Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: It is extraordinary what we hide from ourselves, and even
Speaker 2: more extraordinary that we once had her, my mother's sister,
Speaker 2: and so many like her from everyone. Here are all
Speaker 2: these pictures of nonverbal children, so pulsingly alive, their parents,
Speaker 2: describing their pleasures, their passions, their strengths and styles and tastes. Well,
Speaker 2: I know nothing, absolutely nothing of my aunt's life at all.
Speaker 2: She is a thinning shadow, an aging ghost. Strange hosell them.
Speaker 2: We think about who our parents were as people before
Speaker 2: we made their acquaintance, all the dynamics and influences that
Speaker 2: shape them, the defining traumas and triumphs of their early lives,
Speaker 2: and show them compassion and understanding as they age. I
Speaker 2: was twelve when I learned. My mother and I were
Speaker 2: sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what
Speaker 2: I would do if I'd ever had a desild. This
Speaker 2: provided her with an opening. Her name is Adele.
Speaker 3: That's Jennifer, senior staff writer at the Atlantic. Listeners of
Speaker 3: this podcast might remember her from a previous Bonus episode,
Speaker 3: in which we discussed her remarkable Atlantic cover story. What
Speaker 3: Bobby mcelvain Left Behind, for which she won the twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Now she's back
Speaker 3: to talk about her latest Atlantic cover story, in which
Speaker 3: she excavates her own family secret in a piece called
Speaker 3: Those We Sent Away. Jennifer had an aunt, her mother's
Speaker 3: younger sister, who was sent away to a mental institution
Speaker 3: as a young child. This is a story that many
Speaker 3: families share, one of hiddenness, shame, and silence that casts
Speaker 3: an invisible net over generations. I'm Danny Shapiro and this
Speaker 3: is a special bonus episode of family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 3: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 3: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My first question
Speaker 3: is you were twelve when you learned, But if you
Speaker 3: look back, was there anything that you felt was there
Speaker 3: sort of hovering in the air in your family's home,
Speaker 3: or anything that you know, obviously supplying retrospect and knowledge
Speaker 3: to this, but still where you would say there was
Speaker 3: a sense that there was something that you didn't know.
Speaker 2: I have thought about this, and like you said, there
Speaker 2: is this huge temptation to sort of assign and reprospect, like, oh, yes,
Speaker 2: of course, I was aware of this, and now it
Speaker 2: all makes sense. But there are two things that I
Speaker 2: wrote about that did, of course lead lock into place,
Speaker 2: which was that my grandfather volunteered at the Westchester Association
Speaker 2: for Retarded Citizens. They use the word retarded anymore, we
Speaker 2: should not, but that's what it was called at the time.
Speaker 2: And oh, of course he was trying to parent in
Speaker 2: a daily way indirectly. This is all he did every
Speaker 2: day of his retirement because his daughter was not living
Speaker 2: with him, So that made sense. My grandmother running off
Speaker 2: to the local department store and buying Christmas presents when
Speaker 2: we were Jewish suddenly made sense because my aunt was
Speaker 2: taken to church and every Sunday and only understood Christmas.
Speaker 2: I think something else that may have locked into place was, oh,
Speaker 2: so my grandparents did want more kids. I knew there
Speaker 2: was something sort of unusual about my mom being the
Speaker 2: one and only, like there was never any good explanation
Speaker 2: for it's very rare to comfort across only baby boomers, right, like,
Speaker 2: that's not a thing. And my grandparents were young when
Speaker 2: they had her. I guess in Hinze. One thing I
Speaker 2: will say is that my mother's perfectionism and her control
Speaker 2: and I read about this, but it had some other explanation, right,
Speaker 2: that maybe she really did feel this immense pressure to
Speaker 2: be good enough for two because her own grandmother very
Speaker 2: artlessly said to her one day, you have to be
Speaker 2: good enough for two your parents lost a child.
Speaker 3: I was very struck by that detail. Your great grandmother,
Speaker 3: who you referred to as you know, she meant well,
Speaker 3: I suppose, and had all the subtlety of a light swatter.
Speaker 3: And you know, your mother's thirteen years old, and your
Speaker 3: great grandmother tells her that she had to be good
Speaker 3: enough for two children, smart enough for two children. And
Speaker 3: your great grandmother is, on the one hand, telling your
Speaker 3: mother something right, which.
Speaker 2: Was a gift because my mother was in the dark.
Speaker 2: My great grandmother was truly the first person to explain
Speaker 2: to her what had happened. Like that was, in some
Speaker 2: weird way, its own perverse gift. It wasn't perverse. My
Speaker 2: great grandmother leveled with her, and she was the first
Speaker 2: person to say, this is what happened. You know, you
Speaker 2: have an profoundly retarded sister. That was the terminology of
Speaker 2: the day she was institutionalized. It was a family of secrets.
Speaker 2: No one came through the front door and said this,
Speaker 2: and then she laid this immense burden on her right and.
Speaker 3: Also the burden, I mean, your mother was told that
Speaker 3: her sister had gone away first to quote unquote walking
Speaker 3: school because she was severely delayed in terms of her
Speaker 3: ability to walk. And then you know, when is she
Speaker 3: coming back? We don't know. And this is very much
Speaker 3: something that happened in that time, and you know, you
Speaker 3: write about that so beautifully in your story, but writing
Speaker 3: about medical professionals saying it's better if people don't know,
Speaker 3: the instinct to protect the family, the child from knowledge,
Speaker 3: but in fact it's there. Your mother was working over
Speaker 3: time to try to figure out where her sister had gone,
Speaker 3: what was the age difference between them.
Speaker 2: Born after years, I mean nearly five, so.
Speaker 3: Your mom was a five year old. There's a baby sister.
