Deceit

My earliest memory is of looking out of a playpen at my father. He was in the living room carrying on a conversation with my mother who was in the kitchen. She would occasionally miss what he said and would ask him to repeat it. He would rephrase what he had originally said, which i found puzzling, so I assume I had a very limited vocabulary. I knew my mother was asking him to repeat something. I knew he was saying something different the second time around. Whereas I may have been mistaken in then jumping to the conclusion that he was deceiveing her the second time around, it may have been that i could sense something unspoken in his actions. There was a large amount of deceit going on, as we found out later when he left home and married his mistress of many years. however, before this happened, my parents came to an agreement that he would continue to live with us until my sister and i were finished school, so they then cooperated in keeping the deceit going. Growing up, I never had a great level of certainty about what was really going on and who or what to rely on. I remember as a young teenager I spent a lot of time in a friends house, where the several sibling and parents were constantly having standing up rows with each other and storming out and slamming doors, only to resolve their differences minutes later in waves of laughter and hugs. It took me a year or two to figure out that my family was the disfunctional one! but the worst deceit of all took place when I was three and my granfather bought me a red drum with pictures of soldiers on it for my birthday. My parents hid the drumsticks and told me it was a stool. I sat on that drum for a year. Probably explains my distrust of drummers ever since!