The Lies That Bind

“All truths that are kept silent become poisonous.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Family secrets. Like a silent genetic component, nearly every family has their distinctive ones. I’m obsessed with stories of family secrets coming to light. This probably has to do with the abundance of mysteries within my family. My fixation on the truth has unearthed these secrets. Well, nearly all of them.

My parents came from an older generation than most of my friends’ parents did. Literal boomers, they were born in 1943 and 1947 respectively. Fun fact: in 1990 my father, born in 1943, was forty-seven years old. My mother, born in 1947, was forty-three years old. The sum of forty-three and forty-seven is ninety, as was the year. How my mom figured that one out doodling at the kitchen table, is beyond me, but it’s neat. Growing up, these boomers never explained much of anything. I mean it. If they ordered me to get ready and get in the car and, as children do, I asked why, I was told it was none of my business. My constant barrage of valid questioning was the bane of their existence, I’m sure. For two secretive and preoccupied people, my perpetual curiosity and need for the facts were maddening.

It didn’t stop there. When my beloved dog Tito got older and was suffering from hip dysplasia, they decided to put him down. I was nearly twelve when they made this decision, without telling me a thing. Tito had pooped on the floor. He’d been slowly losing feeling in his rear end for years. He lay down in embarrassment and didn’t move for a couple of days. I knew things were dire for Tito, but I left for school in the morning on the fourth day as I always did. When I returned, only silent emptiness greeted me when I came through the door. Tito was gone.

My mother informed me that Tito had taken a turn for the worse when I was at school, and while driving him to the vet’s office, he passed peacefully in the backseat of her Mazda. Even at that young age, I could smell a lie. I asked her over and again to explain it, and when I pointed out the discrepancies in her account of events, she became tight-lipped and stopped answering my questions. I strongly suspected they weren’t telling me the whole story.

Not long after Tito went, our cat Higgins started to pee everywhere. He hadn’t done this before, so we were concerned. Again, without telling me, my mother brought him to the vet while I was at school. When I came home that day, I looked everywhere, but Higgins was gone. When questioned, my mother told me she had taken him in to get checked, and he just happened to die peacefully on the exam table.

A couple of weeks later, a card came in the mail from the veterinary office. I promptly opened it, as I was allowed to open all the cards that arrived, a perk I relished. I was floored when I read the hand-written sympathy letter assuring my parents that they had made the right choice to put Higgins down. I read and reread that letter a thousand times. I couldn’t believe they had lied to me about something so significant. Confronting my parents when they returned home from work, they ultimately confessed that they had decided to put Higgins down. Only then did they explain that he had cancer in his bowels. They did this without telling me what they had planned. Without explaining anything. I was angry that they had robbed me of the opportunity to say goodbye, and I said as much. My mom exploded in anger, yelling “See! This is why I didn’t tell you because I knew you would make me out to be the bad guy!” I intuited the same thing had happened with Tito’s demise, so I accused them of hiding the truth about that as well. They revealed that they also had Tito put to sleep. It was most upsetting that they didn’t value me enough to be honest and allow me to be a part of what was going on. I understood they did it out of mercy, but they didn’t give me the chance to understand. I was enraged that they denied me the privilege to say my goodbyes or comfort my beloved pets as they passed. Heartbroken and deeply betrayed, I felt I couldn’t trust anything they told me from that point on.

Time reveals all, as they say. When I was seventeen, maybe eighteen, my parents sat me down at the kitchen table and my mother told me that I had another half-sister. One she had unwillingly given up for adoption when she was sixteen years old. My mom explained how she wasn’t given the option to keep the baby. When her parents found out about her state, they sent her to a home for unwed mothers run by catholic nuns. Months later, when her screams of labour subsided, they briskly rushed the baby girl from the delivery room, leaving my mother’s arms to ache in emptiness. Her daughter had reached out through the adoption agency and wanted to meet her. While I felt deep compassion for my mother’s plight, I couldn’t believe that they had kept this secret from me. An entire person was walking around this world sharing my blood and I didn’t even know them. My secret sister Gene had tried to contact my mother many times over the years, but my mother ignored her requests. She was my mother’s shame. I couldn’t imagine the magnitude of heartbreak my mom had endured. She thought I would think less of her for it, but I was elated to find I had another half-sister. Maybe this one would want to be in my life, I thought.

My dad had already come clean a couple of years before about the child he sired when he was seventeen. He knocked up his beautiful Dutch girlfriend, but he wasn’t ready to settle down. When he wouldn’t marry her, his best friend, who was from a good Dutch family, did. They told my dad never to contact them again, as they would raise the girl as their own. My dad got on his Harley and never looked back. I asked him many times if I could look for this other half-sister of mine, but he forbade it. Fast forward to a few years ago, and my last secret sister found my dad through another family member on Ancestry.ca. I can’t tell you how I had yearned to meet this woman thirty-some years my senior. She’s a gem, and I’m glad another truth has come to light.

