STRICT PARENTS MAKE GOOD LIARS

BY MILCAH FAJARDO PHOTOGRAPHY BY MADDIE MOORE

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: strict parents make good liars. We all either know someone that hides almost everything about their lives from their parents, or we are that person. As someone who has personally spent the majority of their life avoiding confessing entirely, I am starting to understand why certain religions make a healthy habit of it.

Here’s the thing. My generation is now well past that age of sneaking out to parties and lying about where we’re going and who we’re with. We’re all moving out of our homes or in with partners, talking about children and marriage, and choosing our own paths in life. And yet, our parents still only know the tip of the iceberg.

This generation of secretive kids has now grown up to be secretive adults. After many ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’ moments, the time has finally come to ask ourselves, how long is long enough to keep our parents in the dark?

It’s important to underline that we’re not simply pathological liars. At the centre of most strict parent-child relationships is a parent that wants better for their kid and a child who would never want to disappoint them. So, in order to live the life that all the other kids with lenient parents were able to and to experience the things we were sheltered from, lying and secrecy seemed like the only solution to gain independence and freedom.

Twenty-two-year-old Phoebe Edwards spoke to Heroica about her experience with strict parents and how it has taught her a thing or two about lying:

Sometimes, I scare myself with how easy lying comes to me because I’ve grown up doing it. I feel like it comes so naturally. There’s no hesitation about coming up with excuses, no thought; it just happens. It’s so dangerous when you think about it.

Phoebe painted herself in the image that her parents wanted to see. From their perspective, they saw what she described as a smart, sensible and level-headed girl. Not too boisterous, not too meek. But they don’t get to see the whole version of her:

With my friends, I feel like I’m a completely different person – my parents see the diluted version of that, the kind of version that could do no wrong. I was very much a goody-goody in secondary school, but by the time I got to college, I grew so fed up with having to maintain that image.

I skipped school all the time. I would argue back with teachers and lie about what I was doing, where I was going and who with, and it definitely showed me that you get to a point where you just break.

Having to maintain a perfect image for her parents became a burden Phoebe was stuck with for a long time. Despite the burden, she knew that some things you’re better off lying about to avoid facing the conflict that would follow if you told the truth.

Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I feel like lying is a necessity. There’s just no point in arguing about stuff, so you may as well just lie and avoid the conversation entirely. I know it would upset them, and that’s why I can’t tell them certain things. It’s obviously going to upset me in the long run too, because I do feel like I’m disappointing them when in actuality, it shouldn’t be like that.

For secretive children with strict parents, lying can become more and more of a necessity than a sin over time. Looking back at her upbringing has certainly made Phoebe realise what kind of relationship she would like to have with her future children:

Because I don’t tell my parents certain things, it’s made me realise I don’t want my kids growing up feeling the same. As long as they’re safe, as long as they check in, I don’t think I should stand in the way of how my future children would want to live their lives. I want them to feel like they can tell me things, like funny stories from their nights out, without having to glaze over certain parts just to appease me because they don’t want to let me down.

Generational patterns are something that we are becoming more aware of, and we know certain ones need breaking so that our future children do not have to lie to us as much as we had to lie to our parents, who bore the strictness of their own parents and so on. One of the generational patterns I know that I want to break for my future children is assuming they’re never going to encounter things like sex, drugs, alcohol, relationships and so on at a young age and therefore never having an open dialogue about it with them.

My parents moved to the UK from the Philippines when I was three. Like most immigrant parents, they both had strong views and values on how they wanted me to grow up. But the older I got, the more I realised how ill-equipped I was to face certain realities because they raised me to avoid them entirely. For instance, I used to be clueless about sexual health.

One of my earliest memories of how my parents viewed taking care of your sexual health was back in secondary school. I went to an all-girls school, and it was that time of the year when all the year eights were offered the HPV vaccine. I brought home my consent form to my parents. They said I didn’t need it. Thirteen-year-old me didn’t think much of it; as far as I was concerned, it was just another thing my parents said no to.

