Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio M
Speaker 1: I always knew my mother had a secret. She guarded
Speaker 1: it fiercely, keeping it under lock and key. That was
Speaker 1: how I envisioned it, hidden chamber, tucked away in the
Speaker 1: recesses of my mother's twisted mind. But her secret was
Speaker 1: too big to be contained, and it would use out
Speaker 1: like a thick slurry, poisoning her thoughts and covering our
Speaker 1: family in darkness. That's Justine Cowen, attorney and writer, author
Speaker 1: of the recent memoir The Secret Life of Dorothy Solmes.
Speaker 1: Justine's is a story about the long reach of secrecy
Speaker 1: and its power to shape our deepest relationships. 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. I began my life in
Speaker 1: San Francisco, and when we were six, we moved to
Speaker 1: a wealthy enclave of San Francisco called Hillsboro, UM, which
Speaker 1: had wide, beautiful streets and estates throughout the town UM,
Speaker 1: and it was so exclusive. There were actually no stores
Speaker 1: in Hillsboro UM, just winding roads and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And on the outside, our lives looked really perfect. We
Speaker 1: had a beautiful Mediterranean house that my mother kept sparkling
Speaker 1: clean and wonderfully decorated. And Um, every day I would
Speaker 1: wake up and it would probably start with maybe a
Speaker 1: violin lesson, and then I would go off to a
Speaker 1: good school and my mother would pick me up after
Speaker 1: school and we would go down to Woodside, California, which
Speaker 1: was about twenty minutes away, where I would take riding lessons,
Speaker 1: and um, we'd come home for a home cooked meal.
Speaker 1: Following the meal, I might have some diction lessons with
Speaker 1: my mother so that I could hopefully get the English
Speaker 1: accent that she had, although that obviously did not work,
Speaker 1: and then maybe some reading before bed. And so my
Speaker 1: life was filled with tutors and lessons and nice things.
Speaker 1: Tell me about your mother from that time. My mother
Speaker 1: was beautiful. She had lovely, silky dark brown hair and
Speaker 1: beautiful hazel eyes, and she carried herself with style and
Speaker 1: always wore a perfectly put together outfit and just exuded class.
Speaker 1: But that was the persona that she showed to the
Speaker 1: outside world. Um, inside the house she was much more
Speaker 1: her curial and some sometimes she could be volatile. I
Speaker 1: remember some incidences where, for example, she threw my dullhouse
Speaker 1: across the room and it smashed pieces. And another time
Speaker 1: she slend the glass coffee table in the living room
Speaker 1: and shattered it into pieces. So life inside her home
Speaker 1: was not the same as what it appeared to those
Speaker 1: that might be appearing in. What would set her off
Speaker 1: when she would fly into these rages, I never really knew,
Speaker 1: and I think that was part of what created some
Speaker 1: fear in me not wanting to set her off, is
Speaker 1: because you never really knew what the trigger was. I mean,
Speaker 1: sometimes there were some things that you knew would upset her.
Speaker 1: Sometimes she would retreat to her room and sit alone
Speaker 1: in the dark, and I didn't know why. My earlier
Speaker 1: memories were that I didn't want to upset her, and
Speaker 1: I didn't want to do anything wrong, and that was
Speaker 1: always very important that I don't do anything, And so
Speaker 1: there was a fear. But then as I grew older,
Speaker 1: that fear turned into anger, which turned into hatred, and
Speaker 1: I harbored very deep resentful feelings towards my mother for
Speaker 1: pretty much most of my life. And tell me about
Speaker 1: your father. Oh, I loved my father. Um. He was
Speaker 1: kind and very even I only remember him raising his
Speaker 1: voice me once or twice in my entire life. He
Speaker 1: was an attorney and he would come home after work
Speaker 1: and I would run down the hall and see him,
Speaker 1: and it was just the most exciting part of the day.