Speaker 3: That's the most wonderful thing in the whole world. And
Speaker 3: as far as your mother was concerned, this was her
Speaker 3: sister who she adored and could do no wrong. It
Speaker 3: was perfect and there was no reason to think anything otherwise,
Speaker 3: because whatever your grandparents were going through was being done
Speaker 3: quietly and a kind of you know, keeping it from
Speaker 3: keeping it from your mother. You know, keeping it from
Speaker 3: the child, which was what happened across the board in
Speaker 3: those days, but it will leaves the child in that
Speaker 3: situation is not knowing what's up, what's going on, and
Speaker 3: sort of attempting to put together pieces of a puzzle.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, And the question is whether it was
Speaker 2: even that active. What I wonder about, like, how hard
Speaker 2: was she actively trying to piece this together or was
Speaker 2: it more like that she walked around in something between
Speaker 2: a fog of bewilderment punctuated by stretches of overwhelming pain.
Speaker 2: You know, she would sort of because at first, as
Speaker 2: you point out, and as I say, you know, she
Speaker 2: didn't have any inkling that anything was different about her sister.
Speaker 4: How could she?
Speaker 2: A five year old knows nothing. And for the first
Speaker 2: year of my aunt's life, the doctors were insisting, the
Speaker 2: pediatrician insisted that nothing was different about her. So it
Speaker 2: took an outside pediatrician to even look at my aunt
Speaker 2: and bluntly declared to my grandmother that she was and
Speaker 2: this is a direct quote, a microcephalitic idiot. Right, My
Speaker 2: aunt had just turned about one, and from that moment on,
Speaker 2: my grandparents were doing a frantic circuit of all of
Speaker 2: the cities specialists trying to figure out what could be done.
Speaker 2: But my mother was kept out of this. And all
Speaker 2: my mother knew was that there was adorable baby girl
Speaker 2: in the playpen in the living room or in the
Speaker 2: crib in her parents' bedroom, and that she had special
Speaker 2: responsibilities visa her little baby sister. She had to go
Speaker 2: in and see if she was napping. She wasn't. She'd
Speaker 2: keep my grandmother company as she was making bottles. She
Speaker 2: invented games to play with her while she was in
Speaker 2: her crib. I mean, what five and a half year
Speaker 2: old or six year old or six and a half
Speaker 2: year old is going to have any understanding of developmental milestones.
Speaker 4: In a child?
Speaker 2: Like they're just not. So this all caught her totally
Speaker 2: by surprise when one day my grandparents said, we're taking
Speaker 2: Adele toa walking school. But I think for she just went, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: walking school.
Speaker 4: I guess that's the thing.
Speaker 2: But you know, as a month's drag by, and she
Speaker 2: keeps saying well when she's coming home, and then as
Speaker 2: the years dragged by, and she one day got hysterical
Speaker 2: and said, how long can it possibly take for Adele
Speaker 2: to learn? How to walk. This was about a year
Speaker 2: and a half in and my grandparents, I mean, there
Speaker 2: were no books to consult, there was no language for
Speaker 2: them to recruit from to explain to my poor mother
Speaker 2: what was going on. I didn't look at my mother
Speaker 2: and say, how actively were you trying to piece this together?
Speaker 2: Like how aggressive were you in your slothing. You know,
Speaker 2: my mother every time she mentions it, first of all,
Speaker 2: it's very pained, and second of all, there's so much
Speaker 2: confusion in her voice when she relives it for me
Speaker 2: that it just sounds to me, frankly, like it was very,
Speaker 2: very over whelming. And also that she sensed on some
Speaker 2: level that asking the question was causing her parents' pain.
Speaker 2: And I think she intuited early on that this is
Speaker 2: a painful subject and I am going to be a
Speaker 2: good kid. I'm not going to create any trouble. I
Speaker 2: am going to behave impeccably. And even before my great
Speaker 2: great grandmother very clumsily said to her, you have to
Speaker 2: be good enough for.
Speaker 4: Two, you have to be perfect for two. I think
Speaker 4: even before.
Speaker 2: That my mother probably had some sense that she was
Speaker 2: going to stand sideways and get.
Speaker 4: Out of the way.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, it's fascinating. First of all, what children
Speaker 3: are capable of absorbing without necessarily knowing or consciously knowing,
Speaker 3: or certainly intellectually knowing. You know, we talk a lot
Speaker 3: on this podcast about the phrase psychoanalytic phrase, the unthought known.
Speaker 3: You know that with is so dangerous to think that
Speaker 3: you never actually think it, but on some deep level
Speaker 3: you know it. And you know, you used a phrase
Speaker 3: a little while ago, the fog of bewilderment, And you know,
Speaker 3: that makes so much sense to me, that fog, and
Speaker 3: that's what you're describing in a way. You know, I
Speaker 3: don't know, but I would doubt that your mother ever
Speaker 3: sort of sat down and had a little talk with
Speaker 3: herself at age nine or ten or seven of you know,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be a good girl, but she internalized
Speaker 3: that memo.
Speaker 2: I think that's right, and I think if you want
Speaker 2: to go to the unsought known, the question is like, Okay,
Speaker 2: this is my grandparents felt like what they had to
Speaker 2: do because it's a source of shame to have a
Speaker 2: child like this. Right, it means that either there's something
Speaker 2: wrong with your genes, it's some kind of religious punishment, right,
Speaker 2: whatever it is, for whatever reasons, and I'll you know,
Speaker 2: it's the nineteen fifties. There's some imperative to assimilate. Among Jews,
Speaker 2: there was probably a double imperative to assimilate. My guess
Speaker 2: is that, like, what did they do? They nailed this
Speaker 2: beneath the floorboards, right, So for my own mom, what
Speaker 2: was scratching underneath the floorboards of her consciousness? Right? Like
Speaker 2: what unthought known was there?
Speaker 4: Right? Like she probably on some level knew something she
Speaker 4: had to.
