I got to thinking yesterday about the role of fear in getting people to keep "secrets" and I decided that fear, while it could sometimes be healthy, I don't think it's the best reason to keep secrets. And, again, it's like a good chunk of my adult life has been characterized by secrets of one sort or another and I don't want to live my life that way. But if I choose to disregard fears that might influence me to keep secrets, the very thing(s) I fear might become a reality and I could have to pay a heavy price for not respecting those fears. But what is worse, living a life of fear and living in a world of forced secrets or the possible negative fallout from not keeping secrets?
Then I got to thinking about one situation in particular where I didn't keep a secret. When I was in Bible school I did some work for a middle-aged nurse, maybe a little older than I am now. She invited me to spend Easter with her brother's family; her brother was a Lutheran pastor and he had a daughter about my age. I began doing things with that daughter, such as go out for lunch or go to the zoo. One time she confessed to me that she was bolemic, and said her family didn't know about it. Later I shared this with a pastor friend, who had a church that was mostly Romanian (he had had a ministry to that part of the world for many years), and he most emphatically said I should have told this girl's parents. But I didn't, although it was out of fear so much as out of a sense that I needed to respect her desire that her parents not know, thinking maybe she would lose her trust in me. I can't remember how this happened, but we lost touch and I don't know what happened with her.
Then there was my neighbors upstairs from me in Russia. A common apartment feature in Russia seemed to be buildings with many stairwells/elevators going up, with 3 apartments on each floor or platform. I was in the middle and the two neighbors on either side of me were very nice, quiet people. But upstairs there was a youngish family where there was some drinking. They had 2 very lovely young daughters, maybe 5 and 7 years old. Sometimes I heard loud angry voices from the adults, especially the father, and stomping and running after the two little girls who would be screaming and/or crying. I didn't call the police, but I really should have. I guess the only thing I might have had to fear in that case was a bad relationship with my neighbors.
So the thing is, when should you be quiet and when do you need to speak out? For me, it's hard to decide when there is so much going on, when I don't feel well, when it's hard enough for me to just take care of myself, when I'm all alone and don't have anyone to rely on or help me. So it's really the easiest thing, at least in the short run, to just not decide and just set it aside and in that way keep secrets not so much as an active decision to do so as a lack of decision to speak up.
***
A day later...
My rash that started last August is back, although this time I'm on medications for it and it's still acting up. There's one medicine that I'm not on the highest levels the allergist has recommended, so I'm increasing that one today, but I have appointments next week with both a new dermatologist (my old one doesn't take my insurance) and the allergist. My primary care doctor today concurred that I should lift heavy things because of the new back issue.
Meanwhile last night I found out that the gal I was going to have lunch with Sunday had to go out of town, so now I don't know what I'll do Mother's Day.
I'm not a good candidate for the "How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies" mindset because I don't like instrumental relationships, and I think these things smack of that, even if just subtly. I give people the right to like or not like me as they choose, but I'm not going to try to "win" them. I'm a "what you see is what you get" kind of person, which sort of fits with all this dislike for secrecy and the like. But I think that Jesus was like that too. He didn't beat around the bush, although if His listeners didn't have "eyes to see and ears to hear" they might not have understood, but that's a spiritual mindset issue. He didn't deny that He was the Son of God or give the impression that He was other than that. And He also didn't force people to accept Him, although He could make it very clear that there could be consequences for rejecting Him. I can't really say the same for me, in that I don't suppose there's much by way of consequences anyone would face for not liking me, or even for just not believing me (with or without the liking element). This kind of approach to life doesn't necessarily bode well for success in this world, but at least I can console myself that I'm in good company and I walk away with a clear conscience that I didn't try to deceive someone into liking me, for example.
***
Back to the issue at hand though, the family secrecy issue. I'm just going to go for it here, although I'm bound to suffer for it later.
Regarding mom, I feel badly that I didn't call her more often than I did, but I did talk to her several times a week usually and I had prepared two (and even sent one) gifts for her. These weren't anything of great proportion mind you, but I'm rather poor, so I have to content myself with well thought out meaningful gifts rather than splashy or exorbitant gifts, although that's not to say that the later gifts can't also be well thought-out and meaningful. But for me with my health constraints this kind of thing takes a fair amount of pre-planning to get it all together in a timely fashion. So it's not like I was ignoring her or not paying attention to her, but she might have needed more frequent contact. So I feel badly about that, but I had been through enough myself that I needed a little space to keep myself together too, especially since I'm here all by myself with no one really to help me.
I just say this because I think my brothers might feel some regrets for having done or not done this or that. I don't know about my one brother, but my brother in Seattle has expressed some of this. He really did a lot for mom, but mom could be rather difficult sometimes and my brother I think got frustrated with her from time to time. So evidently the night before she died (or the night of her death) he stopped by her place exhausted from working such long hours (70+ hours a week for a month or more) and found her in bed still in the evening having eaten a full half gallon of ice cream he had gotten her out of sort of a guilt feeling for not being so available to her. He didn't like to get her those kinds of foods because he was trying to encourage her to eat better and also get up more and go walking and the like. So when he came in that evening he said something to the effect of being tired of this "bull crap" (her laying in bed all day and eating all the ice cream in one fell swoop). When he finally found the empty bottle of pills after her death - a full month's supply he'd just brought her - and a brief note that said "good-bye bull crap" (or something to that effect) it really cut him to the core. I guess you can appreciate this.
