Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
Speaker 1: is a secret of my own. My father has been
Speaker 1: helping me write these pages in my dreams. My father
Speaker 1: stands in our house. It is not burned or blackened
Speaker 1: or infelicitous. No melted pools of television screens. Not yet.
Speaker 1: My rocking horse is still there, rocking. The air is clear,
Speaker 1: the dining room table shines. It's all in one piece,
Speaker 1: this house the way I've always imagined it could be.
Speaker 1: So is my father. Sometimes he says, the things I wrote,
Speaker 1: the way I wrote them. We play out the scenes,
Speaker 1: we have our script. Other Times he says, no, not quite,
Speaker 1: it didn't happen like that. My dead father is always moving.
Speaker 1: I follow him. I'm Danny Shapiro. And this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: Have come to think of family secrets sort of like ghosts.
Speaker 1: A family sits at the dinner table, and the ghosts
Speaker 1: hover nearby. A family falls asleep at night, and the
Speaker 1: ghosts linger in doorways, pace the halls. They make a
Speaker 1: cup of coffee in the kitchen. These ghosts are invisible,
Speaker 1: of course, but they're very powerful. In fact, they're all
Speaker 1: the more powerful precisely because they're invisible. My guest today
Speaker 1: is t Kira Madden. Tikira is a supremely gifted young
Speaker 1: writer whose essential piercing human nous shows up on every
Speaker 1: page of her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of
Speaker 1: Fatherless Girls. When I first read Tikira's work, I knew
Speaker 1: that I had to have her on family secrets. Tikira
Speaker 1: grew up in a family shaped by its secrets and ghosts,
Speaker 1: and therefore she herself was formed by all she did
Speaker 1: not know, all her parents kept from her, from each other,
Speaker 1: and from themselves. This is a story about addiction, shame,
Speaker 1: a couple of world rocking DNA discoveries, and thrumming under
Speaker 1: all of it, a family's love for one another. Where
Speaker 1: does secrets go when they're stuffed away? We're about to
Speaker 1: find out. We began, as I often do, by my
Speaker 1: asking Tikira to tell me about the landscape of her childhood.
Speaker 1: I think my childhood always felt like an adventure. I
Speaker 1: think that's the word I would use. That I didn't
Speaker 1: understand the dynamic of parents and child, and it was
Speaker 1: more like we were all on a team together, the
Speaker 1: three of us, me and my mother and my father.
Speaker 1: And there were always fights. There were always conflicts outside,
Speaker 1: conflicts inside conflicts, but we were always running away or
Speaker 1: in a sense of adventure. My mother and I were
Speaker 1: always you know, going in the car to find my
Speaker 1: father at whatever bar or strip club he was in,
Speaker 1: and we never knew what we would find there at
Speaker 1: three in the morning. Um. Where I was going on
Speaker 1: separate adventures with my father to bars, to baseball games,
Speaker 1: two clubs, to Las Vegas. Um. But the three of
Speaker 1: us always we had a team. Um. We had a
Speaker 1: team and a loyalty that I think doesn't make sense
Speaker 1: to people now, but it was. It was just implicit.
Speaker 1: We were a team always. And how old were you
Speaker 1: when you were going to bars and you know, out
Speaker 1: at three in the morning looking for your dad or
Speaker 1: going to Vegas as early as I can remember, yeah,
Speaker 1: um My, my very earliest memories, it was my my
Speaker 1: parents wedding and being there and after that just these
Speaker 1: wild apartments we lived in the wild characters who would
Speaker 1: come in and out. Um, and I very distinctly even
Speaker 1: have memories in a stroller going through some of these
Speaker 1: experiences and just my very earliest memories going in my
Speaker 1: mother's car to these clubs and meeting these strippers outside
Speaker 1: the car, and at some points having golf clubs and
Speaker 1: baseball bats being swung at car windows and shattering, and
Speaker 1: it was all very exciting to me. Well, that's so
Speaker 1: interesting because the fact that you have memories from the stroller,
Speaker 1: if it had been seriously traumatic for you, um most
Speaker 1: likely would have blocked them out. It doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 1: I guess that you're saying that there was something, yeah, exciting.
Speaker 1: I think, in a way exciting. I didn't understand. My
Speaker 1: mind wasn't then yet molded into these false binaries of good, bad, sober, drunk.
Speaker 1: I didn't have those understandings. It didn't feel unsafe to know.
