Father’s Day Reflections

Introduction

Look, I know this post is a little late, Father’s Day having been last Sunday. On that day I had to (well, chose to) provide (quasi-) live coverage of a bike race. But isn’t a week later a better time anyway, now that all the fanfare is over, to reflect on being and/or having and/or having had a dad?

I lost my father in 2017. What a strange way we have of saying this, like it was somehow my fault. “How did you lose him?” one might ask. “Is a grown man that hard to keep track of?!” Perhaps I should say the world lost him, and/or he lost the world. Anyway, one upshot of this is that the holiday doesn’t really require anything of me anymore, which is nice. I always struggled with what to write on my Father’s Day card to my dad, as you shall see … which always brings me to this question: have I made it difficult for my kids to write this card?

This post is a reflection on these and other matters, and is perhaps a bit less lighthearted than my past Father’s Day posts (here, here, here, here, and here).

Trigger warning

Before I begin, I suppose I should warn you that what you’re about to read is not particularly self-deprecating. If you feel that you are a bad father, or are married to one, you might find this post distasteful. If it bothers you to read about how somebody has his act together (or thinks he does), to the point that you basically hate me, you can balance out your experience by reading more self-critical essays here, here, and/or (especially) here.

I say all this because I am not writing today in a hangdog or confessional tone. In this post I will not try to channel my inner Erma Bombeck by poking fun at my haplessness and foibles in a way that is relatable to any audience. I take parenting very seriously, and I am tired of reading essays from irresponsible types who think parenting is about their “personal journey” rather than about their kid(s). For example, I’ve read several testimonials from parents about how being cooped up with their kids during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place taught them how much they’d neglected their kids previously. “I was always at work and didn’t realize what I was missing out on,” this or that dippy father says. “Now I’ve gotten to know my kids better and you know what? I kinda like the little rascals! So now I’m making more time for them.” So what? You were a lame dad and you learned something? Big whoop. I’d rather get my wisdom from somebody who was a good parent all along and didn’t blithely botch the job until a crisis like the pandemic made him pull his head out.

The email to my brothers

The genesis of this post was the below email I wrote to my brothers many years ago. I’ll let it speak for itself.

From: Dana
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:54 AM
To: Geoff; Bryan
Cc: E—
Subject: Father’s Day

Gentlemen,

Since you’re both fathers, and Father’s Day is upon us, I thought I’d share some of my feelings on this occasion. Actually, this e-mail is mainly procrastination, as I sat down this morning to write something in a Father’s Day card and get it in the mail on time, and I’ve got serious writer’s block. It may strike you as odd that I could get writer’s block over such a simple matter as a card, when I generally have what is arguably one of the worst cases of logorrhea on record, but I’ve always found the short card to be a bigger challenge than a 2,000-word blog post. Here are some of my mental rough drafts, crumpled up and thrown into my mental trash bin:

