Tag: secrets

From Secret to Surprise

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“Knowledge increases by sharing, not saving.” – Lyrical

My 6-year-old daughter’s best friend, who is 8-years-old and lives next door, came over this past Sunday with a secret. Here’s how it played out:

Sunday mid-day: “Oh, we’re…. <groan> Never mind. Forget I said anything. It’s nothing bad but I can’t tell you for 3 days.”

Sunday 20 minutes later: I heard her telling my daughter that they are getting a new car and then adding “Well, my dad just said not to tell EVERYONE.”

Monday morning carpool to school: “So I haven’t told ALL the kids on the block.” Then my daughter piped in “Yeah, and my mom doesn’t know.”

Monday evening: My 2-year-old came into the kitchen after playing with his sister and her friend. He ran to me and exclaimed “We have secret!”

Tuesday morning carpool to school: “It’s not too big a deal whether people know or not.”

Wednesday morning carpool to school: “In the new car, we are going to put a towel under my little sister’s seat because you know how messy she is. It should be here today. Or maybe tomorrow.”

Thursday morning carpool to school: “The surprise is going to be here next week.” I asked why it was a surprise now instead of a secret and she replied, “Well, we know it’s coming but not everything about what it’s going to look like so it’s a surprise.”

This must be why we don’t burden our kids with secrets, especially the ones that are heavier to bear!

Secrets

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“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” – Anne Sexton

This week when we are returning from holiday breaks always reminds me of one of the wackiest stories from when I was in business with two partners and we had almost 20 employees. On the Monday after New Years Day in 2008, I was in the office when the office manager came in to say that we hadn’t heard from our program manager, JE, since the Christmas party two weeks prior.

JE didn’t work for me but in a small company, I certainly knew him. I liked him too. He was smart, quiet and diligent about getting his work done. He’d left Microsoft six months before to come work for us and except for one scheduled break in late October, he’d always shown up. It wasn’t unusual for our folks to work from home, especially over the holidays but not answering emails and phone calls was definitely odd.

Since my two business partners to whom JE did report were in Mexico on a hang gliding trip, I jumped in to help. Thinking that maybe we could find his girlfriend’s name and call her to check in, I googled his name. The top result was a memo from the United Stated Department of Justice dated in October of the previous year (the same days of his scheduled absence) that read something like this:

“<JE’s full name>, 27, of <city>, WA was sentenced to six month in prison for his role as the leader of a software pirating group. He will be reporting to <low security prison> on January 1, 2008.”

Well, that explained why we couldn’t get ahold of him! When we finally talked with his girlfriend, she said that JE would be disappointed to know we’d found out because he didn’t want to let us down.

Of course, had he quit before he went to prison, we would have never looked for him!! Granted he had bigger things to worry about in the 8 weeks between sentencing and reporting to the facility but as a logical young man, it seemed obvious that if you don’t want people to look for you, you need to break up with them first.

I think of this often when someone is carrying a secret. It is an immense burden that sometimes precludes thinking and acting rationally. And often the secret itself prevents the carrier from finding the tools to heal – because developing any depth is dangerous, lest it unearth the core of what they are carrying. The secret has a life of its own that requires it to stay buried and drains a lot of energy to support itself.

At the time of my life when this happened, I had a secret too. I was unhappy in my marriage and way of life and I was diligently trying to keep that a secret, mostly from myself. I drank too much wine and then smoked cigarettes when I drank as a way to numb myself from feeling what was really going on.

Thinking back now, I realize that I was forcing myself daily to keep walking down a path that didn’t feel right. I was in a relationship that wasn’t supportive of me, I was in a business partnership with a charismatic that was making me crazy and I had developed no spiritual depth with which I could heal these wounds. All these secrets were a prison in their own way.

As it turned out, I kept my misery under wraps for another year after JE went to prison. Then the charismatic business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities and it all blew apart – the business and my marriage. Finally, no one had any secrets left and I could begin to heal. With nothing left buried, it was finally safe to develop some spiritual depth that carried me out of my prison. I can only hope that JE was able to heal once his secret was out as well.

