Family Secrets

[reporting from Haiti]

There’s nothing shittier in life than domestic problems, problems that arise within your own home, within your own family. These problems, unfortunately, reflect in our behavior in everything else that we do, how we act, how we perceive everything. One particular issue that can cause problems is marriage, which in turn joins two families…or at least it should. My mother and my stepfather got divorced, details as to the reason why being quite a blur. At the time, I didn’t really think about it. I remember us moving out of my step dad’s house, us saying goodbye to our stepbrothers, my mother crying in the front seat, and my little brother completely oblivious as to what was happening. That was then.
Being older now, things started to slowly make sense, some of which I wish I had not known. In the “Da Vinci Code”, Sophie Neveu is disturbed in the novel as she discovers more and more secrets about her family, so much of which was hidden from her for her protection, as they say. Problems with my mother arising at an alarming level, the latter decides to send me to Haiti, to “straighten my acts out and think about my future”, as she so appropriately puts it. Another one of her goals is to start fresh, to solve the problems of the past, to try and forget them, if possible, including with my stepfather. My stepfather was great with me, representing a direct father figure that I never had, so, of course, I had no objection to meeting him and spending a day with him. Little did I know that I was in for the ride of my life, and not the kind that usually involves a lot of moaning, sweating and a waste of millions of potential children (well, in my case anyway). I originally thought that the divorce was all my mother’s idea. But sitting down with my step dad, I realized that this was not a one-way decision. Now, I do understand that what he told me might be a way to turn me against my family. But for one, he’s just not the type and knows that no one can turn me against my family. Two, what he said made sense, because I witnessed what he told me everyday, when I lived them six years ago, and every time I come on vacation and again, on this very day as I write this. As a result of all that happened, his family and my mother’s family never got along and endures in a long and senseless vendetta. When I proposed the idea of joining the two families back together again as it was before, I got in my first argument with my aunt, the first in 19 years.
What is not said in a family always has consequences. Keeping secrets, not giving all of the information about a certain fact, turning into a lie, are all the ingredients for a dangerous meal, one that our poor intestines are not built to endure. Do people honestly believe that not telling the offspring is for their own protection? This is utter horseshit, the kind that cannot be cleaned easily and usually sticks around until the smell is quite unbearable. Understandable that at a certain age, the offspring won’t understand what the truth really means. But keeping one in the dark until he’s 19 years old? Those are issues that should be seriously considered.