July 9, 2026 • 54 mins
In our extraordinary season finale, Mary Afsari shows us how our unknowable pasts—the tragedies, traumas, and truths—can shape a future and change a life. Many lives, in fact.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I see her around, I whisper and she raises her eyebrows.
I don't mention that one day I was going about
my life, and the next it seemed my grandmother was there.
She crept into my thoughts uninvited. While on walks, I
felt her drawing me into rose petals, sending me her scent,
(00:26):
asking me to listen. When I was at work, in
between patient visits, her voice entered my thoughts unexpectedly. I
caught myself talking to her in the passenger seat as
I drove home. In my quietest moments, the unmarked minutes
between tasks, the gray space of life when we are
alone with ourselves, it was like she had never left.
(00:48):
I think she has something to tell me. I confess.
I know it sounds strange, but she has something she
needs me to know.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Doctor Mary Fariba af Seri, Portland, Oregon based, board certified OBGYN,
an author of the recent memoir Labor One Woman's Work.
Mary's is a story of a life shaped by forces
both known and unknowable, and those unknowable forces, silent, waiting
(01:20):
secret become the building blocks to an extraordinary undertaking which
will in time shape other lives. Buckle up. This is
the season finale of Family Secrets, and it's an inspiring one.
(01:43):
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. Mary, tell me
about the landscape of your childhood. Do you have early
memories or fragments of your childhood in Iran?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I was really young when we were in Iran. I
was only about eighteen months old. We had moved back
to Shiraz after living in Chicago, so I was born
in Chicago. My dad finished his medical training and fellowship
with the plan of returning back to Iran with me,
my brother, and my mom. When we were in Shiraz,
(02:30):
I was only about a year and a half until
about I was three years old when we left, and
so my memories are the memories of a toddler. If
we have any memories, I've confirmed a few of them
with my mom. I remember taking walks to a corner
store where we would buy candy. I remember having my
aunties around. You were teenagers when I was a toddler,
(02:53):
and so I remember playing with them. I remember a
mouse coming into the house and everybody jumping up onto
beds wheeling, And I remember stopping on walks with my
mom and talking to friends who lived in the neighborhood, who,
interestingly enough, years later followed my family to California and
(03:13):
then lived in the same neighborhood that we did when
I was growing up as a kid in California, So
it was almost like a transportation of this neighborhood in
Shei Ras to a neighborhood in northern California.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So interesting. Your first language was Farsi, yes, I.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Believe, so there's a little bit of mixed messages. I
know that my mom was mostly speaking Farsie when we
were born. She taught herself English living in America, so
I think that we were getting mixed Farsie in English
just from the time we were born. But my guess
is that it was primarily Farsi in the first year,
(03:52):
definitely Farsie when we were in Iran.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Where was your mother In the birth order with the aunties.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
My mom is number two, and she had an older
brother and a younger sister from the same mother. That's
my grandmother Mahrie. There was another baby that was born
who was later lost to a childhood death. And then
there were a series of two more stepmothers with other
(04:21):
children that were born to them, and so eight in total,
and my mom was number two in that birth order.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
And where did your parents meet?
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So this is kind of an interesting story. My mother
lost her mom when she was only four years old,
and my grandfather was getting remarried for a third time
to a woman who happened to me my dad's first cousin.
And my dad is twelve years older than my mom,
(04:50):
and he was a medical student in Shei Ross and
his cousin was getting married to my grandfather on my
mother's side, and so my dad would come over to
the house at the end of his school days to
visit his cousin, and over the course of a few
years of that, became very close to my grandfather, and
(05:12):
through that relationship met my mother, who at that point
was a child. I mean she was twelve years old,
thirteen years old, and he was in his mid twenties.
But he was really a beloved part of that family.
And when my dad decided that he was going to
leave Iran and go do his medical training in Baltimore,
(05:33):
he asked for my mom's hand in marriage, and at
that point she was sixteen years old.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
So you and your brother and your parents leave Shiraz
in nineteen seventy eight, is that right?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (05:48):
And at that point you are how old?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I was four years old. At that point, the country
was under rule of the Shah of Iran, and there
was a lot happening politically, and there were sort of
the rumblings of an Islamic revolution. There was this knowledge
and undercurrent in the country that there was going to
be regime change, and the knowledge of that led many,
(06:15):
many tens of thousands of Iranians to decide to leave
the country. There was just too much uncertainty and there
was a great fear that the country that they had
lived in, which at that point there were quite a
lot of freedoms. When we look back at photos, it's
unrecognizable in the sense of the photos that people see
(06:36):
coming out of Iran in the last few decades. My
mother was completely dressed like a regular European or American teenager,
wearing short skirts and long hair. The men and the
women were allowed to mingle. There was a lot of
education on both sides, incredible relationships with the US as
(06:57):
far as education goes in science and medicine, and that's
how my dad got recruited for JOHNS. Hopkins was through
a relationship like that. So this undercurrent that that was
going to go away and theocratic Islamic regime was going
to take over the country. My parents, with two young children,
who had already lived in the United States and knew
(07:18):
what the US had to offer us, made the decision
to leave and to come back to the US with US.
Nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty was a really interesting time
to be Iranian American in this country. The hostage crisis
began on November fourth, nineteen seventy nine, which I always
remembered because it was my mother's birthday, and my parents,
(07:41):
like a lot of families, had the TV turned on
to the news, and so day in day out we
were watching these scenes come out of Iran, the hostages.
Americans found and gagged the countdown every single day at
the hostage crisis. And I was a kindergartener at the
time in this sub class suburb in California that was
(08:02):
actually not very diverse. I was surprised that there were
any other Iranians in that school. But one day when
we were going out to recess, I watched as two
second graders sort of hunted down a little boy named Amir,
who I was just vaguely familiar with, but they pinned
him to the ground and they were re enacting what
(08:23):
they had seen on TV, with the hostages calling him
their hostage.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I went home and I told my mother the story,
and my mom, for as young as she was and
pretty recent to the country, was always a fierce advocate
of children and of us, and she ended up going
to the school. And the way that I look back
on it is I don't know what the conversations were,
(08:48):
but I know there were conversations, and I saw her
speaking in Farsi with Amer's family, and I saw her
being able to translate with the school what had happened.
And I think it probably occurred to her at that
time that her children were now being put in a
similar position. We had Persian names that we had been
given at birth, and that's what we were being called.
(09:09):
And one night she and my dad sat us down
to tell us that they had made a decision to
change our first names.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Mary's name had been Fariba and her brother's name had
been Farshid. Their mother asks them if they've heard of
the American folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. These were good,
solid American names, So Fariba became Mary and Farshid would
now be known as Peter. I was pretty excited to
(09:41):
have my name changed. It's a mouthful today.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
For people to say Fariba a f sari. Back then,
to show up in kindergarten, I already felt a little
bit different. We ate Persian food, We had relatives that
were coming over in droves from Iran and sleeping under
our piano, and I knew that our house looked very
different than a lot of the houses in our town.
(10:06):
And so to be told that we were going to
be given these names that were going to allow us
to fit in was really really exciting for me. It
was a relief, and I think that my brother felt
the same way. I wanted to fit in as a kid,
and I really believe that my parents wanted to make
sure that we fit in. They had accents, so no
(10:29):
matter how well educated they were, my dad as a physician,
my mom went on to become a psychologist with a
doctorate in psychology. No matter how educated they became, they
also recognized that just by the sheer accent that they
will never be able to fully shed. They were maybe
viewed differently in certain situations, and it was really really
(10:53):
important to them that we didn't face any obstacles in
terms of our ability to achieve the American dream, which
is why most immigrants leave their countries and come to
the United States.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And in pursuit of that American dream. How early did
you get the memo that you were supposed to grow
up and become a doctor?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
That was very early.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
I had a feeling. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I mean I think that it was really clear to
me because it was so not the type of kid
that I was. If you want to imagine the prototype
or the stereotype of a kid who grows up to
do really well in sciences and then becomes a successful
pre medical student and then goes on to medical school,
I was not that kid. I mean I was ahead
(11:40):
in the clouds. I was always an imaginative kind of writer,
dreamer type, and my dad knew that about me very
very early on and tried really really hard to steer
the ship the other direction. I appreciate the fact that
I had a father that was really invested in my
sss who believed that I could actually grow up to
(12:02):
be anything that I wanted to be. And I have
to say that over the years, I've learned that's not
always the case, and a lot of people find me
extremely fortunate, and I agree to have a father who
spent so much time trying to make sure that I
was going to do well in school. The ways that
he sort of hyper emphasized my shortcomings and things like
(12:27):
math and underemphasized the areas that I really showed talent in,
such as you know, poetry when I was even just
as young as eight or nine years old. So it
came across as You're going to be affirmed for doing
well in the areas that he found value in and
not necessarily recognized for the areas where I might have
(12:50):
been innately drawn to. And you know, I'm a mother now,
and I can kind of feel the tension in that
that your kids come into this world, and if you're
paying attention, it's pretty clear that kids come into the
world with different propensities. And I can see that in
my two children, with very very different propensities from the
(13:11):
time they were very young. And so the idea that
the things that I loved and cared about were not
necessarily valued. I found that to be a little bit
painful and difficult as I started to grow older, you know,
into my teenage years and my college years. And what
did you know.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
About your parents' families, What did you know about where
they had come from and who their parents had been.
