Open Secret

As a child, Steve Lickteig was told that he was adopted. But that didn't turn out to be entirely true, or even half of the story. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. One of the

(00:28):
things I've noticed about family secrets, aside from the fact
that just about everybody has them, is that often if
somebody is, say a writer, an artist, a playwright, a filmmaker,
she or he ends up with a very strong impulse
to tell the story, to make something out of it,
to turn all that weird silence, shame, confusion, and betrayal

(00:51):
into a narrative into something that shines a bright light
in the darkness. I know, I did, I still do.
I mean, that's kind of what this podcast is all about.
You're about to hear Steve Licktie, who did just that
in a very personal documentary film called Open Secret. I
began by asking Steve to tell me about the landscape

(01:13):
of his childhood, his family, and the town in which
he grew up. I was raised in a large Catholic
family on a farm in Kansas. The closest town was
eight miles away, and it was very small. It was
five hundred people, the school I went to. It was
small towns had come together to attend This school that

(01:34):
was built in the middle of a cow pasture, had
about three hundred students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. My
class had around forty students. And these are kids that
I would have got to school with from kindergarten all
the way through to twelfth grade. The town center was
essentially the school, really, and that's where we gathered for
most things, and that's where the center of our our

(01:55):
world was. At an early age, you remember was being
five or six years old, Steve was told by his
parents that he was adopted. Do you have a memory
of that moment? I'm afraid it might be conjured, uh,
like a made up memory. I feel like I do
have a memory of that with my mother telling me

(02:15):
that I was adopted and that my real parents loved
me very much. But I'm afraid it's been so long
I went out. Maybe that's what I wanted to be
remembered as if I know my family, like I think
I know my family, probably did not happen that way.
It's probably a very peripheral conversation, not even a conversation,
just a telling like a check off the list. Okay,

(02:38):
we told him move on. Steve was the youngest by far,
the youngest of his adoptive siblings. Before his parents Don
and Mary Jane adopted him, they raised a family of eight.
There were two boys and six girls. Who arranged an
aid from Steve's sister Beth, who was nine years older
than Steve, all the way to his oldest sister joe Me,

(03:00):
who was twenty two years his senior. By the time
Steve was five, Joanie had moved out of the house
and was living in Colorado. So I just went on
with my life having this information with my adoptive parents,
who were older than my classmates parents by probably thirty years,
I would say. But then the day before my high

(03:20):
school graduation, everything changed, at least how I saw myself changed.
My two best friends, Alan and Vance came over to
my house, walked into my bedroom and said that they
needed to tell me something. It was Vance who said,
we know who your mom is. He says, it's Joanie.

(03:42):
So up until that moment, I thought Joanie was my
adopted sister. This meant then that my adoptive parents were
really my grandparents. My memory of that moment was me
almost immediately trying to prove them wrong in a very
sort of half hearted way. I kept saying that it
didn't make it. But I think that there was something

(04:02):
always in the back of my mind where I knew
something was not quite right with my family and my
situation within that family. And I remember asking them about
my father, but they didn't know anything about my father.
And then that was it. I mean, I think we
talked a little longer they left. I graduated from high school,
and for most of that summer I don't think I

(04:24):
talked about it again. Do you know why Alan and
Vance decided that this was the moment to tell you
what they knew, Because again, in my mind, going back
to this small town, I'm imagining it was a place
that people lived in for generations, not a lot of

(04:46):
people moved in, not a lot of people moved out.
And these were guys that you grew up with your
whole life. Is that correct? That's right? They knew every thing.
I think that those kids who were my classmates and

(05:07):
the people I went to school with all kind of
found out at different times of their lives. That they
didn't all find it out at once. Some found out
very young. Some found out in junior high, but there
was a collective agreement among them to make sure that
I didn't find out. I just have to stop for
a second here, just stop, hold on. It's one thing

(05:29):
to have a massive secret kept from you for your
entire life, to grow up thinking you're adopted, and then
all of a sudden find out that not only are
you not adopted, but your older sister is your mother
and your adoptive parents are your actual grandparents. That would
be world rocking enough, but then it turns out that

(05:49):
a whole town, your teachers, coaches, friends, parents, friends, teammates,
the checkout guy at the grocery store had kept that
secret from you were eighteen years I remember Vance and
Alan both saying to me, we're men now, and Vance,

(06:10):
I think, says, you know, they weren't going to tell
you your parents, so I did. This was true love
and respect for my friends at the time, saying hey,
here's this thing. We've known. Everybody that we grew up
with knows, and you now need to know too. You
have to be brought in to this secret because we're
going to be separating and going our separate ways, and

(06:32):
we think you should know, secrets do a lot of
things to different people in different ways, and the secret creators,
the secret keepers, and then the people who are on
the receiving end of the secret, of the victims of
the secret, all have different things that that they grapple with.
One image particularly stands out for me from Steve's documentary.

