I can only remember one lie my mother ever told me.

When I was a little girl, I loved my stuffed animals. Cats and elephant, tigers and rabbits - I had a whole purple plastic toy box full.  As an only child, I used to spend hours in my room entertaining myself by talking to my toys. I taught them arithmetic and the alphabet, I negotiated conflicts between species, and I came to the rescue in perilous situations. I made sure that each and every animal got an equal piece of my love and attention.  I didn’t learn until much later that my mother would crack the door of my room open and watch me playing with my stuffed animals, smiling.
One morning when I woke up, I found a group of my stuffed animals sitting in a circle in the middle of my rug next to the rocking chair. My biggest stuffed cat was at the head of the circle, sitting upright, and between its paws it held one of my favorite picture books. The rest of the animals were pointed towards the cat, a captive audience. I was elated. I called up everyone of my friends and told them in hushed, excited whispers that my toys really were alive and they had been moving around in the middle of the night. Some of my more realistic six-year-old companions scoffed at me and said I was crazy, but my heart was too happy and too full to listen. For the entirety of the next week, I became a bona fide insomniac, staying up through the late hours of the night waiting for my toys to awaken again so I could ask them my questions and they could finally, finally answer me back.
Of course, they never did, and my poor little heart deflated a bit day by day, a forgotten birthday balloon slowly sinking to the floor. I began to get suspicious. One day, after staring at my toy box for hours on my stomach with my chin in the palms of my hands, I ran downstairs to where my mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and eating a biscotti. “Did you move my toys in the middle of the night? I know you did! Tell me!” And she looked me straight in the eyes and said with a facial expression I wouldn’t discern as a deceiving one for many years, “No, baby, I didn’t.” I walked away bitter and confused, but still believing her.
She never lied to me about anything else. She never told me babies were brought onto Earth by a stork, and she never told me that boys would always care about my feelings more than my breasts. She never told me marriage would be smooth sailing, and she sure as h--- never told me that being in labor wouldn’t hurt.
Her early-onset Alzheimer’s came as a shock to everyone. Or, maybe not. A shock, to me, hits you once like lightening striking and leaves you reeling, but what we went through was more like a dull thud that you think at first is not so bad, but then leaves you lying awake at night feeling its echoes deep in your stomach.
One night I got a frantic call from my father saying that neither Mom nor my daughter Rosie (who Mom was supposed to have picked up at the daycare center a few hours previously) had come home yet. He thought maybe Mom had taken Rosie to the park, but there were no missed calls on the answering machine and he got only voicemail when he called her cell phone. It was getting dark outside, he said, and “She never does this, never! She always calls, Sarah! She knows that I worry and then I pace and then it affects my blood pressure…” Every nerve in my body sprang to life then and rang in my brain like a paranoid chorus of cicadas, and they didn’t stop until we found them at almost midnight inside a diner the next town over. Mom was sipping tea and eating a biscotti, and Rosie was asleep with her head in Mom’s lap, chocolate ice cream ringing her lips and an empty, sticky bowl on the table. As I picked up Rosie and felt her warm, heavy cheek on my shoulder, Dad took Mom’s hand, tipped the waitress, and walked Mom gently back to the car.
My father and my husband and I saw the truth when Mom would look into the mirror, pick up the hairbrush, move it to her head at an awkward angle, and then frown and put it back down again. We saw it when she closed the blinds to keep “that nosy b------” neighbor Mr. Thomas from staring at her through his living room picture window. “He’s spying on me,” she began to say to us, “always calling and knocking. Downright disturbing, that is.” Mr. Thomas stopped me once as we were pulling out of her driveway and asked with a pained expression why Mom wasn’t answering his calls to come over and play chess anymore. We heard the truth when she asked me if I had bought a crib for the baby yet. Rosie had looked at my stomach, then up at me quizzically and said “There’s no baby in there, right Mommy?” Although it pressed cold and sharp against the roof of my mouth like a mint sucking candy, I couldn’t make the truth come out of me in a way that both of them might understand.
Mom went into full-time care when she was sixty, I was thirty-four, and Rosie was five. It wasn’t officially spring yet, but everyone knew the season had already sprung because the icicles were dripping into puddles on the sidewalk and robins began to leave droppings on minivans.
We went to visit one weekend, and the receptionist complimented the little red bow in Rosie’s hair. She giggled and hid behind my leg. Mom had forgotten we were coming, and when we finally got ahold of her, she was recovering from a sobbing fit. She pressed her hands against her cheeks and wiped the tears away with shaking pinky fingers. “Mommy, why is Grandma crying? Did someone hurt her?” asked Rosie, taking a step back from my mother.
“Mom?” I sat down beside her on her bed.
“I was at the party with Henry and we had an awful fight, just awful, I know he’s going to leave me!”
“Who’s Henry, Grandma?” Henry was my mother’s first husband. They had been married at nineteen and divorced by twenty-one. I hadn’t even known he existed until I was old enough to drink wine with my mother and she blurted out one night, red-cheeked and gesticulating wildly, that her first “real man” had been “angry as a bull, dumb as a fish, and fast as lightning.” She kept repeating it too.  A few times she would mess up the order of the words and say he was “angry as a fish” and then she would burst into peals of lopsided laughter, and I would take another sip of wine because I couldn’t figure out how or even if I should be laughing too.
I ended up telling Rosie that Henry was a friend of Grandma’s who had been very mean to her and wouldn’t let her dance with him at the party. But when I tried to whisper in my mother’s ear “Remember? Angry as a bull, dumb as a fish, and fast as lightning,” she looked at me with confused, tear-stained eyes, and I desperately tried to change the subject.
It could have been worse though, I suppose. Even on her hardest days, my mother never lied to me. There wasn’t always truth to what she said; for instance, I wasn’t her high school girlfriend Nina and I wasn’t still dating that nice doctor from Seattle. The truth for her had become something she could carry around with her like a bag of brightly colored marbles. She often pulled out the wrong marble at the wrong time of day, or the wrong season, or even sometimes the wrong decade, but that never made the marble any less real or shiny or full of a little universe.
“Losing your marbles” is such an indelicate phrase, I think, but eventually each of the little marbles slipped out of my mothers hands and rolled under places like the refrigerator or the intricate circuitry of her dying brain. A lie of omission hides the presence of the truth, but if the truth just doesn’t exist anymore in your consciousness, are you truly a liar?
One of the last times Rosie and I went to see Mom, Rosie brought her favorite stuffed polar bear with her. As Mom and I talked, Rosie kept interrupting to tell Grandma facts about her polar bear. He liked red peppers better than green ones, he hated when his ears got muddy, and just last week he had taken a trip to Disney World to see Mickey Mouse. I took Rosie to go to the bathroom and when we came back, the polar bear was sitting upright on the table, holding today’s copy of the New York Times in his scruffy little paws. Rosie squealed with delight. “Look Mommy, he’s reading! He’s reading the news! Look Grandma!”
“He sure is a smart little bear,” my mother replied, “he likes to hear about the world.” I wasn’t surprised, but I was still speechless. I barely said a few words for the rest of the time we were there, leaving Rosie to read the newspaper with the polar bear and narrate his reaction to the comics section while Mom listened and asked the occasional silly, warm-hearted question.
When we left, Mom said a quick goodbye and then turned her attention to the now-empty table where we had been sitting, smiling at the spot where Rosie’s stuffed polar bear had been. The truth had long since become murky and fallen away, but I never saw more clarity in my mother’s eyes then when she sat there, just around the corner from leaving us forever, smiling at one impenetrable little lie.