Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [69]
In reality, all kinds of family stories are silenced. Common examples include those surrounding origins of birth, illness, and causes of death, such as, adoption, out-of-wedlock births, parentage, abortion, depression, mental illness, or suicide. Such silencing is often a combination of unspoken internal and external sanctions. These sometimes happen consciously, such as when persons are trying to protect a family’s image in the face of alcoholism, family violence, eating disorders, sexual abuse, or origins of birth and death. However, at times the silencing of such stories affect those who need to hear them to correctly interpret events in their own lives. For example, a sixty-year-old physicist, who believes her brother was irrevocably damaged by their father’s treatment of him, observed, “Some of that damage might have been mitigated if my brother could understand what had happened to my father to make him behave in those ways.”2 Family stories are silenced when strong pressures converge to deny a real experience.
But far more common are the stories that stay silent through neglect. For example, until quite recently, the voices of ordinary men and women were seldom published or included in academic study.3 When a culture devalues one’s story, so do individuals. Fortunately, exceptions exist, such as the women who chronicled their wagon trips to the west and passed their diaries on to family members who kept these stories alive in the family.
But, more often, silencing happens unconsciously and unintentionally when we “fail to notice that we fail to notice.” Six common threads intertwined to contribute to the silencing of Helga’s story for so many years. Any one of these can be sufficient cause to silence family stories.
BREAKING A CODE
In Helga’s situation, she broke the central code of her culture, in this case that “mothers belong in the home.” This code was particularly strong in Norwegian-American communities, church communities, and the Victorian culture that then prevailed in America. Few married women even worked outside the home, an action that many considered unladylike, even “immoral,” especially when a husband and children needed them. Helga not only left seven children at home, but one was even a toddler who had recently turned two years old. As expressed by Martin Siverson, Ole’s best friend in their Mica Creek community, “It wasn’t right to do.” This code was deeply rooted in Helga’s life experience. Given that “a mother’s place is in the home” had been her own value for twenty years, she was vulnerable to feelings of self-censure for leaving.
For years Helga had contributed to the silence surrounding Clara’s birth by apparently falsifying Clara’s birth date. During her pregnancy with Clara, she broke two 1890s codes: that women should be married before giving birth, and, if pregnant out of wedlock, they should marry the father of the child. Helga and Ole’s choice not to tell Clara about her true birth father probably began in their desire to protect her. However, they underestimated the value of this information to Clara and the impact on Clara when she learned of this deception in her adult years from parents she once trusted. By the time the women arrived in New York, Clara evidently had learned the truth about her birth and told a reporter “she was born in Michigan,” not on the Minnesota prairie after her mother’s marriage. She became estranged from her family during her early adult years and changed her last name to Doré, a name her family believes might be her biological father’s name. She later reconciled with the family.
UNDERESTIMATING THE WORTH
Another primary thread of silencing occurs when others underestimate the value of a person’s