Speaker 2: I mean, she did have other families to compare her
Speaker 2: own to. And I just found out from my mother's
Speaker 2: first cousin that somebody else in their family was pregnant
Speaker 2: and at around the same time as my grandmother. I
Speaker 2: wish i'd known this before I wrote the story. It
Speaker 2: kind of kills me that I didn't. But someone else
Speaker 2: in my family was pregnant at the same time, and
Speaker 2: they gave birth the practically at the same time, and
Speaker 2: that little girl was born and grew up in a
Speaker 2: perfectly kind of typical trajectory, right, hitting all the milestones
Speaker 2: and all the beat's never left house. My mother must
Speaker 2: have put something together. And at some point the kids
Speaker 2: in the neighborhood were gossiping and being cruel and saying
Speaker 2: I heard that your sister was at reform school, right, like,
Speaker 2: so who knows what kind of I didn't ask her
Speaker 2: about the unthought known either. It's funny I was getting
Speaker 2: my own cues from my mother about what was safe
Speaker 2: to ask.
Speaker 4: Truly.
Speaker 2: It's not that I'm not a thorough going, you know,
Speaker 2: interlocutor or you know. I asked a lot of questions,
Speaker 2: but like I obviously was like being very delicate with
Speaker 2: my own mom when I was talking to her.
Speaker 3: Well, it makes perfect sense. I mean, it struck me
Speaker 3: that there's, first of all, a really kind of uncanny
Speaker 3: parallel age wise from when she found out, you know,
Speaker 3: and then what I found out and when you yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean you were twelve when you learned and you
Speaker 3: asked the right question, I mean, or you it wasn't
Speaker 3: really a question. You were musing about what you would
Speaker 3: ever do if you were to have a disabled child,
Speaker 3: and it was like a seam opened, you know, within
Speaker 3: your mother at that particular moment, and she just said it.
Speaker 3: And that's somewhat different from whatever damn burst in your
Speaker 3: great grandmother to have said that to your mother. But
Speaker 3: you do find that out at the same age. And
Speaker 3: there also is I think that feeling of where there's
Speaker 3: great pain in a family, or a child senses that
Speaker 3: about a parent, including a grown child sensing that about
Speaker 3: a parent. There's this delicacy or this feeling of I
Speaker 3: love you and I don't want to cause you pain,
Speaker 3: so I'm not going to go there. So, for instance,
Speaker 3: when you go with your mother to visit Adele, I
Speaker 3: don't think it was the first time that you went,
Speaker 3: but the more recent time, because you the more recent
Speaker 3: time you were going both as a daughter and a
Speaker 3: niece and a reporter. The first time you were that's right,
Speaker 3: you were a daughter and a niece and just wanted
Speaker 3: to see for yourself what was you.
Speaker 2: Know, right, I was only twenty eight, right.
Speaker 3: So but this time you had your recorder on and
Speaker 3: one of the things that you note in your piece
Speaker 3: is how much silence there was in the car.
Speaker 4: Yep, so much.
Speaker 2: Silence and also so much I mean I would have said,
Speaker 2: like not denial, but God, what would be the right
Speaker 2: word deflection? Maybe that's the very various two things to
Speaker 2: pull me in on. And it's like the perfect transition
Speaker 2: because exactly there I am. We have a ninety minute
Speaker 2: car ride, and my mother at any point can be like, wow,
Speaker 2: I wonder what this is going to be. Like, I
Speaker 2: have not seen her in twenty one years, and I've
Speaker 2: only seen her three times ever in my adult life.
Speaker 2: You know, my mom went forty years with not seeing
Speaker 2: her sister again. She went from age six to age
Speaker 2: forty six and then saw her only three times, not
Speaker 2: particularly successfully. You know, the visits were awkward. My Anna
Speaker 2: was living in a different group home at the time,
Speaker 2: so this is a brand new group home, and she's
Speaker 2: not wondering a lot about In fact, not only she
Speaker 2: not wondering a lot about this, she is talking about
Speaker 2: something else entirely. She is telling me all about the
Speaker 2: new necklace making project that she is embarked on. And
Speaker 2: I am kind of sitting there in disbelief, like, and
Speaker 2: my tape recorder is running, and it's not a lot
Speaker 2: of like I eventually like turn it off because it's
Speaker 2: just like stuff about necklaces.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It was crazy.
Speaker 4: I only had about fifteen minutes conversation.
Speaker 2: With her about this, right, and so I have always
Speaker 2: known and I was very nervous about as seking my
Speaker 2: mom whether to do this. Right, Like I said to her,
Speaker 2: you don't have to come with me. I just truly
Speaker 2: want to meet her. I really want to see her.
Speaker 2: I want to write about her. I hope this is okay.
Speaker 2: Please don't feel like this because I want to go.
Speaker 2: It means that you have to go. I understand that
Speaker 2: you have all of these reasons that you have decided
Speaker 2: that you are going to. You know, I don't judge
Speaker 2: at all, like the kind of decisions you've made around this.
Speaker 2: This is like a defining trauma for you as a kid.
Speaker 2: But you know, and she's surprised me by being very
Speaker 2: open to it and saying, no, let's go, let's go together,
Speaker 2: you know, almost like some part of her I thought
Speaker 2: wanted it, But then when we got in the car,
Speaker 2: I thought, no part of her wants this. I think
Speaker 2: she was just this portrait of ambivalence, right, And it
Speaker 2: made it made the reporting really us, you know, and
Speaker 2: really hard. And I think it's one of the reasons
Speaker 2: that like I did it as a reporter, because I
Speaker 2: felt emboldened to ask slightly more challenging questions.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It strikes me that your mother, once she knew as
Speaker 3: a thirteen year old, and also once the sort of
Speaker 3: whisper campaign that must have always been there, that game
Speaker 3: of telephone that happens in suburban neighborhoods or all neighborhoods
Speaker 3: or among all people.
Speaker 4: This is Flatbush.