(06:55):
I found it incredibly haunting. It's a photo taken with
an a day or so of Steve being told the
truth about his identity, that he isn't adopted at all,
that his older sister is his mother, and that his
mother and father are his grandparents. And in this photo
Steve has his arms around both his parents, or rather grandparents,

(07:16):
and he has this great, big smile on his face.
It's always a little bit dangerous to read too much
into a photograph, but when I looked at this one,
it was hard to reconcile that grinning kid at his
high school graduation and what must have been going on
beneath the surface. They completely pushed down all of that
information and didn't bring it up at all to my

(07:40):
parents for a while. That was a period of me
just trying to enjoy that moment of graduating from high
school and this next phase of my life. But I'm
sure underneath all that, I was thinking, well, what is
the next phase of my life? Who am I? Literally?
Who am I? Why did my family do this? We're

(08:06):
going to pause for a moment. Do you think that
you were afraid or nervous about talking to your parents
about it because you were trying to kind of absorb
it in terms of your own reality and not bring
their reality into it, or perhaps because did you wonder

(08:29):
if they would be angry or whether they would deny
yes to all those things that you just said. I
was worried about all that stuff, and I kind of
always kept my emotions in check, and I still do
to a certain extent, and it was something that I
didn't want to lose control by bringing it up so

(08:49):
soon after finding out and feeling like I was going
to careen into this emotional territory that I wasn't ready
to deal with. Steve's family wasn't one to talk to
each other about feelings or problems. It was an atmosphere
of Midwestern stoicism, with a less said the better and
secrets were best off remaining. Just that, like so many

(09:12):
dustballs swept under the rug. So it makes total sense
that Steve would want to stay in control of his
own brand new narrative for as long as he could.
When he did think about it, he did the mental math. Well,
Joanie is twenty two years older than him, That makes sense.
Of course she would have been able to give birth
to a child. And then there was the fact that

(09:34):
he resembled some members of his family in a way
that an adoptive kid probably wouldn't. And as I started
to think about those things, it started to make more
sense to me. And I think that my belief in
it crept up over time, and eventually, you know, then
became something that I fully and holly believed and knew

(09:55):
to be true. And that's probably when the lid really
came off of everything. So here's another thing about secrets.
Once we know the truth, it can't help but live
inside us. Even if we try to ignore what we know.
It pushes its way to the surface of our consciousness.
Sometimes it whispers, sometimes it shouts. One weekend when he's

(10:19):
home from college, Donn and Mary Jane walk in on
Steve having sex with a girlfriend. Picture Mary Jane as
a seventies something. Francis McDormand that's who would be cast
as her in the movie. And Don is a sort
of elderly ed Harris all gruff and taciturn. So Don
and Mary Jane walk in on two teenagers and Steve's

(10:41):
traditional Catholic parents, or I should say grandparents, are appalled.
That was a Saturday. The next day, Sunday, I was
in bed and I heard the TV go on loudly,
and it was a preacher televangelista, you know, on a
Sunday morning show, preaching abstinence, and my mom turned it

(11:01):
up really loud. And my room was right next to
the living room where the TV was, And I got up,
walked out into the living room and I said, did
you play this sermon for Joanie? And then I went
over and I shut the TV off, and she said,
what are you talking about? I said, did you play
this sermon about not having sex to Joanie? And she said,

(11:23):
I have no idea what you mean. I go, I
know Joanie is my mother, and she just kept denying it.
I have no idea, what are you talking about? Who
told you that? There was a back and forth for
a time, and then the most vivid memory of this
is my father sitting in his recliner while this is
all going on, and he just takes his hand, he
slams it down on the arm and he says, damn it,