Speaker 1: Everything was just kind of electric and arousing and exciting
Speaker 1: in my early mind. I think. So, you're father was
Speaker 1: in another family, in another relationship when you were very small. Yes,
Speaker 1: he was married to another woman when I was born,
Speaker 1: and he had two sons with that woman, which I
Speaker 1: didn't understand, of course, until a little bit later. Was
Speaker 1: that something that you knew as you were growing up
Speaker 1: as a toddler? He was the shadowy figure. He was
Speaker 1: just the smell of cigarettes and gold and cash. And
Speaker 1: that's who my father was, this kind of gravelly voice
Speaker 1: figure in my house. I always knew there was this
Speaker 1: other family. My father. Um. He sat me and my
Speaker 1: brother's down when we were younger. My my brothers were
Speaker 1: at that point teenagers and I was a toddler, and
Speaker 1: he explained to all of us that we were actually siblings.
Speaker 1: And I hadn't realized before that point that I was
Speaker 1: just supposedly my mother's kid. I was just a kid
Speaker 1: who was around UM. So I had a sense of
Speaker 1: them as my family or another family, but I didn't
Speaker 1: understand what that meant. And I understood their photos in
Speaker 1: my father's wallet, for example, and seeing similarities, but you know,
Speaker 1: at that point, biology, genetics, um connection, those things didn't
Speaker 1: quite make sense. Well, it sounds like you were left
Speaker 1: to figure it out for yourself a bit. Absolutely. This
Speaker 1: is something that comes up a lot in family secrets,
Speaker 1: the sense of having been a salution as a child.
Speaker 1: So often we were left to our own devices, trying
Speaker 1: to put together the pieces of our families, attempting to
Speaker 1: understand what didn't add up. Our families are all we
Speaker 1: know as children, we feel secrets as an ache, a strangeness,
Speaker 1: or even internalize them as self loathing when we don't
Speaker 1: understand why we feel the way we do. Could you
Speaker 1: describe your mother a little bit? Wild? Is the word
Speaker 1: I would use, and I think that's the word many
Speaker 1: people would use who have met her. Daring, wild, beautiful, electric,
Speaker 1: just a flash of light in any room. My book
Speaker 1: opens with a scene of her shooting a man out
Speaker 1: our window, and that's I think very true to her
Speaker 1: character and why I chose to open her in that way,
Speaker 1: because she's fiercely protective, no boundaries, no filter, She's she's
Speaker 1: just a force. She still is. One of the things
Speaker 1: that really struck me in your book is the way
Speaker 1: in which you had to educate the adults around you
Speaker 1: in the fact that you were a child. There's a
Speaker 1: moment your father has been violent with your mother, and
Speaker 1: it's not the first time, but it's the worst time,
Speaker 1: and she gathers you and you get into the car
Speaker 1: and she hands you a map and she says, find
Speaker 1: the best root out of here. And that moment struck
Speaker 1: me for a lot of reasons, because that felt like
Speaker 1: a metaphor in a way for both for your book
Speaker 1: and for your life, which is you did find the
Speaker 1: best root out of there. How old were you in
Speaker 1: that in that moment? I was in the sixth grade, right,
Speaker 1: and your mother was handing you a map and say saying, like,
Speaker 1: you know, figure it out. Yes, I was very good
Speaker 1: at maps at that point because of so many instances
Speaker 1: of this. There have been many occasions with using maps
Speaker 1: trying to get out of certain situations. Sure, as an
Speaker 1: only child myself, I'm well acquainted with the preternaturally adult
Speaker 1: feeling that many only children experience. At the same time,
Speaker 1: there's also the feeling that the mom, dad, and kid
Speaker 1: are part of a tight little trio, as opposed to
Speaker 1: enlarger families where children banned together in solidarity against the adults.
Speaker 1: Perhaps that's part of the reason why Tikira writes so
Speaker 1: lovingly about both her parents and almost romantically about her
Speaker 1: beginnings with them. It still feels true to me, and
Speaker 1: I think people often say, you know, parents, we do
Speaker 1: the best we can, or they did the best we could.
