Wow.
Mindblowing story in a retro Psychology Today issue on “little detectives” – kids who uncover their parents awful lies, secrets, and scandals. It also reminded me about this Kendra Wilkinson story that popped up on Facebook the other day (more on that down the page) and made me do a mental about-face about the concept of sharing hard truths with your kids (versus keeping family secrets).
It’s comforting to know it’s kinda common in my cohort group – that we all pulled the old 007 stunts to find out family facts being hidden from us when we were kids. Listening through peepholes, picking up the phone line, sneaking through potential evidence. Some kids uncover the truth themselves and have to decide whether to pass it on to a parent. That’s hard enough – being the initial secret-keeper. This particular story was more about a kid overhearing the truth, and then hearing a parent deliver a lie to them in person that clearly contradicted what he just heard. As a parent, telling versus not-telling is a tough decision.
But this tale was next-level in its lies, though. Really felt for the guy.
’cause it was like this whole soap opera style of web-spun deceit. It started with a kid (who they called Brian, adding an asterisk to denote that’s not his real name, which just makes it all the more obvious to whoever was involved in the real story and might be reading the article that obviously it’s their non-Brian) whose dad died. When his mom took the call, he overheard “pills” – and at twelve, you’re old enough to know that means “OD”.
So, first lie is his mom saying “he died of pneumonia” when he really self-murdered.
To be fair, Buddy, it was a group effort and a shared throne.
Because second lie reveals itself when the kid vents his feels later to his mom about missing his smart and funny and charming dad. She in turn unloads on him, saying, “Oh, you think he’s so great? He had an affair and did this shitty thing and that shitty thing and I don’t care if he sired you. You shouldn’t miss him because I hate him and everyone should think like I do.” #paraphrasedquotes
Great. Now the poor kid knows his dad was a cheater. What a way to get the news, too – all at once and through a medium of pure hate because his mom’s been keeping that secret for so long when she shouldn’t have been. He doesn’t even have a non-biased person to talk to about it because his mom’s too overcome with resentment to offer any sort of support. Her brain’s probably been sprinting the same rage track for decades. And like a muscle, our thought-habits get ingrained. So that’d take a while to undo. But Brian wouldn’t realize this. Why would he? He’s young and grief stricken.
So he goes to his paternal gramma (I mean, who better to talk to about daddykins than the lady who birthed him – right?). And they’re super close. They share stories about Brian’s late dad. It’s sweet and emotional and intimate. But then, when this bish is basically on her death bed and, I suppose, thinking she’d better make amends, you wanna know what she tells Brian? That after her son’s affair, he wrote a letter to his wife (Brian’s mom – who now hates her dead husband, mind you). In the letter, Brian’s dad had all the amends for his wife you’d want and need to hear as a woman scorned: “I had this affair. I’m wrong. I’m sorry. I’m mentally ill. I’m getting help for it.” Something to that effect – all in a personalized, non-perfunctory-not-just-an-email note to the woman he loved, married, and had had a child with.
And, now, at 96 grandma admits to Brian – she read her son’s letter… and ripped it up.
“To protect him.”
Lie three.
“Your dad wrote a letter to your mother,” his grandmother told Brian. In the letter, his father spelled out everything he had done; he apologized and begged for forgiveness. But Grandma confessed that she had torn that letter up. She had decided to protect her son’s reputation, and that may have cost him his life.”
Man, how are you still sane, Asterisk Brian?
And did the mom ever find out she’d gotten the apology she’d been waiting for?
She just never received it?
This is like some awful opposite-of-romantic version of The Notebook.
And just like in The Notebook, the truth usually reveals itself. When someone tries to hide half of it, it half reveals itself and our brains make up the rest so we can try to make sense of the world and move on with existence. That’s what happened with the mom – she half made up the story with anger where that missing puzzle piece of her hubby’s note should’ve gone. When we’re livid about being deceived, sometimes that emotion’s so blinding that our own internal logical detectives can’t do their job. Brian, who still loved his father despite his flaws, managed to slowly uncover the truth. For the wife or husband, living in that angry head space may be hard to move out of, but it serves no purpose staying there marinating in it. There’s no solution in that.
It kinda makes me rethink another story that made its way into my newsfeed recently.
Ya know, the one I referenced earlier about ex Playmate Kendra Wilkinson?
(Even easy-to-please peeps get cheated on. So don’t blame yourselves, ladies ‘n gents).
The title read something about explaining to her son her husband’s (his father’s) affair.
The kid’s like four or five, I think.
While I didn’t read the story (couldn’t be bothered – even though I used to love that sexy show she did in the mansion), the main headline alone struck me. I was judgmental. My initial reaction was “why do kids need to know this so young anyway?” The answer, obviously, is that they need to know so that X years from now, when they find out (take your pick on an age – it’s the instant information era so he’ll find out faster than if it were the 80’s or something), their whole lives won’t seem like a lie. That may seem Lilliputian in importance, but – as just one example (and there are plenty) – this kind of cognitive dissonance was reportedly the first thing that set off Ted Bundy – learning his “mother” was his grandma and his “sister” was his mother. They’d lied to him. Like learning you’re adopted, this affects you like a lightning strike.
Your whole identity’s shattered.
Secondly, I feel like the honesty approach’s benefit is symbiotic.
It helps the parents too – but only if they can keep their kids’ well-being in mind when they break the news. (“What kind of an effect is badmouthing daddy gonna have on my child’s developing psyche? What kind of effect does it have on ME to keep saying this out loud or even internally, to myself, all day long?”) It doesn’t. It’s a misery malignancy. By getting it out in the open, you find a creative way to explain it with serenity and in five-year-old language. I think the subtext said Kendra told her son “Daddy is in time out because he hurt mommy’s feelings” – or something to that effect. Not bad at all. It’s a halfway happy medium between the bad secret-keeping and explaining to a kid the diff between marital sex and extra-marital sex before they even know what the eff sex is.
Also, for Kendra (or any parent), saying this out loud with a calm energy (the only kind you wanna use when talking to your kids about their dad, riiight?) serves as a kinda affirmation for you too. If you’re telling yourself and your brunch crew all day long that he’s an asshole and she’s a whore – it might be true, but it’s outta your control, isn’t it? You can’t change his defects or the past. So why stew? Resentment is a stew – it’s holding a scalding stew pot in your palms and planning to throw it on the object of your disgust and his side piece. But in the process, you only burn yourself – and maybe your child – who grows up thinking they’re to blame somehow.
By changing the tone of the story when you say it out loud (and to the child you love), you can empower yourself by changing the only things you do have control over: Your response, your outlook, and your energy.
That’s super hard to do if you’re blinded by hurt.
Hard – but not impossible.
Just remember that your kids are mirrors of you – and maybe it’ll motivate you to try.