February 10, 2022 • 58 mins
When Zoe Shaw becomes pregnant at fifteen years old, her life is thrown into orbit. Not only must she conceal her pregnancy from her family and community, but too, her future will be forever informed by the secret at the core of her adolescence.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. The
landscape of my childhood really began with my parents childhood.
My parents met when they were my mom was fifteen
or sixteen. They married when she was seventeen, and my
(00:22):
dad was I think, maybe a sophomore in college or
maybe a junior in college. And my parents came from
a predominant African American family in Nashville, Tennessee. My grandfather
was a biomedical professor at Fisk University, and my parents
(00:43):
grew up in the Civil rights movement time, of course,
and this this idea of who you're supposed to be,
especially as an African American, and this predominant society, I
guess is the best way that I can kind of
explain it. Your reputation mattered, what you looked like mattered,
Everything on the outside mattered so much for being able
(01:04):
to get along in society. That's Zoe Shaw, psychotherapist, life coach,
motivational speaker, podcast host, and writer whose work is focused
on empowering women. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets.
(01:37):
The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
My mother, she was one of the first, I believe,
the first African American to go through this predominantly white
Catholic school after Brown versus Board of Education in and
(02:00):
so she was taught very much that who you are,
what you do, what is scene is still very important.
So I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. My dad was
in medical school at the time that I was. I
was born, and I'm a second child. My mom was
in college. My father utilized the Air Force to pay
(02:21):
for his medical school, so after he graduated from medical school,
they were stationed in Washington, d c. At Andrew's Air
Force Base, and so that is where I went when
I was one year old and lived there until I
was about eight or nine. And I had a very sheltered, um,
really just wonderful early childhood. And when my father got
(02:41):
out of the Air Force, my parents decided to move
to rural Maryland, a place called Smithsburg, Maryland, which is
a really really tiny spot next to a slightly bigger
the town Hagerstown. My father got a job at the
hospital there, so he was an ear physician. What I
didn't notice when I was young was that my parents
(03:04):
had this idea. I think after the Civil Rights movement
and things had quote changed so much in our society
that they wanted to raise us without this concept of race.
And they never spoke about color of skin or race.
And even more important, my mother went out of her
way to not speak about it. What do you think
that was about for your mother? Was it the whole
(03:24):
idea of it? Just it shouldn't matter, it doesn't matter.
I think it was more of were past, that we
have gotten behind that, and I want my children to
not have race be a part of their idea about
how the way the world works, which sounds good on
the level, right. It sounds good that they had this
(03:49):
idea that that we are past that and that doesn't
matter and shouldn't be a factor in our lives anymore.
And like I said, had we continued to grow up
in Washington, d C. I think that it might have
been fine because it never occurred to me. I was
around other people with different colors and diversity, and I
didn't feel different. I think that a lot of our
previous generation was steeped in is also that white is better,
(04:15):
and so we want better opportunities for our kids. So
we want to send our children to the better schools,
to the white school I don't think it's still much now,
especially in cities anymore, because just because our you know,
we are a melting pot now, but things are different
back then, and my parents brought that with them. It
was really about, I think, wanting the best for us,
(04:35):
which would have been good had they not been decided
to move to this place, a very rural, farming community.
It was all white. There were also a number of Mennonite.
My parents sent me to a Christian school, and all
of a sudden, I'm this little black girl showing up
from Washington, d c. And the school of all white people,
(04:56):
many of whom have never really interacted with with a
black person. And so that was a really big you know,
it was life changing and I learned a lot of
things about how other people perceived me, and I learned
a lot of things about blackness, and I learned a
lot um that affected my self esteem, you know, as
a child. That dawning realization, or maybe it wasn't dawning,
(05:18):
maybe it was sudden, Like what did that feel like? Yeah,
I think it was dawning because I didn't go and
expecting that, and you know, me going into a sea
of white people wasn't really an issue necessarily until the
things started being said and the questions started being asked.
The best way I can describe it as shame, I realized,
(05:39):
or I began to feel a sense of Oh, these
people think that I am not as good as they are.
These people think that I am less than Oh, this
is how they see me. So I think I think
the best way to say it is shame, which in
a healthy family of color or family of difference, parents
(06:00):
are there and able to kind of reinforce some sense
of good and pride and who you are. And that
is something that my parents did not do because they
did not want to talk about color or race. And
so we, meaning my brother and my sister, knew very
clearly that these were things we couldn't talk about with
our parents, and there was nothing in our environment that
(06:22):
allowed us to kind of work it out. We had
to work it out within ourselves, and it wasn't even
anything we talked about with each other either. Kids who
grow up in families in which certain subjects are simply
off limits quickly learn that they have to send for
themselves to make matters more complicated. After a fairly garden
(06:43):
variety church going Episcopalian upbringing. When the family moves to Maryland,
Zoe's mom converts to an evangelical church, adding fuel to
the fire. We started going to church where a pastor,
you know, with a red face would shake his head
and speak in tongues and people would uh, you know,
(07:07):
raise their hands. And so I'm learning about who I am,
you know, and what this means about the color of
my skin. And then I'm in this environment where I'm
learning about God in a very different way than I
learned about him back when we were in Washington, d C.
And I later also learned that the pastor didn't believe
in the mixing of races. And so then the message
(07:28):
I got was God loves you, but not as much
as he loves the white people. And so all of that,
you know, that's a landscape that I grew up in,
and it explains a lot about just my self esteem
and you know, my family history going into my adolescence
(07:48):
as things begin to unfold because you internalize that shame.
The shape of the shame is not just they think
I'm not as good as they are, but if they
all think I'm not as good as they are. Maybe
I'm not as good as they are, then maybe I'm not. Yes,
I think that was always a question. There was always
(08:10):
this seed of this little fire, the seed of indignation
that knew better, but it was overshadowed for the most
part and most of my you know, growing up years
from nine until you know, twenty and so, yes, that
question is always there. Am I not? Am I not
as good? Well? Yeah, I mean I think when you're
(08:31):
a child, you don't have any defenses against that. And
as you said, if your parents are into place that
you can go to unpack some of this stuff, then
you're left, you know, we are left to contend with
it on our own, and we don't have the tools
for it. We don't. And you know, my parents, because
(08:52):
I know, you know, like most parents do, is they
do what they think is right, They do what they
think is the best they felt. I think that they
were going into this kind of environment and society to
prove them wrong, that they were going to somehow teach
our pastor that black people are just as good. But
my parents had tools that we didn't have, and they
didn't even give us any. And so I think what
(09:15):
they did in some ways it could be respected. It's
just the way they went about it that wasn't productive.
Zoe attends a private school that's all white. Then she
goes to a public junior high school where some black
kids are busted in from other neighborhoods and come from
backgrounds and environments that are very different from Zoe's. She
(09:36):
doesn't quite know what to make of them, and they
definitely don't know what to make of her, so they're
mean to her and call her names. They called me Oreo,
black on the outside, white on the inside. And I
was in this place of desperately wanting them to um
accept me and then also not understanding anything about who
(09:58):
they were at the same time, and so I just
kind of pushed myself away from them, and I felt
like they were the mama bird who sniffs the bay,
you know, the babies, and figures out there's something wrong
with them and pushes them out of the nest. So
it's kind of both of them pushing me away and
me pushing them away, and then me grappling again with
(10:18):
who am I right? I don't belong either place because
I don't really understand them, and they don't really understand me,
but then I'm not white and just really trying to
struggle and find my place. And how do you metabolize
that during that time? Does it make you retreat? Does
it make you work harder and want to excel? It
(10:40):
made me push myself away from them and attempt themhow
to not identify with them? And I think the way
that I dealt with it was to push them away
and to attempt to assimilate and be accepted as much
as I can. I think one of the benefits was
that I was also a very excellent athlete. I fell
tremendously and I poured a lot of myself into my athletics,
(11:04):
and I put a lot of myself into my academics
and found acceptance that way. I think that that helped,
because you know, obviously I have succeeded um and got
a lot of accolades from that, and that attention may
be helped. But I think it also the way that
(11:25):
it didn't help is that it didn't allow me to
value and honor myself as a person who I was.
It was for what I could do and what I
could provide. When Zoe's fourteen, she meets a boy, an
older boy named Finny at her brother's wrestling match. Z
We had been interested in boys before, but many were white,
and they said things like, if you weren't black, I'd
(11:47):
date you. For Zoe, this creates uncertainty and secretiveness around
who she's attracted to and who's attracted to her. Things
were changing a little bit when I was in high school,
such that a white girl would date a black guy,
and that was a little more accepted, but white guys
were not interested in dating black girls. I didn't ever
(12:08):
see that happen, and so I understood that my skin
color made me off limits, unattractive, and maybe not unattractive,
but it had to be secret. If I was going
to be in relationship with someone, it had to be secret.
So fast forward to meeting Vinny. And this is a
black guy. He's in college, he's attractive, and he took
(12:32):
an interest in me. We just started talking and he
asked me my phone number, and I tried to be
coy and I told him my last name and that
he could find me in the phone book, never thinking
that he actually would. Um and we set our good guys,
and a few days later he called me. We began
a m We begin a relationship. It's interesting because I
(12:53):
pause because I remember, you know, when he called me,
one of the first things he asked me was how
was your day? And that, in a very odd way,
threw me for a loop because no man had asked me, ever,
how my day was. Just think about that for a
sec such a simple question, right, how was your day?
(13:16):
And Yet for Zoe, this is something new, something she's
not used to being asked, not even when she was
growing up by her own father. My father was a brilliant,
brilliant man, but he had a lot of pain, and
he came from a very difficult um family situation, a
narcissistic mother, and my father adored my mother, and he
(13:40):
really didn't have any space in his life to love
anyone else. And I say love in terms of an
action bird. My father loved me, and I know he
loved me, but we didn't really have a relationship, and
he didn't really have much of a relationship with any
of us, my brother and my sister. He was a workaholic,
and so I also grew up with what I called
baddie lust, which I didn't really discover until I was
(14:03):
twelve and I visited a friend and we spent the
night and got up in the morning, and her dad
was like making us pancakes, and he knew my name,
and he was asking us questions like he was interested
in us, And I was fascinated. I had never seen
that where a father was that interested in their child.
