Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio Deep in the Woods.
Speaker 2: Deep in the Woods, it was ringing real good, ten
Speaker 2: inches down, ten inches down with a solid sound.
Speaker 3: That's Nashville based singer, songwriter and memoirist Witthill Wits is
Speaker 3: a story of love, loss, tenacity, redemption, and the way
Speaker 3: secrets seep from one generation to the next without our
Speaker 3: knowing how or why, until the lights finally blink on
Speaker 3: and we see what had been hiding in the shadows.
Speaker 3: And while finally knowing doesn't fix everything, it's a hell
Speaker 3: of a start bay.
Speaker 2: But you know the one no cod that dog.
Speaker 3: I'm Danny Shapiro and this is 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.
Speaker 1: I was born in Manhattan in nineteen fifty eight, so
Speaker 1: the landscape was vertical. A lot of tall buildings and
Speaker 1: small buildings and hard edges, lots of brick and stone
Speaker 1: and cement and marble stairs and metal, and lots of
Speaker 1: noise buses and trucks and honking and screeching of brakes.
Speaker 1: I was born in Mount Sinai, and they brought me
Speaker 1: home to this microscopic one bedroom apartment. It's the third floor.
Speaker 1: The building was on the corner of First Avenue and
Speaker 1: fifty second Street. My dad moved out, and I was yelling, well,
Speaker 1: very young, like it's unclear, no one alive remembers when
Speaker 1: he moved out, so it was either maybe two or
Speaker 1: four something like that. So I have no memories of
Speaker 1: my parents together, and so I grew up as an
Speaker 1: only child. My parents were both from the South. My
Speaker 1: mother was born in rural Mississippi, very poor family farmers.
Speaker 1: She picked cotton as a child, and my mother had
Speaker 1: two sisters, younger sisters, and little by little they moved
Speaker 1: to Columbus, Mississippi, which was an upgrade from the totally
Speaker 1: rural setting that she was born into, and then got
Speaker 1: to go to public school. And she was very, very bright,
Speaker 1: but also kind of a tortured child. She felt very different,
Speaker 1: like she had been dropped into an environment that she
Speaker 1: was not sated for. She had great goals and aspirations.
Speaker 1: I remember her telling me once that she was in
Speaker 1: the outhouse, back in the farmhouse that they first lived in,
Speaker 1: and she picked up a copy of a magazine that
Speaker 1: they used for other purposes and she saw an article
Speaker 1: about New York City and delicatessens and decided that that's
Speaker 1: where she was going to end up. And she just
Speaker 1: kind of zeroed on that. And she was very bright
Speaker 1: and got a scholarship to what was then called Mississippi
Speaker 1: State College for Women. No one had ever said, Marian,
Speaker 1: you should go to a college, but she got a
Speaker 1: scholarship and graduated with a degree in speech I think
Speaker 1: it was, but also did a lot of theater. And
Speaker 1: the minute she got out of there, she headed north
Speaker 1: and ended up at a summer stock in Massachusetts where
Speaker 1: she met my dad, and he likewise was from the South,
Speaker 1: well from Appalachia. He was the son of Armenian immigrants
Speaker 1: who had come to this country to escape the genocide.
Speaker 1: My grandfather opened a saloene called the Sanitary Lunch, and
Speaker 1: my father was their first son. Then they had twin boys,
Speaker 1: one of whom died young. And at that point my
Speaker 1: father's mother disappeared. She was always a troubled woman, according
Speaker 1: to what little my father remembers of her.
Speaker 3: How old was your father when she disappeared?
Speaker 1: I think he was twelve or thirteen, and his little
Speaker 1: brother was more like eight. My father grew up in
Speaker 1: cold country with miners in the saline at night and
Speaker 1: my grandfather selling moonshine and speaking Armenian upstairs in the
Speaker 1: little apartment that they lived in and English the rest
Speaker 1: of the time. My dad, like my mom, was very smart,
Speaker 1: kind of different from everyone else, and was encouraged by
Speaker 1: a teacher to really go for it. He went to
Speaker 1: college at Concord College, got a theater degree, and started
Speaker 1: getting a master's degree, but ended up going to the
Speaker 1: same summer stock in Plymouth, Massachusetts that my mother went
Speaker 1: to in nineteen fifty four, and the die was cast.
Speaker 1: I cannot get any information from my dad about how
Speaker 1: that happened or what smarked their relationship. But when the
Speaker 1: summer was over, they moved to New York City and
Speaker 1: got an apartment together and married, and very very quickly
Speaker 1: they were a couple. I think they probably got married
Speaker 1: because there was a cheap apartment that they found out
Speaker 1: about and they took it. So they married in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, and it was three years before I was born.
Speaker 3: And you have no memory of the three of you
Speaker 3: together as a family before your father moved out.
Speaker 1: No, it's hard to say because even though I would
Speaker 1: imagine things were a bit tempestuous at the time of
Speaker 1: the break. They really pulled it together and were quite
Speaker 1: civil with each other Throughout the rest of my upbringing.
Speaker 1: My father moved very close just down the block. My
Speaker 1: mother could lean out her window and look to the right,
Speaker 1: and my father could lean out his window and look
Speaker 1: to the left, and I could walk between their buildings,
Speaker 1: and so they really kept up appearances and were quite
Speaker 1: civil with each other, which was great, and so we
Speaker 1: did things together. Sometimes there were times we all vacationed
Speaker 1: at the same house. Some family friends lived across the
Speaker 1: hall from my mother. Their names were Tom and Margaret Knight,
Speaker 1: and they became my godparents, and I thought of them
Speaker 1: as another set of parents. They were a childless couple,
Speaker 1: older than my parents, and just the best people, and
Speaker 1: I loved them so much, and they were very invested
Speaker 1: in me, and I ended up thinking of my parents
Speaker 1: and Tom and Margaret as being the four legs of
Speaker 1: my table in my mind, and that's how I saw them,
Speaker 1: that they were these four people that supported me and
Speaker 1: I loved to distraction. And Tom and Margaret had a house,
Speaker 1: a little tiny cottage on Cape Cod, and when I
Speaker 1: was three years old, I started going there, sometimes just
Speaker 1: with Tom and Margaret, sometimes with my mother, sometimes with
Speaker 1: my father, sometimes all of us together. Was very progressive
Speaker 1: considering what happened later. My life with my parents very
Speaker 1: much revolved around theater, but also any kind of creativity.
Speaker 1: It was quite clear to me from early on I
Speaker 1: would be some kind of performing artist. It was destined.
