was gone during the day at work, but he came was home at five-thirty. The boy didn't understand not having the summer off for fun. He was too young to fathom what it meant to work to live. Sometimes his grandmother had to work too, and he would go with her to the mall. She sold cloths, and he would walk around. Sometimes she gave him money to eat ice cream and French fries. He would do this while watching televisions through the windows of electronics stores.

      The summer ended and the boy went to first grade. He didn't like school, and his classroom was too dimly lit, but the recess on the playground was great. One day his teacher was sick, and his grandmother was his classes substitute teacher, and all the other children knew that he was special because of it. After that event the other boys made fun of him, and the recess turned into a war of shoving and retreating for the young boy. He disliked school even more because of this, and his teacher noticed the boy's loss of focus and disenchantment for the assignments. His grandparents found out, and tried to fix the problem by enrolling the boy in Tae-kwon-do to fix his focus, and reading with him every night to encourage his grade score.

      Their plan worked very well, and the boy recovered and flourished until the end of the school year and the beginning of the next summer with his grandparents. During this time he broke his first bone, his left arm, and resolved the problem with the bullies by being the cool kid with a cast that everyone wanted to sign. In the middle of the summer his mother came to his grandparent's house with a police officer, and said that he had to come with her. The boy's grandmother objected most fiercely while his grandfather tried to sooth the situation, and remove the boy from the vulgarity that the event had become.

      In the end his mother said goodbye to him, but that he was coming back home in a couple months. The young boy didn't understand what she meant by home because he thought he had a home, but after a couple weeks his idea of home changed. He found himself in a lawyer's office reading a car magazine with a secretary smiling at him in between answering the phone. He was trying to make sense of the idea of horses being trapped in cylinders, and how girls would want to drive cars half naked when the yelling started from behind the closed door where his mother, grandparents, and the lawyer were.

      After a short time, and many reassuring looks from the secretary the boy's mother came from the office screaming, and roughly grabbed the boy and bolted down the stairs with him into her red dented Honda. He started crying, and saw his grandmother crying as his mother drove them away from the lawyer's. His mother was very angry, and the young boy wanted to open the door at the next stop light and make his escape, but every light was green and just when he had worked up the courage to open the door while the car was moving, to escape at any cost, his mother put his seatbelt around his waist. She told him that this was for his safety because cars crash everyday, and there is hardly any warning.

      The boy's mother reached into the back of the car while they were driving and brought out gifts she had bought for the boy, and told him that she had missed him so, and that they were going to have a wonderful time at her boyfriend's apartment, and that they had a surprise for him when they got there that he was going to love.

      The surprise was a mountain bike that the boy couldn't ride because it was too tall, and her boyfriend was an alcoholic, and the boy hated the tribal mask that hung above his bed because they gave him nightmares, and his dreams didn't come with safety belts.