You know. My father would often ask me how old
(14:23):
I was, and he didn't know the names of my friends,
you know, and he definitely didn't ask you how your
day had been. No, no, he didn't. So you know,
I had this combo of self esteem issues, identity issues,
daddy lust and it was just the perfect storm for
meeting Vinny. And then he was black, but he didn't
(14:45):
know that I wasn't, you know, like the other people.
And eventually, as he got to know me, he just
accepted me, and he would joke about the things. He
would say, you know, you grew up in a bubble,
or he somehow accepted the fact that I us been
I didn't know my culture like I should, and I didn't.
I wasn't like everybody else. We'll be right back. Zoe
(15:26):
and Vinnie have both grown up in religious homes. Where
shall we say, sex before marriage is frowned upon a
great deal of emphasis is placed on purity, especially purity
for women. I knew very clearly that my mother was
a virgin when she married my mother. My parents were
sure to let me know. It's funny because I don't
(15:48):
know if my dad was. Nobody ever talked about that is,
the fact didn't seem to matter as much. But my
mother was a virgin when she married my father, and
of course I was expected to do the same. But
that didn't happen. Me and I, you know, developed a
sexual relationship, and within a year of dating, I became pregnant.
(16:11):
And you were how old I was fifteen when I
became pregnant. You know. When I met Benny, I actually
lied to him about my age then he was must
have been eighteen. I told him I was fifteen, even
though I wasn't really yet. I was probably, I don't
know a few months from that. And we started dating
when I was fourteen. So you can't fathom telling your parents.
(16:34):
I mean, that's just that's just not something that you're
going to do initially, right. I was actually very much
praised for being the easy, good girl, and I always was.
I got good grades, I didn't give my parents any trouble.
I obeyed them, and so this for me too, now
(16:54):
become pregnant, you have disobeyed them, and probably the worst way,
in my opinion at that time, UM was really devastating
for me. On top of just the shame of what
I had done. So I could not figure out how
to form those words to tell my parents. Back then,
there were not you know, pregnancy test you could just
(17:15):
pick up at the drug store. And so I I
skipped school and I went to a pregnancy clinic, Crisis
pregnancy clinic, where they confirmed that I was pregnant. I
told Benny and we planned to get an abortion. Now
I was also the child who had walked in anti
abortion marches, and um, remember we're an evangelical Christian, we
(17:41):
don't believe in abortion. My mom and dad donated to
Jerry Fallwell. They were like a premier, silver gold whatever,
donators to Jerry Fallwell's pregnancy home and his mission to
save babies. So I also came out of that that
culture her. And so here I was at fifteen now
(18:04):
deciding I'm willing to get an abortion because I can't
do this. I can't tell my parents, I can't ruin
my my life. You know, I've done the simple thing,
and I have to hide it. And so we planned
to do that, and then he saved up his money
and um I he picked me up from the school
on the day that we had scheduled the appointment and
he drove me to the clinic. Then he stayed in
(18:26):
the in the waiting room and I went inside. And
when you go in, there was you know, a group
of other girls, and we had to do this little
group where they quote counsel you before you get the abortion.
And in the beginning, the nurse passed out these little
pills to everyone and said to take this medication. I
(18:46):
guess it was going to relax you or something prior
to the procedure. And the first thing I did was
I looked at her and I said, well, this pill
hurt the baby. And I remember she looked at me
with this expression of do you know you're just kid
what you're getting ready to do, and you're asking me
if this skill is going to hurt the baby. And
it was also the first inkling for me that I
(19:08):
was a mother who was already kind of thinking about
this fetus as my child already concerned. So here I
am carrying these two you know, the echonomy is walking
myself into the abortion room. And I got on the
table and the doctor came in, and um, they began
(19:30):
to set up and need his ultrasound, and and he
did make a mention that I was really far along,
but that he could still do it because the baby
was small. And before I could, even before I could
process my thoughts, my words just tumbled out and I
sat up and I just said I can't do this.
(19:51):
I've changed my mind. And the doctor was very irritable,
and he looked at me and he, you know, just said,
you know, you've wasted my time and you're too far along,
and if you come back here, I'm not treating you,
and good luck, although I felt like he was wishing
me something other than luck. And I literally jumped off
the table, grabbed my socks and shoes and ran out
of there into the lobby. And then he's looking at me,
(20:13):
why do I like, is it over already? And I
told him I'm not doing it. I changed my mind,
and he, you know, he was really just wonderful and
he was like, okay, Um. He put his arm around
me and we walked out of the place, trying to
figure out what to do from there. And you know,
as I tell that story, I'm always cognizant of the
(20:36):
woman who has gotten the abortion, because in that moment,
I know because of the history of me and my parents,
and my family and and and my religion, and all
of those things led me to be in a place
where I couldn't do it. But I just want to say,
because so many of us have our own shame and
(20:57):
secrets around um things with sex and abortions and and
things like that, that there's just no judgment because we
all we all make our choices largely because of our
influences that were not even fully aware of, And so
I just have no judgment for any woman who who
would and has and will make a choice like that.
(21:21):
When Zoe and Vinnie leaves a clinic, his arm protectively
around her, z he has a fantasy she and Vinnie
will run away and find a castle with all live
happily ever after. But as with most fantasies, reality comes
crashing through, and the reality is that Zoe has volleyball
practice and school. The reality is that she has parents
(21:43):
at home who have no idea what's going on. The
reality is that Zoe is still pregnant. I don't think
that I had any idea what I was going to do.
I think I just went straight into a sense of denial,
and so I literally said nothing, and I continued on,
and I finished my volleyball season. I remember, you know,
(22:06):
reaching to get a ball and landing flat on my
stomach and feeling the baby pressed into me so strongly,
and remembering, oh, okay, there's someone there. It was in
December when I started track practice, and by then I
was able to wear sweatshirts, was getting cold on in Maryland,
and I was almost discovered once at track practice because
(22:28):
my coach was gonna put this device around my stomach
to do these lifting things, and I remember slowly taking
off my sweatshirt and looking at him to see if
he noticed. Over time, my mom figured it out. She
asked me one day, Zoe, are you pregnant? She literally
(22:50):
just said those words, and I'm sure there were plenty
of signs um and even still I couldn't tell her yes.
So I allowed my poor mom to me to another
pregnancy center, where another kind lady told us that I
was pregnant. How far along were you when your mother
asked you that question? I must have been four or
(23:10):
five months those around December, and I was doing may
so and there at the clinic. I had this idea
that somehow my mom being there would make this all
go away, that maybe I wasn't really pregnant and she
would tell us that. But of course that didn't happen.
I sat there and she told me what I already knew,
and my mom was quiet. I thought about what happened
(23:34):
in the abortion clinic, because in the abortion clinic, because
I was under age, the woman asked. The woman said,
you can't get an abortion at fourteen without your parents consent.
And I remember thinking, oh, okay, well great, well I'm
going home. That's solved. And then she said, well, wait,
if you sign this paper and it says that you
know you fear that if you disclose your pregnancy to
(23:58):
your parents that you will be hurt in some way
or abused or something, then you can sign that and
it's fine that the law allows that. And I remember
feeling so horrible and guilty for signing that paperwork, but
I kind of rationalized it in my mind. I was like, well,
if I tell my parents, you know, Bill drop dead
and we won't have any parents to take care of us,
and somehow that will be dangerous. So okay, I'm going
(24:20):
to sign it. But the contrast of my mom's actual
response and the pregnancy clinic was quiet, sad and disappointed, um,
which is is typical for my mom. And so you know,
I just sat there with shame and sadness, and I
(24:44):
felt very much a burden in that moment. On the
way home from the clinic, Zoe and her mom make
a stop. They go to Dairy Queen, which used to
be a wonderful treat when Zoe was a child old,
but now all that childlike wonder is gone. Over ice cream.
(25:05):
Zoe apologizes to her mom and tells her she wishes
she could go away just so her parents won't have
to deal with her predicament. Zoey's mom tells her that
she and her father will talk about it. Her mom
doesn't say much else, she remains quiet disappointed. In the
coming weeks, her parents tell Zoe that they will in
(25:26):
fact be sending her away, having had pre marital sex
and becoming pregnant. They see Zoe as a bad influence
on her younger sister, so plans are made off she
will go to a pregnancy home, and so I had
to go. And you know, in my mind at that time,
I understood, because I understood that I was tainted. I
(25:49):
understood that, you know, I had done this sinful thing,
and that I deserved this. Was Bennie still in your
life at that point? He was, Yes, Benny was still
in my life. Um. And I remember feeling disappointed because
remember my fantasy about us running away to a cast
bowl together, and I wanted him to somehow swoop in
(26:12):
and and say, you know, no, this is my child
and I want to marry you. And I were not
I'm not going to let this happen. And none of
that happened. He was very much an agreement. I later
found out, maybe seven ten years later, that my father
had gone to Vinnie in private and said, if you
(26:32):
contest any of this, I will accuse you of statutory
rate and you know, basically I will destroy you if
you can test any of this. We are doing this
because he was he was over He was nineteen at
that time and I was fifteen. He said, we are
doing this in Zoey's best interest, and so he agreed.
(26:54):
And of course I didn't know that at that time,
and I just felt like he didn't care. But yes,
we were still together. And I started preparing to leave,
and my parents told me that they were going to
tell everyone that I was going to boarding school. I
remember hearing stories from my mom about girls who got
in trouble and what happened to them. And from my
(27:15):
mom's experience, if a girl got pregnant as a teenager
and her society at least she disappeared. You didn't see
her anymore. And so I think that on some level,
my mom was just continuing what she understood to be
the way that you deal with these things. And so
my parents um packed me up and they took me
(27:38):
for five hours away to Lynchburg, Virginia to Jerry Fallwells
Liberty god Parent Home for pregnant women, and um that's
where I spent the duration of my pregnancy. So my coach, UM,
my teachers, the school, our church, family, everyone was told
(27:59):
that I went to reading school. Now I was told
that my siblings are also told that I went to
boarding school. I later found out maybe three years ago,
I found out that my parents had actually told my
siblings that I had a psychiatric breakdown and I had
to go to a psychiatric hospital. In some ways, this
is understandable because number one, my parents probably wouldn't necessarily
(28:24):
have sent me to a boarding school for no reason.
