Gloria picked up a strawberry from the bowl in front of her and handed it to me. She had two over-the-bed tables, the type you’d find in a hospital, on either side of her recliner. They were covered with catalogs and magazines, get-well cards from friends who no longer came to visit, cell phone and television remote, notepad and pen, lip balm and tissues, bottles of water, books of crossword puzzles, and a crocheting project I never once saw her pick up or make any progress on—all the things she might need at any time. She would swing one table in front and over her legs and the other out of the way with a practiced hand. Today, the table in front of her had a big bowl full of strawberries, and a much smaller bowl full of strawberry stems.
She was gleeful about those strawberries. She ate each one in a single huge bite, emptying one bowl and filling the other with remarkable speed.
“These make me feel like I’m a little girl again on the farm, out in the sunshine,” she said. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I spent a day out in the sunshine.” Then, “Course, I don’t miss the heat, being out in the fields, you understand. Just the sunshine. I miss that feeling.”
“Did you grow up on a farm?” I asked.
“No, no,” she said quickly. “I just spent a lot of time there when I was a child.”
The conversation meandered somewhere else, but in a few minutes she grew quiet and pensive. She picked up another strawberry and ate it very slowly, with her eyes closed.
“I want to tell you a story,” she said.
“Every Sunday after church, we all came home and put on our work clothes. My grandmother came to pick us up in her big car, and we, me and my brothers and my father, we all drove out to the country to a farm. It was the farm of a black family. Not a very big farm, and kind of falling apart because there was no farmer. He was dead. It was just his wife out there, trying to hold on.
“We’d go out there, and we would work our fingers to the bone, all of us. Even my grandmother. We were out in the fields, helping with harvesting and pulling weeds. Even when I was real little, I picked up stones out of the dirt so they could plow. We worked in the house and the barns, fixing whatever needed fixing, cleaning whatever needed cleaning.
“I didn’t mind, though. I actually really liked it, because there were half a dozen children out there that we could play with. We went down to the creek and played hide-and-go-seek. We built forts and fairy lands, and played little jokes on each other. We had so much fun. Their mother would have a huge dinner waiting for us, and later there was supper, too. I loved going out there.
“But I never knew just who they were, or why we went there. We never visited with any other black folks. Just that family. We never went to any other farm. Just that one.
“I asked when I was little, but was always told to hush. I asked once, when I was a teenager, who they were and why we went out there every single Sunday, but my mother slapped me hard across the face and told me to never ask again. So I didn’t.
“When I grew up and got married and had my own children, I stopped going out there. I don’t know if my father and grandmother continued, because I never asked. It was just not something we could talk about. Ever.
“And then I sort of forgot. Not really, but I never thought about it after a while. We never talked about that family, and I never saw them again. I don’t think I ever knew their last name.
“Years went by. And then, at my grandmother’s funeral, a black woman walked up to me. She threw her arms around me. ‘Do you recognize me?’ she asked.
“Well, I was totally confused. ‘No,’ I said.
“‘I’m Betty,’ she said. ‘From the farm? On Sundays? We used to play together when we were little girls.’ And then I did recognize her. I hadn’t seen her since I was a teenager, but I knew her.
“And then. Well, my goodness. Then she said, ‘I’m your cousin.’
“Kerry, I just stood there with my mouth open. That whole family—they were my cousins. My own flesh and blood. My father’s brother had fallen in love with a black woman. They lived together in secret out in the country and had children. But then he died, leaving them alone out there, one woman and five little kids to run the farm.
“That’s why we all went out there and worked till our fingertips bled. Because she couldn’t do it alone. They were my cousins, my father’s nieces and nephews, my grandmother’s grandchildren.”
Gloria sat back in her recliner and threw her hands out to the sides and laughed. “All along, they were my cousins.”
“And you had no idea, all those years?”
“Nope. It was a big secret.”
“But Betty knew?” I asked. “She knew at the funeral. Had she just found out, too?”
“Oh no, she knew all her life. They all knew all along, the black children. Even the little ones, they knew who we were and who they were.”
“But wait!” I think I shook my head. “The children knew all along, when you came out to visit on Sundays, that you were cousins, and they never told you? Why not?”
“Because they were all sworn to secrecy not to tell anyone until my grandmother died.”
“Why?”
“Because of her shame. They had to keep the secret of who they really were.”