It was after my parents got divorced that my dad started spilling more beans. Drunk on whiskey one night, we were discussing my closest half-sister, from my mom’s first marriage. She was an addict and had a lot of struggles in her life. My dad slipped up and said that it was no wonder, just look at who her dad was. I know my sister’s dad; he’s an Australian writer whom my mom referred to as an idiot savant. But he was no addict. That’s when my dad told me that my mom’s first husband was not my sister’s father. Her first husband had pursued my mom romantically throughout university and when she found out she was unexpectedly pregnant, she accepted his persistent marriage proposal. My dad divulged that my sister’s biological father was an Armenian drug runner, and most likely the same father as Gene. Not a man she could start a family with, my dad explained. My mom never told her first husband, or my sister, the truth. I had heard my sister lament about her lack of connection with her father, and question incessantly why she had these struggles when neither her parents did. It suddenly made sense. When I worked up the courage, I informed my sister about her origins. I had an almost psychotic loyalty to the truth after all the secretiveness that I’d lived with. She was blown away and asked my mother about it, but she denied it vehemently. In later years, our mom met my sister’s continuing questions with silence. This was the closest to admitting the truth she ever got.

When my mother passed away, I cleaned out her tiny apartment, all the while looking for clues and answers to who this secretive woman was. I found more questions. In a box of papers and journals, there was a sticky note atop the pile that read, “If you’re reading this, Norman, SHAME ON YOU!” Who the fuck is Norman? I thought, bewildered. I still don’t know. She never spoke of a Norman. There was no Norman in her meticulously kept address book. Whoever he was, my mom thought he was seriously suspect. A man who may have broken into her home and rifled through her personal papers. Her mind was clouded near the end, so Norman could have been a paranoid delusion. But as it stands, if you see Norman, tell him my mom was onto him and I’m gunning for the sneaky son-of-a-bitch.

Then I found her journal. It was written and addressed to me only. I was stunned as she’d never shown me. I started reading. On one page, she explained that she’d had a good day and had spiked her orange juice with vodka, apologizing for her sloppy writing. As I deciphered her still disciplined, tense cursive, I read, “I miss…ask me. I can explain it to you, Leah, but I will never risk having this fall into the hands of your blood relatives. You are the only living being I trust with my thoughts, my heart. You were, are, and always have been my reason for continuing to fight the good fight.” Who could she possibly miss? Who did she still need to keep secret after all these years? These thoughts consumed me for some time. My mother was introverted at best and did not have many connections to others. But she missed someone, someone secret, and I wish I knew who that was. For the longest time I thought if I could find out who it was, I would find another piece of her. Perhaps it was the father of my two half-sisters? I mused. I imagined him as the intrinsical bad boy. My mom, madly in love with him, and he with her, but the two could never be together. Maybe his racy lifestyle wouldn’t permit it, or he was a criminal on the run, or he was an addict like my sister. Regardless, it remains a mystery. She never got to tell me, as it was the second last entry she ever wrote.

What I discovered, the real treasure, was her best-kept secret. It was her mother’s love for me. I read her script through burning tears that she was proud of me. That she respected my decisions. How she thought I was her greatest achievement. She wrote, “I feel that you will continue the legacy of your Grandma Klughart who came to this country with such hope. Let’s not disappoint her at this late date. And I know you won’t.” I had been clueless about her love for me. Shame for all the bitterness I had held toward her twisted my insides into knots. The anger I had carried around and carved as tiny letters into the corners of my bedroom rang in my ears. I HATE MY MOTHER. The past as I knew it was suddenly transformed by understanding. Only obtained by peering into my mother’s vulnerable soul after she was already gone. It was like delicate golden sunlight streamed into every dark memory and infused it with tenderness. My anger, resentment and bitterness overlay it like a death shroud. How could I not have known?

As I sit here and write this now, I forgive her for her secretive tendencies. In the spotlight of my naturally narcissistic childish memory, everything was about me. I couldn’t comprehend that she didn’t know any better. It didn’t even occur to me that she wasn’t able to understand the ways she’d hurt me. I thought it was purposeful. I thought she knew exactly what she was doing. She was God-like in my eyes. She was my mother. I understand now that she didn’t have the self-confidence or surety to bear the burden of truth. To take responsibility for her choices. To allow herself to be open and vulnerable. Instead, she hid and hardened herself for fear of getting hurt. I think that’s why she couldn’t tell me that she loved me, because her frail psyche couldn’t bear it if I rejected her. I wish she had been braver. I wish I could tell her that on the other side of fear, is love. I was always right here, Mom.

Written in that little green journal were all the things she couldn’t say to me while she was alive. The sweet words I have dedicated myself to telling my children daily. I know how tragic it is to only find someone’s love for you after they’re gone. I will not keep secrets, good or bad, because I know the feelings of disconnection and betrayal it creates. I appreciate that we only get so much time before we must leave. I wish she and I had more time. So, I will not leave questions. My children and my people will already have the answer to everything when I leave here, and that’s my love for them all.

Leah Marguerite