100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren, #26

          (Crouse and me - July,  Brennan's, New Orleans)

When I was about 7-years old I stole 50 cents from my mother and felt so guilty that I confessed.

Although there’s a part of me that wants to believe the reason I confessed to stealing from my mom was because I have a solid value of honesty, I think I remember it because it was a defining moment in the development of my character.

I told the truth because my conscience was more painful than the “switching” I knew I’d get from my mother.

I learned that dishonesty can be painful. I would soon learn that honesty can be equally painful.

We teach children to lie right from the “get go” don’t we?  If they cry they get what they want, so they learn to fake cry. If they do something bad, we scold or spank them, so they learn to deny they did the bad thing, or point to a sibling to blame. They learn early on that lying pays off.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of painful honesty. I used to say that my husband was the most honest person I’d ever known, but I taught him to lie by punishing his honesty. Like the time I asked him if a dress looked OK on me and he said, “No, you look like a beached whale.” He shortly thereafter learned the value of lying (and I gave that dress to Goodwill).

If you Google “Is honesty the best policy?” you’ll see this issue has been debated forever. Some argue “honesty is the best policy” no matter what. Others say honesty is a human impossibility, or at least insensitive or unrealistic. We even have a nationally recognized holiday, April 30, “Honesty Day,” which was created in the early 1900’s as part of a campaign “to urge politicians to stay away from lies and tell the truth”!

Honesty has so many different facets it is mind-boggling. Check out this interesting BBC article dissecting honesty, which says, for example:

“What harm do lies do? Society is hurt because:

• The general level of truthfulness falls - other people may be encouraged to lie
• Lying may become a generally accepted practice in some quarters
• It becomes harder for people to trust each other or the institutions of society
• Social cohesion is weakened
• Eventually no-one is able to believe anyone else and society collapses”

Sound familiar?

And what about being honest with yourself. Sounds like a good policy in general. Right? But there are times when being honest with oneself is so punishing it is debilitating.

So, what am I trying to say to my kids and grandkids? I’m saying honesty is complicated.

I’m not sure I have the right to define honesty for anyone, because to me honesty is relative, which feels sort of icky, but is honest. And although I couldn’t live with the dishonesty of stealing money from my Mother, there are some dishonesties I can live with, and some honesties with which I cannot live.