Secrets I Can’t Tell My Parents
By Sarah Kasbeer
Before anyone knew a global pandemic would engulf our lives, I sat at a booth with my sister in a crowded restaurant near Times Square. She was visiting from Illinois, and we were headed to see a Broadway musical—activities that now seem plucked from an alternative reality. Over dinner, we talked about my forthcoming book, a collection of personal essays that examined some of the most painful experiences of my youth. The university press that was publishing it had planned to fly me to Tennessee for a reading that fall, and my sister was adamant about driving down to attend.
I had mentioned the reading to my parents a few months before, but only recently realized there was nothing I could possibly read aloud that wouldn’t make them uncomfortable. There was far too much in the book about my teenage sex life, not to mention the passages that describe violences inflicted upon my body in intimate detail. I had already ruled out the possibility of my dad ever reading it. My sister, it turned out, didn’t think my mom should read it either.
“You think it will upset her too much,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”
I gulped, a piece of soft gnocchi stuck in my throat. I knew she was right. I’d written a whole book of things I couldn’t bring myself to say, and they were the very things my mother wouldn’t know how to react to and I couldn’t bear for my father to hear. Part of the shame I carried was because by not talking about the most consequential experiences of my life—the ones that formed my identity—the people closest to me had helped render them unspeakable. And now that I had chosen to speak them to the world, the very people I wanted to hear them most and tell me they loved me anyway would probably rather avoid it.
“Don’t even mention his name,” my mother said once when the subject of my high school boyfriend came up at a family gathering—a full decade after we’d dated. He had been a year older than me, tall and broad-shouldered with dark blonde hair and green eyes. When he stole beer from the liquor store, he would laugh as he came running down the street to jump in the back of a friend’s getaway car. He was a prankster with a sense of humor—and, as it turned out, a violent side. My parents tried to forbid me from seeing him because of his priors, which included an aggravated assault, but that only made me want him more. A year into our relationship, he was arrested for domestic battery.
My parents and I had never discussed the events in any detail—not the assault, not the restraining order, not the stalking that soon ensued. Afterwards, I went on to college, moved away and started a career. In their minds, the whole messy saga was likely better left buried, and to some extent, I bought into this idea. If everything was fine now, why dredge up the past? Looking back, I wonder if there wasn’t something sacred about the little girl who once played chess on her father’s knee that they wanted to preserve, unmarred by thick, scarred knuckles. At the time, the silence felt like blame, a white noise that seemed to whisper, I told you so.
What is left unsaid can easily become a screen for projection. In my early twenties, I was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance. I told no one. There was no female detective urging my cooperation, no protracted court proceedings—just my avoidance of the fact that anything out of the ordinary had even happened. The silence spoke again, and this time with a similar message: your fault. It wasn’t until I had a job with insurance that covered therapy, years later, that I dared investigate what lived under the silence. I could only close the void between the truth and me by filling it with every detail I could remember.
“My parents and I had never discussed the events in any detail—not the assault, not the restraining order, not the stalking that soon ensued.”
The stories, unspooled in their fullness, surprised me. It was almost as if they belonged to someone else and I was reading them for the first time. Only then did I understand their power—that they might have the ability to pierce someone else’s silence. This idea led me to decide to publish an essay about recovering from rape. I wanted to tell my parents in person beforehand, so they wouldn’t find out what had happened to me on the internet.
Against the silver backdrop of late winter, I walked to the Airbnb where they were staying on a visit to Brooklyn. My hands were shaking as I entered the small, warm apartment, a steam radiator whistling in the background. My father was leaning against the windowsill, eating the overripe banana my mother had packed him for the airplane, its bruised peel wilting. I said I needed to tell them something. I uttered the three words I once thought to be unutterable, then crumpled to the floor. This memory itself possesses the hallmarks of a traumatic experience—a single image attached to a heightened emotional state.
Each time I told someone the story, it became more real. But telling my parents didn’t have the same effect. I felt guilty for having to wound their daughter once again, right before their very eyes. I had already tainted the image of the girl they once adored—did I also have to disappoint them with the fact that their adult daughter was not exactly flourishing in the way they might have hoped? They helped me up, hugged me and told me they were sorry that had happened. But we never spoke about it again. Tiptoeing around the truth only left it suspended between us.
After I published the essay, I told my mother she didn’t have to read it. I knew it would upset her. But this time, I wasn’t protecting her as much as I was protecting myself from the fact that I believed she would find my pain too unpalatable. “I think I’d better not,” she agreed.
