To Tell Or Not To Tell

[Above photo: Three generations at Beach Island, 1980]

23 January 2022

Counterintuitive Einsteinian propositions like there are places in the Universe where there is no time, matter can be so compressed that a mote can weigh more than the Earth, energy and matter are equivalent, or its not important whether you choose to pay for the subway or to jump the turnstile are appealing to me now. Time, for example, expands and contracts according to our perception of it. How long were the summer days when I was a child, playing in the lake, rowing a boat and towing a toy one, or trying to catch a perch? Now days move with such rapidity that their passage is difficult to even notice!

In response to this, perhaps, and realizing that (my) time is finite, I am bringing order to my life. I am scanning and organizing all photos and negatives, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of the latter. I just spent an hour cleaning off my Desktop, deleting, refiling, and so forth. My p-Touch label maker was compromised; I left batteries in it, thoughtlessly, and after 4 years in storage they leaked, corroding the poles. All efforts to clean the latter were insufficient to restore it to health.  I gambled ($10) and ordered a power cord and have revived it. Now I have labelled my new skis and poles, as well as my many file-folders and anything else I can think of. I’ve scanned most of my writings and organized them into categories (labelling the notebooks). This is all so antithetical to my basic nature that I surprise myself. It is wonderful to be able to instantly find what you are seeking, unless the search itself is the goal, like stumbling upon a breathtakingly beautiful village in the Shan Hills of Myanmar or roaming through Paris. And, I certainly have time on my hands, given that it is below freezing outside every day and we are starved of snow. I do walk an hour or so each day, using a face mask to cover my nose and a knit choker to keep the lower half of my face from chill.

My sister called me and was upset that I was publicly (here) criticizing our now-40 years deceased mother. I respect her concerns, although I feel differently about it than she does. I am using this blog for many reasons. It began as a letter to family, friends, and patients, a not-so-intimate recording of my experiences and thoughts/feelings as I endured the discomforts and terrors of lung cancer and its treatment. Then it became a snapshot of each week as I worked in and wandered through Malawi and Myanmar. With the novelty of those settings no longer available to me, I have turned inward and am reviewing my life-to-date. And in the process, I find that having a witness or 30, for I have never attempted to publicize my blog, helps me to write and to remember. I don’t feel a need or desire to resume psychotherapy or analysis.  I have panned much of the gold out of that stream over my lifetime. And I am not in distress.

It upset my sister, however, for which I am sorry. Her conscious thought was that it would damage our mother’s reputation. Mom was an amazing person and did a lot of good in the world, helping both patients, organizations, friends, family, and even those who helped her. She assisted her housekeeper’s son through college and graduate school, for example. Many of her patients sent us notes at her death, writing of their gratitude for her help. I doubt that many of my few readers actually knew my mother.

As I am learning, it can be painful to revisit the failings of a loved one, especially how they have failed us. It hurts more to have them stirred up if we have put those injuries, and their inflictor, comfortably to rest inside us.

I don’t need this blog to be True Confessions, nor my version of Mommy Dearest. I do want it to be more than affable, inoffensive, and bland. In addition to being boring, in the blandness is a dishonesty, portraying someone as faultless when they were not.  A person who overcomes external hardships, whether in the forms of bad luck or poor judgment, or those internal, such as mental illness of any degree of severity, is much larger and more admirable to me than one who manages to avoid those.  That my mother had a difficult childhood, her parents vocally wishing the second daughter were a boy and then to be followed by two boys, makes her accomplishments shine more brightly. That she had 3 serious depressions, was widowed with two young children, and then proceeded to complete psychiatry, child psychiatry, and psychoanalytic training and subsequently exercise her skills with care and intelligence is more worthy of my admiration than if she hadn’t experienced those adversities.

Another aspect of this question intrigues me. Like guardrails or warning signs on a mountain road, would an atmosphere of openness about current relationships and behaviors favorably influence future behaviors?  We celebrate “great” leaders, like Alexander, Cyrus, and the Pharaohs, as well as great edifices like the mighty stone fortresses that dot the globe. If we were honest about the blood costs of their conquests and those constructions, the cruelty and slavery involved, etc. it would temper our adulation, I think. As with an ordinary schlemiel like myself, for example, if I know that my actions will be readily viewable by others, might it exert a beneficial effect on my behavior? 

It seems to me that the CRT struggle, not that most Republicans actually care about its substance other than as a useful wedge issue, is about transparency and understanding.  Don’t talk about things in class that might “upset” a child. What preparation for life is that? Even animals who clearly lack conscious awareness can learn from their mistakes; don’t lick the hot stove, don’t run into the road without looking because it hurt like the devil the last time you did. “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Santayana reminds us.

Of course, there are places for privacy. Children shouldn’t be privy to their parents’ sex life, as much as is possible, or their parents’ filicidal fantasies.  Therapists must be scrupulously confidential about their clients.  Statements that would merely wound someone else should be withheld. Secrecy between peers should often be honored.

What is unsaid, however, is often absolute poison in a relationship. The extremes are with infidelity and with incest, I suppose, although concealed past experiences, including crimes, that have shaped one member of a relationship(s) can exact a terrible price on all.

It is a slippery slope, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we should simply mount the escalator down a secure, confined tunnel. These issues can be considered. Moving ever toward transparency and communication feels progressive to me. I suspect that many of the couples who were not able to talk with each other about their sex lives in the first half of the 20^th century experienced no end of misery as a result.

I am unsure here and I recognize a quality of defensiveness in what I am writing. But it does help me to understand my past to put these things on paper to be witnessed. I wouldn’t have done it when my mother was alive, as it would have hurt her. I choose to think that if she knew it would help me to do this, she would agree to it, evidence of her sense of culpability and love of her child (81yo child!). These are complicated questions with no simple answers.

I hesitate to say it but it appears that the noose(s) is tightening.  A conviction on Fraud may provide a fitting term for a man who is estimated to have told 30,000 untruths (averaged 21/day) in his 4 years as president. Then again, Sedition, relating to interruption of the peaceful transfer of power after an uncompromised election, is waving a flag. No breath-holding here, but things are looking up. Of course, that might mean we’ll have a 2024 candidate who would prohibit discussions in schools of slavery and racial inequality lest they cause “discomfort”, who plans to empower a squad of “Election Police” to discourage non-existent fraud, and who denounces and forbids mask mandates. I think he is a bit smarter than DT, though perhaps not as cunning.