Speaker 1: And I say that from their perspective, and you know,
Speaker 1: happily I was interested in that. How much of that
Speaker 1: was because I sensed their investment in me, but there
Speaker 1: certainly was a lot in me that responded to that.
Speaker 1: It was very comfortable on stages. They brought me on
Speaker 1: stages all the time. One of my earliest pictures of
Speaker 1: me is on a stage with some actors I don't
Speaker 1: even know who they were. And I loved it, you know.
Speaker 1: I loved the idea of theater and plays and music
Speaker 1: and dance. I always had music lessons and dance lessons
Speaker 1: growing up, and you know, I'm happy about that, of course,
Speaker 1: and my mother in particular was extremely invested in that.
Speaker 1: For me, I look back on it and it just
Speaker 1: seems kind of golden and just so cool. How I
Speaker 1: was encouraged to do anything. If I didn't want to
Speaker 1: go to school because I wanted to write a short
Speaker 1: story about an avocado, I could stay home and do that.
Speaker 1: She didn't care, and you know, I'd finished the story
Speaker 1: in like fifteen minutes and watch TV the rest of
Speaker 1: the day and nobody would know. And the same with
Speaker 1: my dad. They were just very encouraging of my interests.
Speaker 1: That said, things in the apartment with my mom were
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a hackneyed word, but complicated. I
Speaker 1: mean she was a very anxious person. She was moody.
Speaker 1: How much she drank, I'm not sure, but there were
Speaker 1: many trips to the liquor store and she could turn
Speaker 1: on a dime. There could be you know, bluebirds and
Speaker 1: rainbows one minute, and then just coldness and an abuse.
Speaker 1: She was physically really abusive to me at times in
Speaker 1: ways that it's really difficult for me to even describe.
Speaker 1: And it was incredibly scarring, emotionally scarring and confusing because
Speaker 1: this was somebody I loved. I just felt so accepted by.
Speaker 1: And so I remember going off to college and telling
Speaker 1: my roommate and my friends at college all my mom
Speaker 1: and I are so close, it's like we're one person.
Speaker 1: In two bodies, and I thought that was great, and
Speaker 1: I thought they'd be jealous of me or something, and
Speaker 1: everybody just looked at me and like I was there
Speaker 1: was something wrong, which, of course there was something very
Speaker 1: wrong with that.
Speaker 3: It's one of the things that comes up again and
Speaker 3: again on this show. And you know when we talk
Speaker 3: about secrecy and family, is that as children, whatever our
Speaker 3: reality is in our family just seems like it must
Speaker 3: be the reality, you know, and that surely everybody's family
Speaker 3: is like this, So right.
Speaker 1: Yes, when I'd go and visit my friends that had
Speaker 1: both parents at home and they'd all sit around the
Speaker 1: dinner table together and read stories while the kids ate,
Speaker 1: and my eyes were wide open, it was like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this is this thing happens. And I never was jealous.
Speaker 1: It just was so different early on. I mean, there
Speaker 1: were times when it was just so fun and I
Speaker 1: felt like we were buddies in the apartment, but I
Speaker 1: was lift alone a lot. When she finally realized she
Speaker 1: could leave me alone in the apartment, she did and
Speaker 1: it didn't bother me. I mean, we were just on
Speaker 1: top of each other all the time in that tiny space.
Speaker 1: I mean we shared a one bedroom and I remember
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time looking out the windows.
Speaker 1: And if I looked out the living room window, it
Speaker 1: was on to First Avenue, and I could just watch
Speaker 1: this river of cars going by, and I would stare
Speaker 1: at it just for hours. It was like watching the
Speaker 1: sun on distant mountains or something like that. It was
Speaker 1: always changed, and it was always fascinating to me, the
Speaker 1: movement and the fact that it always flowed in one direction.
Speaker 1: And if I went and looked out my bedroom window,
Speaker 1: I looked out onto fifty second Street, and it was
Speaker 1: quieter there, but not much. And there was a building
Speaker 1: across the street, kind of a large, much nicer building
Speaker 1: than ours, with many, many windows, and I could stare
Speaker 1: in those windows at night and just watch all kinds
Speaker 1: of things happen, which was very instructive to me growing
Speaker 1: up and fascinating. And I remember I did, I said
Speaker 1: this thing where I would write notes and I would
Speaker 1: say I am very happy, I am a very happy child,
Speaker 1: and I would crumple them up and throw them out
Speaker 1: the window, and then watch to see if anyone would
Speaker 1: pick them up. And I look at that now, and
Speaker 1: I think, what was I doing? Was I trying to
Speaker 1: be rescued and I didn't even realize it. Basically, what
Speaker 1: I was doing was littering. Nobody ever picked it up,
Speaker 1: not one time. And I did that at the bank too.
Speaker 1: If I went in a bank, I would find a
Speaker 1: deposit slip at the bottom of the stack of deposit
Speaker 1: slips and write how happy I was on the deposit
Speaker 1: slip and slip it in for somebody to read, which
Speaker 1: was I don't understand that.
Speaker 3: Do you think that you were trying to convince yourself
Speaker 3: so that you were a happy childhood? What do you
Speaker 3: think your motivation was.
Speaker 1: I think subconsciously it was probably a bit of a
Speaker 1: message in a bottle kind of thing. But I do
Speaker 1: say looking back that all the window gazing was I
Speaker 1: really saw myself as Rapunzel and like the princess in
Speaker 1: a tower. The only thing I didn't have was the
Speaker 1: braid because my mother kept my hair chopped really short.
Speaker 1: I begged her for long hair. I had a long
Speaker 1: haired wig that I wear around the house because I
Speaker 1: wanted long hair so badly. She had long hair, but
Speaker 1: I couldn't, and she would just chop it off with scissors.
Speaker 1: And throughout my childhood till I was probably about ten
Speaker 1: until I really laid it down the lawn said, I'm
Speaker 1: growing my hair out and it's just what it is.
Speaker 1: Until then I had just this very strange chopped haircut.
Speaker 3: Why do you think she did that?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I've never understood why she did that.
Speaker 1: It looked terrible, I mean, look ridiculous.
