Family Stories and Secrets

'The Innermost House' by Dr. Cynthia Blakeley

Source: Emory ILA, used with permission

Another Thanksgiving in the books. As usual, we spent the holiday weekend with my husband’s family in Alabama—well, “framily,” a combination of family and friends whom we have known for so long and love so much that they, too, are family. Lots of cooking and fussing, eating and drinking, and, of course, stories!

So many stories, some told over and over every Thanksgiving and some told for the first time over laughter and tears. And, also as usual, many of the stories were about friends and family no longer with us, parents and grandparents, stories of our own childhoods and generations past. As I have written about so many times in this blog, family stories are the glue that connects us across the generations; family stories provide the foundation for our own sense of who we are and of the core values we live by.

Last night, I was reminded of the complexity of family stories. My good friend and colleague Dr. Cynthia Blakeley has just published her memoir, The Innermost House, and gave a reading at Emory University sponsored by the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Department of Psychology. Cynthia grew up in the wild nature of outer Cape Cod in a working-class family that eked out a living from fishing and tourism; her story is poignant and loving, written in lyrical language, bringing her stories to heartbreaking and heartwarming light. Like any memoir, Cynthia’s focuses on her own childhood and young adult experiences, but she deftly weaves in family stories—and family secrets. Part of her motivation to write the book was her nagging sense as an adult that there was more to her story, family secrets held close but still present.

Not all family stories are positive or happy, and perhaps some family secrets are better left untold. But even when untold, family secrets have generational effects. Children implicitly understand the holes, the stories left unsaid, and these can eat away at feelings of safety and security in the world.

Carol Smart, using data from the Mass Observation Project, an archive at Sussex University, explored how adults discussed family secrets, and she describes their various forms and functions, including secrets of avoidance and personal grievance. Many family secrets become mythic stories, like the great uncle who ran away to the circus, but no one really knows what happened, or virtual stories, where narrators claim there are no secrets but still mention things never talked about in the family. The most pernicious secrets are about family formation–marriages, adultery, adoption, paternity. Smart concludes that family secrets “trouble the smooth façade of ordinary family life” (p. 551).

Cynthia’s nagging sense of family secrets left untold led her to dig into her own history. She spent years eliciting stories from her grandmother and mother, and she worked diligently in historical archives, as well as rereading her own childhood journals and searching through family photos and letters to piece together their difficult histories. Her maternal grandmother was abandoned to an orphanage as a child even though she had living parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. She then married into a loving, tumultuous family and ended up fostering no less than 17 orphaned girls, clearly compassion learned from her own experiences. Yet she remained an aloof grandmother, always there, but too often with a disapproving edge.

Cynthia’s mother was a joyous woman, sexy and charismatic, who entered a disastrous first marriage during which she was physically and emotionally abused. Her strength and determination to get out of that relationship was heroic but left many scars, including addiction and, most likely, post-traumatic stress. She loved her children with affection and acceptance, but in a completely chaotic environment. This is the legacy that Cynthia was born into.

Cynthia describes her childhood on the Cape as rambunctious, reveling in the natural beauty and running wild with too many siblings and cousins to count. Yet there was also darkness—a mother who was loving but unreliable, a childhood bully, the stigma of being a lower-class “Wellfleetian,” and an especially harrowing episode of sexual assault. Cynthia’s story is one of “writing her way out”—of being determined to go to college, of getting scholarships and fellowships, and of ultimately earning a doctorate and becoming a successful professional and academic. It is a story of triumph in many ways, yet, as an adult, Cynthia still felt there was something missing, something she needed to know. Her family’s stories.

And so she slowly but surely began to extract, piece by piece, through multiple interviews with her grandmother and mother, the stories—the stories of their experiences, the stories that made them who they were, and the stories that lingered in Cynthia’s own being. Fortunately for Cynthia, her grandmother and mother showed amazing resilience and ultimately created productive, loving lives. Interestingly, both lived lives that centered on helping others—her grandmother as a foster parent and her mother as an addiction counselor and social worker. Learning her family stories has helped Cynthia understand who they were, but also to better understand who she is. Her persistence, tenacity, and resilience are as much a part of her legacy as the challenges she has faced.

Family Dynamics Essential Reads

Breaking Bad: Moving Beyond Enmeshment

Are You the Family Whistleblower?

As Cynthia’s memoir highlights, sometimes discovering family secrets can be positive; it can bring deeper connections and understanding among family members and perhaps can even promote healing.

I am lucky to have married into a family that has so many wonderful stories, but I grew up in a family dark with secrets, secrets I will never learn now. And, for me, that is a loss, a loss of a sense of who I am and how I came to be this person. Cynthia’s memoir, in its sweeping beauty, is ultimately a story of redemption, of healing and forgiveness. This Thanksgiving season, it is the best story of all.