Small Fictions

A little mischief in life, just to keep things interesting.

There are things I tell my kids that aren’t entirely true.

Not big things.

Not the kind that matter later.

Just small ones.

Like how I can always tell when they’re lying — because their eyes change color when they do.

They still pause when I say it.

You can see it — the split second where they consider whether it might be real.

A quick blink.

A glance away.

A hand that moves just slightly closer to their face, like they might cover it if they could.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

The truth comes out before it has time to settle into something else.

I know what I’m doing.

I know the irony of it — telling a lie to catch one.

It’s not lost on me.

But there are moments in parenting where the clean, honest explanation just… doesn’t work.

Where “because it’s the right thing to do” feels thin against whatever impulse they’re trying to outrun.

And in those moments, something a little more immediate, a little more convincing, tends to win.

Parenting, at times, feels less like instruction and more like theater.

A little stagecraft in the service of raising decent humans.

We do this more than we admit.

We say carrots help you see in the dark.

We warn that the ice cream truck only plays music when it’s out of ice cream.

We create a world that bends just slightly, enough to guide them where they’re not yet able to guide themselves.

Not forever.

Just for now.

Children already live in a kind of half-magic.

Tooth Fairies.

Santa.

The quiet belief that the world is paying attention to them in ways it probably isn’t.

We don’t create that entirely.

But we do… manage it.

Shape it.

Nudge it in directions that make our jobs a little easier, and their choices a little better.

It would be nice if everything about parenting was clean.

If every lesson could be taught honestly, directly, without any need for embellishment.

But it isn’t.

Some things are learned through experience.

Some through repetition.

And some, at least in the beginning, through a well-placed fiction.

One day, they’ll figure it out.

They’ll realize their eyes never changed color.

That I couldn’t actually tell, at least not in the way I said I could.

And maybe they’ll see the trick in it.

But by then, hopefully, they won’t need it anymore.