Can You Keep a Secret

Cassandra Clare once wrote, “Lies and secrets…are like a cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only destruction behind.” When I was in college, I worked as a paid intern at a local police department alongside my closest friend. One afternoon as we worked filing papers in the criminal records office, he jokingly suggested that we look up family members to see if they had ever been arrested. In those days, all local arrests were kept in an enormous index card file, with all arrestees divided up alphabetically. Laughingly I began scrolling through the names until my fingers froze as I found my father’s name alongside the address of the home I grew up in. 

I took his booking number and walked on unsteady legs to the arrest folders’ shelves, my eyes quickly settling on my father’s. Opening it, I saw the multiple entries, bail records, booking sheets, all stemming from various DWI arrests my father had been subject to during my childhood. I looked numbly as my father’s face stared drunkenly back at me from his mug shot. My friend, now ashamed of his idea, attempted to console me as I correlated the various dates with my father’s times mysteriously absent from the house during my younger years. All of these arrests, some resulting in jail time, had been hidden from me by my parents.

My father’s alcoholism permeated every facet of my life as a child. His unpredictable moods, unexplained absences, and utter detachment from his family shaped me into the adult I would become. When I found out about his arrest record, I had already been estranged from my father for years. My tolerance for his behavior and the pain it brought, abundant as a boy, had long since been exhausted. We would reconcile briefly a few years later after he finally got sober, the tenuous relationship we had built then quickly cut short by his death at 57 from a brain tumor only a few years later. 

The deep shame that surrounds substance abuse in families is almost ubiquitous. As astonished as I was that my mother had withheld my father’s arrests from my sister and me, her secrecy should not have surprised me. I grew up in a house of secrets and lies. One Sunday afternoon, when I was about 8 or 9, I asked my father to bring me to the mall to buy a pocket knife I had saved my money for. Still too young to effectively understand and gauge my father’s level of intoxication, I missed the many warning signs as I approached him in the den, where he lay on the sofa watching a football game. ‘Can we go to the mall now like you promised?” I asked, hesitating as his red eyes met mine. “No,” he replied sullenly, probably aware of his drunkenness and inability to drive, his gaze already returning to the game. I began to cry as I walked away.

My mother, already busy preparing dinner in the kitchen, appeared in the doorway and began admonishing my father, telling him that he should not break his earlier promise to me. Looking back, I am still stunned that she could have done this, given that she was undoubtedly aware of how drunk he was. Sufficiently chastised, my father rose unsteadily from the couch and mumbled for me to get in the car. Happy in my ignorance, I ran to get my money and hurried to the garage. We were at Sears a short time later, and my new pocketknife was in my hands. As we made the short trip home, my father rear-ended the car ahead of us as we approached a red light. Jumping from the car, he met the other driver in the road where the two men briefly spoke before hurriedly exchanging information and returning to their vehicles. In later years I would surmise that the other driver had possibly been drunk, neither man wanting the risk of police involvement. As he got back into the car, my father quickly swore me to secrecy, imploring me not to tell my mother. I agreed, anxious to win his approval, and I said nothing when we returned to the house. 

That evening, after my mother noticed the damage to my father’s car, she sat me down at the kitchen table and interrogated me about what had occurred that afternoon. Remembering my promise, I held fast to my story, insisting that nothing had happened. Then, she changed tactics, adopting a confiding tone as she told me, “you know your father is a drunk, right? Can’t you smell the liquor on his breath? He’s an alcoholic.” Unsure of the meaning of her words, I shook my head numbly as she sent me off to bed, exasperated with my naïveté. Years later, now a father myself, I still look back in astonishment at her utter disregard for my safety and well-being that day.

Throughout my childhood, I was regularly reminded to keep what went on behind the doors of our house a closely guarded secret. My father’s mysterious absences, now so easily explained, were simply not spoken of. His alcohol and pill addiction were our private shame. My parents finally separated once and for all when I was 11, their divorce following a year later as I entered middle school. It was a full year before I shared this information with anyone, even a close friend. It was not until my senior year in high school that friends began to slowly open up their own inner worlds that I realized how typical my experience was. 

The trouble with keeping secrets is that you can never truly gain perspective or understanding, both for yourself and the experiences of others. We all strive to keep up appearances, to not show any weakness. Nobody wants to be singled out as being different. In our urgency to avoid this, we fail to take the opportunity to see how our own struggles really are not that dissimilar from those of others. When I began my career as a police officer, I quickly realized how many people are struggling just to get through life, how many are touched in some way by tragedy or heartache. I have stood in million-dollar mansions, quiet suburban tract houses, in rotting trailers, and roach-infested apartments while listening to identical tales of sadness, addiction, and abuse. Truly nobody has the market cornered on pain. How liberating would it be if we all could acknowledge that? How freeing would it be to stop not only judging others but to stop fearing their judgment of ourselves and our experiences.