But probably the most important is that they couldn't visit me,
And so my parents had to come up with a
reason why they couldn't visit me, and their reason was
because I was in a psychiatric hospital. So your siblings then,
for all of those years following, had their own secret
that they kept. Correct. Yeah, I mean secrets, create secrets,
(28:48):
create secrets. It's really something they do. They do. We'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. Zoe
(29:16):
is terrified when she arrives at the pregnancy home, but
she also feels deserving of this as her punishment. She
understands why she's been banished. Most of the other girls
there are from low socioeconomic backgrounds. It's very institutional, and
yet again Zoe feels out of place. Despite this, there's
(29:38):
a camaraderie among the girls, though the air circumstances may vary.
They're all kind to one another, but still, there's more
going on at the pregnancy home than meets the eye.
I felt like we were all taking time bombs in
a way, because there was this other layer of secrecy
within the Liberty god Parent Home because it was also
(30:02):
directly attached I mean all of it housed together with
an adoption agency. So the goal, of course was for
you to come in, have your baby, place your baby
for adoption through their adoption agency, and leave. And we
are we weren't allowed to communicate with the girls who
had left um and so you know, you would make
friends with somebody, and when they got close to do date,
(30:25):
you know, you'd wake up in the morning to check
and see is your friend gone? Did they disappear? Are
they still here? And there wasn't communication afterwards, and they
didn't want us to because you know, to some extent,
they didn't really want us to be able to hear
about what's it like on the other side once you've
given your child away. Why was it called the Liberty
(30:45):
god Parent Home? What was the god parents part of it?
The god parent home? The idea was that they are
saving babies and essentially kind of becoming their god parents
and taking care of babies. You know, I have a
number of mixed failings about all of that part, partly
because I was a part of that Liberty Godparent Home
(31:06):
didn't save any babies. Although I understand the drive with
people who are anti abortion to want to save babies.
I understand that. But Liberty Guard god parent Home didn't
even accept you in the home until you were past
the period where you could even have an abortion. And
then there's of course the other whole idea of that,
(31:28):
of the fact that you know, a baby raised by
a single mom. Isn't you know, that's not okay that
we should take these babies and put them in home,
you know, with two parents. But you know, it was
the nineteen well, early nineties at that point. It's so
interesting because you just said it was the early nineties.
(31:48):
You could have said it was the early nineteen fifties.
You're right, because it was. Actually it wasn't you know,
it wasn't the nineteen fifties. It was it was that
time period. But yeah, and I very much felt like
I was caught up in that now looking back, you know,
kind of after we moved to to Higgerstown, so that
(32:10):
was the culture, you know, and the understanding is that
I'm going to place my baby for adoption, and you
had some agency, so to speak, in the choice of
adoptive parents. So you know, when you say agency, it's
an interesting word because never once did anybody say you
have to do this and you have no no choice.
(32:31):
It was always we're going to help you make your decision.
And there was no help with how could you bring
a baby home? How could you not place your baby
for adoption? But there was this idea that you were
making this choice and they were going to help you
make this choice. Now, my mom did send me a
(32:51):
letter that was very clear when I was in the
home that if I were to try or want to
bring this baby home, that our relationship as mother and
daughter would forever be changed. Um And ultimately, I think
a lot of the guilt and shame that I took
with me after this whole process was a feeling like
(33:13):
I had somehow chosen my mother over my child. And
for me, that didn't feel okay. But I felt that
I had to choose her over my child because I
didn't know how to do anything differently. I didn't know
how I could leave and run off to the castle
and take care of, you know, my baby. So you know,
(33:34):
we had therapy and we had a process of making
your decision, and then you know, when I said what
what I was supposed to say? Which is our place
my baby? Then they presented me with a book with
pictures of really kind looking couples, and I remember thinking
of that time. My parents would never pick a babysitter
(33:56):
for me by looking at a bunch of pictures of girls,
And yeah, I'm picking parents from my child by looking
at a bunch of pictures. And maybe it's a paragraph
about who they are. And so I picked the nice
looking couple and waited for my baby to be born.
(34:18):
When Zoe goes into labor, she's in a therapy session
at the home. Her therapist, Jamie, is the one who
takes her to the hospital. No one else is available. Jamie,
a young social worker in her twenties, shuffles Zoe into
her cool little sports car, but first she puts a
plastic bag on the car seat, just in case Zoe's
water brakes. And so I'm getting in this you know car,
(34:43):
sitting on this plastic bag. I'm, you know, sixteen, and
I have no idea what I'm in store for. But Jamie,
bless her heart, sat with me through probably at least
half of my labor, at least four hours, until my
mom could drive to get there. Now, prior to my
mom getting there, a nurse had given me some um
(35:03):
pain medication. It was just a pill. Nobody offered me
an epidural. Nobody offered me anything else that They did
offer me some pill, and I took the pill and
it did seem to help a little bit. By the
time my mom got there, I was really in the
throes of labor and Jamie took off, and I had
asked for something for the pain, and my mom just
(35:25):
shook her head, just just shook her head. Now what
did you make of that shake of your mother's head.
I just internalized it as I deserved this, I needed
to feel it. I needed to experience all of the
pain of what I had. You know, this was my
punishment that I shouldn't be relieved of this experience. And
I think, probably to some extent, that is true. My mother,
(35:48):
though in her defense, she had all three of her
children without pain medication, But in that moment, I perceived
it as no, you don't get to have at And
I just remember the deep shame I felt in that
moment when my mom shook her head no, And I
went through the rest of my labor. You know, without
(36:09):
any pain medication, and so my daughter was born, and
you know, it was just such a sober, just a sober,
such a sober experience. You know, there was no excitement,
there was no congratulations. You know, they weren't smiled. I think,
no matter how old you are, when you have a child,
you're not prepared for the aftermath, you know, the war
(36:34):
zone that your body is. But I think there was
a level of trauma that was probably increased after that
experience because I was so young, and um. I just
remember seeing my body, you know, the day after and
just thinking what what have I done? And the thing
(36:54):
with the home is once you have the baby, they
want you to leave as soon as possible. They don't
want you to stay for obvious reasons. They don't want
you to connect with the baby, they don't want you
to change your mind. And my mom was totally on
board for all of that. The social worker from the
agency came and said, it's better if you just leave
as soon as possible. I remember there was this doctor,
(37:15):
that's young doctor. Um. I was in the room and
my daughter, I named her Kaya. Her name is different now,
but I don't know if I was holding her, if
she was in the bassinet that he just kind of
flew into the room and he was like a breath
of fresh air, and he was all smiled, and he
congratulated me, and he said, what a beautiful baby I have,
what a wonderful mom I'm going to be. He did
(37:37):
all of her vitals and just wished me the best
and left the room. And I remember thinking he didn't
see in the file, he didn't see that I'm placing her.
And I remember just thinking, I hope that he never
reads that. I hope that that stays a reality somewhere
in his mind forever, because he was the only brightness.
(37:58):
You know, everybody else was just bar all the nurses
and everybody that came in because they knew that I
was placing her. So we packed up really quickly, and
I did that walk. I don't know, I don't know
how better to explain. It was just like a walk
towards death, almost, you know, I was conscious of every
single step as I was left the hospital that I
(38:21):
was putting distance between myself and my baby. Zoe and
her mother head downstairs to leave the hospital. So we
waits by the exit while her mother goes to get
the car. And then suddenly her mom zips around the
corner in a brand new vehicle, a shiny red Pontiac Fiero,
(38:44):
a push present for her daughter, and I remember thinking,
of course, it's a two seater. I couldn't bring a
baby home if I wanted to. And she presented me
with my present, which I suppose was supposed to be
for my sixteenth birthday, and I remember thanking her and
hugging her and crying. Although I wasn't crying because I
(39:07):
got a new sports car. I was crying, of course,
because of all of what was transpiring in that moment.
And we got in my new sports car and we
drove away. Before we got home, we stopped at a
hotel and we had to stay there for a few days,
and my mom bought girdles to put around me so that,
(39:27):
you know, nobody could tell that I was pregnant when
I got back home. And I went back home, and yes,
I did my very best to try to pretend like
everything was normal. And a couple of months later, my
mom took me to a restaurant um and sat down
and told me that the home that I had picked
(39:49):
for my daughter, that the parents had changed their minds,
and all this time I thought she was with them.
And I found out that she and fact left the
hospital to go to foster home because that was the
way they did it. Then that the baby doesn't go
directly into the foster home. I don't know what it
has to do with paperwork or whatever, so she left
(40:11):
or I'm also not clear if maybe there wasn't actually
a family, you know, I don't know that information. But ultimately,
my daughter was a few months old and had been
raised by strangers who were never going to keep her. Meanwhile,
I'm living in this three story, you know, home with
this family, and my daughter's in foster care. So my
(40:35):
mom told me that the parents changed their mind and
that they had another set of parents, and I had
to sign some paperwork two agree that this next set
of parents could have her instead. And I remember looking
at my mom and I remember saying, can we just
(41:00):
go get her? Please? Can we just go get her?
And my mom said nothing, She just shook her head
and I didn't say anything else, and I you know,
I kicked myself for a while after that because I thought,
you know, when I was little, I would beg my
mom if I wanted to go stay at a friend's house. Mom,
Please please please. I learned how to say, you know, please, please, please,
(41:21):
until sometimes she'd give it, and I kind of I
kind of kicked myself because I feel like I didn't
fight hard enough. I said it, but I know that
that there was so much shame in that it was
hard for me to even ask her please. And you know,
when she denied me, I guess there just wasn't enough
(41:41):
fight in me to try to push more. Do you
think it would have made any difference. I don't know.
I doubt it. Time marches inexorably forward. Zoe goes to
college and eventually marries a man twenty years for senior.
Her daddy lust, the kind women so often feel when
(42:02):
their own fathers have been withholding dictating her choices. She
does tell her husband about her secret history, but his
response isn't exactly freeing. He basically just wants to pretend
that it never happened. Sound familiar. Now, As a therapist,
Zoe understands so much more about the choices we make.
(42:22):
They tend to underscore the feelings we already have about ourselves.
In this case, his reaction just deepens the red in
her scarlet letter. They move forward, leaving the past in
the past and start their family life, having two sons
and then a daughter. And of course, you know, after
giving up my daughter, there's always a part of me
(42:44):
that wanted to have a daughter um of my own
that I could keep, and so we were all so
very excited. I feel like, both my mom and I
and everyone in the family this was going to be
the only daughter, because my brother had three sons and
I had had two sons, and I think there was
a sense of exoneration when we found out I was
having a girl. But unfortunately, when my daughter was born,
(43:07):
we didn't know at the time, but she was born
with the severe genetic disorder called crowd Willy syndrome, and
she was in the nicke and barely surviving for many weeks.
