Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: I was three when I was kidnapped. Any age, the
Speaker 2: day must have been a Saturday or a Sunday, because
Speaker 2: when my grandmother and I stepped from the fabric store,
Speaker 2: we were shocked at how dark the day had become.
Speaker 2: So it must have been midday. Me not in school,
Speaker 2: unless it was the summer day. Usually, whenever we shopped
Speaker 2: for fabric store things. Whenever my grandmother shopped for fabric
Speaker 2: store things, we went to a Michael's and a strip
Speaker 2: mall down Highway one eighty three, just far enough for
Speaker 2: the strip mall to seem alien impossible to get home
Speaker 2: if I were ever left there. But on this day
Speaker 2: we had gone to a fabric store I had never
Speaker 2: seen before. It's name a blank stucco edifice. To me, now,
Speaker 2: am I misremembering it?
Speaker 3: That's Sean McCrae, award winning poet, an author of the
Speaker 3: recent book Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, a memoir
Speaker 3: of a kidnapping. Shane's is a story about Yes being
Speaker 3: kidnapped by his white grandparents to keep him away from
Speaker 3: his black father, But at its heart, it's about the
Speaker 3: attempt to recover memory to put together the many blank
Speaker 3: or missing pieces that were kept from him to assemble
Speaker 3: a life and a whole complete self. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 3: and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
Speaker 3: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 3: secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2: I suppose I could start with ground Rock, Texas, which
Speaker 2: is where I lived from the age of almost four
Speaker 2: until the age of ten or eleven. I lived in
Speaker 2: a three bedroom house that was made of brick, and
Speaker 2: the bricks were painted a very light yellow. The neighborhood
Speaker 2: that I lived in was a suburban neighborhood, but far
Speaker 2: away from anything that one might call a city center.
Speaker 2: It was like a kind of stripmolish area, too far
Speaker 2: away to walk to or anything like that. But that
Speaker 2: was the closest to a kind of urban center near
Speaker 2: where I lived, and so there was just a bunch
Speaker 2: of houses across the street from me. There was the
Speaker 2: elementary school that I ended up going to. I think
Speaker 2: that sidewalks are now there, but when I lived there,
Speaker 2: there weren't any sidewalks. There was a creek that I
Speaker 2: felt sort of separated the part of the neighborhood in
Speaker 2: which I lived from the rest of the neighborhood, or
Speaker 2: the rest of the neighborhood beyond. This creek was a
Speaker 2: lot larger than the part in which I lived, and
Speaker 2: the creek, as far as I know, doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: I saw my old neighborhood about ten years ago, and
Speaker 2: where the creek was, it seemed like it had all
Speaker 2: been covered with cement, and so there's still a channel,
Speaker 2: I guess for water. But when I lived there, there
Speaker 2: was a creek with sort of these natural little rock
Speaker 2: islands in it, and a lot of catfish and snakes,
Speaker 2: poisonous snakes. You could kind of see the elementary school
Speaker 2: from my house. Behind the elementary school was I don't
Speaker 2: really know the history of this space, but it was.
Speaker 2: It looked kind of like a ruin of a very
Speaker 2: small settlement. There were a few houses in this kind
Speaker 2: of large warehousey space, and it was really very very strange.
Speaker 2: You accessed it by kind of going through a little
Speaker 2: kind of foresty area, a large patch of which somehow
Speaker 2: was bamboo. And on the other side of this bamboo
Speaker 2: area were a few ruined houses. It looked as if
Speaker 2: they had been torn up like a storm had gone
Speaker 2: through them, but there were still remnant things that would
Speaker 2: indicate that people had lived there, like bits of furniture
Speaker 2: things like that, but they must have been abandoned or
Speaker 2: whatever it was it happened to them some years before
Speaker 2: my family moved into that area.
Speaker 3: Did that exert a pull on you at all? You know,
Speaker 3: that sort of abandoned area.
