Family secrets buried under weight of shame

There are secrets in the house.

The line sounds like a voiceover for a horror movie promo or the teaser on the cover of a crime novel. But the way it read in Tuesday's Tribune was a thousand times more chilling.

The case is familiar by now: Mila Petrov, 29, is charged with killing her daughter, Melanie Beltran, age 5. It was the culminating brutality of Melanie's short life.

"There are secrets in the house," one of Melanie's six siblings was quoted as telling child welfare workers. "We don't tell."

Melanie's body told. Bruised, scarred, burned. The descriptions of that little girl in her moment of death are so grotesque, so heartbreaking and infuriating, they make you wish you didn't know.

There's a lot in the story of what allegedly happened to Melanie Beltran to leave the ordinary person stunned by what human beings are capable of doing.

And one of the stunning, if not exactly surprising, things is that we can do awful things within a family--within our first circle of love--and do those things under a family code that says: Don't tell.

The magnitude of the secret in Melanie's house may be extreme but there's nothing unusual about families hiding terrible troubles from the world outside the front door.

That's one reason the reported remark by Melanie's sibling is so powerful. We may not ourselves have experienced such horrific violence, but a lot of us recognize the wider truth about dark family secrets.

Alcohol abuse, drug abuse, incest, battery, financial ruin, psychological terrorism. Don't tell. Don't tell because you might hurt someone you love. Don't tell because telling might hurt you.

The other night, unrelated to this case, I was talking with a friend about the secrets we kept in our own houses as children and the ones that only as adults did we discover had festered in the homes of kids we thought we knew.

She was shocked and a little relieved, she said, to learn that families she had thought of as ideal, families she had envied and whose perfection humiliated her, were hiding their own shame.

Another reason not to tell: You imagine that no one else would understand. No other family is as failed as yours. Your family is alone.

But even to people who have held family secrets, it may seem strange that children can hoard them so well.

"Children can be incredibly loyal to their parents, even when they themselves have been abused," says Froma Walsh, a professor of clinical socialwork at the University of Chicago.

"Partly it's the fear that they could lose that parent if the secret came out. Even when the parent has been abusive, the fear of loss can be traumatic. When they've witnessed abuse, there's also the fear that the abuse could turn on them as well."

She revised. Not fear. The better word is terror.

Witnessing what happened to Melanie, and keeping it secret, must have damaged every child in her home.

Families are ecosystems. Each life grows in response to the lives around it. Fertilized by secrecy, behavior that the world considers aberrant can come to seem normal. Within the family, it is normal.

"Everyone hit Melanie because she touched our things," one of her siblings told a state worker.

Bad behavior compounds bad behavior. The secret compounds too.

Julie Spielberger, a research fellow at the Chapin Hall Center for Children, says fear and shame can keep children from telling.

"If these children felt threatened by abuse in the house," she says, "they might have done it to protect themselves or to feel more secure, to feel `my mother likes me better.'"

As Walsh noted, "Secrets are most dangerous and damaging and common when they're about harmful and shame-laden issues."

The terrible thing that happened to Melanie is terrible for her siblings too. But until a family secret is unlocked, the door is closed to help.

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mschmich@tribune.com