Secrets, Lies & Father's Day
Shortly before Ma lost her mind, she unburdened herself; I'm the keeper of our family secrets and shame.
I decided not to post on Father’s Day because:
this Stack is meant to be about me and Ma, not him
I idolized him and I had good reason to be afraid of him. An unhealthy no-appropriate-boundaries relationship, he wasn’t such a great dad. Think: Reader’s Digest My Most Unforgettable Character—Tales from the Dark Side.
we’d never really celebrated what our family deemed “bullshit Hallmark card holidays” such as Mother’s and Father’s Day. Looking at that sentence, I guess you could say we didn’t celebrate anything about familial love. And wedding anniversaries were just…awkward.
I didn’t want to bum everyone out, so I just smiled at all those essays and posts about healthy, loving family relationships. Keeping my skepticism–and jealousy–on the DL, while a steady stream of “I’m calling bullshit on that one. And that one. That’s really bullshit. Happy little family bulldookie” ran through my head all day.
I’m the keeper of family secrets.
The last one, an only child, I hold my own secret and shortly before my mother lost her mind, she unburdened herself first of her own secret, then since Fred (my father) was already dead; she let go with his as well.
Why she chose to do a final reveal? She was still living alone, we were just at the beginning of this roller coaster ride. Could she have felt the dementia creeping in more than I was aware and thought: if not now, when? Or did they just get too heavy, a lifetime of carrying this locked box around—a trouble shared is a trouble halved? She might’ve worried she’d die never giving me the key to my own life. I doubt she realized how much what happened to them, individually and as couple, impacted me. We never realize our full effect on those who love us. So, she let them go.
Unburdened. Literally. Freeing herself of the last of the heavy things her mind needed to be careful of.
And now those burdens are mine.
As if my own was not enough.
Something I did.
Something he couldn’t do.
Something that was done to her.
You’re only as sick as your secrets.
All of our secrets are shame-based. Maybe that’s what all secrets are. A thing we don’t want the World to see because it will think less of us. Proof of our—wrongness. We’ll become pariahs, judged unworthy by the World. Well, the joke’s on you, World. We beat you to the punch and judged ourselves: Unworthy. Unlovable. Less than.
Uncovering my parents’ secrets helped me understand who they were and why we were the way we were as a family.
We are all snowflakes.
No two people hate themselves in exactly the same way. How you hate yourself, how you treat the world you see through that prism, is unique. It’s a result of all the things you believe about yourself, even the ones you haven’t admited to yourself.
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