From “Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma” by Ellen Corcella
During Christmas break, 1975, my first year in college, I walked with my father and sister up the stairs into the Fayette County Courthouse in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. My father asked me to testify at a hearing over custody of my sister, Maureen, who had been living with him on and off the past few years.
My father explained he needed full custody to stop arguments with my mother and to secure my sister’s living situation. I was eighteen and trying myself to secure a new living situation away from home, adjusting to college life, and trying to suppress the abject fear that my mother would commit suicide because I left home. My father was utterly oblivious to my tenuous situation or the personal cost I had suffered and would continue to suffer in my relationship with my mother.
I had decided that what happened in my home – what happened between myself and my mother – was to be kept secret. To do otherwise would be a fundamental betrayal of my mother. My father, as usual, was oblivious to the harmful position into which he placed me. After years of my mother using me to get at my father, my father was prepared to use me to outmaneuver my mother. Consciously or not, he was ready to sacrifice me in his rivalry with my mother.
Secret-keeping was the integral dynamic of our family structure. The oath of omerta, the code of silence. Truth be told, no one else in my family uttered a word about our situation with my mother. My father never talked about it, neither did my siblings. It was our shame, our shared family possession we would never ever surrender to anyone outside the family.