When I was a kid, I was taught that there was nothing about the family that you could say to anyone not in the family. I’m not talking about big things like marital difficulties (though, that, of course, was also verboten), but about the little things. The story I tell over and over goes like this. My parents went to play tennis with their friends all the time. One time, they were out with a friend playing tennis. Another friend called and asked for my father. I said he was out playing tennis.
It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. When my parents came home, my father flipped his shit at me. He told me that I shouldn’t have said that to the other friend, which confused the hell out of me. I asked why because I truly didn’t undrestand. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but what was the big deal about going to play tennis with some friends. My father said that the other friend would feel left out, which didn’t make sense to me, either.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized the issue. My father was playing with his current special ladyfriend (and her husband. And my mather). My father has had a mistress since–well, probably since dating my mother. He certainly has had one since I was a little kid. My mother has been crying about it for fifty years. He always had one in the wings as well–a backup in case he got bored with the current one. Which he often did.
I wouldn’t have thought the other friend was his type because he liked really feminine women–but, on the other hand, he married my mother who was not a typically feminine woman. The other friend was more like my mother than my father’s usual type. At any rate, at some point, she cut herself off from the Taiwanese community, and I would not be surprised if my father was part of the reason why.
Anyway, he was mad that I had told his potential mistress that he was with his current mistress. He was by nature a very sly person. He kept things close to the vest and only doled out information as needed. As he deemed it to be so, I mean, not the more universal meaning of the word. It was impenetrable until you realize that it just meant what put him in the best light. That’s it.
My point is that I was taught that you don’t tell anyone anything. Period. No matter how seemingly innocuous it seemed, it was an outrage to say anything to anyone about anything. It was like his penny-pinching ways. He would scrutinize every penny spent (one time he was here recently, he complained about kiwis being two for a dollar), but then he’d spend a hundred bucks on a water pick he never used. It sat unopened on a shelf for years. It wasn’t even that it was a hundred bucks (which was a lot of money, but not excessive), but that he bought it on impulse and never used it.
In the same way, he hoarded information about himself, and in general was not happy with any of it being told to anyone unless he approved it first.
On the flip side, my mother told everyone everything. Not when it came to my father, maybe, but everything else was fair game. And even with my father, she could never keep her own dicta. For her fiftieth anniversary, she really wanted to go on a cruise. She told my brother to pay for it and tell my father that he had paid for it, while she would send him (my brother) the money. I found out later from my brother that my mother told my father that she had paid for it at some point.
That’s her to the core. She can’t keep a secret for the life of her. When I had my medical crisis, she was telling everyone and their sister about it. The Uber driver. The cleaner. Probably the mailman if she talked to him. She got mad at me when I said maybe she could dial it back.
“It’s my life, too!” She said heatedly. Well, yes. But it’s primarily my life. And I think I should get to decide who gets to know the details of what happened to me (outside of the medical system, of course).