“Your grandmother’s shame?” I asked.
“Of having black grandchildren.”
“But she—all of you—went out there every Sunday. Of her entire life, until she died? Even though she was so ashamed?”
“Well, they were still her grandchildren,” Gloria said, seemingly puzzled by my questions. “I know they kept it a secret because they were trying to protect me.”
“Protect you how?” I asked.
“Kerry?” She started laughing again. “Do you really not understand? From knowing that I had black family. From knowing my uncle had run away with a Negro woman. I reckon that’s why they kept it hid, to keep me protected.”
“But protected from what?”
“Well, I guess from the shame. They didn’t want me to have to carry the shame, too.” She sighed, and I could tell it was time for me to be quiet. “Times were just different then. We had so many secrets in my family.”
• • •
THERE ARE so many secrets out there in the world. I carry around some of them, secrets that have been entrusted to me by patients and family members. Most of them are personal secrets about the teller, secrets about things they did, things they thought or felt or wished, things they didn’t think they could ever tell. Things that happened to them, things done to them when they were small, or helpless, or desperate. Secrets about the self.
But some of the secrets I’ve been privy to were elaborate, family-held secrets. Secrets with multiple participants and levels of understanding. Secrets held across generations that demanded that children be complicit in their own shame, like Gloria’s cousins.
Because that’s what secrets are about—shame.
Shame, along with the belief that keeping a secret will protect you or someone else, comes from the idea that there is some part of us so monstrous, so terrible, so inhuman, that it must not be known. The intense humiliation and pain of being shamed for a perceived transgression just reinforces the need to keep the secret. Shame-filled secrets are told—when they are told at all—with bodies trembling and voices shaking so hard they are barely comprehensible, with fear and urgency in equal measure, throbbing with the enormous energy it has taken to keep them secret for so long.
Why, after so many years, do people tell me their secrets? I don’t think it’s for forgiveness. I’m not a priest, rabbi, or pastor. I can’t offer some sort of sacramental absolution or formal forgiveness on behalf of God. No, when someone shares a shameful secret with me, it doesn’t feel like confession. It feels like an unburdening.
The great mid-century cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote about the differences between cultures based on shame and those based on guilt. Guilt and shame aren’t the same thing. In fact, they’re opposites.
In a guilt-based culture, society enforces its norms and rules by instilling an internal moral compass in people that tells them when they do something wrong. When they violate it, they feel bad about what they have done and how it affects others. The guilt is over the wrongdoing, and it’s internally generated. Even if no one else ever knew about the transgression, it sparks guilt.
In a shame-based culture, on the other hand, social control comes from a sense of honor or duty, and a sense of wrongdoing comes from the fear of being shamed and ostracized by other people. Break a social norm and your honor is damaged—you are indelibly damaged—and the honor of your family as well. Shame comes from other people knowing. Shame is based on pain and fear; it works because the person being shamed experiences emotional and psychic pain and, as a result, fears ever being shamed again. Sometimes a person is cast out of her community, physically harmed, or even killed for doing something seen as shameful. Hence, the desire to keep shameful things secret.
While a culture may rely more heavily on either shame or guilt for social control, they’re not mutually exclusive; people can feel both. Shame plays as great a role in people’s spiritual lives as guilt does, because it poses an existential problem. When people feel shame, they believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with their very person, with their soul. Shame comes from who you believe you are, not just what you’ve done or felt.
I was deeply ashamed of having been psychotic. I thought the very core of me was obliterated, or utterly ruined at best.
That shame came from the enormous stigma around mental illness in our society. It might be acceptable to introduce the topic of postpartum depression into discussions with a group of other mothers, but bringing up postpartum psychosis was a sure path to becoming a pariah. As a sympathetic (and beloved) psychiatrist once said to me, “We just don’t have support groups for people with drug-induced psychotic disorder caused by anesthesia during childbirth.”
While good friends tried to reassure me that I just “wasn’t myself” when I was psychotic, who exactly was I?
I had one answer for that: I was a bad mother. That the birth had gone so spectacularly badly didn’t seem to me to indicate medical complications and poor decisions on an anesthesiologist’s part. It seemed to mean that I was, at my very core, a failure as a mother. I mean, really, whose first attempt at birth goes like that? I felt like I was cursed.
