Family
Secrets
“I don’t know how you heal a wound and not let it
get some air.”
Barbara
Neely
My
friend Dejuana came by yesterday. She had read my blog about family stories and
asked, “What about family secrets?” It’s a good question. In southern families,
secrets are the bread and butter of life. We are schooled from birth to keep
our mouths shut about our family’s “business.” In short, everything’s secret unless
you are told otherwise. If we go blabbing the family secrets to people outside
the family, and sometimes, even to people inside the family, we become a pariah.
As we
talked about keeping secrets, I was tossed back into my own childhood when
everyone tried to keep the secret of my dad’s alcoholism. We did that by not
acknowledging it, by acting as though he wasn’t bouncing off walls, by not
addressing it once he sobered up, and, most assuredly, by not discussing it
with others. It was a little like having a pet bull that lived in the house and
kicked down all the walls, and somehow behaving as though that happened at
everyone’s house. I honestly did not know what “normal” looked like until I was
a grown-up who didn’t live with her family.
Dejuana
has a different take on family secrets. She believes they happen so that future
generations can experience grace once the secret is out. Let’s say that back in
the day a family member got pregnant before they were married. This used to be cause for a “shot-gun wedding.” Sometimes to keep the secret, the
girl was sent away to have the baby and give it up for adoption. Having a child
out of wedlock was considered a shameful indiscretion on the whole family. Fortunately,
that is not so true anymore. Sometimes breaking open the family secrets paves
the way for grace.
When we
were children, we were compelled to keep the family secrets simply because we
depended upon our parents for the essentials of life. But once we are grown, we
can step outside the matrix of the family’s fairytale and allow our eyes to see
what is true. Keeping secrets is a form of lying—to ourselves and to the people
we care about. We don’t have license to be boundaryless, and tell everyone our
business and pry into theirs, but when we love someone, keeping secrets can be destructive
to the relationship. As Dejuana said, we look at what choices were made for us
and what choices we have made for ourselves and decide which are worth keeping.
It takes
courage to open the door and let some air get to those family secrets. Sometimes
it takes a while for us to even see through them to what is real. A good
question to ask is, who are we protecting? What exactly is the reason for the
secret? Once we are able to take the family secrets out of their wrappings, out
of the dark basement and into the sunlight, we may just find that no one cares
any more. We can set them free like birds from a cage and let them fly away. And
that, my friends, is where grace comes in. Take a good deep breath and bid the
family secrets goodbye.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment