The weight of it
11 July 2010 04:13 PM Categories: The struggle
If you tell, everyone will know how bad you are. And stupid. And worthless. They will reject you.
Tired of the weight, you tell anyway. No one thinks you are bad. Or stupid. Or worthless. Sometimes they treat you with empathy. Others ignore what you tell them, but you come to understand that they don't know what to do with it, that it's their problem, not yours.
You start to feel better, like maybe you didn't cause your abandonment by being bad or being too smart-assed or being too you. Your abandonment was your parent's problem and not yours, even though now you are left to deal with the lifelong aftermath.
You think of her, the other girl, your biological grandmother, sixteen and pregnant in New Castle, Delaware in 1950, how she carried also carried a baby -- your mother -- probably in secret until almost the end. You think of her secret pregnancy, the secret father, the secret baby going off to live with a new family. Your birth grandmother grew up, got married and had two additional children. She held fast to the secrets.
You are angry with her for keeping these secrets, for denying information and empathy. You identify with her, remembering what it was like to be young, alone, and terrified. You want to tell her "I understand" (as much as you can). You want to punch her in the face. The legacy of suppression is a foul one and you need to blame someone for what happened to you. Someone distant and easy. But you can't. The people to blame, your mother, your father, other adults in your life at the time . . . oh, you're afraid of the mess your anger would make and you know now how hopeless they were.
You try to write about secrets, but it just feels like an emotional morass.
That's the problem with secrets.
Image: My mother, summer 1952.
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