Elephants and Exes

What do you do when your kids come to you and tell you that their mother was telling them something about you that you knew was false?  Do you tell them mommy lied?  Do you change the subject?  Do you tell your own lie or something negative about her?  As divorced people, it's not uncommon to find ourselves in this situation.  The one thing you do not need to do is belittle their other parent.  You should never tell your children anything deliberately negative or critical of their other parent.  Obviously the two of you didn't get along and you're now exes, but to your children, she is still mommy and you are still daddy.

So what to do - how do you handle this?  I have had several moments where I had to address a situation such as this, but with their mom saying all these bad things about their dad, the last thing I wanted to do was be the dad saying more bad things about their mom.  That doesn't help the children at all.  But I was reminded of a fable I'd heard years before about the blind men and an elephant:

Six blind men were asked by their king to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The blind man who felt a leg said the elephant was like a pillar; the one who felt the tail said  the elephant was like a rope; the one who felt the trunk said the elephant was like a tree branch; the one who felt the ear said the elephant was like a hand fan; the one who felt the belly said the elephant was like a wall; and the one who felt the tusk said the elephant was like a solid pipe.  The king explained to them:  All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you experienced a different part of the elephant. The elephant actually has all these features.

Remembering this story, I sat my two children down on the couch one evening after they'd been asking questions about things their mother had said about me that I knew to be untrue.  I blindfolded both and, not having an elephant handy, grabbed the only thing I could find that I thought might suffice - a shampoo bottle: thick at the bottom, and narrow at the top.  I held it by the top for my daughter and let her feel the bottom.  Then I held it by the bottom and let my son feel the top.  When I asked them to describe it, one said it was thick and kind of big, the other said it was narrow and small.  I removed their blindfolds and let them see what it was they were feeling.  Taking a page from the fable, I told them something like this:

Sometimes mommy and daddy see, hear or remember things differently.  I see or remember it one way, and mommy sees or remembers it another way.  It doesn't mean either one of us is wrong, it just means that we're different and we may see, hear or remember things differently sometimes, just like the two of you thought differently about this bottle.

Being young at the time, probably 7 and 9 or so, this was enough to convince them that perhaps what mommy was saying about daddy, while clearly not accurate, wasn't necessarily a lie, and we were able to move on to other things.  In fact, I haven't really had to address that question since then.

The short story is this - too often we get in competitions with our ex to see who can tell the kids the most garbage about their other parent.  Perhaps we hope that we can make ourselves look better than the other person in the eyes of our children.  But all they see is both parents tearing each other down.  They don't see right or wrong, or who won and who lost - and they don't care.  They only see conflict between the two people who mean the most to them.  Our goal should be to BE the better person, not to tear the other down to be a lesser person.  The children will learn the truth about both of us in their own time and in their own way.  Let them know that you had their best interests at heart.  And who knows, maybe you'll get lucky and the local zoo will let you borrow their elephant!