Speaker 2: Visiting that space is one of the few relatively clear
Speaker 2: memories that I have of my childhood. But now when
Speaker 2: I think about it, it sounds like a sort of
Speaker 2: impossible space, like how could it have been real? How
Speaker 2: could I have ever gone there? Even though I feel
Speaker 2: really confident that I went there, I also doubt the
Speaker 2: possibility of it even existing. But it did exert a
Speaker 2: pull on me. I like to explore a lot when
Speaker 2: I was a small.
Speaker 3: Child and tell me who you lived in the yellow.
Speaker 2: House with my maternal grandparents, my grandmother, who was my
Speaker 2: mother's biological mother, and my grandfather, who had adopted my
Speaker 2: mother when my mother was I believe, thirteen years old.
Speaker 3: So Shane is living with his grandparents. He refers to
Speaker 3: them as mom and Dad, even though on some level
Speaker 3: he's aware that they are his grandparents, and when his
Speaker 3: mom a young woman who had him at just eighteen
Speaker 3: years old, comes to visit. He calls her by her
Speaker 3: first name, Denise.
Speaker 2: When my mother came to visit me, I don't think
Speaker 2: there's any way for me to know whether she felt
Speaker 2: like my mother, because I wouldn't know what it feels like.
Speaker 2: She's the only model that I would have, and so
Speaker 2: particularly as a child, I guess maybe in some ways,
Speaker 2: not just because the person that I called referred to
Speaker 2: as my mother was my grandmother, but I was aware
Speaker 2: that my mother was my mother, and so in a
Speaker 2: kind of abstract way, I felt a very strong connection
Speaker 2: to her insofar as she was my mother and I
Speaker 2: was aware of it. I lived with her up until
Speaker 2: I was about four. I guess most of the time.
Speaker 3: You describe at one point sitting by the window, you know,
Speaker 3: when you knew she was going to be coming, And
Speaker 3: it struck me the way that you described that that
Speaker 3: there was a kind of combination of excitement and a
Speaker 3: kind of longing. Sure, so what was the story that
Speaker 3: you grew up being told by your maternal grandparents about
Speaker 3: your father and about why you were living with them
Speaker 3: away from your family.
Speaker 2: So my grandparents told me that the reason that I
Speaker 2: didn't live with my father, well, really, the reason I
Speaker 2: didn't see him, didn't really know him, was that he
Speaker 2: didn't want me, and also that even if I were
Speaker 2: interested in seeing him, it kind of didn't matter, because
Speaker 2: they told me that he lived in Brazil and he
Speaker 2: had a whole new family, other children now, and that
Speaker 2: he just wouldn't be interested in seeing me anyway. And
Speaker 2: they told me that I had started to live with
Speaker 2: them when I was eighteen months old, and that they
Speaker 2: had essentially taken me in as a favor, a favor
Speaker 2: to my mother because she felt like she couldn't take
Speaker 2: care of me, and since my father was out of
Speaker 2: the picture, whatever his opinions about whether he could take
Speaker 2: care of me, those were irrelevant. The general sense that
Speaker 2: I was supposed to have was that my father's family
Speaker 2: were sort of disreputable criminal. Even my grandparents had told
Speaker 2: me the story that one of my relatives on my
Speaker 2: father's side had one year when I was very little,
Speaker 2: I guess it must have been one year old, had
Speaker 2: stolen all of my Christmas presents. And I think that
Speaker 2: that I think they told me that story just to
Speaker 2: sort of reinforce the idea that I shouldn't even want
Speaker 2: to have anything to do with my father's side of
Speaker 2: the family, and I was better off not knowing them.
Speaker 2: I should also say that, I mean, you know, as
Speaker 2: a small child, my sense of how biology worked was
Speaker 2: regard to parents and children really vague. But I was
Speaker 2: aware of my father's blackness, and I was aware that
Speaker 2: my father's blackness had something to do with my own identity,
Speaker 2: something very significant.
Speaker 3: And did you have a sense that that was an
Speaker 3: issue for your grandparents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my grandparents were very clear about not liking not
Speaker 2: white people to various degrees. My grandfather was a self
Speaker 2: identified Republican, my grandmother was a self identified Democrat. But
Speaker 2: they could agree that not white people were not good.
Speaker 2: That was what they wanted to communicate in various ways.
