by Andrew Smeja

Created on: November 18, 2009   Last Updated: November 19, 2009

My parents told me many lies when I was young. Most of them to make me afraid of doing something that they didn't want me to do. The one that really sticks in my mind is my dad telling me that if I touch a TV screen it may explode. He told me that a kid in Virginia died because he touched his parents TV screen and it blew him into a hundred pieces. I never touched a TV screen before, but after being told that, I was terrified that I might accidentally touch a TV screen and it would kill me. To this day I have not found a single news article about a TV exploding from someone touching the screen.

Worse then exploding TV's, my parents told me about child protective services. My father told me that CPS randomly makes inspections of peoples houses, and that if your room isn't clean enough, they will take you away. He told me if my room wasn't clean enough one day CPS would take me away to an orphanage. He spent many hours talking about how bad living in an orphanage is, and how most kids who go will get molested. I wasn't sure what being molested meant when my dad told me that, but I was quite sure it was something that I did not want.

Not quite as bad as being scared that I was going to be molested because I didn't clean my room well enough, my mom would often lie about what was going on between her and my dad. One of the primary reasons my parents fought was their finances (my mom was a stay at home mom). My dad insisted that my mom frequently bought a lot of things that she didn't need with her debit card, without telling him or checking the account balance, and that he had a lot of overdraft fees because of this. My mom said that didn't happen, that my dad exaggerated greatly what was going on. My mom got divorced this past year, its November, and my mom has nine hundred dollars in overdraft fees. My mom gets an alimony check every week from my dad, I can't say how much is enough... But if you know how much your getting each week you should be able to manage your finances better then that.

Another lie my parents told me, was that they never did drugs. My parents constantly talked about the dangers of drugs, and how the people that do drugs are "bad people". I would later find out that when my mom was a teenager she used cocaine, and that my father frequently smoked marijuana. I would later find out that while growing up my mom frequently used pain medications, my dad thought she was addicted. This was one more of many fights my parents would frequently have that they lied to me about. I never really cared why they fought, or who was right and who was wrong I simply wished they would stop.

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