• Happy Father’s Day to the best dad ever!!!! ⇐ False, sentimental, likely to be taken as sarcastic … I mean, this is our dad we’re talking about, and even he isn’t so clueless as to believe I’d call him the “best dad ever”
• Happy Father’s Day! ⇐ Too simple, likely to be taken as perfunctory
• Happy Father’s Day! I hope you like the card. I thought of you when I saw the car on the front. I hope the car picture doesn’t dredge up ill feelings based on the fact that I bought a Volvo, the very car you warned me against buying, based on the murderously, scandalously expensive official Volvo replacement parts that they force you to buy. I didn’t ignore your lecture, either time, about the friend who took his Volvo to a mechanic to have the rear-view mirror replaced, only to find that the car rejected the used replacement like a bad organ because its computer chip did a VIN lookup and it didn’t match, and the new mirror was $600 (or was it $800?). I want you to know that although I listened to that story and committed it to memory, I then went right out and bought a Volvo anyway, because it looks cool and I want to be the envy of the neighbors, even at the expense of our planet since my car gets vastly inferior gas mileage to your car [a Scion XB that we call “The Toaster” because it looks like one]. Also, your VIN lookup story failed the sanity test … I think you might be mistaking your own wild-ass theory for reality. ⇐ Too long, too bitter, too judgmental, too likely to engender ill will
• Happy Father’s Day! I hope you like the card. I thought of you when I saw the car on the front. Of course this car is a convertible, which isn’t safe, but I couldn’t bother myself to search harder for a card with a safe car (or a toaster) on the front, or to make my own card. No, I just selected the first thing that basically slotted in to the “more or less germane” category, if only in the most perfunctory way. ⇐ Too subtle
• Happy Father’s Day! You were always there for me, Dad … except on those occasions (roughly 12 hours a day, seven days a week) when you weren’t actually there, for me or anybody else, because you were working, except when you actually were at home but were inexplicably lying on your back taking a nap on the floor of the living room and then getting really angry at your sons for making too much noise and waking you up, as though four boys together in a room can possibly be quiet. ⇐ Too accurate
• Happy Father’s Day! I really appreciate your parenting, and I want you to know that I forgive you for the spankings, especially the ones that Mom commissioned (“Wait ‘til your faaaaaather gets home!”), and I appreciate the grim stoicism you displayed when dispatching your spanking duties, even though it sometimes seemed like all you came home for was to spank us and eat dinner before going back to work. I know that your intentions—to produce respectful, obedient children—were good (even if I’m personally opposed to corporal punishment). ⇐ Too political
• Happy Father’s Day! I’m sorry my brothers and I let you down. I’m especially sorry for my own failure, given that I’d given you false hope with some early scholastic promise before choosing a wussy major like English, and I know it must have been humiliating for you to admit to your old Navy/grad-school buddy that I chose English instead of Engineering, and I winced inwardly, not just for myself, when I ran into that Navy/grad-school-buddy at the UPS shipping facility back in ‘90 and he said, “You’re at Cal, then? Good man. Though your dad told me how disappointed he was that you chose English.” ⇐ Insincere, because in reality I’m totally unapologetic about my choice, preferring to see Dad’s disappointment as a failing in him, not us
• Happy Father’s Day! Thank you so much for getting that HP-85 computer and letting us kids use it. My early use of that machine really wired me for the Information Age, and I largely credit your prescience for my gainful employment today. ⇐ Too weirdly specific

So yeah, it’s a difficult task, writing that card. I’ll get to it somehow, though, and I think it’ll even be on time, and I’ll probably even give him a call on Sunday, though talking to him on the phone is a bit nerve-racking, at least at first, until we settle into our respective roles of lecturer and audience. Then it’s a simple matter of saying “uh-huh” and “oh, interesting” from time to time until he runs out of steam and we can more or less gracefully exit the call. As you well know.

Am I too harsh?

Of course with my brothers I can be extra critical of my father, because they know exactly what I’m talking about (even if they’re more likely to cut him some slack). I certainly wouldn’t have shared the above email with, say, the people who attended my dad’s memorial; instead I wrote a speech designed to better balance the laudatory with the honest, to fondly commemorate my dad while still acknowledging the trickier areas of our relationship. But that audience consisted of people who liked the guy enough to attend his memorial … it would be unseemly to stand up at that lectern and bag on him.

Does that make it okay to share the above email here, to a (possibly) wider audience? Well, I doubt my dad’s friends read albertnet (after all, he didn’t). And of course it’s too late to offend him. I think in the service of understanding a couple of fundamental questions—what makes a good parent, and what makes a parent bad?—I’m calling it in bounds.

Don’t we all make mistakes?

There are so many ways to screw up as a parent. Nobody can get it right all the time, and of course all of us parents are learning on the job. It would be nice if we could learn from our mistakes on our firstborn and get it right after that (and it is the case that I’m less screwed up than my three older brothers), but what works on one kid might not work on another (and yes, I was joking in that previous parenthetical, seeing if you’re still awake). Parents learn as they go … or fail to learn.

So what makes the difference between a dad who screws up from time to time but whose kid takes it in stride, and a parent whose kid can’t think of what to write in a Father’s Day card? There are probably a thousand good answers to this, but I’ll focus on a couple. One: how hard does the dad actually try? Two: how much rapport is available to work through disappointments together?

I’ll take an example from my own parenting to explore this. To be of any use, this needs to be a bad memory, of a time when I really screwed up and felt really bad … a low moment for me as a father. (Ah, now I’ve got your attention!) So here’s the story. My older daughter A— was on the high school mountain bike team; I was a coach. We were doing the Sunday team ride on Mount Tam, and she was having breathing problems. Like many cyclists (including myself), she suffered from exercise-induced bronchospasm (EIB), an asthma-like condition that can occur during intense exercise, especially in dusty conditions. On top of this, her bike had a catastrophic mechanical problem (I think the chain got really badly jammed), which I struggled to fix. The group had left us far behind, and I bloodied my hand during the repair, and when we went to catch up my daughter’s breathing was so bad, she could barely pedal her bike. Her wheezing was so loud it seemed to me she was exaggerating it. I blew my top and was yelling at her,  as if she wasn’t having a crappy enough time already. I stopped short of accusing her of playing up her breathing trouble, but I’m sure my exasperation came through in my tone and my volume. (I fact-checked this story with A— yesterday, and she recalls that she’d forgotten her inhaler that day, which was part of what drove my fury. I hadn’t remembered that, but we both agree this was a very bad episode in any case.)