And I felt this crushing sense of I am being punished,
and now my daughter is being punished. Of course, God
wouldn't give me a healthy baby girl. Of course, it's
kind of a trick. And I sat with that for
(43:27):
many years, and so yes, then you know, I dove
into being a mom of a special needs child and
trying to grapple with that in all of my shame
and my guilt surrounding that for a number of years.
Here Zoe is again faced with intense shame and the
sense that she's being punished, as well as a profound loneliness,
(43:51):
the isolation that comes from raising a child with special needs,
and to this the heavy guilt she still carries from
her secret child, the healthy daughter she had given birth
to years ago. All moms, you know, we have our
own built about all things with our parenting. If I
had not eaten this, if I had done this differently,
you know, if if if with any issues that our
(44:12):
kids might have, but and special needs moms, I think
have another layer of that. And then I additionally had
another layer on top of that that wasn't healthy for me.
And it certainly wasn't healthy I think for for my
daughter for an number of years because I just parented
her with just so much guilt. But yeah, that those
(44:35):
layers were definitely there, and they were in silence because
none of my friends knew. My very best friends, she
and I went through both of our early pregnancies together,
and she thought that we both went through our very
first pregnancy together. So yes, nobody knew, and so a
lot of that was very much kept in secret, but
so we manages. She's strong, stronger than her secrets. She
(44:58):
built her very busy family life and is thriving in
her career as a psychotherapist as well. And one day, well,
one day, her birth daughter finds her and reaches out.
Her name is Sarah. She found me through Facebook. Um,
(45:19):
she actually found her father first because I was private
on Facebook. I don't remember how she found out his
name because it was a closed adoption. There were letters
that went back and forth for the first year too,
and identifying information was blacked out, but sometimes they went
(45:40):
felt great about blacking out some of the things. I mean,
someone in the agency would just go through with the
marker and just black things out and then they'd spend
it off, you know. Um, so maybe that's how she
was doing some detective work. Clearly correct. Yes, And she
found him. And I was homeschooling my kids in the
middle of a normal homeschool day and I get a
(46:01):
call from Denny, who I rarely ever heard from, um,
and he said, I have our daughter on the line.
And I remember I just just my feet just left
from under man. Before I knew it, I was just
plopped straight down on the ground, um, and I heard
her voice and she said Hi, as simple as that
(46:23):
eighteen years later, you know. And so we started a conversation.
And I remember I went into my closet and I
shut the door, and I thanked down on the closet
floor and I was talking to her and whispers because
remember nobody, my kids don't know, um, that they have
a sibling out there. Um. But Sarah and I began
to get to know each other, and eventually we met
(46:45):
for the first time. I told my husband and he was,
you know, not very interested in any of it, and
certainly didn't want us to tell the kids. UM. So
we told the kids that I was going on a
business trip, and I went on my business trip and
that my daughter for the first time. What was it
(47:05):
like to meet her? Oh, you know, I was at
the airport and I was downstairs and she was coming
from upstairs. I was waiting for her, and I was
looking at the escalator, kind of waiting, and it almost
it's kind of crazy, but I don't felt like she
was descending from heaven. I could see her just coming
slowly down on the escalator. It was just I can
(47:30):
only say, maybe it was like coming home. I saw
parts of her in parts of a vinny. And the
interesting thing though, is that I was so shut down.
I think from so many years that I wasn't able
to emote. I wasn't able to cry. I saw her
(47:52):
and we hugged and I smiled, and she was crying,
and I just felt this damn like this wall. And
I remember, are feeling Zoe, why can't you cry? Why
can't you feel anything? Um? And I mean I know
now and I understand the process, but um, in that moment,
I couldn't. Later, when we were talking in the restaurant,
(48:12):
I you know, as we begin to talk about things,
I was able to kind of attach to some emotion,
but in that moment I just felt so closed up.
Well it's it's understandable because you had been taught that
again and again and again. The only way to survive
is to close it off and shut it down exactly.
(48:34):
Zoe tells her mother that Sarah has found her. She
lets her know she plans to meet her birth daughter.
She isn't exactly asking for permission, but Zoe and her
mother seemed to reach a tacit agreement that the secret
needs to remain secret. That Zoe won't tell her kids. Later,
Sarah also reaches out to Zoe's parents. They are her
(48:54):
grandparents after all, and they begin to develop a relationship
of sorts, not exactly like family, more like family adjacent.
How did they receive her? My parents are very polite.
I don't know that i'd say they were overly welcoming,
But there wasn't any negativity. There wasn't I don't think
(49:15):
that there was any desire to push her away. My
parents are very well mannered, polite people, and so they
met her, and they welcomed her. When I say welcome,
I don't really like that word, because they didn't welcome
it her into our family. They weren't going to tell
anybody about her, but they were willing to meet her.
So they still intended to absolutely keep this a secret. Yes,
(49:41):
For a few years, Zoe continues to get to know Sarah,
meeting her clandestinely, sneaking away telling her kids she's going
to visit a friend. But then Zoe's father dies suddenly
of a heart attack, and now, as happens with secrets,
another layer emerges. Because Sarah is going to go to
her grandfather's funeral. Of course, she is she's now twenty
(50:04):
one years old, and there's a very good chance that's
always children will cross paths with her, you know, in
the midst of my dad dying so suddenly and me,
you know, needing to fly to the East coast, and
you know, my husband didn't want me to bring the
kids because one of the first things he said was,
(50:24):
is Sarah going to be there? So, you know, I
called Sara and let her know that my father had passed,
and of course she expected to be at the funeral.
You know, my mother was in shock. Um she was
not obviously in a good place at all. And I
get home to Maryland and it's the day before the funeral,
and my mind is racing, and I remember saying to
(50:48):
my mom, I'm going to tell my children about Sarah
and my mother. She looked at me, but she didn't
look at me. She looked through me. And remember her
eyes were just dead, and she just turned around and
walked upstairs. And I remember that's the first time I
felt I felt like a child, because I felt like
(51:10):
I was making this decision all by myself. And it
was the first decision an opposition that I was making
all by myself, and I did. I gathered my kids
up and I brought them upstairs and I told them,
I have something to tell you. You have an older sister.
Remember those words, you know you have an older sister.
There are five simple words, and they escaped my lips,
(51:34):
and I remember just feeling like I wanted to grab
them and pull them back. And I watched, you know,
the effect of them on my kids, and you know,
initially they were just like what and they were excited,
and I asked me tens and times of questions. Over time,
I saw a donning in my thirteen year old eyes
that was like, oh, my mother's alied to me. But
that took some time, and that took some working through
(51:54):
with him. So I told them, and I remember feeling like,
on some level, like this way have been lifted off
and I am becoming a adult for the very first time.
I knew my husband would be horribly upset, and I
chose not to ask him before I told him afterwards,
and that started a whole another cascade of of of
(52:15):
problems in our marriage. Um but I felt so reborn,
and then the next day I had to tell my family.
So we had the actual funeral at the church so
we showed up at the church and Sarah was there,
and um, she sat in front of us with my kids,
(52:37):
and for the first time I had all of my children,
all five of them with me sitting there at my
dad's funeral. Nobody knew who she was. I didn't introduce
her to anyone. There's just a lot of you know,
just a lot of sadness and and and all the
things that happened at a funeral. Well, after the funeral,
we went to my sister's home and that's where our
(52:59):
family was, so my extended family, my aunts and uncle
is my everybody. And Sarah came and I took a
deep breath, and in the middle of everybody standing there
in the living room, I said, I have somebody I
want to introduce you to. My mother just kind of
snuck away and I told them, you know, this is
(53:22):
my daughter, Sarah. I gave birth to her when I
was sixteen years old, and I placed her for adoption,
and I want you guys to meet her. Even as
I say it, it just makes me feel kind of
breathy because it was such a huge monumental thing for
me to do. And I know that my mother never
would have done it. She would have been fine to
(53:43):
just pretend like Sarah was a friend. And the very
last thing I could or would do would be allow
my daughter to participate in this secret. She knew she
was a secret, but I wasn't going to ask her
to participate. Hate and holding the secret. And somehow, for
some reason, I don't know if it's a combination of
(54:05):
my father dying or just the reality of what I
was going to be continuing in my life and perpetrating
with my children if I didn't tell the truth and
speak the truth. And so I did it so powerful
in the period ongoing, you know, from then, you know
(54:28):
that that sense of having put down a burden that
maybe assumed a kind of greater and greater and greater weight,
because I think somehow secrets just get heavier and denser,
they take more maintenance, and they extend and and create
(54:49):
more need for more kinds of secrets. It's like it's
like cracks in the ice just getting you know, going,
you know, sort of fanning outward. And I'm wonder how
it's felt once you were able to put down that burden,
both you know, with your family, with your extended family,
(55:10):
and most of all, with yourself. Two have lived so
long with something so profoundly secretive and and not be
doing that anymore. I know people have said this before,
and in some ways it's so cliche, but you don't
really understand the weight of the burden until the burden
is taken off. It's two things that happened. I think
(55:33):
it's like those five words. I felt, you know, my
whole license. I was fifteen years old. If I had
spoken those words, that somehow the world was going to
fall apart, but everything would you know, would be destroyed,
That I destroyed people, I destroyed my family, that all
these horrible things would happen, and that I said those
five things and nothing happened. And so part of it
(55:56):
was like a realization that I was holding the secret unnecessarily.
I was holding the secret and an attempt to honor
my parents, an attempt to honor my husband, and it
was all for nothing, and the secret of itself had
created damage. And so I think that in addition to
(56:18):
the beautiful weight being lifted, it was that realization that
ultimately nobody cares. You know, people, you know, we hold
these secrets for for years and years, and we we
build them up to be something so much more than
they are. And yeah, people hear them and they might
go wow, and maybe they'll murmur for a few minutes.
(56:40):
But I've been holding that secret for decades, and someone's
going to talk about me for a minute. And so
I think it was that realization of the futility of
of keeping it, and yet I had done it for
so many years, and that just became, I think, a
driving passion for me to just continue in my authenticity,
(57:01):
continue on this path and and help other women as well.
