Don't Lie to Me!!

This is the last day of September.  What??  I'm really going to have to put my foot down regarding the passing of time.  Seriously, isn't this supposed to be, say, the last day of March or so?  This is getting absurd.  Time passes, I don't get older (even though I just had a birthday, it was the same as last year), we have another Halloween, another Thanksgiving, another Christmas and bam!  We're into a new year!  Father Time must be an angry old man to make every day fly so quickly.  This has been true all my adult life.  Your's, too, I would imagine.  I think it's the curse of being an adult which, by the way, actually has many curses too numerous to mention today.  I can remember just DYING to get my driver's license!  How exciting to be driving around my home town, looking all cool and signifying!  As if my mother was going to allow me to have the family car to drive around.  First time she did, a hose blew.  I stopped the car in the middle of a very busy street.  Smoke (steam, really) was flowing from the hood of the car.  I was frantic, knowing the car was apparently this side of bursting into flames.  And the very worst part?  I was NOT where I told my mother I was going.  At this point, I must confess my sister and I had a chronic habit of lying to our mother in order to survive the household.  We crafted gargantuan lies to get out of the house.  We lied about where we were going.  We lied about what friends would be with us.  We lied about what time we left or arrived.  We lied about events at school  We lied about things that happened around the house.  We lied because we had to.  Our mother grounded us every weekend for any small reason. If she didn't ground us, she would scream at us for hours.  She never caught us lying, but every time she discovered a truth, we were punished.  Walking through her minefield was a real art, and we eventually learned to perfect it.  We're still liars.  Back to my car story.  I was on the west end of town, delivering my sister and her friend somewhere they weren't supposed to be before I went to the place I wasn't supposed to be.  And then the car decides to screw us over.  As I was frantically watching the rolling steam come from the car, knowing it would explode at any second and praying it would surely take my sister and me with it so our mother would feel sorry for all the punishment she doled out over the years and wish her sweet babies could still be with her, a man pulled up and helped us.  He crippled the car to a nearby gas station and the car was fixed.  Mr. Fixit must have been a mother liar, too,  because I don't remember paying him.   Of course a lot of time had passed very quickly and now that the car was in good shape again, we had just enough time to return home.  And guess what!  We didn't tell mom what happened.  We lied our answers to whatever questions she asked because that was our habit, our only path to any kind of freedom in the household.  I do want you to know that mom was and is the only person we lie to on a daily basis.  I don't lie to anyone but her.  My sister does the same.  And a new generation of liars popped up when we had kids.  They learned to lie to her, too.  My sister and I never said, "Lie to your grandmother."  They learned through their own mistakes.  Tell the truth, you will pay.  Self preservation, friends, self preservation.  My name is Barbara, and I lie to my mother.