(Dad’s first secret/lie)
“Who are those little girls?” my mother asked my grandmother, pointing at the picture on her living room end table, the first time my mother and paternal grandmother ever met.
“Oh, those are nieces of mine.” my grandmother fibbed, denying my sister, Nancy’s, existence. My grandmother denied the existence of her own grandchildren in order to help her son, her only child, deceive his 2nd wife.
My mother had no idea that my father had been married before, much less that he had two children. She wouldn’t know these things for another two years after their marriage.
My mother did not learn of Nancy’s existence until her first born was a year old and she was pregnant with me when Dad brought five year old Nancy to live with us, after her mother died.
The older child, Bonnie Lou, the firstborn of my father’s, had already died of cerebral palsy at the time my grandmother told that fib.
Our mother was enraged at this deception, having not known he’d ever been married before, taking it out on Nancy for the whole of her life.
People talk about forgiveness, but it’s hard when you’ve witnessed systematic abuse for decades. Not just a moment of poor judgment that results in damage, but an entire lifetime.
A few years before the alzheimers appeared, my father told me the tragic story of how he walked out on Hester, his first wife, and how much he regretted it.
It was the remorse he showed through the years that made me able to forgive my father to a great extent. He never had a father, or male mentor, or grandfather. Never had any of the advantages that my mother had. He was always remorseful for his mistakes. My mother never acknowledged making any mistakes.
This picture is of Nancy Lee and her mother, Hester, a red haired beauty. Nancy kept a box with all her pictures underneath her bed when we were children and I loved to come into her room and look through them, with Nancy in the room and the door closed of course.
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a touching note: A few weeks after his 3rd wife was buried I took him to her grave and as we drove away he looked back and said, “Poor Hester”… referring to his wife from 60 years earlier … a few weeks after that He couldn’t remember who anyone was except his mother (in the photos)
…..
while Dad was in the hospital, suffering from alzheimers, I brought family pictures to his room to comfort him. When he saw a picture of his first born, Bonnie Lou, he slid the picture quickly behind another picture, looked around frantically and whispered to me to hide it. It was then that I’d realized he’d felt forced to hide her picture from two jealous wives for the past five decades! The only pictures that I ever saw of pretty, little Bonnie Lou were in a box under my sister’s bed.
As my stepmother framed it to us many times, we were reminders that he’d shared a bed with another woman. The fewer reminders of that, the better.
Oikos 