Keeping Trust

Six-year-old me was in my room, on my bed… and watching YouTube when I was supposed to be doing my Khan Academy math homework . 

The bliss was short-lived. Soon, my dad saw my time limit was at an average of two hours per day when my time limit was only an hour. 

“Emma! Do you know the screen time password?” he asked. This was after about a week of him and my mom trying to figure out why the time limit wasn’t working. I had played along and pretended I had no clue what was going on. My face turned red as my young brain tried to figure out what to say. My dad took my silence as the confirmation of my lies.

When I was first caught knowing my screen time password, my mom came to my defense.

“She’s just a kid! She doesn’t know better! She’ll never lie again, right Emma?” she insisted to my dad. I had nodded eagerly, making promises I knew I wouldn’t keep. Just a month or so later, the same thing happened. Once again, I was watching YouTube when I should’ve been doing homework. My mom questioned me, asking me to tell the truth…but I lied again. I remember the look she gave me, the memory still fresh in my mind after all these years. Her eyebrows furrowed, her eyes hurt, and her mouth twitched down slightly. 

“I trusted you,” she said. “Yet, you broke that trust. I can’t trust you again until you gain it back.” When she said those words to me back then, I didn’t think much about it.

Then, as I grew older, especially those first two years after she told me that, I was questioned on almost everything from doing my homework down to simply if I read a book or not. 

“Did you do your homework? Did you actually clean your room? Lemme check your screentime! Why are you being so secretive?” I heard all these questions multiple times. 

“When will you trust me?” I asked so many times.

“When you gain it back,” was all the response I received.

Looking back, I know it was silly the things I lied about. But I was a kid who just wanted to watch TV all day long and never do homework. A kid who made mistakes and just so happened to lose all the trust her mother had in her.

I’m not sure when I finally realized how important trust was, but at some point, I decided to just be honest. Okay, so I got a bad grade. I forgot to take out the trash. And I figured out the screen time password. I finally figured out telling the truth, no matter how bad what I did was, will always result in a lesser punishment.

Now I realize trust is the foundation of relationships, and not just with family members. My relationships with my teachers, friends, and classmates are all based on trust in some way shape or form. Always turning in homework and studying for tests, so teachers can trust I’m a good student. Always replying to my friends and helping them with homework, so they can trust I’m a reliable friend.

I’ve grown up always hearing the words, “Honesty is the best policy,” at school. And I hadn’t recognized how important this cliche was until my mother’s words.

If I could go back to that moment of six-year-old me watching YouTube, I would just tell her, “It’s better to just tell the truth Emma. You’re only six. They’re not going to be mad.”