Unlocking Secrets Read online

  “Then the only advice I can give you is to be the first one to stand up in front of the group tomorrow morning, because then your fears won’t have time to build up,” she said.

  That night, a psychic gave a presentation and channeled some deceased people from the other side. Maybe Larry will come through and tell me it’s okay, I thought. But no such luck. I kept looking for a sign from him. It might seem silly, but a big part of me still felt that I would be betraying him and that I needed his permission.

  I stayed up past 2 A.M. trying to prepare my talk because we weren’t allowed to use notes. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my brain to focus. So I just surrendered and went to bed. Whatever comes out is whatever’s going to come out, I told myself.

  The next morning when Gail asked who wanted to go first, I raised my hand. Earlier, at the start of the workshop, everyone had worked together to create a name for each person. I had been given a medicine name, the Goddess of Love, Light, and Truth. “Truth”—it seemed to be another sign. So I started my talk by saying, “I don’t know what the Goddess of Love, Light, and Truth is like, but I can tell you what the Goddess of Fear is like,” and just continued from there.

  I had spoken many times at work functions and always hated it. So often, I’d get lost because negative thoughts would derail my thinking. But not this time. It was the first time I had ever felt as though someone was almost talking through me. My heart opened, and it spoke. I guess it couldn’t—I couldn’t—hold it anymore. It was like that Elizabeth Appell quote: “And then the day came when the risk to remain tight, in a bud, became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

  Gail let me talk for 13 minutes instead of the usual 8, and when I was finished, I looked out at the group. There was a stillness in the room. Several people were crying. Many were smiling.

  What I didn’t see—but had fully expected to see—was judgment or rejection. No one threw daggers at me or left the room. Nobody was looking down on me. And while I’d started the talk afraid, I was no longer afraid. The drive to tell the truth kept me going.

  I kept my secrets for 30 years based on beliefs about what might happen if I let people see the real me. But after my disclosure, my world didn’t come to a shattering end.

  Instead, people came up to me during our break and told me their own secrets. One woman had been raped and hadn’t told anyone. Someone else had lost a job due to addiction.

  A couple of them said, “You should write about this.” It was the first time I’d ever considered that my story could potentially be of value to others. It seemed as though the universe was sending me a message: “This isn’t just about you anymore. We all have a story to tell, and almost everyone hides pieces of who they are. Maybe you can educate people about the emotional cost of hiding and secret-keeping.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced, though, until a few months later in New York City. I was downtown and decided to walk over to the September 11 memorial. I had known several people who died that day in the terrorist attacks, but had never visited Ground Zero. For so many years, the thought of doing so had been just too painful. But for some reason that day, I stopped and paused at the corner, looking down at the memorial’s waterfall.

  Then I noticed that I’d stopped directly in front of the name James Crawford. Now, I didn’t know James Crawford, but I certainly had known a Larry Crawford. I could feel that this was a message from my Larry. He was there with me!

  I went down into the subway to head back home, and while waiting on the platform, a woman and her husband asked me for directions. We chatted a bit and ended up sitting next to each other on the train.

  During our ride, my phone beeped to let me know I had an e-mail, and when I checked, I saw that it was from Hay House. I opened the e-mail to discover that my book proposal had been accepted for publication! It was impossible to contain my excitement, even though I was in public. I’m not a crier, but my eyes welled up as I was overwhelmed with joy.

  It felt like a message from Larry that it was okay to share our story with the world. My heart pounded, and I just had to tell the news to someone. So I turned to the woman who had asked me for directions and asked, “May I share something with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I wrote a book proposal, and I just found out it’s going to be published!”

  “Really? Congratulations!”

  “Yes! I can’t believe it!”

  “What’s the book about?” she asked.

  “It would take a while to tell you. Basically, it’s about my life, but mostly about my husband’s death. It was very traumatic for me. I loved him very much.”

  “What’s your name? I want to read the book.”

  “I don’t even know when it will come out. It’ll be a long time.”

  “That’s okay. I really want to read it.”

  “Kathe Crawford. Kathe with an e instead of a y. Thanks for letting me share that! And are you clear now about how to get where you’re going?”

  “Yes, I think so.” She paused for a second and took a breath. “I’m taking my husband to the hospital for his first chemotherapy treatment. He has stage four cancer.” Her eyes filled with tears, but I could tell she was trying to stay strong since her husband was sitting right next to her. He just looked at me as the three of us shared a moment of . . . I don’t know exactly what to call it. Grace? Fear? Love? All of the above. They knew I understood what they were going through.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she continued. “I just don’t know how to handle all of it.”

  She had so many questions she wanted to ask me. I tried to answer all of them before I reached my stop.

  When I had to leave the train, I hugged her good-bye, not knowing if I’d see her again, if her husband would make it, or if she’d ever read my book.

  I was sure that meeting them was another sign from the universe that there was a purpose in telling my story.

