I have no secrets. That's been both my strong point and my weak point throughout my life. In the early days of email, my kids used to call me Mrs. RTA (Reply to All). They still don’t trust me.
Fortunately, I spent most of my business life in public relations and marketing, where keeping secrets wasn't required. I have only kept one secret throughout my life, and I still remember what it was because it was so singular. Even that secret was not kept totally, because I revealed it to my daughters. The actual possessor of the secret, the person who asked me to keep it, is dead, as are all the original actors. But the descendants are still involved, so it goes to my grave with me.
In every other way, I'm the proverbial open book. Pretty much everyone who knows me knows my age, which I own proudly. And whether on any given day I feel rich or poor, healthy or ill.
That's because I have a theory about secrets: they should not exist. They hinder communication and stop us from really getting to know the real person to whom we are talking. This dates all the way back to my childhood and should have been part of my therapy a long time ago.
My mother used to say "if you can't say something nice about something, don't say anything." I always felt that disabled my ability to give constructive criticism.
Even as a young child, I felt that secrets were related to lies. I'm a big proponent of telling the truth, and I didn't understand how telling the truth, which I was taught was a virtue, matched up with "if you can say anything nice, don't say anything" Clearly, these were contradictions, right?
When I was a child, we often spent a month in Florida during the winter. And by the way, I thought everyone did this because everyone WE knew did it. But because we never were supposed to talk about money, I had no idea we were privileged. We actually traveled by train from New York to Miami, which took about 24 hours. It was a lot of fun because we slept on the train. My parents would put us to bed in our berth, which had bunk beds, and then they would head for the bar to drink and dine with their friends. The one with the berths was called the sleeping car, and the one with the booze was called the dining car.
One night, I could not fall asleep on the train. My younger brother was already "out," and I was bored. I spent a great deal of my childhood unable to sleep, and another great deal of it bored. When I told him I was bored, my father used to tell me to bang my head against the wall in Yiddish. "Shlug kup im vont," or something like that. That seemed a non sequitur.
Anyway, I headed off through the train cars for the dining car to tell my parents I couldn't sleep. My parents were cocktailing with a group of people, one of whom had just told my mother that her hair looked beautiful. This seemed a perfect time to interject, "it's not her real color. She dyes it." My mother smiled wanly, took my hand and we immediately took off back to the sleeping car. As we walked, she "blew her top." Something like "haven't I told you a thousand times already not to tell the family secrets?" I had no idea it was a secret. Why was it a secret? If it was a secret, was dying one's hair a lie? After all, you changed your true color.
One of the reasons I have unresolved anger with my mother, which I spend much of my meditation time trying to let go of, was her (to a child) ridiculous need to keep up appearances, keep secrets, and only say positive things in public. In private, however, it was always things like "you have such a beautiful face, if only you could lose some weight." This was interpreted by the child Francine as "you're embarrassingly fat."
I'm sure my mother didn't know that children’s brains developed on a certain schedule, and that an ability to deal with paradox, ambiguity, and nuance was not among the 0-10 developmental milestones. My mother always seemed to think I ought to know stuff that I didn't really know, and that I should NOT know stuff that I thought I had the right to know. Like where my Uncle Harry went when he disappeared from our lives, even though he was my favorite uncle. (He died of a heart attack while having sex with a woman who wasn't my Aunt Ruth. )He was also her favorite brother, but my mother never mentioned death in front of me. He simply disappeared, leaving my Aunt Ruth to live another forty years.
Another person who simply disappeared from my life was a man named Ken Lader, who painted lovely flower paintings and gave them to my mother to hang in our house. One day he, too, went missing. Only later did I find out that he was a Mafia guy who had been executed. They found his body in a vat of acid on a pig farm in New Jersey and were only able to identify him by his dentures.
The worst result of all the secrets kept in my family was that I never knew my father had rheumatic heart disease and was really sick until after I was married, when New York had a blackout and he died after walking 8 flights of steps to our apartment on 6th Avenue and 56th St. If I had put things together I could have figured out that he was sick, because he went to the doctor (Michael Markman’s father) very often, and took me with him. Yet no reason was ever given for those visits, nor was any information shared.
When this happened, I was forced to confront death for the first time, and I was already 25. My father was the first person who actually died in my life, rather than just disappearing. Even my grandparents just disappeared.
This “privileged” upbringing left me with a lifelong fear of death, a lifelong hypochondria related to my own heart, a terrible case of separation anxiety, and a hatred of secrets and lies.
Love your writing! Keep doing it.
That surely was a generation of keeping secrets. I was always questioning why?? And was swiftly punished for even asking for an explanation of why was it a secret. Thank you Francine for writing about the “secrets” and the ambiguity of it all.