QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS PROVIDED BY MOLLY BRUCE JACOBS.
Your book is called Secret Girl. Who is she and why was she a secret?
The “Secret Girl” was my sister Anne, who I didn’t meet until we were both in our thirties although we’d lived most of our lives less than half an hour apart.
She was born with hydrocephalus and our parents institutionalized her from birth. I didn’t even know she existed until I was 13.
Why did your parents institutionalize her rather than raise her at home?
The doctors recommended that they not bring Anne home. They didn’t even want my mother to see her as an infant. They said she’d die within a year and that it would be pointless to get attached. This was typical back then. Physicians routinely encouraged parents to whisk their less than perfect babies away to institutions. There were many “secret children” like Anne back then.
But she lived far beyond a year?
Yes, but as she grew up, I think my parents were afraid to bring her home. Afraid of the unknown. What the implications would be. How their lives would change if she were present. My father was on his way to becoming editor of the Baltimore Sun and my parents entertained and traveled a lot. Home was kind of like a museum. A spotless place, with lots of books and we were a family that ate by candlelight every night. My parents probably couldn’t imagine Anne ever fitting in. Anne became a guarded secret they felt too ashamed to reveal, much less talk of among themselves.
It has sometimes been hard for me to believe that my parents left Anne in a state mental hospital and rarely visited her. At the same time, I have to say that my parents did what many families back then did. It would have been unusual for a family to bring home a mentally retarded child. The alternatives that we have today were virtually non-existent in the fifties and sixties. Had I been faced with my parents’ dilemma then, I don’t know what I’d have done.
You learned that you had a retarded sister when you were 13, but didn’t meet her until many years later. Why?
The message I got from my family was clear: she was a family secret. She was well cared for, I told myself. At first, I was jolted, shocked, I could hardly fathom that I had another sister, much less a retarded sister. And all I could imagine was a girl with a huge head, a cartoonish creature who was something less than human. The picture I had of her in my mind was terrifying and it stayed with me for a long time. Besides, at 13, I was full of my own emotional insecurities, and the family dynamics were complex--Anne was only the tip of the iceberg. I buried her in the back of my mind and tried to forget her. I simply wasn’t ready.
What made you want to meet her after so much time had passed?
It was in 1992 that I first went to see her. It happened suddenly. I was rebuilding my life, emerging from something of a personal shamble—a bad marriage, a law career I didn’t like, too much drinking—things were looking better. I was feeling grounded, and more at ease with myself than ever before. One day I found myself telling someone about Anne. Just blurted it out that she existed and that I’d never seen her. The look on his face was one of astonishment and disbelief. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing and suddenly neither could I. So I called BARC and found out where she lived and arranged to visit.
Now, I deeply regret that I ignored my own sister for so many years. Still, I sometimes wonder if meeting her later in life was meant to be. Had I grown up with her, I don’t know if I’d have been as receptive to her—and to the changes she provoked in me—as I was at 38 years old.
What was it like when you first met Anne?
When I parked outside her house, I felt as if I was about to cross over a great divide and step into a completely foreign land. I didn’t know much about my sister, and the image I had of her in my mind dated back to when I was a child, when my parents first told me about her. I imagined she would have a huge head, and I wasn’t even sure if she could talk or walk. This sounds crazy, I’m sure, but I just didn’t know what to expect. So I expected the worst. I was scared, and very nervous.
When I walked into her house for the first time, young women seemed to come at me from all directions. They were checking me out, touching me, and talking all at once. I wondered which one of them was Anne, and then I said her name. Suddenly the women were quiet, and Anne stepped up to me. She grabbed my hand and in a very loud voice she said, “I missed you, Buddy!” I tried to speak but nothing much came out. She was so obviously my sister, it seemed unreal. We had the same coloring—brown hair, green eyes—and she seemed so familiar. I guess I was in shock, meeting my sister for the first time. The funny thing though is that Anne was completely at ease with me, while I was the shy one, hanging back and feeling awkward.