How much was that kind of storytelling part of your
lives as a family once you were here in the States.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I feel like there were five stories that just were
on repeat my whole childhood. So there was a story
about my mother's father, my grandfather, who was still alive
up until I was in college. We didn't see him
until I was in college. He was able to make
one visit and then he passed away shortly after. But
(14:13):
he was this larger than life, you know, landowner in
Iran who wore Armani's suits and drove his jeeps around
the property. And so it was a little bit of
a two dimensional picture of this grandfatherly figure who I
never had a relationship with, but who was somebody that
my mother was deeply, deeply attached to and in love with,
and who she left in order to come to the
(14:35):
United States. The flip side of it was that she
had lost her mother as a child. She was only
four years old and my grandmother died, and that story
was completely unknown. So why did she die, how did
she die? What were the circumstances around that. That was
not something that we ever talked about. I don't think
(14:57):
I even asked questions about it until a point in
my life. As a kid. My mom would refer to
her mother as her fairy godmother, and that's how I
grew up thinking about her, that she had this angel
that was looking out for her and weren't we lucky
that she had this special angel looking out for us?
And any time anything remotely you know, scary, might happen.
(15:21):
She had a few health scares that she came out of.
It was always thanking her fairy godmother forgetting her through,
and that to me was my grandmother. She was an
ethereal figure kind of floating around keeping an eye on us,
but there was really no information about her. It felt
like a void. It just felt like a whole in
(15:44):
the history of our lives. Because my dad would talk
about his life and he also had these rich, super
tragic stories from his childhood around both of his parents,
who he also lost pretty young as a teenager. But
those stories had depth to them, like I could feel
(16:06):
and see his mother and his father, and I could
feel and see my maternal grandfather. But my maternal grandmother
was a ghost.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Did you know her name?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I didn't learn her name until my late twenties, and
it came as a complete surprise to me. I was
back at home from living across the country, and I
was going through old photos with my mom, you know,
one of those moments were on the floor and somebody
had given her a box of pictures that they had
(16:41):
retrieved from Iran. So these photos hadn't been seen in
almost thirty years, and so we're going through all these
black and whites, and then I pulled out a picture
of somebody that looked like it must be her mother.
It looked exactly like my mom, and so I asked
about it, and my mom said, yeah, that is your
grand mother Mary. And that moment just completely floored me,
(17:08):
because up until then I had no idea that my
grandmother's name had essentially been Mary, which is what my
name had been changed to.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
So this was not a Peter Paul and Mary situation,
or was it was your mother was this buried so
much for your mother that it's possible that your mother
decided to name you Mary in kindergarten, was out thinking
about the parallel to her guardian angel.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Well at the time when I saw the picture and
she said the name Mary, and I asked if that
was her name. My mom said, yeah, that's why I
named you Mary. I thought you knew that, so I
assumed that that connection had been made when I was five,
but it was never ever explained to me. I think
(17:57):
it's a pretty common immigrant kid move to walk the
family line and then also have side quests where you're
actually pursuing things that you also want to be doing.
And I will just say I did that my entire life.
So I was a very good student. And then when
I went to college, I took all of the pre
medical undergraduate requirements just in case I decided to apply
(18:21):
to medical school, and also probably to appease my dad,
so he knew I was taking all of the classes.
But I was also a women's studies major, and I
was also doing a lot of creative writing, and I
wanted to travel. There was a lot of other things
that I had imagined myself being and doing but I
did complete what I needed to complete for medical school
(18:41):
in the case that I should decide to do that,
and I did well enough in those courses. I did
take some time after college and I moved to Boston.
I was accepted to a program, the Public Health and
Communications program, And for me, it's just the perfect metaphor
for who I was trying to be in my life.
I go to this, you know, medical school program, and
(19:02):
so maybe that'll appease my dad for a little bit,
but I'm really going to study some things that I
care about around public health and public relations and campaigning.
And I did that, and I had this very rich
experience in Boston. I did an Albert Schweitzer fellowship. I
was developing programs and underserved communities. I was very serious
about martial arts, getting a black belt and showed a
(19:23):
coon karate. I mean, I was a pretty focused young person.
I got a really good job after graduate school working
for a nonprofit that was affiliated with Harvard and traveling
and developing programs. So I felt like I was doing
pretty well for, you know, a twenty five year old
who was still trying to decide what my sort of
lifelong career was going to be, and yet there were
(19:46):
these weekly phone calls home, and week after week after week,
it felt to me like it didn't matter what else
I was doing and what else I was achieving. You know,
my dad had an eye on a prize, which was
that I was going to become a doctor, and until
I achieved that, nothing else really held a lot of
value or a lot of weight to him. Was that
(20:08):
true if your brother too, Yeah, my brother had similar
pressures put on him, and he was similarly on a
winding road in his twenties.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Also to become a doctor.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Also to become a doctor. Yes, I'll just say to
be fair, you know, my dad absolutely loves being a physician.
He has been an incredible physician his entire life. He's
eighty five years old. He was forced to retire because
of a medical condition just three years ago. He is
an infectious disease doc who went to his office every
(20:40):
single day during the COVID pandemic, even in the early
days when we didn't know what was happening. And he
was in his late seventies when he was doing that,
so he was aware and we were aware that he
was putting his own health and life at risk and
believed very strongly that that's what he was put here
to do, so very much a man who followed his
(21:02):
passion and his life has been an example of that,
and I think he just very very strongly believes that
if that is something that you can't achieve in your life,
why wouldn't you And he wanted that for me. Whether
or not it was the right path for me or
not yet to be determined. There was a moment I
flew out to meet them on a one week vacation.
(21:24):
They were going to Paris and I was in Boston,
so it was really accessible for me to go meet them.
And we had this moment when I was twenty six
years old walking through the Picasso museum and we sat
on a bench afterwards, and again he was asking me,
what are you going to do with your life and
when you're going to get serious about your life? And
all I could really think about was that I had
(21:45):
been pretty serious about the things that I had chosen
to commit to up until that point. But what he
was talking about was medical school. And he set a
line that stuck with me where he said, well, you know,
if you had some other big talent like Picasso, maybe
I wouldn't be so concerned. But if you were to
become a doctor, it would grant you lifelong security. And
(22:08):
one of the reasons that line stuck with me not
just because it hurts for your father to think you
may not have a talent or an ability to do
something else, but I wanted to make sure that if
I did choose to become a doctor, that I didn't
do it for those reasons. So it became actually like
an oppositional force in me to make sure that I
(22:30):
made the decision based on something inside of me that
felt like it was the right choice that.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Makes so much sense that in other words, it needed
to become for you a kind of calling in the
way that you know, in a different way, but you
know that you had witnessed your father experience being a
physician as a calling. Yes, for sure, we'll be back
in a moment with more family secrets. Mary does go
(23:09):
to medical school, and she is doing it for the
right reasons, but by her third year, the wings of
her free spirit are feeling a bit clipped. She's losing
sight of who she is. She feels caged in.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
There's a lot of class work, and there was a
lot of studying. I was really committed to it, but
by the time I got to my third year, I
went to one of the deans at the school and
I pretty much was like, you need to bust me
out of here for at least a month or so,
like I kind of need to regain that sense of
who I am and why I am doing this in
the first place. And I'm so lucky that I had
(23:47):
somebody who supported me in that, because it wasn't really
allowed at that time. But he helped me apply for
a scholarship program, and when I got accepted, I was
able to choose to go to a certain country and
spend a month doing your rotation. And at that point
I was really interested in pediatrics, and so I chose
to do a pediatrics rotation in Bolivia for one month.
(24:08):
The thing with doing pediatrics, especially in a country like
Bolivia at the time this was in two thousand and five,
is you are just seeing twenty thirty forty fifty mothers
a day with their babies, as well as all the
other children that they have to bring in tow for
their appointments. And I was doing this type of work
(24:30):
in clinics that were in the mountains as well as
in the cities. We were going to orphanages, and one
day we ended up in a clinic that was in
the jungle, and there was a real awareness that was
starting to build to me that these women did not
necessarily have control over how many babies they had, and
as a result, they would end up with seven, ten, twelve,
(24:53):
fifteen children over the course of that many years, and
there was a lack of resources. Sometimes one child would
die at the age of seven because they got sick
and there was nobody to take care of that one child.
So what these women were experiencing over and over again
became very clear to me. And in this one hospital
(25:16):
that was a Catholic hospital and so technically we were
not supposed to be providing birth control. There was an
obgyn who had taken upon it himself to actually place
IUDs in women that they were buying on the black market,
bringing in in their purses, and the curtains were drawn.
We never wrote a note, we never took names, and
(25:38):
he was just putting IUDs in this woman, cutting the
strings extremely short so that even their husbands may not
be aware that they had had birth control placed. And
that rotation. It was one week in that clinic. It
really flipped the script for me where I started to
become aware that when you care about children and you
care about families, you really have to start with the mothers.