Speaker 1: I think about that a lot, and I think the
Speaker 1: easier answer would be to always say, yes, my parents
Speaker 1: did the best they could. But I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: that's that was always the case, and I'm not sure
Speaker 1: it even matters, because maybe sometimes you know, my father
Speaker 1: didn't do the best he could, but that's okay. Like,
Speaker 1: there's a life of being a father and the life
Speaker 1: of being a person in the world. And I think
Speaker 1: through reflection and after his death, I start it to
Speaker 1: understand those two versions and multiplicities of so many versions
Speaker 1: of who a person can be. That the lens of
Speaker 1: just a father is in some ways an unfair lens,
Speaker 1: and the lens of just mother, like that scope is
Speaker 1: too small. I had to think about how they ended
Speaker 1: up the way they were um to my to my
Speaker 1: limited knowledge, of course, and acknowledge the failure that I
Speaker 1: can't break away from that limited scope of my own
Speaker 1: singular experiences. As you've said, Danny, and some of your work,
Speaker 1: there's a moment where you describe hearing the words addict,
Speaker 1: you know, or crackhead or whatever the language was being used.
Speaker 1: Someone was describing your parents in those ways, and you
Speaker 1: had never put language to that at all. Yes, Yes,
Speaker 1: is that something you would think of as having been
Speaker 1: secret in your childhood or was that it didn't seem
Speaker 1: to me that ways seemed like they were pretty out
Speaker 1: there with their addictions, that that wasn't something they were
Speaker 1: hiding from you or from the world. Speaking to children
Speaker 1: of addicts, I see and I hear that a lot,
Speaker 1: that there's there's just no vocabulary. As a child, in
Speaker 1: the absence of a vocabulary, Takira makes up a new
Speaker 1: language with phrases that render her parents addiction in terms
Speaker 1: she can understand. When her parents are high, she calls
Speaker 1: them sleepy boy and sleepy girl. It wasn't until I
Speaker 1: started seeing, you know, commercials about drugs and Whitney Houston
Speaker 1: on the news, being caught and seeing those familiar objects,
Speaker 1: and then hearing the words from other people from media
Speaker 1: that I started putting together what was actually going on.
Speaker 1: Finding and knowing the language and labeling it is something
Speaker 1: that's so powerful. I'm thinking of a previous episode of
Speaker 1: Family Secrets where my guest Debbie Millman, who was being
Speaker 1: abused by her stepfather, cuts out a clipping from an
Speaker 1: Ann Lander's column in which someone writes to a Landers
Speaker 1: about being abused, and for the first time she thinks,
Speaker 1: a I'm not the only person in the entire world
Speaker 1: that's happened to and be this is a thing, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a name for it exists. That episode really
Speaker 1: resonated with me, and she kept it under her pillowcase
Speaker 1: or under a mattress, and I kept a book by
Speaker 1: Drew Barrymore under my pillowcase, and I remember hearing that
Speaker 1: on that episode and um sharing that experience that I
Speaker 1: There was this ghost written eighties book called Little Girl Lost,
Speaker 1: which was Drew Barrymore's early memoir. And it wasn't until
Speaker 1: I read that book that was the first it just
Speaker 1: throttled me. That was the first sense of someone else
Speaker 1: has parent like this. In some way, these behaviors are mirrored.
Speaker 1: It's not just me in the world, because before you
Speaker 1: understand addiction of course as a kid, or abuse of
Speaker 1: any kind, you think that this is only happening to me.
Speaker 1: This couldn't possibly be happening to anyone else in the world.
Speaker 1: And until I read Drew Barrymore, of all of all books,
Speaker 1: of all stories, this kind of gossipy Hollywood book, did
Speaker 1: I realize, Oh wow, her her father is trying to
Speaker 1: drink gasoline. My father tries to drink gasoline. It's not
Speaker 1: just me, me and Drew Barrymore. It still wasn't plural,
Speaker 1: but it was me and Drew Barrymore had the secret
Speaker 1: from the rest of the world. We're going to take
Speaker 1: a quick break her parents. Addiction isn't the only secret
Speaker 1: Tiakia learns to keep. When she's in middle school, Tika
Speaker 1: begins an online relationship with a senior boy in her
Speaker 1: high school who eventually asks her to meet him at
Speaker 1: the local shopping mall. Love was violence, Love was desperate um,
Speaker 1: love was forced, and it was forceful. And so you know,
Speaker 1: at that time, I was I was a middle school girl.
Speaker 1: I was talking to a senior from my high school
Speaker 1: on the internet. I hadn't met him in real life,
Speaker 1: and he wanted me to meet him at a shopping mall.