The corollary to all that shame: secrets. I learned, the hard way, not to tell people what had happened to me.
But the problem with secrets is that they are exhausting. And while they might protect what people see as their most vulnerable places, that protection comes at an enormous cost.
• • •
“I HAVE ANOTHER STORY to tell you,” Gloria said, several weeks later. She had steadily gotten sicker and weaker, so that we were now visiting for the first time in her bedroom instead of the living room. Despite her exhaustion, though, she had insisted on getting up and dressed and in her chair.
We’d been having a good time talking about the indignity of Gloria having to accept help from her neighbor, Ronald, with bathing and bathroom. Many Southern women of her age might have been embarrassed, but Gloria found it hilarious that the last man who would probably see her naked was an unemployed forty-year-old gay man. “So it’s come to this,” she laughed.
Then she stopped laughing and bit her lips.
“And it’s not just a story I want to tell you. You have to do something for me.”
“I’ll try. I’ll always try,” I said.
“You’ve got to do better than try.” She turned away from me and stared straight ahead of her, silent. This was really unlike her. In a minute or so, she began to talk.
“I got pregnant when I was nineteen,” she started. Unlike other times, she didn’t laugh as she told this story, and she didn’t really seem to be telling it to me. She spoke slowly, laboriously, and paused after each sentence with a look of slight shock on her face, as though surprised by what she’d just said. She seemed almost to be in a trance. But she didn’t hesitate. She told it as if compelled, as if once she’d begun, nothing could make her stop.
“I wasn’t married. It was my best friend’s boyfriend. They had broken up. He asked me to go for a drive. I’d never had a boyfriend, and I was flattered.
“I’d never had sex before, and I didn’t know what was happening. It was . . . it was confusion. I was foolish. So foolish.
“Later, by the time I figured out I was pregnant, he and my best friend had gotten back together and gotten engaged. She was so happy. I couldn’t tell her.
“Now, I wasn’t a girl. I was a full-grown woman, with a job as a secretary. But I still lived at my parents’ house and I never knew anything about sex. That seems crazy, I know, but I didn’t. When I told my parents, my father . . . oh my God, my father.
“He was so strict. He was the strictest father in the world. We weren’t even allowed to wear skirts above the knee or a smudge of lipstick. I wasn’t allowed to pluck my eyebrows. And then to get pregnant. To get pregnant. Oh my Lord. I thought he would kill me.
“But instead they sent me away. He and my mother both. She agreed to it, my mother. They said it was the only way. I had to go, because I had nowhere else to live. No one to marry, not enough money to raise a baby, and once anyone figured out I was pregnant, I’d lose my job anyway. So what choice did I have? What choice did I have? No choice. I had no choice.
“Things were different back then, so different. I was trapped. Women like me, we ended up garbage. I didn’t want to be garbage. I didn’t want that. So I had to go.
“The home was in Charleston. I’d never been to Charleston before, but we weren’t allowed to go out and explore. We just stayed in, me and the other girls there. Six months later, I had my baby.
“Some of the people there said I shouldn’t look at him, because it would make it harder to give him up. Because that’s what I was going to do. That’s what I had to do.
“I came back to my mother’s and father’s house a few days later. When they picked me up, they didn’t ask about it. I didn’t get the addresses of any of the other girls there. It was like it never even happened. I gave him up and had never even seen him.
“But the next day I knew I had made a mistake. I woke up and I couldn’t breathe. With every drop of my soul, I knew I’d made a mistake. I was like a caged animal. I couldn’t stop moving. I had made a terrible mistake. I had to get my baby back.
“I called up the home. I talked to the social worker. She was a Jewish woman from New York. Her name was Ruth. She was so skinny you couldn’t believe she could stand up straight. But she was the most intimidating woman I’d ever met.
“Ruth said I couldn’t have the baby back. I told her I had to have him back. She told me it was better for the baby to go to a family. I said I had to get him back. She said he would be better off without me, on account I had no money and no husband. I just kept telling her I had to get my baby back.
“Finally she said that if I wanted my baby back, I had to pay for him. I had to buy him back. I had to pay back all the money they’d spent on me. I had to pay for six months of room and board, and for the doctor visits, and for delivering the baby in the hospital, and for the baby’s doctor visits and the formula they were giving him, and for the nurses who had taken care of him since he’d been born. She was sorry, but that was the rules.