(26:01):
And I really fell in love with the mothers and
decided that that was probably the direction my career was
going to go. Well.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And one of the things that I find so moving
about your story is that that would be enough. I mean,
that would be enough of a reason for the switch flipping.
But there was also something happening that you were not
conscious of that you know. I mean, on this podcast
we often end up talking about the secrets we keep
(26:29):
from ourselves. This was both a secret that was kept
from you and in a way like a secret that
somehow you're unconscious knew, which is that there was this
tremendous family history on both sides, your grandmother Mary and
on your father's side as well. That had to do
with that kind of precarious what can happen to women
(26:53):
who are really exactly in that situation that those women
in Bolivia were in.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, I've never really I've said this out loud, but
I will say that the work that I've been doing
for the past twenty years as an obgyn, which is
bearing witness with women during childbirth, also being with mothers
when they experience tremendous loss, and also being put in
(27:20):
the position of potentially saving a mother's life when something
goes wrong, as it can very quickly in obstetrics. The
part that I think I haven't said out loud is
that I was meant to do this work, that this
work flows out of me, and that despite any reservations
(27:43):
I might have had about getting into medicine in the past,
my career has been this incredible extension of who I
feel that I am, and it is hard to deny
now that I've come to truly investigate and understand where
I come from both of my grandmothers and what they experienced,
(28:07):
it's hard for me to deny that there's not a
through line there, and that's why I chose to tell
their stories.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Something else happens. While Mary is in Bolivia. She meets Keith,
who will eventually become her husband. She returns to the States,
graduates medical school, and while still early in her career,
she becomes a mother. This is a rarity in her profession.
She is only permitted to take maternity leave if she'll
make up the time on the other side. As these
(28:39):
very busy, intense years tick by, characterized by harrowing work,
sleep deprivation, and now two young children at home, Mary
is increasingly feeling burnt out and running parallel to this
burnout is another story, a deeper story she's only just
beginning to know and decipher.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I was about ten years into my career, and ten
years is a point where when you've been really grinding
to build a private practice, which is what I was doing.
I was in a small community practice. There were just
three doctors. We were seeing all the pregnant women. We
were doing all the kynecologic surgeries. I was getting called
in the middle of the night to deliver babies. There's
(29:21):
an emergency in emergency room. And then I had my
own children at home, who at that time were four
or six seven years old, two of them, and trying
to manage all of that, which is a pretty common
story for most doctors. I was hitting a point where
I could feel myself starting to what we call burnout
(29:44):
in the physician sense. A lot of reasons for it,
and I would say in mind, there was a lot
of sleep deprivation, and just a lot of facing patient
situations where I think I thought I was going to
have more control over and realizing that there are system
obstacles to being able to do all the things that
you want to do as a doctor. And so I
(30:06):
was in a particularly challenging situation with a very young
preteen patient who would become pregnant and spent almost a
year taking care of her and going through her whole
experience of delivery and postpartum. And as I was going
through all of this, recognizing my challenges, feeling the obstacles
(30:29):
being sleep deprived, trying to be a mother, it dawned
on me that there was some drive within me that
was keeping me going that felt disproportionate to just a job.
And people would ask me. They would say, like, why
are you working this hard? Or what is it that
(30:49):
keeps you going and seeing this many patients? And why
is it that you haven't taken a one week vacation?
And I did sort of feel like there was something
that was pushing me that fell a little bit beyond myself,
and I wanted to learn to understand that because it
didn't feel good, and I wanted to be able to
maintain the work that I was doing, but to do
(31:10):
it in a healthier balance and for somebody that's sort
of grounded in the medical world. I also come from
a background, maybe in a heritage that also believes in
probably something bigger than us that exists, and I started
(31:33):
to feel this presence of my maternal grandmother. She just
sort of arrived in a way where I was starting
to wonder about her think about her. I had remembered
that I was named for her, and it dawned on
me that at one point somebody had told me that
she was pregnant when she died and was twenty six
(31:55):
years old when she died, and so at this point,
ten years into my career, I realized that if anybody
could understand why she had died in the family, that
person was probably me. I was the expert. I was
the obie, and nobody had spoken to me or even
in front of me about the fact that it was
(32:19):
a pregnancy related death. And that's when I started to
ask my family members if anybody knew how she had died,
and I got q answers. My dad, who's the medical
expert of the family up until that point, felt that
she had probably had some condition that led to high
(32:42):
blood pressures that led to a stroke. And these are
things that can't happen. Women do develop high blood pressure,
they do become preaclantic, or atlantic women do die in
childbirth due to these things. But it was her fifth pregnancy,
and I just wasn't sure if that was exactly the reason,
And we didn't have medical records, and my dad wasn't there,
(33:03):
and so I started to realize that he probably didn't
have the whole story. And so I was asking my
auntie and my uncle, who were children at the time
they had lost their mother. And it was my aunt
who still lives in Iron, who had just the tiniest
little bit of information that she had gleaned from the
(33:26):
women that lived in the town, what they had shared
with her, and she shared that with me, and that
led me on this investigation around what I think probably
actually killed her.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And was your mother a part of that search or
did you not speak to your mother about it?
Speaker 2 (33:44):
You know, everybody was always in the room when I
would ask the questions, and there seemed to be just
an acceptance that something in the pregnancy had killed her.
So for me, the idea that she died while she
was pregnant, possibly of a stroke, possibly of high blood pressure.
It's a very dramatic story the moment that they realized
(34:06):
that she was very sick and dying. It involved a
bonfire and her skirt catching on fire and being carried
away from a party, and all of those details, in
my mind became clinical details. So it was an investigation
into how would a pregnant woman end up with a
skirt caught on fire being lifted up and carried down
(34:28):
the driveway, which that is something my mom and her
older brother did. Remember. That was the detail they carried
forward with them.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
You know what striking me right now listening to you
is that it's this combination of your gifts that allowed
you to actually really do that excavation, because yes, you
had the clinical knowledge and therefore like knew the questions
(35:00):
to ask, and you know, you weren't entirely satisfied with
the answers that you had received, but you also had
this creative and spiritual connection to Mary, where in a
way she became a kind of guardian angel for you,
the way that your mother had described her being for
your mother, and so you were filling in the pieces
(35:23):
of her story and of what happened to her, both
in a medical forensic way and a journalistic way, and
also a kind of poetic way.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yeah. You know, interestingly, in investigations they've done around burnout,
one of the ways to combat burnout is the use
of imagination. And I didn't know that at the time.
I just happened to be somebody who lived in my imagination.
But at that time, Mahrie became like my buddy in
(35:57):
this moment in time when I felt very alone. I
couldn't really relate with my peers and my friends because
everybody had young children. But then I felt like I
lived this double life in the hospital, sort of experiencing
things that it was really hard for me to talk
about on the playground later when I would go to
pick up my children. And so in some ways I
sort of bridge that gap, and this story of my
(36:20):
grandmother came into play, and once I had an idea
about how she might have died, I really started to
think more and more about what might have led her
to the decisions that she made in the last six
months of her life, and those decisions kept me going
(36:40):
really thinking about what it is that women face, what
happens when women don't feel like they have agency in
their lives, similar to what was happening in Bolivia, similar
to what's happening in other parts of the world, similar
to what we were starting to feel in our own country.
(37:01):
And so that became more and more of the fulfillment
of my purpose was understanding what happens to women in
those circumstances, and she was my moral conscience.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Can you talk a little bit about those last six
months of her life?
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, I talk about them realistically, in the sense that
the details are made up. I imagined the details my
aunt who pulled me aside one night when I was
asking my mom and my uncle and my dad what
had happened. She stepped outside. She was smoking cigarettes, and
(37:43):
we were standing on the driveway, and she told me
that what she had heard is that at some point
my grandmother had become pregnant again and it was her
fifth pregnancy in six years, and had drank a drink
and the drink was intended to end the pregnancy, and
(38:05):
somewhere along the way after drinking the drink, that is
when she got tragically, you know, super super sick, probably septic,
and ended up dying. So she died and obviously the
baby she was carrying died. And what I did in
trying to imagine those months leading up to her death
(38:27):
was I really wanted to try to imagine what was
going through her mind that led her to this decision
to drink a drink and how did she even know
that that was an option and what did that look
like and feel like in nineteen fifties Iran, where obviously
this was illegal, And so I recreated those scenes from
(38:48):
my mind, and I think in doing that, I hope
I've given her a little bit of a story back.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
And then there's also the story of her paternal grandmother.