Speaker 1: And on the weekends he would bring work home um
Speaker 1: and he would sit in the library and read briefs
Speaker 1: or whatever he may be doing, and I would lie
Speaker 1: on the harbor floor beneath the table where he was
Speaker 1: working and read books while he was there. And it
Speaker 1: just felt comforting to be in his presence. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, there were these moments, these incidents with
Speaker 1: your mother. You write about your first memory of her
Speaker 1: being awakened because she's screaming because she's having a nightmare. Yes,
Speaker 1: And it was when we were in San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: I just heard her screaming, and I ran into the
Speaker 1: bedroom and I remember seeing my father holding my mother
Speaker 1: and she continued to scream, and he told me to
Speaker 1: go back to bed, and then she eventually stopped. And
Speaker 1: you know, later I was told that it was because
Speaker 1: the air raid sirens that are sprinkled around San Francisco
Speaker 1: that had originally been put in in the event the
Speaker 1: Japanese flew across the ocean in World War Two, but
Speaker 1: we're now used for other purposes in San Francisco, such
Speaker 1: as I suppose there was a tsunami or something like
Speaker 1: that had gone off accidentally and it had triggered memories
Speaker 1: of World War Two from my mother. And what were
Speaker 1: some of the stories you were told about your mother,
Speaker 1: or you know, told by your mother about herself while
Speaker 1: you were growing up? You know, I think with with
Speaker 1: family's secrets, so often there are clues um things that
Speaker 1: we don't even register as clues until we have a
Speaker 1: lot more information. But when you're a child, you accept
Speaker 1: the stories that are told to you, you know, by
Speaker 1: your parents, because they're your parents, and it's all you
Speaker 1: really know. Well, I knew that my mother was from England,
Speaker 1: and she had always told me that she came from
Speaker 1: blue Blood, which I came to understand at an early
Speaker 1: age meant some sort of aristocratic blood from England. I
Speaker 1: also knew that she was illegitimate. My mother told me
Speaker 1: that she was from blue Blood, but I have no
Speaker 1: memory of anyone telling me that she was illegitimate, but
Speaker 1: I always knew it. That's so interesting, and yet you
Speaker 1: can't locate how you discovered it or whether you were
Speaker 1: told it's just something that you knew. Yes, it was
Speaker 1: something that I always knew. And I also I knew
Speaker 1: that I should never ask about my mother's background. I
Speaker 1: shouldn't ask who my grandmother was. I shouldn't ask anything
Speaker 1: about my grandfather that would trigger an event with my mother.
Speaker 1: I knew that was one of the things that would
Speaker 1: and she would become angry, or she would get upset,
Speaker 1: or she would retreat back to her room. And so
Speaker 1: I just need better than to ask, and so I
Speaker 1: just didn't. In the ninth grade, Justine leaves the manicured
Speaker 1: streets of Hillsboro to attend a prestigious boarding school down
Speaker 1: the coast of California in a town called Ojai. Always
Speaker 1: wanted to put a premium on her daughter's education. Justine's
Speaker 1: mother is the one who pushes her to attend. Justine
Speaker 1: doesn't really want to go, but she goes anyway. Boarding
Speaker 1: school is only one of the many ways Justine's mother
Speaker 1: attempts to shape and groom her throughout her childhood. She
Speaker 1: learns as many skills as humanly possible, musical instruments, languages, athletics,
Speaker 1: even lessons in penmanship and diction. Years later, when she
Speaker 1: asks her father, why did I have to go to
Speaker 1: boarding school? Why did you support it, he says, to
Speaker 1: get you away from your mother. After boarding school, Justine
Speaker 1: goes to Berkeley, which is only forty five minutes from
Speaker 1: where she was raised, but might as well be a
Speaker 1: million miles away in terms of the culture of the
Speaker 1: University of California Berkeley, where she's studying. There, she begins
Speaker 1: to build a life on her own terms. She's finally
Speaker 1: distancing herself from her mother's grip nineteen years old and
Speaker 1: trying to create her own path. But one day the
Speaker 1: phone rings. It's her father calling to tell Justine that
Speaker 1: she needs to come home immediately. It's her mother. She's
Speaker 1: in some sort of trouble. He had called me and
Speaker 1: said that my mother had gotten into her car and
Speaker 1: was driving um to the hospital, and that he'd have
Speaker 1: to go after her and get her to pull over
Speaker 1: her car and then bring her back home. And I
Speaker 1: asked him if there was anything wrong, why was she
Speaker 1: going to the hospital, And he just didn't really respond
Speaker 1: to that, and just asked that I come home and
Speaker 1: take care of her so that he could go to court.
