Never Enough Time
My guest this week is Sharon Lippincott, who defines herself as an evangelist for lifestory writing and memoir. As such, she is a keen observer of the way that family and friends deal with secrets.
Herewith her contribution to my series on issues that play a role in my forthcoming novel, A Fitting Place.
It never came up …
“Mom, I need my birth certificate to apply for my passport. Do you know where it is?” Twenty-three-year-old Sally was preparing to move with her bridegroom to his new station in Europe.
“Look in the top file cabinet drawer. There’s a folder toward the back, labeled Family Documents.”
Sally had no trouble finding the folder, but as she flipped through the documents, one nearly stopped her heart. Gothic letters at the top identified it as divorce proceedings, and her father’s name and a woman she never heard of were listed. The date was several years before Sally was born and three years before her father and mother had married. She stood in a state of shock, reading and re-reading the document. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her?
She finally put the document back in the drawer. After bidding a hurried good-bye to her mother, she went home to consider what she’d seen. There must be a reason nobody had told her or her sister. What else did she not know? Did she have half siblings somewhere she knew nothing about? How could she blurt out the question, let her parents know that she knew? Finally she decided to do a little research before confronting them. Even though they’d always encouraged Sally and her sister to speak their minds about anything, it seemed the game had changed.
The evening she went by to see Uncle Jim. He was a straight shooter, and she knew he’d level with her. Sure enough, her father had been married before, as soon as he graduated from college, but it had only lasted three years. There had been no children. “I’m so sorry you had to learn about it this way, Punkin. You deserve better. I told your dad several years ago that he ought to come clean about this and he promised he would. But I guess it isn’t easy to figure out how. Don’t be too hard on either of them, okay? You know they love you and didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She nodded and thanked him and went home warmed by his big hug.
“Dad, there’s something I need to ask you,” she said when she found her father puttering around his garage workshop the next day.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Why didn’t you or Mom tell us kids that you’d been married before?”
His eyes formed huge circles before they fell to the floor. “You found the papers.” Sally nodded without replying.
It’s not that we meant to keep it from you,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t really a secret. It’s just that, well, it never came up. How do you work that into a conversation?”
“I don’t know Dad, but I wish you’d figured it out.
I never got around to it …
Sally’s true story is intense, but nearly everyone has lesser secrets that aren’t really secrets. Many are far simpler, about things that just never came up. For example, my friend Suzanne recently told me that she was stunned to learn, after forty some years of marriage that Sam hates beets.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I guess I just never got around to it. You don’t fix them that often, and I thought you must like them,” Sam replied.
Sometimes, when something just doesn’t come up at first, it may later seem that if you bring it up now, you’ll raise a lot of questions about why you didn’t mention it sooner. Things can become complicated, though originally quite innocent and harmless.
We all have “secret” information that may or may not be intentionally withheld. Maybe you avoided a topic for fear of starting an argument or hurting someone’s feelings. Maybe you understood (or assumed) that if you mentioned “whatever” it is, the other person would never think of you the same way again, and that wasn’t a risk you wanted to take.
But mostly, well, there’s just never enough time to say everything on your mind. Choices have to be made. We do the best we can, and roll with the punches when things go astray like they did for Sally.
So don’t assume, if you learn that someone has been keeping a secret—even if it’s as big as Sally’s dad—that they intended to never tell you. Maybe it really was just hard to know how to bring it up. The moment was never right.
What do you wish you’d found the right moment to talk about?
This blog continues the discussion on themes in my novel. I welcome comments and guest blogs from my readers based on their own experiences. Let me know if you’d like to do a guest blog on one or more of the issues relevant to A Fitting Place.
Sharon Lippincott is the author of five books and a contributor to several others. Her most recent, Adventures or a Chilehead: A Mini-Memoir with Recipes, entertains readers with her lifelong love affair with mouth-searingly hot chile. She teaches writing courses online, in Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh Osher programs, and co-hosts the Life Writers’ Forum YahooGroup. She is founder of the Pittsburgh area WE WRITE! Creative Writing University and serves on the NAMW advisory board. She has been blogging at The Heart and Craft of Life Writing and invites you to visit her new Adventures of a Chilehead blog where she shares reflections on places, pleasures and pains of hot peppers.
Sharon welcomes questions and comments by email at ritergal@gmail.com.
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