Speaker 2: We're talking about a serious city neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know. So eventually the kids are cruel
Speaker 3: and your mother begins to say to tell people that
Speaker 3: she's an only child. And it just strikes me that
Speaker 3: the work emotionally and psychologically that had to go into,
Speaker 3: you know, like the heartbreak of that this is what
Speaker 3: I'm going to say, and this is how I'm going
Speaker 3: to live. It is how I'm going to live my
Speaker 3: life moving forward, because there didn't really seem to be
Speaker 3: any other option. And so then all of these years later,
Speaker 3: there she is, you know, in the car driving with you,
Speaker 3: and yeah, she's talking about necklaces because it's it's like
Speaker 3: the thirteen year old saying I'm an only child. The
Speaker 3: degree to which we have to work over time to
Speaker 3: put something that won't be easily boxed up in a
Speaker 3: box or under the floorboards, as you say, and the
Speaker 3: courage that it takes to confront it, which it struck
Speaker 3: me reading your piece, and the sort of trajectory emotionally
Speaker 3: that your mother goes through. Over the course of the story,
Speaker 3: it reaches a point where it is no longer in
Speaker 3: any way Adele is not in a box for her anymore.
Speaker 3: Adele is not a person with a diagnosis, a person
Speaker 3: who was sent away and who isn't able to recognize
Speaker 3: her own parents, her own sister. It becomes something else entirely.
Speaker 2: Well, my mother said something very interesting to me at
Speaker 2: one point, which is that she was led to believe
Speaker 2: that Adele was so intellectually compromised that she was essentially
Speaker 2: a vegetable. That's almost verbatim what my mother said to me, and.
Speaker 4: So I think.
Speaker 2: It was almost giving her permission to say, I don't
Speaker 2: have a sister. My sister is not sentient, you know,
Speaker 2: in the way that you can like make the decision, Oh,
Speaker 2: if somebody's a vegetable, you know, like end of life care, Like,
Speaker 2: why would we want to, you know, sustain some I
Speaker 2: mean I really think on some level, that is the
Speaker 2: way my mother was trying to think about her, even
Speaker 2: though what's fascinating is that she had plenty of evidence
Speaker 2: to the contrary. She saw this little girl who was
Speaker 2: scooching or out in her own platepen following her when
Speaker 2: my mother, you know, well, as my mother shouted here,
Speaker 2: baby Adele would scooch to different corners of the crib
Speaker 2: and smile or acknowledge her. So Adele was plenty interactive,
Speaker 2: or certainly interactive enough, but yet at some point she
Speaker 2: allowed that story, a different story to kind of become
Speaker 2: the story. And my god, I don't think she was
Speaker 2: a thirteen year old.
Speaker 4: When she told people she was an only child.
Speaker 2: I think it was starting from the time she was
Speaker 2: like six and a half or seven, her her sister
Speaker 2: gets sent away, and I having being completely bewildered by
Speaker 2: it when people started asking, she just said, I'm an
Speaker 2: only child because no one else was in the house.
Speaker 4: And my suspicion is.
Speaker 2: That my grandparents encouraged her to say it. You know,
Speaker 2: the only question if somebody asked me this recently, and
Speaker 2: I was embarrassed to not know the answer, it was
Speaker 2: a great question. I can't believe I didn't think to
Speaker 2: ask my mother. In my grandmother's obituary, how many kids
Speaker 2: says it say she has? And my grandmother was not
Speaker 2: a person of any note.
Speaker 4: I'm sure the.
Speaker 2: Obituary that ran was the little squib that you paid
Speaker 2: for right in the New York Times or in the
Speaker 2: local paper. And I'm sure my mom paid for the squib,
Speaker 2: and it would have been my mom who was in charge.
Speaker 4: And the question is what decision would my mom would
Speaker 4: have made? Would have made?
Speaker 2: Would She has said that my grandmother had one kid
Speaker 2: or two And I sat there, like completely unable to
Speaker 2: answer that question. For the life of me, I could
Speaker 2: not tell you. Years ago when she saw her sister
Speaker 2: with her mother when she was already in her forties,
Speaker 2: and it was like the first time she saw her
Speaker 2: sister as an adult. Forty years later, she came home
Speaker 2: and she wrote like this little mini essay for herself,
Speaker 2: was saying, I have a sister. And I asked her,
Speaker 2: why did you write that?
Speaker 4: Was it?
Speaker 2: Because it was almost like this sense of unreality and
Speaker 2: you just wanted to make it real. And she said,
Speaker 2: I wanted to admit it to myself. This is some
Speaker 2: secret that I had been hiding for all these years.
Speaker 2: She used the word admit, which I think is so fascinating,
Speaker 2: you know, like it was a confession of some kind.
Speaker 3: To herself in a way. I mean the tagline for
Speaker 3: this show is the secrets we keep, the secrets sircut
Speaker 3: from us, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. And
Speaker 3: I always find the most fascinating, strange, uncanny, resonant kind
Speaker 3: of secrets, the ones that we are somehow able to
Speaker 3: keep from ourselves until we no longer can.
Speaker 2: That was what she did. I mean, she had this
Speaker 2: clan DestinE sibling, you know, and it was she she
Speaker 2: was keeping this knowledge from herself.
Speaker 4: I think on some.
Speaker 2: Level in order to function. I mean, I think it
Speaker 2: must have been too hard to process otherwise. But she
Speaker 2: told me something very interesting that I had for a
Speaker 2: long time in my story and then ultimately cut because
Speaker 2: she was so ambivalent about it. But for your show,
Speaker 2: and for you, just because you're so psychoanalytically inclined, you'll
Speaker 2: find this whole internal debate that she had about it fascinating.
