The Not Good Enough Mother by Sharon Lamb

Author:Sharon Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

7. LYING

In my forensic work, I’ve been fooled, lied to, tricked, and manipulated by parents. Parents leave out bits of their stories that will make them look bad for the evaluation. Those who admit to bad deeds produce excuses and distortions of the truth. A few times, I’ve given myself heart and soul to a mother sitting across from me only to understand later that I’ve been lied to.

There are different kinds of lies. There are the misrepresentations of anyone who’s trying to hide an addiction or sugarcoat their past. If they have been to AA, I can recognize the AA voice of oversharing, which is supposed to sound like someone taking responsibility. When I don’t hear that, I assume that the facts will be manipulated in an attempt to avoid the shame.

Some lies are obvious, but I can handle those. I sit in front of the lying parent with the printed DCF case plan in front of me, reading the facts. I do this after the mother has given me her story.

“Okay, I’m reading here—what about the time DCF says you slapped your daughter?”

“No, that never happened.”

“It says here that DCF learned about this from a friend of yours.”

“She’s lying. She wanted to sleep with my husband. We’re not friends anymore.”

“Okay. But it says here your daughter told the social worker it happened.”

“She learned to lie from her father.”

There have been a few pathologically lying dads whose bragging about lives of danger and foreign travel raised red flags.

“DCF says that they checked some register and you were never a Navy SEAL.”

“It was classified, so how could they have checked?”

“Well, they say here you gave them your platoon number and it didn’t exist.”

“They must have checked under my current name. I used a different name when I enlisted.”

“But you didn’t give that name to DCF? Why not?”

“I don’t like to talk about it. I killed about twenty people, innocent and not. I’ll bring in the papers next time I see you.”

Needless to say, the dad kept forgetting to bring me the papers. And when I visited his trailer to do a home observation with his daughter and asked to see the papers then, darn if they weren’t at his mother’s house in North Carolina.

There are also retractions. A retraction is when someone says the truth at first and then in a subsequent meeting takes it back, or vice versa. I didn’t know what to make of George’s retraction. George was a sex offender who had served his time in prison and completed three years of group therapy for sex-offending men, having admitted to what he did. He had sexually abused a twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of a girlfriend who took off and left her daughter in his care. She became a sort of partner to George, helping him to raise his own five-year-old child. Was he lying three years ago when he admitted he had sexually abused the girl? Or was he lying now when he told me that three

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.