Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
Speaker 1: episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: The easiest way for a child to lose their seat
Speaker 1: at the adult table is to speak. If no one
Speaker 1: hears your voice for long enough, they forget you're there.
Speaker 1: They let things slip, They say things they wouldn't normally
Speaker 1: say in front of a child. Even the adults who
Speaker 1: noticed and remember your presence will simply point a finger
Speaker 1: in your direction and make direct eye contact. You better
Speaker 1: not repeat any of this you hear. That's Ashley Seaford,
Speaker 1: author of the memoir Somebody's Daughter. Ashley's is a story
Speaker 1: of generational trauma and the ways our lives can be
Speaker 1: shaped by what we do not yet know. It's also
Speaker 1: a story of tremendous rise lands and the capacity to
Speaker 1: turn what is most difficult into art. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. The landscape of my childhood
Speaker 1: is sort of as deceptively flat as Indiana. Indiana is
Speaker 1: thought of as a very flat state, and I get
Speaker 1: at I mean, whenever I take a road trip anywhere,
Speaker 1: I can tell I'm somewhere else when it starts to
Speaker 1: be visibly hilly or mountainous. But it's also a deception
Speaker 1: because as there's a lot going on on the ground
Speaker 1: in Indiana, and so no place is actually very flat,
Speaker 1: things are growing in the places that other people would
Speaker 1: call flat. And I think that my childhood was similarly
Speaker 1: that way. I think it looked like I was having
Speaker 1: a very normal experience and I was having within myself
Speaker 1: something a lot more mountainous. Mm hmm. I love the
Speaker 1: way you put that, So let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about that inner mountainous terrain. Describe your mother for me.
Speaker 1: The mother of your childhood, the mother of my childhood
Speaker 1: is beautiful. She's my whole world in a lot of respects,
Speaker 1: as most people's mothers are. She is both loving and volatile.
Speaker 1: She is as charming in the world as she can
Speaker 1: be full of rage in the home. She is young,
Speaker 1: younger than I think it's possible to realize as a
Speaker 1: child when she had you. How old was she one?
Speaker 1: I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine being a parent at
Speaker 1: a married parent at one, and then very quickly becoming,
Speaker 1: you know, a single mom of two at Ashley's mom
Speaker 1: became a single parent at Ashley and her younger brother
Speaker 1: r C. Because her father was imprisoned. A few years later,
Speaker 1: when Ashley is four, her mother is in a new
Speaker 1: relationship and Ashley is starting to experience and be on
Speaker 1: the receiving end of her mom's rage. Soon, Ashley is
Speaker 1: sent to Missouri to live with their grandmother. What was
Speaker 1: the landscape of that, like, you know, your grandmother's place. Oh,
Speaker 1: it was it was a different life. I really took
Speaker 1: to the country really quickly. It was you know, the
Speaker 1: gravel driveways and the long grass that just grew everywhere,
Speaker 1: the forest, you were surrounded by trees. There was just
Speaker 1: something about being outside and sort of being expected to
Speaker 1: be outside a lot that felt right to me and
Speaker 1: felt good and natural to my body. And we lived
Speaker 1: my grandmother and I. We lived in her stepfather. We
Speaker 1: didn't live in the upstairs of the house with him.
Speaker 1: We lived in the basement area, and we had a
Speaker 1: staircase that went directly from the basement out into the backyard.
Speaker 1: And there were always lizards and things like that in
Speaker 1: that little stairway on our way out of the basement,
Speaker 1: and I just there was something about living in that
Speaker 1: place and being in that place where I was the
Speaker 1: most comfortable my body has really ever felt. You wrote,
Speaker 1: I was not always so afraid of the world or
Speaker 1: nervous about the other people in it or what they
Speaker 1: might do to me. So it seems that in your
Speaker 1: early childhood the danger, if you felt danger, had to
Speaker 1: do with your mother's rage and her sort of unpredictability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was a very intense kid. I saw something on
Speaker 1: TV that said cigarettes kill, and I was like, what,
Speaker 1: my mom must not know this because she smoked cigarettes.
Speaker 1: Like that was my whole thought process, and so I
Speaker 1: took the cigarettes out of her bag and I just
Speaker 1: threw them in the trash. I didn't even think about obviously,
Speaker 1: Like I'm very young at this point, around four years old.