Her father had always been forthcoming about the painful loss
in his childhood and that he didn't grow up with
his mother, but Mary learns there's more to it.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
My father is a great storyteller, and I knew there
was a pretty dramatic story of when he was twelve
years old he had had a baby sister that had
just been born, and his father handed him the baby
and put him in a taxi cab and this is
in Tephron at the time, this is in Iran in
(39:35):
the nineteen forties, and had him go to the police
station and he was instructed to tell the police that
he had found a baby on the sidewalk, even though
it was his baby's sister. He was not allowed to
tell them that. And so over the years, my dad
had sort of shared bits of that story. I mean,
I think he waited until we were old enough to
absorb it, and it was always a very difficult story
(39:57):
for him to tell. You'd become choked up even to
this day telling that story because he lost his sister
that day. It wasn't until I started looking into the
Mehari story that I wanted to understand the background to
why it was he was given his baby sister. And
(40:19):
what he shared with me is that his mother, after
delivering that baby, she had already had signs of depression
sort of his whole childhood. It wasn't a great childhood,
but she experienced very severe postpartum psychosis, and his father
recognized that she was not mentally well or stable to
take care of the children, and she was admitted to
(40:41):
a psychiatric hospital right after she gave birth. And interestingly,
you know, she stayed in the hospital for a while.
And you know, these stories that we hear feel like fiction,
and it's actually our parents' lives. His dad now had
a few children that he didn't know how to take
(41:02):
care of without a mother, and so he went and
remarried rather quickly, while my dad's mother was admitted and
so she didn't have a home to come back to.
So even once she had recovered to the point where
she could leave the hospital, she never returned back to
her own family, and she ended up going and staying
(41:23):
and working and being a nanny for another family. And
my dad never saw his mother again. So both of
my parents were in essence orphaned by their mothers due
to pregnancy related conditions.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
We'll be right back her grandmother, Mary's story off Star's story.
It's all beginning to make sense. Mary's calling, Mary's haunting,
Her family's past and her present are moving closer together
(41:59):
now and create a powerful need for change. Dreams visions
that result in big, bold moves requires some combination of
grace and grit. Mary has both.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
I can say that those of us that work in
reproductive health started becoming increasingly uncomfortable back in twenty fifteen.
We could sort of see what was happening, and you
could predict that there were, you know, mechanisms being put
into place that we're going to slowly and then maybe
rapidly strip away access to reproductive health care and rights
(42:38):
and you know, policies and laws that we took for granted.
And so it was way back then that I started
reimagining the way that we might have to provide care
for women and for anybody that wanted reproductive health care.
The idea that somebody would show up to my practice
as a drug rap and just stalk our shelves with
(42:58):
birth control pills andds. It dawned on me that there
was a really good chance that that might go away.
And I'm an Oregon, and I felt more protected. But
I did start to think about what would happen in
other states, and would there be a way for us
to be able to provide women with care in areas
(43:19):
where they weren't able to receive that kind of care.
It really felt like that care was probably going to
go away, and all of this kreemed into the pandemic
and just a restructuring in general of the way that
healthcare was being provided, and my desire to come up
with a model where we could actually take ourselves where
(43:41):
people needed care, rather than asking people to follow this
very old school model of go to where your doctor is.
No matter where your doctor is, find a way to
get there. And the pandemic sort of accelerated this notion
for me of how little we are doing for people
(44:03):
in communities that have difficulty accessing care. So even those
of us in cities, do you remember the days when
you needed to get a PCR COVID test and you
had to drive to a parking lot and sit in
line and then get a nasal swab out of your car.
And we were doing it sitting next to the sick
(44:25):
family member and putting ourselves at increased risk to get
PCR tested. And then I would look around and the
Amazon trucks and the instacarts were just delivering food and
toys and treats to houses all over my neighborhood. And
I got this notion of you know, what could I
(44:47):
do to provide more mobile care? Is it possible that
we can take ourselves to where people are rather than
asking them to come to us. And I had this
day dream of a mobile clinic, something that would house
an exam room and something where I could take myself
because I know that I can provide excellent specialized obstetric
(45:09):
care and gynecologic care. I could take somebody that is
a medical assistant who also does blood draws. I could
have an ultrasound machine. We could do any kind of
procedure in the back of an RV that I could
do in my office. I knew that we could do that,
and so the seed was planted, and I started by
actually driving around and doing PCR tests in my town
(45:33):
for people, letting them know they could come out onto
their front porches and I could do the swabs, send
them off to a lab, build their insurance, and they
never had to leave their homes. And then it turned
into this full fledged mobile clinic that we've been running
now for four years.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Can you describe the RV and this mobile clinic.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
It's a thirty one foot camper RV purchased at Camping World,
except that I used a hair dryer and a ladder,
and I peeled all those red, white and blue detals
off one winter in order to then be able to
put an actual name of a clinic and a logo
on the outside. But for the first year we didn't
(46:15):
have that, and these incredible patients showed up anyways and
trusted that they were coming to a clinic, because that's
how we advertised ourselves on social media and through our website.
So the way the clinic looks now is you approach it.
It's an RV that has just, you know, a little
(46:38):
bit of signage on the outside, a little bit of
instructions about waiting in your car. We'll text you when
you're ready for you, because we just see one patient
at a time inside and when you step inside for me,
it is this idealized version of how we could be
providing care. We closed the door behind us, we lock
the door. My best friend who's seamstress, made the curtains
(47:01):
on the inside. There's usually some light music playing. There's
the regular couch that you see when you walk into
an RV that's just still there, and our patient sits
on the couch and I like to sit on a
little stool so I'm pretty low to the ground so
we can be face to face. And Laura, my medical assistant,
is seated at the little kitchen table and she just
has her computer there. We have blood draw supplies, We
(47:24):
have a microwave to pop popcorn. We have the sterilization
equipment and all of the medical equipment that I had
in my normal gynecologic office in the back of the RV,
where you would normally have the queen size bed. We
ripped that out and we have an exam bed, and
we have an ultrasound machine, and we have a bathroom
and we have a curtain. And so we start out
(47:46):
into the front and then for anybody that needs an
exam whatever it is we're doing, we move on into
the back and they get undressed and we do exams.
I place iud's, I remove IUDs, I do biopsies, We
do colpaskapies for abbamal pap smears. We do free ultrasounds
for people in their first trimester pregnancy so we can
confirm whether or not they have a healthy first trimester
(48:08):
pregnancy or not. And all of that is being done
in this vehicle that we can pop open, close up,
and drive away. And our locations can be in parking lots.
One of my favorite locations is in a little bit
of more of a rural community where every week we
park in front of a barn. We are on a
(48:29):
country road. If you looked it out of a map,
you would think that you were literally just driving onto
a field. But when you arrive our clinic is there
and we're there to greet you.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
What do the patients who find you? I mean, I
feel my whole body feeling relief that this exists, just
with us talking right. So, how do you experience your
patients differently than in the old setting and who comes
to you.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
When I started telling people that I was going to
do this, there were a lot of questions about who
is going to go see their gynecologist in a parking
lot in an RV. And I didn't have that same
doubt about women being willing to come to a place
(49:21):
once we established that it was a safe place and
it was a place where they were going to receive
care that they could trust. And so when we originally
built the clinic, we made it very clear that we
were providing trauma informed care, that this was a safe
place for people who had possibly experienced medical trauma in
(49:43):
a hospital or clinic setting, or for folks who had
sexual trauma where going to a doctor was excruciating, that
maybe doing it in the different setting would feel safer
to them. I initially thought that the point of the
clinic was to get out into communities that didn't have doctors.
But we're just as busy in our urban centers as
(50:05):
we are in our rural centers because folks who are
neurodivergent who have a hard time accessing large facilities. We
have folks who are coming out as trans and need
gender affirming care. It's very uncomfortable in certain waiting rooms
if this is the first part or the early part
of your process. We have a lot of women who
(50:27):
experience infertility, or maybe they're undergoing a miscarriage, or they've
had multiple miscarriages, and sitting in a traditional obi waiting
room with expectant mothers is really difficult for them as well.
So it's this alternative space where you pull up in
a car and when you walk into that clinic, I
have to say, the clinic becomes your clinic. It becomes
(50:49):
what it is that you need, because we're actually there
to serve that purpose. I think the fact that we
are willing to create something different inspired our patients to
believe that they are a part of something that is
larger than themselves. And I think that if you are
aspirational and you build something aspirational, then you will attract
(51:13):
aspirational people. And so our patients are people who actually
have other choices. A lot of them do, and they
choose to be a part of our community because it
is what we are building. It is what is missing.
We are actually building community, and we're building a new
way of doing things that feels hopeful.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
In her Beautiful book, Mary describes a moment in which,
regarding the work she is doing, a patient asks do
you have a personal motivation? Here's Mary reading her answer.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I paused, hmm, nobody has really asked me that before.
I'm curious, they responded, because there are a lot of
doctors not wanting to provide this care right now. Well,
I started slowly and closed my computer on my lap.
I wanted to make sure I really said this correctly, truthfully.
(52:19):
I can't speak for anybody else, but I know this
much for me. My eyes drifted to the tattoo on
my forearm. My parents left their country in order to
provide me with a life where my autonomy was protected, valued, supported,
even encouraged. I continued, and now another version of me,
(52:41):
the one that would still be there if my parents
hadn't left, is being shot and killed in the streets
for daring to show her hair. I listened to my
own voice. I had never explained this before, this fight
for bodily autonomy. It starts with one person, one torment,
and if we do not stand for that, it spreads
(53:04):
to all of us. I thought for a moment, then continued.
I only recently learned that my grandmother died as a
result of attempting an illegal abortion. She left behind four
young children. How different might things have been for her?
