As I reflect on my childhood, I now am uncomfortable with the concept of Santa Claus.

Today, I would not intentionally lie to my children, but I did, because their father and I went through our children’s early childhoods taking them to see Santa in the Mall and we dutifully laid out cookies and milk and hid presents under the tree.

I now see that I was guilty of imposing the Santa Claus Syndrome on my children. As an adoptee, I should have known better. But I fell for the cultural bias of the times. And I now despise what I did, and I despise the way I was raised, too, with lies of all sorts.

Sure, as a young child I was delighted, but when I realized that the wonder of Santa was a lie, I felt deceived.

Just as my childhood was ending, at 18, I got the biggest shock of my life. That’s when I was found by siblings I was never supposed to know. That’s when all the lies told to me by my adoptive parents began to unravel. That’s when I saw, for the first time in my life, that I had a birth certificate in the name of Joan Wheeler, but I also had one in the name of Doris Michol Sippel. And, like Judith Land, I also had two baptismal certificates, each handwritten and certified by the Catholic priest at our parish, the parish of my birth and baptism. So many lies. As Judith says, this lying and perjury “is not acceptable behavior”.