Speaker 2: My grandmother was more subtle than my grandfather was.
Speaker 3: But that was a point of agreement for them. Yes,
Speaker 3: all the years that Shane lives with his grandparents, he
Speaker 3: always sleeps with his lights on. Something's going on internally,
Speaker 3: something that doesn't feel quite right. Always know, don't we
Speaker 3: when something's amiss, even though we can't quite identify it.
Speaker 3: One day in school where Shane has skipped a grade,
Speaker 3: so He's five or six years old and already in
Speaker 3: second grade. He draws a swastika on a white T
Speaker 3: shirt with a black magic marker. Shane has seen swastikas
Speaker 3: in books about World War Two in his grandparents' house,
Speaker 3: where they admire as a Nazi military effort, so he
Speaker 3: has no idea he's doing something that people will find troubling,
Speaker 3: and the principal sends him home.
Speaker 2: My grandmother in particular, felt that that was an abusive
Speaker 2: authority to send me home for drawing swastikas all over
Speaker 2: my shirt, which it hadn't occurred to me because I
Speaker 2: didn't know anything about the history at all. It hadn't
Speaker 2: occurred to me that that was a sort of offensive
Speaker 2: thing to do. Had no idea. When I was in
Speaker 2: elementary school, when I was asked about my father, I
Speaker 2: would just say that I didn't have one. I felt
Speaker 2: really strongly actually, like I just didn't Whereas by the
Speaker 2: time I got to middle school, I started asserting that
Speaker 2: I hated him. I didn't know him, obviously, but nonetheless,
Speaker 2: if I were asked about him, that's what I would say.
Speaker 3: And Shane, where was the hate coming from?
Speaker 2: That? He was not interested in me? And so I
Speaker 2: hated him for that, or at least thought I it.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, there's other hateful behavior within the wall of Shane's grandparents' home.
Speaker 3: His grandfather is violent toward him, and when Denise comes
Speaker 3: to visit, she sometimes asks if he wants to come
Speaker 3: live with her instead.
Speaker 2: Whenever my mother would ask me whether I wanted to
Speaker 2: live with her, it was very uncomfortable because I was
Speaker 2: aware that she was my mother and that I was
Speaker 2: supposed to feel a particular way, and you know, I
Speaker 2: did love her. I didn't want to hurt her feelings,
Speaker 2: but I was also I also sort of thought of
Speaker 2: my grandmother as my mother, and I didn't want to
Speaker 2: leave my grandparents. And I've often wondered, you know, why
Speaker 2: did I want to stay so desperately with these abusive people.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't until recently that I was sort of able,
Speaker 2: finally able to make sense of it, thinking about you know, well,
Speaker 2: along with so many other things, this is almost certainly
Speaker 2: a consequence of being kidnapped. That I didn't want any
Speaker 2: sort of major change in my living arrangement. That my
Speaker 2: anxiety about that, even though I couldn't articulate it, was
Speaker 2: incredibly high. I was very, very anxious and also always
Speaker 2: feeling always worried that I was going to be forced
Speaker 2: from the particular living arrangement that I had, and so
Speaker 2: it was always extremely stressful. I think I understand why
Speaker 2: my mother wanted me to be aware that I could
Speaker 2: live with her if I wanted to, but it was
Speaker 2: always an extremely stressful interaction to me.
Speaker 3: But during these exchanges with his mom, she never tells
Speaker 3: him that she too had been beaten by her father
Speaker 3: when she was younger, which makes it even more striking
Speaker 3: that she also never asks Shane whether his grandfather is
Speaker 3: also abusing him.
Speaker 2: It's something that I guess to some extent I still
Speaker 2: kind of can't really understand unless I told in my
Speaker 2: mind that she was very desperate to please my grandfather.
Speaker 2: There's only so much I can read in her own motives.
