Family secrets

Never done: Joined a Mussar Va'ad.

A Va'ad is a group -- so this is a group of people to study with, and to engage together with in our ethical and reflective practice. Mine is either 6 or 8 people -- I'm not quite sure who all is going to be in it, but we started with 6 people around Zeva's resplendent table.

I've known and worked with one of the people for 20 years. The rest I've known between 6 months and 6 years. I feel vulnerable with some of them, yet comfortable with all of them; ready to share most parts of my life and my ethical decision making with all of them, but not the same parts with everyone ... so it feels like there's always going to be a pull to hide something from someone. Which, if I am completely honest, feels completely comfortable to me. (I will write about my relationship with secrecy in another post. It's too late now to go into it.) (I don't appear to be hiding something, do I?)

PS ... I am adding on to this after a couple of days. I think the question is actually between what do I want to keep private, and where am I pulled to keep secrets? What's the difference between privacy and secrecy? I think of privacy as for self, and secrecy is from others. And we are right back to the tension in Mussar between the yetzer hore and yetzer tov -- the evil inclination/ focus on self and the good inclination/focus on others.

When I was 32 years old, I found out, along with the rest of my family, that my father had had a secret career from a time before I was born until I was in my early teens. And possibly beyond -- because I am pretty sure that there are parts of his work that have still not been declassified. My father was one of the designers of the first aerial reconnaissance satellite cameras -- nicknamed the spy satellite -- that was employed by the US during the Cold War, to accurately assess the Soviet Union's nuclear capacity. I knew he was an optical physicist. When I was little, I thought he designed eye glasses. Later, I knew he designed cameras, but pictured something you could hold in your hand.

But what he was really doing isn't relevant to this post. Because we didn't know -- including my mother, with whom my father had a wonderful relationship -- and from whom, they agreed, there were no secrets. There were very few hard and fast rules in my young life. One was -- Mom and Dad tell each other everything, so if you tell one of us something, we will tell the other. The other was -- we always have to know where everyone is. If you are in trouble, or somewhere you are not supposed to be, you will not get in trouble for it if you need to ask for help getting home. Really? Mom and Dad tell each other everything? Really? We always know where each other is? Is that why when my dad traveled, there was a secretary at a central location in Washington DC answering phones as if she were a hotel receptionist in California, or wherever my dad said he had gone? So isn't it interesting that the only two hard and fast rules in our house are the rules that my father had to break for his career? When someone in a family has such a huge secret, the rest of the people can tell something is up, but might misplace the secret. I was ten. My dad went away on a lot of business trips -- often suddenly. Naturally I assumed he was having an affair. (He wasn't.) But the other thing that happens, is that the whole family adopts a culture of secrecy, without even knowing why. And now we are back to me in my Mussar Va'ad, struggling with what is OK to keep private, and what is an unhealthy secret. Because I really -- no I REALLY value my privacy. And I respect other people's. But I also have some long-held secrets. And I'm not always sure what the difference is.

When I first came out, one of the things I read was that when gay people (that's what we used to call ourselves back when I came out) have to keep our gayness a secret, we often keep lots of other secrets as well. Because we are afraid that people will be smart and link together bits of information, and come to the realization that we are gay. I think it is true for everyone with a secret. Sometimes this is taken to absurd extremes. Take this example. The weekend in 1995 when my dad was at my kitchen table in Portland, just after he had told me about his secret career, he casually mentioned his step sister Anita. Jenny: "Who?" Dad: "Anita. My step sister." Jenny: "You never told me you have a step sister." Dad: "Of course I have. My father remarried after my mother died." Jenny: "What? Seriously?" and it went on from there. This information had nothing to do with the fact that sometimes my dad would fly to Cape Canaveral to be on hand for space shuttle launches, and yet somehow it had attached itself to the chain of secrecy.

I don't have a succinct wrap-up for this expanded post. But what do you think is the difference between secrecy and privacy?