August 17, 2023 • 48 mins
In this bonus episode, Dani sits down with Pulitzer Prize Winning Writer Jennifer Senior about her latest cover story in The Atlantic - ‘Those We Sent Away’ - which explores her own family secret.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
It is extraordinary what we hide from ourselves, and even
more extraordinary that we once had her, my mother's sister,
and so many like her from everyone. Here are all
these pictures of nonverbal children, so pulsingly alive, their parents,
describing their pleasures, their passions, their strengths and styles and tastes. Well,
(00:28):
I know nothing, absolutely nothing of my aunt's life at all.
She is a thinning shadow, an aging ghost. Strange hosell them.
We think about who our parents were as people before
we made their acquaintance, all the dynamics and influences that
shape them, the defining traumas and triumphs of their early lives,
(00:48):
and show them compassion and understanding as they age. I
was twelve when I learned. My mother and I were
sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what
I would do if I'd ever had a desild. This
provided her with an opening. Her name is Adele.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
That's Jennifer, senior staff writer at the Atlantic. Listeners of
this podcast might remember her from a previous Bonus episode,
in which we discussed her remarkable Atlantic cover story. What
Bobby mcelvain Left Behind, for which she won the twenty
twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Now she's back
to talk about her latest Atlantic cover story, in which
(01:31):
she excavates her own family secret in a piece called
Those We Sent Away. Jennifer had an aunt, her mother's
younger sister, who was sent away to a mental institution
as a young child. This is a story that many
families share, one of hiddenness, shame, and silence that casts
an invisible net over generations. I'm Danny Shapiro and this
(02:05):
is a special bonus episode of family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My first question
is you were twelve when you learned, But if you
look back, was there anything that you felt was there
(02:27):
sort of hovering in the air in your family's home,
or anything that you know, obviously supplying retrospect and knowledge
to this, but still where you would say there was
a sense that there was something that you didn't know.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I have thought about this, and like you said, there
is this huge temptation to sort of assign and reprospect, like, oh, yes,
of course, I was aware of this, and now it
all makes sense. But there are two things that I
wrote about that did, of course lead lock into place,
which was that my grandfather volunteered at the Westchester Association
(03:07):
for Retarded Citizens. They use the word retarded anymore, we
should not, but that's what it was called at the time.
And oh, of course he was trying to parent in
a daily way indirectly. This is all he did every
day of his retirement because his daughter was not living
with him, So that made sense. My grandmother running off
(03:29):
to the local department store and buying Christmas presents when
we were Jewish suddenly made sense because my aunt was
taken to church and every Sunday and only understood Christmas.
I think something else that may have locked into place was, oh,
so my grandparents did want more kids. I knew there
(03:53):
was something sort of unusual about my mom being the
one and only, like there was never any good explanation
for it's very rare to comfort across only baby boomers, right, like,
that's not a thing. And my grandparents were young when
they had her. I guess in Hinze. One thing I
will say is that my mother's perfectionism and her control
(04:18):
and I read about this, but it had some other explanation, right,
that maybe she really did feel this immense pressure to
be good enough for two because her own grandmother very
artlessly said to her one day, you have to be
good enough for two your parents lost a child.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
I was very struck by that detail. Your great grandmother,
who you referred to as you know, she meant well,
I suppose, and had all the subtlety of a light swatter.
And you know, your mother's thirteen years old, and your
great grandmother tells her that she had to be good
enough for two children, smart enough for two children. And
(05:02):
your great grandmother is, on the one hand, telling your
mother something right, which.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Was a gift because my mother was in the dark.
My great grandmother was truly the first person to explain
to her what had happened. Like that was, in some
weird way, its own perverse gift. It wasn't perverse. My
great grandmother leveled with her, and she was the first
person to say, this is what happened. You know, you
have an profoundly retarded sister. That was the terminology of
(05:31):
the day she was institutionalized. It was a family of secrets.
No one came through the front door and said this,
and then she laid this immense burden on her right and.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Also the burden, I mean, your mother was told that
her sister had gone away first to quote unquote walking
school because she was severely delayed in terms of her
ability to walk. And then you know, when is she
coming back? We don't know. And this is very much
something that happened in that time, and you know, you
(06:05):
write about that so beautifully in your story, but writing
about medical professionals saying it's better if people don't know,
the instinct to protect the family, the child from knowledge,
but in fact it's there. Your mother was working over
time to try to figure out where her sister had gone,
(06:27):
what was the age difference between them.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Born after years, I mean nearly five, so.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Your mom was a five year old. There's a baby sister.
That's the most wonderful thing in the whole world. And
as far as your mother was concerned, this was her
sister who she adored and could do no wrong. It
was perfect and there was no reason to think anything otherwise,
because whatever your grandparents were going through was being done
quietly and a kind of you know, keeping it from
(06:53):
keeping it from your mother. You know, keeping it from
the child, which was what happened across the board in
those days, but it will leaves the child in that
situation is not knowing what's up, what's going on, and
sort of attempting to put together pieces of a puzzle.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yes, I mean, And the question is whether it was
even that active. What I wonder about, like, how hard
was she actively trying to piece this together or was
it more like that she walked around in something between
a fog of bewilderment punctuated by stretches of overwhelming pain.
You know, she would sort of because at first, as
(07:33):
you point out, and as I say, you know, she
didn't have any inkling that anything was different about her sister.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
How could she?
Speaker 2 (07:40):
A five year old knows nothing. And for the first
year of my aunt's life, the doctors were insisting, the
pediatrician insisted that nothing was different about her. So it
took an outside pediatrician to even look at my aunt
and bluntly declared to my grandmother that she was and
this is a direct quote, a microcephalitic idiot. Right, My
(08:00):
aunt had just turned about one, and from that moment on,
my grandparents were doing a frantic circuit of all of
the cities specialists trying to figure out what could be done.
But my mother was kept out of this. And all
my mother knew was that there was adorable baby girl
in the playpen in the living room or in the
crib in her parents' bedroom, and that she had special
(08:22):
responsibilities visa her little baby sister. She had to go
in and see if she was napping. She wasn't. She'd
keep my grandmother company as she was making bottles. She
invented games to play with her while she was in
her crib. I mean, what five and a half year
old or six year old or six and a half
year old is going to have any understanding of developmental milestones.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
In a child?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Like they're just not. So this all caught her totally
by surprise when one day my grandparents said, we're taking
Adele toa walking school. But I think for she just went, oh, okay,
walking school.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
I guess that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
But you know, as a month's drag by, and she
keeps saying well when she's coming home, and then as
the years dragged by, and she one day got hysterical
and said, how long can it possibly take for Adele
to learn? How to walk. This was about a year
and a half in and my grandparents, I mean, there
were no books to consult, there was no language for
(09:30):
them to recruit from to explain to my poor mother
what was going on. I didn't look at my mother
and say, how actively were you trying to piece this together?
Like how aggressive were you in your slothing. You know,
my mother every time she mentions it, first of all,
it's very pained, and second of all, there's so much
(09:51):
confusion in her voice when she relives it for me
that it just sounds to me, frankly, like it was very,
very over whelming. And also that she sensed on some
level that asking the question was causing her parents' pain.
And I think she intuited early on that this is
(10:14):
a painful subject and I am going to be a
good kid. I'm not going to create any trouble. I
am going to behave impeccably. And even before my great
great grandmother very clumsily said to her, you have to
be good enough for.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Two, you have to be perfect for two. I think
even before.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
That my mother probably had some sense that she was
going to stand sideways and get.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Out of the way.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Well, I mean, it's fascinating. First of all, what children
are capable of absorbing without necessarily knowing or consciously knowing,
or certainly intellectually knowing. You know, we talk a lot
on this podcast about the phrase psychoanalytic phrase, the unthought known.
