Holding Secrets

Some secrets need to be shared. Exposing them to the light releases some of their darkness and mystery (I almost wrote "misery"). My mother's whole life was secret, and she took those secrets to the grave. She told us nothing intimate about herself, revealed almost nothing of her true self. She gave us the occasional anecdote, and we have had to fashion those few anecdotes into the story of her life.

 

We learned that when she was little, her father routinely washed her hair. Afterwards they would sit on two wooden chairs in the back yard, and he would comb her hair dry in the summer sunlight.

 

She used to try to reconstruct this happy experience with her three daughters, but it was never as pleasurable for her as her memories. Perhaps we didn't relish being with her as she had loved being with her father. Perhaps as he combed her hair he had filled her with stories of his life. She certainly didn't do that.

 

What other secrets of our mother did we learn over the years? Very few. She didn't like stewed tomatoes. She had no self-confidence and no love for herself. We were able to infer that her view of herself came directly from her mother, who called her "a galumphing galoot" because of her height and her big feet.

 

From the time I began to be aware of my mother as a human being, I knew that her own mother had not been good to her. Grandma Annie died before I was born, and in all my growing up I never heard a good word about her. Not that I heard bad things; my mother kept her secrets. But even a not-very-alert teenager eventually notices that Grandma Annie doesn't figure largely in the family lore. We heard more stories about her husband, my grandfather Vincent, called "Bin."

 

Having said that, what do I actually know? The story about Bin combing my mother's hair in the sun. That's one. Here's another: Bin once gave us two little dogs. I was five, so my mother at that time had children of 7, 5, 3, 2, and 1. "Oh goody!" she must have said. "Just what I need: two dogs!" Their names were Synchro and Ossie (Bin was an engineer and the dogs' names were actually synchronization and oscillation). They were yappy little black and white short-haired dogs, both from the same litter.

But perhaps I'm remembering it wrong. Maybe these weren't gifts from Bin at all but from my mother's sister Lil, whose visible jealousy of my mother's fecundity led her to give my mother, over the years, a Doberman and two huskies. The huskies came together, as a matched pair. I don't believe my mother considered any of these to be "just what I wanted" gifts.

 

Confusion and the vagaries of memory twist many of the details of my mother's life. Her secrets have become our garbled stories.

 

The moral, if there is one, is this: if you feel you must, then hold your secrets tightly to yourself, shielding your children from the pain of your life. But they will eventually fill in the blanks themselves to create the stories they need. Is that what you want?

 

Copyright 2010 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com