Where our memory diverges is around my apology. I recall apologizing later that day, and again when we learned, months later, that she actually had Vocal Cord Dysfunction (VCD), an evil twin to EIB, which actually involves louder wheezing because it’s the vocal cords blocking the airway. A— does not recall the apologies, and this makes me wince. It reminds me that, as much the lack of an apology can exacerbate one’s pain, the apology itself does not, of course, undo the bad behavior. And yet A—, even without an apology, forgives me for the episode, saying that it “doesn’t make me add an asterisk when I say you’re a good father.”

So how come I struggle to forgive my own father? Why do I look back on his parenting with such a shudder? Why did I always have trouble coming up with anything nice to say in my Father’s Day cards? When I sift through my memories in search of answers, few episodes stand out and I’ll share a couple here.

Exhibit A. When my dad bought me my first bike—a 10-speed (for which choice I have to hand it to my dad, it changed my life)—I read the owner’s manual, which emphasized the importance if the free 30-day tune-up. I mentioned this to my dad, and asked if he could take me and my bike to the shop to get this done. He walked over to the bike, lifted the front wheel, gave it a spin, and declared that the brake pads were on upside-down, and that the person who built the bike (and by extension, apparently, the whole shop) was incompetent, and that we’d be better off not letting them near the bike.

This argument had a couple of problems. First, it didn’t make sense even to my 9-year-old brain that my dad would identify a problem with the bike without fixing it. Second, it wasn’t that long before I knew that his statement about the brake pads was simply false. My dad lied about the brake pads because he was just too lazy (or as he surely thought of it, too busy) to bring the bike to the shop, and didn’t want to get into some annoying dialogue about it. My interpretation of this behavior is that he either a) didn’t have much respect for honesty as a value that should always be upheld; b) was too stingy in his estimation of my intelligence to realize I’d know he was lying; and/or c) underestimated my ability to remember any of this and thus realize later that he'd lied. And then, a year or two after this, he lied again! I’d noticed my bike’s wheels seemed wobbly and asked my dad if my axle nuts were loose or something. He gave the wheel a spin and then said to my brother, “Geoffrey, can you check the axle nuts on Dana’s bike and make sure they’re tight?” Of course my dad knew damn well it wasn’t the axle nuts; he just didn’t want to have to work on my bike. Geoff knew this too and said, “It’s not your axle nuts. Your wheels are out of true. It’s a spoke tension thing.” He seemed as disgusted as I was. Again, my dad had just figured out the quickest way to exit the conversation, even if that meant flat-out lying to me.

To reiterate: two things differentiate my poor parenting example and my dad’s. One is how hard he was trying (or wasn’t), and the second is how much rapport existed to support any effort toward resolution. In the case of my transgression (the outburst during the mountain bike ride), at least after the fact I could discuss my behavior with my daughter. Even if her memory is the correct one and I didn’t apologize, we’ve talked about this (and other episodes) several times over the years, and we’ve talked in general about how she feels about me as a dad. I’ve invited both my daughters to give me a report card from time to time. They know I take parenting seriously and can handle criticism. So when I talk about trying one’s best, I don’t just mean endeavoring to always do the right thing, but to be willing to admit it when you fall short, and do the work necessary to understand and (at least try to) correct the behavior going forward.

In contrast, I couldn’t call my dad out on his misbehavior, for two reasons. One, for me to confront him about his dishonesty would be a serious accusation, which he wouldn’t have handled well based on his ego and his failure to hold himself accountable. Second, my dad wasn’t actually interested in having rapport with his sons, at least when we were kids. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the kind of loosey-goosey over-modern type who thinks parents and their children should be pals, without any concept of parental authority, but I think the family hierarchy fulfilled some lack in my dad in ways that weren’t healthy . He enjoyed having his sons be in awe of him, of his great brain, of his height, his power, his aloofness … I think he didn’t even mind that we were afraid of him—sufficiently so to never dream of criticizing him. Thus there was no rapport.