“If I can do that, I asked, iffen I can do that, pay that money back, I can have him? I can have my baby?
“Yes, she said. But you’d be making a mistake, she said, in the calmest, angriest voice I ever heard. A terrible mistake, and it would be the worst thing for that baby and for you. You have no husband, no home of your own, not enough money to buy him shoes and clothes and food.
“I sold everything I had to raise that money. I sold my car. I sold my record player and all my records. I sold all my clothes except for one dress and one pair of shoes. I sold every gift anyone had ever given me, every bit of jewelry. I even sold my hair curlers. I used every penny of my savings. Finally I had enough money.
“When I told my parents I was going to get my baby, I thought my father would have a stroke, right there in the living room. I’ve never seen someone so angry. I was so scared. I thought I might turn to dust from the fear. But I knew I had to do this.
“They kicked me out. I went to my friends but they couldn’t help me. I even told my best friend and her husband, my son’s father. I don’t know if he knew he was the daddy. But he looked right at me and said no. No, he would not help. I had nowhere to live.
“So finally, I went to my grandmother. She had a big farm out in the country. I told her what happened. I was afraid she would turn me out, too. But instead, she said, I will help you. You and your baby can live here, with me.
“She drove me to Charleston in her car. When we got there, Ruth, the Jewish social worker from New York, met us in her office. She asked me if I really wanted to do this. I just pushed the envelope of money onto the table. She looked at me real hard. She was never one to smile. And she didn’t smile now. But her face was not so stiff, I thought. Softer, maybe, I thought. I hoped.
“Ruth called a nurse to bring the baby in. He was a month old already. It was the first time I’d ever seen him.
“When the nurse brought him in, my grandmother stood up and walked over and reached out for him. But then Ruth stood up and got in between my grandmother and the baby. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not how this is going to be.’ She took the baby in her arms. I thought she was going to take the baby back, right in front of my eyes, take him away from me. I started to cry.
“But instead, she walked over to me where I was sitting stuck in the chair like a statue. She put him in my arms.
“‘She is his mother,’ Ruth said to my grandmother. ‘She gets to hold him.’
“Ruth turned to me then. ‘I have never met a woman who was more a mother than you,’ she said to me. ‘You are his mother. Don’t let anyone take him away from you. If you love him like this all his life, he will be fine.’ She still didn’t smile, but she put her hands on my arms and squeezed, harder than I ever would have thought someone so skinny could squeeze.
“I have made so many mistakes in my life. This is the one thing I know I did right. It’s the best thing I ever did in my whole life. I fought to get my baby back. I gave up everything to get my baby back. It’s the greatest thing I ever did, or ever will do. I got my baby back.”
• • •
GLORIA STOPPED, out of breath from the exertion of telling me. She snapped out of her trance, and I did, too. She turned to look at me. Her face looked different. She pinned me with her eyes, drained but fierce.
“I want you to tell him,” she said. “I’ll give you his phone number and you will call up my son and tell him. I want him to know. His father was always so mean to him, and I want my boy to understand that it wasn’t him. His father was mean because he resented him. My son wasn’t his baby. I married him when my son was a year old, but he never came to love him right. I thought he would, I told myself he would, but he never did. I want my son to know it wasn’t because there was something deep wrong about him. I think he always thought that. He knew his father didn’t love him right. I want my baby to know why before I die. Will you call him and tell him his father wasn’t his real father? Pull out your phone and I’ll give you his number, and you call when you leave here.”
I stumbled and stammered. I’m not sure why I was so shocked by her request. Maybe it’s because I usually only listen. I don’t act. I was unprepared, and unsure how to tell Gloria I couldn’t do what she was asking.
She stared at me as I sat there with my mouth hanging open. Finally she said, “It’s just a phone call.”
I pulled myself together and said, as gently as I could, “I think that’s something you need to tell him.”
Gloria had been calm the whole time she told me the story, but now tears welled in her eyes and her hands began to shake.
“I can’t tell him. I just can’t. Please. You have to tell him.”
“I think that might be a bit of a shock, Gloria, if I called him out of the blue and told him that his father isn’t really his father. He doesn’t even know me.”
“He would be relieved. He would be happy. There’s no other way.” She began to cry.
“You could tell him,” I said as gently as I could.
