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January 22, 1999/5 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 17
Parents need a good reason to keep secrets
NANCY P. BRODY, PH.D.
Special to Jewish News
The woman came in clutching the August 1998 issue of Glamour magazine. She opened the magazine and showed me the article even before she sat down.
The title of the article was "Secrets from My Mother's Past." It was subtitled, "When I learned she'd been married before, I wondered what else she was hiding from me."
The woman, a writer herself, laughed as she said, "When I first came across this article in the doctor's waiting room, I actually had to think for a minute if I had written it." But she had not. The article was written by Jonathan Rosen.
"This guy knows exactly how I felt when I found out about mother's first marriage," the woman explained. The man in the article was only 13 when he accidentally discovered his mother was married prior to her marriage with his father. He said he was shattered by the news and felt betrayed. The woman I was seeing was 45, and the mother of grown children when she discovered, also by accident, that her mother was married prior to her marriage to the woman's father. She also was shattered by the news and felt betrayed.
Both "children" were haunted by their discovery, and each had questions. The man wondered about additional secrets his mother was keeping and wondered who his mother really was. The woman was concerned that maybe she did not share a father with her older siblings and even wondered, "Is my father really my father?"
The woman did not tell her mother she had learned about her first marriage for quite some time. She chose to first tell her siblings. Imagine her surprise when she discovered they already knew about their mother's short-lived marriage. Even cousins knew about the marriage. The woman could not understand why she was apparently the only one in the family, including extended family, who did not know about her mother's first marriage. She concluded that the only reason for her not being told was that her mother did not love her or respect her enough to share this information with her.
Hoping her mother would have a better explanation for keeping the secret, she told her mother she knew about the first marriage. Unfortunately, her mother could not understand the impact it was having on her daughter. The woman said she felt verbally slapped in the face when her mother told her, "What happened in my life before you were born is none of your business."
Later the woman said, "If my mother is right, if what happened before we were born is none of our business, why do we bother to study history? And what about truth and honesty?"
The issues are complicated. Certainly there are some things children, even adult children, may be better off not knowing about their parents, but there should be good reasons for withholding such important information as a parent's previous marriage, a child's parentage or the existence of unknown siblings. Rarely is it appropriate to keep a secret from one child when others are told about it.
Secrets often take on greater importance than they really have and cause unnecessary pain when they are accidentally revealed. Rosen explained that when he found out about his mother's secret marriage, "Nothing around me changed, but everything was different."
Nancy Brody, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist with offices in Scottsdale.
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