Vaccination day comes, and everyone is nervous about getting their jabs. The sports hall was full of teenage girls waiting for their vaccines. Everyone I knew was being inoculated for cervical cancer. Friends asked me why I was not getting my jab. I just stood there, shrugged my shoulders, and told them, unconvincingly, that my parents said I don’t need it. At the time, I was thinking, surely if the entire year group has been vaccinated, why would they not want me to be vaccinated too? This wasn’t some random girl’s sleepover I was missing out on; this was my health we’re talking about.

That day, my older sister and I were walking home, and I asked her why Mum and Dad said I couldn’t get the vaccine. She told me that HPV was only something you’d be exposed to if you had sex. And just like that, I had so many other questions. Why couldn’t I have gotten the vaccine just in case? Even if I do wait to have sex after marriage, am I still not at risk of being exposed to HPV? What if, God forbid, I was raped and exposed to it then? These questions remain unanswered to this day.

Since then, I have taken it upon myself to navigate my sexual health without telling them, despite both my parents being NHS nurses. And that isn’t even the half of it. We live in a scary world, and parents often make the same mistake of trying to shield us from it rather than preparing us for it.

Twenty-year-old Lillie Dean shared with Heroica how her sheltered upbringing failed to educate her on the reality of the world, particularly in relationships:

I was so naive to the world around me. The problem with how strict my parents were when I was younger meant that I packed everything I couldn’t do into a short space of time, and I was really irresponsible for a couple of years

While Lillie was navigating relationships as well as her young adult life, her mother had a massive influence on who she dated. With past boyfriends, Lillie’s mum would plant so much doubt to the point that it would cause cracks in the relationship:

She always gave me her negative opinions. No guy was ever good enough for me. When I was in a relationship, she was constantly sowing these seeds of doubt. A lot of the things we would argue about stemmed down to the things my mum would say to me. She would tell me he was just using me, even though I knew he wasn’t. Her negativity really impacted the way I viewed the relationship; I had to detach myself from my mum’s views so that I could be more emotionally open.

As much as parents think they know what’s best for us, a lot of the time they project their lives onto ours. Lillie struggled in particular with trying to live up to her mum’s expectations for her dating life, which wound up giving her the opposite of what she was looking for:

The one guy my mum finally approved of turned out to be abusive. He was overall really unstable, and we were on and off for ages until it broke me down to the point that I just allowed all these horrible things in our relationship to carry on. When I finally broke it off for the last time, I realised I had wasted all this time in my life on this person who my mum thought was right for me, just because he seemed like my dad.

She adds: When my mum finally learnt about all that had happened, she came round eventually and said I need to stay away from him. But one of the main reasons why I stayed was because he was the only guy that she has ever been supportive of.

As much as we’d like to see the good in all people and pray that they want nothing but the best for us, unfortunately not everyone out there feels the same. This was a lesson that Lillie had to learn the hard way:

They wanted to shelter me from the world so much that they never actually told me about what I was about to experience. When my future kids start seeking independence, I will give it to them in some way, and I will in no way give it to them as late as my parents did. Those of us who grew up like this share the feeling of being misunderstood and the belief that our secrecy and rebellious actions only seemed rebellious because our caregivers opposed our lifestyle choices and identity.

As much as it’s all fine and well saying how we want to raise our kids differently from how our parents raised us, it’s easier said than done. But whether you’ve experienced the worst or the best that the world has to offer, the reality is that we cannot dictate the kind of person our children will be. All we can do is heal ourselves, and hope that we’ll have the wisdom to equip them for reality. And whenever you decide that your parents have been in the dark long enough, just remember that you don’t need to justify the things you lied about because you’ve already spent your whole life doing that to yourself.

One day you’ll be able to be unapologetically you around your parents, but for now take comfort in the people whom you can be yourself with. God knows they’re hard to find. Strict parents may make good liars, but remember that you are also far more than that. ✦

Self Portrait

_Coming of Age

I lost my virginity by doing anal at sixteen without lube. Don’t recommend.