Speaker 3: In pictures, Witt has taken on the role of the observer,
Speaker 3: as only children often do. She watches and listens. She
Speaker 3: continues to look out her windows and into the windows
Speaker 3: of others, and when her mom leaves her home alone,
Speaker 3: in many ways, things are better, more calm. After all,
Speaker 3: Witt never knows which version of her mother she's going
Speaker 3: to get, so in her mom's absence, Wit does her
Speaker 3: best to connect with herself and with the world. She
Speaker 3: gazes out at the traffic on the street below and
Speaker 3: tosses notes to the sidewalk. She blasts the stereo and
Speaker 3: dances in the living room as hard and as long
Speaker 3: as she wants. She creates a whole world for herself
Speaker 3: alone in that apartment. Outside the apartment, she has a
Speaker 3: world too. She's just gotten accepted to the High School
Speaker 3: for Performing Arts.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, when I got into that school. My
Speaker 1: mother was just over the moon. Everything was going according
Speaker 1: to plan. I was a drama student that I was
Speaker 1: also dancing, and midway through my time at Performing Arts,
Speaker 1: I wanted to switch to the dance department, and my
Speaker 1: mother was all for it. She wanted me to be
Speaker 1: a dancer more than anything. I don't know what that
Speaker 1: was about. The fact that I wanted to switch majors
Speaker 1: and be a dance major was huge for my mom,
Speaker 1: and the school said that I could not do that,
Speaker 1: that I would not get a degree from the High
Speaker 1: School for Performing Arts if I switched majors. And you
Speaker 1: would think that the school had sent me to Siberia
Speaker 1: for the amount of rage that instilled in her.
Speaker 3: When Wit finishes high school as a drama major, Alas
Speaker 3: she leaves for college to study dance. She spends her
Speaker 3: first two years at the State University of New York
Speaker 3: and then transfers to the University of Michigan in ann Arbor.
Speaker 3: Wit flourishes there, excelling academically and creatively. She meets a guy.
Speaker 3: He's a dancer and carpenter, an enticing combination. They begin dating,
Speaker 3: and after graduation they moved to New York City together
Speaker 3: with all the changes, their relationship becomes rocky, but they're
Speaker 3: in it. Then Wit becomes unexpectedly pregnant. She thinks back
Speaker 3: on how her mother had always made it very almost
Speaker 3: abundantly clear to her that women had abortion rights, but
Speaker 3: Wit doesn't want an abortion. She wants to have the child.
Speaker 1: It wasn't an ideal relationship, but I felt like we
Speaker 1: could make it work. I had heard from my dad
Speaker 1: and probably from Tom and Margaret, how distressed my mother
Speaker 1: was when she she got pregnant with me, and I
Speaker 1: know that she threatened suicide. My father had to physically
Speaker 1: restrain her from throwing herself down the stairs of our
Speaker 1: apartment building. And I also know that she starved herself.
Speaker 1: She told me that her doctor said, don't gain too
Speaker 1: much weight, and so she took that to me to
Speaker 1: not eat. And they say that by the time I
Speaker 1: was born, she was skin and bones, and I was fine,
Speaker 1: you know. I took what I needed and was a
Speaker 1: healthy baby, a small but healthy baby. And that was
Speaker 1: a clue that became really apparent in later years that
Speaker 1: there was a connection between what happened when she was
Speaker 1: pregnant and what happened when I got pregnant.
Speaker 3: When were you told that this was the case and
Speaker 3: this was the way that your mother was when she
Speaker 3: was pregnant with you.
Speaker 1: That's one of those things where you just kind of
Speaker 1: always knew it and you don't remember who told you
Speaker 1: were how so it was just part of legend. Ha
Speaker 1: ha Marion tried to throw herself down the stairs, ha ha,
Speaker 1: and oh she was so skinny, as sort of family lore,
Speaker 1: but it was not presented in this within hushed tones.
Speaker 1: It was just part of family legend.
Speaker 3: That's so interesting because you'd think that that could be
Speaker 3: pretty traumatizing for a child or a teenager, you know,
Speaker 3: a young person to hear about the way their mother
Speaker 3: felt about being pregnant with them. That you know that
Speaker 3: it wouldn't be like, oh, presented with you know, some
Speaker 3: sense of lightness and hilarity around it.
Speaker 1: A year or so, right, And in my memory, that's
Speaker 1: how it was presented, And I don't remember taking it personally.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, she's a little weird. Whatever, I'm here,
Speaker 1: Woo woo, everything's great, We'll be right back.
Speaker 3: It's September fourteenth, nineteen eighty, the day of what wit
Speaker 3: now calls the Telling the day she tells her mother
Speaker 3: the news of her pregnancy. It's a beautiful day. And
Speaker 3: Wit takes the train up Lexington Avenue and walks the
Speaker 3: same blocks she's walked thousands of times from the subway
Speaker 3: station to the apartment she grew up in with her mom.
Speaker 3: But despite the familiar steps, a sense of foreboding weighs
Speaker 3: her down.
Speaker 1: And I told her I was pregnant, and it hung
Speaker 1: there in the space, and all the cars and the
Speaker 1: trucks are zooming by, and the whole world is completely
Speaker 1: unconcerned about what's going on in here. And I remember
Speaker 1: she was standing over by the window of the doorway
Speaker 1: to the kitchen and she just turned to me and
Speaker 1: she said, get it taken care of. And I knew
Speaker 1: what she meant, and I said, no, or, we're not
Speaker 1: going to do that. I don't want to. It's going
Speaker 1: to be fine. We're going to get married and we're
Speaker 1: going to move to Cape Cod. And we had already
Speaker 1: planned to move to Cape Cod and renovate this old theater,
Speaker 1: and that plan was in the works and we were
Speaker 1: so excited about it, and so I said, that's what
Speaker 1: we're going to do. And it's going to be fine,
Speaker 1: don't worry. We're going to get married. And she said
Speaker 1: you're going to be barefoot and pregnant on cape cod.
Speaker 1: I said, no, I'm not. It's going to be fine,
Speaker 1: you know. And it was just like talking to a
Speaker 1: snarling dog. It was terrifying. She was like a frozen human.
Speaker 1: And then she said, then there can be nothing more
Speaker 1: between us. And I don't remember anything after that, I
Speaker 1: guess I grabbed my bag and went to the door
Speaker 1: and went downstairs, and I walked to second Avenue, and
Speaker 1: then I walked to the third avenue and then I
Speaker 1: turned right and I went down in the subway and
Speaker 1: went back to Soho and I remember calling my aunt.
Speaker 1: My mother had these two magnificent sisters who I just loved.
Speaker 1: And I called my aunt Celia, and I was crying
Speaker 1: and saying, you know, telling her what had happened. And
Speaker 1: my aunt Celia said, oh, honey, you know, of course
Speaker 1: she's shocked right now, but she'll be fine. She'll get
Speaker 1: over it and it's going to be fine. And I
Speaker 1: really took that to heart, and it wasn't fine. It
Speaker 1: was never fine after that.
Speaker 3: Perhaps she just needs some space, Wit thinks, and thankfully
Speaker 3: that space is filled with the support and love from others.
Speaker 3: WIT's dad is over the moon, optimistic as he's always been.