Speaker 2: She said to me that when she was in psychoanalysis
Speaker 2: in her early twenties, my mom, her psychoanalyst, said to her,
Speaker 2: do you think that as a child you walked around
Speaker 2: in terror that if you did anything wrong you would
Speaker 2: also be sent away, that you would also be sent
Speaker 2: to the equivalent of walking school. If your grades weren't
Speaker 2: good enough, or if you didn't hit a particular milestone,
Speaker 2: if you were clumsy in sports, if you were this
Speaker 2: for you or that, you know, would you have been
Speaker 2: sent away? And I grew up with my mother telling
Speaker 2: me that she believed this, that she thought and like
Speaker 2: if she wasn't good enough, she'd be sent away. That
Speaker 2: she labored under this misapprehension. And I brought this up
Speaker 2: with her in the car and she said, oh, you
Speaker 2: know what, I think. I think my shrink was wrong
Speaker 2: about that. I think my psychoanalyst is wrong. I don't
Speaker 2: really think so. I don't think I was a perfectionist
Speaker 2: for that reason. It probably had much more to do
Speaker 2: with like what nanny said to me. You know that
Speaker 2: she told me that I'd be good enough for two
Speaker 2: But I don't think I ever really feared that I'd
Speaker 2: be sent away. But maybe her psychoanalyst was right. I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't know. You know, my mother is clearly not sure.
Speaker 2: At some point when I was younger, that was the
Speaker 2: story I was told by her, but she recantidate when I,
Speaker 2: you know, asked her in the car. She had that
Speaker 2: she thought that her psychoanalyst's hypothesis was right, and she
Speaker 2: didn't even present it to me was when I was
Speaker 2: a young woman as her psychoanalyst's hypothesis. She said, so,
Speaker 2: you know, I had this sister who was sent away,
Speaker 2: and so I was definitely afraid when I was a
Speaker 2: kid that if I did anything wrong, I would be
Speaker 2: sent away. And when I brought this up there in
Speaker 2: the car, she said, well, I'm not sure that's true.
Speaker 2: It was my psychoanalyst who came up with this as
Speaker 2: an idea, and I think you just put it in
Speaker 2: my head and it sounded very tidy, and it sounded
Speaker 2: very plausible. But you want to know what, I'm not
Speaker 2: sure it's right.
Speaker 3: I mean, in the absence of, you know, actual fact
Speaker 3: checkable knowledge, these are narratives that we can supply right.
Speaker 3: So for a period of time in her life, that
Speaker 3: was the narrative she supplied correct, and then later in
Speaker 3: her life it became no, I don't think. I don't
Speaker 3: think that was it, which seems very right to me
Speaker 3: in terms of the way that our stories and our
Speaker 3: memories and our relationship to whatever the you know, to
Speaker 3: whatever is at hand shifts and changes over the course
Speaker 3: of our lives. Absolutely This was, from the standpoint of
Speaker 3: what we understand today, just shockingly common in the nineteen forties,
Speaker 3: prop nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties if a family had a
Speaker 3: child who was severely disabled intellectually, you know, and or physically,
Speaker 3: that they would be sent away and there were and
Speaker 3: never spoken of again and erased. And there were famous
Speaker 3: examples of people who did this, ranging from the Kennedys
Speaker 3: to Arthur Miller and pearlss Buck. This was what was
Speaker 3: considered the thing that you did. And some families dealt
Speaker 3: with that as a secret differently than others, or the
Speaker 3: secret sort of comes out in certain I mean Miller
Speaker 3: never wanted to write about it, would never wanted to
Speaker 3: talk about it.
Speaker 2: It was never visited.
Speaker 3: And never visited. And pearlss Buck ends up writing about
Speaker 3: it in her memoir. She writes, I felt as though
Speaker 3: I were bleeding inwardly and desperately. So Buck faces head
Speaker 3: on at a certain point, just the absolute agony of
Speaker 3: you know, what it is to institutionalize a child, and
Speaker 3: so it ranges. But I think what all of the
Speaker 3: families of that time of sort of post war America,
Speaker 3: and as you say, the shame of having a child
Speaker 3: who is severely disabled. There's just this feeling that this
Speaker 3: is what you do, and the doctors and their white
Speaker 3: coats and their certainty, and the way that doctors were
Speaker 3: seen at that time as being god like. So one
Speaker 3: of the things that I'm wondering about your piece begins
Speaker 3: with your husband telling you to read this tweet that
Speaker 3: went viral. And the tweet is by someone who he
Speaker 3: writes about his son, who is his twenty fifth birthday.
Speaker 3: He's never said a word in his life, but has
Speaker 3: taught me so much more than I've ever taught him.
Speaker 3: And this tweet goes viral and your husband points out
Speaker 3: to you, and you're scrolling through and you're reading some stuff,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't occur to you right away why you're
Speaker 3: going down the rabbit hole other than wow, this is
Speaker 3: really interesting that this tweet went viral. And I find
Speaker 3: that so fascinating that it took you a bit right
Speaker 3: to realize why your husband had pointed out that tweet
Speaker 3: to you and why you were immersed in the story.
Speaker 2: So one important thing to point out the reason that
Speaker 2: went viral is because there was a lot to read
Speaker 2: in response to the tweet. What happened was that tweet
Speaker 2: unleashed this outpouring from parents all over the world of
Speaker 2: pictures of their own nonverbal or minimally verbal children, so
Speaker 2: that what I was scrolling through was picture after picture
Speaker 2: after picture of these beautiful kids, some young, some old,
Speaker 2: some full fledged adults, whether much older parents or their siblings.
Speaker 2: And some were joyous and some were goofy, and some
Speaker 2: were silly, and some were serious, and some were bad
Speaker 2: as I mean.
Speaker 4: It really ranged these pictures, but.