Speaker 1: And what did you discover when you got home? When
Speaker 1: I went home, Um, I walked down the hall and
Speaker 1: looking for my mother and knocked on the bedroom door,
Speaker 1: and my mother was in bed in her nightgown and
Speaker 1: had a notepad in her hand, and she was writing
Speaker 1: something that I couldn't see, and she called me over
Speaker 1: to her, and I looked down at this notepad and
Speaker 1: I still remember what it looks like. It's just seared
Speaker 1: in my memory. It was one of those yellow legal
Speaker 1: notepads with the light green lines, and she had a
Speaker 1: pencil in her hand, and she was just writing over
Speaker 1: and over and over again. Name that I had never
Speaker 1: heard before, Dorothy Sulms, Dorothy Sulms, Dorothy Sulms. And what
Speaker 1: did you, as a college student, a young woman, make
Speaker 1: of that at the time, or did you just want
Speaker 1: to get back to your life and sort of tuck
Speaker 1: that away. I was surprised by what she had said,
Speaker 1: and didn't know who Dorothy Sulms was, But at the
Speaker 1: time I didn't want to know, and so I did
Speaker 1: whatever I could to get out of that room and
Speaker 1: to just extract myself from the situation. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: by that point, I just didn't want to get into
Speaker 1: it with her and was really working on distancing myself
Speaker 1: from her, because that's really when I was most happy.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: In the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment states honor thy
Speaker 1: father and thy mother. But sometimes, as in Justine's case,
Speaker 1: it just isn't possible, And the only thing that is
Speaker 1: possible for self preservation and survival is either to completely
Speaker 1: break ties or create a very powerful set of boundaries.
Speaker 1: The first boundaries that I thought up was just geographical.
Speaker 1: I moved to Japan, and then I moved to Washington,
Speaker 1: c And I always made sure to keep a physical
Speaker 1: distance from my mother because I remember when I would
Speaker 1: go home for the holidays, because that was expected, and
Speaker 1: I mean I had to do that, I would start
Speaker 1: to feel anxiety and depression. And two months before I
Speaker 1: would go home, and when I would see my mother
Speaker 1: and she wanted to touch me, and she wanted to
Speaker 1: hug me, um, I would recoil, which you could see
Speaker 1: it on her face that it broke her heart. But
Speaker 1: I couldn't bring myself to hug her. So the best
Speaker 1: thing for me to do was to just stay away
Speaker 1: as much as I could. Staying away works for a while.
Speaker 1: Justine has a lovely early adulthood. She surrounds herself with
Speaker 1: good friends. She becomes an attorney working in environmental law,
Speaker 1: following her beloved of father's footsteps. But even though she's
Speaker 1: moving on, her relationship with her mother continues to weigh
Speaker 1: her down, as does the secret at the core of
Speaker 1: her mother's history and identity. To Justine's knowledge, her mother's
Speaker 1: name is Eileen Thompson. So who in the world is
Speaker 1: Dorothy Solmes and why does she loom so large in
Speaker 1: her mother's past. The first hint that I had about
Speaker 1: her past, what more than a hint when she started
Speaker 1: to try to tell me about it, was and when
Speaker 1: I was in my late twenties, and she sent me
Speaker 1: a letter. It was a short letter, just a page
Speaker 1: or two, but in it she mentioned that she was
Speaker 1: a foundling, and I had never heard the term foundling before,
Speaker 1: and it was clear that she wanted me to pick
Speaker 1: up the phone and call her and talked to her
Speaker 1: about it, but I decided I didn't want to, so
Speaker 1: we didn't speak of it. Several years later, when I
Speaker 1: was probably in my early to mid thirties, an envelope
Speaker 1: showed up from my mother, and I always knew it
Speaker 1: was from her because she had this wonderful handwriting. And
Speaker 1: I opened it up and there was a six stack
Speaker 1: of pages, and I looked at the front and it
Speaker 1: was clear that it was a memoir, a memoir that
Speaker 1: my mother had written about her life. Did it have
Speaker 1: a title it did? It said Coreum Girl, And I
Speaker 1: didn't know what that meant. I had no idea what
Speaker 1: a Korum girl was, and I didn't want to know um.