(10:59):
You know that with is so dangerous to think that
you never actually think it, but on some deep level
you know it. And you know, you used a phrase
a little while ago, the fog of bewilderment, And you know,
that makes so much sense to me, that fog, and
(11:20):
that's what you're describing in a way. You know, I
don't know, but I would doubt that your mother ever
sort of sat down and had a little talk with
herself at age nine or ten or seven of you know,
I'm going to be a good girl, but she internalized
that memo.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
I think that's right, and I think if you want
to go to the unsought known, the question is like, Okay,
this is my grandparents felt like what they had to
do because it's a source of shame to have a
child like this. Right, it means that either there's something
wrong with your genes, it's some kind of religious punishment, right,
whatever it is, for whatever reasons, and I'll you know,
(12:00):
it's the nineteen fifties. There's some imperative to assimilate. Among Jews,
there was probably a double imperative to assimilate. My guess
is that, like, what did they do? They nailed this
beneath the floorboards, right, So for my own mom, what
was scratching underneath the floorboards of her consciousness? Right? Like
(12:21):
what unthought known was there?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
Right? Like she probably on some level knew something she
had to.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
I mean, she did have other families to compare her
own to. And I just found out from my mother's
first cousin that somebody else in their family was pregnant
and at around the same time as my grandmother. I
(12:51):
wish i'd known this before I wrote the story. It
kind of kills me that I didn't. But someone else
in my family was pregnant at the same time, and
they gave birth the practically at the same time, and
that little girl was born and grew up in a
perfectly kind of typical trajectory, right, hitting all the milestones
and all the beat's never left house. My mother must
have put something together. And at some point the kids
(13:13):
in the neighborhood were gossiping and being cruel and saying
I heard that your sister was at reform school, right, like,
so who knows what kind of I didn't ask her
about the unthought known either. It's funny I was getting
my own cues from my mother about what was safe
to ask.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Truly.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
It's not that I'm not a thorough going, you know,
interlocutor or you know. I asked a lot of questions,
but like I obviously was like being very delicate with
my own mom when I was talking to her.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Well, it makes perfect sense. I mean, it struck me
that there's, first of all, a really kind of uncanny
parallel age wise from when she found out, you know,
and then what I found out and when you yes, yeah,
I mean you were twelve when you learned and you
(14:01):
asked the right question, I mean, or you it wasn't
really a question. You were musing about what you would
ever do if you were to have a disabled child,
and it was like a seam opened, you know, within
your mother at that particular moment, and she just said it.
And that's somewhat different from whatever damn burst in your
(14:24):
great grandmother to have said that to your mother. But
you do find that out at the same age. And
there also is I think that feeling of where there's
great pain in a family, or a child senses that
about a parent, including a grown child sensing that about
a parent. There's this delicacy or this feeling of I
(14:45):
love you and I don't want to cause you pain,
so I'm not going to go there. So, for instance,
when you go with your mother to visit Adele, I
don't think it was the first time that you went,
but the more recent time, because you the more recent
time you were going both as a daughter and a
niece and a reporter. The first time you were that's right,
(15:07):
you were a daughter and a niece and just wanted
to see for yourself what was you.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Know, right, I was only twenty eight, right.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
So but this time you had your recorder on and
one of the things that you note in your piece
is how much silence there was in the car.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Yep, so much.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Silence and also so much I mean I would have said,
like not denial, but God, what would be the right
word deflection? Maybe that's the very various two things to
pull me in on. And it's like the perfect transition
because exactly there I am. We have a ninety minute
(15:49):
car ride, and my mother at any point can be like, wow,
I wonder what this is going to be. Like, I
have not seen her in twenty one years, and I've
only seen her three times ever in my adult life.
You know, my mom went forty years with not seeing
her sister again. She went from age six to age
(16:09):
forty six and then saw her only three times, not
particularly successfully. You know, the visits were awkward. My Anna
was living in a different group home at the time,
so this is a brand new group home, and she's
not wondering a lot about In fact, not only she
not wondering a lot about this, she is talking about
(16:30):
something else entirely. She is telling me all about the
new necklace making project that she is embarked on. And
I am kind of sitting there in disbelief, like, and
my tape recorder is running, and it's not a lot
of like I eventually like turn it off because it's
just like stuff about necklaces.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
It was crazy.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
I only had about fifteen minutes conversation.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
With her about this, right, and so I have always
known and I was very nervous about as seking my
mom whether to do this. Right, Like I said to her,
you don't have to come with me. I just truly
want to meet her. I really want to see her.
I want to write about her. I hope this is okay.
Please don't feel like this because I want to go.
(17:15):
It means that you have to go. I understand that
you have all of these reasons that you have decided
that you are going to. You know, I don't judge
at all, like the kind of decisions you've made around this.
This is like a defining trauma for you as a kid.
But you know, and she's surprised me by being very
open to it and saying, no, let's go, let's go together,
(17:38):
you know, almost like some part of her I thought
wanted it, But then when we got in the car,
I thought, no part of her wants this. I think
she was just this portrait of ambivalence, right, And it
made it made the reporting really us, you know, and
really hard. And I think it's one of the reasons
that like I did it as a reporter, because I
felt emboldened to ask slightly more challenging questions.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
It strikes me that your mother, once she knew as
a thirteen year old, and also once the sort of
whisper campaign that must have always been there, that game
of telephone that happens in suburban neighborhoods or all neighborhoods
or among all people.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
This is Flatbush.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
We're talking about a serious city neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah, yeah, you know. So eventually the kids are cruel
and your mother begins to say to tell people that
she's an only child. And it just strikes me that
the work emotionally and psychologically that had to go into,
you know, like the heartbreak of that this is what
(18:49):
I'm going to say, and this is how I'm going
to live. It is how I'm going to live my
life moving forward, because there didn't really seem to be
any other option. And so then all of these years later,
there she is, you know, in the car driving with you,
and yeah, she's talking about necklaces because it's it's like
(19:12):
the thirteen year old saying I'm an only child. The
degree to which we have to work over time to
put something that won't be easily boxed up in a
box or under the floorboards, as you say, and the
courage that it takes to confront it, which it struck
(19:34):
me reading your piece, and the sort of trajectory emotionally
that your mother goes through. Over the course of the story,
it reaches a point where it is no longer in
any way Adele is not in a box for her anymore.
Adele is not a person with a diagnosis, a person
who was sent away and who isn't able to recognize
(19:58):
her own parents, her own sister. It becomes something else entirely.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Well, my mother said something very interesting to me at
one point, which is that she was led to believe
that Adele was so intellectually compromised that she was essentially
a vegetable. That's almost verbatim what my mother said to me, and.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
So I think.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
It was almost giving her permission to say, I don't
have a sister. My sister is not sentient, you know,
in the way that you can like make the decision, Oh,
if somebody's a vegetable, you know, like end of life care, Like,
why would we want to, you know, sustain some I
mean I really think on some level, that is the
(20:48):
way my mother was trying to think about her, even
though what's fascinating is that she had plenty of evidence
to the contrary. She saw this little girl who was
scooching or out in her own platepen following her when
my mother, you know, well, as my mother shouted here,
baby Adele would scooch to different corners of the crib
(21:10):
and smile or acknowledge her. So Adele was plenty interactive,
or certainly interactive enough, but yet at some point she
allowed that story, a different story to kind of become
the story. And my god, I don't think she was
(21:31):
a thirteen year old.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
When she told people she was an only child.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I think it was starting from the time she was
like six and a half or seven, her her sister
gets sent away, and I having being completely bewildered by
it when people started asking, she just said, I'm an
only child because no one else was in the house.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
And my suspicion is.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
That my grandparents encouraged her to say it. You know,
the only question if somebody asked me this recently, and
I was embarrassed to not know the answer, it was
a great question. I can't believe I didn't think to
ask my mother. In my grandmother's obituary, how many kids
says it say she has? And my grandmother was not
(22:13):
a person of any note.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
I'm sure the.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Obituary that ran was the little squib that you paid
for right in the New York Times or in the
local paper. And I'm sure my mom paid for the squib,
and it would have been my mom who was in charge.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
And the question is what decision would my mom would
have made? Would have made?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Would She has said that my grandmother had one kid
or two And I sat there, like completely unable to
answer that question. For the life of me, I could
not tell you. Years ago when she saw her sister
with her mother when she was already in her forties,
and it was like the first time she saw her
(22:51):
sister as an adult. Forty years later, she came home
and she wrote like this little mini essay for herself,
was saying, I have a sister. And I asked her,
why did you write that?
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Because it was almost like this sense of unreality and
you just wanted to make it real. And she said,
I wanted to admit it to myself. This is some
secret that I had been hiding for all these years.
She used the word admit, which I think is so fascinating,
you know, like it was a confession of some kind.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
To herself in a way. I mean the tagline for
this show is the secrets we keep, the secrets sircut
from us, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. And
I always find the most fascinating, strange, uncanny, resonant kind
of secrets, the ones that we are somehow able to
(23:44):
keep from ourselves until we no longer can.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
That was what she did. I mean, she had this
clan DestinE sibling, you know, and it was she she
was keeping this knowledge from herself.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
I think on some.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Level in order to function. I mean, I think it
must have been too hard to process otherwise. But she
told me something very interesting that I had for a
long time in my story and then ultimately cut because
she was so ambivalent about it. But for your show,
and for you, just because you're so psychoanalytically inclined, you'll
find this whole internal debate that she had about it fascinating.
