Mother's Secrets

Dear Mum

There is a secret that you never knew about me.

Ironically, the secret is this: I was aware of your closely guarded secrets long before you passed away. Two of your biggest secrets, anyway (God knows how many there really are).

A third secret (hopefully the final one I’ll discover) only crossed my radar recently.

I didn’t tell you this because I assumed, given that your eleven children had all been adults for a long time, that you had decided never to tell us. You must have had good reasons for this, at least in your way of thinking, and I respected that. Perhaps by the time we were all adults you had decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

Perhaps you were ashamed? If so, there was no need for that.

Mum, ‘secretive’ is not a word I would ever have chosen to describe you until I started to stumble onto these morsels of hidden information.

There were more obvious descriptors of you than ‘secretive’, after all.

Guileless. Decent. Honest. Caring. Accepting. Tolerant. Forgiving. Generous. Thoughtful. Loving.

Quietly intelligent. Quietly proud.

‘The closest thing to a saint on earth’. That was Dad’s favorite way of describing you.

Those descriptors are largely true, but ‘secretive’ now replaces ‘guileless’ on my list.

You were never secretive with malicious intent. You were secretive with the intention of forever protecting your eleven children from truths that were unpalatable. Or truths which simply did not fit the accepted narrative of who our family was.

I came to suspect many years ago that the usual narrative about 'the first cousins' was not the full story, for instance.

The facts, in brief, are that your older sister died giving birth to her tenth child. She was just 39. At some point down the track, the children (late teens down to infant) moved out of home. Most were ultimately fostered out, many in dubious situations, although all spent extended periods staying with us in our modest house.

It was vaguely understood by us that their father, grieving after the sudden death of his wife, simply could not cope with raising all his children. The children stayed with us during school holidays, resulting in some terrific memories from my childhood. There were already eleven of us, after all, so having more kids around was great fun. The cousins obviously adored you and regarded you as their second mum. You and dad were generous with your time and treated all as if they were part of some huge extended family.

There was more to it, though, Mum, wasn’t there? Two of the teen girls in that family had pregnancies and, as was the norm back then, discreetly gave up their babies for adoption. I did not know that until a few years ago.

Who was the father? Or fathers?

DNA sharing means that I now communicate with one of the grandsons of those pregnancies, Mum. He seems to be a decent young guy who craves to know more about his biological origins. I’d like to help more but it is too late to ask.

It was perhaps three years ago that I learned another of your secrets, the one about 'a different cousin'. She was your first cousin, therefore my second cousin. This woman killed her husband and two children in the early 1960s in a sleepy rural town. Her husband was in a gun club, and, for reasons that I will never know, she used his shotgun to blast them all away sometime during the night. She then shot herself in the head but somehow survived, only dying fifty years later.

All four were found early the next morning by the poor man who regularly gave the two children a lift to school.

We were never told this rather significant piece of news of the triple killings. We did not mix much with that branch of the family, after all. But the perpetrator, by definition, was my cousin too and I probably should have been informed at some point.

Mum, about thirty years after this incident, I remember how we took you to meet two cousins. They were sisters and the younger one was the person who had killed her husband and children all those years before. At the time I had no idea. She was by then a snowy haired old woman with a cheerful, slightly vague demeanor. She even looked a little like you.

You sat at the dining table with the woman’s older sister, chatting, catching up, eating freshly baked cake, and drinking tea out of fine porcelain cups.

I sat talking to this old dear as she in turn watched my children playing on the floor.

I found out several years ago about the triple murders from archival news articles while researching family history. Your cousin spent decades institutionalized. She was obviously 'out’ by our one-time meeting in the 1990s (or was she just on some sort of day release?).

By the time I learned all this, Mum, you were unwell and becoming forgetful. There was never a right moment to broach the subject, and I assumed you had never mentioned for your own reasons.

A ‘third secret’, Mum, the one I’ve only stumbled on since your death, is in some ways more disturbing.

What could be worse than being related to a triple murderer?

Being closely related to a powerful politician who you vehemently disagree with.

Again, I was doing family research. Again, I found connections that I would prefer not to have discovered. This politician was until recently the most powerful person in our nation. He is also a person who I do not respect. He is a person whose policies and values I am appalled by.

He may well be a valued son, husband, father, and friend to some. I wouldn’t know as we have never met, and I won’t be rushing out to make his acquaintance. I’m angered by his government – their cover-ups, misogyny, mismanagement of the COVID19 vaccination rollout, inaction and delaying tactics on issues such as climate change, the sidestepping of personal responsibility.

You must have known, Mum. You were in touch with that side of the family. You talked about some of them and exchanged mail periodically with them. I even now vaguely recall visits from close mutual relatives in my childhood. I just never made the connection.

To be fair, you may have just been attempting to protect us all from the realization of being closely related to such a second-rate human being.

I cheer myself up by reminding myself that being related to somebody says nothing about one’s own life achievements or lack of them. It is guilt by association only. I hope you understood this for yourself, Mum.

Where does all this leave us?

For me, Mum, nothing has changed. You were a wonderful mother to us (and our cousins) right until the end. You did not complain at all about the cancer which laid waste to you, finally ending your life the day before your 90th birthday. Complaining was never your style. I still hear you chuckling dismissively about your terminal diagnosis, saying something like ‘Oh, it’s all a lot of silly fuss over nothing’.

I suspect you knew your prognosis long before we did. You were capable of secrets, after all.

I was happy to play along with the official narrative by the end. There was no point raising these long-hidden realities with you. None of it altered who you were and your motherly need to protect us, even when some of us were so obviously undeserving.

I find myself admiring this updated narrative of you, Mum, the new depths that I have found in you. Who would have thought that a benign little old lady, herself born prematurely and ultimately the mother of eleven, would have been capable of keeping such secrets?

We were not hurt by not knowing, after all, were we?

It’s too late to pass all this on in person, but I’m going to say it anyway.

Good on you, Mum.