(57:22):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly
z Achor 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 Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
(57:42):
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more
(58:13):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. The
landscape of my childhood really began with my parents childhood.
My parents met when they were my mom was fifteen
or sixteen. They married when she was seventeen, and my
(00:22):
dad was I think, maybe a sophomore in college or
maybe a junior in college. And my parents came from
a predominant African American family in Nashville, Tennessee. My grandfather
was a biomedical professor at Fisk University, and my parents
(00:43):
grew up in the Civil rights movement time, of course,
and this this idea of who you're supposed to be,
especially as an African American, and this predominant society, I
guess is the best way that I can kind of
explain it. Your reputation mattered, what you looked like mattered,
Everything on the outside mattered so much for being able
(01:04):
to get along in society. That's Zoe Shaw, psychotherapist, life coach,
motivational speaker, podcast host, and writer whose work is focused
on empowering women. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets.
(01:37):
The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
My mother, she was one of the first, I believe,
the first African American to go through this predominantly white
Catholic school after Brown versus Board of Education in and
(02:00):
so she was taught very much that who you are,
what you do, what is scene is still very important.
So I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. My dad was
in medical school at the time that I was. I
was born, and I'm a second child. My mom was
in college. My father utilized the Air Force to pay
(02:21):
for his medical school, so after he graduated from medical school,
they were stationed in Washington, d c. At Andrew's Air
Force Base, and so that is where I went when
I was one year old and lived there until I
was about eight or nine. And I had a very sheltered, um,
really just wonderful early childhood. And when my father got
(02:41):
out of the Air Force, my parents decided to move
to rural Maryland, a place called Smithsburg, Maryland, which is
a really really tiny spot next to a slightly bigger
the town Hagerstown. My father got a job at the
hospital there, so he was an ear physician. What I
didn't notice when I was young was that my parents
(03:04):
had this idea. I think after the Civil Rights movement
and things had quote changed so much in our society
that they wanted to raise us without this concept of race.
And they never spoke about color of skin or race.
And even more important, my mother went out of her
way to not speak about it. What do you think
that was about for your mother? Was it the whole
(03:24):
idea of it? Just it shouldn't matter, it doesn't matter.
I think it was more of were past, that we
have gotten behind that, and I want my children to
not have race be a part of their idea about
how the way the world works, which sounds good on
the level, right. It sounds good that they had this
(03:49):
idea that that we are past that and that doesn't
matter and shouldn't be a factor in our lives anymore.
And like I said, had we continued to grow up
in Washington, d C. I think that it might have
been fine because it never occurred to me. I was
around other people with different colors and diversity, and I
didn't feel different. I think that a lot of our
previous generation was steeped in is also that white is better,
(04:15):
and so we want better opportunities for our kids. So
we want to send our children to the better schools,
to the white school I don't think it's still much now,
especially in cities anymore, because just because our you know,
we are a melting pot now, but things are different
back then, and my parents brought that with them. It
was really about, I think, wanting the best for us,
(04:35):
which would have been good had they not been decided
to move to this place, a very rural, farming community.
It was all white. There were also a number of Mennonite.
My parents sent me to a Christian school, and all
of a sudden, I'm this little black girl showing up
from Washington, d c. And the school of all white people,
(04:56):
many of whom have never really interacted with with a
black person. And so that was a really big you know,
it was life changing and I learned a lot of
things about how other people perceived me, and I learned
a lot of things about blackness, and I learned a
lot um that affected my self esteem, you know, as
a child. That dawning realization, or maybe it wasn't dawning,
(05:18):
maybe it was sudden, Like what did that feel like? Yeah,
I think it was dawning because I didn't go and
expecting that, and you know, me going into a sea
of white people wasn't really an issue necessarily until the
things started being said and the questions started being asked.
The best way I can describe it as shame, I realized,
(05:39):
or I began to feel a sense of Oh, these
people think that I am not as good as they are.
These people think that I am less than Oh, this
is how they see me. So I think I think
the best way to say it is shame, which in
a healthy family of color or family of difference, parents
(06:00):
are there and able to kind of reinforce some sense
of good and pride and who you are. And that
is something that my parents did not do because they
did not want to talk about color or race. And
so we, meaning my brother and my sister, knew very
clearly that these were things we couldn't talk about with
our parents, and there was nothing in our environment that
(06:22):
allowed us to kind of work it out. We had
to work it out within ourselves, and it wasn't even
anything we talked about with each other either. Kids who
grow up in families in which certain subjects are simply
off limits quickly learn that they have to send for
themselves to make matters more complicated. After a fairly garden
(06:43):
variety church going Episcopalian upbringing. When the family moves to Maryland,
Zoe's mom converts to an evangelical church, adding fuel to
the fire. We started going to church where a pastor,
you know, with a red face would shake his head
and speak in tongues and people would uh, you know,
(07:07):
raise their hands. And so I'm learning about who I am,
you know, and what this means about the color of
my skin. And then I'm in this environment where I'm
learning about God in a very different way than I
learned about him back when we were in Washington, d C.
And I later also learned that the pastor didn't believe
in the mixing of races. And so then the message
(07:28):
I got was God loves you, but not as much
as he loves the white people. And so all of that,
you know, that's a landscape that I grew up in,
and it explains a lot about just my self esteem
and you know, my family history going into my adolescence
(07:48):
as things begin to unfold because you internalize that shame.
The shape of the shame is not just they think
I'm not as good as they are, but if they
all think I'm not as good as they are. Maybe
I'm not as good as they are, then maybe I'm not. Yes,
I think that was always a question. There was always
(08:10):
this seed of this little fire, the seed of indignation
that knew better, but it was overshadowed for the most
part and most of my you know, growing up years
from nine until you know, twenty and so, yes, that
question is always there. Am I not? Am I not
as good? Well? Yeah, I mean I think when you're
(08:31):
a child, you don't have any defenses against that. And
as you said, if your parents are into place that
you can go to unpack some of this stuff, then
you're left, you know, we are left to contend with
it on our own, and we don't have the tools
for it. We don't. And you know, my parents, because
(08:52):
I know, you know, like most parents do, is they
do what they think is right, They do what they
think is the best they felt. I think that they
were going into this kind of environment and society to
prove them wrong, that they were going to somehow teach
our pastor that black people are just as good. But
my parents had tools that we didn't have, and they
didn't even give us any. And so I think what
(09:15):
they did in some ways it could be respected. It's
just the way they went about it that wasn't productive.
Zoe attends a private school that's all white. Then she
goes to a public junior high school where some black
kids are busted in from other neighborhoods and come from
backgrounds and environments that are very different from Zoe's. She
(09:36):
doesn't quite know what to make of them, and they
definitely don't know what to make of her, so they're
mean to her and call her names. They called me Oreo,
black on the outside, white on the inside. And I
was in this place of desperately wanting them to um
accept me and then also not understanding anything about who
(09:58):
they were at the same time, and so I just
kind of pushed myself away from them, and I felt
like they were the mama bird who sniffs the bay,
you know, the babies, and figures out there's something wrong
with them and pushes them out of the nest. So
it's kind of both of them pushing me away and
me pushing them away, and then me grappling again with
(10:18):
who am I right? I don't belong either place because
I don't really understand them, and they don't really understand me,
but then I'm not white and just really trying to
struggle and find my place. And how do you metabolize
that during that time? Does it make you retreat? Does
it make you work harder and want to excel? It
(10:40):
made me push myself away from them and attempt themhow
to not identify with them? And I think the way
that I dealt with it was to push them away
and to attempt to assimilate and be accepted as much
as I can. I think one of the benefits was
that I was also a very excellent athlete. I fell
tremendously and I poured a lot of myself into my athletics,
(11:04):
and I put a lot of myself into my academics
and found acceptance that way. I think that that helped,
because you know, obviously I have succeeded um and got
a lot of accolades from that, and that attention may
be helped. But I think it also the way that
(11:25):
it didn't help is that it didn't allow me to
value and honor myself as a person who I was.
It was for what I could do and what I
could provide. When Zoe's fourteen, she meets a boy, an
older boy named Finny at her brother's wrestling match. Z
We had been interested in boys before, but many were white,
and they said things like, if you weren't black, I'd
(11:47):
date you. For Zoe, this creates uncertainty and secretiveness around
who she's attracted to and who's attracted to her. Things
were changing a little bit when I was in high school,
such that a white girl would date a black guy,
and that was a little more accepted, but white guys
were not interested in dating black girls. I didn't ever
(12:08):
see that happen, and so I understood that my skin
color made me off limits, unattractive, and maybe not unattractive,
but it had to be secret. If I was going
to be in relationship with someone, it had to be secret.
So fast forward to meeting Vinny. And this is a
black guy. He's in college, he's attractive, and he took
(12:32):
an interest in me. We just started talking and he
asked me my phone number, and I tried to be
coy and I told him my last name and that
he could find me in the phone book, never thinking
that he actually would. Um and we set our good guys,
and a few days later he called me. We began
a m We begin a relationship. It's interesting because I
(12:53):
pause because I remember, you know, when he called me,
one of the first things he asked me was how
was your day? And that, in a very odd way,
threw me for a loop because no man had asked me, ever,
how my day was. Just think about that for a
sec such a simple question, right, how was your day?
(13:16):
And Yet for Zoe, this is something new, something she's
not used to being asked, not even when she was
growing up by her own father. My father was a brilliant,
brilliant man, but he had a lot of pain, and
he came from a very difficult um family situation, a
narcissistic mother, and my father adored my mother, and he
(13:40):
really didn't have any space in his life to love
anyone else. And I say love in terms of an
action bird. My father loved me, and I know he
loved me, but we didn't really have a relationship, and
he didn't really have much of a relationship with any
of us, my brother and my sister. He was a workaholic,
and so I also grew up with what I called
baddie lust, which I didn't really discover until I was
(14:03):
twelve and I visited a friend and we spent the
night and got up in the morning, and her dad
was like making us pancakes, and he knew my name,
and he was asking us questions like he was interested
in us, And I was fascinated. I had never seen
that where a father was that interested in their child.
You know. My father would often ask me how old
(14:23):
I was, and he didn't know the names of my friends,
you know, and he definitely didn't ask you how your
day had been. No, no, he didn't. So you know,
I had this combo of self esteem issues, identity issues,
daddy lust and it was just the perfect storm for
meeting Vinny. And then he was black, but he didn't
(14:45):
know that I wasn't, you know, like the other people.
