My mother used to tell me

‘Good things come in little packages.” Probably because I was smaller than my little (younger) sister. She told me to always walk facing traffic so if a car pulls over you can run away more easily. This has, indeed , proven helpful to me over the years as my hearing loss worsened.

She never told me I could be or do anything I wanted. She never told me to be careful of men when I was a little girl. I guess that was too close to the forbidden subject of sex for her to be comfortable. I don’t remember her telling me much of anything. Names of the stars in old movies.

Then there was the day she called me on the phone and told me her big lie, shame, secret. She had kept it from me and my sisters all our lives. It was just a few short years before her death . She stated the facts (“just the facts, ma’am” I hear Joe Friday in my head) and then she said “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

‘It.” Like it was some small thing. The lie she told us all our lives.

The lie: her father dying in an industrial accident when she was two – he fell to his death while sandblasting a building in NYC.

The truth: her mother’s husband had died that way but it was two years before, not after, my mother was born.

So, my mother who gave the impression of purity in her presentation of herself, was actually hiding/denying her shame of being the bastard child of a widow and her adulterous lover. Illegitimacy, vexingly important in pre-WWII, wasn’t even a consideration by the time I heard her story in 2012. But still, I sensed the pain and shame she had borne all her life.

What intrigues me most is how, as a teenager, I often felt my mom thought I was too wildly sexual. Maybe I was, but now I wonder if it wasn’t more her shame at her mother’s sexuality.