For my family? We are only as free as each
(53:24):
other is free.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(54:04):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(54:28):
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I see her around, I whisper and she raises her eyebrows.
I don't mention that one day I was going about
my life, and the next it seemed my grandmother was there.
She crept into my thoughts uninvited. While on walks, I
felt her drawing me into rose petals, sending me her scent,
(00:26):
asking me to listen. When I was at work, in
between patient visits, her voice entered my thoughts unexpectedly. I
caught myself talking to her in the passenger seat as
I drove home. In my quietest moments, the unmarked minutes
between tasks, the gray space of life when we are
alone with ourselves, it was like she had never left.
(00:48):
I think she has something to tell me. I confess.
I know it sounds strange, but she has something she
needs me to know.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Doctor Mary Fariba af Seri, Portland, Oregon based, board certified OBGYN,
an author of the recent memoir Labor One Woman's Work.
Mary's is a story of a life shaped by forces
both known and unknowable, and those unknowable forces, silent, waiting
(01:20):
secret become the building blocks to an extraordinary undertaking which
will in time shape other lives. Buckle up. This is
the season finale of Family Secrets, and it's an inspiring one.
(01:43):
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. Mary, tell me
about the landscape of your childhood. Do you have early
memories or fragments of your childhood in Iran?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
I was really young when we were in Iran. I
was only about eighteen months old. We had moved back
to Shiraz after living in Chicago, so I was born
in Chicago. My dad finished his medical training and fellowship
with the plan of returning back to Iran with me,
my brother, and my mom. When we were in Shiraz,
(02:30):
I was only about a year and a half until
about I was three years old when we left, and
so my memories are the memories of a toddler. If
we have any memories, I've confirmed a few of them
with my mom. I remember taking walks to a corner
store where we would buy candy. I remember having my
aunties around. You were teenagers when I was a toddler,
(02:53):
and so I remember playing with them. I remember a
mouse coming into the house and everybody jumping up onto
beds wheeling, And I remember stopping on walks with my
mom and talking to friends who lived in the neighborhood, who,
interestingly enough, years later followed my family to California and
(03:13):
then lived in the same neighborhood that we did when
I was growing up as a kid in California, So
it was almost like a transportation of this neighborhood in
Shei Ras to a neighborhood in northern California.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So interesting. Your first language was Farsi, yes, I.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Believe, so there's a little bit of mixed messages. I
know that my mom was mostly speaking Farsie when we
were born. She taught herself English living in America, so
I think that we were getting mixed Farsie in English
just from the time we were born. But my guess
is that it was primarily Farsi in the first year,
(03:52):
definitely Farsie when we were in Iran.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Where was your mother In the birth order with the aunties.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
My mom is number two, and she had an older
brother and a younger sister from the same mother. That's
my grandmother Mahrie. There was another baby that was born
who was later lost to a childhood death. And then
there were a series of two more stepmothers with other
(04:21):
children that were born to them, and so eight in total,
and my mom was number two in that birth order.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
And where did your parents meet?
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So this is kind of an interesting story. My mother
lost her mom when she was only four years old,
and my grandfather was getting remarried for a third time
to a woman who happened to me my dad's first cousin.
And my dad is twelve years older than my mom,
(04:50):
and he was a medical student in Shei Ross and
his cousin was getting married to my grandfather on my
mother's side, and so my dad would come over to
the house at the end of his school days to
visit his cousin, and over the course of a few
years of that, became very close to my grandfather, and
(05:12):
through that relationship met my mother, who at that point
was a child. I mean she was twelve years old,
thirteen years old, and he was in his mid twenties.
But he was really a beloved part of that family.
And when my dad decided that he was going to
leave Iran and go do his medical training in Baltimore,
(05:33):
he asked for my mom's hand in marriage, and at
that point she was sixteen years old.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
So you and your brother and your parents leave Shiraz
in nineteen seventy eight, is that right?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (05:48):
And at that point you are how old?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I was four years old. At that point, the country
was under rule of the Shah of Iran, and there
was a lot happening politically, and there were sort of
the rumblings of an Islamic revolution. There was this knowledge
and undercurrent in the country that there was going to
be regime change, and the knowledge of that led many,
(06:15):
many tens of thousands of Iranians to decide to leave
the country. There was just too much uncertainty and there
was a great fear that the country that they had
lived in, which at that point there were quite a
lot of freedoms. When we look back at photos, it's
unrecognizable in the sense of the photos that people see
(06:36):
coming out of Iran in the last few decades. My
mother was completely dressed like a regular European or American teenager,
wearing short skirts and long hair. The men and the
women were allowed to mingle. There was a lot of
education on both sides, incredible relationships with the US as
(06:57):
far as education goes in science and medicine, and that's
how my dad got recruited for JOHNS. Hopkins was through
a relationship like that. So this undercurrent that that was
going to go away and theocratic Islamic regime was going
to take over the country. My parents, with two young children,
who had already lived in the United States and knew
(07:18):
what the US had to offer us, made the decision
to leave and to come back to the US with US.
Nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty was a really interesting time
to be Iranian American in this country. The hostage crisis
began on November fourth, nineteen seventy nine, which I always
remembered because it was my mother's birthday, and my parents,
(07:41):
like a lot of families, had the TV turned on
to the news, and so day in day out we
were watching these scenes come out of Iran, the hostages.
Americans found and gagged the countdown every single day at
the hostage crisis. And I was a kindergartener at the
time in this sub class suburb in California that was
(08:02):
actually not very diverse. I was surprised that there were
any other Iranians in that school. But one day when
we were going out to recess, I watched as two
second graders sort of hunted down a little boy named Amir,
who I was just vaguely familiar with, but they pinned
him to the ground and they were re enacting what
(08:23):
they had seen on TV, with the hostages calling him
their hostage.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I went home and I told my mother the story,
and my mom, for as young as she was and
pretty recent to the country, was always a fierce advocate
of children and of us, and she ended up going
to the school. And the way that I look back
on it is I don't know what the conversations were,
(08:48):
but I know there were conversations, and I saw her
speaking in Farsi with Amer's family, and I saw her
being able to translate with the school what had happened.
And I think it probably occurred to her at that
time that her children were now being put in a
similar position. We had Persian names that we had been
given at birth, and that's what we were being called.
(09:09):
And one night she and my dad sat us down
to tell us that they had made a decision to
change our first names.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Mary's name had been Fariba and her brother's name had
been Farshid. Their mother asks them if they've heard of
the American folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. These were good,
solid American names, So Fariba became Mary and Farshid would
now be known as Peter. I was pretty excited to
(09:41):
have my name changed. It's a mouthful today.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
For people to say Fariba a f sari. Back then,
to show up in kindergarten, I already felt a little
bit different. We ate Persian food, We had relatives that
were coming over in droves from Iran and sleeping under
our piano, and I knew that our house looked very
different than a lot of the houses in our town.
(10:06):
And so to be told that we were going to
be given these names that were going to allow us
to fit in was really really exciting for me. It
was a relief, and I think that my brother felt
the same way. I wanted to fit in as a kid,
and I really believe that my parents wanted to make
sure that we fit in. They had accents, so no
(10:29):
matter how well educated they were, my dad as a physician,
my mom went on to become a psychologist with a
doctorate in psychology. No matter how educated they became, they
also recognized that just by the sheer accent that they
will never be able to fully shed. They were maybe
viewed differently in certain situations, and it was really really
(10:53):
important to them that we didn't face any obstacles in
terms of our ability to achieve the American dream, which
is why most immigrants leave their countries and come to
the United States.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And in pursuit of that American dream. How early did
you get the memo that you were supposed to grow
up and become a doctor?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
That was very early.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
I had a feeling. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I mean I think that it was really clear to
me because it was so not the type of kid
that I was. If you want to imagine the prototype
or the stereotype of a kid who grows up to
do really well in sciences and then becomes a successful
pre medical student and then goes on to medical school,
I was not that kid. I mean I was ahead
(11:40):
in the clouds. I was always an imaginative kind of writer,
dreamer type, and my dad knew that about me very
very early on and tried really really hard to steer
the ship the other direction. I appreciate the fact that
I had a father that was really invested in my
sss who believed that I could actually grow up to
(12:02):
be anything that I wanted to be. And I have
to say that over the years, I've learned that's not
always the case, and a lot of people find me
extremely fortunate, and I agree to have a father who
spent so much time trying to make sure that I
was going to do well in school. The ways that
he sort of hyper emphasized my shortcomings and things like
(12:27):
math and underemphasized the areas that I really showed talent in,
such as you know, poetry when I was even just
as young as eight or nine years old. So it
came across as You're going to be affirmed for doing
well in the areas that he found value in and
not necessarily recognized for the areas where I might have
(12:50):
been innately drawn to. And you know, I'm a mother now,
and I can kind of feel the tension in that
that your kids come into this world, and if you're
paying attention, it's pretty clear that kids come into the
world with different propensities. And I can see that in
my two children, with very very different propensities from the
(13:11):
time they were very young. And so the idea that
the things that I loved and cared about were not
necessarily valued. I found that to be a little bit
painful and difficult as I started to grow older, you know,
into my teenage years and my college years. And what
did you know.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
About your parents' families, What did you know about where
they had come from and who their parents had been.