Speaker 2: But I think it partly has to do with he
Speaker 2: adopted her when she was thirteen, but he had been
Speaker 2: living with her for by that time, like eight years
Speaker 2: or something, and he had told her from the beginning
Speaker 2: that if she was quote unquote good, he would adopt
Speaker 2: her when she was thirteen, and so he kind of
Speaker 2: loading her with worry about living up to some sort
Speaker 2: of idea of goodness so that she could have a father,
Speaker 2: because you know, my grandmother had kidn up my mother
Speaker 2: from my mother's father when my mother was too had
Speaker 2: just taken my mother and not told him where they
Speaker 2: were going, and my mother didn't see him again until
Speaker 2: she was about sixty when she found him. And so
Speaker 2: I think that there was a lot of desire for
Speaker 2: a father and a lot of worry that she would
Speaker 2: be rejected by her father. And so I think that
Speaker 2: when she allowed my grandparents to take me, she couldn't
Speaker 2: allow herself to believe that it wouldn't be a safe
Speaker 2: place for me for a couple of reasons that were
Speaker 2: sort of reinforcing each other, because she maybe felt that
Speaker 2: she couldn't take care of me herself, but she also
Speaker 2: felt like, as I said, she really wanted to please
Speaker 2: my grandfather.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back. At age thirteen, Shane does ultimately
Speaker 3: move in with his mother. In his adolescence, he's beginning
Speaker 3: to stand up to his grandfather, and as a result,
Speaker 3: their relationship has become even more violent, so much so
Speaker 3: that Shane's memories of the beatings have receded into parts
Speaker 3: of his mind. He still cannot fully access These memories
Speaker 3: are blocked in ways that both cost and protect him.
Speaker 3: He does remember, however, in broad hazy strokes moving in
Speaker 3: with his mom.
Speaker 2: Being at my mother's house is sort of like an island,
Speaker 2: Like it's a visible island where I can see days
Speaker 2: and I can see place, and I can see arriving,
Speaker 2: you know, but it's surrounded by blackness, like there's no
Speaker 2: before and there's no after. I know what it was like,
Speaker 2: you know, like physically, but I don't have any memory
Speaker 2: of the time leading up to being with my mother.
Speaker 2: I just suddenly remember being there, but I feel like
Speaker 2: I remember a long stretch of being there and then
Speaker 2: I leave and I don't remember again.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's such an interesting image, and I wondered,
Speaker 3: I mean, do you think that you felt, briefly while
Speaker 3: you were there, a certain kind of safety that you
Speaker 3: hadn't felt before, Like did you feel safer?
Speaker 2: I guess I must have felt safer at my mother's house,
Speaker 2: but I don't know that I recall a feeling of safety.
Speaker 2: I recall a degree of anxiety, a lot of worry.
Speaker 2: It was just different from my grandparents' house, was I think,
Speaker 2: in some ways really different there, But I was only
Speaker 2: there for a few months. But in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: I guess actually my life was different, and I think
Speaker 2: I was different.
Speaker 3: Of course, Denise's life is different during this time too.
Speaker 3: She's never had a child under her roof. She's never
Speaker 3: really had this experience of being a mother. It's a
Speaker 3: struggle for her, and it turns out she isn't of
Speaker 3: taking care of Shane. She tells him that he'll have
Speaker 3: to go back to live with his grandparents, but before
Speaker 3: he goes, she tells him something else. The truth about
Speaker 3: what happened when he was three years old, when he
Speaker 3: was kidnapped.
Speaker 2: So before I left my mother to return to my
Speaker 2: grandparents was when my mother told me that my grandparents
Speaker 2: had taken me from my father without telling my father
Speaker 2: where they were taking me. Up until this point, it
Speaker 2: was my understanding that my father just wasn't interested in
Speaker 2: me at all, and so learning this was a shock.
