Secrets

I love secrets.

My own.

Yours.

Friends of yours.

People I don't know.

Let me clarify, I'm a horrible secret keeper.  Which is why, as a rule, people don't tell me their secrets. I don't blame them.  The secrets I love are the anonymous ones.

I remember the first anonymous secret I ever saw.  It was on the back of a bathroom stall at a rest stop on the 401.  Kristyn was a baby and we were driving to meet my new nephew.  It said:

"He's sitting in the car waiting for me and I am going to tell him I love him.  I know he does not love me back."

Even though it was clear that it had been written a long time before I had read it, I couldn't help but spy on everyone I saw in that rest stop.  Did they write that? How did it go? Do any of these people have secrets like this?

Since then, I've been hungry for stuff like that.  Thankfully, that thing called the internet that was just sort of sputtering along in 1996, took off.  Now there are several website out there for me to get my delicious fix of secrets.  Sites like PostSecret, Group Hug, True Mom Confessions and my personal favourite True Wife Confessions.

I've never confessed anything personally, my life just isn't that interesting.  No one wants to read that I always save the best pork chop for myself or that when the kids were babies and I was home alone all day I would do a rapid clean up in the last half hour of the day so John would think I had slaved.

I find these confessions comforting.  They help me see that no matter what I've got going on, someone has it much worse and I should be thankful.  It also makes me feel way more normal to know that I'm not the only wife who occasionally imagines what her husband would wear in his casket.  Know what I mean?

Thirteen years later though, I wonder if that girl finally confessed her feelings and how it went.  I wish I knew, but somehow I know it wouldn't be the same if I did.