(24:21):
She said to me that when she was in psychoanalysis
in her early twenties, my mom, her psychoanalyst, said to her,
do you think that as a child you walked around
in terror that if you did anything wrong you would
also be sent away, that you would also be sent
(24:41):
to the equivalent of walking school. If your grades weren't
good enough, or if you didn't hit a particular milestone,
if you were clumsy in sports, if you were this
for you or that, you know, would you have been
sent away? And I grew up with my mother telling
me that she believed this, that she thought and like
if she wasn't good enough, she'd be sent away. That
(25:02):
she labored under this misapprehension. And I brought this up
with her in the car and she said, oh, you
know what, I think. I think my shrink was wrong
about that. I think my psychoanalyst is wrong. I don't
really think so. I don't think I was a perfectionist
for that reason. It probably had much more to do
with like what nanny said to me. You know that
she told me that I'd be good enough for two
(25:22):
But I don't think I ever really feared that I'd
be sent away. But maybe her psychoanalyst was right. I mean,
I don't know. You know, my mother is clearly not sure.
At some point when I was younger, that was the
story I was told by her, but she recantidate when I,
you know, asked her in the car. She had that
(25:44):
she thought that her psychoanalyst's hypothesis was right, and she
didn't even present it to me was when I was
a young woman as her psychoanalyst's hypothesis. She said, so,
you know, I had this sister who was sent away,
and so I was definitely afraid when I was a
kid that if I did anything wrong, I would be
sent away. And when I brought this up there in
the car, she said, well, I'm not sure that's true.
(26:06):
It was my psychoanalyst who came up with this as
an idea, and I think you just put it in
my head and it sounded very tidy, and it sounded
very plausible. But you want to know what, I'm not
sure it's right.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
I mean, in the absence of, you know, actual fact
checkable knowledge, these are narratives that we can supply right.
So for a period of time in her life, that
was the narrative she supplied correct, and then later in
her life it became no, I don't think. I don't
think that was it, which seems very right to me
(26:38):
in terms of the way that our stories and our
memories and our relationship to whatever the you know, to
whatever is at hand shifts and changes over the course
of our lives. Absolutely This was, from the standpoint of
what we understand today, just shockingly common in the nineteen forties,
(26:59):
prop nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties if a family had a
child who was severely disabled intellectually, you know, and or physically,
that they would be sent away and there were and
never spoken of again and erased. And there were famous
examples of people who did this, ranging from the Kennedys
(27:23):
to Arthur Miller and pearlss Buck. This was what was
considered the thing that you did. And some families dealt
with that as a secret differently than others, or the
secret sort of comes out in certain I mean Miller
never wanted to write about it, would never wanted to
(27:44):
talk about it.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
It was never visited.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
And never visited. And pearlss Buck ends up writing about
it in her memoir. She writes, I felt as though
I were bleeding inwardly and desperately. So Buck faces head
on at a certain point, just the absolute agony of
you know, what it is to institutionalize a child, and
(28:09):
so it ranges. But I think what all of the
families of that time of sort of post war America,
and as you say, the shame of having a child
who is severely disabled. There's just this feeling that this
is what you do, and the doctors and their white
(28:30):
coats and their certainty, and the way that doctors were
seen at that time as being god like. So one
of the things that I'm wondering about your piece begins
with your husband telling you to read this tweet that
went viral. And the tweet is by someone who he
writes about his son, who is his twenty fifth birthday.
(28:51):
He's never said a word in his life, but has
taught me so much more than I've ever taught him.
And this tweet goes viral and your husband points out
to you, and you're scrolling through and you're reading some stuff,
but it doesn't occur to you right away why you're
going down the rabbit hole other than wow, this is
really interesting that this tweet went viral. And I find
(29:13):
that so fascinating that it took you a bit right
to realize why your husband had pointed out that tweet
to you and why you were immersed in the story.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
So one important thing to point out the reason that
went viral is because there was a lot to read
in response to the tweet. What happened was that tweet
unleashed this outpouring from parents all over the world of
pictures of their own nonverbal or minimally verbal children, so
(29:48):
that what I was scrolling through was picture after picture
after picture of these beautiful kids, some young, some old,
some full fledged adults, whether much older parents or their siblings.
And some were joyous and some were goofy, and some
were silly, and some were serious, and some were bad
(30:09):
as I mean.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
It really ranged these pictures, but.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
What they all had in common is that, like, the
kids were all super characterful, right, they were all just
these pulsingly alive portraits. And yeah, it is weird because,
like everyone in my family, I had been trained to
sort of not think about this. It took me about
(30:33):
a half an hour of scrolling before I went, oh,
my god, there is somebody in my family who meets
this exact description. And the difference is that I don't
know her, and I don't have a single picture of
her nothing, and there's been no pictures that I've ever
seen for her. And in fact, when we had to
find art for this story, you know, the art department
(30:55):
was saying, do you have any pictures of her from
when she was a baby? Or anything. My mother didn't
think she had a single picture of Adele and lo
and behold there was one of my grandparents and her,
and it's in the story.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
It's the only thing there.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah, I've been staring. I've been staring at it while
we're talking.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and like, what's so interesting
about it is like my grandmother looks so impeccably turned out.
She's got her you know, her Sunday best on. I mean,
she's got the hat and the nylons and the lipstick,
you know, and my my and her and my grandfather
was very happy and relaxed with you know, Adele in
the middle. And uh, what you were saying.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
Too about that wide range.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
I mean my grandparents visited her every weekend. They they
didn't just sort of send her away. My my grandparents
had fallen in love with their child and were shattered
to be told that the best thing for her was
to be put, you know, in an institution that was
and and the justification was always it's not just that
(31:57):
it wasn't just that it was best for your family,
that it was best for the remaining sibling, which looking
at my mother, I mean it would have been very
hard to have somebody like a Dell around. But I
don't know whether it was best for her. I think
an open question. There certainly wasn't the infrastructure to sort
of take care of Adele. Would have taken a lot
(32:17):
of work on the part of the family, and they
didn't have any money. They couldn't have had sourced this
but her care. You know, they couldn't have had Brown
Mclock custodial care, which Adele may have needed. But they
also said that it was best for Adele, which it
most certainly was not. This was this like gothic mansion
of horrors. I mean, it was terrible Willowbrook where she
was ultimately institutionalized. But if you're going to look at
(32:41):
the broad spectrum of like people in denial, you know,
who never saw their kids and never talked about them,
like Arthur Miller, to people like Pearls Buck, who very
bravely wrote about their children. And by the way, her memoir,
she wrote a whole memoir that was just about that.
It wasn't a memoir about her life. She wrote a
memoir only about having a child. It was about that
(33:02):
called the child who Never grew, and it was about
the pain of institutionalizing her, which and she waited until
she was nine nine, and when she was in Japan,
everybody thought, like, what, you're gonna put her in an institution.
Nobody there did that. Americans did that. Americans did that.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's a whole other subject. I
mean that makes me wonder about the nature of how
we how we think of family, or how we think
of generations.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And we'll we do it with very elderly, right, I mean,
we do it with it. I mean it's terrible.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
There's a wonderful photograph in your piece, just amazing, of
your mother and Adele on the day of that visit,
not the nineteen ninety three visit, but the visit when
(33:59):
you're starting to report this piece in.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
Your mother has she has an n ninety five mask
that she's pulled down so that you can see her face,
and she and Adele are standing together, and on the
one hand, they couldn't look more different. Adella is much smaller,
and your mother looks like she could walk, you know,
out the door and straight into you know, lunch at
you know, a lovely restaurant and Adele doesn't. But they're
(34:26):
both wearing red sweaters, and they're both wearing the aforementioned
beaded necklaces because each of them has gotten into beating.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
At the exact same time, Yeah, at the.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Exact same time in their lives. And there also are
so many other similarities between them. They both needle point,
they both are neat freaks, they're both musical, and all
of this kind of keeps on merging. What did that
feel like for you during that visit? You know, on
(35:05):
the one hand, you have your your reporter's hat on,
and at the same time you are a daughter and
a niece and a member of a family who is
experiencing this kind of amazing moment.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, I nearly died. I mean, do you remember that
very famous New Yorker story about twins and they were
looking for the first time. I think it's the Minnesota
Twins study where they were looking at trying to string
a part nature and nurture and looking at twins who'd
been separated, and there were all these stories of like,
you know, brothers who hadn't seen each other for forty years,
(35:43):
and identical twins and they'd meet up and they would
both be wearing yellow eyes odd shirts, and they both
had ex wives named Gail. And you know, I mean,
I'm making this up, but you know, nutty stuff like that.
I felt a little bit like I was looking at that.
Also that those darn necklaces, which were like the bane
of my car ride, Like moms stopped talking about the
(36:03):
necklaces suddenly, that it becomes like the most salient thing
because there is Adele wearing a necklace that she's made,
while my mother has a necklace.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
That she's made.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And the first thing that we get, we're shown in
her bedroom is like the drawer full of all the
necklaces she's recently been making, you know, and that's a
photo illustration in the magazine. I mean, it kind of
blew my doors off, you know. I couldn't believe what
I was staring at, and that they both were wearing
these this bright red The thing that really killed me though,
(36:35):
was that they're both musical, Like it would be okay,
you know, my grandfather was in the Greek Club. There's
a story about him, like having been in the same
Greek club as like Frank Sinatra, you know, like okay,
so they're musical, right, Like, maybe that's in the family.