Speaker 1: I'm not thinking about the consequences of my actions because
Speaker 1: I my child, because my brain is not formed in
Speaker 1: that way yet. And my mother's reaction to that, to
Speaker 1: finding out that I had thrown away her cigarettes, was
Speaker 1: to wook me, for it to hit me over and
Speaker 1: over and over, and I remember that it hurt, and
Speaker 1: I remember that I blamed myself. I didn't feel like
Speaker 1: something had happened to me that I didn't deserve. I
Speaker 1: felt like, yeah, I deserved to hurt. I deserved to
Speaker 1: get hit for what I did, even though I didn't
Speaker 1: know what I was doing, and I knew that I
Speaker 1: didn't do it with mal intent. I wasn't trying to
Speaker 1: hurt me. I wasn't trying to upset anybody, but I
Speaker 1: was treated like it was intentional. When you go live
Speaker 1: with your grandma, it's in the wake of this that
Speaker 1: you were more comfortable and more in your body, more
Speaker 1: at home in yourself. Yeah. Soon though, Ashley is sent
Speaker 1: back to Indiana to be with her mom, it's a
Speaker 1: surprise to her that she has a new baby sister
Speaker 1: waiting at home too. I didn't know it was coming,
Speaker 1: but there' she was um, and you know, thank God,
Speaker 1: because she's the best. But I definitely wasn't expecting to
Speaker 1: come back to a different kind of family formation. Tell
Speaker 1: me about what you knew of or what you remembered
Speaker 1: of your father as when you were a child. At first,
Speaker 1: almost nothing. He was more of an idea. I guess,
Speaker 1: like I knew I had a dad out there in
Speaker 1: some respect, but I knew nothing about him. I didn't
Speaker 1: know what he looked like. Um, I didn't know who
Speaker 1: he was in any respect. And it wasn't until I
Speaker 1: found a picture of him in my grandmother's closet and
Speaker 1: she explained to me who he was that I suddenly
Speaker 1: felt that it was important to try to remember who
Speaker 1: he was, and that that was information I should have
Speaker 1: and I should hold on to. And then, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't remember visiting my dad until I was around
Speaker 1: seven years old that I saw him in person. I mean,
Speaker 1: after hugging him and forming that memory of him as
Speaker 1: a person, as a full human being, it was different.
Speaker 1: He occupied a much bigger space in my mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes so much sense. And there's a lot that
Speaker 1: you write about about making memories, which I found really
Speaker 1: interesting because, of course, you know, in many ways we're
Speaker 1: not in control of our memories, and our memories change
Speaker 1: in the retelling um again and again. You know, this
Speaker 1: kind of sense of in a way spiraling back but
Speaker 1: always coming to a new understanding or a new thought,
Speaker 1: a new memory. But the idea of making memory is
Speaker 1: like I want to freeze this in time in some way,
Speaker 1: or I want to hold onto this and I can
Speaker 1: imagine what it must have felt like to be a
Speaker 1: seven year old really meeting your father for the first time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but some years before Ashley meets her father, there is
Speaker 1: another male presence in her life, her baby sister's father.
Speaker 1: His name is Alan. Alan was probably six ft tall.
Speaker 1: He was just, like, you know, a regular dude. I guess.
Speaker 1: He was usually wearing his blue uniform. He was a
Speaker 1: Santa Haitian worker, and he just wore that uniform all
Speaker 1: the time. And he had a brown hat that he
Speaker 1: wore all the time. He was kind of like the
Speaker 1: cartoon character Doug from Nickelodeon who always had on the
Speaker 1: same clothes, staying clothes over and over and over. Unless
Speaker 1: it was a holiday or a special day, he might
Speaker 1: have on regular clothes. But I really owned, like I
Speaker 1: would say, at the time I saw him in his uniform,
Speaker 1: when my sister was around a year. Somewhere between a
Speaker 1: year and two years old is when he started to
Speaker 1: consistently be Around the time that I remember them getting together,
Speaker 1: I'm about oh, six or seven years old, and they
Speaker 1: did not break up until my freshman year of college.
Speaker 1: And in all of that time, as much as he
Speaker 1: was around, he never spent the night in our home.
Speaker 1: M I can't say that I know why, but I
Speaker 1: know that the entire time it was a point of
Speaker 1: contention and and hurtful to my mother, and that it
Speaker 1: was something that he would bring up, you know, as
Speaker 1: like when he was upset with her, as like you know,
Speaker 1: almost like the punishment, like and this is why I
Speaker 1: don't spend the night, And how did he treat you
Speaker 1: like a nuisance? And unless he could use me to
Speaker 1: get under my mom's skin, um, which probably happened twice
Speaker 1: before I realized that that's what was happening and just
Speaker 1: refused to be part of that anymore. But yeah, he
Speaker 1: was very dismissive. He was sarcastic. He was highly critical
Speaker 1: of not just my mother, you know, as we got older,
Speaker 1: he would make fun of us. He would say things
Speaker 1: about our bodies, and it was pretty gross and it
Speaker 1: was disturbing, and it was like if a forty year
Speaker 1: old man was hanging around and he had retained the
Speaker 1: sense of humor of a twelve year old boy. That
Speaker 1: says at all. By this time, Allen and Ashley's mother
Speaker 1: have had another child, Jorian. The familiar atmosphere is fraught
Speaker 1: Ashley and her siblings grow up with a sense that
Speaker 1: danger is everywhere, at school, at church, and even at home.
