So you know how I’m taking this lifespan development class? Well, I was taking it – class just wrapped up today after I turned in my final paper – but it has got me thinking about a lot of different things, especially about my childhood. I’ll eventually get into the existential crisis that happened with almost every single successive chapter, but yeah, not getting into that today.

Anyway, this random memory just keeps bugging me. It was maybe a year after my sister was born, I think; I don’t have much memory of her in this particular snippet, but she was old enough to where it didn’t look super weird if my dad was holding her while my mom was holding a newborn. Or what looked like a newborn. This will be important.

We were traveling somewhere – again, I’m maybe three at this point, so details are pretty scanty – and we stop at a motel. In addition to the two adults and two children under 4, my mom’s dog Babooshka is there, too, which makes me think we might have been in the process of moving? Well, my parents don’t want to leave her in the car overnight, so they wrap her up in a blanket and my mom carries her into the lobby like a baby. I have many questions about these choices as an adult – why bring her into the lobby at all? why didn’t Dad just go in? just for starters – but as a kid? I was more concerned with how my parents were lying.

I remember looking up at my mom and thinking something along the lines of, “They tell me not to lie. Does this mean I can lie now?”

And that was the moment I started to question my parents, a tradition I’ve kept alive for almost 37 years.