Eleanor Vincent

Word Count 1559

Mom was uneasy with touch. Hugs were rare. She was like a bird grazing the tip of a tree branch. Her embraces were brief, tentative, and quickly over. Even into middle age, her hugs never lasted more than a few seconds.

She was a gifted actress who had been a promising off-Broadway ingenue. After she left New York, she went on to star in productions at The Cleveland Playhouse, where my parents worked in their mid-twenties. My father referred to her as “The poor man’s Greta Garbo.”

Mom’s forte was reading bedtime stories, which she performed rather than read.

Her rendition of “Charlotte’s Web” still rings in my ears, with different voices for Wilbur, Charlotte, and Templeton, the rat. To this day, I trap and release spiders in clear plastic containers with a lid made by cutting out the centers of two paper plates and taping them together so they will slide under the container leaving spiders unharmed.

My mother taught us the names of the constellations as we lay on our backs in the grass on summer nights. She took us on canoe rides and pulled us on our Magic Flyer sled to church in the icy Pennsylvania winters. Nature was where she felt most at home. After school on spring afternoons, I’d find her in the backyard sitting at a small wooden table bent over an ancient Royal typewriter. She continued her work in theater by adapting and directing plays for community productions at our local church, typing and mimeographing the scripts.

If I contradicted her or talked back, she lashed out and slapped me. But worse were the times she ignored me altogether. I’d bound in the door after school and call, “Mom, I’m home.” Silence. I’d stand at the bottom of the steps calling her, no response. Later, I’d find her reading on a cot, propped up on pillows, in her bedroom.

How could I know the secret she was keeping from me, or how much she was relying on me and my brother and sister to shield her from prying eyes?

Dad gave us our Saturday night baths, all three of us in the tub together to save time and water. Three small bodies made the water lick the tub's rim. To keep us entertained, he sang his version of the Star-Spangled Banner which went like this:

“Oh-oh say can you see any bedbugs on me?

If you do, pick a few and I’ll fry them for you.”

He rolled the “r” in fry, widened his eyes, and spiked his eyebrows to Grinch proportions. The fried bedbugs added a certain frisson.

It made me laugh every time even though I knew what was coming.

Dad was the star of our baths, belting lyrics as he soaped our backs, Afterwards, he dried and brushed our hair.

But he was also a malevolent God who roared and threatened to cut off my ears if I spilled my milk, who told me my rear end stuck out like a bustle, and later that same day, after I arrived home late for dinner, whipped my bare legs with a branch he pulled off our maple tree, the cutting sound as it whistled through the air, the briny sting of my own blood, the welts rising on the backs of my thighs below my khaki shorts right out there on our front sidewalk where anyone could see. He was a master of humiliation. My father.

I could use terms for him like “malignant narcissist,” or “misogynist.” I could say he had an anger disorder. But terms can mislead. It was complicated.

I found out my mother was a lesbian when I was 15 and walked in on her and her lover asleep in each other’s arms, a sight I both denied because it was devastating and simultaneously welcomed because it explained so much. From that moment on, I knew it was my job to keep this secret. I did not tell my brother and sister or any of my friends.

Up until then, I thought of my mother’s friend Cecile, an art teacher who was only 12 years older than me, as an eccentric older sister. When I gathered my courage and asked my mother about Cecile, her words were curt and final, “I don’t ask about your private life, and I don’t want you to ask about mine.”

Don’t ask, don’t tell was the rule. It meant never having friends stay over, hiding our true family situation.

The night I walked in on Cecile and Mom, I ran upstairs sobbing. My father came out to see what was going on. He took me into his room and proceeded to reveal the love affairs my mother had had with women I had always thought of as family friends, as aunties who bought us books for Christmas and birthdays. He said awful things about Mom. It deepened my horror and shock and made me push the secret as far down in my soul as I could reach.

My parents married each other knowing they were both gay. They lived closeted the entire length of their 22-year marriage from 1947 until they divorced in 1969.

Both were highly strung, depressed, unpredictable people who could lash out without warning. Keeping their homosexuality secret was not the only imperative. There was so much more to hide: child abuse, spousal abuse, sexually tinged secrets, and lies that verged on fraud.

If my parents were still alive, I couldn’t write these things with the depth of calm I feel now. I’d feel like I was betraying them. But in keeping their secrets, I was keeping the system intact, as if the lie of the happy family was more powerful than truth. Like most abused children, I blamed myself. There must be something wrong with me. It was less painful to think that, than to believe that my parents didn’t know how to love me. Instead, I believed that I was unlovable. That was the biggest secret of all, one I tried to keep even from myself.

Once I tried to explain my family to a man I was dating.

“Paul was Dad’s favorite,” I began. “He was the baby of the family, and the story goes that my parents never slept together again after he was born.”

Mild alarm spread across his face.

“They were waiting for their boy…” I said, although there was so much more buried in that revelation. I couldn’t even imagine explaining. “You see, once upon a time, two people who desperately needed to pass as straight in the late 1940s decided to get married even though they both knew they were gay.”

Having gay parents felt shameful and dangerous.

How could I ever give voice, select words, create order out of the chaos that had been my childhood? The raw material I had to work with was like a vat of unset concrete – mushy and heavy – and I would never be able to get it to set up.

My brother Paul, my sister Cathy, and I were anxious, depressed little people with anger issues who wet the bed and sucked our thumbs. I had a blister on my left thumb until I was in fifth grade, when a friend shamed me into giving up my nightly habit.

I found my first therapist when I was in my early twenties, almost murdered by an abusive lover. I knew I needed help. At the time, I had no clue how deep and long-lasting trauma could be. Or how much time, money and effort it would take to recover.

“Hurt people hurt people,” the recovery saying goes. I hurt my daughters, but in very different ways than the ways my parents hurt me. I hovered. I tried to control. Sometimes, I lost patience and shouted. But I never allowed verbal or physical abuse to warp them, and I kept them away from my parents.

I have compassion for Mom and Dad. Both of them were sexually abused when they were children, by people close to their families who should have been trustworthy but weren’t. Both grew up in the uncertainty and chaos of the Great Depression. My father suffered from PTSD because of what he witnessed as a soldier in World War II. My mother and father had to hide their sexual identities, and pretend to be who they weren’t, in order to survive. At times, their marriage was a living hell. But none of that gave them a license to abuse their kids.

By openly talking about my family, I’ve tried to drain the poison. Keeping my parents’ secrets was vital to protecting their livelihood and our place in the college town where we lived, not quite outcasts but suspect. It took decades before I could say how it really was at home.

The intellectual and cultural bright side of being raised by these two wounded people, is counterpointed by the dark side, the slaps and spankings, the shouted insults, the neglectful treatment, the many ways I was harmed instead of protected. They burdened their three kids with a secret we didn’t even know we were keeping. And so, I carry a coin with two different faces, and each day I wake up with that coin in my pocket. It’s mine to carry, to examine, and to bring into the light.

Eleanor’s memoir, Swimming with Maya: A Mother’s Story (Dream of Things, 2013), is a New York Times e-book bestseller that explores love, loss, and resilience following the death of her daughter. Vincent’s essays appear in several collections, including Creative Nonfiction’s anthology, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die and This I Believe: On Motherhood. She holds an MFA from Mills College and is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, Left Margin Lit, and The Author’s Guild. She lives in Walnut Creek, California, and has a new memoir forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press in 2024.