The third thing

Oops, did I say there were two main factors determining whether moments of bad parenting can be assuaged? There’s also a third measure of parenting that is hugely important: consistency. I suppose I have always appreciated this on some level, but it was brought into sharp focus by—of all things—a monologue in a TV show. My daughter A— turned me on to it, in fact; I suspect the episode in question recalled to her some of the dialogue we’ve had about parenting. The episode (s05e06) is called “Free Churro,” and if you have Netflix you can watch it yourself (and you should, if you are, have, or have had a parent). You can read the full script here.

Here’s the setup. BoJack, a horse, is giving a eulogy for his mother, and—far from being organized enough to write anything in advance—he’s just winging it, and rather tastelessly. (The show is a comedy, after all.) Bojack contemplates aloud:

All I know about being good I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up, and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so hard.

Part of why this speaks to me is that this contrast between grand gestures and day-to-day stuff helps me understand why the happiest memories of my parents don’t simply wipe out my disappointments. Did my dad ever do anything great? Yeah, of course! For example, as I described in my own speech at his memorial, he showed up with his car to provide support when I biked up Mount Evans (the highest paved road in North America), first with my new bride and then, 22 years later, with my daughter A—. Also, as I mentioned above, my dad bought my brothers and me dashing ten-speed bikes when all our friends were on clunkier one-speeds, and he let us learn to program on his HP-85 computer, years before anyone had an IBM PC. He built a sled for my oldest brothers for their Boy Scout Klondike Derby, and calculated the perfect parabolic shape for our other brother’s solar hot dog cooker, and once did a 360 in the snow in his VW bus with the entire carpool on board. All very cool stuff … but he wasn’t interested in the day-to-day business of just  being in our lives, and being interested. He didn’t see me in the school play (though I had the lead role); he didn’t come to my high school graduation (saying “I have to work that day” even though it was on a Saturday weeks in the future), and didn’t even attend my college graduation, though this was from his own Alma Mater that he’d wanted all four of his sons to attend. (Details on that last example are here and never mind the “fiction” label; that was applied before my dad had passed away).

And this is the crux, I think: kids can tell when their parents are or aren’t truly committed. This commitment shows in the willingness to pay attention, to be involved, to attend the middle school band concert even though it is essentially the opposite of music. The sense that you, the child, are not only not the point but are in fact a distraction—an obstruction, even—can be devastating. This is poignantly depicted, coincidentally, in that same “Free Churro” episode of “Bojack Horseman.” At the beginning of the episode, before the eulogy scene, there’s a flashback of Bojack being picked up from school, hours late, by his father, who complains about having to do this errand:

I was on a good run with my novel. I had this really interesting sentence that kept going for pages and pages, and I thought about how rare it is to really get in the groove like that. How, most days, I can’t concentrate because my idiot child is blasting the television, and it suddenly dawned on me: hot cock on a rock, [your mom] never even picked up the little noise and snot factory [i.e, Bojack]! … You know Sunday is my writing day. Sundays are the one day that are just for me and my craft, and still, you and the black hole that birthed you conspire to ruin it for me. What am I supposed to do now? Just go back to writing? I’m out of the zone now, the whole day’s shot! All because of you and that brittle wisp of a woman you made the mistake of making your mother.

Obviously there is massive hyperbole going on here (again, the show  is a comedy), but the point really hit home for me. I felt like that noise and snot factory, too. Even when, as a teenager, I got into some really cool stuff (e.g., bike racing; writing, illustrating, and typing a Russian picture book; composing urination-themed poetry), my dad wasn’t aware or interested … his work was more important. And that, above all else, is what makes writing out that Father’s Day card such a difficult exercise, and one that I so little miss.

Am I any better?

To finish this essay on a less unpleasant note, and to make the case that in fact I do try harder and have worked hard to be consistent and approachable and reliable for my kids, I will offer you the bluh-bluh-bluh story. I will start by saying that I always loved reading to my kids, from the very beginning (and still sometimes today, when they’re around). That said, parenting is incredibly tiring, especially when kids are young, and often this read-aloud could be a struggle. (It was even harder coming up with a totally original bedtime story every night, that needed to have fully realized characters and the traditional story arc—exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution—before my kids would be satisfied, but that’s another story … see here.)