And eventually, as he got to know me, he just
accepted me, and he would joke about the things. He
would say, you know, you grew up in a bubble,
or he somehow accepted the fact that I us been
I didn't know my culture like I should, and I didn't.
I wasn't like everybody else. We'll be right back. Zoe
(15:26):
and Vinnie have both grown up in religious homes. Where
shall we say, sex before marriage is frowned upon a
great deal of emphasis is placed on purity, especially purity
for women. I knew very clearly that my mother was
a virgin when she married my mother. My parents were
sure to let me know. It's funny because I don't
(15:48):
know if my dad was. Nobody ever talked about that is,
the fact didn't seem to matter as much. But my
mother was a virgin when she married my father, and
of course I was expected to do the same. But
that didn't happen. Me and I, you know, developed a
sexual relationship, and within a year of dating, I became pregnant.
(16:11):
And you were how old I was fifteen when I
became pregnant. You know. When I met Benny, I actually
lied to him about my age then he was must
have been eighteen. I told him I was fifteen, even
though I wasn't really yet. I was probably, I don't
know a few months from that. And we started dating
when I was fourteen. So you can't fathom telling your parents.
(16:34):
I mean, that's just that's just not something that you're
going to do initially, right. I was actually very much
praised for being the easy, good girl, and I always was.
I got good grades, I didn't give my parents any trouble.
I obeyed them, and so this for me too, now
(16:54):
become pregnant, you have disobeyed them, and probably the worst way,
in my opinion at that time, UM was really devastating
for me. On top of just the shame of what
I had done. So I could not figure out how
to form those words to tell my parents. Back then,
there were not you know, pregnancy test you could just
(17:15):
pick up at the drug store. And so I I
skipped school and I went to a pregnancy clinic, Crisis
pregnancy clinic, where they confirmed that I was pregnant. I
told Benny and we planned to get an abortion. Now
I was also the child who had walked in anti
abortion marches, and um, remember we're an evangelical Christian, we
(17:41):
don't believe in abortion. My mom and dad donated to
Jerry Fallwell. They were like a premier, silver gold whatever,
donators to Jerry Fallwell's pregnancy home and his mission to
save babies. So I also came out of that that
culture her. And so here I was at fifteen now
(18:04):
deciding I'm willing to get an abortion because I can't
do this. I can't tell my parents, I can't ruin
my my life. You know, I've done the simple thing,
and I have to hide it. And so we planned
to do that, and then he saved up his money
and um I he picked me up from the school
on the day that we had scheduled the appointment and
he drove me to the clinic. Then he stayed in
(18:26):
the in the waiting room and I went inside. And
when you go in, there was you know, a group
of other girls, and we had to do this little
group where they quote counsel you before you get the abortion.
And in the beginning, the nurse passed out these little
pills to everyone and said to take this medication. I
(18:46):
guess it was going to relax you or something prior
to the procedure. And the first thing I did was
I looked at her and I said, well, this pill
hurt the baby. And I remember she looked at me
with this expression of do you know you're just kid
what you're getting ready to do, and you're asking me
if this skill is going to hurt the baby. And
it was also the first inkling for me that I
(19:08):
was a mother who was already kind of thinking about
this fetus as my child already concerned. So here I
am carrying these two you know, the echonomy is walking
myself into the abortion room. And I got on the
table and the doctor came in, and um, they began
(19:30):
to set up and need his ultrasound, and and he
did make a mention that I was really far along,
but that he could still do it because the baby
was small. And before I could, even before I could
process my thoughts, my words just tumbled out and I
sat up and I just said I can't do this.
(19:51):
I've changed my mind. And the doctor was very irritable,
and he looked at me and he, you know, just said,
you know, you've wasted my time and you're too far along,
and if you come back here, I'm not treating you,
and good luck, although I felt like he was wishing
me something other than luck. And I literally jumped off
the table, grabbed my socks and shoes and ran out
of there into the lobby. And then he's looking at me,
(20:13):
why do I like, is it over already? And I
told him I'm not doing it. I changed my mind,
and he, you know, he was really just wonderful and
he was like, okay, Um. He put his arm around
me and we walked out of the place, trying to
figure out what to do from there. And you know,
as I tell that story, I'm always cognizant of the
(20:36):
woman who has gotten the abortion, because in that moment,
I know because of the history of me and my parents,
and my family and and and my religion, and all
of those things led me to be in a place
where I couldn't do it. But I just want to say,
because so many of us have our own shame and
(20:57):
secrets around um things with sex and abortions and and
things like that, that there's just no judgment because we
all we all make our choices largely because of our
influences that were not even fully aware of, And so
I just have no judgment for any woman who who
would and has and will make a choice like that.
(21:21):
When Zoe and Vinnie leaves a clinic, his arm protectively
around her, z he has a fantasy she and Vinnie
will run away and find a castle with all live
happily ever after. But as with most fantasies, reality comes
crashing through, and the reality is that Zoe has volleyball
practice and school. The reality is that she has parents
(21:43):
at home who have no idea what's going on. The
reality is that Zoe is still pregnant. I don't think
that I had any idea what I was going to do.
I think I just went straight into a sense of denial,
and so I literally said nothing, and I continued on,
and I finished my volleyball season. I remember, you know,
(22:06):
reaching to get a ball and landing flat on my
stomach and feeling the baby pressed into me so strongly,
and remembering, oh, okay, there's someone there. It was in
December when I started track practice, and by then I
was able to wear sweatshirts, was getting cold on in Maryland,
and I was almost discovered once at track practice because
(22:28):
my coach was gonna put this device around my stomach
to do these lifting things, and I remember slowly taking
off my sweatshirt and looking at him to see if
he noticed. Over time, my mom figured it out. She
asked me one day, Zoe, are you pregnant? She literally
(22:50):
just said those words, and I'm sure there were plenty
of signs um and even still I couldn't tell her yes.
So I allowed my poor mom to me to another
pregnancy center, where another kind lady told us that I
was pregnant. How far along were you when your mother
asked you that question? I must have been four or
(23:10):
five months those around December, and I was doing may
so and there at the clinic. I had this idea
that somehow my mom being there would make this all
go away, that maybe I wasn't really pregnant and she
would tell us that. But of course that didn't happen.
I sat there and she told me what I already knew,
and my mom was quiet. I thought about what happened
(23:34):
in the abortion clinic, because in the abortion clinic, because
I was under age, the woman asked. The woman said,
you can't get an abortion at fourteen without your parents consent.
And I remember thinking, oh, okay, well great, well I'm
going home. That's solved. And then she said, well, wait,
if you sign this paper and it says that you
know you fear that if you disclose your pregnancy to
(23:58):
your parents that you will be hurt in some way
or abused or something, then you can sign that and
it's fine that the law allows that. And I remember
feeling so horrible and guilty for signing that paperwork, but
I kind of rationalized it in my mind. I was like, well,
if I tell my parents, you know, Bill drop dead
and we won't have any parents to take care of us,
and somehow that will be dangerous. So okay, I'm going
(24:20):
to sign it. But the contrast of my mom's actual
response and the pregnancy clinic was quiet, sad and disappointed, um,
which is is typical for my mom. And so you know,
I just sat there with shame and sadness, and I
(24:44):
felt very much a burden in that moment. On the
way home from the clinic, Zoe and her mom make
a stop. They go to Dairy Queen, which used to
be a wonderful treat when Zoe was a child old,
but now all that childlike wonder is gone. Over ice cream.
(25:05):
Zoe apologizes to her mom and tells her she wishes
she could go away just so her parents won't have
to deal with her predicament. Zoey's mom tells her that
she and her father will talk about it. Her mom
doesn't say much else, she remains quiet disappointed. In the
coming weeks, her parents tell Zoe that they will in
(25:26):
fact be sending her away, having had pre marital sex
and becoming pregnant. They see Zoe as a bad influence
on her younger sister, so plans are made off she
will go to a pregnancy home, and so I had
to go. And you know, in my mind at that time,
I understood, because I understood that I was tainted. I
(25:49):
understood that, you know, I had done this sinful thing,
and that I deserved this. Was Bennie still in your
life at that point? He was, Yes, Benny was still
in my life. Um. And I remember feeling disappointed because
remember my fantasy about us running away to a cast
bowl together, and I wanted him to somehow swoop in
(26:12):
and and say, you know, no, this is my child
and I want to marry you. And I were not
I'm not going to let this happen. And none of
that happened. He was very much an agreement. I later
found out, maybe seven ten years later, that my father
had gone to Vinnie in private and said, if you
(26:32):
contest any of this, I will accuse you of statutory
rate and you know, basically I will destroy you if
you can test any of this. We are doing this
because he was he was over He was nineteen at
that time and I was fifteen. He said, we are
doing this in Zoey's best interest, and so he agreed.
(26:54):
And of course I didn't know that at that time,
and I just felt like he didn't care. But yes,
we were still together. And I started preparing to leave,
and my parents told me that they were going to
tell everyone that I was going to boarding school. I
remember hearing stories from my mom about girls who got
in trouble and what happened to them. And from my
(27:15):
mom's experience, if a girl got pregnant as a teenager
and her society at least she disappeared. You didn't see
her anymore. And so I think that on some level,
my mom was just continuing what she understood to be
the way that you deal with these things. And so
my parents um packed me up and they took me
(27:38):
for five hours away to Lynchburg, Virginia to Jerry Fallwells
Liberty god Parent Home for pregnant women, and um that's
where I spent the duration of my pregnancy. So my coach, UM,
my teachers, the school, our church, family, everyone was told
(27:59):
that I went to reading school. Now I was told
that my siblings are also told that I went to
boarding school. I later found out maybe three years ago,
I found out that my parents had actually told my
siblings that I had a psychiatric breakdown and I had
to go to a psychiatric hospital. In some ways, this
is understandable because number one, my parents probably wouldn't necessarily
(28:24):
have sent me to a boarding school for no reason.