Speaker 1: And he showed up with another senior in the car,
Speaker 1: and the sexual assault. Sexual assault occurred at the shopping mall.
Speaker 1: And I didn't have I didn't have any sort of
Speaker 1: vocabulary for what that meant. M I truly did feel
Speaker 1: that it was love, because he had used that word
Speaker 1: with me as well. I think I might love you.
Speaker 1: I'm always trying to write into questions of you know,
Speaker 1: how could things have gone differently had I told my father,
Speaker 1: perhaps we could have had such a different relationship. Perhaps
Speaker 1: we could have um just broken the secrecy in some way.
Speaker 1: Why do you think you didn't, I think because of
Speaker 1: my own confusion of what it was. Because I always
Speaker 1: wanted clarity, I always wanted wisdom. I wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to explain something, and this, that occurrence was something
Speaker 1: I could never explain. When I left them all that
Speaker 1: day and my parents picked me up, they took me
Speaker 1: to a restaurant, and at the restaurant, I went to
Speaker 1: the bathroom, and I still remember the stall I was
Speaker 1: in at the exact restaurant, and I fell to the
Speaker 1: floor and I was just curled up in a ball, weeping,
Speaker 1: And in my mind I felt what had just happened
Speaker 1: was something great and womanly and beautiful, and it was
Speaker 1: love and this was sex, and but my body knew
Speaker 1: the difference. And that's something I think about to this day,
Speaker 1: that the body knows even before we do sometimes. But
Speaker 1: I also think I just didn't want to it into
Speaker 1: trouble for getting in cars with boys, of course, but
Speaker 1: I wish I wish I did. In some ways, I
Speaker 1: also know it would hurt him a great deal of
Speaker 1: someone who was very protective over me. But as you
Speaker 1: as you've described in your work, how a family and
Speaker 1: a room can crackle with secrecy, I think is the
Speaker 1: word you use, and that's definitely something I felt my
Speaker 1: whole life, this crackling secrecy. I described my story in
Speaker 1: this book almost as a Russian doll, but the whole
Speaker 1: thing Russian dolled on me. Every single doll I opened,
Speaker 1: there was another one waiting, and that's not something I expected.
Speaker 1: And even my mother, when confronted with these family secrets,
Speaker 1: she described them as boxes. In the same way that
Speaker 1: I think about opening them. She described as the boxes
Speaker 1: all being closed. She closed them up, she kept them elsewhere.
Speaker 1: She was so great and still is at compartmentalizing, and
Speaker 1: I think that's really common. And I was really struck
Speaker 1: by the end of your book how you describe how
Speaker 1: other people it's like they didn't consider the consequences. And
Speaker 1: for us, that's all we're thinking about is consequence and
Speaker 1: results and what happens. And for some people just doesn't
Speaker 1: cross their mind because they're so good at compartmentalizing what
Speaker 1: they've done, their actions, their memories, the things that live
Speaker 1: in their own bodies. Remember earlier when I mentioned that
Speaker 1: DNA is part of this story. Well, I'd say it's
Speaker 1: more than part of this story. When Tikira is twenty
Speaker 1: seven years old, she's given a d n A test
Speaker 1: as a Christmas gift, just as happens in millions of
Speaker 1: families each year. And this is the key to those
Speaker 1: tightly sealed boxes, the beginning of the end of the
Speaker 1: secrets that had thrumbed in the deepest interior of the
Speaker 1: Madden family. And it was only because my father passed
Speaker 1: away and I was interested in kind of building this
Speaker 1: family tree um. I was just kind of spooked by
Speaker 1: that death of Oh. I want to gather as much
Speaker 1: information as I can while I still have the opportunity
Speaker 1: to do so. So I was interested in this. When
Speaker 1: my mother knew about the test when she saw the
Speaker 1: box and I said I would do it, there was
Speaker 1: no reaction, not even a flinch, not there was no
Speaker 1: fear in her face about it. It was a curious
Speaker 1: thing to her. Why would you want to do that?