How much was that kind of storytelling part of your
lives as a family once you were here in the States.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I feel like there were five stories that just were
on repeat my whole childhood. So there was a story
about my mother's father, my grandfather, who was still alive
up until I was in college. We didn't see him
until I was in college. He was able to make
one visit and then he passed away shortly after. But
(14:13):
he was this larger than life, you know, landowner in
Iran who wore Armani's suits and drove his jeeps around
the property. And so it was a little bit of
a two dimensional picture of this grandfatherly figure who I
never had a relationship with, but who was somebody that
my mother was deeply, deeply attached to and in love with,
and who she left in order to come to the
(14:35):
United States. The flip side of it was that she
had lost her mother as a child. She was only
four years old and my grandmother died, and that story
was completely unknown. So why did she die, how did
she die? What were the circumstances around that. That was
not something that we ever talked about. I don't think
(14:57):
I even asked questions about it until a point in
my life. As a kid. My mom would refer to
her mother as her fairy godmother, and that's how I
grew up thinking about her, that she had this angel
that was looking out for her and weren't we lucky
that she had this special angel looking out for us?
And any time anything remotely you know, scary, might happen.
(15:21):
She had a few health scares that she came out of.
It was always thanking her fairy godmother forgetting her through,
and that to me was my grandmother. She was an
ethereal figure kind of floating around keeping an eye on us,
but there was really no information about her. It felt
like a void. It just felt like a whole in
(15:44):
the history of our lives. Because my dad would talk
about his life and he also had these rich, super
tragic stories from his childhood around both of his parents,
who he also lost pretty young as a teenager. But
those stories had depth to them, like I could feel
(16:06):
and see his mother and his father, and I could
feel and see my maternal grandfather. But my maternal grandmother
was a ghost.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Did you know her name?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I didn't learn her name until my late twenties, and
it came as a complete surprise to me. I was
back at home from living across the country, and I
was going through old photos with my mom, you know,
one of those moments were on the floor and somebody
had given her a box of pictures that they had
(16:41):
retrieved from Iran. So these photos hadn't been seen in
almost thirty years, and so we're going through all these
black and whites, and then I pulled out a picture
of somebody that looked like it must be her mother.
It looked exactly like my mom, and so I asked
about it, and my mom said, yeah, that is your
grand mother Mary. And that moment just completely floored me,
(17:08):
because up until then I had no idea that my
grandmother's name had essentially been Mary, which is what my
name had been changed to.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
So this was not a Peter Paul and Mary situation,
or was it was your mother was this buried so
much for your mother that it's possible that your mother
decided to name you Mary in kindergarten, was out thinking
about the parallel to her guardian angel.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Well at the time when I saw the picture and
she said the name Mary, and I asked if that
was her name. My mom said, yeah, that's why I
named you Mary. I thought you knew that, so I
assumed that that connection had been made when I was five,
but it was never ever explained to me. I think
(17:57):
it's a pretty common immigrant kid move to walk the
family line and then also have side quests where you're
actually pursuing things that you also want to be doing.
And I will just say I did that my entire life.
So I was a very good student. And then when
I went to college, I took all of the pre
medical undergraduate requirements just in case I decided to apply
(18:21):
to medical school, and also probably to appease my dad,
so he knew I was taking all of the classes.
But I was also a women's studies major, and I
was also doing a lot of creative writing, and I
wanted to travel. There was a lot of other things
that I had imagined myself being and doing but I
did complete what I needed to complete for medical school
(18:41):
in the case that I should decide to do that,
and I did well enough in those courses. I did
take some time after college and I moved to Boston.
I was accepted to a program, the Public Health and
Communications program, And for me, it's just the perfect metaphor
for who I was trying to be in my life.
I go to this, you know, medical school program, and
(19:02):
so maybe that'll appease my dad for a little bit,
but I'm really going to study some things that I
care about around public health and public relations and campaigning.
And I did that, and I had this very rich
experience in Boston. I did an Albert Schweitzer fellowship. I
was developing programs and underserved communities. I was very serious
about martial arts, getting a black belt and showed a
(19:23):
coon karate. I mean, I was a pretty focused young person.
I got a really good job after graduate school working
for a nonprofit that was affiliated with Harvard and traveling
and developing programs. So I felt like I was doing
pretty well for, you know, a twenty five year old
who was still trying to decide what my sort of
lifelong career was going to be, and yet there were
(19:46):
these weekly phone calls home, and week after week after week,
it felt to me like it didn't matter what else
I was doing and what else I was achieving. You know,
my dad had an eye on a prize, which was
that I was going to become a doctor, and until
I achieved that, nothing else really held a lot of
value or a lot of weight to him. Was that
(20:08):
true if your brother too, Yeah, my brother had similar
pressures put on him, and he was similarly on a
winding road in his twenties.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Also to become a doctor.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Also to become a doctor. Yes, I'll just say to
be fair, you know, my dad absolutely loves being a physician.
He has been an incredible physician his entire life. He's
eighty five years old. He was forced to retire because
of a medical condition just three years ago. He is
an infectious disease doc who went to his office every
(20:40):
single day during the COVID pandemic, even in the early
days when we didn't know what was happening. And he
was in his late seventies when he was doing that,
so he was aware and we were aware that he
was putting his own health and life at risk and
believed very strongly that that's what he was put here
to do, so very much a man who followed his
(21:02):
passion and his life has been an example of that,
and I think he just very very strongly believes that
if that is something that you can't achieve in your life,
why wouldn't you And he wanted that for me. Whether
or not it was the right path for me or
not yet to be determined. There was a moment I
flew out to meet them on a one week vacation.
(21:24):
They were going to Paris and I was in Boston,
so it was really accessible for me to go meet them.
And we had this moment when I was twenty six
years old walking through the Picasso museum and we sat
on a bench afterwards, and again he was asking me,
what are you going to do with your life and
when you're going to get serious about your life? And
all I could really think about was that I had
(21:45):
been pretty serious about the things that I had chosen
to commit to up until that point. But what he
was talking about was medical school. And he set a
line that stuck with me where he said, well, you know,
if you had some other big talent like Picasso, maybe
I wouldn't be so concerned. But if you were to
become a doctor, it would grant you lifelong security. And
(22:08):
one of the reasons that line stuck with me not
just because it hurts for your father to think you
may not have a talent or an ability to do
something else, but I wanted to make sure that if
I did choose to become a doctor, that I didn't
do it for those reasons. So it became actually like
an oppositional force in me to make sure that I
(22:30):
made the decision based on something inside of me that
felt like it was the right choice that.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Makes so much sense that in other words, it needed
to become for you a kind of calling in the
way that you know, in a different way, but you
know that you had witnessed your father experience being a
physician as a calling. Yes, for sure, we'll be back
in a moment with more family secrets. Mary does go
(23:09):
to medical school, and she is doing it for the
right reasons, but by her third year, the wings of
her free spirit are feeling a bit clipped. She's losing
sight of who she is. She feels caged in.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
There's a lot of class work, and there was a
lot of studying. I was really committed to it, but
by the time I got to my third year, I
went to one of the deans at the school and
I pretty much was like, you need to bust me
out of here for at least a month or so,
like I kind of need to regain that sense of
who I am and why I am doing this in
the first place. And I'm so lucky that I had
(23:47):
somebody who supported me in that, because it wasn't really
allowed at that time. But he helped me apply for
a scholarship program, and when I got accepted, I was
able to choose to go to a certain country and
spend a month doing your rotation. And at that point
I was really interested in pediatrics, and so I chose
to do a pediatrics rotation in Bolivia for one month.
(24:08):
The thing with doing pediatrics, especially in a country like
Bolivia at the time this was in two thousand and five,
is you are just seeing twenty thirty forty fifty mothers
a day with their babies, as well as all the
other children that they have to bring in tow for
their appointments. And I was doing this type of work
(24:30):
in clinics that were in the mountains as well as
in the cities. We were going to orphanages, and one
day we ended up in a clinic that was in
the jungle, and there was a real awareness that was
starting to build to me that these women did not
necessarily have control over how many babies they had, and
as a result, they would end up with seven, ten, twelve,
(24:53):
fifteen children over the course of that many years, and
there was a lack of resources. Sometimes one child would
die at the age of seven because they got sick
and there was nobody to take care of that one child.
So what these women were experiencing over and over again
became very clear to me. And in this one hospital
(25:16):
that was a Catholic hospital and so technically we were
not supposed to be providing birth control. There was an
obgyn who had taken upon it himself to actually place
IUDs in women that they were buying on the black market,
bringing in in their purses, and the curtains were drawn.
We never wrote a note, we never took names, and
(25:38):
he was just putting IUDs in this woman, cutting the
strings extremely short so that even their husbands may not
be aware that they had had birth control placed. And
that rotation. It was one week in that clinic. It
really flipped the script for me where I started to
become aware that when you care about children and you
care about families, you really have to start with the mothers.