Speaker 2: What they all had in common is that, like, the
Speaker 2: kids were all super characterful, right, they were all just
Speaker 2: these pulsingly alive portraits. And yeah, it is weird because,
Speaker 2: like everyone in my family, I had been trained to
Speaker 2: sort of not think about this. It took me about
Speaker 2: a half an hour of scrolling before I went, oh,
Speaker 2: my god, there is somebody in my family who meets
Speaker 2: this exact description. And the difference is that I don't
Speaker 2: know her, and I don't have a single picture of
Speaker 2: her nothing, and there's been no pictures that I've ever
Speaker 2: seen for her. And in fact, when we had to
Speaker 2: find art for this story, you know, the art department
Speaker 2: was saying, do you have any pictures of her from
Speaker 2: when she was a baby? Or anything. My mother didn't
Speaker 2: think she had a single picture of Adele and lo
Speaker 2: and behold there was one of my grandparents and her,
Speaker 2: and it's in the story.
Speaker 4: It's the only thing there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been staring. I've been staring at it while
Speaker 3: we're talking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and like, what's so interesting
Speaker 2: about it is like my grandmother looks so impeccably turned out.
Speaker 2: She's got her you know, her Sunday best on. I mean,
Speaker 2: she's got the hat and the nylons and the lipstick,
Speaker 2: you know, and my my and her and my grandfather
Speaker 2: was very happy and relaxed with you know, Adele in
Speaker 2: the middle. And uh, what you were saying.
Speaker 4: Too about that wide range.
Speaker 2: I mean my grandparents visited her every weekend. They they
Speaker 2: didn't just sort of send her away. My my grandparents
Speaker 2: had fallen in love with their child and were shattered
Speaker 2: to be told that the best thing for her was
Speaker 2: to be put, you know, in an institution that was
Speaker 2: and and the justification was always it's not just that
Speaker 2: it wasn't just that it was best for your family,
Speaker 2: that it was best for the remaining sibling, which looking
Speaker 2: at my mother, I mean it would have been very
Speaker 2: hard to have somebody like a Dell around. But I
Speaker 2: don't know whether it was best for her. I think
Speaker 2: an open question. There certainly wasn't the infrastructure to sort
Speaker 2: of take care of Adele. Would have taken a lot
Speaker 2: of work on the part of the family, and they
Speaker 2: didn't have any money. They couldn't have had sourced this
Speaker 2: but her care. You know, they couldn't have had Brown
Speaker 2: Mclock custodial care, which Adele may have needed. But they
Speaker 2: also said that it was best for Adele, which it
Speaker 2: most certainly was not. This was this like gothic mansion
Speaker 2: of horrors. I mean, it was terrible Willowbrook where she
Speaker 2: was ultimately institutionalized. But if you're going to look at
Speaker 2: the broad spectrum of like people in denial, you know,
Speaker 2: who never saw their kids and never talked about them,
Speaker 2: like Arthur Miller, to people like Pearls Buck, who very
Speaker 2: bravely wrote about their children. And by the way, her memoir,
Speaker 2: she wrote a whole memoir that was just about that.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a memoir about her life. She wrote a
Speaker 2: memoir only about having a child. It was about that
Speaker 2: called the child who Never grew, and it was about
Speaker 2: the pain of institutionalizing her, which and she waited until
Speaker 2: she was nine nine, and when she was in Japan,
Speaker 2: everybody thought, like, what, you're gonna put her in an institution.
Speaker 2: Nobody there did that. Americans did that. Americans did that.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's a whole other subject. I
Speaker 3: mean that makes me wonder about the nature of how
Speaker 3: we how we think of family, or how we think
Speaker 3: of generations.
Speaker 2: And we'll we do it with very elderly, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: we do it with it. I mean it's terrible.
Speaker 3: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 3: There's a wonderful photograph in your piece, just amazing, of
Speaker 3: your mother and Adele on the day of that visit,
Speaker 3: not the nineteen ninety three visit, but the visit when
Speaker 3: you're starting to report this piece in.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3: Your mother has she has an n ninety five mask
Speaker 3: that she's pulled down so that you can see her face,
Speaker 3: and she and Adele are standing together, and on the
Speaker 3: one hand, they couldn't look more different. Adella is much smaller,
Speaker 3: and your mother looks like she could walk, you know,
Speaker 3: out the door and straight into you know, lunch at
Speaker 3: you know, a lovely restaurant and Adele doesn't. But they're
Speaker 3: both wearing red sweaters, and they're both wearing the aforementioned
Speaker 3: beaded necklaces because each of them has gotten into beating.
Speaker 4: At the exact same time, Yeah, at the.
Speaker 3: Exact same time in their lives. And there also are
Speaker 3: so many other similarities between them. They both needle point,
Speaker 3: they both are neat freaks, they're both musical, and all
Speaker 3: of this kind of keeps on merging. What did that
Speaker 3: feel like for you during that visit? You know, on
Speaker 3: the one hand, you have your your reporter's hat on,
Speaker 3: and at the same time you are a daughter and
Speaker 3: a niece and a member of a family who is
Speaker 3: experiencing this kind of amazing moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I nearly died. I mean, do you remember that
Speaker 2: very famous New Yorker story about twins and they were
Speaker 2: looking for the first time. I think it's the Minnesota
Speaker 2: Twins study where they were looking at trying to string
Speaker 2: a part nature and nurture and looking at twins who'd
Speaker 2: been separated, and there were all these stories of like,
Speaker 2: you know, brothers who hadn't seen each other for forty years,
Speaker 2: and identical twins and they'd meet up and they would
Speaker 2: both be wearing yellow eyes odd shirts, and they both
Speaker 2: had ex wives named Gail. And you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm making this up, but you know, nutty stuff like that.
Speaker 2: I felt a little bit like I was looking at that.
Speaker 2: Also that those darn necklaces, which were like the bane
Speaker 2: of my car ride, Like moms stopped talking about the
Speaker 2: necklaces suddenly, that it becomes like the most salient thing
Speaker 2: because there is Adele wearing a necklace that she's made,
Speaker 2: while my mother has a necklace.
Speaker 4: That she's made.