Speaker 1: What could you want to know? That's how deep that
Speaker 1: box was, That's how tightly it was closed. So I
Speaker 1: took the test um. Like your story, it didn't feel
Speaker 1: urgent in any way. I had this kind of running
Speaker 1: joke in my head, because I'm always building story in
Speaker 1: my head of like what if I find out my
Speaker 1: father is not my father because he's just died, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be a twist? And so I was almost preparing
Speaker 1: myself for this to be a big secret, like what
Speaker 1: if I find out because I look nothing like my father,
Speaker 1: I look Chinese and and like my mother. Um, my
Speaker 1: father was you know, blue eyes, blonde hair. So that
Speaker 1: was the running joke. What if I found out after
Speaker 1: he died, after all this grief, through this grief, if
Speaker 1: I found out there wasn't a connection the way people
Speaker 1: had joked about my whole life. And I opened the
Speaker 1: results and I don't find that. I find that I'm
Speaker 1: exactly what I've been told. I am. The map glows
Speaker 1: and all the places I would expect it to glow, Jewish, Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish,
Speaker 1: Eastern European, jew Um, nothing's unexpected. And I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: my mother's my mother, my father's my father. That was fun.
Speaker 1: And it took a while to even find that other
Speaker 1: page on ancestry that shows you the connections, that shows
Speaker 1: you the people who have also taken the test, And
Speaker 1: I see this icon of a woman who in a
Speaker 1: very tiny maybe half an inch icon has dark hair,
Speaker 1: and when I when I opened her picture, the picture
Speaker 1: doesn't grow, but I can see that she's also Hawaiian
Speaker 1: and Chinese, so I know it's from my mother's side,
Speaker 1: which shocks me, as is so often the case when
Speaker 1: people receive unexpected results from a DNA test. Tikira first
Speaker 1: wonders about the test accuracy. She figures that this mystery
Speaker 1: person might be a third or fourth cousin, or maybe
Speaker 1: no relation at all, but she does reach out to
Speaker 1: her and when this maybe cousin, maybe not cousin connects,
Speaker 1: her area code is nine five four, the same area
Speaker 1: code as tikiras from South Florida, and I thought, how
Speaker 1: could I have a cousin who lives where I grew up?
Speaker 1: That doesn't make sense to me. And that's when the
Speaker 1: whole thing started to That was my big tip off.
Speaker 1: I guess, how could that be the same area code
Speaker 1: in the whole world. That's not a third or fourth cousin, Like,
Speaker 1: something's going on here. So Tikira calls the number and
Speaker 1: the two women begin to speak. At first, Tikira thinks
Speaker 1: that maybe this woman is an aunt. After all, she's
Speaker 1: throughteen years older than Tikira. But that isn't what's going
Speaker 1: on at all. This woman with whom Tikira shares a
Speaker 1: significant amount of d n A, is not an aunt.
Speaker 1: She's not a cousin. She's ti Kira's half sister. I
Speaker 1: was saying, I think we are related. I think you
Speaker 1: could be my aunt. Um, this is what my grandfather
Speaker 1: was like he passed away. And she's saying, please listen,
Speaker 1: please help me. I have clues. I have I have
Speaker 1: major clues. All I know is that I was born
Speaker 1: on seven eleven, July eleven, and that's my mother's lucky number.
Speaker 1: And I knew as soon as she said seven eleven,
Speaker 1: which is how my mom says. It's still it's still
Speaker 1: her her pass code on her phone, her alarm code,
Speaker 1: it's everything. I sort of stopped in my tracks, and
Speaker 1: she said, I also think her first name is and
Speaker 1: she says my mother's first name, and the whole world
Speaker 1: is sort of stopped. It really felt true and accurate
Speaker 1: in that moment. Everything froze um, but I couldn't make
Speaker 1: sense of this in any way. It still felt like
Speaker 1: a mistake, until, of course I spoke to my mother.
Speaker 1: Your mother put it in a box, you know, very
Speaker 1: very buried, tightly sealed box. And yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: your sister's half sister's birthdate was her code and her
Speaker 1: lucky number. Yes, that's fascinating because these boxes are really interesting, right,
Speaker 1: because she probably did not walk around with that kind
Speaker 1: of consciousness about that. It's just simply seven eleven. It's
Speaker 1: my lucky number. That's what makes me feel. That's just
Speaker 1: part of my idea entity. Sure, but in fact she
Speaker 1: was walking around with that being her child's yes, birth date,
Speaker 1: two lucky numbers. Tikira's mother doesn't just have one lucky number,
Speaker 1: seven eleven. She has a second one connected to another secret,
Speaker 1: another ghost. We're going to take a quick break. So
Speaker 1: Tikira now knows that her mother had given birth to
Speaker 1: a child thirteen years before she was born. That put
Speaker 1: her mother as a fifteen year old girl who had
Speaker 1: given up a baby for adoption. What was your mother's
Speaker 1: reaction like when you um when you did go to
Speaker 1: her and say I've discovered this, It was the most
Speaker 1: bizarre moment. She was completely throttled back in time and
Speaker 1: in that moment when I when I mentioned it is
Speaker 1: as delicately as I could. All I had to do
Speaker 1: was say her birthday, that I took the test, I
Speaker 1: got the results. There was someone with the birthday seven eleven.