(26:01):
And I really fell in love with the mothers and
decided that that was probably the direction my career was
going to go. Well.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And one of the things that I find so moving
about your story is that that would be enough. I mean,
that would be enough of a reason for the switch flipping.
But there was also something happening that you were not
conscious of that you know. I mean, on this podcast
we often end up talking about the secrets we keep
(26:29):
from ourselves. This was both a secret that was kept
from you and in a way like a secret that
somehow you're unconscious knew, which is that there was this
tremendous family history on both sides, your grandmother Mary and
on your father's side as well. That had to do
with that kind of precarious what can happen to women
(26:53):
who are really exactly in that situation that those women
in Bolivia were in.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, I've never really I've said this out loud, but
I will say that the work that I've been doing
for the past twenty years as an obgyn, which is
bearing witness with women during childbirth, also being with mothers
when they experience tremendous loss, and also being put in
(27:20):
the position of potentially saving a mother's life when something
goes wrong, as it can very quickly in obstetrics. The
part that I think I haven't said out loud is
that I was meant to do this work, that this
work flows out of me, and that despite any reservations
(27:43):
I might have had about getting into medicine in the past,
my career has been this incredible extension of who I
feel that I am, and it is hard to deny
now that I've come to truly investigate and understand where
I come from both of my grandmothers and what they experienced,
(28:07):
it's hard for me to deny that there's not a
through line there, and that's why I chose to tell
their stories.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Something else happens. While Mary is in Bolivia. She meets Keith,
who will eventually become her husband. She returns to the States,
graduates medical school, and while still early in her career,
she becomes a mother. This is a rarity in her profession.
She is only permitted to take maternity leave if she'll
make up the time on the other side. As these
(28:39):
very busy, intense years tick by, characterized by harrowing work,
sleep deprivation, and now two young children at home, Mary
is increasingly feeling burnt out and running parallel to this
burnout is another story, a deeper story she's only just
beginning to know and decipher.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I was about ten years into my career, and ten
years is a point where when you've been really grinding
to build a private practice, which is what I was doing.
I was in a small community practice. There were just
three doctors. We were seeing all the pregnant women. We
were doing all the kynecologic surgeries. I was getting called
in the middle of the night to deliver babies. There's
(29:21):
an emergency in emergency room. And then I had my
own children at home, who at that time were four
or six seven years old, two of them, and trying
to manage all of that, which is a pretty common
story for most doctors. I was hitting a point where
I could feel myself starting to what we call burnout
(29:44):
in the physician sense. A lot of reasons for it,
and I would say in mind, there was a lot
of sleep deprivation, and just a lot of facing patient
situations where I think I thought I was going to
have more control over and realizing that there are system
obstacles to being able to do all the things that
you want to do as a doctor. And so I
(30:06):
was in a particularly challenging situation with a very young
preteen patient who would become pregnant and spent almost a
year taking care of her and going through her whole
experience of delivery and postpartum. And as I was going
through all of this, recognizing my challenges, feeling the obstacles
(30:29):
being sleep deprived, trying to be a mother, it dawned
on me that there was some drive within me that
was keeping me going that felt disproportionate to just a job.
And people would ask me. They would say, like, why
are you working this hard? Or what is it that
(30:49):
keeps you going and seeing this many patients? And why
is it that you haven't taken a one week vacation?
And I did sort of feel like there was something
that was pushing me that fell a little bit beyond myself,
and I wanted to learn to understand that because it
didn't feel good, and I wanted to be able to
maintain the work that I was doing, but to do
(31:10):
it in a healthier balance and for somebody that's sort
of grounded in the medical world. I also come from
a background, maybe in a heritage that also believes in
probably something bigger than us that exists, and I started
(31:33):
to feel this presence of my maternal grandmother. She just
sort of arrived in a way where I was starting
to wonder about her think about her. I had remembered
that I was named for her, and it dawned on
me that at one point somebody had told me that
she was pregnant when she died and was twenty six
(31:55):
years old when she died, and so at this point,
ten years into my career, I realized that if anybody
could understand why she had died in the family, that
person was probably me. I was the expert. I was
the obie, and nobody had spoken to me or even
in front of me about the fact that it was
(32:19):
a pregnancy related death. And that's when I started to
ask my family members if anybody knew how she had died,
and I got q answers. My dad, who's the medical
expert of the family up until that point, felt that
she had probably had some condition that led to high
(32:42):
blood pressures that led to a stroke. And these are
things that can't happen. Women do develop high blood pressure,
they do become preaclantic, or atlantic women do die in
childbirth due to these things. But it was her fifth pregnancy,
and I just wasn't sure if that was exactly the reason,
And we didn't have medical records, and my dad wasn't there,
(33:03):
and so I started to realize that he probably didn't
have the whole story. And so I was asking my
auntie and my uncle, who were children at the time
they had lost their mother. And it was my aunt
who still lives in Iron, who had just the tiniest
little bit of information that she had gleaned from the
(33:26):
women that lived in the town, what they had shared
with her, and she shared that with me, and that
led me on this investigation around what I think probably
actually killed her.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And was your mother a part of that search or
did you not speak to your mother about it?
Speaker 2 (33:44):
You know, everybody was always in the room when I
would ask the questions, and there seemed to be just
an acceptance that something in the pregnancy had killed her.
So for me, the idea that she died while she
was pregnant, possibly of a stroke, possibly of high blood pressure.
It's a very dramatic story the moment that they realized
(34:06):
that she was very sick and dying. It involved a
bonfire and her skirt catching on fire and being carried
away from a party, and all of those details, in
my mind became clinical details. So it was an investigation
into how would a pregnant woman end up with a
skirt caught on fire being lifted up and carried down
(34:28):
the driveway, which that is something my mom and her
older brother did. Remember. That was the detail they carried
forward with them.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
You know what striking me right now listening to you
is that it's this combination of your gifts that allowed
you to actually really do that excavation, because yes, you
had the clinical knowledge and therefore like knew the questions
(35:00):
to ask, and you know, you weren't entirely satisfied with
the answers that you had received, but you also had
this creative and spiritual connection to Mary, where in a
way she became a kind of guardian angel for you,
the way that your mother had described her being for
your mother, and so you were filling in the pieces
(35:23):
of her story and of what happened to her, both
in a medical forensic way and a journalistic way, and
also a kind of poetic way.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yeah. You know, interestingly, in investigations they've done around burnout,
one of the ways to combat burnout is the use
of imagination. And I didn't know that at the time.
I just happened to be somebody who lived in my imagination.
But at that time, Mahrie became like my buddy in
(35:57):
this moment in time when I felt very alone. I
couldn't really relate with my peers and my friends because
everybody had young children. But then I felt like I
lived this double life in the hospital, sort of experiencing
things that it was really hard for me to talk
about on the playground later when I would go to
pick up my children. And so in some ways I
sort of bridge that gap, and this story of my
(36:20):
grandmother came into play, and once I had an idea
about how she might have died, I really started to
think more and more about what might have led her
to the decisions that she made in the last six
months of her life, and those decisions kept me going
(36:40):
really thinking about what it is that women face, what
happens when women don't feel like they have agency in
their lives, similar to what was happening in Bolivia, similar
to what's happening in other parts of the world, similar
to what we were starting to feel in our own country.
(37:01):
And so that became more and more of the fulfillment
of my purpose was understanding what happens to women in
those circumstances, and she was my moral conscience.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Can you talk a little bit about those last six
months of her life?
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, I talk about them realistically, in the sense that
the details are made up. I imagined the details my
aunt who pulled me aside one night when I was
asking my mom and my uncle and my dad what
had happened. She stepped outside. She was smoking cigarettes, and
(37:43):
we were standing on the driveway, and she told me
that what she had heard is that at some point
my grandmother had become pregnant again and it was her
fifth pregnancy in six years, and had drank a drink
and the drink was intended to end the pregnancy, and
(38:05):
somewhere along the way after drinking the drink, that is
when she got tragically, you know, super super sick, probably septic,
and ended up dying. So she died and obviously the
baby she was carrying died. And what I did in
trying to imagine those months leading up to her death
(38:27):
was I really wanted to try to imagine what was
going through her mind that led her to this decision
to drink a drink and how did she even know
that that was an option and what did that look
like and feel like in nineteen fifties Iran, where obviously
this was illegal, And so I recreated those scenes from
(38:48):
my mind, and I think in doing that, I hope
I've given her a little bit of a story back.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
And then there's also the story of her paternal grandmother.
Her father had always been forthcoming about the painful loss
in his childhood and that he didn't grow up with
his mother, but Mary learns there's more to it.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
My father is a great storyteller, and I knew there
was a pretty dramatic story of when he was twelve
years old he had had a baby sister that had
just been born, and his father handed him the baby
and put him in a taxi cab and this is
in Tephron at the time, this is in Iran in
(39:35):
the nineteen forties, and had him go to the police
station and he was instructed to tell the police that
he had found a baby on the sidewalk, even though
it was his baby's sister. He was not allowed to
tell them that. And so over the years, my dad
had sort of shared bits of that story. I mean,
I think he waited until we were old enough to
absorb it, and it was always a very difficult story
(39:57):
for him to tell. You'd become choked up even to
this day telling that story because he lost his sister
that day. It wasn't until I started looking into the
Mehari story that I wanted to understand the background to
why it was he was given his baby sister. And
(40:19):
what he shared with me is that his mother, after
delivering that baby, she had already had signs of depression
sort of his whole childhood. It wasn't a great childhood,
but she experienced very severe postpartum psychosis, and his father
recognized that she was not mentally well or stable to
take care of the children, and she was admitted to
(40:41):
a psychiatric hospital right after she gave birth. And interestingly,
you know, she stayed in the hospital for a while.