At times it was impossible to stay awake while reading to my kids, and as sleep overtook me strange words would come out of my mouth, that had nothing to do with the book, and then (as I described in a journal I kept for my daughter), these words would decay into gibberish. These sounds often came out as something like “bluh-bluh-bluh,” and my daughter’s shorthand when scolding me for this would be, “No bluh-bluh-bluh-ing!” My favorite such memory is when I fell so deeply asleep I didn’t even know where I was, and I awoke to the bizarre sight of my daughter’s face inches from mine, and her fingers actually prying my eyes open to wake me up so I could read some more. These were not kids accustomed to being denied.

Further albertnet reading on this topic:

• Father’s Day
• What Are Fathers For?
• A Father's Day Poem
• World’s Second-Best Dad!
• Father’s Day Focus: Are Parents Interchangeable?

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Santa Denial, and How Lance Armstrong Taught Me To Lie

Introduction

When Robin Williams, a longtime friend of Lance Armstrong, was asked how he took the news that Lance had been doping, and lying about it, all along, Williams replied, “It was like when I found out about Santa Claus.”  This makes sense.  The Lance myth is a lot like the Santa myth:  something that millions of people believed, in part because it’s such a sweet story, they wanted to believe it.

This past Christmas, when I was lying to my younger daughter about Santa, I was surprised how easy it was compared to past years.  Why should this be?  After much soul-searching, I realized that it’s because I paid such close attention this past year to the Lance saga, and how it was that he successfully lied for so long. 

In short, this post explains how Lance taught me to lie.

First, a disclaimer

I want to be very clear that I’m not in favor of lying, unless it’s to my kids about Santa or the Tooth Fairy.  That’s why, until I subconsciously absorbed some important lessons from Lance, I had so much trouble with these lies.  It just felt wrong trampling over my kids’ reasonable skepticism, which as a parent I normally like to instill.  So, even though my lying skills have improved, my moral compass has not strayed, and I’m not lulled into any “grey area” nonsense.  I offer up this essay to you not as a how-to guide, but as an intellectual investigation.  Who knows, perhaps a knowledge of lying technique can help us be more skeptical.  I sure wouldn’t want to be played like a sucker again, after defending Lance for years.

Interestingly, I’ve witnessed a similar evolution of the lying skills and techniques of Lance himself.  In the early days of his lying, he wasn’t so smooth.  In fact, it wasn’t until the accusations went from a trickle to a stream to a full inundation that he mastered his skills at deception.  For example, if you can find the video footage of his press conference regarding the Discovery sponsorship, you’ll see some awkward, inexpert evasion.  Nothing as clumsy as Floyd Landis’s first denial (i.e., when he was first asked point-blank if he doped, he said, “I’m gonna say no…”), but pretty clumsy.

Technique #1:  convince yourself first

It’s pretty clear from the Oprah interview and others that Lance doesn’t actually regret cheating at sport—he just regrets getting caught.  He doesn’t present his doping and his deception as particularly heinous or unique crimes; I think he found a way, very early on, to square all this internally.  He took moral comfort in having convinced himself (and his team) that everybody else was doping too; in having used his massive celebrity to give comfort to cancer survivors (whether or not he made any progress toward funding actual research); and in having generated a vast amount of wealth for the bicycle industry.  In light of all this good he was doing, he must have felt as though depriving some cheating European of those Tours de France was really no big deal. 

So it is with the Santa myth.  To witness the idealistic, innocent, and pure trust my child puts in me, and to take advantage of it with a bald-faced lie every year, requires similar rationalization.  So I remind myself that the truth would only hurt, and that my kid couldn’t be trusted to keep it to herself.  I think of all the kids on the playground whose holiday experience would be damaged by too early a revelation, and all those letters to Santa that wouldn’t be written, and so forth, and thus I rationalize my position.  This was easier this year after I read Lance’s (or was it Tyler Hamilton’s?) description of the vast number of team support people (mechanics, masseuses, coaches, doctors, PR folks, etc.) whose careers depended on his “discretion” (i.e., lies).

Technique #2:  make your lie big and bold

Remember all that mealy-mouthed stuff in “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”?  The writer (i.e., liar) resorts to a sideways trick of turning Santa (the living, breathing man) into something abstract, with statements like “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist” and by comparing him to fairies.  It’s easy to see why the writer would do this, but it’s amateurish.  When Lindsay asked me straight-out this year, “Daddy, are you and Mommy really Santa?” I knew this was no time for prevaricating.  So I snapped at her:  “Why do you love cancer so much?!”  No, of course I didn’t really say that.  That was Lance’s retort when the journalist Paul Kimmage accused him of doping.  It was big, bold, and (best of all) beside the point.  It’s the logical fallacy my older daughter once referred to as “red lobster.”