  “My story.” It wasn’t until I started sharing it that I began to fully understand what keeping my secrets had done. The release I felt that day at Omega was like taking a full breath for the first time in 30 years. The freedom I’d longed for all my life had been largely in my own hands all along. It wasn’t about getting away from anybody else. It was about opening up and allowing. It was about trusting myself and trusting that there were people who would love me in spite of my past. More than anything, though, it was about learning to love myself. That was the biggest lesson.

  And it was a particularly hard lesson because I had learned how to hide my true self and how to keep secrets for my loved ones long before I ever met my husband. I had learned all that in my childhood.

  CHAPTER 2

  LEARNING TO HIDE

  Growing up, I was intrigued by the front doors of the houses in our North Jersey neighborhood. My dad worked long hours, and my mom was often nowhere to be found. So I spent a lot of time wandering the nearby streets, playing a game with myself: Whose door will I knock on today? Who will welcome me as a part of their family?

  I would sneak peeks through the windows of the houses. I imagined the kids coming home from school, their mothers greeting them with excited hugs. “How was school today? What did you learn?” You know—the kinds of things that happen in normal households. Even at a young age, I knew my family wasn’t normal, and I wanted normal so much I could taste it.

  As I tried to catch glimpses of what was going on inside my neighbors’ homes, I fantasized about how the children’s moms lovingly made dinner for them while they did their homework. What would it be like to be one of those kids? If I could just get one of these families to take me in, I thought, I would feel safe and loved. I would matter.

  Not that I ever had the courage to actually knock on any of those doors. But the make-believe game was an innocent, comforting escape from the chaos going on behind the closed door of my own house.

  From the outside looking in, I’m sure everybody thought we were an average f
amily with a loving mother, a hardworking dad, and good kids. But that was a façade my parents were careful to present to the world. I learned early on that the truth should be hidden if you want to be accepted by others.

  My parents were a good-looking couple, so it wasn’t difficult for them to keep up appearances. You couldn’t get more beautiful than my mother, Rosalie, nicknamed “Chickie.” She was an olive-skinned second-generation Italian American who looked a lot like Ava Gardner, one of Frank Sinatra’s wives and a Hollywood Golden Age screen siren. Mom had enormous dark eyes, full lips, and long, thick, fiery auburn hair.

  She was the kind of woman who turned every head—male and female—when she walked into a room. Men turned to putty around her, and she loved the attention.

  My dad had chiseled features with that “bad boy” James Dean kind of look. He was six foot two and slender, but also muscular, rugged, and strong. Since he was a roofer, he had a natural six-pack from carrying bundles of shingles on his back to the tops of houses.

  Dad turned Mom’s head as much for his earning potential as his looks. Well, that and the new baby-blue Cadillac he drove. His friends called him “Cadillac Joe.”

  Chickie and Cadillac Joe were popular in their community. Mom could captivate anyone with her passion and zest for life. Dad was everybody’s friend—the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. Despite his lack of education, he was smart, well-read, witty, and had a great sense of humor. To me, he was larger than life.

  Dad had a rock-solid work ethic, but not my mom. She was the unconventional-artist type with the gift of creativity, and she didn’t like to work hard.

  As popular as they were, neither of them seemed to understand how to be parents. When I was older, my mother said to me matter-of-factly, “I never really wanted kids. I only had them for your father. I was a kid myself when you were born!” She was right. She couldn’t handle the responsibility and just wanted to play.

  Nevertheless, she had three children—my brother, Joe, who was just a little more than a year older than me, followed by me, and then my little sister, Kris, nearly a decade later. Joe and Kris got my mother’s dark Italian features, while I got my father’s blond hair and blue eyes.

  Mom and Dad’s brand of parenting often involved leaving us to fend for ourselves at a young age. For example, when I was five years old and my brother was seven, they decided we should go to parochial school and the adjoining Catholic church. “We think God is important, but we don’t really believe in him ourselves or like what religion stands for,” they said. “But you should make your own decisions and figure it out.” How could children as young as five and seven figure out such a thing?

  The school and church were nearly 30 minutes away by bus. Sometimes Dad would drive us to school early before work, but no one at home made us breakfast, so he’d give us money to buy buttered rolls at the deli next door. On Sundays, they’d drive us to church, leave us there, and pick us up after Mass.

  Girls were supposed to cover their heads, but my mother had forgotten that. One of the nuns looked at me and said, “What’s wrong with you? Where are your parents?”

  “I don’t know. They just dropped us off,” I answered quietly, cringing inside as she placed a tissue on my head, shaking her head in disapproval. Even at five years old, I understood enough to feel ashamed and embarrassed.

  Inside, I watched all the families there together. Their clothes were crisp and clean. The men wore suits and ties. Many of the families held hands. It was amazing. I wished I had parents like that.

  Even though the nuns frightened me, I suppose my exposure to the church solidified my spirituality. God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were my solace and my true family. I trusted God like I didn’t feel I could trust the adults around me. It comforted me to know that He was always watching over me when no one else was.

  Often when I came home from school, I couldn’t find my mother anywhere. I felt rejected. Why didn’t she want to be with me?