But probably the most important is that they couldn't visit me,
And so my parents had to come up with a
reason why they couldn't visit me, and their reason was
because I was in a psychiatric hospital. So your siblings then,
for all of those years following, had their own secret
that they kept. Correct. Yeah, I mean secrets, create secrets,
(28:48):
create secrets. It's really something they do. They do. We'll
be back in a moment with more family secrets. Zoe
(29:16):
is terrified when she arrives at the pregnancy home, but
she also feels deserving of this as her punishment. She
understands why she's been banished. Most of the other girls
there are from low socioeconomic backgrounds. It's very institutional, and
yet again Zoe feels out of place. Despite this, there's
(29:38):
a camaraderie among the girls, though the air circumstances may vary.
They're all kind to one another, but still, there's more
going on at the pregnancy home than meets the eye.
I felt like we were all taking time bombs in
a way, because there was this other layer of secrecy
within the Liberty god Parent Home because it was also
(30:02):
directly attached I mean all of it housed together with
an adoption agency. So the goal, of course was for
you to come in, have your baby, place your baby
for adoption through their adoption agency, and leave. And we
are we weren't allowed to communicate with the girls who
had left um and so you know, you would make
friends with somebody, and when they got close to do date,
(30:25):
you know, you'd wake up in the morning to check
and see is your friend gone? Did they disappear? Are
they still here? And there wasn't communication afterwards, and they
didn't want us to because you know, to some extent,
they didn't really want us to be able to hear
about what's it like on the other side once you've
given your child away. Why was it called the Liberty
(30:45):
god Parent Home? What was the god parents part of it?
The god parent home? The idea was that they are
saving babies and essentially kind of becoming their god parents
and taking care of babies. You know, I have a
number of mixed failings about all of that part, partly
because I was a part of that Liberty Godparent Home
(31:06):
didn't save any babies. Although I understand the drive with
people who are anti abortion to want to save babies.
I understand that. But Liberty Guard god parent Home didn't
even accept you in the home until you were past
the period where you could even have an abortion. And
then there's of course the other whole idea of that,
(31:28):
of the fact that you know, a baby raised by
a single mom. Isn't you know, that's not okay that
we should take these babies and put them in home,
you know, with two parents. But you know, it was
the nineteen well, early nineties at that point. It's so
interesting because you just said it was the early nineties.
(31:48):
You could have said it was the early nineteen fifties.
You're right, because it was. Actually it wasn't you know,
it wasn't the nineteen fifties. It was it was that
time period. But yeah, and I very much felt like
I was caught up in that now looking back, you know,
kind of after we moved to to Higgerstown, so that
(32:10):
was the culture, you know, and the understanding is that
I'm going to place my baby for adoption, and you
had some agency, so to speak, in the choice of
adoptive parents. So you know, when you say agency, it's
an interesting word because never once did anybody say you
have to do this and you have no no choice.
(32:31):
It was always we're going to help you make your decision.
And there was no help with how could you bring
a baby home? How could you not place your baby
for adoption? But there was this idea that you were
making this choice and they were going to help you
make this choice. Now, my mom did send me a
(32:51):
letter that was very clear when I was in the
home that if I were to try or want to
bring this baby home, that our relationship as mother and
daughter would forever be changed. Um And ultimately, I think
a lot of the guilt and shame that I took
with me after this whole process was a feeling like
(33:13):
I had somehow chosen my mother over my child. And
for me, that didn't feel okay. But I felt that
I had to choose her over my child because I
didn't know how to do anything differently. I didn't know
how I could leave and run off to the castle
and take care of, you know, my baby. So you know,
(33:34):
we had therapy and we had a process of making
your decision, and then you know, when I said what
what I was supposed to say? Which is our place
my baby? Then they presented me with a book with
pictures of really kind looking couples, and I remember thinking
of that time. My parents would never pick a babysitter
(33:56):
for me by looking at a bunch of pictures of girls,
And yeah, I'm picking parents from my child by looking
at a bunch of pictures. And maybe it's a paragraph
about who they are. And so I picked the nice
looking couple and waited for my baby to be born.
(34:18):
When Zoe goes into labor, she's in a therapy session
at the home. Her therapist, Jamie, is the one who
takes her to the hospital. No one else is available. Jamie,
a young social worker in her twenties, shuffles Zoe into
her cool little sports car, but first she puts a
plastic bag on the car seat, just in case Zoe's
water brakes. And so I'm getting in this you know car,
(34:43):
sitting on this plastic bag. I'm, you know, sixteen, and
I have no idea what I'm in store for. But Jamie,
bless her heart, sat with me through probably at least
half of my labor, at least four hours, until my
mom could drive to get there. Now, prior to my
mom getting there, a nurse had given me some um
(35:03):
pain medication. It was just a pill. Nobody offered me
an epidural. Nobody offered me anything else that They did
offer me some pill, and I took the pill and
it did seem to help a little bit. By the
time my mom got there, I was really in the
throes of labor and Jamie took off, and I had
asked for something for the pain, and my mom just
(35:25):
shook her head, just just shook her head. Now what
did you make of that shake of your mother's head.
I just internalized it as I deserved this, I needed
to feel it. I needed to experience all of the
pain of what I had. You know, this was my
punishment that I shouldn't be relieved of this experience. And
I think, probably to some extent, that is true. My mother,
(35:48):
though in her defense, she had all three of her
children without pain medication, But in that moment, I perceived
it as no, you don't get to have at And
I just remember the deep shame I felt in that
moment when my mom shook her head no, And I
went through the rest of my labor. You know, without
(36:09):
any pain medication, and so my daughter was born, and
you know, it was just such a sober, just a sober,
such a sober experience. You know, there was no excitement,
there was no congratulations. You know, they weren't smiled. I think,
no matter how old you are, when you have a child,
you're not prepared for the aftermath, you know, the war
(36:34):
zone that your body is. But I think there was
a level of trauma that was probably increased after that
experience because I was so young, and um. I just
remember seeing my body, you know, the day after and
just thinking what what have I done? And the thing
(36:54):
with the home is once you have the baby, they
want you to leave as soon as possible. They don't
want you to stay for obvious reasons. They don't want
you to connect with the baby, they don't want you
to change your mind. And my mom was totally on
board for all of that. The social worker from the
agency came and said, it's better if you just leave
as soon as possible. I remember there was this doctor,
(37:15):
that's young doctor. Um. I was in the room and
my daughter, I named her Kaya. Her name is different now,
but I don't know if I was holding her, if
she was in the bassinet that he just kind of
flew into the room and he was like a breath
of fresh air, and he was all smiled, and he
congratulated me, and he said, what a beautiful baby I have,
what a wonderful mom I'm going to be. He did
(37:37):
all of her vitals and just wished me the best
and left the room. And I remember thinking he didn't
see in the file, he didn't see that I'm placing her.
And I remember just thinking, I hope that he never
reads that. I hope that that stays a reality somewhere
in his mind forever, because he was the only brightness.
(37:58):
You know, everybody else was just bar all the nurses
and everybody that came in because they knew that I
was placing her. So we packed up really quickly, and
I did that walk. I don't know, I don't know
how better to explain. It was just like a walk
towards death, almost, you know, I was conscious of every
single step as I was left the hospital that I
(38:21):
was putting distance between myself and my baby. Zoe and
her mother head downstairs to leave the hospital. So we
waits by the exit while her mother goes to get
the car. And then suddenly her mom zips around the
corner in a brand new vehicle, a shiny red Pontiac Fiero,
(38:44):
a push present for her daughter, and I remember thinking,
of course, it's a two seater. I couldn't bring a
baby home if I wanted to. And she presented me
with my present, which I suppose was supposed to be
for my sixteenth birthday, and I remember thanking her and
hugging her and crying. Although I wasn't crying because I
(39:07):
got a new sports car. I was crying, of course,
because of all of what was transpiring in that moment.
And we got in my new sports car and we
drove away. Before we got home, we stopped at a
hotel and we had to stay there for a few days,
and my mom bought girdles to put around me so that,
(39:27):
you know, nobody could tell that I was pregnant when
I got back home. And I went back home, and yes,
I did my very best to try to pretend like
everything was normal. And a couple of months later, my
mom took me to a restaurant um and sat down
and told me that the home that I had picked
(39:49):
for my daughter, that the parents had changed their minds,
and all this time I thought she was with them.
And I found out that she and fact left the
hospital to go to foster home because that was the
way they did it. Then that the baby doesn't go
directly into the foster home. I don't know what it
has to do with paperwork or whatever, so she left
(40:11):
or I'm also not clear if maybe there wasn't actually
a family, you know, I don't know that information. But ultimately,
my daughter was a few months old and had been
raised by strangers who were never going to keep her. Meanwhile,
I'm living in this three story, you know, home with
this family, and my daughter's in foster care. So my
(40:35):
mom told me that the parents changed their mind and
that they had another set of parents, and I had
to sign some paperwork two agree that this next set
of parents could have her instead. And I remember looking
at my mom and I remember saying, can we just
(41:00):
go get her? Please? Can we just go get her?
And my mom said nothing, She just shook her head
and I didn't say anything else, and I you know,
I kicked myself for a while after that because I thought,
you know, when I was little, I would beg my
mom if I wanted to go stay at a friend's house. Mom,
Please please please. I learned how to say, you know, please, please, please,
(41:21):
until sometimes she'd give it, and I kind of I
kind of kicked myself because I feel like I didn't
fight hard enough. I said it, but I know that
that there was so much shame in that it was
hard for me to even ask her please. And you know,
when she denied me, I guess there just wasn't enough
(41:41):
fight in me to try to push more. Do you
think it would have made any difference. I don't know.
I doubt it. Time marches inexorably forward. Zoe goes to
college and eventually marries a man twenty years for senior.
Her daddy lust, the kind women so often feel when
(42:02):
their own fathers have been withholding dictating her choices. She
does tell her husband about her secret history, but his
response isn't exactly freeing. He basically just wants to pretend
that it never happened. Sound familiar. Now, As a therapist,
Zoe understands so much more about the choices we make.
(42:22):
They tend to underscore the feelings we already have about ourselves.
In this case, his reaction just deepens the red in
her scarlet letter. They move forward, leaving the past in
the past and start their family life, having two sons
and then a daughter. And of course, you know, after
giving up my daughter, there's always a part of me
(42:44):
that wanted to have a daughter um of my own
that I could keep, and so we were all so
very excited. I feel like, both my mom and I
and everyone in the family this was going to be
the only daughter, because my brother had three sons and
I had had two sons, and I think there was
a sense of exoneration when we found out I was
having a girl. But unfortunately, when my daughter was born,
(43:07):
we didn't know at the time, but she was born
with the severe genetic disorder called crowd Willy syndrome, and
she was in the nicke and barely surviving for many weeks.