And you know, these stories that we hear feel like fiction,
and it's actually our parents' lives. His dad now had
a few children that he didn't know how to take
(41:02):
care of without a mother, and so he went and
remarried rather quickly, while my dad's mother was admitted and
so she didn't have a home to come back to.
So even once she had recovered to the point where
she could leave the hospital, she never returned back to
her own family, and she ended up going and staying
(41:23):
and working and being a nanny for another family. And
my dad never saw his mother again. So both of
my parents were in essence orphaned by their mothers due
to pregnancy related conditions.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
We'll be right back her grandmother, Mary's story off Star's story.
It's all beginning to make sense. Mary's calling, Mary's haunting,
Her family's past and her present are moving closer together
(41:59):
now and create a powerful need for change. Dreams visions
that result in big, bold moves requires some combination of
grace and grit. Mary has both.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
I can say that those of us that work in
reproductive health started becoming increasingly uncomfortable back in twenty fifteen.
We could sort of see what was happening, and you
could predict that there were, you know, mechanisms being put
into place that we're going to slowly and then maybe
rapidly strip away access to reproductive health care and rights
(42:38):
and you know, policies and laws that we took for granted.
And so it was way back then that I started
reimagining the way that we might have to provide care
for women and for anybody that wanted reproductive health care.
The idea that somebody would show up to my practice
as a drug rap and just stalk our shelves with
(42:58):
birth control pills andds. It dawned on me that there
was a really good chance that that might go away.
And I'm an Oregon, and I felt more protected. But
I did start to think about what would happen in
other states, and would there be a way for us
to be able to provide women with care in areas
(43:19):
where they weren't able to receive that kind of care.
It really felt like that care was probably going to
go away, and all of this kreemed into the pandemic
and just a restructuring in general of the way that
healthcare was being provided, and my desire to come up
with a model where we could actually take ourselves where
(43:41):
people needed care, rather than asking people to follow this
very old school model of go to where your doctor is.
No matter where your doctor is, find a way to
get there. And the pandemic sort of accelerated this notion
for me of how little we are doing for people
(44:03):
in communities that have difficulty accessing care. So even those
of us in cities, do you remember the days when
you needed to get a PCR COVID test and you
had to drive to a parking lot and sit in
line and then get a nasal swab out of your car.
And we were doing it sitting next to the sick
(44:25):
family member and putting ourselves at increased risk to get
PCR tested. And then I would look around and the
Amazon trucks and the instacarts were just delivering food and
toys and treats to houses all over my neighborhood. And
I got this notion of you know, what could I
(44:47):
do to provide more mobile care? Is it possible that
we can take ourselves to where people are rather than
asking them to come to us. And I had this
day dream of a mobile clinic, something that would house
an exam room and something where I could take myself
because I know that I can provide excellent specialized obstetric
(45:09):
care and gynecologic care. I could take somebody that is
a medical assistant who also does blood draws. I could
have an ultrasound machine. We could do any kind of
procedure in the back of an RV that I could
do in my office. I knew that we could do that,
and so the seed was planted, and I started by
actually driving around and doing PCR tests in my town
(45:33):
for people, letting them know they could come out onto
their front porches and I could do the swabs, send
them off to a lab, build their insurance, and they
never had to leave their homes. And then it turned
into this full fledged mobile clinic that we've been running
now for four years.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Can you describe the RV and this mobile clinic.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
It's a thirty one foot camper RV purchased at Camping World,
except that I used a hair dryer and a ladder,
and I peeled all those red, white and blue detals
off one winter in order to then be able to
put an actual name of a clinic and a logo
on the outside. But for the first year we didn't
(46:15):
have that, and these incredible patients showed up anyways and
trusted that they were coming to a clinic, because that's
how we advertised ourselves on social media and through our website.
So the way the clinic looks now is you approach it.
It's an RV that has just, you know, a little
(46:38):
bit of signage on the outside, a little bit of
instructions about waiting in your car. We'll text you when
you're ready for you, because we just see one patient
at a time inside and when you step inside for me,
it is this idealized version of how we could be
providing care. We closed the door behind us, we lock
the door. My best friend who's seamstress, made the curtains
(47:01):
on the inside. There's usually some light music playing. There's
the regular couch that you see when you walk into
an RV that's just still there, and our patient sits
on the couch and I like to sit on a
little stool so I'm pretty low to the ground so
we can be face to face. And Laura, my medical assistant,
is seated at the little kitchen table and she just
has her computer there. We have blood draw supplies, We
(47:24):
have a microwave to pop popcorn. We have the sterilization
equipment and all of the medical equipment that I had
in my normal gynecologic office in the back of the RV,
where you would normally have the queen size bed. We
ripped that out and we have an exam bed, and
we have an ultrasound machine, and we have a bathroom
and we have a curtain. And so we start out
(47:46):
into the front and then for anybody that needs an
exam whatever it is we're doing, we move on into
the back and they get undressed and we do exams.
I place iud's, I remove IUDs, I do biopsies, We
do colpaskapies for abbamal pap smears. We do free ultrasounds
for people in their first trimester pregnancy so we can
confirm whether or not they have a healthy first trimester
(48:08):
pregnancy or not. And all of that is being done
in this vehicle that we can pop open, close up,
and drive away. And our locations can be in parking lots.
One of my favorite locations is in a little bit
of more of a rural community where every week we
park in front of a barn. We are on a
(48:29):
country road. If you looked it out of a map,
you would think that you were literally just driving onto
a field. But when you arrive our clinic is there
and we're there to greet you.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
What do the patients who find you? I mean, I
feel my whole body feeling relief that this exists, just
with us talking right. So, how do you experience your
patients differently than in the old setting and who comes
to you.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
When I started telling people that I was going to
do this, there were a lot of questions about who
is going to go see their gynecologist in a parking
lot in an RV. And I didn't have that same
doubt about women being willing to come to a place
(49:21):
once we established that it was a safe place and
it was a place where they were going to receive
care that they could trust. And so when we originally
built the clinic, we made it very clear that we
were providing trauma informed care, that this was a safe
place for people who had possibly experienced medical trauma in
(49:43):
a hospital or clinic setting, or for folks who had
sexual trauma where going to a doctor was excruciating, that
maybe doing it in the different setting would feel safer
to them. I initially thought that the point of the
clinic was to get out into communities that didn't have doctors.
But we're just as busy in our urban centers as
(50:05):
we are in our rural centers because folks who are
neurodivergent who have a hard time accessing large facilities. We
have folks who are coming out as trans and need
gender affirming care. It's very uncomfortable in certain waiting rooms
if this is the first part or the early part
of your process. We have a lot of women who
(50:27):
experience infertility, or maybe they're undergoing a miscarriage, or they've
had multiple miscarriages, and sitting in a traditional obi waiting
room with expectant mothers is really difficult for them as well.
So it's this alternative space where you pull up in
a car and when you walk into that clinic, I
have to say, the clinic becomes your clinic. It becomes
(50:49):
what it is that you need, because we're actually there
to serve that purpose. I think the fact that we
are willing to create something different inspired our patients to
believe that they are a part of something that is
larger than themselves. And I think that if you are
aspirational and you build something aspirational, then you will attract
(51:13):
aspirational people. And so our patients are people who actually
have other choices. A lot of them do, and they
choose to be a part of our community because it
is what we are building. It is what is missing.
We are actually building community, and we're building a new
way of doing things that feels hopeful.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
In her Beautiful book, Mary describes a moment in which,
regarding the work she is doing, a patient asks do
you have a personal motivation? Here's Mary reading her answer.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I paused, hmm, nobody has really asked me that before.
I'm curious, they responded, because there are a lot of
doctors not wanting to provide this care right now. Well,
I started slowly and closed my computer on my lap.
I wanted to make sure I really said this correctly, truthfully.
(52:19):
I can't speak for anybody else, but I know this
much for me. My eyes drifted to the tattoo on
my forearm. My parents left their country in order to
provide me with a life where my autonomy was protected, valued, supported,
even encouraged. I continued, and now another version of me,
(52:41):
the one that would still be there if my parents
hadn't left, is being shot and killed in the streets
for daring to show her hair. I listened to my
own voice. I had never explained this before, this fight
for bodily autonomy. It starts with one person, one torment,
and if we do not stand for that, it spreads
(53:04):
to all of us. I thought for a moment, then continued.
I only recently learned that my grandmother died as a
result of attempting an illegal abortion. She left behind four
young children. How different might things have been for her?
For my family? We are only as free as each
(53:24):
other is free.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acur is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
(54:04):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(54:28):
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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