Speaker 1: She writes, protecting my body became my number one goal.
Speaker 1: They're the familial expectations that you will do whatever you
Speaker 1: can to mitigate any unwanted attention from men or boys.
Speaker 1: And then there's the spiritual side of it, where you
Speaker 1: know when you grow up in a town where there's
Speaker 1: a church on every corner, and you know you don't
Speaker 1: necessarily just ask people what school they go to, you
Speaker 1: also ask what church they go to, because everybody goes
Speaker 1: to church. You get the message over and over and
Speaker 1: over as a young girl from the church that it
Speaker 1: is your responsibility and your responsibility at all alone to
Speaker 1: protect what is essentially your value and what your value
Speaker 1: will be to any man or partner or man who
Speaker 1: you would want to be with, because anybody would who
Speaker 1: would have you after you had been damaged or violated
Speaker 1: in some way was a lesser man in the eyes
Speaker 1: of God. So you know it's coming at you from
Speaker 1: all sides. It's coming at you at school. You go
Speaker 1: to school and there are rules about your body, and
Speaker 1: you see who rules pertained to and who the rules
Speaker 1: don't pertain to, and you think it's you. You think
Speaker 1: that it must be you because everybody else has decided
Speaker 1: that it's already. Tell me a little bit more about
Speaker 1: who the rules pertained to and who the rules don't
Speaker 1: pertain to. Well, I was a person um, a girl
Speaker 1: whose body matured before adults were comfortable talking about a
Speaker 1: girl's body maturing. I had breast when I was in
Speaker 1: the third grade, I got my first minstreul cycle. Between
Speaker 1: fourth and fifth grade, I developed, and the reaction of
Speaker 1: the adults around me to my developing body was close considered.
Speaker 1: Like if I wore the same shirt as my best
Speaker 1: friend at the time, who had not hit puberty yet
Speaker 1: and who still very much looked the way people would
Speaker 1: expect girls our age to look, we would have on
Speaker 1: almost the exact same outfit, and I would get sent
Speaker 1: to the principle's office every time it gets to a
Speaker 1: point where it feels like harassment. This was a consistent
Speaker 1: thing for me in school, having the fact of my
Speaker 1: body constantly policed by the adults who were in charge
Speaker 1: of me, constantly being told that the way I looked,
Speaker 1: the way I was shaped, just the shape of my
Speaker 1: body was inappropriate, and I'm still dealing with the shame
Speaker 1: that came with believing that and having to adhered policies
Speaker 1: that forced me to believe it. One New Year's Eve,
Speaker 1: when Ashley is a young girl, she's faced with an
Speaker 1: other terribly inappropriate response to her body. A family friend,
Speaker 1: an older man, kisses her at midnight. I knew it was.
Speaker 1: It immediately felt wrong, and I also realized almost immediately
Speaker 1: that I had to wagh whether or not that moment
Speaker 1: was worth possibly destroying a person, possibly destroying a gathering,
Speaker 1: a family, essentially really a family. I thought, if I
Speaker 1: say something, it could destroy my family, and uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was really really sad and unfortunate. So that becomes
Speaker 1: a secret, something that you know, you bury somewhere within
Speaker 1: your body, within your psyche. And the sense that you
Speaker 1: had and that you write about that scene was danger
Speaker 1: was everywhere. So in a way it's corroborated. You know,
Speaker 1: your mother tells you she wants you to see danger everywhere,
Speaker 1: and then lo and behold, there's danger right in the
Speaker 1: same room as her. We'll be right back in all
Speaker 1: these years growing up with danger ever present, her father
Speaker 1: is ever absent. This absence is a defining quality in
Speaker 1: her life, and when finally she gets to know him,
Speaker 1: she gets to know herself too. When my dad was arrested,
Speaker 1: I was about eight months old. The first time that
Speaker 1: you really remember going to visit him and you know,
Speaker 1: you want to make a memory and you start feeling
Speaker 1: the significance of the fact that he's your father in
Speaker 1: your life is when you're seven. Yes, I think anybody
Speaker 1: who knows what it's like to see and talk to
Speaker 1: another person and feel like a piece of the puzzle
Speaker 1: has just locked into place. You know, whether that's like
Speaker 1: lost sibling, a lover, who you need, who you can
Speaker 1: tell is going to be important in your story and
Speaker 1: you feel that thing lock into place. That's kind of
Speaker 1: what it was like to have that moment and to
Speaker 1: see my dad and to really be cognizant of him
Speaker 1: and and cognizant of wanting to remember this moment with him.
Speaker 1: You know, nobody had ever looked at me like that before,
Speaker 1: Nobody had ever looked at me and their whole face
Speaker 1: lit up like I was the best thing in the
Speaker 1: world that it never happened to me before. And not
Speaker 1: only was that happening in that moment, but the person
Speaker 1: who had that look on their face was my dad.