(11:43):
Mary Jane, just tell him. And that's when it all
sort of broke away, and she said, yes, it's true, Joanie,
is your mother. We adopted you, we your grandparents. And
then I was incredibly angry. I stored out of the house,
I got into my car and drove away, checked into
a motel room in the town, the big town, called

(12:07):
my friends, and we got drunk. But with your anger
towards your parents, it sounds a little bit like confronting
them and then having them finally acknowledge it and admit
it brought this to a different level of reality for you,
because it doesn't sound like you were walking around angry

(12:29):
prior to that. It sounds like you were just trying
to digest it and maybe even in a bit of
a state of numbness. But the reality of that confrontation
brought it home for you. Yeah, it's funny. I think
I remember I was embarrassed about being caught having sex.
That was like a real felt like was an invasion
of my privacy, and I just felt really embarrassed about it.

(12:51):
I always wonder if that had not happened, how long
would it have gone before I confronted? Would I have ever?
Would I have just like never talked about it. But
there was something about that moment, my mom's sort of
almost like smugness about it, her shame in me having
premarital sex, and I just couldn't take the hypocrisy in

(13:11):
that moment. I think that's partly why I snapped. It
was all these mixed emotions of embarrassment and feeling like
she didn't have any place to be lecturing me about
these things when her own daughter, her real own daughter,
had this affair as a young woman and got pregnant.
There's nothing an eighteen year old boy like less than hypocrisy,
That's right. I was like a very holding Coffield moment

(13:32):
of like, who these phonies treating me like they don't
know who I am and what I do? And how
dare her? You know? I'm a man. I keep going
back to the whole idea that the entire town knew
the truth of Steve's identity and that he was the
only one in the dark. I think I'm obsessed with
this part of his story my own personal obsession with

(13:53):
it because when I discovered my own massive family secret
that my dad had not been my biological father, and
I began calling people who were still alive since both
my parents were long gone, to ask them what they knew.
I was terrified that the only one who didn't know
the truth of my own identity was me. Right, I

(14:15):
was really digging for what did they know? And each
time I made a phone call, my heart was pounding
and my palms were sweating. And I finally realized that
what I was most afraid I was going to find
out was that everybody knew. Interesting, you know, that I
was the only one in the dark. So I was
very conscious of that, wondering what that would have felt

(14:35):
like for you. It's like you were living in the
Truman Show. Yeah right, that's right. I it's funny that
you felt that was your fear in your own circumstances.
I have many fears, but one of them was did
everybody know this but me? So let me let me
ask you this, if you don't mind, let me turn
the tables for one second. Do you feel embarrassed by

(14:57):
that that you lacked that ability to perceive something that
was so obviously not right, Or what is the feeling
that you're having about everyone knowing but you. It's already
evolved in a couple of years that I've been living
with this. I think initially there was a little bit
of a feeling of embarrassment or shame or I should
have known, or you know. I pride myself on my intuition.

(15:20):
Where was my intuition? Actually? I think my intuition was
alive and well and working very hard to try to
understand something that I couldn't understand. I just couldn't. We believe,
and we construct narratives around what we know and what
we're told as children, and and the trust that we
place in the adults around us, and it kind of
forms our reality. I think I was most bothered by

(15:44):
the idea that I think my mom and dad thought
that they could get away with it, And I mean
that that sounds so vicious that like a boy, they
just crime. I don't know that they were ever going
to tell me, and I think that is probably the
driving force of any anger I may have about the situation.
I don't know that they ever had any intention of

(16:04):
actually ever telling me. I have a friend who has
psychic abilities, and it's pretty sure she knows what happens
when we die. I'm sure I've lost some of you here,
and I'm a bit of a skeptic myself, so don't
shoot the messenger anyway. She told me that when we die,
we can look back and survey our lives with a

(16:25):
sense of distance and compassion, and we get to see
the whole thing, what we got right, what we missed,
what we just didn't see. And I remember thinking that
if this was true, if I hadn't discovered the truth
about my dad, I would have been standing there thinking,
oh my god, I missed the whole thing I was

(16:47):
wrong about myself. I didn't have an essential piece of information. Yeah,
that that would have been pretty bad death moment, big bummer,
except apparently you don't feel like it's a bump because
you're dead. So Steve has his big confrontation with Don
and Mary Jane. He doesn't talk to anybody else about

