TRUTH TELLER. PERSISTENT. INTUITIVE.

So much of my childhood was confusing and made no sense. They said this, and yet my reality was that. Was I the only one who could see this? Would anyone ever acknowledge what I thought and felt? What was real? Was I crazy? Why was I so alone?

Or was I just, as they so often said, “causing trouble, again”?

The truth, I believe, saved my life.

I grew up in a picture-perfect happy family, or so they wanted everyone to believe. Parents as high school sweethearts, six children, a house on the lake and lots of visitors in the summers. My father was an ordained minister, my mother, a mother and housewife, then a teacher, then a nurse. Both popular and respected in a close-knit community. But family life, at home, behind closed doors, wasn’t quite as idyllic, though also hard to understand why it wasn’t. They fought a lot. There was little affection, considerable distrust, and a general sense of chaos and hopelessness. Resentments and anger always seemed to simmer close by. Financial hardships that didn’t make sense for educated, middle class parents, and the shame of this that must be hidden.

As the youngest, I felt lost and disconnected. My parents and five older siblings just didn’t seem to like me and didn’t want anything to do with me. This meant too, that none felt compelled to take care of me as a child, to ensure that there was wood to burn to keep the house warm when they weren’t there, which was often. And that there was food, that teeth were brushed regularly, that I had clean clothes, was warm enough for winter. It was as if I were toxic to them, as if by ignoring me, they could make me disappear. I didn’t think they were actively trying to get rid of me, but perhaps, passively. I didn’t believe they would have been too distraught if something happened to happen to me.

The façades were strong, but my determination and intuition were stronger, and I would persevere. If I could only figure out what was wrong in my family or wrong with me, I was sure it would unlock the key to resolving my sadness and anger. After all, I had tried everything else.

The truth, I believe, saved my life.

At 32 I begged my father to tell me why he didn’t like me—had never liked me. He became angry, as he notoriously never did with anyone else, and denied that he treated me differently, and told me to grow up. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” It never occurred to me to question if he loved me, despite how I was treated, I believed he must love me since I was his child. The problem was that he didn’t seem to like me, the constant leitmotif of shunning I experienced in his presence that I certainly felt but didn’t understand. And then, instead of telling me why, my father dropped dead of a heart attack, for which I was blamed. All very covert, but altogether it was made clear, I was the problem, “causing trouble, again”.

The shunning I experienced in the family that he instigated as an exemplar for the rest to emulate was something I hadn’t wanted to argue about, I just wanted to know why. What had I done? But it never seemed to be about me, about who I was, or my behavior. It was just my existence. My presence. Not who I was, but what I was. They had never been particularly interested in who I was, anyway. But that I was there, didn’t belong, and had no right to intrude on their happy family was the message I got.

And some ten years later, still searching, still trying to understand, knowing that, with the so-called moral authority in the family long dead, I had only myself to rely on. The memories welled up vaguely in my consciousness with no real connection, it seemed, to anything that would help me understand what was wrong with me. The cabin by the sea that I used to visit with my mother as a little girl. The cabin owned by a family friend, a former congregant from his church. This man’s son I had played with who was some three years younger.

Knowing she was untrustworthy but with little else to go on, I asked my mother who that man was that we visited at his cabin by the sea. “Why did we visit him?” The first time, she said he was just a family friend. “But…”, I began to say. And then something entirely unthought came out of my mouth before I could even consider it. “Was he my father?” Without meeting my gaze, my mother answered, “Why would you think that? That is crazy. You’re crazy.”

And then several years later, I was in my fifties by now, the memories stronger than ever, driving the back roads of Maine on a glorious summer day, puzzled still, I asked my mother again. “Why did we go visit him so often?” In her 80s now, my mother wailed in a tortured, old lady voice. “You’re abusing me! Stop abusing me! I will have your brother charge you with elder abuse!” Startled by her performance, I glanced at her beside me in the passenger seat where she suddenly smiled as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. I stopped the car and got out. I fell to my knees in the grass beside the road. Something, something, unknown and yet barely palpable shifted inside me.

The truth, I believe, saved my life. Or what was left of it.

Before leaving after that visit with my elderly mother, I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t give her a hug goodbye. My siblings were barely civil to me, as usual, but would never have believed or understood anything I had to say in my defense. My mother had long since eroded any trust there might have been between us and destroyed my “legitimacy” with lies about me.

And then she died. One sibling called to tell me, making clear that the others would not have even bothered to call me if it had been up to them.

Some four years later, working in the garden on an autumn day, the name of the son of the man in the cabin by the sea, with whom I had played as a little girl, fell into my head like the whisper of a ghost in my ear. Within minutes I found him on social media. Within hours he responded. Within ten sentences sent back and forth he asked, “Can I be honest with you?” and then, “You are my half-sister.”

Truth. Knowledge. Understanding. Compassion.

I struggled for a long time with the concept of forgiveness and the pat remonstrances thrown at those who appear to withhold it, saying that it is about your healing, not those who have wronged you.

I don’t agree. That doesn’t work for me. It isn’t that simple. Compassion will do. Forgiveness would be a betrayal of my self and that little girl I once was. Forgiveness, were I to declare it, would be a lie, another dishonesty, but this time on my part, added to the already considerable heap. I will not participate. Forgiveness is for those who cared for you, acknowledged the wrong, and are worthy of forgiveness. Forgiving them is not my responsibility, this is not on me. They may gladly seek it elsewhere in the universe, but not here.

All I ever wanted was the truth, a truth I had the right to know, a truth consciously and aggressively denied me. With the truth, I knew, I would have been invincible, the brave girl warrior I already was who had already endured so much. With the truth, I was able to understand what had happened, the roles we had, the games that had been played. And then with this knowledge, the peace and grace of compassion, even empathy for them. That will do.

The universe seems to be tapping more frequently and insistently lately, “Tell your story, tell the truth, get it out there…and let it go.” It is a strange process and one I am neither comfortable with nor confident in but have begun to suspect must be done. The neglect and the attendant emotional abuse, the lying and gaslighting and being scapegoated, all this has become unruly and wanting to be heard. I thought my sense of privacy or self-preservation was holding me back, but now I am beginning to see this is probably just another front, and as I peel back the layers, more pain demands acknowledgment.

I still have a lot of fear of not being believed and of the chorus of my half-siblings telling me, as they always did, that I was wrong, that I was causing trouble, again, and that I wasn’t remembering things as they really were. To put a word to it, that my voice, anyway, was never and still isn’t “legitimate.”

I feel surprisingly unaffected by the shame my parents must have felt. I attribute this to the sense that I never felt cared for and didn’t trust them and, because they showed me no mercy, I have no sympathy for how their reputations may suffer. The truth is liberating and joyous and kind and, I believe, forgives me for this.

In part why I feel it important to talk about our stories and share our experiences is to assure others that we are not alone, and we have extraordinary capacity to help others and ourselves by being open about this. I don’t entirely understand it, but it is strangely healing and liberating to tell this and I feel better and better all the time.

Finally, I feel hopeful that that the deep pain and confusion I have carried for so long really can be excised, though the experience itself will never go away, as it is integral to who I am. I have the right to my experience as much as they still feel they have the right to define it for me. More and more, I believe, knowing the truth has saved my life.