Family History

What is Worth Airing Your Dirty Laundry For?

To Tell or Not to Tell

I got stories. People who know me, know. Yet they don’t know my stories. Not all of them at least. I have friends who know of something that happened at some point and every few years they ask.

Hey, are you ever going to tell me about that thing that happened?

Usually, I deflect or misguide them. Sometimes I insert another, less revealing story instead. I know how to keep a secret. I know how to hide.

I learned from the best.

My grandma, a married, yet single mother during World War II, with a husband fighting for the wrong side while trying to cater to the right one, surely had tricks up her sleeves when it came to providing for her little daughter and the child on the way.

I’m ashamed I didn’t ask enough of the right questions. To send my Oma down memory lane and break open what she had so neatly sowed up, required a bravery I didn’t know how to access. I hadn’t been an adult around her long enough. If at all.

Whenever she felt like sharing I listened. Just as good as teenagers can. With my brother in the adjacent room, watching TV or programming and whatnot, she’d sit in the kitchen and smoke her Lux 100s, sip on her coffee, and occasionally on something else in a separate cup, while I was making a sandwich or doing the dishes.

I did what I had to do to survive, Oma would often finish prematurely.

Other times, when it was just the two of us, she dug deeper. I could feel how torn she was. Protect me or teach me? Open my eyes or leave me to childhood?

I should write a book about my life, she’d frequently say, as if revealing her life’s secrets in print, wouldn’t make me think less of her. Not that that was ever a possibility. I wish I had told her that.

Many things could be said about my mother but no one could say she wasn’t entertaining. On purpose or not, I yet have to find another human being on this earth that makes me laugh as hard as she did.

When she did aim to be funny, we’d usually end up with our hands to our crotches. Her, because she peed her pants laughing, and I, well… because she was doing it so I thought that’s what you had to do when you laughed hard. I know now what she was dealing with down there and holding your crotch is a mere attempt to keep it all where it belongs.

Child, I told you aging was a bitch!

My mom was a strange animal. She lost a lot of herself later in life but when she was younger, she was sneaky as fuck when she needed to be and obliviously dumb when she wanted to be. Not as intellectual and philosophical as my grandma but street-smart combined with extraordinary attractiveness.

Seldom did she lose someone’s attention when she set out to keep it.

When my mother was 8 months pregnant with me, she was held at gunpoint. No, I’m not making this up. You’ll do the math of how clever she must have been to get her, and my little underdeveloped self, out of that situation unharmed. Physically that is.

She never told me in detail, but that’s what grandmas are for.

A lot of fighting and dysfunction was happening in our home when I was growing up. And I was held in the dark about certain details that would have explained why things were the way they were.

Like a great team of two double agents from a different time, my grandma and mom would talk in code so I wouldn’t understand what was going on, but I was catching on quickly and started to throw in my two cents.

How the hell does she know about that, my mom would ask to which my grandma would usually reply with, well she’s not an idiot and if you air your dirty laundry in front of her she’ll put 2 and 2 together eventually.

Of course, I knew stuff. I may have been a lot of things as a child but my Oma was right. An idiot I was not.

On a good day, that would be the extent of it. On a bad day, when my mom was walking right on the edge, things got heated and we would slip into our routine of who can scream the loudest.

Doors were shut, windows were closed and drapes were drawn. I wasn’t always aware of what exactly I was airing, but when that dance of barricading happened, I knew it had to be something juicy.

I also knew, once no neighbor couldn’t peek inside any longer, I’d pay for it. No one needs to know that, were often the last words I heard, before I tried to charm my mom’s uncontrolled-tempered mind.

I could tell stories, but I was conditioned not to. Trained to keep secrets.

What good would it do anyway to bring back the past? Why shame the dead?

Knowing this sucks. Writing this sucks. It’s scary and I hate it. It’s not even about strangers, it’s the people I know I’m most worried about.

It’s always been like that, I guess. You could throw me on stage in front of 3000 people at a festival in northern Germany and I’d sing my heart out, but if you put just one or two people in the audience, I knew and cared about, I’d shit my pants and lose at least three years of my life.

So, is Medium worth airing your dirty laundry for?

If you’re thinking of worth as in how much money you’ll make with it, then probably not. But here’s what I believe is worth giving some thought.

Medium is only the framework in which you write.

I think it’s helpful to know why you write. Why do you want to lay bare what has stayed tucked in for a safe, Sleeping Beauty slumber? If you don’t have a good why, your tale-telling might feel like you’re exposing or punishing yourself and your family.

Is the act of writing itself worth airing your dirty laundry for?

Absofuckinglutely.

To strip down to your bones and beyond. The onion leaves layers of blood and fear on the page. Isn’t that what writing means?

In the end, it’s up to you if you call your laundry dirty, or simply part of your story. Are you going to book the private Salinger cabin with bunker-like qualities, or the open-concept writing experience for others to follow and be inspired by?

I’m still deciding.

Child, strip. If not for your writing then for what?

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