(featured image from Pexels)

Happy Families

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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

My mom told me that one of her friends from her retirement community keeps asking her about my kids. He’s 98 years-old, never married and has no kids, and he asks repeatedly about how I conceived them as a single mom and what I tell them about their parentage. As she was telling me this, I thought “Given that they didn’t even invent invitro-fertilization until he was in his 60’s, I can’t imagine what he thinks.” But in this most recent conversation they had, he started telling her about the traumatic childhood he had — his father’s abuse of his sisters, his mother’s nervous breakdown when she discovered the abuse and his mother’s instruction to him to make sure he never left his younger sister alone with his dad. At the end of relating the story he simply said to my mom, “I would have been a lot better off without a dad.”

This makes me so sad. First of all because I had a great dad. Nothing about what I’ve done is a commentary on dads in general. It was simply a matter of not having the right one for my kids and running out of time.

Secondly because of the shame he still seems to carry. The answer to his question about what I tell my kids is that I tell them whatever they ask but I don’t complicate it with more than they want to know at the time. The first time my daughter asked she said, “Did I have a dad when I was born?” and I said “no” and then she followed up with “Did I have a dog when I was born?” and I thought “that’s where you’re going with this?” and answered “yes”. We’ve had more in-depth conversations since then about me going to the doctor to become pregnant and a little about sperm donors but she’s not all that interested yet. I have no way of knowing how she or her brother will come to feel about this (and it’ll probably be many things) but whatever it is, I will do my best to make sure it isn’t shame. My primary tool to combat that is not to have any secrets about their origins.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a Tolstoy quote I recently came across, “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Given that Tolstoy lived long before invitro fertilization and also gay marriage, I’d say maybe in his time happy families were all alike. But they can look pretty different these days.

But I think Tolstoy was right that unhappy families have many possible reasons that can echo for a long time. I hope that we see my mom’s friend again soon and somewhere in the telling of his story and the grace of being interested in my happy children since he never had any of his own, he finds peace for his inner child.

Truth Telling

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“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” – Thomas Jefferson

The other night we were with a family from school and the dad started to tell a story and then turned to his 4-year-old son and said, “James, can I tell a story about you?”

Such a sweet moment of respect and communication. It started me ruminating about how it gets more complicated to tell the truth as our lives get more intertwined. I try to be careful not to tell stories about my kids that I think they would mind reading 10 years or more from now but of course that’s a judgment call.

It reminds me of a story I heard the other day about a friend of a friend. On the outside, everything looks perfect – she’s attractive, healthy, has plenty of money, married with two grown kids, has a cute new puppy. But she’s unhappy, mostly because her marriage isn’t working for her. Nothing is egregiously wrong but her husband is busy with his work and friends and so he’s not interested in making a vital relationship. So she’s working on taking on new things – most recently writing. And here’s where I’ve imagined it lands –if she tells the truth, it’ll crack her life apart.

Of course this resonates for me because it was me 13 or 14 years ago when I was married. Everything looked fine from the outside of my life but on the inside I was starving. I had a husband, who as my dad gently put it after we divorced, “Loved to be loved.” The core of me was stifled into silence because it knew that if I spoke up and said I wanted more depth and meaning than just taking care of my husband it would be the beginning of the end of that relationship. I drank a lot of wine at the end of each day. Numbing was the only thing I could do to stay and not tell the truth.

I know I’m in trouble when I have to stuff down what I know to be true in order to do something. Having gone through it in my marriage, the moment I get a whiff of a situation that can’t withstand the sincerity of living out loud, it screams DANGER to me. When I write or say the small things that I haven’t dared to acknowledge outside myself before but I know are real, it feels vital and like a bridge to others that will hold up because it’s true.

So where does that leave my family? I think like the father the other night, asking to tell a story is a pretty good idea. And the story the dad told was about sitting in a car with his four-year-old, not paying attention to him because he was doing something on his phone. Finally he realized that his son, who he didn’t know could read, was saying, “It says ‘Pizza Bar.’” Hearing that story reminded me not only to ask my kids if I can tell a story but also to remember that they have learned to read or soon will. My truth needs to be told without risking anyone else’s.