| Late in her life, my mother went on a ten
day bus tour through Canada. Showing me the photos, she described
a friendship she formed with a woman from Germany who was
fluent in several languages.
"Some of the other Jewish women didn't like Greta
because she was German," she told me.
"It's nice that you befriended her," I said.
She nodded. "I told her she should have pretended to
be French, but she wouldn't hear of it. You're too honest,
I said."
"You suggested she deny who she is?" I burst. "Why?
Because other people are narrow-minded?"
"You're like Greta, too honest." My mother
smiled at me as though this was an endearing flaw; quaint
but impractical. "She'd never see those people
again."
"That's not the point," I started, but then
thought better of it. This had been her strategy since long
before I was born. If something was inconvenient, or distasteful,
or too painful in your life, you told a different story.
A divorcée in the fifties, a time when movie stars
like Liz Taylor were the only ones to leave their marriages,
my mother chose to reinvent herself. After she met my father,
the years spent with her first husband simply didn't exist.
Her two children, living across the country in California
with their father and his new wife, were distant relatives
if anyone asked, their letters and photos stashed on a high
shelf in a closet at the back of the house.
Until I was fourteen years old, the secrets of my mother's
past were kept from me as well. I was told my parents were
each ten years younger than they were, and that my sister
Angie and I were my mother's first and only children. No,
that's inaccurate. We weren't actually told this; it was implied
by the absence of others and by my half siblings' willingness
to follow my parents' edict to ask for Aunt Edie when they
called, never Mom. This was in the sixties and early seventies,
a time when younger parents were experimenting with the idea
of treating children as equals. But my folks were from an
earlier generation. To them, good parenting meant meeting
our physical needs and protecting us from harsh realities
that might confuse us or give us nightmares.
Yet they spoke about many terrifying and perplexing things
in our presence. I remember my father commiserating with a
neighbor about degenerates who think nothing of breaking into
your house to slit your throat in your sleep. I was six at
the time, coloring a picture of a pony in a field on the coffee
table next to where my father sat, puffing his sweet-smelling
pipe. He didn't mean to scare me; he believed children paid
no attention when adults spoke to one another. Often my sister
and I heard him talk about us in the third person, comments
not meant for our ears. "This one's going to be trouble,"
he'd say, raising his chin toward Angie who at twelve already
had a curvaceous figure. "But the little one," he'd
add, tugging gently on my ponytail, "she's got the brains."
The things my parents kept hidden invariably had to do with
themselves, their choices and decisions. My mother gave the
family dog away when I was ten but told me that he'd run off.
When I found out what really happened, she insisted she'd
lied to protect me. Even at the time, it pained me that her
logic could be so skewed. Did she really believe it was better
to have me think Sammy was lost and roaming the streets when,
in fact, he was safe in someone else's home? Clearly the person
my mother was protecting was herself; she hoped to avoid facing
my feelings about what she had done.
I don't remember exactly how it came out that my mother had
given the dog away, but it's been my experience that the truth
always reveals itself eventually. When I was fourteen, Angie
was twenty and out of school. Always a wanderer, she wound
up in California where she looked up my mother's "cousin"
Gene. During a chat about our family, Gene absentmindedly
began a sentence, "Well, when I was married to your mom…"
Now that my sister knew the whole story, my parents decided
it was time for me to be told. My mother flew with me to San
Francisco and sat me in a hotel room with Angie and our distant
cousin Tina.
My mother said there was something important she wanted to
tell me and, in the silence that followed, I worried that
one of us in the room was dying of cancer.
Finally, she took a breath and announced, "Tina is my
daughter."
Before thought or even a feeling surfaced, I heard myself
ask the question, "Then who am I?"
It struck the others as funny. The laughed, relieved at having
stumbled upon this tension breaker.
As my mother unfolded the facts of her first marriage before
me, I thought about all I'd missed by not knowing. Tina and
her brother Steve, my brother Steve, both had young
children. I was an Aunt. I'd always envied big families. Meanwhile,
all these people were a part of me. They were mine. Still,
my mother contended that she had kept this secret from me
for my own protection.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
She sighed and shook her head. "It would have been too
much for you," she said.
