Moving Past the Silences: Joy Ahead

My father’s German-Jewish parents, on their honeymoon in England.

At first, as I pried at the hidden seams and hushed whispers that framed my family — the one I grew up in, and the start of what I carried into my marriages— I thought I was the only one who had such a messy background. And I was ashamed.

But the point of this kind of research isn’t to stop when a few things are uncovered; it’s to clean the kitchen, so to speak. Gradually I’ve come to see that even the emotionally healthiest of us often have family members stressed and stretched, wondering and sometimes warped out of shape.

That discovery, for me, has been the best reason to keep writing these chapters. What I’ve experienced may match a piece of your life. When you see the match, you may feel relief. (Some people write to me to explain this.) So by talking it over, we can give each other relief and a new kind of recovery.

Talking Trauma

The problem is, trauma seems to come in two versions: the kind that keeps people talking about it all the time (hard to be a friend when that’s going on!), and the kind that gets bottled up. Pretend that it’s not there. That faded line of numbers tattooed on a neighbor’s arm? Be polite, don’t ask. The car accident down the road? “Nobody got hurt badly, and insurance covered the replacement car. So let’s get on with today.”