So what I really said to Lindsay was, “That’s crazy talk!  Of course we aren’t Santa!”  She looked so relieved.  This was the look of a kid who is all too happy to place her dad’s honesty and integrity above that of some stupid kid on the playground.  Once she had the answer that she wanted all along, her skepticism went right out the window.  Yes, I felt slightly bad about the power I had over her and how I was abusing it, but more than that I thought, “Wow, that was a way better response than I’d have made last year, which would have been the old answer-with-a-question dodge, like ‘What makes you ask that?’”

 Technique #3:  suspend disbelief by throwing a bone

Okay, so you’ve lied to yourself first, and then you’ve told the lie boldly and firmly, and your audience wants to believe you anyway.  That’s a good start.  But what about that niggling doubt that an intelligent person would naturally have?  If left alone, that doubt might start to fester, and end up being to Truth what a grain of sand is to a pearl.  Best to nip doubt in the bud, which can be accomplished easily with a few plausible explanations.

I was as amazed as anybody when Lance went from being a one-day classics racer to a Grand Tour stage racer (by way of cancer).  I’ve seen classics racers evolve into stage racers over time, like Sean Kelly, but even Kelly never won the Tour de France.  So from the very first doping accusations against Lance, I had the beginnings of doubt.  But Lance, in one of his novels, explained that the cancer stripped off the unnecessary upper body muscle he’d had from his swimming days, reconfiguring him as a stage racer.  It didn’t matter that he hadn’t actually lost any weight; I wanted to believe, and that explanation was good enough.  Lance also mentioned his higher cadence as a major asset to his stage racing; it didn’t bother me that I myself get more power out of a lower cadence.  I only cared that his transformation was explained in some way.  (So it is with Chris Froome’s believers, who accept his silly explanation—finally getting over parasitic worms—for suddenly going from mediocre cyclist to the world’s best stage racer.)

The ability of an explanation—whether it’s solid or not—to help suspend disbelief is something Malcolm Gladwell has called “the Photocopier Effect,” after an experiment by a Harvard social scientist, Ellen Langer.  Langer had just a 60% success rate cutting in line to use a photocopier when she merely asked nicely.  But if she gave a reason, like “I’m in a rush,” her success rate went to 94%.  The crazy thing is that when Langer gave a pointless reason, like “because I need to make some copies,” her success rate was still 94%.  The point is, if you throw someone a bone, you’ll get somewhere, whether it’s a good bone or not.

Not that all explanations are created equal.  I never bought Alberto Contador’s “tainted Spanish beef” explanation for his positive clenbuterol test, and I don’t believe Michael Rogers’ “tainted Chinese beef” explanation for the same, and I don’t believe Jonathan Breyne’s “tainted Chinese beef” explanation either.  Tyler Hamilton’s “chimera” (i.e., prenatal evil twin) explanation for his blood doping positive would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. 

So when Lindsay questioned the authenticity of Santa Claus, I threw her the best bone I could.  After denying that my wife and I were actually Santa, I said, “That’s not to say that there aren’t people who impersonate Santa Claus.  Have you ever seen Santa in a mall?  Definitely a fake.”  See?  Now she had an explanation for the fact that somebody had (evidently) questioned Santa’s existence to begin with.  I went on to describe a fake mall Santa who made me cry because when I asked for a “bow and arrow” it sounded like “bone arrow” and I couldn’t make the fake Santa understand what I wanted.  Another red herring, right up there with Lance’s higher pedaling cadence!

Technique #4:  Embroil others in your lie

One reason I believed in Lance for so long was that no disgruntled former teammate ratted him out (until one finally did and all the others followed).  As we now know, Lance didn’t achieve this cooperation by sitting everybody down and formally conspiring in the way that a James Bond villain might.  No, it was all subtle:  if you want to be in the inner circle, you better ride well and show your allegiance, and if you do, you may get a white paper bag, and if you use the substances therein and benefit appropriately, you’re going to the Tour!  But by the way, now you can’t say anything, ever, because you’d have to come clean yourself.  It’s kind of like when my big brother would steal two cookies from the jar, stuff one in my mouth, and say, “You tell, I’ll tell.”  Except the gag order on the Postal team was implicit.