It occurs to me now that if she was protecting me from anything,
it was from fully knowing who she was. A woman who failed
at marriage when to do so was considered a sin; more importantly,
a woman who essentially gave up her children to marry a man
who wanted a wife clean of history.
It's true that to have such knowledge about one's mother
could make the world seem a very shaky place. But, on some
level, I'd actually always known. The problem with badly planned
fiction is there are holes in it. I'd heard Steve slip and
call my mother Mom; I'd seen my mother pour over Tina's letters
then quickly tuck them in her apron pocket when she noticed
I was in the room. I was simply adept at explaining these
moments away to myself. Not wanting to believe my parents
would lie to me, I collaborated with them on the ruse.
As I lay awake that night under the stiff sheets of my hotel
bed, the sounds of a strange city beneath my window, I remembered
every single slip-up and hint. I had ready access to them
as though I'd been keeping a file and had, until then, simply
misplaced the cabinet key.
My parents underestimated how much children listen and take
in. What they also didn't realize was that life feels most
tenuous when what you're told and what's before you don't
line up. I suddenly had a lot of new information to absorb,
and it brought with it many questions, but also a small sense
of calm. There were aspects of my family life that had never
made sense. Now suddenly they did.
My mother and sisters found my initial response to the news
humorous. But now, thirty years later, that question which
rose out of some deep place in me, strikes me as essential
and correct. If my parents, the people who first defined the
world for me, were not who they said they were, then who in
this new reality was I?
The fact that I am someone who was lied to as a child is
a part of my basic fabric. From it grows an insistence on
accuracy and honesty. It is why I write, to find out what
lies beneath the surfaces we show publicly. This life of exploring
and unearthing is the good that came from all this. But the
damage shows itself too. I have an immediate, visceral response
to any discrepancy in logic, recognizing falsehoods because
I hear myself begin to explain them away just as I learned
to in my youth. The problem is that even small omissions have
the weight of great lies to me.
"You're keeping something from me," I'll say icily
to the man I'm involved with, who because of his own set of
childhood wounds, is sometimes evasive. Then I brace myself
for the unveiling of some dreaded secret that will mean the
end of our relationship.
Fortunately, we both recognize the value of having our habitual
patterns knocked loose and challenged.
"You're good for me," Dan will surprise me by saying,
often while I'm still reeling from a fight.
When Dan and I met, I was living with another man. It was
a sad and sticky time during which I had to tell my eight
year old son that my boyfriend was moving out. Friends advised
me to keep my explanations simple, emphasizing that Paul and
I had grown apart and that it was in no way Ethan's fault.
Ethan began to cry, which surprised me. He and Paul had gotten
along but had never been close.
"Paul and I have grown apart," I started dutifully,
but in saying it, I felt the phrase held little meaning. "I'll
tell you the truth," I amended. "I've been doing
a lot of thinking and feeling and, as much as I care for Paul,
I realize I love Dan more."
Ethan's tears stopped as though someone had flipped a switch.
"You know," he said, "I thought you loved Dan.
You laugh a lot with him."
We still went through a period of adjustment, but there was
an underlying peace in our small household. It seemed right
to let Ethan see the woman in transition I was. He may have
had to live with a mother who was somewhat startled and sad,
as well as dizzy with new love; but he didn't have to reside
in the disorienting world of lies and half-truths where I
had been raised.
I try to look kindly on my parents and the mistakes they
made with us, especially now that I know first hand how much
of parenthood is actually guesswork. It's even occurred to
me that, given my strong feelings about my family's secretiveness;
I may sometimes err in the other direction.
Ethan, ten now, has been know to say, "T.M.I., Mom.
Too much information."
"The truth is I don't know what I'm doing," I confessed
to my brother Steve on the phone one night. Despite our separate
upbringings, he and I have grown close over the years.
"Well, Honey," he answered. "You came to that
feeling honestly."
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