My Secrets Have Secrets
A Running in Shadows essay
This is the second installment of my book, “Running in Shadows: A Non-Memoir.” Here is the Introduction. I will be publishing my memoirs in essay form exclusively here on The Triggered World. To read more, please consider becoming a paid or free subscriber.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Keeping secrets is like breathing for my family.
And sharing each others’ secrets is a type of currency.
“They don’t know that we know that they know we know.”
Phoebe Buffay, Friends
Maybe it’s a result of my Mormon, ultra-conservative, cult-like growing up experience. Maybe it’s a result of having two narcissistic parents. Maybe it’s just a microcosm of the world. I don’t know. Do other families hold, keep, whisper, trade, and attack with secrets like my parents and seven siblings have? I’d like to think not, but you only know what you know.
I know my mother’s first secret. Twenty-one years old, pregnant and married to a man that she didn’t quite love. In fact, on days she was honest with herself, he kind of scared her. This weird, enigmatic, kind of manic, husband she had only known for fifteen months. She stuffed the fear and uncertainty down with buckets of french fries. Did her secret feed me through the walls of her placenta? A sticky starch that won’t wash out.
Meanwhile, my father’s secret: twenty-three, married, Mormon, and gay. I should just put that out there right now. Call it a foreshadow, call it being fair to the reader. Of course, my mother didn’t discover the homosexuality for over a decade. I was fourteen when this particular secret finally came out.
After my father came out, mom remarried my step-dad. A saint. He came into this broken, ex-Mormon family of five children with ice cream in tow. We all mutually fell in love. It seemed like manna from heaven that he actually, purposefully, gave up his forty-something bachelor life to raise some other guys’ kids. He had three children of his own. My step-sister, a year younger than me; two step-brothers ten and eight years older than me. Together, we made a not-so-blended family. Like cold butter mixed with sugar to make cookies, but turns into something half grainy and half clumpy.
Our family kept a mutual secret from the moment of conception. Disclaimer before I reveal this first, relatively harmless one: My step-father is a wonderful man. He entered our lives at the exact moment we needed him. He truly was our savior. We don’t call him “step-dad.” He’s Dad. That’s the truth. Part of it.
The hidden truth, and the mutual secret, is that he needed us as much as we needed him. He was lonely. A string of failed relationships sat in his wake. His three children barely spoke to him, generating a strong sense of failure as a father.
You cannot build a house on sand. While harmless, this secret became our sand.
My Brother
2008 - We are at his wedding. The entire family flew out to North Carolina where he’s been living since joining the Army in 2002. He lives there today. Says he found paradise.
Over drinks after the rehearsal dinner, he tells us that he and his wife are already married. They went to the court house four months ago. Something about wanting to put their married name on financial documents. Or maybe it was an issue with Army insurance. I don’t know. Through a cloud of Kentucky bourbon, I can still see their reaction.
My step-sister is furious. She had to drag her toddler and infant on a plane all the way for him to have a fake wedding. My younger sister is equally incensed. She claims the greater hardship of being forced to fly all the way from California. Mom looks annoyed, but fuming.
And I just laugh. Full-bellied guffaws. Good for you, I tell my brother. I’m referring to their decision to do what was the best for the two of them and get married on their own terms. Alright, I’m really referring to how he played the whole thing. He grins and takes another two fingers of whiskey.
My Other Brother
2009 - He decides to get his first tattoo. He tells no one. I pay for it.
2010 - He meets a lovely girl. I’m the first one of the family she meets. They decide to move in together, because they’re in love, and they want to save money, get married, have a family. But this is “living in sin” to my evangelical parents. They live together for an entire year before my parents find out. No, strike that. My parents never find out. My brother and his girlfriend finally admit it when Mom and Dad come to help move them into a new apartment.
2023 - After thirteen years together, ten years of marriage, and three children, my brother and sister-in-law separate. I’m the first person he tells. My parents find out nine months later.
My Sister
This is easy. A constant cycle of secret and not-so-secret grudges and tantrums. Sometimes I know when she is angry with me. Sometimes not.
My sister’s response to everything unpleasant, or even mildly annoying, is to ignore it until it goes away. That means long periods of silence. Failures to communicate important events, or to respond to texts. And phone calls. And emails. And messenger pigeons. Sometimes the silence is an angry, active refusal to speak to me, sometimes it’s a result of her busy accountant schedule. I never know which is which.
Then there are the times of mutual silent treatment, all the while both ignorant that the other is the one not doing the speaking.
My Baby Sister
Unfortunately, my youngest sister has the unenvied position of having no secrets of her own, but is forced to keep the secrets of everyone else.
My Mother
Two many untruths and half-truths to list in this chapter. We’ll get to her later.
My Step-Siblings
At any given moment in time, any number of my seven siblings might not be on speaking terms with any number of the other siblings. At this moment, my step-brother has disowned the whole family. That makes it easy. My sisters-in-law take issue with how they’re raising their respective families and make my brothers refuse to call. My step-sister doesn’t like the way my brother reacted to something significant in her life. My other step-brother ignores my parents. My parents ignore my step-sister. My three sisters and I have a four-way spat of false assumptions and accusations before finally sitting down to clear up all the misinformation clogging our phone lines.
Me
Running in shadows. Moving from one dark corner to another. Lying to myself, my family, the barista making my vanilla latte, my first husband, friends, boyfriends, flings, therapists, psychiatrists. . . You name it. Pretty much anyone and everyone who interacts with me on a daily and not-so-daily basis. Petty lies, big huge untruths, and everything in between.
Gulping lungs of dishonesty like a drowning man. Or, a drowning woman.
Secrets are like breathing. Lies are a way of life.
First secret: My Mormon father sexually abused me.
Second secret: My Mormon grandfather abused him.
Third secret: I ran away from these truths. I hid in marriages, anger, alcohol, sex. When that didn’t work, I smothered my truth with good deeds and a beautiful suburban home, complete with Sunday roasts.
May, 2010
I am in my second rehab. I didn’t attempt suicide this time. Instead I just started drinking enough to let the alcohol do the dirty work. Every cell in my body has been hiding from the truth for so long, with so much effort, that I don’t know reality when it picks me up and slams me down in county detox.
I’m telling my sob story in group therapy. My mother ignored me, my father left. My first husband didn’t sleep with me. I hate myself. The usual. I’m falling asleep with the mundanity of my story, and I can tell I’m putting the other group members to sleep. They don’t even try to hide the eye rolls and yawns.
“Stop acting!”
The yell from our therapist startles everyone, especially me.
I am offended. Hurt. Shocked. Curious.
She continues, “Can’t you see that everything you say and do is an act?!”
And just like that, I see the mask. The emperor doesn’t have any clothes. The house lights turn on and I am standing on a stage, reciting lines given to me by someone else, in a costume designed to trap me. I am speechless, blinking in ultra-violet revelation.
I left the stage that day. Like an actor without adoring fans. Like bread gone stale.
Fourteen years of sobriety. I sit here today unpacking, unwrapping, disgorging, defusing, the secrets packed in boxes of lies, tied with strings of deception.
Like the naked emperor, the Twitter Files, or Watergate, or who took the last brownie, I have to reveal all, or nothing.
This will be the last installment of my memoirs that I post to all Substack users. Moving forward, the first few chapters will be available to free subscribers. After chapter four, installments will be placed behind the pay wall for paid subscribers only.