Speaker 2: But because my grandparents had so effectively raised me to
Speaker 2: have no interest in my father, and because I didn't
Speaker 2: have any kind of memory of my time with him,
Speaker 2: and because I didn't have any understanding even of the timeline,
Speaker 2: you know, I didn't know that I was almost four
Speaker 2: years old when my grandparents took me up. I was
Speaker 2: eighteen months old. And because I assume, because there's such
Speaker 2: a huge conflict between reality and the story my memory
Speaker 2: of it also, I mean, because I think the kidnapping
Speaker 2: itself is such a traumatic event, the memory is just
Speaker 2: it's all gone. I mean, I did know that at
Speaker 2: this point, I had already decided that I didn't hate
Speaker 2: my father, but I didn't know what to do with that,
Speaker 2: you know, because I didn't have any contact with him still,
Speaker 2: and so hating him or not hating him in a
Speaker 2: sense is sort of it's not exactly irrelevant, but it's
Speaker 2: not what is its practical effect. I don't think that
Speaker 2: I stopped hating him for any particular reason. I think
Speaker 2: it was just getting a little bit older. I mean,
Speaker 2: I wasn't, you know, still a child, but maybe sort
Speaker 2: of beginning to think for myself a little bit helped
Speaker 2: me to get beyond the point where I felt like
Speaker 2: hating my father was sort of necessary.
Speaker 3: Chane's grandparents are in California at this point, and he
Speaker 3: does end up moving back in with them. He has
Speaker 3: nowhere else to go. The throes of so much instability
Speaker 3: Shane's early teenage years are defined by depression and flux.
Speaker 3: When he's fourteen, his grandmother decides to leave his grandfather,
Speaker 3: so she and Shane moved back to Salem, Oregon, back
Speaker 3: where it all began. During this time, Shane becomes increasingly
Speaker 3: curious about his father. He now has the information his
Speaker 3: mother told him, as well as his father's name Stanley
Speaker 3: or perhaps it's stan Lee. What he doesn't note is
Speaker 3: where this man is. The stories about Brazil suddenly don't
Speaker 3: sit right. Shane begins to wonder if perhaps his father
Speaker 3: is right here in Salem.
Speaker 2: I was with some friends and we were skating in
Speaker 2: an apartment complex and have been skating for some time,
Speaker 2: and for whatever reason, at that moment, I felt like
Speaker 2: I should look at my father. I want to know
Speaker 2: if he's still here. So I, with my friends knocked
Speaker 2: on a stranger's door. This would have been, I guess,
Speaker 2: probably nineteen ninety two, and it's a somewhat unusual thing
Speaker 2: to do. It's a weird thing to do now maybe,
Speaker 2: but in nineteen ninety two it wasn't completely bizarre, you know,
Speaker 2: because there weren't cell phones, et cetera. And so I
Speaker 2: knocked on a stranger's door and asked if I could
Speaker 2: use her phone book. She said yes, so I, you know,
Speaker 2: open up the white pages. I slipped around until I
Speaker 2: got to the MS and I saw an S. McCrae,
Speaker 2: and then I closed the book and that was sort
Speaker 2: of it. I didn't write down his number or anything,
Speaker 2: but from that moment I was aware that there was
Speaker 2: at least somebody who could be my father, because same initial,
Speaker 2: same last name, you know, SA. It's not a huge city,
Speaker 2: so that there was somebody who could have been him
Speaker 2: in the town. I don't think that I sat around
Speaker 2: with that information for very long before I tried to
Speaker 2: get in touch with him. I think it might have
Speaker 2: only been a few days. As I remember it, I
Speaker 2: called his number. This was at my house where I
Speaker 2: live with my grandmother. I called my father's number and
Speaker 2: my stepmother, Candace answered. Obviously at the time, I didn't
Speaker 2: know who she was, and I asked if he was there,
Speaker 2: and I didn't know his name exactly, you know, and
Speaker 2: so I asked if stan Lee was there, but I
Speaker 2: said it stan Lee McCrae. I said it in a
Speaker 2: way that I hoped would cover the possibilities that either
Speaker 2: his name was Stanley or stan middle name Lee, and
Speaker 2: I tried to say any way they would do both,
Speaker 2: And so I recall my stepmother, Candace, saying hold on
Speaker 2: a minute, and putting the phone down and getting my
Speaker 2: father and talking with him. My father has a different
Speaker 2: memory of it, that he wasn't at home at the time,
Speaker 2: and that so that we talked later. I still feel
Speaker 2: like my version of it is what happened, but you know,
Speaker 2: I have to at least acknowledge that he remembers it differently.
