“Truth isn’t always beauty,” wrote Nadine Gordimer, “but the hunger for it is.”

To be sure, it’s a hunger we’re not always willing to satisfy, nor even nibble at. It takes courage—sometimes extraordinary amounts of it—to ask for the truth. Because once it’s revealed there’s no undoing it. We can never return to the comforts of innocence and illusion. But in exchange we get clarity. And maybe even the chance to heal.

A few years ago, I interviewed a woman who wanted to share her story for my book (BigAskBook.com), on the condition that I withhold her name from publication. Here is her story. The names of the people and cities have been changed to further protect her privacy.

____

For three months during my senior year in high school, I was hidden away in a convent. My mother, acting on the advice of a priest, had sent me there, determined to keep her unwed daughter’s pregnancy a secret. Besides my parents and older brother, Brian, nobody was told the truth about my time away, not even my six younger siblings. The story they were given was that I was in Baltimore taking care of a sick aunt.

Under the care of the nuns, I delivered a son who at my mother’s insistence was quickly put up for adoption. When I returned home, I found that my older brother, then 18, had moved out of the house. What I couldn’t have anticipated then, however, was the duration of his absence.

There was little contact. Brian didn’t come to any of the family events. The story I got from the family was, “Oh, he’s gotten all wrapped up in a new church group and doesn’t want to be bothered by us.”

I carried on with my life, went to college, and that kept me pretty occupied. Once in a great while, he would briefly reappear. We attended each other’s weddings but had no quality time together, we were just each other’s guests. He had children. I had children. Our separate lives went on. A good chunk of my adult life went by without seeing him.

By my early 40’s, I was becoming increasingly troubled by the estrangement. As the two oldest children, Brian and I had always been close growing up. We had had a bond. I missed him.

One day I wrote him a letter that basically asked, “What happened?”

I got his answer a few weeks later, in a phone call. Nothing could have prepared me for what he told me.

While I was at the convent, he said, someone at my high school had guessed I was away because I was pregnant. Our mother was furious and immediately blamed Brian for telling, though he vehemently denied it. She then did the unthinkable. She told Brian that if she found out that anyone was told about the pregnancy, she would say that Brian raped me and was the father of my child.

The ugliness of the lie and the viciousness of the threat upset him terribly, and he moved out of the house. He began detaching himself from the rest of the family, including me, the source of this dilemma.

My asking, and his telling me the truth, was the turning point in our relationship. It was very healing. Since that conversation he has made an effort to come to every family event that he can. We’ve even had some hugs along the way, which we hadn’t had.

We will never be what we were, but I feel we’ve had closure.

Our mother has had Alzheimers for several years, so confronting her about this isn’t an option. And my brother and I agreed not to tell our siblings the reason for his previous absences. If any of them want to know, they’ll have to care enough to do what I did. They’ll have to ask him.

Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

Paul Quinn is author of a book-in-progress about the power of asking, which features this story.