The Claw… A story of a lie

The Claw
This lie we tell to Bang started small, kind of like a snowflake. However, it has grown into a fairly large and complicated tale much like a snowball turns into snowman’s head. You see, many months ago Bang notice a missing tile in the ceiling at Walmart. He asked why. Now, 99% of the time, I give him the truth.This, however, was the 1%. Bang was going through this whining phase (he hasn’t quite passed all the way the through it yet) so when he asked why there was a hole I told him, “That’s where the claw comes down to pick up kids who whine.” It worked. He stopped whining. In the grocery store he asked if there was a claw. Of course, because if it works in Walmart it will work in the grocery store, too. The air ducts are the tubes the whiny kids go through. “Then where do they go?” he asked. They get dropped into the dumpster that’s out back. “Then what?” Then the garbage truck comes to pick them up. This happen at every store. They all have claws.

One day he asked to go see the dumpster behind the grocery store to see where the whiny kids go. So we took him. Lo and behold there was the dumpster. We laughed when we noticed that the dumpster had a tube connecting it to the building. Perfect. He now can see that after you go through the tubes inside the store, you then go through the tube outside and get deposited right into the dumpster. *This dumpster is actually for compost from the produce department*

Then, as our lie continued to manifest, the claws developed cameras and microphones. Bang’s first question in a store is asking where the claw comes out. Quickly, we find a spot on the ceiling, usually air vents, and point it out to him. Then he wants to know where the cameras are. Usually, this one’s easy, we just look for the little black objects on the ceiling that typically house security cameras. After that, he’ll want to know where the microphone is. Sometime it’s emergency sprinkler heads and sometimes it’s a speaker mounted into the ceiling.

Just last night this lie progressed a bit further. Bang asked where the garbage truck takes the whiny kids. “Erie, Indiana,” I told him. Where they have to sleep in Tupperware containers. DW added that they have to go to “bad kid school” where they teach the whiny kids to be good.

As you can see, this lie started small, just a claw to get him to stop whining. It has snowballed. One day he will realize that there is no claw. Hopefully he will laugh at the complexity we have created. Who knows, maybe the claw will be passed on to our grand kids.

We have all told little white lies to our kids for one reason or another. Has one of your little white lies turned into an elaborate hoax as our “claw”? 

This is the thing that picks kids up by their head, takes them through the air ducts and drops them in the dumpster out back.