“No! No I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because—” And here she could barely speak. She shook so hard that the recliner shook underneath her. “Because what—” She sounded like she might choke. “Because what if”—she was almost hyperventilating—“what if he doesn’t think it was a good thing that I went back for him?”
The thought hung heavy in the air.
I’ve learned over the years that these heavy, painful, anguish-filled moments—and believe me, they are anguish-filled for me, too—these moments when I so badly want to say something to break the tension, are exactly the moments I need to stay silent. They are the moments I need to hold still, and hold that sacred space open. Because when I can hold still and hold on in that place, no matter how hard it is for both of us, something can happen.
Gloria shook and cried for a little while, but for far less time than you might think. Now that she had given voice to her greatest fear, she could examine it.
“What if he doesn’t think the best thing I ever did was a good thing at all? What if the social worker was right? What if he wishes I had left him at that unwed mothers home? What if he wishes some other family had adopted him? That he had a different mother? What if he wishes I had never gone back for him?”
I listened, and I waited. I knew I didn’t have the answers, but I’d also been at this sort of juncture often enough to know that the patient does, somewhere deep inside. Maybe not the answers to the questions they’ve just asked, but the answers to the deeper questions that lie under the fear.
Gloria closed her eyes. For a moment I thought she might be so worn out that she had fallen asleep, but then she continued.
“It’s amazing that you can love someone so much when you have never even met him. I loved my son so much and I didn’t even know him. How is that possible? How is it possible to love someone so much that you’re willing to give up your whole life, but you don’t even know him?
“I want him to know, because I want him to know how much I love him. That I loved him before I even knew him. That I love him not because of who he is, but just because he is. That’s what I want him to know.”
• • •
WHAT IF THE THING you consider to be your greatest accomplishment is not seen that way by anyone else? What if the thing you are proudest of is also the thing you are most ashamed of? What if your great love is also your deepest secret?
People keep secrets in a desperate and often ultimately futile attempt to protect themselves or the people they love. They think that the secret will be a bulwark against rejection and public humiliation, and so they carry it, no matter the weight. In so many cases, people keep secrets and even lie to each other out of love, and not malice.
What they may not realize is that in holding on so fiercely to what they see as shameful secrets, they’re actually strengthening that system of shame. Keeping a secret is like fertilizing a weed, and the family secrets that fertilize shame choke out love before it can even grow. The secrets themselves, instead of protecting anyone from shame, become a source of it instead. Shame is the enemy of love; it can never serve it.
I don’t know what it was like for Gloria’s cousin Betty to have to carry the secret of her identity since she was a small child, to know that her grandmother saw her as a source of shame. I never got to meet Betty. But I can imagine, and what I imagine makes me want to cry.
Did Betty’s cruel burden protect Gloria from pain? Of course not. The only thing that secret protected either woman from was each other’s love and support. Gloria commented more than once at the sadness of missing out on decades of Betty’s life.
Yet, even knowing this, Gloria kept the secret of her son’s birth from him. She wanted to protect him from what she felt was her shame and, by extension, his shame. It simply kept her from sharing the enormity of her love. Now, even as she lay dying, desperate for him to know, she still was not sure she could break through that shame and explain the depth of her love. Fear of rejection and humiliation still held its grip, after a lifetime in a stew of secrets.
What if the person you love the most does not love you back? What happens if you pour your love into the world and are rejected? Do you pour your love out anyway? Is it worth the risk? Is love stronger than shame?
These were Gloria’s real questions.
• • •
EVERY VISIT THEREAFTER, Gloria asked me to call her son. She pleaded, she begged. She was desperate for her son to know, and convinced she could not do it herself. At first, trying to talk about why she was too afraid to tell him herself just caused her more anguish, so I sidestepped her requests as gracefully as I could. I asked her to tell me the story again and again, to get it right when it was time to tell him.
Within a few weeks, Gloria had a new suggestion. “You tell him and I could sit next to you.”
“That might could work,” I said.
She told me again what she wanted me to say.
A few weeks later she said, “I might could tell him and you could sit next to me.”
“That might could work,” I said.
Then she practiced what she would say to him with me.
The week after that, she said, “I told my son when he was here the weekend.”
“How did it go?”
She smiled and began to cry. But then she began to laugh as she cried, as she always did, and she couldn’t speak.