“When You Bury A Secret You Bury It Alive”
Family Secrets podcast episode guest & the fallout of remaining silent about the truth of my children’s childhood
When I divorced the violent domestic abuser in 1997 there was quite a bit of overlap from deconstructing my old life to building my new life because I was unskilled in all things life at that time. I was 35 years old with the maturity of the 17 year old who thought going from a dysfunctional family of origin to an unknowingly violent marriage would somehow sort itself out and become the happy forever thing I was trained to imagine.
Learning that training is a lie and continues to be a lie today to so many young women with the same archaic upbringing in this culture has been one of the greatest gifts I’ve given myself in this life. This newsletter and much of my work is my why about changing that silence into speaking about things as rawly as I can.
In the lead up to my choosing to build my own life separate from the bad family training and the violent marriage, I did things like go to church (I didn’t go before and don’t go now), met and thought I was building friendships with people who were not good for me, pursued old left behind hobbies, and delayed going to therapy.
And through all of it I still stayed silent about the violence my kids were exposed to in their childhood home. So from the time my children were 5, 9 and 15 until they became adults, there was little to no discussion on my part with them of what a healthy marriage or relationship looks like. That was the model in my childhood home. That was the model in their violent father’s home and that was the model brought into their childhood home. Silence on all things life improving.
There was a great deal of passive conversation by their father in my children’s childhood home on the world. That subtle poisonous way to convey a value meant to harm another person or group of people. The common model on their father’s part was to call something wrong in a sideways way much like is happening in our larger world right now as the administration works so hard to try to make it’s followers hate people so that weak man can gain power and become an authoritarian.
Their father’s favorite book during those years was the art of war. Sadly I didn’t realize I was one of his targets until too late.
Staying silent was in hindsight, my most critical mistake with my children. Or, better put my lack of maturity to talk to them about what happened, the history of each of their extended families, what could have changed for their own way to handle things in their lives without the absolute rage I felt spilling onto any message of knowledge in the process - was both a mistake and in my stunted state of maturity, impossible.
So all of the important lessons in the how and why it all happened along with the benefit of learning how to avoid it in their own relationships and in themselves - was buried alive and became a rotting mess of tangled messages from me to them. I was learning my own way while trying to raise three children who were hurt too.
In turn my silence allowed for their violent father to paint onto them any message he chose to. Continues to choose to today. It is to this day rarely one of helping his children or the world in a positive way. It is all around him being their focus and crafting the message that it is his version of us against them. Them in his case is women, liberal women, strong women, me in particular. It’s why I have come to understand the deep mistake of staying silent about important things at any age. Children understand much more than we give them credit for and they know when we lie to them at a very young age. When that turns into conflicting messages we lose their trust and they will look elsewhere for knowledge. And when someone in their lives is clever with their messaging things that are cruel, incorrect, purposefully misleading or outright rewriting a history - will look and feel like truth.
It takes a very long time to bring the light back for anyone in the depths of believing things that are not true, especially when their steady diet is of those untruths and any other source of information is cut off. That’s estrangement in many ways. Children who choose to estrange from parents lose the more global perspective of their own lives by not weathering the storms of trying to work through the really shitty parts of their experiences with a parent who is willing to work on things too.
So I write this newsletter for me as much as I write it for you because we are evolving humans who want things to be better. For our children. For us. For the world. For our grandchildren.
It’s why, even as I am critical of him, I take pride and pleasure in remembering my dad’s skepticism mixed with optimism and how I think he’d be so happy to see where I’m headed having taken that invisible deteriorating baton to light it on fire and hand a new beautifully crafted baton to hand off to my children and grandchildren. One they may not pick up or find for a long time, but will be here for them anytime they’re ready.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon,
Cindi