Maybe there's like some kind of constellation of jeans that
coach for that sort of thing, even like being you know,
fuxing with your hands, needle pointing and making necklaces. Even
(36:59):
that I kind of grock. But the fact that they
are neat freaks. Like, on the one hand, I was like, Okay,
So I always assume that my mom was highly controlled
because she had been traumatized and as a consequence, you know,
she deeply traumatized.
Speaker 4 (37:20):
As a kid, her sister gets.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Spirited away, no explanation, it's not discussed, and my mother
makes some unconscious decision for the rest of her life
that she is going to control everything within her power. Right,
And then they meet Adele, and Adele wants to control
everything within her power. And not only that, but they
are controlling everything in the exact same way. It all
(37:43):
revolves around the kitchen. If you get up to try
and clear the dishes and bring them into the kitchen,
my mother will like rush you out of the kitchen
because she is the only one who knows how to
load the dishwasher, and she is the only one who
knows where things go. If you try and make a salad,
she will start instructing you about the oward away to
cut cherry tomatoes. My mother has like really fixed ideas
(38:05):
about cherry tomatoes, you know, like she's got a cherry
tomato philosophy. And you know, I mean so and that
is Adele. You know, like glasses have to face a
certain way, right, like just everything nothing can be out
of place. She gets very agitated things are like not
just so. And I thought, what is there like a
protein coating for this, Like what is going on? And
(38:29):
I thought, Okay, it must just be like it must
just run in the family, right, even though I don't
remember my grandmother or my grandfather particularly being this way.
And then the daughter of the woman who was like
the mama bear in the house where Adele lived. And
so the daughter says to me one day, she knows
(38:50):
Adele very well, right, she knows all the residents of
the house very well, she says to me, because I'm
telling her, like it's so weird that they're both me
pretty excited to assume that my mom was like a
need free because she was born of trauma. This is
a trauma related trait. And the daughter says to me, well,
how do you know that Adele wasn't traumatized? Maybe it's
(39:10):
born of the exact same thing. And I sat there
in Chasten's silence for like eight seconds. You can just
hear eight seconds of nothing on my table order, right,
like just me going oh yeah, oh my god. You know,
because of course I am sure that all of those
(39:30):
years of living in these hellish institutions, right, I mean,
she lived in Willowbrook, which was exposed by Heraldo Rivera
in They're in nineteen seventy two as being just and
RFK visited it in sixty five and called it a
hell hole. It was just this horrible place, people walking
(39:52):
and wailing, naked on the floor, all everybody understimulated. It's
reeked of urine and feces. Not only unhygienic, there was
just it wasn't a school. It was built as a school,
it wasn't a school. There was nothing there and nothing
for the reason it's to play with, nothing for them
to do all day and only two you know attendants
(40:13):
per you know floor for like you know, one person
for eighty people or fifty people. You know, they were
force fed quickly. I mean it was just there was ghastly, ghastly,
and then my aunt was moved from there to a
different institution and it was just as bad and just
as grim And that's where my aunt lived. And I
(40:34):
don't know what I mean. In addition to just being
underloved and underprotected and understimulated, she may have been physically abused.
She may have been sexually abused.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
I mean, we don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
We know nothing. She can't explain it or convey it.
All we know is that every so often my aunt
would say stop that you're hurting me. She would scream it.
And they thought all the doctors were training her thought, well,
she must be psychotic, this is some kind of auditory hallucination.
But why wasn't that just PDSD. Why wasn't she just
(41:09):
re experiencing trauma? You know, who knows. I mean, maybe
she was just having like a horrific memory.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
When she shouted stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
These similarities between my mom, like the meat nick stuff,
the control stuff, it might just be trauma related stuff.
I mean, you know, I'm not a need nick. I mean,
you know, I'm like the Oscar Madison to my mother's Felix.
And by the way, just talking about the generational stuff
(41:40):
people were sent away.
Speaker 4 (41:41):
Right through the.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Seventies, this continued, This just kept on going. It really
wasn't until the eighties that people would even countenance the
idea of keeping neurodiverse kids at home, and that the
infrastructure first kind of became available where you know, day
programs were available and where I don't know. I think
it was probably in the nineties that kids were mainstreamed
(42:04):
into public schools. The public schools started taking them. I
don't know when, but at some point the states started
providing free occupational therapy and physical therapy and speak therapy.
It took a long time for you know, anything like
the infrastructure.
Speaker 4 (42:21):
To be born.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
No, it's one of the ways I can count on
one hand one of the ways that our world has improved.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Now.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
I really want people to read your piece and not
to tell the whole story of it. But there were
no diagnoses. There was no sense that there could be
or should be diagnoses. It was like one big basket
of a catch all for beyond hope, beyond redemption or
difficult right.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah, like like you know, filled with some kind of
panic or anger that can't be expressed right, something.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Right, and that needs to be managed by sedation and
by sort of these extreme measures that make any kind
of real developmental progress absolutely impossible. You know, And a
really moving part of your story is that it occurs
(43:20):
to you that you might be able to get an
answer to what in fact was responsible, what mutation, what
genetic mutation, what condition was responsible for Adele's being, you know,
as as developmentally impaired as she was. You do find
(43:40):
out that she has a very very rare genetic mutation.
And at the time you discover this, there are only
twelve people on record who have been diagnosed with this,
and then you know, over the course of even just
your reporting this piece, there start to be more people
diagnosed with it. The condition is called Coffin Cyrus syndrome twelve.
(44:03):
And then you do something that I found so moving
and so fascinating, which is you want to meet a kid,
you know, someone growing up today, someone being raised in
a very very as different from the way that Adele
spent her life as is imaginable, and just see what
(44:28):
the difference might be if a child is raised with
all of the possible interventions and therapies at her disposal.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
That's right, and it was positively bittersweet.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, well that's the thing, Jen, I mean, there was
this moment that was just like guided me, which was
after you've met this girl and her family, her mother.
There's this line in your piece, which is I thank
Grace and Emma for the gifts and head out to
my rental car. I'd last maybe thirty seconds before losing it.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
This little girl was just outside Kansas City and her
parents adopted her. They had fostered her originally and then
decided to adopt her. They'd fallen in love. My grandparents
had fallen in love and done the opposite. They'd given
their little girl away. And what is amazing is they
(45:27):
hand me these presents and then Emma gives me a
picture for me to give to my aunt and her mother,
who's just this force of nature, looks at Emma and says,
do you remember why you drew this picture for Jennifer?
Speaker 4 (45:41):
Do you remember why you drew a picture for her aunt?
Speaker 2 (45:45):
And Emma, who, of course, because she's benefited from all
of these early interventions, can speak in full sentences unlike
my aunt. And she says, oh, yes, it's because her
her aunt has trouble in school like me and her
(46:05):
mother says, that's right, and she says, do you know
what your what her aunt has? And what I thought
she was going to say was she has coffin cyrus
syndrome twelve, just like you. And that's not what her
mother said. What her mother said was she also has
(46:26):
parents who couldn't take care of her, but found to
her a place where someone else can take care of her,
just like you. And I just thought, but my grandparents
could have taken care of her if they had all
the same resources at their disposal. Not only could they have,
they would have desperately wanted to, because they, like pearl
(46:49):
as Buck, were waiting inwardly and desperately. But they had
no choice. They had to give her away. And they
were being told to for the good of the baby,
for the good of my mother, for the good of
the whole family, by all of these authoritative, granite fased doctors.
And here is my grandma, a working class woman, no
college education, who just swallows hard and says, okay, I
(47:14):
mean it just killed me. It just it broke me
into a thousand pieces. I mean I just sat in
the car and started the ball, you know, I mean
it was so hard, I mean and too. It's credit,
you know. I told my editor about it. I told
him about the moment, and he cut me off before
I even finished it, and he said, how long did
you last before you burst into tears? How unfair is
(47:36):
all of this?
Speaker 4 (47:36):
You know?
Speaker 2 (47:37):
You just you weep for everyone involved, for my aunt,
for my mom, for my grandparents. We are no longer year.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Jen, thanks so much. This has been a really remarkable
and powerful conversation.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
I feel the same way.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
I just feel so lucky to have somebody like you
asking me questions. This kind of conversation is just so
different from me any kind of conversation I have had
or will have with anyone else. So just thanks for
this project.