Speaker 1: And she was so throttled in that moment that she
Speaker 1: believed my father was still alive. And that was her
Speaker 1: first concern was your father doesn't know. Your father doesn't know.
Speaker 1: What am I going to tell him? And I said,
Speaker 1: Dad's not here. But that's how far back she was
Speaker 1: throttled in that moment. She was so just, And that's
Speaker 1: not like my mom. My mom is very to her
Speaker 1: fault in a way, always living in the present moment,
Speaker 1: always very present um. But she was so somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And I knew in that moment, wherever she was um
Speaker 1: as she was saying these things and closing her eyes
Speaker 1: and drinking water, that I could never reach wherever it
Speaker 1: was she she was living in that moment, that there
Speaker 1: was a part of her, so many parts of her
Speaker 1: I will never know, and I don't think it ever
Speaker 1: occurred to me until that moment. Secrets begets secrets begets secrets.
Speaker 1: That is just how secrets work. Their viral contagious A
Speaker 1: married couple who are addict and alcoholics circle and circle
Speaker 1: around the unsaid, the hidden. Their lives are formed by
Speaker 1: what they don't speak of, what they keep from one another,
Speaker 1: And their daughter's life is formed by all that silence
Speaker 1: and fear and shame. Does it surprise you that she
Speaker 1: never told your dad? It did surprise me, knowing the
Speaker 1: full story and having a better understanding of my mother
Speaker 1: and my father and their secrecy. Now now it doesn't
Speaker 1: surprise me in that moment of Corso's how could you
Speaker 1: have not told me? How could you have not told dad?
Speaker 1: How could that be? How is that possible? So your
Speaker 1: mother has a secret from your father, Your mother and
Speaker 1: father have secrets from you, and then your mother and
Speaker 1: father have a secret together. Yes, but remember that ti
Speaker 1: Kira's mom has not one, but two lucky numbers. One
Speaker 1: of those lucky numbers represents the birth of the baby
Speaker 1: she gave up for adoption as a teenager. What can
Speaker 1: the other lucky number represent? What else could possibly be
Speaker 1: so huge and important? Tikira meets her new half sister
Speaker 1: and they begin to form a relationship. It's a revelation,
Speaker 1: after a lifetime as an only child, to have this
Speaker 1: new person in her life. Someone she describes in loving terms.
Speaker 1: It feels for a while like a happy ending, a
Speaker 1: perfect ending, and opening up and understanding finally of the
Speaker 1: secret that had formed so much of her family's life.
Speaker 1: But then it turns out that there's more, There's much,
Speaker 1: much more. Just over a year later, I hear from
Speaker 1: my fiance, of all people, um, that she overheard something
Speaker 1: from other members in my family. And I said, what
Speaker 1: did you What did you overhear? And she said, they said,
Speaker 1: I'm so happy she found her sister, but what about
Speaker 1: her brother? And I said, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: And she said I heard it. And I said, you,
Speaker 1: miss you misunderstood. You didn't hear, You didn't hear correctly,
Speaker 1: And she said, no, I heard. I heard it very clear.
Speaker 1: And I I confronted them and I had them repeat it,
Speaker 1: and I got more information. There is a brother. And
Speaker 1: then I'm thinking, okay, it's my dad's turn. This has
Speaker 1: got to be my dad's child. And she said he's
Speaker 1: your full brother. And I said okay, and I'm doing
Speaker 1: the timeline when could this have happened? And then she
Speaker 1: says he's younger than you. And that was Um. It
Speaker 1: was the complete opposite reaction. I felt with my sister,
Speaker 1: with my sister, and immediately as soon as the shock subsided,
Speaker 1: it just felt like this enormous gift, just the most
Speaker 1: beautiful thing that could have happened to me, and so serendipitously,
Speaker 1: so soon after my father passed away, that I would
Speaker 1: lose the most important person to me and then find
Speaker 1: a sister as someone who grew up alone. And when
Speaker 1: I heard this, it felt the opposite. It felt like
Speaker 1: I've never felt such anger and sadness and rage in
Speaker 1: my entire life. I've always said, considering my father has
Speaker 1: such rage in him, and my mother too, Let's take
Speaker 1: a moment to walk through this more slowly. Tikira, raised
Speaker 1: as an only child, part of the tight little tree
Speaker 1: with her two complicated parents, actually is one of three children.
