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Lousy Little Leaker

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Although I never quite made it to the Bradley Manning level, I’ve been a leaker most of my life for all the wrong reasons. It’s not that I believe in truth or justice or transparency – I just want a little attention. That’s why, one night at the dinner table when I was eleven years old, I cagily revealed to my older brother that he was going to find a Matchbox Car in his birthday haul the next day, but I was not going to tell him which one in the set he was going to receive.

Jaguar

This, I thought, would give me supreme power over him.

Naturally, my mother was outraged that I had betrayed her confidence. I was sent to my room immediately, forced to skip desert.

At the time, I didn’t quite understand the outrage. We each had accumulated a ton of the tiny metal cars, so getting another one was not that big a deal. Which model though? That was the key (as any collector would understand), and I was keeping that significant detail to myself. He would be tormented to have to spend the night knowing there was a new vehicle in his stable and wondering which one it was, praying and hoping it would be the Jaguar XKE when I knew full well it was the Ford Galaxie Police Cruiser. Not only would he spend the night in agony, his morning would be poisoned by disappointment.

Police_cruiser

No actual harm done. What’s the problem?

But in my mother’s mind, I had spoiled her surprise, and I played Edward Snowden to her Lindsey Graham. If she’d had access to the worst gateway lounge in a Russian airport, she would have marooned me there forever, or at least until I apologized to everyone in our family minus the dog.

Which was odd, considering that a few months later the dog was the one who would eventually wind up with that Matchbox Car firmly in his mouth – an unsatisfying substitute for a bone on a dreary, nothing-happening day.

When have you spilled a big secret?

35 thoughts on “Lousy Little Leaker”

  1. i never spilled the beans but my sister carolyn…. when we were growing up carolyn had this odd habbit of making sure everyone int he family know what they were getting for christmas and birthdays before it happened. i suppose there are only so many places where moms and dads can hide their stuff but it never called out to me to pursue the gift info and it never occurred to her to stop, the back of my parents closet was the favorite hiding spot and a day or two before christmas she would start leaking her information. after a while it got old and frustrating. all we are going to get is these couple of gifts and while my parents were not terribly creative about figuring out the perfect gift at least it was a surprise. i think my parents even took to wrapping the gifts before they hid them in their closet in hopes of thwarting carolyns mission but she would shake and rattle and undo the tape enough to figure it out so she could spring it on us,. i think if i were the parent i would have sabotaged here efforts by putting fake presents all over for her to find. boxes full of tissue paper and another full of rocks. but then again my children have their own special set of issues. poor dears.

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  2. Good morning. I have an inside source who tells me things I shouldn’t know. Of course, I can’t give you the name of my inside source. I have probably said too much already. Maybe I had better book a flight out of this country and make sure I land in a friendly place. I don’t want to end up living in an embassy or an airport terminal.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    As a child I was always the kid who would say the family secret out loud, thinking that what I had overheard the adults whispering to one another was something I could say too. I also did not understand that what I perceived as a truth about someone else, should not be spoken out loud. (Thus, my chosen profession as a therapist, where family-secret busting and saying the unsayable are what one must do, fits my natural predelictions).

    So then at age 3 when asked to be a flower girl in my aunt’s wedding, I overheard Grandma complaining to someone else that Mary Jane should have been chosen. I knew she was displeased. There was no consolation for this (Grandma could have worn the t-shirt which says, “If Grandma ain’t happy, Nobody’s happy”). The day of the wedding I pouted and tantrumed all day because I knew I displeased Grandma. When I said Mary Jane was supposed to be flower girl and I did not want to do it, no one could understand this or support me. There are still pouty pictures of me floating about the family, a mere 57 years later.

    Out of the mouths of babes.

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  4. At perhaps five years of age, I remember one morning going to my mother’s bedroom after I woke up. I tried to get into bed with her, but someone was under the covers holding them down tightly so I couldn’t. Just then the mailman rang the door bell, and mom told me to go see who it was, probably with a keen sense of having been saved by the bell. I scampered down the stairs; it was the mailman with a special delivery, and I excitedly shared with him that someone was in my mom’s bed. I also added my guess as to who it was: my dad’s best friend who had been hanging out at our house a lot lately. (Dad was at sea at the time.) Well, you can imagine how fast that “secret” spread throughout our small town. I couldn’t understand mom’s rage, and the beating I got that day, but I learned it was best not to talk to others about what was going on at our house. I’ve been good at keeping secrets ever since.

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      1. I didn’t understand the concept of infidelity, and had no clue that mom had done anything wrong, Steve, so from my perspective the only problem was the beating I got. We never again talked about it, and it wasn’t until after mom’s death that my sister and I discussed it. She, of course, has no memory of it ever happening being two and one-half years younger than me. Considering mom’s circumstances, alone in a foreign country, raising two little girls virtually by herself, I can’t really fault her for seeking some solace and companionship where she could find it. I’m sure there were plenty of people who judged her for it, and because we lived in such a small town, I can also understand why my parents chose to move to Copenhagen six years later.

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  5. I am a natural secret spiller who has to keep lots of secrets due to the nature of my job. I wonder at odd moments what provision HPPA makes for demented health care providers who start spilling the beans when they end up as residents in nursing homes. Reminiscing is healthy for the old, and I can only imagine the havoc I could create when, as an old person, I just start talking about the old days and all the things I know about most of the families in town. In some ways, I can hardly wait!

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    1. Ooooooh, Renee! Thank you for this! It’s part of the reason I’ve been off the blog so much. I’m so afraid I’ll spill the beans in my selfish desire to unload my own stress. The idea of spilling those beans in my future senility has me snorting! Can they really hold your life experiences against you? Hysterical! Thanks!