Speaker 1: At that point in my life, I was finally creating
Speaker 1: happiness for myself. I was keeping distant from my mother,
Speaker 1: and quite honestly, it felt manipulative. UM. I had wanted
Speaker 1: to know the history of our family for years and years,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't until I had really kind of broken
Speaker 1: free and created my own life that suddenly my mother
Speaker 1: wanted to tell all. And it felt to me like
Speaker 1: she was trying to reel me back in. So I
Speaker 1: put it in an envelope and put it in the
Speaker 1: back of a file cabinet. I mean, I must have
Speaker 1: known that it was important and that I shouldn't just
Speaker 1: toss it away. I saved it as I did the
Speaker 1: letter that she sent years before, but I didn't want
Speaker 1: to read it. When it comes to family's secrets, um,
Speaker 1: there has to be a certain kind of readiness involved,
Speaker 1: Otherwise finding something out at the wrong moment can actually
Speaker 1: end up being destructive, and that we do have some
Speaker 1: kind of internal radar for that. You had a hard
Speaker 1: one life at that point, and you had overcome a
Speaker 1: lot of psychological obstacles and instability that it really could
Speaker 1: be drawn pretty much directly right back to the way
Speaker 1: that your mother had raised you and the way that
Speaker 1: she had been And so that is not a point
Speaker 1: where you wanted to go there. But as you say,
Speaker 1: you tucked it away, it's not like you burned it.
Speaker 1: I must have known that one day I would revisit it.
Speaker 1: I just knew that that wasn't the day. I didn't
Speaker 1: realize that it would be twenty years. What is the day?
Speaker 1: How did that come about? Was it a slow build?
Speaker 1: Was it sort of haunting you in some way? Or
Speaker 1: was there just this eureka moment of now it's a
Speaker 1: time and I need to know. Well, it was after
Speaker 1: another's death, and my mother's death really took me by
Speaker 1: surprise in terms of how it impacted me emotionally. I
Speaker 1: worked so hard to keep an emotional distance from her,
Speaker 1: and when she died, I was at her deathbed and
Speaker 1: I was overwrought. I ran from the room. I saw
Speaker 1: obed like I had never sobbed before. Justine's mother had
Speaker 1: died of Alzheimer's, so Justina is surprised by her reaction
Speaker 1: to her mother's death because the death itself was not sudden.
Speaker 1: Her mother's decline had been gradual, as it so often
Speaker 1: is with Alzheimer's disease. She had been losing her memory
Speaker 1: for years plus. You'd think the history between Justine and
Speaker 1: her mother and the distance between them wouldn't provoke such
Speaker 1: a tidal wave of grief. When I went back home
Speaker 1: to the home that I had with my husband Patrick,
Speaker 1: I was exhausted. I could barely get off the couch
Speaker 1: for days. And even after that, I was just fatigued,
Speaker 1: and I would go out and I would cry for
Speaker 1: no reason. And I was stunned at my reaction. And
Speaker 1: then I just put it away. Um, you know, it
Speaker 1: faded over time, and I just tucked it into the
Speaker 1: back of my mind and went on and life was
Speaker 1: really happy. I had this wonderful man that I had met,
Speaker 1: so loving and kind. His entire family brought me in
Speaker 1: and life was just wonderful. And we went on a
Speaker 1: month long trip to Europe and my husband said, let's
Speaker 1: go to London. Well, I had never been to England,
Speaker 1: and I've traveled quite a bit, but I intentionally never
Speaker 1: went to England because it felt too emotionally powerful, because
Speaker 1: I knew that's where my mother was from. But I said, oh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be fine. There's not going to be a
Speaker 1: problem here, and I'm gonna be with my husband and
Speaker 1: my mother's you know, two died years ago. It's going
Speaker 1: to be fine. And I went to London and we
Speaker 1: walked around the streets and I could not stop thinking
Speaker 1: about my mother and I didn't know why. And when
Speaker 1: we came back from Europe, when we landed, I again
Speaker 1: became emotional, and it was because I knew that my
Speaker 1: mother wasn't going to call me, even though I never
Speaker 1: wanted my mother to call me. So I sat at
Speaker 1: my computer and I typed in the words that I
Speaker 1: had heard only once before, thirty years before, Dorothy Sums.