And I felt this crushing sense of I am being punished,
and now my daughter is being punished. Of course, God
wouldn't give me a healthy baby girl. Of course, it's
kind of a trick. And I sat with that for
(43:27):
many years, and so yes, then you know, I dove
into being a mom of a special needs child and
trying to grapple with that in all of my shame
and my guilt surrounding that for a number of years.
Here Zoe is again faced with intense shame and the
sense that she's being punished, as well as a profound loneliness,
(43:51):
the isolation that comes from raising a child with special needs,
and to this the heavy guilt she still carries from
her secret child, the healthy daughter she had given birth
to years ago. All moms, you know, we have our
own built about all things with our parenting. If I
had not eaten this, if I had done this differently,
you know, if if if with any issues that our
(44:12):
kids might have, but and special needs moms, I think
have another layer of that. And then I additionally had
another layer on top of that that wasn't healthy for me.
And it certainly wasn't healthy I think for for my
daughter for an number of years because I just parented
her with just so much guilt. But yeah, that those
(44:35):
layers were definitely there, and they were in silence because
none of my friends knew. My very best friends, she
and I went through both of our early pregnancies together,
and she thought that we both went through our very
first pregnancy together. So yes, nobody knew, and so a
lot of that was very much kept in secret, but
so we manages. She's strong, stronger than her secrets. She
(44:58):
built her very busy family life and is thriving in
her career as a psychotherapist as well. And one day, well,
one day, her birth daughter finds her and reaches out.
Her name is Sarah. She found me through Facebook. Um,
(45:19):
she actually found her father first because I was private
on Facebook. I don't remember how she found out his
name because it was a closed adoption. There were letters
that went back and forth for the first year too,
and identifying information was blacked out, but sometimes they went
(45:40):
felt great about blacking out some of the things. I mean,
someone in the agency would just go through with the
marker and just black things out and then they'd spend
it off, you know. Um, so maybe that's how she
was doing some detective work. Clearly correct. Yes, And she
found him. And I was homeschooling my kids in the
middle of a normal homeschool day and I get a
(46:01):
call from Denny, who I rarely ever heard from, um,
and he said, I have our daughter on the line.
And I remember I just just my feet just left
from under man. Before I knew it, I was just
plopped straight down on the ground, um, and I heard
her voice and she said Hi, as simple as that
(46:23):
eighteen years later, you know. And so we started a conversation.
And I remember I went into my closet and I
shut the door, and I thanked down on the closet
floor and I was talking to her and whispers because
remember nobody, my kids don't know, um, that they have
a sibling out there. Um. But Sarah and I began
to get to know each other, and eventually we met
(46:45):
for the first time. I told my husband and he was,
you know, not very interested in any of it, and
certainly didn't want us to tell the kids. UM. So
we told the kids that I was going on a
business trip, and I went on my business trip and
that my daughter for the first time. What was it
(47:05):
like to meet her? Oh, you know, I was at
the airport and I was downstairs and she was coming
from upstairs. I was waiting for her, and I was
looking at the escalator, kind of waiting, and it almost
it's kind of crazy, but I don't felt like she
was descending from heaven. I could see her just coming
slowly down on the escalator. It was just I can
(47:30):
only say, maybe it was like coming home. I saw
parts of her in parts of a vinny. And the
interesting thing though, is that I was so shut down.
I think from so many years that I wasn't able
to emote. I wasn't able to cry. I saw her
(47:52):
and we hugged and I smiled, and she was crying,
and I just felt this damn like this wall. And
I remember, are feeling Zoe, why can't you cry? Why
can't you feel anything? Um? And I mean I know
now and I understand the process, but um, in that moment,
I couldn't. Later, when we were talking in the restaurant,
(48:12):
I you know, as we begin to talk about things,
I was able to kind of attach to some emotion,
but in that moment I just felt so closed up.
Well it's it's understandable because you had been taught that
again and again and again. The only way to survive
is to close it off and shut it down exactly.
(48:34):
Zoe tells her mother that Sarah has found her. She
lets her know she plans to meet her birth daughter.
She isn't exactly asking for permission, but Zoe and her
mother seemed to reach a tacit agreement that the secret
needs to remain secret. That Zoe won't tell her kids. Later,
Sarah also reaches out to Zoe's parents. They are her
(48:54):
grandparents after all, and they begin to develop a relationship
of sorts, not exactly like family, more like family adjacent.
How did they receive her? My parents are very polite.
I don't know that i'd say they were overly welcoming,
But there wasn't any negativity. There wasn't I don't think
(49:15):
that there was any desire to push her away. My
parents are very well mannered, polite people, and so they
met her, and they welcomed her. When I say welcome,
I don't really like that word, because they didn't welcome
it her into our family. They weren't going to tell
anybody about her, but they were willing to meet her.
So they still intended to absolutely keep this a secret. Yes,
(49:41):
For a few years, Zoe continues to get to know Sarah,
meeting her clandestinely, sneaking away telling her kids she's going
to visit a friend. But then Zoe's father dies suddenly
of a heart attack, and now, as happens with secrets,
another layer emerges. Because Sarah is going to go to
her grandfather's funeral. Of course, she is she's now twenty
(50:04):
one years old, and there's a very good chance that's
always children will cross paths with her, you know, in
the midst of my dad dying so suddenly and me,
you know, needing to fly to the East coast, and
you know, my husband didn't want me to bring the
kids because one of the first things he said was,
(50:24):
is Sarah going to be there? So, you know, I
called Sara and let her know that my father had passed,
and of course she expected to be at the funeral.
You know, my mother was in shock. Um she was
not obviously in a good place at all. And I
get home to Maryland and it's the day before the funeral,
and my mind is racing, and I remember saying to
(50:48):
my mom, I'm going to tell my children about Sarah
and my mother. She looked at me, but she didn't
look at me. She looked through me. And remember her
eyes were just dead, and she just turned around and
walked upstairs. And I remember that's the first time I
felt I felt like a child, because I felt like
(51:10):
I was making this decision all by myself. And it
was the first decision an opposition that I was making
all by myself, and I did. I gathered my kids
up and I brought them upstairs and I told them,
I have something to tell you. You have an older sister.
Remember those words, you know you have an older sister.
There are five simple words, and they escaped my lips,
(51:34):
and I remember just feeling like I wanted to grab
them and pull them back. And I watched, you know,
the effect of them on my kids, and you know,
initially they were just like what and they were excited,
and I asked me tens and times of questions. Over time,
I saw a donning in my thirteen year old eyes
that was like, oh, my mother's alied to me. But
that took some time, and that took some working through
(51:54):
with him. So I told them, and I remember feeling like,
on some level, like this way have been lifted off
and I am becoming a adult for the very first time.
I knew my husband would be horribly upset, and I
chose not to ask him before I told him afterwards,
and that started a whole another cascade of of of
(52:15):
problems in our marriage. Um but I felt so reborn,
and then the next day I had to tell my family.
So we had the actual funeral at the church so
we showed up at the church and Sarah was there,
and um, she sat in front of us with my kids,
(52:37):
and for the first time I had all of my children,
all five of them with me sitting there at my
dad's funeral. Nobody knew who she was. I didn't introduce
her to anyone. There's just a lot of you know,
just a lot of sadness and and and all the
things that happened at a funeral. Well, after the funeral,
we went to my sister's home and that's where our
(52:59):
family was, so my extended family, my aunts and uncle
is my everybody. And Sarah came and I took a
deep breath, and in the middle of everybody standing there
in the living room, I said, I have somebody I
want to introduce you to. My mother just kind of
snuck away and I told them, you know, this is
(53:22):
my daughter, Sarah. I gave birth to her when I
was sixteen years old, and I placed her for adoption,
and I want you guys to meet her. Even as
I say it, it just makes me feel kind of
breathy because it was such a huge monumental thing for
me to do. And I know that my mother never
would have done it. She would have been fine to
(53:43):
just pretend like Sarah was a friend. And the very
last thing I could or would do would be allow
my daughter to participate in this secret. She knew she
was a secret, but I wasn't going to ask her
to participate. Hate and holding the secret. And somehow, for
some reason, I don't know if it's a combination of
(54:05):
my father dying or just the reality of what I
was going to be continuing in my life and perpetrating
with my children if I didn't tell the truth and
speak the truth. And so I did it so powerful
in the period ongoing, you know, from then, you know
(54:28):
that that sense of having put down a burden that
maybe assumed a kind of greater and greater and greater weight,
because I think somehow secrets just get heavier and denser,
they take more maintenance, and they extend and and create
(54:49):
more need for more kinds of secrets. It's like it's
like cracks in the ice just getting you know, going,
you know, sort of fanning outward. And I'm wonder how
it's felt once you were able to put down that burden,
both you know, with your family, with your extended family,
(55:10):
and most of all, with yourself. Two have lived so
long with something so profoundly secretive and and not be
doing that anymore. I know people have said this before,
and in some ways it's so cliche, but you don't
really understand the weight of the burden until the burden
is taken off. It's two things that happened. I think
(55:33):
it's like those five words. I felt, you know, my
whole license. I was fifteen years old. If I had
spoken those words, that somehow the world was going to
fall apart, but everything would you know, would be destroyed,
That I destroyed people, I destroyed my family, that all
these horrible things would happen, and that I said those
five things and nothing happened. And so part of it
(55:56):
was like a realization that I was holding the secret unnecessarily.
I was holding the secret and an attempt to honor
my parents, an attempt to honor my husband, and it
was all for nothing, and the secret of itself had
created damage. And so I think that in addition to
(56:18):
the beautiful weight being lifted, it was that realization that
ultimately nobody cares. You know, people, you know, we hold
these secrets for for years and years, and we we
build them up to be something so much more than
they are. And yeah, people hear them and they might
go wow, and maybe they'll murmur for a few minutes.
(56:40):
But I've been holding that secret for decades, and someone's
going to talk about me for a minute. And so
I think it was that realization of the futility of
of keeping it, and yet I had done it for
so many years, and that just became, I think, a
driving passion for me to just continue in my authenticity,
(57:01):
continue on this path and and help other women as well.
(57:22):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly
z Achor 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 Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
(57:42):
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more
(58:13):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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