(17:09):
his secret, not for a very long time. But as
he moves through his twenties, an aimlessness sets in. The
kid who was a star in high school barely scrapes
through college, and it's kind of flailing. He doesn't have
a passion for work. His relationships are pretty unsatisfying. But
he doesn't know what's wrong. He doesn't know why he's

(17:30):
so miserable. I got up in the morning, I had jobs,
I did all the things you do, but I was depressed.
I sometimes I couldn't get out of bed for a
whole day. I'm just play there. I did really poorly
in college. Everything how I was in high school was
not the way I was as the sort of young adult,
drinking too much, all the stuff that goes along with

(17:51):
something like this happening to you. But I never put
two and two together. I wasn't like, oh, I I'm
sad and depressed because the secret was kept for me
my entire childhood. I never made that connection. And I
went to various counselors and psychologists and so forth, and
of course it would come out that I would tell
this story, but I still can never make that direct connection.

(18:12):
I just sort of thought, oh, well, I'm lazy, or
I've not found the right thing to do in my life,
or whatever it might be. And that was kind of
my twenties. For the most part, just didn't feel good.
I didn't feel close to my family, I didn't feel
the relationships that I would have with people were always
going to be on my terms. That you really do
develop this lack of trust, even though you can't articulate that.

(18:36):
It's just a feeling of I don't know about this person.
Just keep you at arms length for a while. I
don't know what's going on with you. I don't want
you in my space. And then you do this stupid
thing where you use I did this a lot in
my twenties that I look back on now, and then
you use this story as like a little weapon or
a way of getting people to think that you're interesting
or damaged in some way. And I would deploy it

(18:59):
at times that I thought would maybe that would impress
this girl or maybe you know, I would really wow
this party crowd with my story of my horrible and
of course I would embellish it. But even then, I
think I was trying to figure out, what does this
story mean to me? Really? What is it all about? Really?
And I think that's what I was playing with in
those early days, and it moved forward to something more concrete,

(19:23):
and as I discovered journalism, and I just discovered that
there is a real power in crafting a truthful narrative,
or at least as truthful as you can make it
and your emotional truth. Steve eventually discovers his calling as
a journalist and finds success working for NPR and various
other news organizations. He digs for the truth in other

(19:43):
people's stories, and eventually he begins to think he might
want to make a film to dig for the truth
of his own family story and in order to tell
the truth in three and sixty degrees, not only Steve's
own story, but seen through the lens of everyone in
his family. He begins a process of interviewing his brother's sisters, Mary, Jane, Don,

(20:06):
his old friends, the ones who broke the news to him.
To begin with, being the documentarian allows Steve a little
bit of distance, and also this is so important permission,
his camera and recording equipment a buffer between himself and
his own pain. Then I started to see like there

(20:26):
was a way to do this, tell the story that
would be fair to everyone, not just to me, but
to my family. I learned that there was a way
to let people have their say about what had happened
without any accusations and without people feeling like they were
put on trial, and that's ultimately where I got to.
But it was incredibly long period of time, and even

(20:47):
the making of the film was long. You know. I
started in two thousand three. I don't think I finished
in two two eleven. So it was a very very
hard pulling thread very slowly. Do you think that in
part was because as you could sort of only really
examine it a little bit at a time. Yeah. I
couldn't have done it all at once. It would have

(21:07):
killed me. Every time I did an interview with a
family member, it would take this little chunk out of me.
Then I just steal myself for the next one. And
also you know, the issues of job and money and
all those sorts of things. But it was just every
interview was like a little slice of energy. Decision making,
all those things were just sort of taken away and
it took a while. Then you do all the interviews

(21:29):
for it, and then you have the editing process, which
was absolutely torturous for me to watch myself, to see
the things I was saying, to acting the way I
was acting. I had a great editor who taught me
to be honest in those moments and don't ask to
have things cut out that are gonna be truthful and honest,

(21:50):
We're going to take a quick break. And then there's Joanie.
The palpable awkwardness and discomfort during the moments Joanie is
on screen made me squirm as Steve and Joanie talk

(22:12):
that awkwardness sometimes turns to anger. There's such a feeling
of disconnect between them. She doesn't seem like his mother,
she doesn't seem like his sister. A glass of wine
is always nearby whenever she's on camera, and she seems
a bit lost, baffled at the turns her life is taken.
Try as I might, I didn't really feel a bond

