When I was a kid my mother always knew what I was doing, even when her back was turned. A few times I asked her how she knew when she had told me to stop doing something. He reply was that she had eyes in the back of her head. I put some thought into this. It had to be true. how else could she know what I was doing when her back was turned. I began to wonder why she didn't walk around backwards. It was plain to me that the eyes in the back of her head were better than the eyes in the front. The eyes in the front of her head needed glasses but the eyes in the back could see perfectly through all of her hair.

My younger sister told me that she doesn't remember asking how our mother knew she was doing things so she doesn't remember being told about the eyes in the back of the head. But she, too, put some thought into the enigma of our mother always knowing things. She figured our mother had an invisible, floating eyeball that followed her around the house. She could be in another room doing something she knew she wasn't supposed to and our mother would call out to tell her to stop.

I think most mothers tell fibs similar to this one. My father talks about he and his brother asking their mother how she knew certain naughty things they had done. Her reply was that a little bird had told her. My father said he and his brother used to search for the little bird to do it in. They were tired of their mother knowing everything.

Now I am a mother. Despite my oath as a teenager to 'never do that to my kids' I have perpetuated the fib. Why? If I tell them the truth, that I can hear them, they'll be quieter. So my daughters, too, believe their mother has eyes in the back of her head. I know they believe it because I've heard the elder telling the younger one about it.