Speaker 4 (48:07):
I feel like it's a gift.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
You know, it's a big g.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
This was a special bonus episode of Family Secrets. As
we work on the next season, which will drop in
early November, keep an eye and an ear out for
more special bonus content. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
It is extraordinary what we hide from ourselves, and even
more extraordinary that we once had her, my mother's sister,
and so many like her from everyone. Here are all
these pictures of nonverbal children, so pulsingly alive, their parents,
describing their pleasures, their passions, their strengths and styles and tastes. Well,
(00:28):
I know nothing, absolutely nothing of my aunt's life at all.
She is a thinning shadow, an aging ghost. Strange hosell them.
We think about who our parents were as people before
we made their acquaintance, all the dynamics and influences that
shape them, the defining traumas and triumphs of their early lives,
(00:48):
and show them compassion and understanding as they age. I
was twelve when I learned. My mother and I were
sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what
I would do if I'd ever had a desild. This
provided her with an opening. Her name is Adele.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
That's Jennifer, senior staff writer at the Atlantic. Listeners of
this podcast might remember her from a previous Bonus episode,
in which we discussed her remarkable Atlantic cover story. What
Bobby mcelvain Left Behind, for which she won the twenty
twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Now she's back
to talk about her latest Atlantic cover story, in which
(01:31):
she excavates her own family secret in a piece called
Those We Sent Away. Jennifer had an aunt, her mother's
younger sister, who was sent away to a mental institution
as a young child. This is a story that many
families share, one of hiddenness, shame, and silence that casts
an invisible net over generations. I'm Danny Shapiro and this
(02:05):
is a special bonus episode of family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My first question
is you were twelve when you learned, But if you
look back, was there anything that you felt was there
(02:27):
sort of hovering in the air in your family's home,
or anything that you know, obviously supplying retrospect and knowledge
to this, but still where you would say there was
a sense that there was something that you didn't know.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I have thought about this, and like you said, there
is this huge temptation to sort of assign and reprospect, like, oh, yes,
of course, I was aware of this, and now it
all makes sense. But there are two things that I
wrote about that did, of course lead lock into place,
which was that my grandfather volunteered at the Westchester Association
(03:07):
for Retarded Citizens. They use the word retarded anymore, we
should not, but that's what it was called at the time.
And oh, of course he was trying to parent in
a daily way indirectly. This is all he did every
day of his retirement because his daughter was not living
with him, So that made sense. My grandmother running off
(03:29):
to the local department store and buying Christmas presents when
we were Jewish suddenly made sense because my aunt was
taken to church and every Sunday and only understood Christmas.
I think something else that may have locked into place was, oh,
so my grandparents did want more kids. I knew there
(03:53):
was something sort of unusual about my mom being the
one and only, like there was never any good explanation
for it's very rare to comfort across only baby boomers, right, like,
that's not a thing. And my grandparents were young when
they had her. I guess in Hinze. One thing I
will say is that my mother's perfectionism and her control
(04:18):
and I read about this, but it had some other explanation, right,
that maybe she really did feel this immense pressure to
be good enough for two because her own grandmother very
artlessly said to her one day, you have to be
good enough for two your parents lost a child.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
I was very struck by that detail. Your great grandmother,
who you referred to as you know, she meant well,
I suppose, and had all the subtlety of a light swatter.
And you know, your mother's thirteen years old, and your
great grandmother tells her that she had to be good
enough for two children, smart enough for two children. And
(05:02):
your great grandmother is, on the one hand, telling your
mother something right, which.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Was a gift because my mother was in the dark.
My great grandmother was truly the first person to explain
to her what had happened. Like that was, in some
weird way, its own perverse gift. It wasn't perverse. My
great grandmother leveled with her, and she was the first
person to say, this is what happened. You know, you
have an profoundly retarded sister. That was the terminology of
(05:31):
the day she was institutionalized. It was a family of secrets.
No one came through the front door and said this,
and then she laid this immense burden on her right and.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Also the burden, I mean, your mother was told that
her sister had gone away first to quote unquote walking
school because she was severely delayed in terms of her
ability to walk. And then you know, when is she
coming back? We don't know. And this is very much
something that happened in that time, and you know, you
(06:05):
write about that so beautifully in your story, but writing
about medical professionals saying it's better if people don't know,
the instinct to protect the family, the child from knowledge,
but in fact it's there. Your mother was working over
time to try to figure out where her sister had gone,
(06:27):
what was the age difference between them.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Born after years, I mean nearly five, so.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Your mom was a five year old. There's a baby sister.
That's the most wonderful thing in the whole world. And
as far as your mother was concerned, this was her
sister who she adored and could do no wrong. It
was perfect and there was no reason to think anything otherwise,
because whatever your grandparents were going through was being done
quietly and a kind of you know, keeping it from
(06:53):
keeping it from your mother. You know, keeping it from
the child, which was what happened across the board in
those days, but it will leaves the child in that
situation is not knowing what's up, what's going on, and
sort of attempting to put together pieces of a puzzle.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yes, I mean, And the question is whether it was
even that active. What I wonder about, like, how hard
was she actively trying to piece this together or was
it more like that she walked around in something between
a fog of bewilderment punctuated by stretches of overwhelming pain.
You know, she would sort of because at first, as
(07:33):
you point out, and as I say, you know, she
didn't have any inkling that anything was different about her sister.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
How could she?
Speaker 2 (07:40):
A five year old knows nothing. And for the first
year of my aunt's life, the doctors were insisting, the
pediatrician insisted that nothing was different about her. So it
took an outside pediatrician to even look at my aunt
and bluntly declared to my grandmother that she was and
this is a direct quote, a microcephalitic idiot. Right, My
(08:00):
aunt had just turned about one, and from that moment on,
my grandparents were doing a frantic circuit of all of
the cities specialists trying to figure out what could be done.
But my mother was kept out of this. And all
my mother knew was that there was adorable baby girl
in the playpen in the living room or in the
crib in her parents' bedroom, and that she had special
(08:22):
responsibilities visa her little baby sister. She had to go
in and see if she was napping. She wasn't. She'd
keep my grandmother company as she was making bottles. She
invented games to play with her while she was in
her crib. I mean, what five and a half year
old or six year old or six and a half
year old is going to have any understanding of developmental milestones.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
In a child?
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Like they're just not. So this all caught her totally
by surprise when one day my grandparents said, we're taking
Adele toa walking school. But I think for she just went, oh, okay,
walking school.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
I guess that's the thing.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
But you know, as a month's drag by, and she
keeps saying well when she's coming home, and then as
the years dragged by, and she one day got hysterical
and said, how long can it possibly take for Adele
to learn? How to walk. This was about a year
and a half in and my grandparents, I mean, there
were no books to consult, there was no language for
(09:30):
them to recruit from to explain to my poor mother
what was going on. I didn't look at my mother
and say, how actively were you trying to piece this together?
Like how aggressive were you in your slothing. You know,
my mother every time she mentions it, first of all,
it's very pained, and second of all, there's so much
(09:51):
confusion in her voice when she relives it for me
that it just sounds to me, frankly, like it was very,
very over whelming. And also that she sensed on some
level that asking the question was causing her parents' pain.
And I think she intuited early on that this is
(10:14):
a painful subject and I am going to be a
good kid. I'm not going to create any trouble. I
am going to behave impeccably. And even before my great
great grandmother very clumsily said to her, you have to
be good enough for.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Two, you have to be perfect for two. I think
even before.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
That my mother probably had some sense that she was
going to stand sideways and get.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Out of the way.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Well, I mean, it's fascinating. First of all, what children
are capable of absorbing without necessarily knowing or consciously knowing,
or certainly intellectually knowing. You know, we talk a lot
on this podcast about the phrase psychoanalytic phrase, the unthought known.
(10:59):
You know that with is so dangerous to think that
you never actually think it, but on some deep level
you know it. And you know, you used a phrase
a little while ago, the fog of bewilderment, And you know,
that makes so much sense to me, that fog, and
(11:20):
that's what you're describing in a way. You know, I
don't know, but I would doubt that your mother ever
sort of sat down and had a little talk with
herself at age nine or ten or seven of you know,
I'm going to be a good girl, but she internalized
that memo.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
I think that's right, and I think if you want
to go to the unsought known, the question is like, Okay,
this is my grandparents felt like what they had to
do because it's a source of shame to have a
child like this. Right, it means that either there's something
wrong with your genes, it's some kind of religious punishment, right,
whatever it is, for whatever reasons, and I'll you know,
(12:00):
it's the nineteen fifties. There's some imperative to assimilate. Among Jews,
there was probably a double imperative to assimilate. My guess
is that, like, what did they do? They nailed this
beneath the floorboards, right, So for my own mom, what
was scratching underneath the floorboards of her consciousness? Right? Like
(12:21):
what unthought known was there?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
Right? Like she probably on some level knew something she
had to.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
I mean, she did have other families to compare her
own to. And I just found out from my mother's
first cousin that somebody else in their family was pregnant
and at around the same time as my grandmother. I
(12:51):
wish i'd known this before I wrote the story. It
kind of kills me that I didn't. But someone else
in my family was pregnant at the same time, and
they gave birth the practically at the same time, and
that little girl was born and grew up in a
perfectly kind of typical trajectory, right, hitting all the milestones
and all the beat's never left house. My mother must
have put something together. And at some point the kids
(13:13):
in the neighborhood were gossiping and being cruel and saying
I heard that your sister was at reform school, right, like,
so who knows what kind of I didn't ask her
about the unthought known either. It's funny I was getting
my own cues from my mother about what was safe
to ask.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
Truly.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
It's not that I'm not a thorough going, you know,
interlocutor or you know. I asked a lot of questions,
but like I obviously was like being very delicate with
my own mom when I was talking to her.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Well, it makes perfect sense. I mean, it struck me
that there's, first of all, a really kind of uncanny
parallel age wise from when she found out, you know,
and then what I found out and when you yes, yeah,
I mean you were twelve when you learned and you
(14:01):
asked the right question, I mean, or you it wasn't
really a question. You were musing about what you would
ever do if you were to have a disabled child,
and it was like a seam opened, you know, within
your mother at that particular moment, and she just said it.