Speaker 2: And the first thing that we get, we're shown in
Speaker 2: her bedroom is like the drawer full of all the
Speaker 2: necklaces she's recently been making, you know, and that's a
Speaker 2: photo illustration in the magazine. I mean, it kind of
Speaker 2: blew my doors off, you know. I couldn't believe what
Speaker 2: I was staring at, and that they both were wearing
Speaker 2: these this bright red The thing that really killed me though,
Speaker 2: was that they're both musical, Like it would be okay,
Speaker 2: you know, my grandfather was in the Greek Club. There's
Speaker 2: a story about him, like having been in the same
Speaker 2: Greek club as like Frank Sinatra, you know, like okay,
Speaker 2: so they're musical, right, Like, maybe that's in the family.
Speaker 2: Maybe there's like some kind of constellation of jeans that
Speaker 2: coach for that sort of thing, even like being you know,
Speaker 2: fuxing with your hands, needle pointing and making necklaces. Even
Speaker 2: that I kind of grock. But the fact that they
Speaker 2: are neat freaks. Like, on the one hand, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: So I always assume that my mom was highly controlled
Speaker 2: because she had been traumatized and as a consequence, you know,
Speaker 2: she deeply traumatized.
Speaker 4: As a kid, her sister gets.
Speaker 2: Spirited away, no explanation, it's not discussed, and my mother
Speaker 2: makes some unconscious decision for the rest of her life
Speaker 2: that she is going to control everything within her power. Right,
Speaker 2: And then they meet Adele, and Adele wants to control
Speaker 2: everything within her power. And not only that, but they
Speaker 2: are controlling everything in the exact same way. It all
Speaker 2: revolves around the kitchen. If you get up to try
Speaker 2: and clear the dishes and bring them into the kitchen,
Speaker 2: my mother will like rush you out of the kitchen
Speaker 2: because she is the only one who knows how to
Speaker 2: load the dishwasher, and she is the only one who
Speaker 2: knows where things go. If you try and make a salad,
Speaker 2: she will start instructing you about the oward away to
Speaker 2: cut cherry tomatoes. My mother has like really fixed ideas
Speaker 2: about cherry tomatoes, you know, like she's got a cherry
Speaker 2: tomato philosophy. And you know, I mean so and that
Speaker 2: is Adele. You know, like glasses have to face a
Speaker 2: certain way, right, like just everything nothing can be out
Speaker 2: of place. She gets very agitated things are like not
Speaker 2: just so. And I thought, what is there like a
Speaker 2: protein coating for this, Like what is going on? And
Speaker 2: I thought, Okay, it must just be like it must
Speaker 2: just run in the family, right, even though I don't
Speaker 2: remember my grandmother or my grandfather particularly being this way.
Speaker 2: And then the daughter of the woman who was like
Speaker 2: the mama bear in the house where Adele lived. And
Speaker 2: so the daughter says to me one day, she knows
Speaker 2: Adele very well, right, she knows all the residents of
Speaker 2: the house very well, she says to me, because I'm
Speaker 2: telling her, like it's so weird that they're both me
Speaker 2: pretty excited to assume that my mom was like a
Speaker 2: need free because she was born of trauma. This is
Speaker 2: a trauma related trait. And the daughter says to me, well,
Speaker 2: how do you know that Adele wasn't traumatized? Maybe it's
Speaker 2: born of the exact same thing. And I sat there
Speaker 2: in Chasten's silence for like eight seconds. You can just
Speaker 2: hear eight seconds of nothing on my table order, right,
Speaker 2: like just me going oh yeah, oh my god. You know,
Speaker 2: because of course I am sure that all of those
Speaker 2: years of living in these hellish institutions, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: she lived in Willowbrook, which was exposed by Heraldo Rivera
Speaker 2: in They're in nineteen seventy two as being just and
Speaker 2: RFK visited it in sixty five and called it a
Speaker 2: hell hole. It was just this horrible place, people walking
Speaker 2: and wailing, naked on the floor, all everybody understimulated. It's
Speaker 2: reeked of urine and feces. Not only unhygienic, there was
Speaker 2: just it wasn't a school. It was built as a school,
Speaker 2: it wasn't a school. There was nothing there and nothing
Speaker 2: for the reason it's to play with, nothing for them
Speaker 2: to do all day and only two you know attendants
Speaker 2: per you know floor for like you know, one person
Speaker 2: for eighty people or fifty people. You know, they were
Speaker 2: force fed quickly. I mean it was just there was ghastly, ghastly,
Speaker 2: and then my aunt was moved from there to a
Speaker 2: different institution and it was just as bad and just
Speaker 2: as grim And that's where my aunt lived. And I
Speaker 2: don't know what I mean. In addition to just being
Speaker 2: underloved and underprotected and understimulated, she may have been physically abused.
Speaker 2: She may have been sexually abused.
Speaker 4: I mean, we don't know.
Speaker 2: We know nothing. She can't explain it or convey it.
Speaker 2: All we know is that every so often my aunt
Speaker 2: would say stop that you're hurting me. She would scream it.
Speaker 2: And they thought all the doctors were training her thought, well,
Speaker 2: she must be psychotic, this is some kind of auditory hallucination.
Speaker 2: But why wasn't that just PDSD. Why wasn't she just
Speaker 2: re experiencing trauma? You know, who knows. I mean, maybe
Speaker 2: she was just having like a horrific memory.
Speaker 4: When she shouted stuff like that.
Speaker 2: These similarities between my mom, like the meat nick stuff,
Speaker 2: the control stuff, it might just be trauma related stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I'm not a need nick. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm like the Oscar Madison to my mother's Felix.
Speaker 2: And by the way, just talking about the generational stuff
Speaker 2: people were sent away.
Speaker 4: Right through the.