Speaker 1: And it's not like I didn't know people who were
Speaker 1: dads or people who had dads. I never saw their
Speaker 1: dad's look at them like that. But look at how
Speaker 1: my dad looked at me. And I think that I
Speaker 1: had had all this reason before then to suspect that
Speaker 1: I was kind of bad, But in that moment, just
Speaker 1: because of the way my dad looked at me, I
Speaker 1: started to suspect that maybe I could be like especially
Speaker 1: good in some way. Maybe the badness wasn't a special
Speaker 1: thing about me. You know, it's amazing how in our
Speaker 1: childhood's if there's one person, maybe it's a parent, maybe
Speaker 1: it's a teacher, maybe it's a grandparent, and maybe it's
Speaker 1: not often maybe it's a moment or an experience like
Speaker 1: that where we have that feeling of being seen and
Speaker 1: loved and held that can really go such a long
Speaker 1: way to saving us. Absolutely, you know. Tony Morrison wrote
Speaker 1: about this, talking about how when her children walked into
Speaker 1: the room, she made sure that her face lit up
Speaker 1: whenever they walked into a room. Whatever she was doing,
Speaker 1: she always tried to make sure that the first thing
Speaker 1: she did when they walk into a room was light up,
Speaker 1: and I remember reading that and thinking that, oh, my god,
Speaker 1: like that might be it, like that might be the secret,
Speaker 1: because I knew how that moment had, you know, altered
Speaker 1: my perception of myself as a child. It isn't until
Speaker 1: actually is twelve that she asks an uncle why exactly
Speaker 1: her father is in jail? Why do you think you
Speaker 1: hadn't asked before? I think I specifically hadn't asked my
Speaker 1: uncle Clarence before, because I genuinely worried that he didn't know.
Speaker 1: At that point, I didn't realize that, oh, it's just
Speaker 1: me and my brother who don't know. I thought maybe
Speaker 1: it was that a lot of our family doesn't know,
Speaker 1: and I asked him, you know, do you know? Like
Speaker 1: that was my first question to him, was do you
Speaker 1: know why my dad is in present? I wasn't sure
Speaker 1: that he knew, and my mind wasn't sophisticated enough I
Speaker 1: guess to assume that he would, but you know, he
Speaker 1: reacted by saying that he didn't think it was his
Speaker 1: place to tell us, right, And it's it's so interesting
Speaker 1: because it sounds like you were actually being kind of
Speaker 1: protective of him when you're twelve and you ask him that,
Speaker 1: And so this is really the first time that you
Speaker 1: understand that there are people in your family who know
Speaker 1: things that you don't know about this. Yes, the world
Speaker 1: around Ashley confirms once again that danger is everywhere. In
Speaker 1: high school, she has a boyfriend, Bradley, who violently assaults her.
Speaker 1: Both during and in the aftermath of that assault, Ashley dissociates.
Speaker 1: She essentially floats away from her body, and she doesn't
Speaker 1: tell anyone. Most notably, she doesn't tell her mother. What
Speaker 1: I've realized as an adult is that a good part
Speaker 1: of the reason why I didn't tell anybody was because
Speaker 1: I genuinely did not believe that anybody would be on
Speaker 1: my side. I did not believe that I would be
Speaker 1: treated like something had happened to me. I thought that
Speaker 1: I would be treated like I had allowed something to
Speaker 1: happen to me. And so not only was I ashamed
Speaker 1: of it, I was afraid of what it meant about
Speaker 1: me and who I was and what I wanted versus
Speaker 1: I guess what my words and my body told people
Speaker 1: I wanted. Was there at difference? Yeah? It was not good.
Speaker 1: It was terrible. And so you hold this secret again,
Speaker 1: you know it lodges somewhere inside of you, which is
Speaker 1: what secret to do. They never go away, so you
Speaker 1: don't how anyone in your family. I guess one of
Speaker 1: the things I was wondering about was who is your
Speaker 1: father to you? During those years when you think of him,
Speaker 1: you know, we're making memories of him and his adoration
Speaker 1: of you, and his pride in you and his belief
Speaker 1: in your goodness? Did that in any way help to
Speaker 1: kind of sustain you during that time? Did you ever
Speaker 1: think about talking to him about it? It's actually when
Speaker 1: things sort of shifted, um, and my idea of my
Speaker 1: father lived more in a fantasy place than in reality,
Speaker 1: because the reality, in reality, this thing had happened to me.
Speaker 1: And I didn't want my idea of my father to
Speaker 1: be anywhere near this thing that had happened to me.