So it was when I brought my older daughter Alexa in on the Santa deception.  I knew she wouldn’t believe in Santa forever, and I dreaded the day when I’d have to come clean and admit I’d been lying all along.  It was just my luck that when that moment finally came, I’d recently read Tyler Hamilton’s book and had learned of the power Lance had through speaking softly and wielding financial repercussions. 

Predictably enough, the first domino to fall was the Tooth Fairy.  (I think that myth is more fragile because teeth are lost one at a time, so you don’t have the momentum of mass belief that the Christmas season entails.)  Of course once your kids know you’re capable of routinely lying to their faces about the Tooth Fairy, they figure out the Santa deception almost instantly.

Alexa was blunt:  “Okay, Dad, I know there’s no Tooth Fairy.”  I was equally blunt in my reply:  “You’re right.  There’s no Tooth Fairy.  And now that you know that, you won’t be surprised when you no longer get any money for losing a tooth.”  That was the extent of it.  Alexa, of course, is no fool:  she instantly grasped that if she later decried Santa as a fake, she could kiss her Christmas stocking—and all that candy—goodbye.

So when Christmas rolled around, Alexa not only kept Mum about Santa, but—of her own volition—took an active role in perpetuating the myth.  Hours before Lindsay confronted me about Santa, Alexa (in Lindsay’s presence) threw me a perfect softball:  “Hey Dad, does Santa give lesser presents to kids in poor communities?”  I casually replied, “Well, yes, a really fancy gift in a poor community could cause a lot of envy and strife.  So Santa naturally scales it down.  Meanwhile, in very affluent communities he has to give fancier gifts because the kids are so jaded.”  For Lindsay to hear this intelligent discussion among older, more worldly people was a perfect ruse.  And when Lindsay later asked if my wife and I pretend to be Santa, Alexa said, with an exquisite facsimile of eye-rolling annoyance, “That’s what she keeps trying to get me to believe.”  I couldn’t ask for a better accomplice.

Should I be thanking Lance?

I suppose I could thank Lance for helping me learn how to lie.  But I’m not sure how much use I’ll have for this skill once Lindsay knows the truth about Santa.

That said, I suppose we could all thank Lance for all the stunning entertainment he’s given us over the years, from the seven Tour de France victories to the botched comeback and on to the thrilling scandal, which brought about a veritable orgy of self-righteous pontificating from so many journalists, bloggers, and Internet haters.  Meanwhile, Oakley and Trek could thank Lance for generating so many sales; after all, these companies get to keep all that money they made.

But before we start thanking the guy, we should remember that, unlike lying about Santa, Lance’s deception was not a victimless crime.  He robbed all the clean cyclists, and the clean would-be cyclists (who left the sport rather than doping), as well as the would-be clean cyclists (those lured into doping by the culture Lance so generously fueled).  Lance should get coal in his stocking.

From the Archives - When You Are Engulfed in Shame

Introduction

Last May, I took a writing class called “Memoir: Art of the Personal.” The instructor encouraged her students not to shy away from troubling material. Her advice was something like “go where the pain is.” This makes sense. Had Dostoyevsky written a novel called Obedience and Praise rather than Crime and Punishment, he might not be so famous.

More recently, I read a parenting book called Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. It has a chapter titled “Why Kids Lie” that offers some, well, shocking statistics. A four-year old, a cited study attests, “will lie about once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour.” The book goes on to describe how “kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars.”

As a kid, I was no exception: I was not above lying. Plus, I stole. If this seems interesting to you, perhaps you will enjoy this story, which I wrote for my class.

When You Are Engulfed in Shame – May 27, 2010

When I was about ten, I stole money from my family. Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly—daily, in fact—for a couple of weeks. I felt no remorse (at least at first), and had no regard for consequences. I was pilfering change from the bus money jar.

Every day, as soon as we got home from school, my brother Max and I would to get a dime from the jar for our bus fare, and walk about half a mile to the bus stop to catch the slow, meandering #5 bus that would take us all the way across Boulder to the YMCA. It was a boring trip made all the more boring by our taking it five days a week for years. At the Y we had swim practice. I hated swimming—still do—and especially hated being bullied in the locker room afterward. Bigger kids would roll towels into a “rat’s tail,” get the end wet, and snap us with it, leaving red marks on our bare skin. Then, my eyes burning from the chlorine in the pool, I’d wait with my brothers for forty-five minutes for our mom to pick us up around 7. Given the time demands of swimming and school, I had no life.