Speaker 2: Seventies, this continued, This just kept on going. It really
Speaker 2: wasn't until the eighties that people would even countenance the
Speaker 2: idea of keeping neurodiverse kids at home, and that the
Speaker 2: infrastructure first kind of became available where you know, day
Speaker 2: programs were available and where I don't know. I think
Speaker 2: it was probably in the nineties that kids were mainstreamed
Speaker 2: into public schools. The public schools started taking them. I
Speaker 2: don't know when, but at some point the states started
Speaker 2: providing free occupational therapy and physical therapy and speak therapy.
Speaker 2: It took a long time for you know, anything like
Speaker 2: the infrastructure.
Speaker 4: To be born.
Speaker 3: No, it's one of the ways I can count on
Speaker 3: one hand one of the ways that our world has improved.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I really want people to read your piece and not
Speaker 3: to tell the whole story of it. But there were
Speaker 3: no diagnoses. There was no sense that there could be
Speaker 3: or should be diagnoses. It was like one big basket
Speaker 3: of a catch all for beyond hope, beyond redemption or
Speaker 3: difficult right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like like you know, filled with some kind of
Speaker 2: panic or anger that can't be expressed right, something.
Speaker 3: Right, and that needs to be managed by sedation and
Speaker 3: by sort of these extreme measures that make any kind
Speaker 3: of real developmental progress absolutely impossible. You know, And a
Speaker 3: really moving part of your story is that it occurs
Speaker 3: to you that you might be able to get an
Speaker 3: answer to what in fact was responsible, what mutation, what
Speaker 3: genetic mutation, what condition was responsible for Adele's being, you know,
Speaker 3: as as developmentally impaired as she was. You do find
Speaker 3: out that she has a very very rare genetic mutation.
Speaker 3: And at the time you discover this, there are only
Speaker 3: twelve people on record who have been diagnosed with this,
Speaker 3: and then you know, over the course of even just
Speaker 3: your reporting this piece, there start to be more people
Speaker 3: diagnosed with it. The condition is called Coffin Cyrus syndrome twelve.
Speaker 3: And then you do something that I found so moving
Speaker 3: and so fascinating, which is you want to meet a kid,
Speaker 3: you know, someone growing up today, someone being raised in
Speaker 3: a very very as different from the way that Adele
Speaker 3: spent her life as is imaginable, and just see what
Speaker 3: the difference might be if a child is raised with
Speaker 3: all of the possible interventions and therapies at her disposal.
Speaker 4: That's right, and it was positively bittersweet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's the thing, Jen, I mean, there was
Speaker 3: this moment that was just like guided me, which was
Speaker 3: after you've met this girl and her family, her mother.
Speaker 3: There's this line in your piece, which is I thank
Speaker 3: Grace and Emma for the gifts and head out to
Speaker 3: my rental car. I'd last maybe thirty seconds before losing it.
Speaker 2: This little girl was just outside Kansas City and her
Speaker 2: parents adopted her. They had fostered her originally and then
Speaker 2: decided to adopt her. They'd fallen in love. My grandparents
Speaker 2: had fallen in love and done the opposite. They'd given
Speaker 2: their little girl away. And what is amazing is they
Speaker 2: hand me these presents and then Emma gives me a
Speaker 2: picture for me to give to my aunt and her mother,
Speaker 2: who's just this force of nature, looks at Emma and says,
Speaker 2: do you remember why you drew this picture for Jennifer?
Speaker 4: Do you remember why you drew a picture for her aunt?
Speaker 2: And Emma, who, of course, because she's benefited from all
Speaker 2: of these early interventions, can speak in full sentences unlike
Speaker 2: my aunt. And she says, oh, yes, it's because her
Speaker 2: her aunt has trouble in school like me and her
Speaker 2: mother says, that's right, and she says, do you know
Speaker 2: what your what her aunt has? And what I thought
Speaker 2: she was going to say was she has coffin cyrus
Speaker 2: syndrome twelve, just like you. And that's not what her
Speaker 2: mother said. What her mother said was she also has
Speaker 2: parents who couldn't take care of her, but found to
Speaker 2: her a place where someone else can take care of her,
Speaker 2: just like you. And I just thought, but my grandparents
Speaker 2: could have taken care of her if they had all
Speaker 2: the same resources at their disposal. Not only could they have,
Speaker 2: they would have desperately wanted to, because they, like pearl
Speaker 2: as Buck, were waiting inwardly and desperately. But they had
Speaker 2: no choice. They had to give her away. And they
Speaker 2: were being told to for the good of the baby,
Speaker 2: for the good of my mother, for the good of
Speaker 2: the whole family, by all of these authoritative, granite fased doctors.
Speaker 2: And here is my grandma, a working class woman, no
Speaker 2: college education, who just swallows hard and says, okay, I
Speaker 2: mean it just killed me. It just it broke me
Speaker 2: into a thousand pieces. I mean I just sat in
Speaker 2: the car and started the ball, you know, I mean
Speaker 2: it was so hard, I mean and too. It's credit,
Speaker 2: you know. I told my editor about it. I told
Speaker 2: him about the moment, and he cut me off before
Speaker 2: I even finished it, and he said, how long did
Speaker 2: you last before you burst into tears? How unfair is
Speaker 2: all of this?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: You just you weep for everyone involved, for my aunt,
Speaker 2: for my mom, for my grandparents. We are no longer year.
Speaker 3: Jen, thanks so much. This has been a really remarkable
Speaker 3: and powerful conversation.
Speaker 4: I feel the same way.
Speaker 2: I just feel so lucky to have somebody like you
Speaker 2: asking me questions. This kind of conversation is just so
Speaker 2: different from me any kind of conversation I have had
Speaker 2: or will have with anyone else. So just thanks for
Speaker 2: this project.
Speaker 4: I feel like it's a gift.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a big g.
Speaker 3: This was a special bonus episode of Family Secrets. As
Speaker 3: we work on the next season, which will drop in
Speaker 3: early November, keep an eye and an ear out for
Speaker 3: more special bonus content. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.