Does your family have a secret? Supposedly, all families have secrets, some major and some minor. Apparently, keeping these secrets hamper positive emotional development by unknowingly heaping shame and fear on the next generation.  Take this opportunity to unburden yourself and write your family secret in the comments section of this post No need to sign your name, anonymous is fine. If your post is more than 500 words, email me (bitsyparker@mac.com) and I'll post your essay - anonymously if you choose.

Here is one of my secrets.

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Family Secrets
August Is To Sweaters As White Is To Funerals

I read a New York Times article about families who keep secrets. Apparently, the author’s father had been involved in a life of crime and hence had to keep his family on the move to safeguard the secret – and to spare his life. My family, too, had a secret.  We hid the identity of an entire person, my brother.

As a young girl it was gratingly stressful to continually lie about being an only child.  In the same vein, it was also difficult to generate heartfelt letters to the brother I had rarely seen and indicate my thanks for the latest handmade necklace he had mailed to me in Texas from his prison cell in South Carolina. 

The tale is fairly simple:  my mother had a child when she was a freshman in college and my father was a senior in high school.  All accounts lead to the conclusion that at 17 and 19 my parents were not nurturing caregivers to the unwanted baby, presumably, they must have thought, a baby who was born to ruin their lives.  Not surprisingly the child, who was berated for being a late reader and a lousy athlete became a drug-using flower child of the 1970’s who was in and out jail and eventually landed in prison for robbery.

However simple, it seems the facts were too gruesome for my family to acknowledge or accept; so, my parents affected an oddly natural response, they erased the problem boy.   My brother was 16 when my parents adopted me –me, the perfect child whose inherent responsibility was to become everything my non-existent brother was not. My brother and I never lived in the same house after I was about 3 or 4 years old.  As a result, we never spent time together and did not really know one other.

I remember toddling into his bedroom where he kept three snakes that wrapped around my ponytail.  He was always eager to entertain me.

I remember him writing his girlfriend’s name, Cecelia, hundreds of times in the shape of a heart.  It seemed like he loved her.

I remember him frantically driving me in his fast GTO to the hospital after my father suffered a heart attack. From his panicky emotion, I could tell he loved my father.

I remember him taking a suitcase to his GTO after he and my father fought and he ran away never to live with us again.  He was crying.

I remember the big stuffed bear he gave me for my 3rd birthday. He wanted to please me.

I remember looking out the small glass pane of my front door as my brother and father wrestled a wild man, later to be known as my brother’s friend, who was beating down our front door because he was having a bad LSD trip. 

I remember visiting my brother in a small jail near a beach town. My grandmother and great aunt decided to visit him and took me. My great aunt wore two different colored shoes. It gave us something to talk about.

Truthfully, my brother was a kind person who surely was just trying to find a response to his existence. He yelled out but there was no answer. From birth his existence was not recognized nor appreciated.  He must have been comforted by the feelings that the drugs gave him, however brief.  Any feeling is better than no feeling, right?

During his time in the South Carolina prison I was in junior high school. I had to be careful to throw away any letters he sent me, lest my friends see them and uncover the secret my parents had heaped on me to safeguard.  Ironically, my mother always insisted that I write a loving note thanking my brother for the latest macramé necklace or embroidered shirt he sent me.  Mustering an emotional response to a virtual stranger, one that isn’t supposed to exist, is disturbing.

When the word came that my brother was sick and dying, honestly, I was relieved that my problem would soon be over.  What I didn’t calculate was how long it would take him to die, nor the fact that he would be occupying my bedroom as he died.

The summer of 1980 found me giddy as I anticipated my 13th birthday. I spent hours talking on my yellow Trimline telephone to a white-skinned, white-haired boy named Ross, whom I suspect turned out to be gay, despite the immense amount of time we spent practicing the art of flirting.  In retrospect, Ross must have been engaging in this flirtatious behavior because he had something to prove to his older brother who gave Ross a smug look of approval as I sashayed my white tennis skirt around their kitchen drinking lemonade made by Ross’s mother in an effort to entertain me in a way that would keep me coming back.  Obviously, Ross’s family knew he was gay and was hopeful that our charade was real and would render him normal.

When my brother arrived in Texas to visit he looked bad. No hair and very skinny.  Hiding him was more important than ever.  How could I dominate the Little League Field and carve my deserved spot of impending high school popularity with my “just-showed-up-from-prison” brother in tow?  Explaining the fact that I even HAD a brother was a problem.  Thinking strategically, I decided to curtail my appearances with the “in” crowd until my brother left.   Just phone calls with Ross. No more tennis or baseball for a while.

