SECRETS, SECRETS ARE NO FUN.
SECRETS, SECRETS, HURT SOMEONE.
ELIZABETH
Nurse/Stripper (S3 E14 - The Office)
Right now, if I were to think of a title to a book about my family, it would probably be ‘Secrets, Secrets, More Secrets; How to Discover Family Secrets – A Guide to Coping and Recovering From the Shock of Discovering Family Secrets.’
I digress…..
But seriously, I sometimes feel I have cornered the market on the sheer number and shock value of secrets in a single family!
I always knew there were secrets in my family. There were discussions held in low voices, just out of earshot. There were family members that we never saw, but only heard about. There were also the secrets I had to keep – the truths about the goings on in my own home that I was not allowed to speak about, for fear of bringing further shame upon the family.
The first big secret I had to keep was my sexual abuse. My stepfather was an alcoholic and a pedophile, but to a 4 year old, he was just daddy. He wasn’t mean to me, like he was to my mother & my brother. On a normal day, he was a mean, nasty drunk who beat my mother and terrorized my brother. Not me though. He doted on me and made me feel special.
I remember the day that my brother ran over me with his bike. He had set up a bike ramp to jump wheelies like Evil Kneivel. I ran in front of his bike in the middle of an epic jump and he landed on my back, causing my glasses to crack, which gashed my cheek. I was rushed to the ER where the doctor sewed me up and my daddy surprised me with a new baby doll & bassinet. It was blackmail, you see. He wasn’t being nice to me because he loved me and wanted to be a good daddy. He wanted me to keep a secret – that he was molesting me. He wasn’t nice to anyone else like that, but me.
The first big secret I discovered was that my daddy wasn’t my real daddy. To me, it was a relief. Even though I’ve never met my real father (read my story here) I’m forever grateful that I don’t carry the evil blood of my stepfather in my veins.
SECRETS MAKE YOU SICK
My family is a sick family. No one was on good terms with anybody. I never understood why until recently. I was always afraid to ask, feeling as though I would be intruding on someone’s privacy. I longed to know the mysteries surrounding all of the rampant dysfunction in our family. When my mother died, I felt like I had some freedom to start inquiring, since she had a way of triangulating all of my attempts to establish relationships with my extended family. She was a master at it, frankly. I now call it her ‘superpower‘.
My great-uncle provided me the first clue. When I first met him in 2014, he was a spry 95 years young. A veteran of WWII, he proudly showed me his many war medals. It was such an honor to be in his presence. I felt a tremendous sense of loss, because I had been denied the privilege of knowing him for all of my life, and here he was, at the end of his. I spent a day with him and his wife, soaking up every second I had with them, cherishing every memory they shared with me. They had incredible memories! The details they could recall were remarkable! I regret not recording the conversation that day. He was the patriarch of the family, the eldest son of 13 children. All of his siblings looked to him for guidance and support. This I knew. My mother had often spoken of him in this way.
He spoke of his father, my great-grandfather, and how his alcoholism impacted him as a young man. It was embarrassing to him, because his father was known to make a spectacle of himself. My uncle found himself many times trying to ‘save face’ for the family by talking to the cops so they wouldn’t arrest his father, or covering for him in the family landscaping business. The secrets, however, were in the attic.
He didn’t go into much detail, but my uncle mentioned something about his father taking the daughters into the attic. There were five daughters, one of which was my grandmother. His father “did things to them in the attic”, and that’s why his sisters were loose women, married and divorced several times.
Later on I discovered that my great-grandfather not only molested his daughters, but he also molested every single one of his granddaughters, my mother included. No one ever told. He was never arrested. Almost all of these little girls went on to live very dysfunctional lives.
Secrets make you sick.
The unthinkable
It’s been just over a year since my mother died and I believe that she took a lot of secrets with her to the grave, but there was one secret that my older brother was determined to tell me.
It was awful.
It’s almost too terrible for me to type.
Shortly after she passed away, my brother came over to visit. He was beginning to look ill at this time (I had no idea that he was already in late stages of pancreatic cancer) and we had a good heart-to-heart talk. A talk that was way overdue. My brother was very devoted to my mother, in a very dysfunctional way. She was probably one of the meanest persons I have ever known and treated him horribly. I think he gave it back to her in the last few years, but the abuse, neglect and pure meanness that he suffered because of her could not be calculated. I really felt bad for him, for us, because his blind devotion to HER caused us to have a fractured relationship. She was always poisoning us against each other, honing her craft of manipulation on the regular. I learned that as long as she lived, she would have the power over him, and that I would have to be content with the way things were. This day, however, the truth was going to be told, and my brother was telling it.