(22:34):
between them. Steve does, however, seem like a son during
his moments with Mary, Jane and Don because he was
their son for eighteen formative years. It's not like his
discovery automatically turned them into grandparents in his psyche, nor
did it turn Joanie into his mother, because that's just

(22:55):
not how it works. In the film, you in review
Joanie a number of times, and those are some of
the most painful scenes to me. They were in the film,
and there's a moment in which I guess it's in
anticipation of an upcoming wedding and your wedding and whether

(23:20):
she's going to come or not come, and who she
will be at your wedding, how do you explain her?
What is her role? And you say to her, you know,
I'm not sure that I'm ever gonna be able to
call you mother? Right right? Yeah, So could you talk

(23:44):
a little bit about that, about that moment. Yeah, there's
a preface to that. I get the film has been
around for a while, and it's been on all the
places where you can get to see movies, and it's
been a festivals and so forth, and I've had a
lot of great reactions, but I've had a lot of
negative reactions to how I am in the film, toward
Joanie in particular. And this is one moment that people

(24:04):
talk about. You softened it, actually, I actually say it,
how would you feel if I never called you mom?
Which is that's a really pointed question and kind of
a jerky way to saying it. But of course is
the moment in the film, and no one knows all
the backstory to that moment. Necessarily they see what they
see in the movie, and there's only so much you
can include and and all the feelings and emotions that

(24:27):
came up to that moment. I feel so bad about
the whole thing, and I've I've always thinking I'm gonna
ask my distributor to take the movie down off of
all the places and nobody can see it ever again.
But Steve, when you say you feel bad about the
whole thing, you mean you feel bad about the whole thing,
or you feel bad about the film part or or
what I feel bad about the whole thing. I feel

(24:50):
bad about that I ever knew. I feel bad that
I made the film. I feel embarrassed about how I
come across in the film, even though I'm also at
the same time, if you can imagine this, proud of it,
because it's an accurate journalistic depiction of me in that moment.
I was angry at times. I was kind of a
jerk at times. I don't often come across as that articulate.

(25:12):
At times, I sometimes make these leaps of logic that
don't make any sense, you know, all this stuff. But
in thinking about the conversation that we were going to have,
I had this. I mean, it's an epiphany. It really is.
It's not to put too much of a dramatic point
on it. But I had this moment of of something
that has never once occurred to me in all the
years and even all the adoption conferences that I've taken

(25:33):
this film too. In that moment, in that scene, the
reason I said it that way it was feeling so angry,
or it was an angry way of asking it, is
that it is hard to understand if you have not
been adopted or had a secret kept from you about
who you are. It seems to me that part of
why you would have been mad about it is it
was erasing your history. It was essentially saying those first

(25:56):
eighteen years where you believed what you believed, that doesn't matter. Right.
And the people who understand this actually are adoptees. When
I go to those conferences and show this film and
I always preface it with this sort of oh, I'm
a real jerk in this, sorry everybody, And at the
end they're like, what are you talking about? You are
not a jerk at all. In fact, you are acting

(26:19):
how anybody would act, and you deserve to be able
to act that way and you should never apologize for that.
A lot of states still have closed adoption records, although
that's changing, So you really don't have any access to
your history, your actual biological history. You have to take
on this other history that is really hard to understand

(26:39):
if you have not been through it. And that is
my if, if as any message I could send to
the people who say, boy, Stevie really hard on Joanie
in that movie and man, poor Janie. And I agree
she had a rough time to absolutely, but it's really
important to understand that I feel like I'm sounding angry
right now. I'm more of just emphatic about it. Is

(26:59):
that because I so it's brand new, I'm just coming
to This is the hardest thing for me to have
realized all these years, and that I just realized recently,
is that I actually don't owe Joanie anything. I don't
owe her relationship. I don't owe her to be called mom.
I don't owe her to act as a son to her.
I don't owe her anything because there was never any
agreement made between us or transaction made between us. We

(27:20):
are just two people. Do you suppose that there is
also an element to that response that that that people
have that is probably a largely unconscious response when they
have it that the person in those circumstances is supposed
to feel grateful. In other words, absolutely, yeah, I mean