Speaker 1: I wanted them to be separate, you know. And this
Speaker 1: is sort of the start of like issues. I started
Speaker 1: to have the dissociation, though I wouldn't have known to
Speaker 1: call it that then, but yeah, because in that dissociated place,
Speaker 1: I was still twelve, and I was still the girl
Speaker 1: that my dad saw the last time I saw him,
Speaker 1: and I was still worthy of all of the letters
Speaker 1: I had from him, and all of the kind things
Speaker 1: he had said to me, and all of the belief
Speaker 1: I had in myself and in my goodness through those moments,
Speaker 1: you know, in my mind, in that fantasy place, I
Speaker 1: was still worth those things. And whenever I had to
Speaker 1: be back in my body and reality, I was, in
Speaker 1: one way or another forced to face the fact that
Speaker 1: I wasn't that growing, that what had happened to me
Speaker 1: had changed me, that my body was changing, that my
Speaker 1: perspectives were changing, and the person who I was becoming
Speaker 1: felt so much third year than the person my dad loved.
Speaker 1: My father wrote to me, I would say three or
Speaker 1: four times a year, which doesn't sound like a whole
Speaker 1: lot until kind of have the factor in that, like
Speaker 1: inmates have to be or at least at that time,
Speaker 1: they had to be able to afford envelopes and paper
Speaker 1: and stamps like they have to buy them. And the
Speaker 1: only way to get those things and also money to
Speaker 1: make phone calls and all that stuff is by having
Speaker 1: an institutional job. And you know, even now, like in
Speaker 1: if you have an institutional job, you could get paid,
Speaker 1: like around in Indiana, it's about fourteen cents an hour
Speaker 1: and then all the prices on everything are hyked up
Speaker 1: in there. So you gotta think about how long somebody
Speaker 1: has to work in order to be able to afford soap,
Speaker 1: any toiletries. They might need, phone calls, plus any media,
Speaker 1: any form of entertainment whatsoever. It's like three or four
Speaker 1: times a year. There's a lot of money to write
Speaker 1: both of your children individual letters that I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just you know, you're my favorite girl. I hope
Speaker 1: you smile today. I hope you think about me, you smile.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to hug you someday. I can't wait
Speaker 1: for the day where we can see each other every day.
Speaker 1: You know, we can see each other all the time,
Speaker 1: and you know, and I would think, man, I can't
Speaker 1: wait for that day either. My dad's letters were really
Speaker 1: full of dreams for the kind of life maybe we
Speaker 1: would have if he were here, if he hadn't done
Speaker 1: what he'd done, and if you hadn't gone to prison,
Speaker 1: you know, And I really liked to dream with her.
Speaker 1: When Ashley is fourteen, she finally learns why her father
Speaker 1: is in prison. Her grandmother tells her, my grandmother, God rest,
Speaker 1: her soul, tact and appropriateness was never really her her forte.
Speaker 1: So she was just kind of upset with me because
Speaker 1: my mother and I had gotten into an argument before
Speaker 1: my grandma and I caught the bus to go to
Speaker 1: the mall, and my mom told me not to talk
Speaker 1: to my grandma about our argument because they had this
Speaker 1: whole thing between them where, you know, even though they
Speaker 1: were super close and always in each other's business, they
Speaker 1: were always trying to keep the other one out of
Speaker 1: their business and it was a ship show, um. And
Speaker 1: my grandma wanted me to talk about why I was
Speaker 1: upset or why I was upset when she had gotten
Speaker 1: there from the argument with my mom, and I didn't
Speaker 1: want to talk about it because I didn't want it
Speaker 1: to become a thing. And she started telling me when
Speaker 1: we were walking around the mall that I needed to
Speaker 1: be nicer to my mom because I didn't know what
Speaker 1: my mom had been through, and that I didn't even
Speaker 1: know why my father was in prison, and I just,
Speaker 1: for some reason, I got kind of bold about, you know,
Speaker 1: why is he a prison? You know, I wanted to know,
Speaker 1: and my grandma did this thing where she would act
Speaker 1: like she wasn't gonna tell me because if she told
Speaker 1: me that I'd tell my mom, and she told me,
Speaker 1: and I was like, no, I won't, you know. And
Speaker 1: we were sitting in the food court and eating really
Speaker 1: bad americanized chat eas food, and she just told me,
Speaker 1: she told me, your dad's in prison because he raped
Speaker 1: two women, and then she just looked at me. She
Speaker 1: kept looking at me, and I knew that she was
Speaker 1: looking at me to watch my reaction and make sure
Speaker 1: that I didn't get what she would consider hysterical, which
Speaker 1: would be showing any emotion at all. So I raised
Speaker 1: my eyebrows enough to be like, huh, you know, and
Speaker 1: then I just went back to eating my food because
Speaker 1: it was the only way that I could not look
Speaker 1: at her looking at me and think my thoughts and
Speaker 1: have the moment to process. And then we took the
Speaker 1: bus home, and I, you know, I had to sort
Speaker 1: of spend the rest of the time acting as normal
Speaker 1: as possible, because if I had been even a little
Speaker 1: bit off, it would have been problem. And then when
Speaker 1: I got home, I called my best friend at the time.