Speaker 3: Tom and Margaret are thrilled too, So hard as it is,
Speaker 3: Wit doesn't reach out to her mom, she lets it rest.
Speaker 3: Some weeks later, one of WIT's medical bills of twenty
Speaker 3: dollars is routed to her mom's apartment, as her mom
Speaker 3: still has Wit on her insurance plan. Soon after, Wit
Speaker 3: receives a frosty note from her mom with the bill attached, saying,
Speaker 3: if this is the way things are going to go,
Speaker 3: you're going to have to pay your own bills. Wit
Speaker 3: is struck by her mom's tone, but of course she'll
Speaker 3: take care of the bills. Not a problem, and yet
Speaker 3: the problem. The big problem persists. In the fall, Wit
Speaker 3: and her boyfriend designed to get married, despite the fact
Speaker 3: that their relationship is still unsteady, a small affair just
Speaker 3: friends her dad, Tom and Margaret and her future mother
Speaker 3: in law. After the wedding, the two moved to Cape
Speaker 3: cod to the same town where Tom and Margaret had
Speaker 3: their summer house.
Speaker 1: It's the place that I loved, This town called South Yarmouth.
Speaker 1: We rented this little old house on Main streets from
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundred said it was just beautiful. I love
Speaker 1: old things and old houses, and it had those shiny,
Speaker 1: wide pine floors. And he sold the loft, you know,
Speaker 1: he sold the fixtures, took the loft, and he moved
Speaker 1: up a couple of months after me, and we just
Speaker 1: sort of settled in. In May of that year, I
Speaker 1: had this baby in the house with my husband and
Speaker 1: a college friend who took the train in from Boston.
Speaker 1: And it was fantastic. It was magical, and you know it.
Speaker 1: Through this entire gestation period, I wrote to my mom constantly.
Speaker 1: I thought, I'm just going to keep writing and pretend
Speaker 1: everything's okay. She's got to wonder how I'm doing. I
Speaker 1: wrote all these little, chatty little letters about oh, and
Speaker 1: then we went to the movies, and then we went
Speaker 1: for a walk on the beach. And the baby's growing
Speaker 1: and I can feel her kicking. You know, all the
Speaker 1: stuff that you would write to a mother, and I
Speaker 1: just sent them out into the world. And sometimes I'd say,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't even know if you're reading these letters.
Speaker 1: If with a tree falls in the forest, does anyone
Speaker 1: hear it? And you know, ha ha, And just keeping
Speaker 1: it light and talking about how I felt and how
Speaker 1: much I missed her and that maybe we could work
Speaker 1: it out, and so many letters and she never answered them.
Speaker 3: It's so interesting with the parallel between throwing those notes
Speaker 3: saying I am happy out your window as a kid
Speaker 3: into the void.
Speaker 1: Yes, you're so right. I never thought what about dad.
Speaker 3: After the baby is born, the new family of three
Speaker 3: moves back to Michigan, where WIT's husband goes to graduate school,
Speaker 3: and Wit falls absolutely in love with motherhood. She's living
Speaker 3: a rich and fulfilling life that combines being a mom,
Speaker 3: the very thing her own mother abhorred was eventually returning
Speaker 3: to dance, teaching classes and founding her own dance company.
Speaker 3: She's actively making up for the loss she's experienced with
Speaker 3: her mother, adapting to a new life without her. In
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty six, she has another child, a boy named Sam,
Speaker 3: and all.
Speaker 1: Through this, I'm writing to my mom and also going
Speaker 1: to therapy, a lot of therapy. I couldn't afford anything,
Speaker 1: but I paid for that therapy, and the therapists uniformly
Speaker 1: were horrified, which was gratifying to me. Would have been
Speaker 1: upset if they'd said I'd just get over it. No.
Speaker 1: They were like, what happened? She what? And they said, well,
Speaker 1: of course you're having a hard time. You have no closure.
Speaker 1: You have to find out about this. You need to
Speaker 1: reach out. And one of them suggested that I call her.
Speaker 1: And I remember being in the kitchen of my house.
Speaker 1: My kids were asleep, and it was a beautiful day,
Speaker 1: and I just did it. I called my number. This
Speaker 1: is the number of my childhood. And to be honest,
Speaker 1: I had called it many times. I had called it
Speaker 1: dozens of times. I would call it and just let
Speaker 1: it ring, and then I'd hang up. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to own my home. You know. I didn't just lose
Speaker 1: my mom. I lost my home, my apartment where I'd
Speaker 1: lived for eighteen years, and I wanted to own it.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be there. I wanted to see my stuff.
Speaker 1: But I'd always hung up, and this time I let
Speaker 1: her answer, and she answered and she said yes. My
Speaker 1: mother never said hello, she always said yes, And I
Speaker 1: just said it's me, and I said, I just need
Speaker 1: to know if this is permanent, is there any chance
Speaker 1: for us moving forward? And oh my god, it was
Speaker 1: so bad. She screamed. She screamed into the phone, and
Speaker 1: she screamed, I can't stand it. I can't stand it,
Speaker 1: over and over again, and I just hung up. And
Speaker 1: it was, oh the worst, it was so painful. Then
Speaker 1: this weird thing happened a few days later. I got
Speaker 1: a card in the mail from her, and she apologized,
Speaker 1: and it was the weirdest note. It said, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: I screamed, and she said, none of this is your fault.
Speaker 1: She said, it's my bete noir and mine alone. And
Speaker 1: of course, well I took French and that means black beast.
Speaker 1: And she said something about I hope you're as happy
Speaker 1: as you deserve to be, and then she said if
Speaker 1: I was thinking any part of this was warm, She
Speaker 1: closed with, if it ever is profitable to make contact,
Speaker 1: I will contact you, and then she just signed it
Speaker 1: with her initial and that hurt. That just hurt.
Speaker 3: The word profitable is is profitable? What do you think
Speaker 3: she meant by that?
Speaker 1: Well? Profitable for her Throughout this whole experience of losing
Speaker 1: someone this way, the parrot that has been so hard
Speaker 1: is that she was never uniformly horrible. I mean, I
Speaker 1: loved her. She's knuggled with me, she rubbed my back.
Speaker 1: She said she loved me, and then she'd hit me
Speaker 1: like crazy, and then she'd want to hear my every thought,
Speaker 1: and then she wouldn't speak to me, and then the disowning,
Speaker 1: and then this letter that seems apologetic and like she's
Speaker 1: owning her shit. You know it's my fault and mine alone,
Speaker 1: and then ending with this. It's so back and forth.
Speaker 1: It's so ambiguous that it's hard. It was always so
Speaker 1: hard for me to know how to feel about her.
