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I Felt Estranged Because My Family Kept Secrets
Personal Perspective: Finding the part of my family that was estranged.
Posted August 2, 2024 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Growing up, my family was a bastion of secrets and sisters: my mom, her five sisters, and my own older sister all mostly lived within driving distance of each other in a kind of family dynasty. I learned early on that you were never allowed to say anything bad about any member of the family, no matter what they had done or said, because family was everything.
My mom and her sisters, except for my sweetly naïve aunt Jean, all loved one another more than they loved their difficult husbands. While I liked my aunts, I didn’t really know them.
They loved certain cousins of mine, like the surgeon who was big on the appearances of the women he dated (he once dropped a date for not being blonde and willowy enough.) They adored my cousin, who always mentioned her big Cambridge house and the famous people she knew. She had opinions on everything from politics to culture, and you were expected not to argue with them.
When she disparaged my writing and mocked my outfits, I cried to my mother, but my mom said that any criticism of this cousin hurt her deeply and personally, and I was not to speak ill of her ever. I began to realize that the sisters loved only one side—their side.
So, who did I feel was really family? I always loved my mom but not my brutal dad. My sister began as my best friend. But when I was little, I adored my cousin Robby, who used to read to me, using different voices and making hilarious asides. He was so funny, smart, and caring.
But suddenly, he was persona non gratis; he vanished at 17, then married and divorced. The only thing I heard later about him was that my mother was furious with him because he hadn’t invited someone my mom wanted him to invite to his second wedding. (This was a sisterly pattern of holding grudges. My own sister never forgave my cousins Margie and Nancy for being mean girls to her when they were in their early teens.)
I rebelled. I didn’t want to ignore hurts just because they were from “family.” I didn’t want to keep my opinions silent because they weren’t the same as the family’s. I felt so lonely growing up.
So, I focused on my sister and friends. I married a wonderful man and had a gorgeous baby boy. I grew really close to my sister’s daughter, too, something that made my sister verbally violent. She accused me of stealing her life, and her daughter. “Have no contact with her, or else you’re dead to me,” she told me.
I was stunned, but my mother emphatically told me I should do what my sister wanted, because a sister was much more important than a niece. But I couldn’t walk away from a family member I loved, no matter my family’s ire. And when my niece married and had kids, they became my family, too.
We all grew older. My mother died. My aunts, too. And my sister kept her word and estranged herself from me, her daughter, and her grandchildren, so we were all dead to her. I felt that loss so deeply.
Then, something happened.
My Aunt Caroline was shut out of the sisters' tight-knit group. She began to show up at my book readings, accompanied by my cousin Margie, whose unconditional love bonded us. Margie organized a lunch for us and for my cousins Liz and Nancy, an event so raucous, so warm, that we were all practically falling on the floor laughing and telling stories.
To my happy amazement, that bond stuck. Nancy, Margie, and I text and email almost every week. I love them. They love me. They even tried to reach out to my sister, apologizing for being mean girls when they were just teens. But even after all these years, my sister held her grudge, angrily refusing to make amends.
There's more.
Just a few months ago, at my reading in Boston, Nancy was there in the first row! Margie had texted! A man came up to me, grinned mischievously, and said, “Know who I am?” I had no idea, but he was my cousin Robbie! I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl. He had seen my name and decided to come and meet me.
Excitedly, we talked about our shared past, the aunts, the secrets, and my niece Hillary, whom he was dying to meet. And we all had a Zoom. Everyone told stories I didn’t know. Listening, I felt as if the world had cracked open. I didn’t know that my ethereal Aunt Teddy had been beaten up by her husband but refused to leave. I didn’t know that Robbie had also been routinely beaten up by his older brother, so often and so badly that he was brought to the hospital by his mother, where he stayed for weeks upon end. I didn’t know when he came home that his father, an uncle I had never warmed to, had insisted that even with his leg in a cast, he could get up and walk. I didn’t know that this dire treatment was the reason why he ran away from home to get married at 18! I never knew that my aunts knew how bad it was with my mother and my abusive dad, but felt powerless to do anything, I didn’t know that my boisterous Aunt Gertrude had a horrific argument-filled marriage or that my beautiful Aunt Freda’s unhappy marriage was leavened with a long-time boyfriend.
Bringing all these secrets out into the light was healing. I yearned to be able to tell my mom, who would be happy because it was family. I wanted to tell my sister, because she had loved Robbie so much, she had even thought he might take her to her high school prom. But my mother is dead. My sister has estranged herself. Why did it take us so long for the surviving family members to meet and love one another? Why hadn’t I tried to find them? Maybe because growing up, all that family hadn’t made me happy.
I may have grown up feeling like an outcast in my family, but now I feel like I am a member of a side of the family I never really knew existed for me. I cannot wait to know them and love them even more.