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  6. It certainly would be tempting for a person like you to spill some of private things you know, Renee. There are plenty of people who don’t mind spreading false information about the work of health care providers. Health care provides may not be able to defend themselves because they must not tell what they know. I’ve seen this happen. I except you have also.

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  8. Completely OT. Who has found Mini-Sota Donut Ice Cream? I’ve called around and can’t find it anywhere!!

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  10. I’m surprised I can’t think of much here, though there must be something – at age 6 I think I told someone we were moving before my folks were ready to tell people that, but I don’t remember repercussions. And when I accidentally found a Christmas sweater when I was 7, I just put it back and pretended I was surprised.

    I am always starting on some new food or exercise plan, and say to myself that I’m not going to mention it to anyone till I’ve got the new pattern down (then if you don’t follow through, no one else knows), but I always end up blurting it out to those who are around me.

    OT: Stepson and grandkids coming in tonight, so I may not be on the Trail much for a while…

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  11. I do have a tendency to blurt out information that I should keep to myself. I know I have spoken up when I shouldn’t have done so many times. Somehow I have managed to erase most of these slip ups from my memory. I do have an example that occurred recently. When talking to a neighbor I revealed some information about another neighbor that came from a private source. It was pointed out to me that I should not pass on information told to me which is confidential.

    Fortunately no harm was done because the information I had was already somewhat widely known. I don’t how other people learned about what I thought was confidential information. I guess I should have realized that in a small town, like the one I live in, nothing can be kept secret for very long.

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  12. At six or seven, I was standing with my dad and a car insurance adjuster who was surveying a long tear on my dad’s Cadillac convertible top. The man asked me, “Little girl, do you know how this tear got here?” For reasons only a psychoanalist could provide, I said, “Yes. My daddy took a knife and put it there!” I’d venture a guess here that my brother would have a whole different version of this story.

    In my past, secret-keeping wasn’t my strong suit. My kids never got over this unfortunate character-flaw and have banded together to make sure that “Mom’s the last to know”. As a result, my two son’s impending proposals to their first and second wives were shared with their sister before me. All the pregnancies were likewise kept secret until others had been told. Although my boundaries are remarkably stronger now than in the past, the kids haven’t caught up.

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    1. I’m puzzled, Cb, by the phrase “For reasons only a psychoanalist (sic) could provide.” Are you saying that you made that answer up rather than just telling the truth? If you were merely telling the truth, I should think that you don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell you why you said it. You were merely young enough that you didn’t understand the inherent deceit in filing an insurance claim when you had done the damage yourself. If, on the other hand, you made up that answer at the spur of the moment, that’s another story.

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      2. Satire doesn’t always come through, PJ (comment on psychoanalysis). To clarify: I did indeed say what I wrote to the insurance adjuster, but many years later heard a different story from my brother about just how the tear occurred. It left me forever wondering why I’d have said what I did if it wasn’t true, and if I did just make it up, why I would’ve done that. I’ll never know, I guess.

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    2. I had nothing to say in response to today’s question, or so it seemed. But now I do.

      My sister always felt like an outsider in our family. Occasionally she would say something provocative, telling an embarrassing truth as if she needed to confirm her outsider status. There was an element of childlike innocence about those moments, as you suggest PJ, but also a little bit of a sly dig at our parents. This didn’t happen often.

      I can’t remember spilling the beans. I think most people recognize my joy in telling stories, so they wisely don’t tell me secrets. I never want to hurt people, but it is hard for me to keep a secret if it makes a good story. And yet I kept a secret in our family for decades.

      When my dad went to the grocery store, he took me. After our supermarket trip Dad would walk across the alley to have a few beers in a bar before going home. He left me in the car, saying, “Your mother doesn’t need to know about this, buddy.” And I said nothing. When I learned that he kept beers in the garage so he could drink in secret while doing home handy man projects, I said nothing.

      In short, because I couldn’t see that he was a closet alcoholic, I kept his secret until he finally revealed his disease himself when I was approaching middle age. I don’t know if I would have revealed his secret if I had understood what was going on, but I did not understand. Dad sneaked drinks. That was all I knew until he suddenly confessed and totally quit drinking. Addiction isn’t always easy to spot.

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      1. I also kept this secret. I felt overly protective of my father my whole life. My memory, however, was of hard liquor he hid in the garage workshop and that he was in his mid-60s when he “confessed” this to my mother. Every now and then when he returned from the workshop, he’d be so drunk that his words were slurred. Mom thought these episodes were caused by dangerously high blood pressure and fussed a lot. There came a night in which he was so drunk that he came into the house and did a face plant. This time, my mother reached for the phone to call 911 and he suddenly blurted out, “No! Stop!! I’m an alcoholic!!!” That night, he promised that he’d never take another sip of alcohol the rest of his life. And he did not, even during the two agonizingly lonely years after her death and before his own. Dad was a man of his word.

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        1. Steve and Cb, it’s not surprising that you’ve both kept this secret. There is so much shame and guilt associated with alcoholism that many people never acknowledge it or get treatment. It’s the proverbial elephant in the room, everyone is aware of it, but no one wants to deal with it. And it affects not just the alcoholic but the entire family. The stigma associated with alcoholism and mental illness are very real and makes it more difficult for people with these diseases to seek and get treatment.

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  16. Thanks for keeping the music coming! I’m traveling this week and only sporadically looking in. Somebody should post the Beatles “Do you want to know a secret”.

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