Secrets

I remember the first time I realized my father had some pretty dark secrets. I think I was most stunned to realize he was human—just a man, and not the perfect father I knew and loved. I had spent the past decade thinking he could do no wrong. I was most definitely a Daddy’s Girl. And now I had discovered he was a mortal man.
“Your mother is not your real mother,” he told me over breakfast at the local IHOP. I think I almost choked on my pancake. “I was in college when I married and you have a half-brother.” I’m pretty sure I choked when I heard that. There was more. “His name is Jeff and he’s coming to visit next month.”
I just sat there gawking at him like he’d just revealed to me his secret identity was the Pope and he wanted to take me for a ride in the Popemobile. “His mom and I divorced when he was very young. Shortly after I drove a truck with your Uncle Tom and moved to Lawrence, Kansas.”
Even though I was only ten years old, I knew my dad had always wanted to be a minister. Never in a million years did I ever dream he’d been divorced. He went on to tell me that he’d met a young woman who worked at a tire shop and they married soon after they met. In the span of about three minutes, I had been delivered the news that I had a brother eight years my senior that I’d never met, the woman who I knew as Mom wasn’t my biological mother, and to top it all off, my minister father had been divorced not once, but twice! I felt sick, and it was only about to get worse.
According to my father, everything seemed to be okay with my biological mother, Viola, until she got pregnant with me a few months into the marriage. She started doing irrational things, like giving him telephone messages from people who had never called, often complete strangers she had pulled out of the city telephone directory. Viola took my father’s college year book, which he was prominently featured in as a sports hero, and wrote in it as if she had been a part of his life then. In reality, he had been married to his first wife, and it would be almost a decade later before they would even meet.
It turns out that Viola was mentally ill. Dad said he felt like he could change or even “cure” her simply because he willed it, and he loved her. He was very wrong, and motherhood seemed to only make it worse. She suffered from not only postpartum depression, but what I believe would be diagnosed as postpartum psychosis today. Dad told me he came home one day and asked Viola what she had done during the day and she answered, “I tried to drown the baby.”
That was when he had her hospitalized. This was in the 1970’s, when the powers that be believed that the only recourse for the mentally ill was hospitalization and heavy medication. It killed my father to see Viola like that. After a short time he brought her back home again. Ultimately, because he feared for my safety, he had her hospitalized again and quietly divorced her when I was around nine or ten months old.
Viola’s mother allegedly plotted to kidnap me on numerous occasions and she would show up on our doorsteps all the way into my teens, despite moving to another state. This was somehow kept from me until I was nearly twenty years old. When I was about twenty-one or so, I began a correspondence with my grandmother, making it clear that I did not want to be forced to have a relationship with Viola. I also made it clear that if Viola wanted to contact me, she was more than welcome to do so, but the choice had to be hers. She never took advantage of that invitation however.
When I was twenty-three, my grandmother became very ill and made a dying request to see me. She wasn’t sure if I would come or not, but for me it was a no-brainer. Of course I went. I felt torn, though. I was fiercely loyal to my step-mother, and I still am. She’s always been my mommy, a title you earn. She had battle scars to prove she’d more than earned it. It was not an easy decision to make to go to Kansas and meet my other family—but I did just that.
I met Viola during that trip. We’ve maintained a friendship for almost eleven years now. She’s not my mother, and will never be….but she is my friend. In fact, I even went and spent a week with her this past summer. I met my half-brother and earlier this year Jeff and his family were transferred to Colorado and we practically live in the same neighborhood. While we have a strained relationship, it’s not malevolent. I love to see my three nephews as they grow up. My father has since passed away, but the secrets he kept still affect those he left behind to this day.
I think now that Dad’s gone, I am able to appreciate all that he really did for me. During an era where single divorced fathers raising their infant daughters on their own were not widely accepted, my father took the risk and did it anyway, in order to insure my safety. He made sure my step-brother, Jody, who is nine years older than me, always had anything he needed. He made whatever sacrifices that were needed so that I could go to summer camp every year. He encouraged me to sing competitively, and was often my biggest supporter. He made my education a priority and fostered my ability to write and my desire to read everything I could get my hands on, despite being diagnosed with a learning disability. In short, he loved me, even when I was less than lovable. This was especially true during my teen years.
Don’t get me wrong. Obviously, my father’s decisions to “protect” me from the “truth” of my origins also robbed me of a part of my roots and who I am, and who I might have been. Three decades later, I am still sorting through the ramifications of those decisions. Despite this knowledge, I know my father never did anything out of anger, but love motivated everything he did concerning me. I know this, and yet I also know that my father was emotionally abusive. If not abusive, which is a term that I think is a little harsh, then at least emotionally distant. He found it very difficult to say he loved me, even though I don’t doubt that he did. I still reel from this knowledge as well.
Secrets—we all have them, and some are more damaging than others. I am extremely grateful that when my father passed away in 1999, I had brought many of the most damaging family secrets into the light of day. I dragged many of them from my father, making our relationship strained to the breaking point, but once it broke, we also began to heal. The last thing he said to me was, “I love you.”
And that was no secret.