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Sparkle (1)
Dear Oprah,
At 4 p.m. Monday, having studiously avoided all on-line references to the "big reveal" that you had scheduled, I flipped on the T.V. in my kitchen.
My eyes pricked with tears listening to you weave the tale of Patricia. As you narrated her story, I knew before you ever said it. I knew Patricia was your sister. Allow me to congratulate you on the new addition to your family!
I was 26 when my mother sat me down . Her delicate hands trembled as she slowly exhaled. "I have something I need to tell you..." She looked smaller to me at that moment. As if the parts had reversed, and I was now the parent to her role as child. I couldn't possibly imagine what she was going to tell me.
She said that she had a child, a daughter that she had given up for adoption before meeting my father. For more than three decades, she carried this secret, locked tightly away, wrapped in a thick blanket of shame. There was also fear. Fear that her secret would be revealed. Fear that upon revelation, she would be rejected by those who loved her most; fear that people would somehow "see" her differently.
Now, Oprah, my mother's story is different in some ways than your mother's. Mom didn't have other children at the time. She was unmarried, and the only child of two Irish Catholic parents on Long Island. She was sent to a "home for unwed mothers" to carry the pregnancy to term so that the baby could be surrendered for adoption. But she didn't just receive prenatal care. She was force-fed heaping piles of shame. Reminded daily that she was a sinner, a "bad girl", a slut. Told to keep this secret, from everyone. Forever.
When Mom told me I had another sister, I wept. Not from sadness, or anger. Certainly not from shame. I wept because this amazing woman who had taught me so much, and loved us all so much, and raised us to be empathetic, caring, loving adults had been carrying her shame for decades. And she carried it alone. She was burdened by the fear of the secret being found out. My heart ached that she was treated the way she was after she got pregnant--that she was led to believe that she was intrinsically bad.
When women surrendered children for adoption in the 1960's, as our mothers did, the message was clear: You should BE ASHAMED. That was complemented by the not-so-sage advice to just "forget about it". The claim was that because the adoptions were closed--that their identities would forever be protected--they should just move on and put it behind them.
My mother didn't tell anyone. Nor did she forget about it. Her secret, that shame, colored her life. And, the shame never went away. It impacted her every day of her life. Revealing this secret did not simply dissolve years of self-flagellation. Which brings me to the point of this letter.
I know that it was with the best of intentions that your closing message to your mother on yesterday's show was to tell her that she can now let her shame go. But, Oprah, it isn't that easy. You can't undo the impact of over forty years of internalized shame in a matter of months. Though you and I see no shame in the choice that our mothers made, they still carried this secret, effectively alone, believing that they should be ashamed. That for various reasons, they were not good women, they weren't good mothers, because of the choice that they made.
So you can't expect them to just "let that go". Mom told me about my sister in 1996. They met one another in 2001. Mom died in 2005. That's nine years, and even then she never was able to completely let go those feelings of shame and inadequacy that surrounded her experience as a birth mother. My guess is, even with therapy, it would take an adult years of intense work to unravel that complex web of emotion and process it.
