Grown-up true
Dec. 2nd, 2025 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseWhen I was very young - certainly not yet four years old - I burnt my hand on the iron. My mother had told me not to touch it because it was hot, so she could not understand for the life of her why I did that. And I couldn't tell her.
The thing was, even at that very early age, I was very much aware of... let's say a discontinuity. Grown-ups believed that the truth was very important, and so I was always having it impressed on me that lying was wrong (not that I was especially in the habit of doing it; let's face it, there wasn't really much to lie about, given the fact that I was afraid to misbehave deliberately). However, I was also quite aware that grown-ups frequently said things to children that weren't actually true true, which was puzzling. And I was a very logical child, so I reasoned that these things had to be true in some sense, because grown-ups said it was so important to tell the truth. Therefore I concluded that grown-ups had the power to declare things to be... sort of... true. There was true true, and there was grown-up true, and if the two clashed (as they frequently did), you had to go with grown-up true if you knew what was good for you.
So, when my mother told me not to touch the metal thing because it was hot, I - not knowing much about electricity at that stage - naturally thought "oh, that can't possibly really be hot, this is grown-up true". The thing was, I knew exactly what grown-up true was for. Grown-up true was for controlling children. I knew almost from the start that children had to be controlled as tightly as possible at all times, as otherwise... well, I didn't really know. Perhaps the world would end or something. And I felt a little aggrieved that my mother had felt obliged to go to the trouble of making something true, rather than just asking me not to touch the iron because she didn't want me in her way. If she'd just said that, I'd have done as she asked, because I knew I was always in the way in any case and I didn't want to be any more in the way than I was by dint of merely existing.
And so I decided I was going to prove it was just grown-up true, and I touched the iron... only to discover, to my astonishment and considerable pain, that she was telling the actual truth this time.
She still wonders why I did that. And she's never going to find out.
The thing was, even at that very early age, I was very much aware of... let's say a discontinuity. Grown-ups believed that the truth was very important, and so I was always having it impressed on me that lying was wrong (not that I was especially in the habit of doing it; let's face it, there wasn't really much to lie about, given the fact that I was afraid to misbehave deliberately). However, I was also quite aware that grown-ups frequently said things to children that weren't actually true true, which was puzzling. And I was a very logical child, so I reasoned that these things had to be true in some sense, because grown-ups said it was so important to tell the truth. Therefore I concluded that grown-ups had the power to declare things to be... sort of... true. There was true true, and there was grown-up true, and if the two clashed (as they frequently did), you had to go with grown-up true if you knew what was good for you.
So, when my mother told me not to touch the metal thing because it was hot, I - not knowing much about electricity at that stage - naturally thought "oh, that can't possibly really be hot, this is grown-up true". The thing was, I knew exactly what grown-up true was for. Grown-up true was for controlling children. I knew almost from the start that children had to be controlled as tightly as possible at all times, as otherwise... well, I didn't really know. Perhaps the world would end or something. And I felt a little aggrieved that my mother had felt obliged to go to the trouble of making something true, rather than just asking me not to touch the iron because she didn't want me in her way. If she'd just said that, I'd have done as she asked, because I knew I was always in the way in any case and I didn't want to be any more in the way than I was by dint of merely existing.
And so I decided I was going to prove it was just grown-up true, and I touched the iron... only to discover, to my astonishment and considerable pain, that she was telling the actual truth this time.
She still wonders why I did that. And she's never going to find out.