And that's somewhat different from whatever damn burst in your
(14:24):
great grandmother to have said that to your mother. But
you do find that out at the same age. And
there also is I think that feeling of where there's
great pain in a family, or a child senses that
about a parent, including a grown child sensing that about
a parent. There's this delicacy or this feeling of I
(14:45):
love you and I don't want to cause you pain,
so I'm not going to go there. So, for instance,
when you go with your mother to visit Adele, I
don't think it was the first time that you went,
but the more recent time, because you the more recent
time you were going both as a daughter and a
niece and a reporter. The first time you were that's right,
(15:07):
you were a daughter and a niece and just wanted
to see for yourself what was you.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Know, right, I was only twenty eight, right.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
So but this time you had your recorder on and
one of the things that you note in your piece
is how much silence there was in the car.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Yep, so much.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Silence and also so much I mean I would have said,
like not denial, but God, what would be the right
word deflection? Maybe that's the very various two things to
pull me in on. And it's like the perfect transition
because exactly there I am. We have a ninety minute
(15:49):
car ride, and my mother at any point can be like, wow,
I wonder what this is going to be. Like, I
have not seen her in twenty one years, and I've
only seen her three times ever in my adult life.
You know, my mom went forty years with not seeing
her sister again. She went from age six to age
(16:09):
forty six and then saw her only three times, not
particularly successfully. You know, the visits were awkward. My Anna
was living in a different group home at the time,
so this is a brand new group home, and she's
not wondering a lot about In fact, not only she
not wondering a lot about this, she is talking about
(16:30):
something else entirely. She is telling me all about the
new necklace making project that she is embarked on. And
I am kind of sitting there in disbelief, like, and
my tape recorder is running, and it's not a lot
of like I eventually like turn it off because it's
just like stuff about necklaces.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
It was crazy.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
I only had about fifteen minutes conversation.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
With her about this, right, and so I have always
known and I was very nervous about as seking my
mom whether to do this. Right, Like I said to her,
you don't have to come with me. I just truly
want to meet her. I really want to see her.
I want to write about her. I hope this is okay.
Please don't feel like this because I want to go.
(17:15):
It means that you have to go. I understand that
you have all of these reasons that you have decided
that you are going to. You know, I don't judge
at all, like the kind of decisions you've made around this.
This is like a defining trauma for you as a kid.
But you know, and she's surprised me by being very
open to it and saying, no, let's go, let's go together,
(17:38):
you know, almost like some part of her I thought
wanted it, But then when we got in the car,
I thought, no part of her wants this. I think
she was just this portrait of ambivalence, right, And it
made it made the reporting really us, you know, and
really hard. And I think it's one of the reasons
that like I did it as a reporter, because I
felt emboldened to ask slightly more challenging questions.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
It strikes me that your mother, once she knew as
a thirteen year old, and also once the sort of
whisper campaign that must have always been there, that game
of telephone that happens in suburban neighborhoods or all neighborhoods
or among all people.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
This is Flatbush.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
We're talking about a serious city neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah, yeah, you know. So eventually the kids are cruel
and your mother begins to say to tell people that
she's an only child. And it just strikes me that
the work emotionally and psychologically that had to go into,
you know, like the heartbreak of that this is what
(18:49):
I'm going to say, and this is how I'm going
to live. It is how I'm going to live my
life moving forward, because there didn't really seem to be
any other option. And so then all of these years later,
there she is, you know, in the car driving with you,
and yeah, she's talking about necklaces because it's it's like
(19:12):
the thirteen year old saying I'm an only child. The
degree to which we have to work over time to
put something that won't be easily boxed up in a
box or under the floorboards, as you say, and the
courage that it takes to confront it, which it struck
(19:34):
me reading your piece, and the sort of trajectory emotionally
that your mother goes through. Over the course of the story,
it reaches a point where it is no longer in
any way Adele is not in a box for her anymore.
Adele is not a person with a diagnosis, a person
who was sent away and who isn't able to recognize
(19:58):
her own parents, her own sister. It becomes something else entirely.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Well, my mother said something very interesting to me at
one point, which is that she was led to believe
that Adele was so intellectually compromised that she was essentially
a vegetable. That's almost verbatim what my mother said to me, and.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
So I think.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
It was almost giving her permission to say, I don't
have a sister. My sister is not sentient, you know,
in the way that you can like make the decision, Oh,
if somebody's a vegetable, you know, like end of life care, Like,
why would we want to, you know, sustain some I
mean I really think on some level, that is the
(20:48):
way my mother was trying to think about her, even
though what's fascinating is that she had plenty of evidence
to the contrary. She saw this little girl who was
scooching or out in her own platepen following her when
my mother, you know, well, as my mother shouted here,
baby Adele would scooch to different corners of the crib
(21:10):
and smile or acknowledge her. So Adele was plenty interactive,
or certainly interactive enough, but yet at some point she
allowed that story, a different story to kind of become
the story. And my god, I don't think she was
(21:31):
a thirteen year old.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
When she told people she was an only child.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I think it was starting from the time she was
like six and a half or seven, her her sister
gets sent away, and I having being completely bewildered by
it when people started asking, she just said, I'm an
only child because no one else was in the house.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
And my suspicion is.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
That my grandparents encouraged her to say it. You know,
the only question if somebody asked me this recently, and
I was embarrassed to not know the answer, it was
a great question. I can't believe I didn't think to
ask my mother. In my grandmother's obituary, how many kids
says it say she has? And my grandmother was not
(22:13):
a person of any note.
Speaker 4 (22:14):
I'm sure the.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Obituary that ran was the little squib that you paid
for right in the New York Times or in the
local paper. And I'm sure my mom paid for the squib,
and it would have been my mom who was in charge.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
And the question is what decision would my mom would
have made? Would have made?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Would She has said that my grandmother had one kid
or two And I sat there, like completely unable to
answer that question. For the life of me, I could
not tell you. Years ago when she saw her sister
with her mother when she was already in her forties,
and it was like the first time she saw her
(22:51):
sister as an adult. Forty years later, she came home
and she wrote like this little mini essay for herself,
was saying, I have a sister. And I asked her,
why did you write that?
Speaker 4 (23:04):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Because it was almost like this sense of unreality and
you just wanted to make it real. And she said,
I wanted to admit it to myself. This is some
secret that I had been hiding for all these years.
She used the word admit, which I think is so fascinating,
you know, like it was a confession of some kind.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
To herself in a way. I mean the tagline for
this show is the secrets we keep, the secrets sircut
from us, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. And
I always find the most fascinating, strange, uncanny, resonant kind
of secrets, the ones that we are somehow able to
(23:44):
keep from ourselves until we no longer can.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
That was what she did. I mean, she had this
clan DestinE sibling, you know, and it was she she
was keeping this knowledge from herself.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
I think on some.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Level in order to function. I mean, I think it
must have been too hard to process otherwise. But she
told me something very interesting that I had for a
long time in my story and then ultimately cut because
she was so ambivalent about it. But for your show,
and for you, just because you're so psychoanalytically inclined, you'll
find this whole internal debate that she had about it fascinating.