Speaker 1: And that didn't get me very far. But then I
Speaker 1: remembered the other word that I had learned when my
Speaker 1: mother had reached out when I was in my late twenties.
Speaker 1: In that letter the word Foundling, and I put in
Speaker 1: Foundling and London, and then there it was the Foundling Hospital.
Speaker 1: And that was the first step. And I emailed someone
Speaker 1: at the Foundling Hospital which is now called Quorum and said,
Speaker 1: I think my mother might have been Dorothy Sums. Now,
Speaker 1: how you've put something together here and you think maybe
Speaker 1: your mother was known as Darthy Solmes when she was
Speaker 1: a child, when she was a foundling at the Foundling Hospital. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll be right back. Justine dives into research. She digs
Speaker 1: into the history of the Foundling Hospital, both during the
Speaker 1: time her mother was there and the institution's history dating
Speaker 1: back to seventeen thirty nine. She also returns to her
Speaker 1: mother's manuscript, which is so painful to read that she
Speaker 1: can only read it a few pages at a time.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, looking back on it, that the first thing
Speaker 1: that I did was reach out to a complete stranger
Speaker 1: in London to start my research instead of just going
Speaker 1: into my foul cabinet and picking up my mother's manuscript
Speaker 1: to get me started. Why do you think that was?
Speaker 1: Because I think it was going to be too painful,
Speaker 1: and I was afraid what I was going to learn.
Speaker 1: And I think that as an attorney, I'm very accustomed
Speaker 1: to research, and that being able to do the research
Speaker 1: in the way that I would handle any sort of
Speaker 1: case that I was working on allowed me to do
Speaker 1: it in a way that didn't feel frightening and it
Speaker 1: felt comforting. And that makes a lot of sense. To
Speaker 1: understand what my mother went through, you really have to
Speaker 1: go back to the beginning of the Family Hospital. It
Speaker 1: started in the mid seventeen hundreds, and it was created
Speaker 1: two raise illegitimate children to pay degree changed chamber pots
Speaker 1: for Britain's elite, and to serve them. It served a
Speaker 1: second purpose, and the second purpose was to take a
Speaker 1: woman who had had an unfortunate pregnancy and two restore
Speaker 1: her back to her prior position. The only way that
Speaker 1: that could be done is to take the child and
Speaker 1: to keep the child a secret, and that secret that
Speaker 1: the child itself was a secret and was shameful. That's
Speaker 1: really what shaped the founding hospital for the next two
Speaker 1: centuries and what also shaped my mother. In the early
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, my grandmother and her name was Lena Weston
Speaker 1: m a name that I had never heard before until
Speaker 1: I had gone to London and dug through the files.
Speaker 1: She had become pregnant and her brother had kicked her out,
Speaker 1: and she had nowhere to go, so she reached out
Speaker 1: to the founding hospital and asked that they take her child.
Speaker 1: It was my mother. They didn't just take the child. Instead,
Speaker 1: my grandmother had to go through a very rigorous process
Speaker 1: in which she had to prove that she was a
Speaker 1: respectable woman and that if they took this child away
Speaker 1: from her, that she would be able to return to
Speaker 1: a virtuous life. The process included reaching out to, of
Speaker 1: course the men in her life, her doctor, her pastor,
Speaker 1: and her brother, and they all had to attest that
Speaker 1: she was a virtuous woman. And then she actually had
Speaker 1: to have an in person interview with the governors of
Speaker 1: the hospital, who were all very well to do men
Speaker 1: who um presumably quizzed her on how it was that
Speaker 1: she came to be in this situation and how she
Speaker 1: would conduct her life if they granted her the favor
Speaker 1: of taking her child from her. Apparently she was virtuous enough,
Speaker 1: and she had to go and on a particular day
Speaker 1: turned my mother over to the Fothering Hospital when my
Speaker 1: mother was two months old. And what year was this,
Speaker 1: That was nineteen two. Justine's mother spends twelve years in
Speaker 1: the Foundling Hospital's care. The first five years she lives
Speaker 1: with a foster mother, which was a practice dating back
Speaker 1: to the Foundling Hospital's early history. When the children who
Speaker 1: were in the hospital were discovered not to be doing
Speaker 1: very well, they'd be shipped off to the country to
Speaker 1: be wet nursed at the age of five. No matter
Speaker 1: whether the foster mother um and sometimes a foster father
Speaker 1: loved their foster child or not, the child would be
Speaker 1: taken away and sent to the institutional facility, which when
Speaker 1: my mother as a child was in Brokemstaed just outside
Speaker 1: of London, and they would be dropped off unceremoniously. Most
Speaker 1: of them were not told that they were even leaving.