My book event this past fall in Tennessee turned out to be a Zoom webinar, as all in-person classes were canceled at the university. I had given my parents permission not to attend; that way I wouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable about what I planned to read—an essay about my high school boyfriend.
The evening of my virtual launch, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, eyeing the softening shape of my now 38-year-old face and thinking about the 20 years that had elapsed since the events in that essay. I brushed my hair, conscious of the few wiry grays that had recently sprouted around my forehead. My preening was interrupted by a push notification—my mother had replied to an Instagram story I made to promote the event. There were no words, just pixels in the shape of the pink hearts emoji. I blinked, hesitating for a moment. My disappointment caught me off guard; the fact that I had thought for a split second she might have changed her mind and decided to join, or more to the point, that I had let myself want something I knew to be out of reach. I took a deep breath and tried not to let the tears smudge my freshly applied mascara.
“After I published the essay, I told my mother she didn’t have to read it. I knew it would upset her…’I think I’d better not,’ she agreed.”
To be fair, my father also had never expressed any desire to read my book, although he mostly read astronomy textbooks and 1,200-page biographies of FDR. The idea of him having to imagine me as a sexual being with braces felt like a bridge too far. My parents are Baby Boomers from the Midwest who had already given me so much more than they had growing up that it seemed greedy to also want all of my emotional needs to be met as well—at the expense of theirs, no less. But I was now a New Yorker with a therapist who valued resolving past conflicts as a means of personal growth.
When I was in the early stages of writing my book, I sat with my husband and watching a Ted Talk on YouTube by the author Melissa Febos titled, “Telling Your Secrets Can Set You Free.” In it, she recounted sending her mother, who happened to be a therapist, a copy of her memoir, which chronicled her experiences as a heroin addict and a dominatrix. Her mother, she explained, read it in a single night, then called to tell her: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever read, and I am so proud of you.” By this point in the talk, I was crying. My husband tried to comfort me by gently rubbing the outside of my thigh. “You can’t compare them,” he said. “Your parents are different.”
Recently, I sat with my parents for an impromptu dinner via FaceTime. In my apartment, their tiny images were framed by an iPhone resting against a carafe of water. At their house, now in California, I was propped up against a Costco-sized box of toilet paper on the kitchen table. When we finished our respective dinners, my mother set a few chocolate chips on a placemat, and pushed it toward me as a dessert offering. I laughed, before taking it upon myself to share that I would be doing an interview for our hometown NPR station for Domestic Violence Awareness month. They both looked uneasy. The last time I’d been on the radio in Central Illinois was when I won the county geography bee in fifth grade, thanks to my father's devoted tutelage.
I realized then the size of the gap in our understanding of my life during the 30 years that stretched between these two interviews. I began to think that maybe the silence had been whispering something entirely different to them—something much more soothing. If a soft blanket of cognitive dissonance was telling them that everything was fine, protecting them from having to feel guilty for not being able to protect their child, who was I to puncture it?
“I began to think that knowing their daughter’s deepest, darkest, secrets in full detail might not be the best way for them to love me, right now or ever.”
“So, are we in the book?” My father asked, and then half-joking, “And do we come off looking like jerks?” It was the first time I’d considered that maybe it wasn’t my ugliness they were afraid of. “I don’t think so,” I said, explaining that I’d been honest about the strained relationship that had emerged between us during my teenage years, and that there were sections about that in the book. My mother nodded then looked away.
As I watched my 70-year-old parents through the little screen—my mother’s white hair contrasting with my father’s lack of any hair at all, something stirred in me that was different from my normal desire for their explicit approval and outward expressions of pride at my accomplishments. I began to think that knowing their daughter’s deepest, darkest, secrets in full detail might not be the best way for them to love me, right now or ever. I wish that the level of clarity I had to achieve in order to write my book could offer them the same comfort or closure. But I understood that resurrecting what had remained buried for so long would likely cause more damage than repair.
I specifically hadn’t included a dedication in the book since “For my parents” would have felt strange—they had already implied that they didn’t want to read it. Instead, I’d selected an epigraph from a poem by Anna Akhmatova, which actually served as a dedication to the only person I needed to bear witness to the struggles of my younger self and love her anyway. “You are so many years late,” it reads. “Nevertheless, I am glad you came.”
Sarah Kasbeer is the author of the essay collection A Woman, a Plan, an Outline of a Man. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Dissent, Guernica, The Normal School and elsewhere.