Knowing

Occasionally, I cross paths with people I haven’t seen in a while and they ask me how my family is doing. I would always say “they’re fine,” even though I had no idea if that was true. I have not visited my childhood home in over three years. I have not seen or spoken to my brother and sister in years, and I have never been to their homes. Mom, whose heart was always the biggest part of her, would text me sporadically to tell me about the things everyone was doing together without me. I still haven’t decided whether the knowing or the not knowing is worse.

I started saying “they’re fine” when I left the cult decades ago. In the beginning, I thought the not knowing might only be for a little while. Parents didn’t really just pretend their kid didn’t exist because of a difference in beliefs…did they? But I kept running into people who wanted to know and I kept not knowing, until my reality was just the not knowing and a perpetual grieving of the living. Every time I said “they’re fine,” I was a little less so. I was complicit in reinforcing the idea that something needed to be hidden, something was wrong with me, something was wrong with all of us. What kind of daughter doesn’t know how her parents are doing? How contemptible does a person have to be for her family to disown her? I was ashamed of the not knowing.

The shame is the point of shunning. The shame kept me living in other people’s reality, where I had always been miserable. My reality is, I don’t know how my family is doing because they are in a cult and they shun me because I am not. When people ask me how my family is, I’m going to start saying “I don’t know” so I can be fine. Now I know there is no shame in not knowing.