The brother was ensconced in my bedroom and was rapidly deteriorating.  He was in terrific pain almost all the time.  My mother was constantly calling the pharmacist and doctor trying to find out how to squelch the pain when the Dilaudid and Morphine was not enough.  My brother couldn’t eat anything and we spent lots of time trying to buy various flavors of ice cream and other foods that might appeal to him.  I was sleeping on the couch in the living room and my telephone conversations with Ross were continuously interrupted as my brother rang the homemade buzzer my father installed to let my brother notify us he was suffering and needed another injection of pain medicine. 

My parents were – where the hell were they? – out, I guess, and it was my responsibility to give my brother Morphine and Dilaudid injections. Yep, I was 12-years old and had the responsibility of answering the call of the buzzer and racing into my former bedroom to respond to my wailing brother who was writhing in pain. 

One time in particular found me in a quandary because four hours had not elapsed since I had last administered the pain medicine. Apologetically I inform the pain-wracked body that was twisting and crying under my yellow bedspread with its white rickrack trim that it was not time for another injection. “Bitch, just give it to me.”  I can’t remember if I gave him the shot or not, but I do remember sobbing on the couch from the callous remark. 

When my father came home and found me crying I explained the harshness of such strong language when I was just trying to help… poor me.  Thank goodness after years of non-communication, my father decided it was finally time to speak to his son. It was one of the only times I remember my father going into the bedroom.  My big father burst into the sick room and chastised his boy, who was now a bag of bones, for speaking to the dearly-loved girl in such a tone. 

I wonder if my brother remembered those words as the last ones that his father spoke to him. I wonder if my father remembers how his son looked lying in the bed like a skeleton with those big, brown eyes looking up and begging for one bit of kindness or affection.

Those eyes show up in my life from time to time, and it is always unsettling.  Sometimes I see them on a stranger, but often I see them in renditions of Jesus hanging on the cross. 

It wasn’t too much longer before my brother called out in pain so intensely that my mother called an ambulance. As the stretcher was leaving my bedroom, I saw his face. He was dead.

Then there was preparing me for the funeral.   What would I wear?  We were going back East and my mother wanted to make sure I looked impressive for my relatives.   My mother was consumed by finding the perfect outfit for me to wear to the funeral.  Believe it not, I wore a winter white sweater skirt and top. August is to sweaters as white is to funerals.

I turned lemons into lemonade. My brother was buried on the first day of high school. I was absent, but instead of being forgotten, I made a big splash upon my return  -- The Girl Who Buried Her Brother made a grand entrance and garnered all sorts of attention.

As it turns out, we think my brother probably died of AIDS contracted from injecting drugs with dirty needles. However, in 1980, AIDS was not known factor.  We’ll never know if he died of AIDS, and we will never know how difficult it was for him to live as a family secret.

Comments

[Izzy]

What a beautifully told but horribly sad story. I'm sorry.

But yes, it's true. All families have their secrets. I was at the center of our family's biggest secret. It's not much of a secret anymore but rather a scar that still hurts.

[Anonymous]

Our family secret started a long time ago, well before one of my brothers hid in a closet one morning, waited until everyone had left the house, carried his 22-caliber rifle to his junior high school, and shot and killed one of his teachers.

Needless to say, receiving a phone call from a police officer bearing news of this sort is not the way a mental illness should be discovered. I was a junior in high school at the time, and I will never forget being summoned from class and told to go home immediately.

The route home took me past the junior high where the shooting had just occurred. The sight of the police cars at the school was disquieting, but that of my father walking hurriedly down the hill toward the school was unnerving. I knew something terrible had happened even before I stopped the car and my dad told me what he knew.

May no parent ever have to endure what my father endured that day and the days that followed. He was a public figure and carefully cultivated a public image that emphasized his family. He could hardly have done otherwise, given his political stature and the nature of his business. What I remember the most vividly about that day was the look on his face when I saw him walking down that hill. To say he appeared stricken does not do justice. At that moment the veneer of the public figure had been stripped away, exposing the anguished soul of a father whose son had cried out for help in an unspeakably violent and destructive act.

What went wrong in our family and why do we try to keep it a secret? I have often tried to find an answer to those questions, as, I presume, have my brothers and sisters, though our family does not discuss the “secret”. There is a scene in Jude the Obscure when Jude and Sue return to their dismal lodgings to find their three children hanging dead from clothes hooks. The elder had hung his younger siblings and then himself, leaving a note: “Killed because we were too many.”