But as soon as we were alone upstairs in her bedroom, I began to relax. Anne showed me all her things, she talked non-stop, and asked me to write my name and the date over and over. We spent a few hours together that day. I didn’t want it to end. We were so comfortable with each other, it was as if we had known each other all our lives, and just hadn’t seen each other for a while. When I left, I heard myself promising to come back soon.
Did getting to know your sister make you feel differently in any way about mentally retarded or disabled people?
Yes, of course. I don’t think that I had much interaction at all with disabled people as I was growing up. They weren’t a part of my world. Mentally retarded people were like foreigners to me, foreigners that I didn’t understand at all and couldn’t relate to, and who I imagined couldn’t relate to me. After knowing Anne, that all changed dramatically. Mentally retarded people are people, human beings like you and me with many of the same reactions and feelings that we have. They’re different too, of course. They have their own limitations, as well as their own strengths and capacities.
I think it’s too bad that they haven’t been more integrated into our society. They are no longer routinely abandoned to institutions, but live in group-supervised homes—some of which are wonderful nurturing places—or with their families. Day care is available these days. But I feel as if they are still treated as a separate class of people, and that there is still a social taboo attached to people with severe disabilities. They may not be quite as hidden away as they were when Anne was born, but there is still some prejudice against them. Prejudice born from fear of the unknown.
Why did you write the book?
Anne inspired me to write Secret Girl. I wanted to give voice to her story, and to others like her, because it was a story she couldn’t tell herself, and an important story that needed to be told. I felt compelled to write about her, what institutional life had been for her, how she’d been virtually abandoned as unacceptable and too imperfect to acknowledge, a shameful secret no one talked about. All the odds seemed to be against her. But Anne’s spirit survived. More than that, it blossomed. That’s the story I wanted to tell.
There’s another reason I wrote the book. There used to be many ‘secret children’ like Anne who were considered worthless human beings. I think of them as invisible people. Forgotten souls. I think it is important not only for individual families, but also for our society to acknowledge, and not forget, the truth and tragedy of this legacy.
What did you learn from Anne?
At first, I saw her as my counterpart I’d lost touch with long ago. She seemed to have what the world I grew up in had suppressed in me. In spite of her disabilities, she was all that I wasn’t, or what I’d imagined I wasn’t allowed to be. She seemed to understand the important things in life that many of us have forgotten. She wasn’t obsessed with accumulating things. (In fact, when I first met her, she seemed oblivious to the bag of presents I held out to her, and was far more interested in me.) There was nothing self-conscious or complacent or judgmental about Anne. She was never formal and had few facades like I did. If she felt like dancing, she danced, wherever she was -- in church, a bookstore, a restaurant, the bathroom in McDonalds. She was a genuine free spirit. I think of her as wired from her heart, not trapped in her thoughts. She related to people straight from the center of her being. She didn’t worry about the future, what tomorrow might bring, and she wasn’t hung up over the past. She bore no grudges. Anne found tremendous joy in the simplest of things—a flower pressed to her nose, a cup of tea, the taste of a chocolate, the smell of a leather pocketbook. Just being Anne was enough for her.
I must sound like I idealized her, and I did in the beginning. But I quickly learned that she was more than my counterpart. She was herself, uniquely Anne, with a voice and a will of her own. Her spunk and determination to be herself had survived decades of institutional living.
I found myself opening up to her, inviting her to step through invisible walls surrounding me. I felt lighter when we were together, less encumbered than ever before, and more present.
Aren’t you simply hanging out the family laundry and exposing secrets that are private?
That wasn’t my intention. I hope I’ve gone further than that. My hope is that people will enjoy reading Secret Girl and then reflect upon their own capacity for hope and forgiveness in this world. Its through hope and forgiveness that people bond with each other, and form true connections. That’s what the book is really about. On a certain level, the book is about my family, and the family secret, but on a deeper level, it is about much more. I hope that it sheds light upon the struggle for human connection that we all share, the need to accept one’s limitations, and to learn forgiveness. It goes beyond the dynamics of one family around an invisible sister hidden away in an institution, but explores my journey to claim my sister as well as myself.
