TELLING THE KIDS

Have you ever had anything that happened in your family that you don’t tell anyone? Your co-workers, whom you’ve worked with for years, don’t know the dirty little secrets of your family. They don’t know about your relatives because you’re embarrassed. You’d rather have them assume that you come from a “normal” family, whatever that is. Maybe it’s your parents, or a sibling, or grandparents, or whomever. They’d probably not think any less of you and you might be surprised to find out what they’re not telling you. But it’s a secret and you keep it to yourself because who wants to air out their dirty laundry.

What if something happened to you? What if the horrible secret in your life is how you were abused as a child, or even an adult? What if what happened to Tina, had happened to you? Unfortunately, it has happened to too many children but that’s not the point right now. What normally happens? Even if you tell someone, you tell as few people as necessary. There are so many reasons but for whatever the reason, we keep those secrets to ourselves.

For years I’ve wondered how I would tell my children. How do we tell our children what happened to their mother? How do we tell them that their mommy gave birth to another child before we met? How do we tell them how that happened? They don’t even know about sex. How are we going to explain about rape?

Do we show them the 20/20 show? We did show them the very end so they could see themselves on TV. They were pretty excited about that. Recently, when I was on the phone, I told him that I couldn’t wait to see him. He told me that I could just watch 20/20 and I’d see him. That made me laugh.

Do we show them all the news articles, blogs, and posts that will tell them what happened to their mommy? Do we have someone else tell them?

These are rhetorical questions but I wonder how we’ll tell them. I wonder when we’ll tell them. I’m not going to try and answer these questions right now. I know we’ll figure it out as time goes but for now we keep them blissfully unaware. They don’t need to know right now.

At the end of 20/20, it ended with Tina saying, “Mommy went through a time when bad people did some tough things but we made it through and God is still good.” For right now, that’s what we’ll tell our children. When it’s all said and done, the most important thing that we want to teach our children is that “God is still good."