Speaker 1: And I'm the kind of person that wants to know.
Speaker 1: I want to know how to feel. I wonder what
Speaker 1: my role is. I wonder what your role is. I
Speaker 1: never got that with her, and it just got worse
Speaker 1: and worse. Through this process, and through the years, I
Speaker 1: found that I did get stronger, and I started writing
Speaker 1: less in parts because I was so busy with life.
Speaker 3: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 3: Not only is life busy, but it's also pretty wonderful.
Speaker 3: Wit has fantastic kids, a fantastic dance company, and now
Speaker 3: positions teaching dance at universities too. She has a robust
Speaker 3: group of cool, creative friends, and she thinks to herself
Speaker 3: more than once, my mom would love these people. Why
Speaker 3: did this have to happen? Everything would be so different
Speaker 3: if she were still in my life. As she gets
Speaker 3: closer to these friends, inevitably people start to ask her
Speaker 3: about her family. She doesn't know how to handle the
Speaker 3: fact of her estrangement from her mother.
Speaker 1: I really never quite knew what to say, and I
Speaker 1: had all these stock answers, none of which were good.
Speaker 1: And one of them was, oh, yes, she lives in
Speaker 1: New York. Changed subject immediately. Another one was, yeah, my
Speaker 1: parents are divorced and you know we're not terribly close,
Speaker 1: changed subject immediately. And then sometimes I'd say, yeah, she
Speaker 1: lives in New York. I guess you could call it
Speaker 1: a living and that would shut the conversation down, and
Speaker 1: it was a little hostile, and I didn't know which
Speaker 1: one was right, and it really put me in this
Speaker 1: kind of awful situation to have to answer that question.
Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting too, because the desire to shut it down,
Speaker 3: you know, in the sense of, you know, mothers and daughters,
Speaker 3: you know they're supposed to be together in some fairy
Speaker 3: tale way forever. I mean, to be someone's mother is
Speaker 3: you know, that is an idea shifting thing. Once you
Speaker 3: are somebody's mother. You are always somebody's mother, right, And
Speaker 3: I would imagine that, you know, in meeting new people
Speaker 3: and making new friends, part of not wanting to talk
Speaker 3: about it is there's something that's so kind of dark
Speaker 3: and secretive that you might have felt that it reflected
Speaker 3: on you and not only on your mother exactly.
Speaker 1: Those conversations were hard, like if it was somebody and
Speaker 1: I just I said, I'm throwing caution to the wind,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to tell this nice person what happened.
Speaker 1: They were horrified, they couldn't well, and also filled with disbelief.
Speaker 1: They didn't believe that such a thing could happen. And
Speaker 1: I didn't really want to get into the minutia of
Speaker 1: what happened. And I didn't want them to think that
Speaker 1: I was a bad person, because maybe they think I'm
Speaker 1: a bad person because what mother would do something like that?
Speaker 1: And I did internalize this line of questioning brings this
Speaker 1: around to how I internalized this stuff. I did feel
Speaker 1: sometimes like did I do something really bad that I
Speaker 1: don't remember? And that became kind of this sneaky snake
Speaker 1: in my mind. They kind of undermined me in my life.
Speaker 1: You know, I've always been an artist, a performing artist,
Speaker 1: an actor or a dancer, you know, and now a
Speaker 1: songwriter and writer. And there's an undercurrent in me of
Speaker 1: and I'm just making my little dances. Oh, I'm writing
Speaker 1: my little thing, and it won't make any difference in
Speaker 1: the world. And I'm you know, sort of comparing her
Speaker 1: life to mine and undercutting the value that I've put
Speaker 1: into the world. I'm not saying I'm the greatest person
Speaker 1: in the world at all, of course not. But I've
Speaker 1: looked from the outside at myself and my lack of
Speaker 1: drive and my life of ambition, and my willingness to
Speaker 1: sort of undermine my successes. And now, whether that's because
Speaker 1: of what my mom did, or whether that's how I'm wired,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I can't say for sure. While all
Speaker 1: this was happening for me and my little world of
Speaker 1: my family and friends in Michigan, this happened to my
Speaker 1: family too, to my mother's family. Before this happened, we
Speaker 1: had these fantastic holidays together, Christmas in Easter, and you know,
Speaker 1: we weren't a huge family, but I had four cousins
Speaker 1: that I was very close to, more or less my age.
Speaker 1: We adored each other and my two aunts, who I
Speaker 1: just absolutely can't even tell you how much I adored
Speaker 1: them and their families, and we got together all, you know,
Speaker 1: every possible chance. And this affected them too, because they
Speaker 1: were forced to take sides. My mother was like the puppeteer,
Speaker 1: and you know, her name was Marian. And it was
Speaker 1: years later when I thought, she's like the Marionette, and
Speaker 1: she's like this grand puppeteer telling everybody in our family
Speaker 1: how to behave She shut down any mention of me,
Speaker 1: and she's a powerful personality. Everybody felt bad. She's the
Speaker 1: kind of person who walks in the room and you
Speaker 1: feel her power and positive or negative. And everybody was
Speaker 1: a little spirit of Marian, and so nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: bring me up. If there was going to be Christmas
Speaker 1: down in Baton Rouge one year, I might get a
Speaker 1: very cautious little phone call saying, just so you know
Speaker 1: your mom's coming down this crispin I play okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I won't call. And that was painful. I hated that
Speaker 1: I didn't even get to go to my grandparents' funerals.
Speaker 1: I mean I volunteered to not go. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to make a scene. I thought, oh you know her parents,
Speaker 1: She gets the custody of the funeral. You know, these
Speaker 1: tilsees with killus. Decisions that had to be made, and
Speaker 1: everybody was just trying their best to keep the peace.
Speaker 1: And some of them thought, oh, you know, if we
Speaker 1: just keep the piece long enough, she'll come around.
Speaker 3: And I knew she wouldn't, and of course she didn't.
Speaker 3: But Witt continues to thrive. Her dance company is successful.
Speaker 3: She begins writing songs as well. She's creatively on fire.
Speaker 3: She and her first husband divorce, and a few years later,
Speaker 3: Wit marries a musician in ann Arbor and becomes part
Speaker 3: of his wonderful, warm, open family. His mom steps in
Speaker 3: and treats Wit like a daughter. Eventually, Witt is ready
Speaker 3: to step back from dancing, which has become hard on
Speaker 3: her body after so many years. She and her husband
Speaker 3: relocated to Nashville. She writes more and more music, and
Speaker 3: it's been a long time since she's tried to contact
Speaker 3: her mom. Life has great momentum, and she's in the
Speaker 3: right place at the right time, in the flow. And
Speaker 3: then comes the pandemic, and though she worries about her mother,
Speaker 3: she doesn't reach out. She's just going to upset an
Speaker 3: old woman, there's just no point.