Speaker 1: Her mother had a child as a teenager. That was
Speaker 1: a huge revelation, but this this meant that her two parents,
Speaker 1: together when she was a very young child, had another child,
Speaker 1: a brother, who they gave up for adoption. I was
Speaker 1: so angry, and I think processing that, I think I
Speaker 1: was so angry that my father was gone, and I
Speaker 1: knew I could never ask the questions, and I knew
Speaker 1: I just felt like I've already gone through this. I
Speaker 1: can't believe I'm going through this again, and I can't
Speaker 1: believe it's more intense. It's a full sibling, it's my
Speaker 1: father's and I can't talk to my father. I was
Speaker 1: able to get all the answers from my mother about
Speaker 1: my sister, but I knew this was unreachable in a
Speaker 1: different way. And unlike ancestry, I had no connection to
Speaker 1: find this brother, my full brother, the only the full
Speaker 1: sibling I have in the world, the person who shares
Speaker 1: more DNA with me than anyone in the world. I
Speaker 1: had no lead of any kind, and that infuriated me,
Speaker 1: and I felt deceived um And when I called a
Speaker 1: family member that night and asked if it was true,
Speaker 1: and she told me, and I soon realized everybody knew.
Speaker 1: That was the hardest part, that it felt like this
Speaker 1: conspiracy in a way to keep this from me. How
Speaker 1: old were you and your mother was pregnant one one
Speaker 1: and a half. And there's a moment I believe correct
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong, where someone tells you they sent
Speaker 1: you away, right like during during that period of time
Speaker 1: you went to Disney. Disney, I'm sorry, Disney that's what
Speaker 1: I thought, didn't but you were like one and a
Speaker 1: half years old. Yeah, I still haven't taken my son
Speaker 1: to Disney, totally deprived. It's great. So then what happens
Speaker 1: with your with your brother? It's still the unknown. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's still the unknown, and I mean, we'll see. What
Speaker 1: I've tried to embrace in the book is the unknown
Speaker 1: where the unfinished story is the story that we don't
Speaker 1: have the perfect plot arc that we always want, and
Speaker 1: I'm still trying to figure out what that story looks
Speaker 1: like with my brother. Sometimes the unfinished story is the story.
Speaker 1: Here's t Kira reading a passage from her beautiful book,
Speaker 1: how Alma Kula is a place in the afterworld in
Speaker 1: which all of one's ancestors are waiting. I always liked
Speaker 1: this legend best, the idea of this place where all
Speaker 1: family ties remain solid, intact, or nothing on earth ever mattered.
Speaker 1: It is the place in which all family members are reunited,
Speaker 1: and I like to imagine that everyone shows up a young, healthy,
Speaker 1: so much bright life in the face, and all the
Speaker 1: realms of heaven and hell. Al Amakua is the most
Speaker 1: desired among the people of Hawaii. Once the family is reunited.
Speaker 1: Each spirit is encouraged to visit their own idea of home.
Speaker 1: Home can be in the depths of the sea, in
Speaker 1: the tree tops, a spirit may choose their grandmother's lap
Speaker 1: in her rocking chair. The sour smell of malasadas. Ancient
Speaker 1: legend describes it as the place of your greatest responsibility.
Speaker 1: Others define it as returning to one's rightful place or
Speaker 1: one's greatest duty. The Hawaiian word for this is kolianna
Speaker 1: many Thanks to t Kira Madden, you can find out
Speaker 1: more about her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of
Speaker 1: Fatherless Girls at t Kira Madden dot com. Family Secrets
Speaker 1: is an I Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a
Speaker 1: supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie
Speaker 1: Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family
Speaker 1: secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch
Speaker 1: with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com,
Speaker 1: and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Speaker 1: and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Speaker 1: Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
Speaker 1: Shapiro dot com For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.