Speaker 1: Their countless stories of children just being placed on a
Speaker 1: bus or a coach as they called it, and they
Speaker 1: thought they were coming back home at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, but instead they were dropped off at the
Speaker 1: family hospital. They were taken in, their clothes were removed,
Speaker 1: they were put in bathtubs, you know, two or three
Speaker 1: at a time. They would never see those clothes again.
Speaker 1: They would share their heads and they would sit there
Speaker 1: shivering and then sobbing, not knowing what was going on.
Speaker 1: Really just treated like prisoners and put in these uniforms,
Speaker 1: uniforms that had not changed since they were first designed
Speaker 1: in the mid sev hundreds, and then that would start
Speaker 1: their life at the family hospital. As Justine learns more
Speaker 1: about the way the foundlings were treated, living their lives
Speaker 1: in shapeless uniforms with sheared heads, she can't help but
Speaker 1: sink back to some of the strange aspects of our
Speaker 1: own childhood too. The clothes her mother bought her were
Speaker 1: always too big, extremely unfashionable, baggy sack like garments that
Speaker 1: must have resembled, perhaps subconsciously, to Eileen, the clothes she
Speaker 1: had been forced to wear as a child. And once,
Speaker 1: when Justine tried to cut her own hair in the
Speaker 1: style of her favorite Charlie's Angel, she botched it, of course,
Speaker 1: and this sent her mother into a panic. Promptly, Eileen
Speaker 1: arranged to have Justine's hair fixed by a fancy San
Speaker 1: Francisco stylist. What must have crossed her mother's mind when
Speaker 1: she saw her child with her hair all chopped off.
Speaker 1: Justine also soon discovers there are striking physical similarities between
Speaker 1: the Foundling Hospital and her own childhood home. I still
Speaker 1: remember being in the Founding Museum and walking into the room,
Speaker 1: and it was a very earnate room, and it contained
Speaker 1: a lot of the furniture that the governors used, and
Speaker 1: there across the room were these two chairs that were
Speaker 1: so familiar to me because they were the two They
Speaker 1: looked almost exactly like the two chairs that sat in
Speaker 1: our living room as a child. And I looked at
Speaker 1: those chairs and began to cry and just was very emotional.
Speaker 1: And at the time, I don't think I understood why,
Speaker 1: And later I understood that when I was at the
Speaker 1: Founding Museum for the first time, I was making the
Speaker 1: connection between what had happened in the past two years ago,
Speaker 1: this institution that brutalized thousands of children, um and how
Speaker 1: that connected to our family, and it put a pin
Speaker 1: in a sense of telling me, this is what happened
Speaker 1: to my family. Because the relationship between my mother and
Speaker 1: I was always so fraught that I could never ever
Speaker 1: completely understand why, and that time, when I saw those chairs,
Speaker 1: it was symbolic to me that what had happened to
Speaker 1: our family was bigger than me and my mother, and
Speaker 1: that we had been swept up in this institution that
Speaker 1: had served Britain's ruling class for over two hundred years.
Speaker 1: And in a way, through this journey, I've actually felt
Speaker 1: lucky that I have been able to uncover everything that
Speaker 1: happened to my family. Having this troubled relationship with someone
Speaker 1: that you're supposed to love is more common than I'd
Speaker 1: ever thought. Of course, learns that that is far from
Speaker 1: the case. But I'm fortunate and that I can put something.