Speaker 1: In June of twenty twenty, my aunt calls me on
Speaker 1: the phone and says she always calls me a little chick, said,
Speaker 1: little chick, I can't reach her mother. And there, you know,
Speaker 1: the bottom kind of dropped out of my stomach because
Speaker 1: I knew. I figured at some point i'd get a
Speaker 1: call like that, but I didn't know how it would happen.
Speaker 1: And she said, yeah, I've been calling since Wednesday and
Speaker 1: there's no response. I leave messages on the machine and
Speaker 1: she doesn't answer. And then we got a hold of
Speaker 1: the business office of her apartment building and they said
Speaker 1: that she had been taken to a hospital. They didn't
Speaker 1: know which one, and my aunt was like, how are
Speaker 1: we going to find out which hospital she's at? And
Speaker 1: I said, I'll call you right back. And I called
Speaker 1: two hospitals nearby and found her at a nearby hospital,
Speaker 1: and of course, the operator said, do you want it
Speaker 1: and want me to connect to I said no, thank you,
Speaker 1: and I called Judy back and gave for the number,
Speaker 1: and the story was that she had broken her leg,
Speaker 1: broken her femur. My mother said, Judy, I've broken my femur.
Speaker 1: And I'm going home to die in three weeks, none
Speaker 1: of which made any sense. My mother didn't want anybody
Speaker 1: to have found her. She was furious that Judy had
Speaker 1: tracked her down and didn't want anybody to come up.
Speaker 1: She didn't want any help. But little by little word
Speaker 1: came out that she had had cancer for years, nobody
Speaker 1: knew about it, and she had broken her hit for
Speaker 1: her leg, and she probably was in her last weeks
Speaker 1: or months she worsened. She came home to be cared
Speaker 1: for by a woman who cleaned her house. That's the
Speaker 1: only person she wanted with her. And I immediately go
Speaker 1: into this. I could help, you know, maybe I could
Speaker 1: help in some way, And just my brain just kept going,
Speaker 1: what can I do? And then you're not involved, You're
Speaker 1: not involved in this, but I want maybe I could.
Speaker 1: She loves tomato sandwiches. Maybe I can arrange to have
Speaker 1: a really good tomato sandwich sent to her apartment and
Speaker 1: then stopped. That makes no sense. No one is going
Speaker 1: to send it's a pandemic. No one's going to bring
Speaker 1: her a sandwich, you know. Just these crazy thoughts of
Speaker 1: wanting to ultimately know what happened, be forgiven, be spoken
Speaker 1: to be involved in some way, and it was a
Speaker 1: strange place to be, just liminal place between being a
Speaker 1: daughter and a nobody. And as she worsened, her attorney
Speaker 1: contacted me and he knew about this disowning and he
Speaker 1: didn't have to reach out to me, but he did,
Speaker 1: but didn't really tell me very much. She died on
Speaker 1: July twenty third in her apartment with her housekeeper, and
Speaker 1: my aunt Judy called and told me, and I cried
Speaker 1: a very particular cry. You know, I was in my
Speaker 1: sixties and I just felt like a kid abandoned all over,
Speaker 1: which is ridiculous, but you know, you feel what you feel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't strike me as ridiculous at all, because
Speaker 3: you were that kid. You know, all of those selves
Speaker 3: are always alive inside of us, and you never got closure,
Speaker 3: and the you know, the idea that they're could possibly
Speaker 3: be closure was always there, even as this most remote
Speaker 3: possibility while she was still alive, and that died with her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the lawyer, he blessed him. He went
Speaker 1: over to her apartment and said, you really need to
Speaker 1: talk to your daughter, you know, would you like to
Speaker 1: talk to her. She's ready to talk to you if
Speaker 1: you like, and she just wouldn't even respond to him.
Speaker 1: And at that point I just said, like that was
Speaker 1: a lawyer. I like, just let it go. It's not
Speaker 1: going to happen. And you know, I had pity for
Speaker 1: her at this point. You know, she's suffering and dying,
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to make it worse for her,
Speaker 1: so you know, of course I'm not going to push that.
Speaker 1: And then came the realization that she had remembered me
Speaker 1: in her will and that my aunt and I had
Speaker 1: full custody of all her belongings, her entire apartment, which
Speaker 1: was filled with beautiful antiques and art paintings and silver.
Speaker 1: And a few months later, my husband and I were
Speaker 1: in we were visiting my dad, and I got a
Speaker 1: call from the attorney that he had made arrangements with
Speaker 1: the superintendent of the building to let me into the apartment.
Speaker 1: Could we be there in six hours? I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll be there, and we were actually getting ready to
Speaker 1: return to Nashville, so we just packed up our stuff
Speaker 1: a little early and we drove into Manhattan and parked
Speaker 1: across the street from her building, and we went in
Speaker 1: and it was it was like walking into an Egyptian tomb.
Speaker 1: I would imagine where you feel like the world has stopped,
Speaker 1: the world from a different time is preserved. And that
Speaker 1: was just me and with my life experience feeling that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was just an apartment sold with stuff.
Speaker 3: An apartment you'd never been in it before.
Speaker 1: I had never been in this apartment. But there were stings. Oh,
Speaker 1: there were things that I remembered, and those were the
Speaker 1: things that I looked for and wanted. A certain cabinet
Speaker 1: that our telephone sat on, a tiny little table that
Speaker 1: sat in front of the sofa when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: and my dad used to turn that table upside down
Speaker 1: and I'd get inside it and he'd swing me around.
Speaker 1: I wanted the things for my childhood, and I looked
Speaker 1: for the sculptures. When I was young, my mom went
Speaker 1: and had her bust made by a very good artist,
Speaker 1: a sculptor, and it sat in our living room, the
Speaker 1: head of my mother with these hollowed out eyeballs. It
Speaker 1: was very beautiful, bronze, very it was life sized. And
Speaker 1: I remember when I was a child, she said, Oh,
Speaker 1: the sculptor would like to do your sculpture too, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, I don't know about that, and she
Speaker 1: talked me into it, and for a couple of months
Speaker 1: I had to go down to this creepy, cold, filthy
Speaker 1: artists studio in the West twenties somewhere before that was cool,
Speaker 1: and climb up these filthy stairs and put on a
Speaker 1: leotard and stand in front of this sculptor. I mean,
Speaker 1: she was with me, but it was cold and uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: and I didn't understand why we were doing this. And
Speaker 1: she sort of had me in similar pose to the
Speaker 1: little ballerina at the Met and so I had my
Speaker 1: arms crossed, but I did not look anything like the
Speaker 1: little ballerina at the Met, let me tell you. And
Speaker 1: it was maybe three feet high when it was finished,
Speaker 1: and she had it cast in bronze and put it
Speaker 1: on the bookshelf next to her. So we were there together,
Speaker 1: cast in bronze, and those were there long after she
Speaker 1: disowned me. I remember relatives seeing, Yeah, we went to
Speaker 1: the apartment, and that sculpture of you is still there.
