In Defense of Telling Family Secrets

Why you should write about what your parents told you not to.

by Artem Furman/Shutterstock.com

Here are three secrets my mother wishes I wouldn’t tell you about our family:

1. We’re inbred to hell and gone. Mom’s parents were third cousins, and years after getting married, Mom found out that she and Dad are fifth cousins.
2. I’m not straight. When I told Mom I’d written an essay about coming out, she said, “Good Lord, with your real name!?”
3. During my childhood, my parents fought over a dead woman named Wanda. Dad slept with Wanda twenty years before I was born while Mom was out of town at Grandma’s funeral. Mom never got over it and brought it up once a week as bizarre dinner entertainment for us kids.

Bonus secret: I accidentally shit my pants a lot until I was sixteen.

I’ve never had any respect for secrets. Maybe it’s because I like the thrill of disclosure, or maybe it’s because my most painful memories are about those things which I had to keep secret.

Either way, I don’t believe in locking up our stories. Secrets are imprisoned stories that can’t teach anything but shame. Instead of hiding our painful strangeness, we’d be better off if we jerked our skeletons out of the closet and danced them around the room.