Speaker 1: Brent had told him that I was going to come over,
Speaker 1: and I did, and I told him what I had
Speaker 1: just learned about my dad, and he just helped me,
Speaker 1: and I just cried and cried and cried because I
Speaker 1: was devastated. I was so devastated. Have you had in
Speaker 1: your earlier years fantasy is about what he might be
Speaker 1: in prison for or did you really just kind of
Speaker 1: shut that down for yourself when you were a kid.
Speaker 1: I mean, I had all kinds of ideas about why
Speaker 1: he might need it there, you know, and reasons and
Speaker 1: excuses for why he may have done those things and
Speaker 1: why he may have gotten wrongfully accused or anything. And
Speaker 1: the one thing I didn't want it to be this
Speaker 1: is this. Almost anything else, I felt like I could
Speaker 1: find some way to rationalize it, Like my brain could
Speaker 1: find some way to think that maybe it's this, maybe
Speaker 1: it's this specific way that this could happen where it's
Speaker 1: not really his fault. But there's no way. There's no
Speaker 1: way that could happen with me. There's just no way.
Speaker 1: And it forever altered, you know, my perception of my dad,
Speaker 1: you know, forever altered my perception of him. He had to,
Speaker 1: it was always going to, but that was the moment
Speaker 1: that it happened for me. Yeah, there's a passage in
Speaker 1: your book where right after you know your grandmother's told
Speaker 1: you this, and you go over to Brett's house and
Speaker 1: you write, my father's crimes repulsed me, and I felt
Speaker 1: for some reason that I should have known better. I
Speaker 1: convinced myself something about his letters, his drawings, or the
Speaker 1: tone of his voice should have revealed to me what
Speaker 1: he had done, but I hadn't noticed, because I hadn't
Speaker 1: wanted to. And then you write, my naivete shamed me,
Speaker 1: and I accepted that shame as my own. In the
Speaker 1: dark at night, the saddest parts of me assumed my
Speaker 1: father's crimes were the source of the crime committed upon me. Now,
Speaker 1: that is just so complex and layered and sort of
Speaker 1: boomerangs all the way back to it's a bad world.
Speaker 1: It's a dangerous world. Your body causes danger, women's bodies
Speaker 1: caused danger. When you think about it now and you've
Speaker 1: processed so much and you've done so much work, do
Speaker 1: you feel that that lurking secret of the reason why
Speaker 1: your father was convicted and sent to prison, that that
Speaker 1: was kind of like the noxious gas in the air,
Speaker 1: where the whole idea of men are danger us and
Speaker 1: you're internalizing things so much as being bad or good,
Speaker 1: yourself as bad you know, the fault being yours. It
Speaker 1: just feels very knotted up in what wasn't being said
Speaker 1: for all those years. Mm hmm. I think it's a
Speaker 1: lot of it. But I also have to consider the
Speaker 1: fact that my grandmother had five girls. You know, I
Speaker 1: have four aunts. We all lived in the same neighborhood,
Speaker 1: were like all there together, and they all have daughters. Nobody,
Speaker 1: you know, except for except for one aunt, only has sons,
Speaker 1: but everybody else has daughters. There's a lot of women,
Speaker 1: and my family has a history of women who have
Speaker 1: been violated, who have been assaulted, who have been beaten,
Speaker 1: who have been cut, who have been the victims of
Speaker 1: people in and outside of their own family. So that
Speaker 1: legacy of pain and of expected pain from men, the
Speaker 1: foundation for that had been laid long before anything happened,
Speaker 1: you know, with my dad. But I think that for
Speaker 1: me personally, it's not necessarily that it affirmed their fears
Speaker 1: about men in general, are about the world in general.