Speaker 1: And so I went into her apartment after she died,
Speaker 1: and I thought maybe I would find those things, and
Speaker 1: they weren't there. And all I can imagine is they
Speaker 1: wound up at goodwill, and I hope wherever has them
Speaker 1: enjoys them. Or if they were melted.
Speaker 3: Down, maybe they were turned into something good, or maybe
Speaker 3: they were separated.
Speaker 1: I actually think that the bust she returned to the sculptor,
Speaker 1: and I saw some paperwork about that she turned the
Speaker 1: bust to the sculpture, But I don't know what happened
Speaker 1: to my sculpture.
Speaker 3: Metaphors abound.
Speaker 1: Metaphor is about absolutely.
Speaker 3: Instead of her mom's sculptures, what Wit does end up
Speaker 3: with are her mom's journals, of which there are many.
Speaker 3: She grabs all the notebooks and papers she can find,
Speaker 3: hoping that something must be recorded somewhere that it would
Speaker 3: explain in her mom's eyes, what happened between the two
Speaker 3: of them, something that is perhaps introspective, self aware, some
Speaker 3: snippet that perhaps can provide answers and closure.
Speaker 1: When I got home with all her writing, I remember
Speaker 1: sitting in my room that I often write in and
Speaker 1: just looking around, thinking, there's got to be something in there.
Speaker 1: This got to be the reason. And I started writing
Speaker 1: my own accounts of what had happened and staring at
Speaker 1: these journals, and I suddenly realized one day that in
Speaker 1: her travel journals they were dated, and I had my
Speaker 1: journals that were dated, and I thought, what if I
Speaker 1: compare my journals with her journals on specific days, then
Speaker 1: I could answer this question that I'd asked myself so
Speaker 1: many times, and that question was I wonder what she's
Speaker 1: doing right now? And it worked. I was able to
Speaker 1: match up my wife with hers on specific dates. And
Speaker 1: I looked at my journal for April twenty second, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six, which was when my son was born, and
Speaker 1: I was in labor in my house at ann Arbor
Speaker 1: and giving birth and all that that entailed, and I
Speaker 1: just I had in kinded this hour by hour account
Speaker 1: of what had happened. And I looked in her travel journals,
Speaker 1: and she was in Kenya at the time at a safari,
Speaker 1: and I accounted for the time change, and I matched
Speaker 1: up what was happening like when I was roaming the
Speaker 1: house in the middle of the night by myself in
Speaker 1: labor and looking out the window at the snow. And
Speaker 1: then I could look at her journal and know that
Speaker 1: what she was doing she was having little teacakes for
Speaker 1: breakfast and then going out on her first safari of
Speaker 1: the day and looking for the tigers and the hyenas
Speaker 1: and the lions, and she wanted to see the cubs
Speaker 1: and it was fascinating to see. And you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know that there is any psychic relevance to that,
Speaker 1: but boy, it sure felt it was so interesting to me.
Speaker 1: And there were more there were more instances of that,
Speaker 1: and I ended up writing about those connections. I called
Speaker 1: them connections, but you know, I think they were just
Speaker 1: coincidences that I tried to make into connections.
Speaker 3: So one connection that you do make is there's a
Speaker 3: letter from her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So my mother's belongings were brought to a storage
Speaker 1: facility in Alabama, and my cousin, while going through a
Speaker 1: desk drawer, found a letter actually more like notes for
Speaker 1: a letter to me, and their dated November of nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: so just a short pit after the separation, and my
Speaker 1: cousin made a PBF of the document and emailed it
Speaker 1: to me, and in the email, she said, cause this
Speaker 1: is going to be painful, and I'm so sorry, and
Speaker 1: I knew that this was going to be bad. And
Speaker 1: in this document, which is born and tattered, and it's
Speaker 1: really just notes scribbled and also typewritten notes, but she's
Speaker 1: trying to explain what happened, And there's a lot, but
Speaker 1: the part that I found really really interesting is this,
Speaker 1: and I'll just quote a little bit of it. She said,
Speaker 1: your recent choices have disappointed me and distressed me acutely.
Speaker 1: But that's none of my business. But that's only one
Speaker 1: level of my problem. The outer crust. My deeper problems
Speaker 1: have to do with, if you will, a psychological wark,
Speaker 1: the origins of which are vague, buried under nearly fifty
Speaker 1: years of fears, denials, confusions, ignorance regarding pregnancy and birth,
Speaker 1: and the bottom line adds up to a response of
Speaker 1: passionate hysterical revulsion since the time of my own pregnancy
Speaker 1: of what yours is turning out to be a replay
Speaker 1: emotion wise, I've obviously known something was wrong. Perhaps unconsciously
Speaker 1: I believed and hoped you would make other sets of
Speaker 1: choices so that I'd not have to deal with it.
Speaker 1: The clincher, I now weighed into the ever deeper, darker
Speaker 1: Maybe I never loved you. All My life with you
Speaker 1: as a mother was a performance designed to atone for
Speaker 1: never having wanted you, an attempt to make good at
Speaker 1: the same time, a desperate attempt to make you so informed, aware, sophisticated.
Speaker 1: If you will, you should never face the nine months
Speaker 1: of sheer hell, my ignorance and fear brought me to
Speaker 1: make you different from me.
Speaker 3: There's so many layers to that, yeah, so many, you know.
Speaker 3: And one thing that strikes me is that you were
Speaker 3: different from her. Earlier in our conversation when you quoted
Speaker 3: her as saying something like, you know, now you're going
Speaker 3: to be barefoot and pregnant in Cape cod the thought
Speaker 3: that went through my mind was and what's wrong with that?
Speaker 3: Of course right? But for her, for her, it was
Speaker 3: a nightmare. But for you, you weren't her. You weren't her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, we had to separate at some point.
Speaker 1: I mean, every therapist I ever have spoken to it said,
Speaker 1: you know, you were incredibly enmeshed with this woman, and
Speaker 1: you knew that in some way that this gave you
Speaker 1: the perfect out. You had to separate so that you
Speaker 1: could be a mom and live the life you were
Speaker 1: intended to live, the life that you wanted to live.
