佚名/Anonymous
When I was a little girl, my mother told me to wait for the light to turn green before I crossed the street and to cross always at the corner. This I did. Indeed, I was positive as a very young child that I would get mashed like a potato if I ever so much as stepped a foot off the sidewalk while the light was red. I followed my mother’s advice until I realized that she herself jaywalked constantly, dodging in and not of moving traffic-and pulling me with her. So after a while I followed her example and not her advice.
My father told me never to cheat or steal and I remember my intense humiliation the day, only 6 years old, I received a public spanking for swiping three dimes from the windowsill where they had been left by a visiting uncle. Yet my father pushed me under the turnstile to get into the subway and got me into the movies for half fare, way after I was old enough to pay full price. And my mother continually brought home reams of stationery and other supplies lifted from the offices where she worked.
Both my parents exacted severe punishment for lying and yet I knew, in time, that they lied to me and to each other and to others when, presumably, they felt the occasion warranted it.
And this was just part of the story. But hypocrisy about sex, about race relations, about religion, took me a longer time to see. I was out of high school before that picture began to pull together. Understanding didn't devastate me because I had begun to absorb the knowledge little by little, through the years. By the time I was 18 or 19 I guess I was both old enough to understand and strong enough to face what I saw. And we, my friends and I, did come to take it for granted. Parents were that way. Older people were that way. The word for what we found out about our parents’generation was hypocrisy. And most of us accepted it as part of life-as the way things were.
Now I am grown up and I have children of my own. I go with my sons to the park where, illegally, we let our huge dog off the leash and keep on the lookout for a policeman who might catch us and give us a ticket. For the longest time I used to pull my little daughter across the middle of the street-just like my mother used to do-warning her,“Don't do this when I’m not with you.”