(27:43):
you were taken in, you were loved, Otherwise you might
have had very different circumstances. Or I mean, I don't
know whether the reason why I'm relating to this is
as someone who discovered that she was donor conceived, um,
but I know that what people feel about people who

(28:03):
find out that they were doing or conceived is well,
you're you're here, aren't you. I mean, you're glad you're here,
You've you've had this great life and that as if
that's supposed to check that box and then you're kind
of done with it and there's no room for other feelings,
much more complex feelings of what led to in my case,

(28:23):
my being born and in your case, the way that
you were raised. Oh there's yeah, I've heard that many
many times. You know, you're lucky that you weren't aborted,
You're lucky you were't abused. All true. And you know
you can be grateful and still be adamant that you
don't owe the person something beyond the gratefulness. You know, Yes,

(28:46):
you can have two things in your head at the
same time of like thank you for not aborting me
or abusing me. And I'm not going to call you mom,
and I'm not going to call you mom, So let
me ask you what's your relationship out to Joanie and
in the fullness of time and in the aftermaths of
open secret coming out. So she did not like the film.

(29:09):
She felt that she wasn't portrayed in a positive way,
which I disagree. I think she comes across as a
very sympathetic person who went through a very difficult childhood,
had her struggles with her own identity, trying to figure out,
you know, who she wanted to be, and I think
she found it embarrassing. It's funny. Other members of the
family feel like that was an absolute accurate depiction of

(29:32):
her in every way. I wouldn't have released it if
I thought that it was somehow damning to her. I
think that she comes out as someone who's incredibly complicated
and has a lot to tell and a lot to show.
The movies a lot about two women, you know, my mom,
Mary Jane and Joanie and the struggles of that time
being choice is not given to them, choice is taken away,

(29:55):
and I felt like that was portrayed fairly accurately for them.
Do you feel like this whole experience has very much
affected your interest in not keeping secrets in your family
and in your family that you've made with with your
wife and your kids. Yeah, any secret that has an

(30:17):
effect on someone else, I am very much against. You know,
there are lots of secrets, their secrets that you keep
for yourself that only affect you, like that you eat
too many cupcakes at night when nobody's looking or whatever.
But then there's the secrets that of people's identity or
any secret that I think can obstruct someone's progress in
the world. I think is a bad secret and it

(30:38):
needs to be told. I feel very very strongly about that.
And I would never keep a secret from my kids
if it was something that if they knew the truth,
would make their life better or not even better, it
would just move their life forward. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
I think that we are formed by what we don't know,

(30:59):
at least as much, if not more, then by what
we do. And we're when we're formed by what we
don't know, it's going is gonna sound like a word puzzle,
but we we were being formed by something we don't
even know we're being formed by. And so there's something
that's very dangerous about that because it's so it's so
unavailable and so unconscious. Yeah, I always think my my

(31:23):
hypothetical and all this is imagine if my parents had
set me down at the age of five and six,
instead of saying adopted, said hey, listen, you should know
we're your grandparents and we love you very much. And
Joanie is your mom and she had you and she
couldn't take care of you because she wasn't ready to
do that. But they're part of this family, and you know,
we're going to raise you as our grandson and our
son if you want us to, and you know, welcome.

(31:47):
You know what an amazing moment that now I get it.
This is Kansas, this is Catholic. People were like, oh
my god, Janie, I can't believe she's pregnant. What kind
of awful person is she? You know, I don't know
the social mores of the time, but that would have
been a really amazing thing to have happened if it
would have happened that way. Of course, this story would

(32:08):
not be complete without talking about Henry. Who's Henry, you
might ask, Steve's biological father. I remember there was a
very brief conversation that I had with Joni at the
age I was twenty, I think I was in school,
and she goes, I have Henry's phone number. I've had
it for a long time. Um. She told me that

(32:31):
in that moment that she had been sending photos to him.
She had an address and a phone number, so he
knew I existed, but she didn't know anything about him.
She's like, I don't know. He has a thick accent,
and I don't even know where he's from. I think
she you know, she told me very stories about him
being from Romania and from Italy and all kinds of stuff,
but she never knew anything really about him. But she
had a name and a phone number, and he was

(32:51):
living in Los Angeles, which is where she met him
when she ran away from home that summer and got pregnant.
And so I took that number from her and I
held onto it for a while, and then one night
I called it and he answered the phone, and it
was the thickest accent I had ever heard in my life.
Like it was, this is a kid from Kansas who