I asked him every question I could think of. I wanted to fill in every blank of my past that I believed the abuse had caused to be hidden. I wanted to know about his life before I came along, how he felt when I DID come along. I craved the tiniest of details of memories only he could provide. He graciously told me what he could, from his perspective – and that’s what I wanted. I wanted to see the world from HIS eyes. I wanted to go back to some sort of innocence between the two of us, from when we were little.
After a while his body stiffened and he rested his elbows on his knees, looking down at the floor. He said , “I have some other stuff to tell you.” I knew it wasn’t good. I could tell from the change in his demeanor and body language. I was prepared, and I replied, “Ok, tell me.” Then he said, “Umm, no… I’m not sure if I should tell you, it’s pretty bad. It might upset you pretty bad.” I assured him that I could handle it and begged him to please tell me. He reluctantly agreed.
“When I was little I was molested. Mom & Bill would drop me off with this couple to baby-sit me and they would do stuff to me. I have cigarette burns down there to prove it”
Tears burned down my cheeks as I tried to maintain my composure. All I could think of was this precious little boy, having suffered so much already, being abused like this.
“But that’s not the worst of it.”
‘How could it be worse that this’, I thought? I honestly didn’t think I could hear anymore. However, as an abuse survivor, I knew I MUST validate his story, validate his courage to share this with me, to tell the SECRETS.
“Someone else abused me too. It was grandmother.”
THAT IS WHEN MY JAW HIT THE FLOOR.
please, no
My head started spinning. I could not comprehend the words that my brother had just said. He looked at me intensely, looking for the reaction in my face, wondering if I would believe him. I know that look, because I’ve GIVEN that look many times when sharing my own story of abuse. There is nothing quite more terrifying than telling your story of abuse and wondering if you will be believed. I believed him. As horrifying and confusing as it was, I believed him.
He told me that the abuse went on for maybe a year or so when was four or five years old. He didn’t go into any details about the abuse (thankfully – I didn’t want to know) but I could tell it was deeply traumatic for him and at that moment a million things about him made sense to me. He was always troubled. He was angry, sad, unable to focus. He never achieved any success in life and remained dependent on my mother emotionally and financially for most of his life. He abused drugs and alcohol. He literally failed to thrive. From before he could probably recall memories, his life and future had been stolen from him. But he was also brilliant (probably genius IQ), funny, personable, loving. This revelation crushed me in more ways than one.
He said he confronted my grandmother a few years before she died (they never spoke about it before then) and she completely blew him off. She didn’t even apologize. He then told my mother, who went totally ballistic and confronted my grandmother on her own, to which she replied, “It was a long time ago, what do you want me to do about it now?” I was completely dumbfounded, but not surprised. I could picture my grandmother responding in this manner, taking no responsibility.
I loved my grandmother and despite her crappy personality and ability to hold a grudge like no other, thought of her more as a mother-figure than my own mother. Now history had to be rewritten.
I told my brother that I was so sorry for what happened to him and that I wished he could have gotten help a long time ago. I assured him that what was done to him was horrible, criminal, and that my grandmother’s reaction to him when confronted was beyond disgusting. He claimed to have forgiven her and moved on, but he carried the effects of that abuse every single day of his 52 years on this earth. I saw it on him as if it were written on his face, and the sadness was overwhelming. He died 5 months later.
SECRETS MAKE YOU SICK
breaking the chains
I have decided that secrets will no longer rule and reign in my family, going forward. Whether they are ugly, painful, beautiful or glorious, the secrets will be told. Truth will prevail from now on. So much damage has been done; so much tragedy relived and repeated because of the secrets in my family. No more I say, no more.
I have been somewhat of a trailblazer in my family of origin. I think it has shocked a few of those who are content to keep the secrets safely tucked away, hoping they will die off eventually in future generations. I intend on pursuing the truth and documenting it so that history does NOT get repeated, so that my children and grandchildren can learn from the mistakes of their family. The pain must be dragged out into the open to be seared in the hot glare of the truth.
The truth surely will, set you free.