Speaker 2: And that was it. He came to see me that
Speaker 2: night and then drove me around Salem, introducing me to relatives.
Speaker 2: The McRae family is a pretty big and well known
Speaker 2: family in Salem, and so I knew who the mccrays were,
Speaker 2: which is I guess part of the reason that I
Speaker 2: thought he would might very well still be around. And
Speaker 2: so he kind of drove me around, introducing me to them.
Speaker 2: And it was a sort of bewildering time. I learned
Speaker 2: during the time that I was a kind of spectral
Speaker 2: presence in their lives and had been my whole life.
Speaker 2: Folks had talked about me. I want to say that
Speaker 2: it felt like in some ways being a ghost, like
Speaker 2: I was inhabiting an idea of myself that had come
Speaker 2: before me. But of course I don't know what it's
Speaker 2: like to be a ghost. But that's how I would
Speaker 2: That's how I would describe it, that I was walking
Speaker 2: around in the place of a previous version of myself
Speaker 2: and it was just very self dislocating and also well,
Speaker 2: maybe renewing, maybe affirming. It was a strange, a strange day.
Speaker 3: Shane imagines a parallel life, a life in which he
Speaker 3: hadn't been kidnapped, in which he would have grown up
Speaker 3: in Salem and been one of them, a craze and
Speaker 3: part of this big family. And then all these years later,
Speaker 3: he's a late teenager and something has been restored, but
Speaker 3: in something being restored, what's been taken away is thrown
Speaker 3: into even starker relief.
Speaker 2: I don't want to describe it in a way that's
Speaker 2: too melodramatic, but you can never really, at least I
Speaker 2: can never, I think, really be healed if one conceives
Speaker 2: of healing, as you know, having a sense of wholeness
Speaker 2: in relations to in relation to the family that I
Speaker 2: didn't grow up with, and in relation to the self.
Speaker 2: I could have been. I am instead, very very aware
Speaker 2: of all of these lives that might be my actual
Speaker 2: life and that might be, you know, have something to
Speaker 2: do with my biological information, et cetera. And I'm aware
Speaker 2: that I can't know any of them for sure. I
Speaker 2: don't really know who I am, and I can't really
Speaker 2: know who I am, And partly that's the result of
Speaker 2: an effort on the part of my grandparents to ensure
Speaker 2: that I couldn't know. Partly that's because they had their
Speaker 2: own secrets that they were trying to hide from me
Speaker 2: and my mother, like my grandmother being married five times.
Speaker 2: I remember having a conversation with my mother some time
Speaker 2: after my grandmother died where my grandmother had somehow raised
Speaker 2: me with an awareness. Really when I was a teenager,
Speaker 2: I started to get the awareness of how many times
Speaker 2: she had been married, and I had a number that
Speaker 2: was one more than the number that my mother had.
Speaker 2: And it turned out my number was also not all
Speaker 2: of them, so that neither of us had the complete picture,
Speaker 2: but our own pictures. Our pictures were different from each other's.
Speaker 3: You're right that your father says to you in one
Speaker 3: of your early conversations that part of why he was
Speaker 3: still in Salem. Was because he always wanted you to
Speaker 3: be able to find him. It was sort of the opposite,
Speaker 3: if such a.
Speaker 2: Thing can be.
Speaker 3: It was a kind of one hundred and eighty degrees
Speaker 3: from the story that you had been fed by your
Speaker 3: grandparents who kidnapped you. You describe him as someone very
Speaker 3: kind and very much not angry, and it seems like
Speaker 3: he was described in a very different way to you,
Speaker 3: presented as a very different kind of person.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my father is one of the calmest people that
Speaker 4: I know and doesn't seem to hold any grudges, certainly
Speaker 4: doesn't seem to hold any grudges in any way having
Speaker 4: to do with being kidnapped.