Speaker 1: For me, it affirmed my fears about me, that something
Speaker 1: really was wrong with me, that I was bad, because
Speaker 1: the only person who had ever looked at me like
Speaker 1: I was good had done such a terrible thing. M Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: In the years that followed this shattering, discovery actually focuses
Speaker 1: on healing, on having healthy relationships with men, but perhaps
Speaker 1: more importantly, a healthy relationship with herself. I gave myself
Speaker 1: therapy as an eighteenth birthday president. Even before that, you know,
Speaker 1: I was lucky to have a couple of adults around
Speaker 1: me who were not counselors or anything like that, but
Speaker 1: who listened to me, you know, who just listened to
Speaker 1: me when I was hurting, when I was scared. I
Speaker 1: had a couple of people who I could count on
Speaker 1: and who would listen to me, who were adults. And
Speaker 1: I got therapy as soon as I could, and I
Speaker 1: stayed in therapy for as long as I could, and
Speaker 1: I just never stopped doing that. I think something in me,
Speaker 1: some part of me, realized that I didn't necessarily need
Speaker 1: my goodness to be affirmed by somebody else. I needed
Speaker 1: to trust myself enough to see it in myself, to
Speaker 1: find it in myself and believe it. And that wasn't
Speaker 1: going to happen without a lot of work. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's because I'm an oldest daughter, or
Speaker 1: a Capricorn or what it is. But work has never
Speaker 1: been the scariest thing to me. You know. The scariest
Speaker 1: thing to me has been giving in or or giving up,
Speaker 1: or deciding that I'm not worthy, not battling that thought
Speaker 1: that I already have, you know, getting into it. A
Speaker 1: lot of time when I was growing up, I felt
Speaker 1: like my mom was giving in to other people, to
Speaker 1: what they thought, to what they wanted. You know, I
Speaker 1: felt like my mom traded herself in a lot and
Speaker 1: didn't get a lot back. And if I didn't know
Speaker 1: exactly what I wanted to do, I knew that I
Speaker 1: didn't want to do that. When we talk about identity
Speaker 1: and sort of how we become ourselves, you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: if we're lucky, we're partly formed by positive role models
Speaker 1: and modeling other people's behavior sometimes, and I don't I
Speaker 1: think it doesn't get talked about enough. We form ourselves
Speaker 1: kind of in opposition to well, I don't know what
Speaker 1: I do want it to look like, but I do
Speaker 1: know what I don't want it to look like. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you know. When I was growing up, one of the
Speaker 1: things that was really really common were movies where adults
Speaker 1: forgot what it was like to be kids and their
Speaker 1: lives fell apart. M hm. I guess I just watched
Speaker 1: the adults around me at the time do things that
Speaker 1: I thought, like, you know, you've forgotten what it was
Speaker 1: like to be a kid. You wouldn't do that if
Speaker 1: you remembered what it was like to be a kid.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't say that. You wouldn't behave that way if
Speaker 1: you remembered what it was like to be a kid. Now,
Speaker 1: as an adult, I have a more sophisticated view of that,
Speaker 1: which is more so like, you wouldn't say that if
Speaker 1: you didn't kind of hate your child self, if you
Speaker 1: didn't kind of think your child self was weak and
Speaker 1: think that they deserved to be hurt or harmed. That's
Speaker 1: why you think it's okay to hurt hard kids. It's
Speaker 1: because you think you deserved it. When you work, I
Speaker 1: knew I was watching a lot of things happen that
Speaker 1: I did not want to repeat. It's not like I
Speaker 1: was a perfect kid. It's you know, it's not like
Speaker 1: I was a specifically delightful and well behaved kid. Like
Speaker 1: you know, I was a kid, and there were things
Speaker 1: I did when I was in middle school. I kept
Speaker 1: a box of note cards where every time my mom
Speaker 1: did something that I thought was a bad parent moment,
Speaker 1: I wrote it down. And I was going to keep
Speaker 1: that box until I was a parent, so that I
Speaker 1: could go through it and remember all of the things
Speaker 1: that I did not want to do to my kids.
Speaker 1: And one day, after keeping this box for months, almost
Speaker 1: a year, one day it suddenly occurred to me that
Speaker 1: if my mom ever found this box, it would, I thought,
Speaker 1: destroy her emotionally, and so I threw it away. I
Speaker 1: threw away the whole box of car that I have
Speaker 1: been keeping because I didn't want to do that. I
Speaker 1: also didn't want to hurt her. And like, that is
Speaker 1: kind of the struggle of the book and even like
Speaker 1: of my life, which is that you know, I'm already
Speaker 1: making notes about what I don't want to do, and
Speaker 1: all in that list is hurt my mother. And those
Speaker 1: two desires can exist in the same place, but the
Speaker 1: outcome can't always exist in the same place. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really that's really beautifully put. Ashley does not visit her
Speaker 1: father from the time she learns of the reason for
Speaker 1: his imprisonment at the age of fourteen until she's twenty five.
Speaker 1: Her mother is sick, and she becomes painfully aware that
Speaker 1: she may soon be without any parent at all. She
Speaker 1: asks her friend Trent to drive her to prison, which
Speaker 1: is three hours from where she lives. The visit lasts
Speaker 1: two hours and forty seven minutes. Ashley is her father's
Speaker 1: first visitor in five years, and in that visit, which
Speaker 1: is filled with mutual kindness and affection and a lot
Speaker 1: of catching up, it becomes clear that it is possible
Speaker 1: that someone you love can do heinous and completely unacceptable things,
Speaker 1: things that have impacted your life tremendously, but still be
Speaker 1: someone you love. It was just so much information at once,
Speaker 1: and then you know, to get into the room, to
Speaker 1: see him, to have him stand up because he sees me,
Speaker 1: and to be able to hug him, but then not
Speaker 1: be able to touch him, you know, like anymore, like
Speaker 1: not be able to touch his hand or anything like
Speaker 1: that's against the rules. And it was just trying to
Speaker 1: talk to each other, just trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: language of that kind of anticipation for a conversation, for
Speaker 1: a connection with another person. It is a wild, wild
Speaker 1: feeling that in some ways will is are indescribable even
Speaker 1: to myself, but It was a good visit. You know.