Speaker 1: And so at the end of it, she basically just says,
Speaker 1: I can do you no good except by absenting myself
Speaker 1: from you, which is what she did. And she meant it.
Speaker 3: Witt learns that there is actually a clinical term from
Speaker 3: what her mother suffered from, one that shaped their entire relationship,
Speaker 3: totophobia of fear and revulsion revolving around pregnancy. In her journals,
Speaker 3: WIT's mom writes extensively about her own childhood experience of
Speaker 3: watching her mother give birth and how it terrified her heartbreakingly.
Speaker 3: Wit also discovers all of the letters she wrote to
Speaker 3: her mother over the years, all those letters filled with
Speaker 3: hopeful updates on her life. They were tied together in
Speaker 3: a bundle, unopened.
Speaker 1: I figured she would have thrown them out, so I
Speaker 1: thought it was interesting she saved them in a way
Speaker 1: that was a message like I'm just going to save
Speaker 1: these so that when I die, you will know that
Speaker 1: I never even opened your letters. So I thought that
Speaker 1: was that's communication. There's some sort of communication going on there.
Speaker 3: It surely is.
Speaker 1: But it's been fascinating to open them. I could only
Speaker 1: do one or two at a time because it was
Speaker 1: just too much. It's just overwhelming to hear my own
Speaker 1: voice change as I grew older, my written voice. You know.
Speaker 1: She's just so young and so positive, and we're going
Speaker 1: to get through this.
Speaker 4: And oh, it's going to be fine, and oh I
Speaker 4: went and went to the library today, and I wish
Speaker 4: you would respond, but it's okay if you don't, because
Speaker 4: I'm still you know, just that voice compared to the
Speaker 4: one in later years, where in the nineties it's like,
Speaker 4: where are your manners? I sent you a letter, why
Speaker 4: don't you respond? I became a little bit more hard edged.
Speaker 3: Alongside all of these discoveries, Wit makes another one, but
Speaker 3: this time it isn't a secret she discovers or a
Speaker 3: stack of papers. It's a hobby, possibly the most poetic
Speaker 3: hobby you could ever imagine. Wit has taken up metal detecting.
Speaker 3: She finds a metal detector on Craigslist for two hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty dollars and takes the plunge.
Speaker 1: It changed my life. Nashville is a great place to
Speaker 1: metal detect There have been people here for centuries and centuries,
Speaker 1: and I've dug Indian artifacts, native artifacts in my garden.
Speaker 1: This is a place where people have lived since before time.
Speaker 1: And so I started metal detecting, and it provided this
Speaker 1: enormous amount of relief for me. Always been a little
Speaker 1: tightly wound, a little anxious, and it is the most meditative,
Speaker 1: meaningful hobby, and anyone who does it knows. I joined
Speaker 1: a club. I joined the Middle Tennessee Metal Detecting Club,
Speaker 1: and I started in the backyard and dug up Civil
Speaker 1: War bullets and musketballs, and I've dug Spanish reals from
Speaker 1: the seventeen hundreds right in my neighborhood. And yeah, there's
Speaker 1: meaning to it. When you're looking in the dirt and
Speaker 1: it's chaos in the dirt. It's roots and rocks and
Speaker 1: mud and bits of grass, and then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you see something shiny and you pull it out and
Speaker 1: it's a Liberty dime from nineteen twenty two, and it's
Speaker 1: as shiny as it was when it fell out of
Speaker 1: someone's pocket and you hold it in your hand and
Speaker 1: you think about the person who dropped it, and there's
Speaker 1: this connection to the past. And not everybody has that,
Speaker 1: but people who metal detect have that. They get this
Speaker 1: history rush. You want to connect with people from the past.
Speaker 1: And I think that's probably one reason this thing with
Speaker 1: my mom has been so painful, because I feel connected
Speaker 1: to her. I felt connected to her even when she
Speaker 1: did terrible things to me, Even remembering the things she
Speaker 1: did when I was a child that were really not good.
Speaker 1: I felt connected to her and I told her that,
Speaker 1: I said, Mom, I feel like we're connected by a
Speaker 1: silver band, and no matter where we are, we have
Speaker 1: a connection with a silver band. She appreciated that. She
Speaker 1: liked that, she liked to know that I loved her.
Speaker 1: But you know, it didn't last. And then she went
Speaker 1: off and had her freedom and saw the world. And
Speaker 1: in all the writings, in all the journals, there was
Speaker 1: only one place in all of that writing where she
Speaker 1: mentioned me. And it was the saddest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: And she had written it in the middle of the
Speaker 1: night after having the dream, and she just talked about
Speaker 1: me being a baby. It's too sad to even say that.
Speaker 1: It was very short, just a couple of lines, and
Speaker 1: it showed her ability to self reflect and to look
Speaker 1: at herself and to acknowledge that what had happened was
Speaker 1: really sad. And so you know, I found that, and
Speaker 1: it happened in a hotel in Tokyo, and I just
Speaker 1: I don't really know the meaning of it. I just
Speaker 1: know that she did dream about me. So there was
Speaker 1: that where this lives inside me. Now I will tell
Speaker 1: you that a long time ago, when I was in
Speaker 1: the throes of it and she was still alive, and
Speaker 1: I thought about her a lot, and so often I
Speaker 1: would think, Oh, she woke up today and she's still
Speaker 1: not calling me. Even the thousands and thousands of days later,
Speaker 1: I'd still think that, and it would hurt. She made
Speaker 1: the decision every day to let this happened. And I
Speaker 1: remember sitting with a girlfriend of mine in nan Arbor
Speaker 1: and I was crying and remembering this because it's still hurt,
Speaker 1: and I would still cry, and I said, how am
Speaker 1: I going to feel when she dies? If we haven't
Speaker 1: worked this out? How am I going to feel? And
Speaker 1: my friend looked at me and she said, relieved. You're
Speaker 1: going to feel. Relieved had never occurred to me, And
Speaker 1: that's how I feel. It's over. You're so sweet. I'm
Speaker 1: going to take you home with me. I dug it up.
Speaker 1: I dug it.
Speaker 2: Up from my baby buddy one.
Speaker 1: Now he says, go wash your hands.
Speaker 3: But what about Only Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Molly's Acre is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
Speaker 3: the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
Speaker 3: like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
Speaker 3: story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
Speaker 3: one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero.
Speaker 3: You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Rider.
Speaker 3: And if you'd like to know more about the story
Speaker 3: that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 2: Under the Sand, Under the Sand, Bad Goal, Band.
Speaker 4: Big.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite IT shows.