“He raised her as a daughter,” my sister said. “But he was not her birth father.”
I remembered that my big sister, as an adult, had moved to Montana to be closer to her father and other half siblings. But I now realized that Mary had moved closer to the man, not biologically related, who’d raised her as his own blood. He’d chosen to love her as a daughter; my big sister had chosen him as a father. They’d chosen each other. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of love. I had to get off the phone. I said good-bye to my sister and paced around my office.
My mother was a liar. A bold liar. But she was not an accomplished liar. Her falsehoods were often so obvious that we could immediately discount them. But had she successfully lied to my sister and me about rape—about two rapes? And why had she told me about the rape when I was only a young boy—when I was beginning my separation from her? Was it a way to keep me close? Was it a way to include me in some personal conspiracy? Did she worry that I might become a rapist? Was that story a warning? A call to self-examination? Did that rape story serve as my mother’s highly dysfunctional version of the Sex Talk? Was she trying to help me? Or hurt me? I paced and paced and paced. I thought about my mother. I thought about her various deceptions.
Then I called my sister again.
“Why did Mom divorce that Montana Indian?” I asked.
“She missed our rez,” my sister said. “She loved our rez.”
“And he loved his rez too much to leave his,” I said, anticipating the narrative.
“Yep,” my sister said. “Mom gave him an ultimatum. Move to the Spokane rez or get divorced.”
I laughed. That seemed utterly logical. That is exactly how much an Indian can love their own reservation.
“So, it’s like Mom was having an affair with the Spokane rez,” I said.
“And that Montana guy was sleeping around with his rez,” my sister said, filling in the narrative.
We laughed.
I said good-bye again.
And then I wept, not for long. I cried so often while writing this book. It became a ceremony, equal parts healing and wounding. I often get asked if my writing is “therapeutic,” and I always say, “Well, I think it can be therapeutic for other people. But for me? Well...”
I thought more about my mother. About her lifetime of myths, lies, and exaggerations. And then I realized something new: I don’t think my mother ever told a lie about something as tragic and epic as rape. She was a fabulist but not criminally so. She manipulated us with her lies. She hurt our feelings. She exhausted us. But she never put us in physical danger with a lie. Can a liar have a code of ethics? No matter how cruel my mother could be, I cannot imagine her being cruel enough to invent two rapes.
So I believe that my mother told my sister the truth about being raped and giving birth to Mary, the daughter of that rape.
I also believe that my mother told the truth when she said that she was, like her daughter, conceived by rape.
But why did my mother apportion the truth? Why did she tell me one version of history and tell another to my sister? I imagine my mother’s pain and shame were so huge that she could only approach them piece by piece. I also think my mother was afraid to burden any of her children with the entire truth. My mother needed us to know. She needed to tell her story. But each of her children only got one piece—one chapter—of the book. I imagine my other siblings—and perhaps nieces, nephews, and cousins—were also given parts of my mother’s most painful and truthful stories.
And, in this way, I recognize the way in which I have protected myself through the careful apportioning of secrets, of personal details, of emotions. I know how I reveal certain parts of myself only to certain groups of people.
“Sherman,” a friend once said to me. “How come you’re so much funnier around strangers than you are around me?”
That line made me laugh and wince with self-recognition.
“I think the realest version of me isn’t funny,” I said to him. “If I’m being funny, it usually means I’m uncomfortable. It usually means I’m angry. Maybe being unfunny around you is me trying to be your real friend. And not just your funny friend. Maybe being unfunny is my way of showing you love. I mean—I don’t want to perform for you.”
“Okay,” he said. “That makes sense. But could you maybe try to be funnier sometimes? Because that version of you is so entertaining.”
My friend and I laughed again. And I winced again. That friend knows I am a secretive person. And he will someday read this book and he will have more questions. And I might tell him things—good and bad stuff—that are not contained within these pages.
But I will also still keep my secrets. I don’t want him to know the worst stuff, not all of it, or maybe not any of it.
You want to talk tribal sovereignty? Well, let me tell you about my personal sovereignty. Let me tell you about my one-man reservation. Let me tell you about My Clan of Me.
Let me tell you that, yes, I am my mother’s son. And I am so much like her. We lived in separate, but related, villages forever across the river from each other. We belonged to the Ever-Nomadic Tribe of Obfuscation.
But I still have questions I want to ask her. There are questions I want to ask of the whole world. As a man, I don’t feel I have the right to formulate answers to these questions. I don’t want to pretend that I am wise about anything, let alone a subject as complicated and horrific as the meaning of rape. But, as the son and brother of rape victims, as a man who feels the primal need to understand and protect his loved ones, I have questions. I have questions. I have questions.
What were my grandmother and mother thinking and feeling as they gave birth to daughters of rape? As they raised those daughters? Did they often think about how their daughter was conceived? Did they willfully forget? Did they love that child less than their other children? Or did they love those daughters most? Is my big sister’s early death somehow psychologically connected to her conception? Was my big sister’s difficult life an inevitable result of the horrific way she was created? How does the child of a rape develop self-esteem? How does it feel to look into a mirror and see your rapist father’s face? How does it feel to look into your child’s face and see your rapist’s features? How much forgiveness does it take to survive all of that?