Holding fast to the family secrets: Motherhood in heroic terms

OUTSIDE of the Mafia, the family is the most effective repository of secrets, most of them bad.

I know of no family which doesn’t go purse-lipped when the name of a missing person is mentioned, or of a particular disease. TV and until relatively recently, cancer, were seen as bringing shame on a family.

But families still tend not to share the glad tidings that diabetes, psoriasis, epilepsy or depression run through their clan, sometimes skipping a generation only to come roaring back to strike a later generation.