Tenika Walker was a baby when her parents learnt they had AIDS. They tell why they kept the news from her.
They kept it a secret from their daughter all her life. But after more than 20 years, Stephen and Wendy Walker decided it was time to reveal their chilling news: “We have AIDS.”
And while it was difficult to make the momentous confession, the Perth couple say they are just glad they had the opportunity to do so. After all, when they were first diagnosed with HIV in 1987, the doctor’s predictions were grim.
“We believed we wouldn’t be alive by the time our baby daughter, Tenika, was 10 years old,” Wendy, now 52, recalls.
“We were told that being HIV positive was a death sentence.” It was then that the couple made the extraordinary decision to conceal their HIV status from their daughter, to protect her from worrying about their health.
“If Tenika saw us taking medication, which we’ve both had to do daily for 22 years, we’d tell her they were vitamins, or something like that,” Wendy admits. “We hardly told a soul about our condition. We told our parents and siblings, but one member of our family behaved so strangely towards me after finding out, I didn’t feel comfortable telling others.
“Stephen and I will never know which one of us got the virus first and passed it on to the other, and that doesn’t matter to us,” she adds. “As we’re not drug takers, one of us obviously got it through sex. We both had other sexual partners before we got together in 1983.”
But the pair – both still in miraculously good health thanks to advances in medication – decided they no longer wanted to live a lie, and nervously broke the news to Tenika, now 22.
Shocked at first, their daughter, a psychology student, says she quickly came to terms with her parents’ disease.
“Mum took me to dinner and just suddenly came out with it,” Tenika recalls. “She cried as she told me, ‘There’s something I have to tell you. Your dad and I are HIV positive.’
“I think I took it all pretty well. I can see why my parents felt the need to lie to me; they just didn’t want me to worry. They didn’t know how I’d react. But really, I don’t blame them for lying. I was more concerned they were going to be OK. “In a way, it’s brought us all even closer,” she adds. “I know I can discuss anything with Mum and Dad. There are no secrets now.”
Tenika says she also now understands why her dad would cry every time she had a birthday.
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