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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I like my coffee black, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share lessons I learned from a broken lamp.

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What I Learned Yesterday:
Remember episode 23? That’s the episode where I snuck home after school to get some Halloween candy and ended up playing around with a lighter and toilet paper while I was there. In that episode I mentioned that there was a story about a lamp that I would tell you one day. Today is that day.

Now before I get into the story of the lamp, let me preface this story by telling you that my version of this story does not match my brother’s version. After my brother heard the Halloween candy story he and I compared memories. They were mostly the same, but there were a few differences. We also talked about the story I’m telling you today. He remembered some things that I do not. He remembers that we had friends over during the time the lamp event happened. I remember it being just me and my brother.

I don’t think that our differences in the story will matter. I think what matters most is how I remember the events of that day and the way it affected me both as a child and as an adult. So, disclaimer complete, here’s the story of the lamp.

From the time I was 1st grade until I finished 3rd grade we lived in a trailer house on a few acres of land just off of Interstate 35, a few miles south of Guthrie, OK. It’s just about 8 miles from where I live today. My brother and I were pretty rambunctious, but that’s normal of kids of the ages we were. It seemed we were always getting in trouble for something.

One time I remember that I’d heard that dragsters used bleach to do burnouts before races. We couldn’t find bleach, so we used mom’s liquid laundry soap to try and do burnouts with our Hot Wheels cars in the laundry room floor. She wasn’t happy about that for some reason.

Another time we played tag inside the house. That may seem pretty harmless, but we tagged each other by taking the caps off of our markers and throwing them at each other. When my parents came home and saw all the marker spots all over our clothes and the furniture, they got a little upset. Go figure.

Like any kid, both my brother and I tried to lie our way out of things. My dad always told us that if we told the truth, we wouldn’t get in trouble. I remember that I wasn’t ever sure if that was true. It seemed too good to be true. Could telling the truth really be used as a get out of jail free card? It seemed riskier than lying, so I often chose lying.

One day my brother and I were rough housing. I don’t remember if we were wrestling, playing tag, or doing something else. As I said before, I don’t remember there being other kids there. Whoever was involved and whatever the cause, at some point we knocked a lamp off of a table. It was a glass lamp, but fortunately the glass part of the lamp didn’t break. What broke was one of the legs of the lamp.

I remember that we tried everything we could think of to fix the leg. It was a metal base so any glue that we had access to was not strong enough to mend the break and withstand the weight of the lamp. No matter what we tried, the lamp kept falling over. There was no way to hide what we’d done. We decided our best option was to come clean and do it right away.

We called dad at work and told him the whole truth. We then asked him point blank if we were going to get in trouble. We reminded him that he said if we told the truth, we would not get in trouble. He told us that we’d done the right thing and that we would not get in trouble.

A little while later dad got off work and made it home. He came in the front door, took one look at the lamp, and all bets were off. He was angry. I don’t remember the full extent of our punishment, but I know it involved a thorough spanking. I remember that we again reminded dad of what he said, but it did not change the outcome.

As you can imagine, this really impacted me. I remember feeling betrayed. I’d told the truth just like he wanted. He said that we wouldn’t get in trouble and we did. I remember thinking that telling the truth was not at all worth it. After that day I don’t know if I ever tried telling the truth as a first option. I lied a lot.

In fact, I lied so much that my parents didn’t believe me even when I told the truth. In fact, about 3 or 4 years after the lamp there was another incident. My brothers and I were out goofing off with some friends. We each had BB guns and we were out shooting birds and cans and stuff. We had swapped guns and the one I had didn’t belong to me. It was a pellet gun pistol. As we ran down the dirt road near our friend’s house, I tripped. I fell forward and tried to catch myself. As my hands hit the ground, the rest of my body continued downward. My face slammed into the gun in my hand and the hammer of the gun cut me on the forehead, right between the eyes.

It was a minor cut. It only bled for a few minutes and we were back on our way and our task of thinning out the bird population. I didn’t think anything of the incident until later that night during dinner. My step-mom asked me about it and wanted to know how it happened. Since it wasn’t a big deal, I told her the truth. My brothers backed my story.

About 15 years later my wife and I had dinner with my dad and stepmom. At one point during dinner she got my attention and said she wanted to ask me a question that had been bugging her all those years. She asked me about the day I got cut on my forehead and wanted to know what happened. I told her the same story I just told you. She looked shocked. All those years she thought I had been lying about what happened. She thought one of my brothers had accidentally shot me and because I lied so much, she didn’t believe my story.

Fortunately it was long before that night over dinner that I figured out lying was not a better option than telling the truth. Sometime around the time I was 14 or 15 I finally started telling the truth more often. I won’t spend time telling you about all the stupid things I lied about. Looking back on it now, I must have really thought my parents were idiots if I thought they were believing my lies. I still got in plenty of trouble. If they could prove what I’d done, punishment was handed down and it was more severe than if I’d just told the truth.

Here’s what I learned.

I didn’t realize immediately that the lamp had impacted me the way it did. At some point down the road I realized how it made me feel the day we got in trouble for telling the truth and made the connection to the path of lying. Honestly, I don’t think I realized it until I was at the point where I was tired of trying to lie my way out of getting in trouble.

When I did realize the impact it had had on me, I resolved to never, ever, do that to my kids. And I haven’t. However, I’ve also never told them that telling the truth would get them out of trouble. Instead, what Kari and I have told them is that lying is never accepted in our home. It will always bring a much more severe punishment. If they tell the truth they will be punished, but the punishment will be less severe. Our kids still lie, but for the most part, they have been very honest with us.

I really wish that I could tell you that my dad has a very different memory of this event. I wish that I could tell you that when I asked him about the lamp and my memories, he corrected me and gave me the wisdom and perspective of a parent. However, when my brother and I asked him about it recently, he had no memory of that day at all. Still, I’m willing to concede that there are important details that led up to that day that caused him to go back on what he said.

I say that because, as a parent, I know that kids hear what they want to hear. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve told my kids one thing that was very clear to me, and they understood it in a totally different way. After all, kids hear what they want to hear.

So I don’t want to totally throw my dad under the bus here.

What I know to be absolutely true is this: I felt betrayed by my dad that day and it taught me a lesson the hard way. It taught me that I needed to have a different rule for lying for my kids than I did as a kid. It also taught me that trust is earned. If I want my kids to be trustworthy, I have to be trustworthy to them first.

I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.

If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday, I would be grateful if you’d leave a review in iTunes.

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