(24:21):
She said to me that when she was in psychoanalysis
in her early twenties, my mom, her psychoanalyst, said to her,
do you think that as a child you walked around
in terror that if you did anything wrong you would
also be sent away, that you would also be sent
(24:41):
to the equivalent of walking school. If your grades weren't
good enough, or if you didn't hit a particular milestone,
if you were clumsy in sports, if you were this
for you or that, you know, would you have been
sent away? And I grew up with my mother telling
me that she believed this, that she thought and like
if she wasn't good enough, she'd be sent away. That
(25:02):
she labored under this misapprehension. And I brought this up
with her in the car and she said, oh, you
know what, I think. I think my shrink was wrong
about that. I think my psychoanalyst is wrong. I don't
really think so. I don't think I was a perfectionist
for that reason. It probably had much more to do
with like what nanny said to me. You know that
she told me that I'd be good enough for two
(25:22):
But I don't think I ever really feared that I'd
be sent away. But maybe her psychoanalyst was right. I mean,
I don't know. You know, my mother is clearly not sure.
At some point when I was younger, that was the
story I was told by her, but she recantidate when I,
you know, asked her in the car. She had that
(25:44):
she thought that her psychoanalyst's hypothesis was right, and she
didn't even present it to me was when I was
a young woman as her psychoanalyst's hypothesis. She said, so,
you know, I had this sister who was sent away,
and so I was definitely afraid when I was a
kid that if I did anything wrong, I would be
sent away. And when I brought this up there in
the car, she said, well, I'm not sure that's true.
(26:06):
It was my psychoanalyst who came up with this as
an idea, and I think you just put it in
my head and it sounded very tidy, and it sounded
very plausible. But you want to know what, I'm not
sure it's right.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
I mean, in the absence of, you know, actual fact
checkable knowledge, these are narratives that we can supply right.
So for a period of time in her life, that
was the narrative she supplied correct, and then later in
her life it became no, I don't think. I don't
think that was it, which seems very right to me
(26:38):
in terms of the way that our stories and our
memories and our relationship to whatever the you know, to
whatever is at hand shifts and changes over the course
of our lives. Absolutely This was, from the standpoint of
what we understand today, just shockingly common in the nineteen forties,
(26:59):
prop nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties if a family had a
child who was severely disabled intellectually, you know, and or physically,
that they would be sent away and there were and
never spoken of again and erased. And there were famous
examples of people who did this, ranging from the Kennedys
(27:23):
to Arthur Miller and pearlss Buck. This was what was
considered the thing that you did. And some families dealt
with that as a secret differently than others, or the
secret sort of comes out in certain I mean Miller
never wanted to write about it, would never wanted to
(27:44):
talk about it.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
It was never visited.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
And never visited. And pearlss Buck ends up writing about
it in her memoir. She writes, I felt as though
I were bleeding inwardly and desperately. So Buck faces head
on at a certain point, just the absolute agony of
you know, what it is to institutionalize a child, and
(28:09):
so it ranges. But I think what all of the
families of that time of sort of post war America,
and as you say, the shame of having a child
who is severely disabled. There's just this feeling that this
is what you do, and the doctors and their white
(28:30):
coats and their certainty, and the way that doctors were
seen at that time as being god like. So one
of the things that I'm wondering about your piece begins
with your husband telling you to read this tweet that
went viral. And the tweet is by someone who he
writes about his son, who is his twenty fifth birthday.
(28:51):
He's never said a word in his life, but has
taught me so much more than I've ever taught him.
And this tweet goes viral and your husband points out
to you, and you're scrolling through and you're reading some stuff,
but it doesn't occur to you right away why you're
going down the rabbit hole other than wow, this is
really interesting that this tweet went viral. And I find
(29:13):
that so fascinating that it took you a bit right
to realize why your husband had pointed out that tweet
to you and why you were immersed in the story.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
So one important thing to point out the reason that
went viral is because there was a lot to read
in response to the tweet. What happened was that tweet
unleashed this outpouring from parents all over the world of
pictures of their own nonverbal or minimally verbal children, so
(29:48):
that what I was scrolling through was picture after picture
after picture of these beautiful kids, some young, some old,
some full fledged adults, whether much older parents or their siblings.
And some were joyous and some were goofy, and some
were silly, and some were serious, and some were bad
(30:09):
as I mean.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
It really ranged these pictures, but.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
What they all had in common is that, like, the
kids were all super characterful, right, they were all just
these pulsingly alive portraits. And yeah, it is weird because,
like everyone in my family, I had been trained to
sort of not think about this. It took me about
(30:33):
a half an hour of scrolling before I went, oh,
my god, there is somebody in my family who meets
this exact description. And the difference is that I don't
know her, and I don't have a single picture of
her nothing, and there's been no pictures that I've ever
seen for her. And in fact, when we had to
find art for this story, you know, the art department
(30:55):
was saying, do you have any pictures of her from
when she was a baby? Or anything. My mother didn't
think she had a single picture of Adele and lo
and behold there was one of my grandparents and her,
and it's in the story.
Speaker 4 (31:08):
It's the only thing there.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah, I've been staring. I've been staring at it while
we're talking.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and like, what's so interesting
about it is like my grandmother looks so impeccably turned out.
She's got her you know, her Sunday best on. I mean,
she's got the hat and the nylons and the lipstick,
you know, and my my and her and my grandfather
was very happy and relaxed with you know, Adele in
the middle. And uh, what you were saying.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
Too about that wide range.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
I mean my grandparents visited her every weekend. They they
didn't just sort of send her away. My my grandparents
had fallen in love with their child and were shattered
to be told that the best thing for her was
to be put, you know, in an institution that was
and and the justification was always it's not just that
(31:57):
it wasn't just that it was best for your family,
that it was best for the remaining sibling, which looking
at my mother, I mean it would have been very
hard to have somebody like a Dell around. But I
don't know whether it was best for her. I think
an open question. There certainly wasn't the infrastructure to sort
of take care of Adele. Would have taken a lot
(32:17):
of work on the part of the family, and they
didn't have any money. They couldn't have had sourced this
but her care. You know, they couldn't have had Brown
Mclock custodial care, which Adele may have needed. But they
also said that it was best for Adele, which it
most certainly was not. This was this like gothic mansion
of horrors. I mean, it was terrible Willowbrook where she
was ultimately institutionalized. But if you're going to look at
(32:41):
the broad spectrum of like people in denial, you know,
who never saw their kids and never talked about them,
like Arthur Miller, to people like Pearls Buck, who very
bravely wrote about their children. And by the way, her memoir,
she wrote a whole memoir that was just about that.
It wasn't a memoir about her life. She wrote a
memoir only about having a child. It was about that
(33:02):
called the child who Never grew, and it was about
the pain of institutionalizing her, which and she waited until
she was nine nine, and when she was in Japan,
everybody thought, like, what, you're gonna put her in an institution.
Nobody there did that. Americans did that. Americans did that.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's a whole other subject. I
mean that makes me wonder about the nature of how
we how we think of family, or how we think
of generations.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And we'll we do it with very elderly, right, I mean,
we do it with it. I mean it's terrible.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
There's a wonderful photograph in your piece, just amazing, of
your mother and Adele on the day of that visit,
not the nineteen ninety three visit, but the visit when
(33:59):
you're starting to report this piece in.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Twenty twenty one.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
Your mother has she has an n ninety five mask
that she's pulled down so that you can see her face,
and she and Adele are standing together, and on the
one hand, they couldn't look more different. Adella is much smaller,
and your mother looks like she could walk, you know,
out the door and straight into you know, lunch at
you know, a lovely restaurant and Adele doesn't. But they're
(34:26):
both wearing red sweaters, and they're both wearing the aforementioned
beaded necklaces because each of them has gotten into beating.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
At the exact same time, Yeah, at the.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Exact same time in their lives. And there also are
so many other similarities between them. They both needle point,
they both are neat freaks, they're both musical, and all
of this kind of keeps on merging. What did that
feel like for you during that visit? You know, on
(35:05):
the one hand, you have your your reporter's hat on,
and at the same time you are a daughter and
a niece and a member of a family who is
experiencing this kind of amazing moment.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, I nearly died. I mean, do you remember that
very famous New Yorker story about twins and they were
looking for the first time. I think it's the Minnesota
Twins study where they were looking at trying to string
a part nature and nurture and looking at twins who'd
been separated, and there were all these stories of like,
you know, brothers who hadn't seen each other for forty years,
(35:43):
and identical twins and they'd meet up and they would
both be wearing yellow eyes odd shirts, and they both
had ex wives named Gail. And you know, I mean,
I'm making this up, but you know, nutty stuff like that.
I felt a little bit like I was looking at that.
Also that those darn necklaces, which were like the bane
of my car ride, Like moms stopped talking about the
(36:03):
necklaces suddenly, that it becomes like the most salient thing
because there is Adele wearing a necklace that she's made,
while my mother has a necklace.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
That she's made.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And the first thing that we get, we're shown in
her bedroom is like the drawer full of all the
necklaces she's recently been making, you know, and that's a
photo illustration in the magazine. I mean, it kind of
blew my doors off, you know. I couldn't believe what
I was staring at, and that they both were wearing
these this bright red The thing that really killed me though,
(36:35):
was that they're both musical, Like it would be okay,
you know, my grandfather was in the Greek Club. There's
a story about him, like having been in the same
Greek club as like Frank Sinatra, you know, like okay,
so they're musical, right, Like, maybe that's in the family.