In a sense, I think, my brother killed because we were too many, too many for busy and harassed parents to notice when something was out of balance, too many for any of us to notice that one of us was desperately and dangerously ill.

There is not much more to say about this other than that I learned both good and bad lessons from it, and I have learned that talking about the “secret” and acknowledging it gives me a sense of relief. Oddly, I have never crossed the barrier and spoken to family members about the secret – only to a therapist and my wife. I learned that children need more than just care and feeding. They need to be played with. They need to be talked to like they were real people. They need to be kissed and hugged. They need discipline and boundaries. They need to feel safe, both in the world of the family and the world at large. No Dr. Laura here—I’m not talking about home schooling, stay-at-home parenting, or traditional gender roles. I’m talking about putting aside some things in order to do other things.

My parents used to socialize a lot; I do not. My dad worked late and on weekends, and rarely took time off; I work hard but not late, take frequent breaks, and spend every spare moment I have with my wife and children. My wife, who works just as hard as I do and has her own career, does the same.

[Jenny from Mommin' It Up!]

Sheesh that is a doozy. It made me really sad for you and your brother. What a burden for a child to bear.

[hokgardner]

I was going to write a heart-felt, semi self-pitying post about the horrid relationship my mother and I had during my teenage years, well beyond the usual teenage girl-mother dynamic, and some of the things that happened to me as a result, but after reading these two stories, I realized how minor my secrets are.

But on the topic of secret siblings, my father has a secret half brother. He was born with Down Syndrome and put into an group-home type setting almost immediately after birth. I don't think my grandparents even brought him home from the hospital. My father, his brothers, and their step-brothers have never met their other brother, they don't even know where he is, other than somewhere in Massachusetts, or the extent of his disabilities. And they can't ask either. My grandfather has passed away, and my grandmother never speaks of him. They know better than to even ask. I think it's a great sadness all of them carry - they have a brother they will never know. A brother who possibly doesn't even know he has a huge family out there wondering about him.

[bitsy parker]

That's so sad about the Down Syndrome uncle. Wonder what makes people tick?

[The Dol]

Wow. What heartache we go through to maintain appearances. Bravo to you guys for telling these stories. My immediate family doesn't have a secret the likes of yours, bitsy. We've had our own tragedy, but it wasn't the same. I'm really sorry about your brother.

[Anonymous]

My secret is MUCH less significant than your secrets. I was just going to write that my parents would never let me or my brother and sisters order a Coke or iced tea at restaurants. It was our "secret" that we were only allowed to order water.

[anon]

Not sure this counts, but our dog constantly crapped on the floor and my mother was always in a panic to pick it up before somebody saw it. As a kid I recall her telling me not to tell anybody that the dog was messy.

One time a friend came over and I was about 10 years old. I remember distracting my friend by having her set-up the Monopoly game while I secretly picked up the turd in a papertowel and secretly gave it to my horrified mother.

[Kate]

I had a secret baby during my senior year in college. I planned to place the baby through private adoption with a loving couple that lived in a nice house somewhere in Washington. I was to move on with life as if the whole thing never happened once the papers were signed. For 40 weeks and one day, one other person on Earth, the child's father, knew I was pregnant. I carried on with school and work and checked out for only one day, a Friday, when I gave birth. On the day she was born my daugher's father spilled the beans to his parents and blew my plan for a 'secret baby that never happened.' We ended up keeping and raising the baby together. The secret baby is now 16 and is the absolute center the known world as far as I'm concernd. I can't imagine her not knowing and loving me and me her. But for a lark of a confession, my husband to his parents, I would have had a secret that ultimately would have ended me.

[Cheryl]

Beautifully written, Bitsy. And terribly, terribly sad.

[Novembrance]

Good grief, woman. Your writing packs a wallop. What a tragic story.

[cal gal]

A tragic story of immense proportions, rivetingly told. So many parents haven't a clue what the hell they're doing when it comes to their most important job.

[canape]

My heart breaks for everyone in your family.

And I think you are brave and right for telling that story. If only in honor of your brother.

[Anonymous]

When I was around 4 - 5 years old my family was at a party at the house of a friend of my dad, who was also a coworker at the insurance company where he sold insurance. I have patchy memories of my dad sitting on a couch, next to a woman who was crying and he had his arm around her. My mom was not in the room. And my sister told me that later at that party she and I followed our dad as he left the party with this woman and walked around the block. He didn't notice us following him. At one point they stopped walking and started kissing. Later we told our mom what we saw "mom, we saw dad kissing that lady!". My sister recalls that my mom had no reaction to that news. We had witnessed one of the many times my dad was with other women, while married to my mom.