Princess Kennedy: Growing Up Kennedy
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Peter is the all-American football, track and field star, now a stake president—”Why can’t we all be like Peter?” He told his children at the age of 3 that I was gay, and that meant I was a child molester. He was pretty much banned from my life by my mother and me. We didn’t speak for years until he was hit by a car and almost died. I wasn’t going to let it go out like that, so I reconciled and he now tries to make up with me every day for his past misgivings—I love him. His 26-year-old son is terrified of me.
Bobby: wild child, runaway, Motörhead and hard rocker were some of the adjectives I would have used to describe him. He once traded a 1964 GTO convertible—white, opal glaze—for an eight-ball. Sad, frustrated and slow are words I’d use after an accident he was in where he and a friend were fucking around drunk on their motorcycles, speeding down Millcreek Canyon, resulting in a horrendous traumatic brain injury.
Jan was a beauty queen (Miss Days of ‘47) and has a sassy streak and a temper. She raised me, was my protector, defender and is now kinda of the stereotypical housewife from Happy Valley adjacent. Her oldest wanted to study abroad in France like her aunt. After getting engaged to the first guy that asked her within the first few months at BYU ID, I asked my sister, “Wish you had sent her to France?” thinking my sister was freaked out at the impending nuptials. “Oh no!” she replied, “This way I know she’ll never have premarital sex.”
That makes me Cindy. To Mother and Daddy (as I call them), I can do no wrong since I was the youngest child, and if you said otherwise, mother would have you executed. I am their perfect baby, something that drives the other Kennedys crazy. Here’s my dilemma: Do I go off the fiction of what they believe about me, or demand the facts?
This is my family and moreover, this is my life and history—I have the right to write it. I would never intentionally hurt my family, but when it comes to my personal life, I haven’t been 100– percent honest with them either, and I guess my fear comes from not what they think of what I say about them, but of what they will think of me.
Growing up Kennedy is by no means a new story, but it will be my story, and I hope that when it comes out, you will pick it up and see how my fears and questions played out.