Maybe there's like some kind of constellation of jeans that
coach for that sort of thing, even like being you know,
fuxing with your hands, needle pointing and making necklaces. Even
(36:59):
that I kind of grock. But the fact that they
are neat freaks. Like, on the one hand, I was like, Okay,
So I always assume that my mom was highly controlled
because she had been traumatized and as a consequence, you know,
she deeply traumatized.
Speaker 4 (37:20):
As a kid, her sister gets.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Spirited away, no explanation, it's not discussed, and my mother
makes some unconscious decision for the rest of her life
that she is going to control everything within her power. Right,
And then they meet Adele, and Adele wants to control
everything within her power. And not only that, but they
are controlling everything in the exact same way. It all
(37:43):
revolves around the kitchen. If you get up to try
and clear the dishes and bring them into the kitchen,
my mother will like rush you out of the kitchen
because she is the only one who knows how to
load the dishwasher, and she is the only one who
knows where things go. If you try and make a salad,
she will start instructing you about the oward away to
cut cherry tomatoes. My mother has like really fixed ideas
(38:05):
about cherry tomatoes, you know, like she's got a cherry
tomato philosophy. And you know, I mean so and that
is Adele. You know, like glasses have to face a
certain way, right, like just everything nothing can be out
of place. She gets very agitated things are like not
just so. And I thought, what is there like a
protein coating for this, Like what is going on? And
(38:29):
I thought, Okay, it must just be like it must
just run in the family, right, even though I don't
remember my grandmother or my grandfather particularly being this way.
And then the daughter of the woman who was like
the mama bear in the house where Adele lived. And
so the daughter says to me one day, she knows
(38:50):
Adele very well, right, she knows all the residents of
the house very well, she says to me, because I'm
telling her, like it's so weird that they're both me
pretty excited to assume that my mom was like a
need free because she was born of trauma. This is
a trauma related trait. And the daughter says to me, well,
how do you know that Adele wasn't traumatized? Maybe it's
(39:10):
born of the exact same thing. And I sat there
in Chasten's silence for like eight seconds. You can just
hear eight seconds of nothing on my table order, right,
like just me going oh yeah, oh my god. You know,
because of course I am sure that all of those
(39:30):
years of living in these hellish institutions, right, I mean,
she lived in Willowbrook, which was exposed by Heraldo Rivera
in They're in nineteen seventy two as being just and
RFK visited it in sixty five and called it a
hell hole. It was just this horrible place, people walking
(39:52):
and wailing, naked on the floor, all everybody understimulated. It's
reeked of urine and feces. Not only unhygienic, there was
just it wasn't a school. It was built as a school,
it wasn't a school. There was nothing there and nothing
for the reason it's to play with, nothing for them
to do all day and only two you know attendants
(40:13):
per you know floor for like you know, one person
for eighty people or fifty people. You know, they were
force fed quickly. I mean it was just there was ghastly, ghastly,
and then my aunt was moved from there to a
different institution and it was just as bad and just
as grim And that's where my aunt lived. And I
(40:34):
don't know what I mean. In addition to just being
underloved and underprotected and understimulated, she may have been physically abused.
She may have been sexually abused.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
I mean, we don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
We know nothing. She can't explain it or convey it.
All we know is that every so often my aunt
would say stop that you're hurting me. She would scream it.
And they thought all the doctors were training her thought, well,
she must be psychotic, this is some kind of auditory hallucination.
But why wasn't that just PDSD. Why wasn't she just
(41:09):
re experiencing trauma? You know, who knows. I mean, maybe
she was just having like a horrific memory.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
When she shouted stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
These similarities between my mom, like the meat nick stuff,
the control stuff, it might just be trauma related stuff.
I mean, you know, I'm not a need nick. I mean,
you know, I'm like the Oscar Madison to my mother's Felix.
And by the way, just talking about the generational stuff
(41:40):
people were sent away.
Speaker 4 (41:41):
Right through the.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Seventies, this continued, This just kept on going. It really
wasn't until the eighties that people would even countenance the
idea of keeping neurodiverse kids at home, and that the
infrastructure first kind of became available where you know, day
programs were available and where I don't know. I think
it was probably in the nineties that kids were mainstreamed
(42:04):
into public schools. The public schools started taking them. I
don't know when, but at some point the states started
providing free occupational therapy and physical therapy and speak therapy.
It took a long time for you know, anything like
the infrastructure.
Speaker 4 (42:21):
To be born.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
No, it's one of the ways I can count on
one hand one of the ways that our world has improved.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Now.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
I really want people to read your piece and not
to tell the whole story of it. But there were
no diagnoses. There was no sense that there could be
or should be diagnoses. It was like one big basket
of a catch all for beyond hope, beyond redemption or
difficult right.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah, like like you know, filled with some kind of
panic or anger that can't be expressed right, something.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Right, and that needs to be managed by sedation and
by sort of these extreme measures that make any kind
of real developmental progress absolutely impossible. You know, And a
really moving part of your story is that it occurs
(43:20):
to you that you might be able to get an
answer to what in fact was responsible, what mutation, what
genetic mutation, what condition was responsible for Adele's being, you know,
as as developmentally impaired as she was. You do find
(43:40):
out that she has a very very rare genetic mutation.
And at the time you discover this, there are only
twelve people on record who have been diagnosed with this,
and then you know, over the course of even just
your reporting this piece, there start to be more people
diagnosed with it. The condition is called Coffin Cyrus syndrome twelve.
(44:03):
And then you do something that I found so moving
and so fascinating, which is you want to meet a kid,
you know, someone growing up today, someone being raised in
a very very as different from the way that Adele
spent her life as is imaginable, and just see what
(44:28):
the difference might be if a child is raised with
all of the possible interventions and therapies at her disposal.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
That's right, and it was positively bittersweet.
Speaker 3 (44:42):
Yeah, well that's the thing, Jen, I mean, there was
this moment that was just like guided me, which was
after you've met this girl and her family, her mother.
There's this line in your piece, which is I thank
Grace and Emma for the gifts and head out to
my rental car. I'd last maybe thirty seconds before losing it.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
This little girl was just outside Kansas City and her
parents adopted her. They had fostered her originally and then
decided to adopt her. They'd fallen in love. My grandparents
had fallen in love and done the opposite. They'd given
their little girl away. And what is amazing is they
(45:27):
hand me these presents and then Emma gives me a
picture for me to give to my aunt and her mother,
who's just this force of nature, looks at Emma and says,
do you remember why you drew this picture for Jennifer?
Speaker 4 (45:41):
Do you remember why you drew a picture for her aunt?
Speaker 2 (45:45):
And Emma, who, of course, because she's benefited from all
of these early interventions, can speak in full sentences unlike
my aunt. And she says, oh, yes, it's because her
her aunt has trouble in school like me and her
(46:05):
mother says, that's right, and she says, do you know
what your what her aunt has? And what I thought
she was going to say was she has coffin cyrus
syndrome twelve, just like you. And that's not what her
mother said. What her mother said was she also has
(46:26):
parents who couldn't take care of her, but found to
her a place where someone else can take care of her,
just like you. And I just thought, but my grandparents
could have taken care of her if they had all
the same resources at their disposal. Not only could they have,
they would have desperately wanted to, because they, like pearl
(46:49):
as Buck, were waiting inwardly and desperately. But they had
no choice. They had to give her away. And they
were being told to for the good of the baby,
for the good of my mother, for the good of
the whole family, by all of these authoritative, granite fased doctors.
And here is my grandma, a working class woman, no
college education, who just swallows hard and says, okay, I
(47:14):
mean it just killed me. It just it broke me
into a thousand pieces. I mean I just sat in
the car and started the ball, you know, I mean
it was so hard, I mean and too. It's credit,
you know. I told my editor about it. I told
him about the moment, and he cut me off before
I even finished it, and he said, how long did
you last before you burst into tears? How unfair is
(47:36):
all of this?
Speaker 4 (47:36):
You know?
Speaker 2 (47:37):
You just you weep for everyone involved, for my aunt,
for my mom, for my grandparents. We are no longer year.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Jen, thanks so much. This has been a really remarkable
and powerful conversation.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
I feel the same way.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
I just feel so lucky to have somebody like you
asking me questions. This kind of conversation is just so
different from me any kind of conversation I have had
or will have with anyone else. So just thanks for
this project.
Speaker 4 (48:07):
I feel like it's a gift.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
You know, it's a big g.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
This was a special bonus episode of Family Secrets. As
we work on the next season, which will drop in
early November, keep an eye and an ear out for
more special bonus content. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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