Dirty Little Secrets
When we got married my mother-in-law gave me some marital advice, including, don’t keep secrets from each other and never fight over money. Thirty years into our marriage, I’m not very good at keeping secrets and when I do it’s usually over spending money.
What my mother-in-law didn’t share in all her wisdom was that she didn’t follow her own advice. My father-in-law hated to spend money so instead of fighting over it she just didn’t share openly that she was spending any of it. Perhaps she didn’t consider her omission a secret because she got away with her secrete spending, because my father-in-law was truly clueless.
She once redecorated the entire house without ever sharing a bill with him. When the furniture finally arrived he still didn’t notice it. For weeks he would drop his keys on a table that didn’t exist never noticing that she’d completely redecorated the living room. At that point, the furniture was in the house and he couldn’t get mad at her.
I learned the terrible habit of secret-spending from my own mother who used to sneak packages from shopping into the house. She never let my Dad see the packages of clothing we’d purchased after our epic trips to Loehmann’s. She’d make us bring them into the house over a few days so he wouldn’t suspect we’d gone shopping. I kept thinking, wouldn’t he notice the bill? Or the new clothes we wore every day for a month. When he finally did notice, my mother would confess everything right away. And he’d just sigh and tell her she looked beautiful. To this day she says she wasn’t keeping secrets about her bulk shopping addiction, she was just timing the fashion shows. Right.
My husband isn’t as clueless as my father-in-law or my Dad, so I’ve had to keep quite a few shopping secrets from him in a variety of ways– like torn off labels and hidden garment bags. Or by the shipping method: shipping the clothing back from a trip instead of bringing it back in my suitcase. Once my secret shop was foiled by the packages arriving at our house before I did, which lead to our very own “Ricardo” moment. You know the one where “Lucy’s got some ‘splaining to do.”
Recently, in order to hide an impulse purchase, I bought it using half cash and half credit card. Only I was stupid enough to put it on the same transaction. My husband called me on it. Apparently the clueless gene was passed on to me.
Secrets. We all have them and we all keep them, even from those we love the most. Some are stupid little things, like a grown woman hiding clothing purchases. And some are truly earth shattering and life-changing.
I’ll never forget when my good friend kept noticing things missing from her house. Not little things, but big things. Like furniture. I joked with her that it would be really funny if her husband had another house somewhere.
Turns out he did. He had a whole other apartment and life just miles from the life she thought she’d been living with him and their infant son. There was a lot more than just the missing furniture. There was a fake passport, bank accounts, and lots of emails to women in other countries. All of which she discovered as her life unraveled.
Every time she called or knocked on the door I entered into her soap opera of a life and found myself flabbergasted at the discoveries she was making about her husband. It was shocking stuff given we were new moms living in suburbia and more important, he’s a pretty boring guy. An anesthesiologist – the guy who puts you to sleep – literally. He kept a huge secret for a good long time – until he was discovered.
But I told her she should have seen it coming, because he even kept his age a secret when they got married. He was a lot older than she was and apparently didn’t want to seem that old to her, so he lied about his age. When she threw him a 40th birthday party all his friends outed him as being actually 42.
As I tried to comfort her I kept saying stupid things like, well at least he doesn’t have a second family somewhere. And yet I know that kind of thing happens a lot in families - including my own. My brother reminded me there was a history of this about two generations back in our family - making for a very complicated family tree.
As I helped my friend through her drama, it did make me start to worry about what kinds of secrets my husband could be keeping from me. Except it didn’t take me long to realize I really had nothing to worry about, because his secrets are definitely not earth shattering. Mostly they involve food.
I’ve never found strange women’s’ phone numbers in his pockets – but I do find the remnants of M+ M packages. I’ve never found lipstick on his collar, but I’ve often discovered grease stains on his shirt from the pizza he ate on the way home for dinner.
I also have my own food-related secrets. I hide food I don’t want to share with my family. I have a favorite coffee house in Bethesda, Maryland. Every time I visit I buy their famed massively-sized Fig Newtons. I love them. I want them for myself. I do not want to share them. So, I hide them in our outside freezer hoping no one will discover and eat them. Recently, my son found one and was shocked that I was holding out on him. He made me watch while he ate the whole thing.
They say that confession is the first step to recovery (don’t they?). So if I’m confessing my secrets, I think I must confess that I don’t tell my husband when I get my pedicures – which is pretty stupid considering he will eventually see my toes. If he calls while I’m getting one and asks me what I’m doing I say, “nothing,” and hope that the jets from the foot bath won’t be heard in the background.
Here’s another one, sometimes after I finish a big project I go to the movies all by myself. I love eating popcorn in the middle of the afternoon, sitting in the dark playing hooky. Usually it’s me and a bunch of old men. Of course, some of them must be keeping their own secrets because they all look so guilty when the lights come up.
Secret-keeping used to be the province of scripted soap operas on television. But reality T.V. show stars are always trying to keep secrets from their co-stars. Problem is they aren’t very good at it because they always end up confessing to the camera - - like it can keep a secret. Whenever I watch reality shows I think, “Hey Kim Kardashian it’s going to be hard to keep that pregnancy a secret for long, especially when you wear such tight dresses.”
These days it’s hard to keep secrets at all given we’re all living our lives on social media. Social media has a way of being a virtual tattle-tale. Like, if we travel and don’t tell people we are going away, we’re bound to get tagged by somebody and outed on Facebook. Busted in Seattle.
There’s even a web-site devoted to confessing secrets called www.postsecret.com. It was used in the video for the All American Rejects song, Dirty Little Secret. The site allows individuals to anonymously post their secrets on an index card for the world to see. The confessionals range from deep and disturbing, to trite and ridiculous.
I guess it must be cathartic to let go and share to complete strangers. I know that when I’ve confessed something that I was holding secret, I end up realizing how much better it feels. I wish I’d known about this site years ago. Think how much money I could have saved using an index card instead of sharing my secrets in confidence with a very-well educated and licensed professional, called a therapist.
Still after almost 30 years of marriage to my husband, I’m certain we know all of each other’s secrets - even if we don’t talk about them out loud to each other. And if he thinks I’ve still got some secrets, that’s not such a bad thing – that way I’ll always be interesting and he’ll always have something new to learn about me. As long as he knows the most important things aren’t a secret, that I love him every day and…only I know where I hide the chocolate.