Speaker 1: I got to talk to my dad about my friends
Speaker 1: and what I like to read and what I like
Speaker 1: to listen, to the fact that I fancied myself a writer,
Speaker 1: and that I was writing about me and writing about
Speaker 1: him and writing about the world around me, and having
Speaker 1: him just want more, more and more, to just want
Speaker 1: me to say more and more and more about who
Speaker 1: I am and what I'm up to and all of that.
Speaker 1: It was hetty, It was wild in terms of your
Speaker 1: writing about him. What were you hoping for from him?
Speaker 1: You know, I was hoping for him to sort of
Speaker 1: give me his blessing, to give me his permission to
Speaker 1: write about those things. I don't know that if I
Speaker 1: hadn't gotten it, that that means I wouldn't have kept
Speaker 1: writing about it, you know, because I know how I am. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't think that would have happened. But I think
Speaker 1: what I was looking for in that moment was sort
Speaker 1: of just the affirmation of my right to do it,
Speaker 1: of my right to talk about what I saw, what
Speaker 1: I heard, what happened. Um what I know, what I
Speaker 1: don't know, what my life had been up until that point.
Speaker 1: I wanted him to affirm that, like, yeah, that that's
Speaker 1: yours and you get to do what you want with that.
Speaker 1: And that's what I got. That is such an extension
Speaker 1: of the way that you described the way that he
Speaker 1: looked at you, you know, when when you were seven
Speaker 1: years old, kind of a different version of that. After
Speaker 1: this visit, Ashley is empowered as a writer, and she's
Speaker 1: carving out her own life in New York City with
Speaker 1: her partner Kelly. The city embraces her in that magical
Speaker 1: way that can happen when you're right where you're supposed
Speaker 1: to be, when the world and the people in it
Speaker 1: are the opposite of danger, when they find you and
Speaker 1: guide you and mentor you. She's with someone she loves,
Speaker 1: and she's existing in both worlds, loving and honoring the
Speaker 1: complexities of her family and her past, but also creating
Speaker 1: distance and living in her new present, carving out her future.
Speaker 1: She writes, I could exist in both as me fully me.
Speaker 1: I think at a certain point what I did really
Speaker 1: was just accept reality. I accepted what the reality was,
Speaker 1: and the reality was that I'm a bad pretend and
Speaker 1: I'm a bad liar, and I don't like to pretend,
Speaker 1: and I don't like to lie. And I didn't want
Speaker 1: to be around my family as a palatable version of
Speaker 1: me and have to lie to them about who I
Speaker 1: was and how I felt and what I thought. And
Speaker 1: you know, for a long time, I just thought my
Speaker 1: family couldn't handle that. I thought they wouldn't allow it.
Speaker 1: I thought that it couldn't be because it had never
Speaker 1: really been before. And I had to have a bigger
Speaker 1: imagination about what they could handle, what I could handle,
Speaker 1: and the kind of boundaries that would allow us to
Speaker 1: remain in each other's lives. And when I expanded my
Speaker 1: imagination about those possibilities and allowed for some of those experience,
Speaker 1: it worked out. It really worked out. We had a
Speaker 1: family reunion a month after in my book came out.
Speaker 1: I went, it was great. We had a great time.
Speaker 1: Everybody was great. They were proud of me. What a
Speaker 1: beautiful idea, the idea of expanding the imagination. Sometimes we're
Speaker 1: limited by what we can imagine. Yet other times, in
Speaker 1: the most unlikely ways, even the hardest things can work out.
Speaker 1: Here's Ashley reading the words her father spoke to her
Speaker 1: that day of her visit in prison, words that gave
Speaker 1: her permission. So, look, I don't know what all you're writing,
Speaker 1: And maybe it don't make me sound too good, but
Speaker 1: that's not your fault. That's on me. This is something
Speaker 1: I can give you if you need it. You need
Speaker 1: my permission, you got it. Do me a favor, actually,
Speaker 1: and you write about you and me. Just tell the truth,
Speaker 1: your truth. Don't worry about nobody's feelings, especially really not mine.
Speaker 1: You've gotta be tough to tell your truth. But it's
Speaker 1: the only thing we're doing next to Loving some money.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly
Speaker 1: z a Core is the story editor and Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: is the executive producer. If you have a family secret
Speaker 1: you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and
Speaker 1: your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number
Speaker 1: is one eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
Speaker 1: can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
Speaker 1: if you'd like to know more about the story that
Speaker 1: inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.