Attention starved
This woman has a real problem with lying:
It started small.I knew a girl in high school who was, sadly, memorable only for the fact that she was constantly in some sort of wrist brace or leg brace or sling of some sort. I'd say she was accident-prone but for the fact that she always seemed to heal suspiciously quickly from each of her little mishaps.The woman called Grand Junction radio station KMOZ, requested a song and mentioned to the disc jockeys that she was headed off to basic training in the Army. She said her name was Amber Kenney.
The first flake of deception — her name was Sarah, not Amber — grew into an avalanche of lies. ...
Last month, she told [DJs Robert St. John and Libby Jackson] that her husband had been deployed to Iraq. She also mentioned that she was pregnant and that she thought she might be having twins. She said she was due in September. Later, she would tell Homefront Heroes, the Western Slope military support group, that she was due in May.
Nobody picked up on the discrepancy -- until later.
"She just kept calling. Things went on. We had no reason not to believe her," Jackson said.
"Then, last week, she called us and said, 'Did you hear? My husband died. He was killed overseas,'" Jackson said. "Robert and I were both like, 'No, you're kidding.' I told her to come see us.
"I cried with her; I hugged her. She cried. We all cried."
I can never remember how exactly she claimed to have hurt herself each time -- which is probably a credit to how well she had developed her routine -- but it wasn't hard to tell that she was full of it and just trying to get attention. I'm sure it also had something to do with the fact that she was terrible to get along with, and that she had no friends.
And if I think back, I can probably imagine that my mom would have cautioned me not to jump to conclusions too quickly, to have sympathy for the girl, but it might have been an advantage of my age that I didn't have a whole lot of understanding and life experience to clutter up my BS-detector, which was clearly telling me and everyone else that this girl had a serious problem with needing attention.
What's saddest about this story -- at least for her -- is that I can't remember a single other fact about this girl, other than her attention-getting antics. Except, also, that she got an expensive Audi for her 15th or 16th birthday. If I were to armchair-analyze her, 12+ years after the fact, I'd say this might have been a case where she didn't get much love around the house, and that her parents threw money at her instead of spending time with her. But who knows.
At least in Miss Kenney's case, she might have made the first step to straightening her stuff out:
"I think I need some serious counseling," [she said.]
Posted by Matt at February 10, 2005 11:21 AM
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