(33:11):
had never been really anywhere, and uh, it was this
thick European accent. And you know, I'll tell you. What.
If there's anything that I'm embarrassed about, it's about how
just dumb I was in those moments where I had
this man on the phone and I didn't know what
to ask him. I just froze. And all he said
to me was I don't have anything for you. And

(33:33):
I don't know if he meant that monetarily or emotionally
or what it was, but I was so panicked. I mean,
it sounds like the thing you described earlier about your
heart's racing and you're gripping the phone. I didn't know
what to do. I was still a kid in that way,
and so I just was like, I don't want anything
from you, thank you for talking to me, goodbye, and
I hung up and that was it. I never talked

(33:54):
to him again. He died, um, you know, five or
six years later. Eventually I was able to track down
a daughter that he had from his marriage, who is
the same age as Joanie, by the way, and I
wrote her a letter and we connected that way, and
that's where I found out who he was, where he's from.
He was born and raised in Poland, was a Holocaust survivor.

(34:17):
All these pieces sort of started to come together and
just in case you're thinking that this story can't get
even more complex than it already is, it turns out
that Steve has a biological half sister that his father, Henry,
was in fact married when he got Jonie pregnant. I
talked to her recently. She had just gone on a

(34:38):
trip to Poland with her son, one of her sons,
who was at my wedding. By the way, I've become
sort of friendly with him. He was very interested in
this whole story. He's my same a I'm his uncle technically,
but we're the same age. But she had gone to
Poland to go visit Henry's the town where he lived
and where he was rounded up, and all those sorts
of things, and she wanted to talk to me about it.
So we had a phone call, and you know, we

(35:00):
talk about it. It's funny, and she'll refer to Henry
as our father, which I think is something she obviously
does not have to do but does. And then she
had said, I can't wait to meet your boys. You know,
they're my they're my only nephews. It's funny. I see,
he was a member of my family, but with no
name attached, no signifier, attached to it. No, like sister, brother, cousin.
She's just is somebody who's part of my world. Sure,

(35:20):
I mean it's such it's such a depiction of modern family,
the families that we make, the families that we end
up with. We're so interested in defining with labels who
we are to each other. Right, Oh yeah, I just
see her as this person who's in my life and
who is a family member. But it would be very
strange to call her sister, and you know what, she's
ever asked me to. As Steve and I talk, I

(35:46):
find myself thinking a lot about closure. After all, he's
known the truth since he was eighteen. He's now forty nine,
He's made a film about it, he has a wife, kids,
a great career, a life he built in Washington, d C.
Is there a point when a family secret like this
begins to lose its power? Is closure a real thing?

(36:09):
Does Steve believe in it? No? I don't. Actually, I
think that I sort of visualize it. The secret part
of it, or the grappling with it, is like a bumpy,
pothole filled road. It's a bumpy gravel road with twists
and turns. And then when you come to sort of
grips with it. The road smooths out, but it keeps going,

(36:30):
so there's not an ending, and that road could become
bumpy again. So it's a traveling metaphor. You know, you're
the closure is when you die. That's the end, that
it's closure. But I'm always going to be grappling with
all of this. Right now, I'm on a smooth road
with it, and I love Joanie. I care about what

(36:52):
happens to her. I can't forge a mother's son relationship
with her that will never happen. It doesn't mean that
I don't have feelings for her or respect her and
care about how she's doing. But there was a time
where that road was awfully bumpy and not good to
travel on, and now it feels like it's a nice, steady,
smooth ride. And my goal is for it to just

(37:14):
continue that way on my own terms. Now, she may
she may say the opposite. She'd be like, oh, no,
the road is still really bumpy and it's not good.
I'll say, well, that's that's your perception of it. Mine
is this. I'd like to thank my guest Steve Lichtie

(37:36):
for sharing his story with us today. For more about
his documentary, visit Open Secret film dot com. Family Secrets
is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is the
supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers,
and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have

(37:57):
a family secret you'd like to share, you can get
in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets
podcast dot com, and you can also find us on
Instagram at Danny Ryder, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod
and Twitter at Fam Secrets Pod. That's fam Secrets Pod.
For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.