The money I stole was for Zēmis. A Zēmi was a fancy soft drink, prepared to order by a high-tech vending machine in the Y’s lobby. You’d put in your 25 cents, select your flavor (cherry, lime, whatever), and then watch in awe as a tapered plastic cup— ornate as a crystal goblet —dropped onto a little grille and was half-filled with crushed ice. The Technicolor syrup came next, climbing the ice. Then carbonated water fizzed in, right to the top—such precision! I’d treat my friend John to one, too. (He was a year older and really weird—he used to fly his hand along ahead of him as we walked, making it dip and soar, making cool spaceship noises.) My generosity was half the fun of the Zēmis for me: I loved being Big Mr. Moneybucks.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think the stolen bus money wouldn’t be missed. My family had already gone through a bus money embezzlement scandal. That time, my brother Max—the troublesome middle child—had been blamed, and was harassed for days. It finally come out that our dad had needed change and raided the bus money cache, and hadn’t thought to mention it. Though Max was exonerated, the stigma never really went away. So now, when I was stealing bus money for real, I figured I’d have a readymade scapegoat when the theft was discovered.

When Mom noticed the embezzlement, an ad hoc tribunal was formed. Each of the four brothers was both a prosecutor and a defendant. Max was harassed all over again, even while I continued to steal to support my Zēmi habit. I repeatedly accused Max myself, both to make my innocence more realistic and for the sheer joy of it. My brothers and I thrilled to the intrigue of crime and punishment, basked in the righteous indignation of shaking down a suspected wrongdoer and bringing him to justice.

(That it wouldn’t be actual justice didn’t matter a bit: the satisfaction was the same. Once, years before when I was like five, sitting around the house bored, I decided to scrape my leg with a Lego until a large red welt appeared. Then I went crying to my oldest brother, Bryan, telling him Max did it to me. I watched with great satisfaction as Bryan went over and beat on Max, bawling him out the whole time out for hurting his little brother. It made no difference to me that Max was innocent; the spectacle of richly deserved punishment being meted out was really all I needed.)

Perhaps to prevent us from all getting spanked by our dad, my mom actually offered amnesty. “Okay, this is your chance,” she said. “Whoever stole the money, step forward now, and you won’t be punished. Just admit you did it, and all will be forgiven.” I wasn’t even tempted to do this. Maybe Mom wouldn’t punish me, but I’d have to listen to my brothers castigating me not only for my heinous theft, but for having accused Max the whole time. It would also be tough to witness Max himself attaining new heights in righteous indignation.

And, truth be told, I had finally become ashamed of my actions. Funny how that works: if nobody had noticed the missing money, I’d have blissfully gone right on stealing (just like a pro athlete who blithely dopes and will go on doping until he gets caught and then, sobbing, apologizes to his fans and vows to help clean up the sport). I cursed myself, my friend, and those damn Zēmis. I’d never felt so low. It became more important than ever to hide my guilt.

The truth came out soon enough. My brothers, who had long envied my fancy drinks, now questioned whether it was really my friend John paying for them. I insisted that it was. “Well, I’ll just give a call over there and find out,” Geoff announced. I was almost sure he was bluffing—after all, all four of us were deathly afraid of the phone. (Just calling a business to find out its hours, as our mom sometimes made us do, was almost impossible. Whichever kid made the call would be almost unable to talk—his throat would go dry, his vocal chords would contract, and his strangled voice would come out in a thin, reedy squeak. Naturally, his brothers would mock him for this.)

But I couldn’t bring myself to call Geoff’s bluff. There was just that small chance that he would actually go through with the call, and my friend would unknowingly sell me out, and that was just too much to face. So I spilled my guts before Geoff dialed the first digit. I confessed.

Right away my brothers lit into me, cackling like hyenas, thrilling to my shame like rabid journalists. Max was the most triumphant. Over and over he cried out, “I can understand a liar—but a fieth?” He brandished this indignant cry like a Gatling gun, making sure everybody heard and appreciated it. It became the slogan for my defeat. I felt so low I didn’t even have the heart to correct my brother (“It’s not ‘fieth,’ it’s ‘thief,’ you moron!” I’d have said). I let my brothers have their day in the sun, and felt completely deserving of my humiliation. After all, I’d stolen repeatedly, lied, and—worst of all—sold out my own brother, all for a fizzy drink.

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