Speaker 1: I can put it in this tangible box of this
Speaker 1: is what happened to our family. I can trace it
Speaker 1: all the way back to the seventeen hundreds and move
Speaker 1: all the way forward. The shame that was put on
Speaker 1: those women in the seventeen hundreds existed in my childhood home.
Speaker 1: You know, you spoke earlier about the recoiling from your mother,
Speaker 1: literally the sort of inability to bear her touch or
Speaker 1: to touch her, and you liken it too, or you
Speaker 1: draw a line in a way through time to how
Speaker 1: she must have been treated in the very very formative
Speaker 1: early you know, weeks and months of of her infancy
Speaker 1: and not being held and not being touched, and that's
Speaker 1: the stuff that you don't get to redo, and it
Speaker 1: it lingers in a kind of traumatic way. And the
Speaker 1: whole idea of inherited trauma or epo genetic trauma, that
Speaker 1: perhaps your feeling of recoiling was part of that same pattern,
Speaker 1: which is very painful, but I think also healing because
Speaker 1: there's at last the possibility of an explanation for it.
Speaker 1: I used to make lists of things that my mother
Speaker 1: had done and go over them in my head in
Speaker 1: a sense to justify how I felt about her. And
Speaker 1: the list was never good enough. And I always knew
Speaker 1: that the fact that you know, she turned my doll
Speaker 1: house across the room or in a table, that those
Speaker 1: really weren't the reasons why I felt the way I
Speaker 1: did about my mother, but I never could understand why,
Speaker 1: and I frequently thought that meant there was something wrong
Speaker 1: with me, um that I was a bad daughter, or
Speaker 1: you know, all sorts of feelings would swirl around in
Speaker 1: my head, some that I wasn't even aware of, and
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't until I undercovered the story that
Speaker 1: I realized that I wasn't to blame, but also my
Speaker 1: mother wasn't to blame, but that we'd really been caught
Speaker 1: up in this tragic story. Ultimately, Justine is able to
Speaker 1: access a lot of her mother's files, files her mother
Speaker 1: had never been able to see because of our cane
Speaker 1: laws designed to continue the secret and protect it until
Speaker 1: all parties are no longer living. Justine discovers that her grandmother, Lena,
Speaker 1: had been trying for years, heartbreaking Lisa to send things
Speaker 1: to Eileen slash Dorothy, money, letters, asking after her, and then, finally,
Speaker 1: when the war comes to England and there are air raids,
Speaker 1: Lena begs the governors of the Foundling hospital to allow
Speaker 1: her to take her daughter away where she'll be safer.
Speaker 1: The governors are not inclined to bend or break the rules,
Speaker 1: but how else to say this? Because Eileen slash Dorothy
Speaker 1: has been such a difficult foundling, rebelling, breaking the rules,
Speaker 1: even running away, they decide that it's perfectly fine for
Speaker 1: her to be taken off their hands. So mother and
Speaker 1: daughter actually are reunited. Que the violins right, not so much,
Speaker 1: After twelve years, a lot of damage has already been done.
Speaker 1: It was heartbreaking when I discovered the letters that my
Speaker 1: grandmother had written. In the archives in London, and it
Speaker 1: was very emotional to see not just a few letters,
Speaker 1: but letter after letter after letter that she had written
Speaker 1: by hand and on any scrap of paper that she
Speaker 1: could find. I mean, some of it was during wartime
Speaker 1: and she would write and write and asking about her
Speaker 1: little girl, and you could feel the love. And then
Speaker 1: you think about my mother um as a little girl
Speaker 1: who had never been touched in a loving way, which
Speaker 1: was by design. They were being raised to be servants
Speaker 1: and love and comfort and affection had no place in
Speaker 1: that kind of training. And when they were reunited, I
Speaker 1: had this hope myself that somehow there would be this
Speaker 1: loving bond created. You know, years later it it didn't happen,
Speaker 1: and it's clear they became estranged at some point in time.