So that's one thing. Another thing is a couple things mom had told me in the last few weeks of her life. The first one involved my other brother with the two boys. She said something about all of us kids being single and I was a little surprised and asked about this brother's girlfriend (at least I understood their relationship to be romantic in nature and it seemed pretty strong when I was there). She said that his girl friend didn't want to marry him because she saw the same things in him that I had. Now I'm not sure where she made this connection, as I'm sure it would have been something she put together, as my brother would never have given such an explanation for what happened with their relationship. But the thing was that she seemed to come around to seeing (again) that I understood what was going on correctly (again, because she had a year or so earlier given me credit for correctly understanding a couple other situations).
The thing here, however, is not as straight forward as it seems, I think, because to a certain extent (maybe even to a large extent) mom could be a bit of an opportunist (for whatever reason). What I mean is that if things had gone well with the couple, even if I was right about my brother, she would have been motivated to discredit my view because of the benefit (of one kind or another) of having one of her children married, etc. In this way, her acknowledgement of how she viewed reality was not so much based on fact as on pragmatic benefit, and this was good to keep in mind in relations with her. I don't think, however, she meant this in a harmful way at all, but just that she had this great need for things to go well for her and her family and any semblance of this kind of thing was enough to enable her to try to hold on to this and reject anything to the contrary.
The other thing involves my other brother in Seattle. Mom told me a couple months ago or more that he had demanded that she ask an aunt how much she was leaving to us kids! I didn't even know she was going to do that at all until she told me that she needed my address for that purpose (remember I'd not given it out for some time because of what happened in the fallout that landed me back down here). I was really shocked by this demand by my brother and to think that my brothers had always said that I only wanted mom and dad's money because I had so much problems with work, but I never ever did anything like this and didn't even ask for money. Now, it makes me sick to say that my brother is going to visit this aunt this weekend. Knowing this about him just puts a whole other slant on things.
The last couple days I was in Seattle for mom's funeral, after my other brother had left, we, my brother in Seattle and I, were going through the last of the things in her apartment and he said he wanted both mom's good china and her silver set because I was getting so much already. First of all, I did take some of mom's clothes (mainly shirts, a couple coats/jackets, scarves, etc.), but my brothers had taken some of dad's clothing after he died. And I also took all her cookbooks except the slow cooker cookbook he wanted. I said I was going to make a family cookbook with all of the recipes I could pull together from our childhood because I have a recipe database to do that with. So that was another whole box. I did take a few things that I just didn't want thrown out or given away because I thought they should stay in the family, but I do know mom had discussed with me about the china and silver but I can't remember which she wanted me to have, because I just have had too much else going on in my life to worry about that kind of thing. Our other brother got the silver from a grandmother. I said okay he could have the silver and china, and I'd take the set of knives, but he even sort of balked at that. But what happened after that was the real clincher. He said that he didn't know what he'd do with the silver and china unless he gets married some times, so maybe he'd sell it. I didn't say anything because I'd already said he could have them both, but I was very upset that it came to that that he didn't even really want them anyway, that they were just a potential money maker for him.
The other thing that I didn't address when I was back there, partly because he could be really testy (and I think my other brother and his kids who were staying with him the whole time while I was at a family friends' a couple blocks away, really makes me concerned maybe for my brother's emotional health. He's very good at what he does and what he's done in his house is very impressive, especially how he's managed to find ways to do it economically (get good deals, do the work himself, etc.), but there's still a lot that isn't finished. One of those things is that there aren't doors on a lot of the rooms, including one of the two working bathrooms, and that's the only full bathroom (that's working). But he's hung a sheet over the door that could be pulled down to give visual privacy and then turning the fan on in the bathroom gave a little audible privacy. The set up of the house is that everything is off of one hallway which turns at the end to go into the master bed and (unworking) bath. The other bath with the sheet over the door is directly at the end of the hall. When I was staying with him he never pulled the sheet down to pee and then he'd begin talking to me. Generally, I'd just sort of discretely pop into the kitchen, sometimes just standing there waiting for him to stop so I could come out and not have to witness this lack of discretion. I began to not use that bathroom at all (even with the sheet pulled down) but use the half bath that at least had a door on it (if not a handle yet).
Can you imagine that in this situation I feel very alone? All I have in this world, really, are my two brothers and nephews, but I had to sign a document saying that I would not have any contact with my nephews (which I will respect until they turn 18) unless my brother makes it clear (i.e., explicit) that that document is no longer in effect, at which time I would want him to sign a document officially rescinding it.
The other thing that really hurt me recently in all this is it's seemed for a long, long time that the family almost never proactively wants to help me in ways that might help me be self-sufficient, but only in a most extreme crisis, when it would look particularly bad if they didn't do something. Last fall I could have used $5,000 to pay for a lawyer to handle my EEOC/ADA suit against my last employer, since the EEOC had given me a right-to-sue letter, but I had to file the suit within 90 days after receipt of the EEOC letter. Since I didn't have the money (because I'd spent that much moving each way to my brother's and then back here). But then I learned through all this financial stuff about mom's estate that she had given my brother an $80,000 mortgage! That $5,000 could have helped me win a law suit which would have put me in a lot better position than I am now, but this is just indicative of the way my family treats me.
Maybe next time I'll return to the articles.