Speaker 2: I think that it was something that he had to
Speaker 2: kind of live with and work through for real long
Speaker 2: time before we reconnected, before I found him. My understanding
Speaker 2: of it is he was really thoughtful about it, sort
Speaker 2: of from the beginning. Beyond the sort of visceral, very
Speaker 2: intense feelings that he and any parent would have, he
Speaker 2: also was very I was thinking about it and being
Speaker 2: aware of that. One of the reasons that he didn't
Speaker 2: leave Salem is he wanted me to be able to
Speaker 2: find him. I mean that means a lot to me,
Speaker 2: and it meant a lot to me at the time.
Speaker 2: One of the things, maybe the chief thing beyond not
Speaker 2: having a real memory of my childhood and not really
Speaker 2: having a childhood in my memory, is that I don't
Speaker 2: have with regard to my parents. I think I have
Speaker 2: a really difficult time accessing or sort of experiencing my feelings,
Speaker 2: you know. And it feels like, ironically, I suppose my
Speaker 2: relationship with my feelings feel like one of the reasons
Speaker 2: that I have such difficulty accessing my feelings is I'm
Speaker 2: trying to protect myself from something. It's the same mechanism
Speaker 2: that you know results in me having blocked so many memories.
Speaker 2: It's a sort of it's the same kind of desire
Speaker 2: to protect myself. So when I think about being told,
Speaker 2: you know, that he hadn't left because he was hoping
Speaker 2: I could find him, of course that fills me with emotion.
Speaker 2: But it fills me with emotion in the way that
Speaker 2: like if you're watching a glass being filled with a liquid,
Speaker 2: I am aware, I can see it. I can see
Speaker 2: the being filled with emotion happening, as opposed to I
Speaker 2: am in the glass, or I am the glass you know,
Speaker 2: there's something about, you know, the inability to be the glass,
Speaker 2: you know, to just have to watch it happening that
Speaker 2: I feel as an impoverishment. I would like to be
Speaker 2: able to experience those emotions in a more immediate way.
Speaker 2: But I also feel in a sort of abstract, vague
Speaker 2: way that I wouldn't know, I wouldn't be able to
Speaker 2: handle them, I wouldn't know what to do with them.
Speaker 2: And so even though I in my late forties, I'm
Speaker 2: still at this stage with relate which regard to all
Speaker 2: this information at which I have barely begun to sort
Speaker 2: of incorporate it into my life, to sort of figure
Speaker 2: out how to have some control over it or have
Speaker 2: some healthiness in relation to it. I was going to
Speaker 2: say to heal, but I think that's not right. I
Speaker 2: don't think that's the right word. I think there are
Speaker 2: ways in which I'm lucky that I got so good
Speaker 2: at blocking out memories, about blocking out sort of painful things.
Speaker 2: Insofar as if I'm going to have this big, enormous
Speaker 2: mess in the middle of my life, it's good that
Speaker 2: I can live without it dominating every moment of my life.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, I am aware that it would
Speaker 2: probably be a good thing to someday get to the
Speaker 2: other side of it, but I don't know how. So
Speaker 2: when I think about things like that, things like what
Speaker 2: my father said, it's very emotional, But I'm also aware
Speaker 2: of how emotional it is in a way that sort
Speaker 2: of interferes with the full experience of the thing.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, that makes perfect sense, And yet at
Speaker 3: the same time, you have been able to create and
Speaker 3: build a family and have a happy relationship with a
Speaker 3: partner and three kids. That strikes me as an extraordinary thing,
Speaker 3: Like maybe all of this is compartmentalized, but the love
Speaker 3: isn't compartmentalized.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 3: Here's Shane reading one last passage from Pulling the Chariot
Speaker 3: of the Sun.
Speaker 2: My father is picking up the phone. Then his voice Hello,
Speaker 2: I hadn't heard for thirteen years. Immediately like no other
Speaker 2: person's voice, an accent. I couldn't place music from somewhere
Speaker 2: I didn't know anymore, wavering in each syllable, even a
Speaker 2: simple word like hello, loosened by music, made difficult to understand.
Speaker 2: Though I knew he had said hello, though I had
Speaker 2: heard only music, and I asked him his name.
Speaker 3: Family secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
Speaker 3: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 3: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 3: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 3: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
Speaker 3: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 3: check out my memoir Inheritance.
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