  Mom’s local extended family was busy living their own lives, and Dad’s family didn’t live nearby. Plus, Mom was frequently not on speaking terms with her family members, so there were rarely other adults available to help. I couldn’t get attached to anyone, though, because if I did, they’d soon disappear from our lives.

  I loved my maternal grandmother, who was more of a mother to me than my mom. But she and my mother didn’t get along, which sometimes got in the way of my spending time with her.

  Then, when I was eight years old, I made the mistake of telling my grandmother about a fight I’d witnessed between my parents. My grandmother asked my mom about the argument, and I caught my mother’s wrath for telling. It became clear that Mom wanted our family business kept from our extended family.

  That’s when the importance of secret-keeping was solidified for me. It certainly felt important for my own safety and became ingrained in me as a survival mechanism. I had to either keep almost everything to myself or deal with my mother’s anger.

  Despite this secrecy, between the five of us in my immediate family, there were few boundaries. Mom would think nothing of telling me the details of her relationship with my dad. As I got a bit older, she even casually told me she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stay with him, as if I were one of her girlfriends. Little was sacred or censored. We shared pain, violence, and tears. And those shared secrets kept us tight as a family in many ways—brutally tight and emotionally enmeshed.

  My mother’s biggest secret was the way she behaved when only the immediate family was around. She’d have outbursts that built and built until she started smashing things—even items she loved. I don’t know if Mom did it on purpose, but she often smashed gifts I’d given her. She even sold some of my gifts over the years.

  “I gave you that!” I’d say when she broke things, but she’d just brush it off.

  “You made me do it. Next time, behave!” The rejection was heart-wrenching. I loved her so much, and I just couldn’t understand why she would treat me like that.

  She blamed both my brother and me for her fits, but I seemed to be her number one scapegoat. “It’s all because you didn’t come home on time,” she’d say, or “If you’d just vacuumed the house like you were supposed to.”

  I didn’t realize it as a child, but she was dealing with mental illness. All I understood was that she couldn’t control her rage. She also had debilitating physical illnesses starting when I was only about five. For a while, doctors thought she was just suffering from some sort of psychosomatic “female hysteria.” Then she finally found someone who diagnosed her with endometriosis. She would often start to hemorrhage out of nowhere, and we’d have to rush her to the hospital. She had terrible bad luck from a medical perspective. Once, she was even dropped from a gurney and was injured.

  As a result, throughout my childhood, when Mom was home, she was usually in bed and in pain, barely able to move. This was why, even after her outbursts, it was hard to stay mad at her. How do you turn away from someone who’s suffering so much? What I heard in her voice was pain and desperation, and I was always so scared she was going to die. The fear of abandonment was always right on the surface.

  All I could think to do was to try to help her as best I could. Since I was the girl and Dad worked late so much of the time, it became my responsibility to take care of Mom and the house.

  I tried as hard as I could to do everything the way Mom wanted so we could have peace. When she stayed calm, caring for her fulfilled me in a strange way. I’d brush her brow and ask if she was okay.

  It was my first lesson in the rewards of people-pleasing. If I denied my own needs and took care of others, I felt at least somewhat accepted. The real me had no value, in my mind. Truth had no value because telling it could spell abandonment. Maybe if I did everything right, she wouldn’t leave me.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do everything right. When I tripped up, Mom would yell, “If people really knew who you are, they’d see wh
at a phony you are!” But I guess, considering how much our whole family hid our true selves from the outside world, we were all phonies.

  Kris was born when I was nine, and Mom was too sick and depressed at the time to take care of her new daughter. Suddenly, even more responsibility fell upon my shoulders.

  When I would get out from under it all for a little while to take walks through the neighborhood, I usually had to take Kris with me in a stroller. But I was always trying to escape the craziness, so I’d sneak out of the house without Kris whenever I could. I paid a price for those glimpses of freedom, though. One day, I dared to take a walk without my sister, and when I got home, my mother was livid.

  “Where were you?” she screamed. When I tried to answer, she screamed louder, “Shut up!”

  “I just . . .”

  “Shut up!” She picked up the nearest object and smashed it on the floor.

  “I just want to tell you . . .”

  “No excuses!” She picked up another object and smashed it.

  I tried to get her to hear me. “I just . . . I’m sorry!”

  But the more I tried to talk, the more out of control she became. As a little girl, I felt responsible for what she felt and expressed, and I wanted desperately for her to understand that I hadn’t meant it.

  Sometimes she’d whack me across the face with the back of her hand. “Your mouth!” Or she’d grab me by my hair and shake me hard.

  Still, at other times, Mom could be kind and loving to me, especially when she wasn’t depressed. I have a particularly fond memory from when I was in kindergarten. Mom came to my school and brought cookies for everyone. I was so proud. Another time, I wet my pants at school, and she came to pick me up. I was so embarrassed and scared that she would yell at me. Instead, she hugged and comforted me. I’ll always remember that feeling of being safe in her arms. I knew in that moment that she really did love me, and I’d do anything to get more of that love.