Speaker 1: And I think that once the bond is broken or
Speaker 1: not allowed to form, sometimes there's not a lot that
Speaker 1: can be done. And I think a lot about the
Speaker 1: bond between my mother and myself, and I think, well,
Speaker 1: the founding hospital in the social maories that forced my
Speaker 1: grandmother to give up her child broke the bonds between
Speaker 1: her and her daughter, and that carried down into the
Speaker 1: next generation. All these broken bonds between mothers and daughters
Speaker 1: complicate Justine's feelings about the possibility of becoming a mother herself.
Speaker 1: I definitely was afraid that I would be a good mother,
Speaker 1: and that I would repeat the mistakes that my mother
Speaker 1: had made. But actually my greatest fear was that I
Speaker 1: would have a daughter that felt about me the way
Speaker 1: that I thought about my mother, and that terrified me.
Speaker 1: And since I've gotten married, I have nieces, and some
Speaker 1: of them I have developed just an extraordinary bond with.
Speaker 1: And just the other day I was talking with my
Speaker 1: husband and I said, you know, I think I would
Speaker 1: have been a good mother. You end up being able
Speaker 1: to meet with two different women who had known your
Speaker 1: mother back before your mother came to the United States,
Speaker 1: Bernice and Lydia, who had been in the Foundling hospital
Speaker 1: with your mother. As you're speaking with Lydia, you're worried
Speaker 1: that she's kind of getting this sense that this journey
Speaker 1: of yours to learn as much as you possibly can
Speaker 1: about your mother's history had been motivated by your great
Speaker 1: love for your mother, and you don't want to sort
Speaker 1: of falsely let that stand. And you say to Lydia
Speaker 1: that your relationship with your mother was troubled, and Lydia
Speaker 1: responds in this beautiful way. She says to you, of
Speaker 1: course it was how would she have known how to
Speaker 1: be a mother? And it felt to me like that
Speaker 1: was some kind of turning point for you, or in
Speaker 1: all the layers, sort of sluffing away of permission to
Speaker 1: have this be the story that it is and have
Speaker 1: it not be your fault and not be your doing.
Speaker 1: That felt like the last piece of it sort of
Speaker 1: falling into place. Did it feel that way to you, Well,
Speaker 1: it was a very powerful moment for me, and it
Speaker 1: did give me some permission to at least start exploring
Speaker 1: for giving myself, and that was part of the journey.
Speaker 1: I didn't even realize that I was going to undertake here.
Speaker 1: To close out this remarkable story, is Justine reading from
Speaker 1: the deeply moving ending of her memoir. My mother and
Speaker 1: I were about the same age when we each felt
Speaker 1: an irresistible pull to understand the past and how it
Speaker 1: had shaped who we had become. I can't claim to
Speaker 1: fully understand what finally compelled me to uncover my mother's secrets,
Speaker 1: an obsession that spanned the course of two years. I
Speaker 1: do know that the anger I had shouldered for much
Speaker 1: of my life had taken its toll, the sheer intensity
Speaker 1: of my feelings for my mother, the loathing that was
Speaker 1: always simmering just under the surface, where burdens with a
Speaker 1: palpable weight. Perhaps I had hoped that understanding my mother's
Speaker 1: past might provide me with a sense of peace. But
Speaker 1: my mother's journey was not about anger. It was about shame.
Speaker 1: It is lonely to have no love for one's mother. Well,
Speaker 1: I had hoped that my feelings would change. Love cannot
Speaker 1: be forced or conjured up. Perhaps she was not the
Speaker 1: only one with rounds too deep to heal. But in
Speaker 1: my quest to learn about my mother's past, I realized
Speaker 1: that I had come to know someone special, someone I
Speaker 1: wanted to hold the comfort and protect. That person was
Speaker 1: a little girl with a smattering of freckles and silky
Speaker 1: brown hair, feisty and courageous, and probably full of dreams.
Speaker 1: I had grown to love that little girl. Her name
Speaker 1: was Dorothy Songs. M h Family Secrets is a production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Molly's a Core is the story
Speaker 1: editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you
Speaker 1: have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave
Speaker 1: us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
Speaker 1: upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
Speaker 1: That's the number zero. You can also find me on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Danny writer, and if you'd like to know
Speaker 1: more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out
Speaker 1: my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.