May 13, 2021 • 49 mins
Nicole Georges never knew her father. From the time she was little, she was told he died when she was just an infant—of colon cancer, her mom said. But after getting a strange palm reading in her early 20s, Nicole realizes there may be more to the story. Not knowing how to approach her mother about it, Nicole—like so many other Americans dealing with personal crises—calls up a familiar, and controversial, source of advice on family matters: Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. That
was it the anti climax of my whole parented life.
Mom reacted as expected. She kicked her mistake under the
couch and kept moving. If I wanted to keep a parent,
(00:22):
I needed to forgive and accept her as she was
a sixty year old woman with an enormous capacity to
love in the present but never reconcile the past. I
cut my losses and moved forward. That's Nicole J. George's.
Nicole is an illustrator, writer, zinster, podcaster, and educator. She's
(00:46):
also the author of the graphic memoir calling Dr Laura,
a story about discovering a secret hidden from her all
her life that had to do with the bedrock of
her identity. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets,
(01:13):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I grew up everywhere. I was born in Ohio. I
was raised with my mom's side of the family, which
(01:35):
is all Syrian, and I had a Lebanese stepgrandmother, and
so I grew up with a big family and a
lot of Lebanese food. I lived with my mom, and
I lived with my two sisters, who were ten and
twelve years older than me, and we quickly moved from
Ohio to Maryland, and then from Maryland we moved to Florida,
(01:55):
and then we moved to Kansas. And so at a
certain point, my sisters moved away and it was just
me with my mom and at that point various step
dads and I just really communed with animals. I stayed
home all the time. I never went to school. I
watched TV, made clothes for my stepped animals, trying to
(02:17):
teach my turtle how to read, trying to you know,
dress the dogs and clothes. I was like watching Phoebe's
playhouse and then living my Pope's playhouse fantasy. What was
the reason for all the moving? We moved a lot
for men. My mom was always kind of orbiting around
(02:37):
whatever man was my stepfather or was, you know, was
auditioning to be my next stepfather, And so we moved
for other people's jobs. Generally, my extended family all lives
in Ohio, you know, so that's that was where we
kept coming back to, or that's where and that's where
I was born. But then everywhere else we moved was
for a step dad or someone my mom was with.
(02:59):
Tell me a bit about your mom of your childhood.
What was she like. My mom's very charismatic, you know,
she smiled all the time. She was a motivational speaker.
At some point, she was also an eighties businesswoman. She
had a huge life with a lot of things. When
I was growing up, her temper to me was unpredictable,
(03:24):
and she was always trying to keep it together and
keep various secrets together from my stepdad's or whoever I
was dating. There was always something that we had to
be conspiring about to keep from people, whether it be
something about money or like don't tell your stepdad you
haven't been to school this week, or things like that.
(03:46):
You know, my mom was very warm. I've never had
a home where, you know, someone didn't say I love you,
or didn't give me a hug, or didn't you know. Food,
I think is one of my original love languages. My
mom was like always like rolling grape leaves and making
me food. And when I went vegan as a teenager,
her trying to figure out how to make vegan food.
She's always more than willing to do all of that stuff,
(04:07):
and yet I always had this feeling of being de
prioritized in favor of the men that were around, and
feeling like I just really wanted some time alone with
her and I couldn't get it. Her dance card was full.
When she would ask you to keep her secrets or
you know, not tell the truth in the service of
(04:28):
some kind of secret, was it an attempt to kind
of kind of bond with you, like you and she
were this team. What do you think that was? Absolutely,
we were co conspirators. We were a team. There was
some kind of the thing of, you know, us together.
(04:50):
It was almost like we were embattled, like us together
against Bill in the blank so against the truancy officer,
against my stepdad, against whomever from the outside wanted to
look into our home and we didn't want them to
know what was going on. There was kind of like
a best friend quality, and there was also a co
conspirator bonding sort of vibe. And also some of these
(05:13):
secrets were positioned to keep me safe or to keep
me out of farms, like I had done something wrong,
Like I had horrible stomach problems as a kid, and
I had stomach problems in particular ways that like there
was like I had the kinds of things that I
feel I could have been cleared up very quickly, but
lasted for a decade and I never went to school,
(05:36):
And so my mom would basically be like, Okay, well,
well since you didn't go to school all week, we
have to hide this from your step dad so you
don't get in trouble or just it was like I
had to keep myself as secret. I had to keep
you know, the fact that I was like soiling myself secret,
or the fact that this problem was happening secret. I
had to keep like the financial situation of our home secret.
(05:58):
There was just a lot of things is to keep
track of. It isn't until Nicole is an adult that
she comes to realize that there is a term, a
true medical definition for the crushing symptoms that plagued her
as a child, and co priceis which is often caused
by emotional distress or separation anxiety. The hallmark of it,
(06:21):
at least as I was understanding it, is, you know,
you had this terrible stomach trouble and just trouble going
to the bathroom. Really like serious stuff that seems like
it comes up most often with children who are like
really dealing with something that they don't understand. I don't
mean the physical part. I mean the psychological and emotional part,
(06:44):
Like there's something about what's going on that's just hidden
and I don't know. I mean, does that make sense
to you? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It feels like,
you know, as far as I can tell, And from
researching it and being in therapy for a very long
time and talking to people, it feels like, either you
(07:07):
know something, it seems like a psychological problem, and it
was being treated like a physical problem. It was being
treated unreliably, so we would never see the same doctor twice.
It was treated unliably as a physical problem or a
failing on my part, like why don't you just go
to the bathroom. But I think it was a psychological
issue that started happening when I was a toddler. I
(07:28):
mean it interests me in terms of the subject of
this podcast two, because there's so much that I think
happens to children when something really significant is being kept
from them and they don't know it. You know, they don't.
I shouldn't say they, I should say we, you know,
we we don't know it. But yet it's kind of
(07:51):
in the air all around us, like some sort of
like invisible poisonous gas. And when that happens and there's
no ex pla nation for it, the child, even like
really young children, just start feeling like there must be
something really really wrong with them, and they turn it
against themselves. And that's like it's one of the most
(08:12):
toxic elements of a secret being withheld. Tell me also
a little bit about your relationship with your too much
older sisters, like both when you were a child and
then once they left home and you were left to
send kind of for yourself, was your mom, and they
(08:33):
were out of the house by the time you were,
you know what, like eight years old. Yeah, my sisters
went to college when I was six, and then when
I was eight, my middle sister, Meg, she pretty much
raised me. It was kind of like my sisters had
like a teen pregnancy. When my mom had me, she
(08:54):
was very preoccupied with other things, and so my sister,
who was ten years older than me, ended up, you know,
taking me to the grocery store with her, picking me
up from school, making sure I brushed my teeth, putting
me to bed. She was entirely responsible for me more
or less, and my mom kind of drilled into her
that she was a big drag and drilled into me like,
(09:15):
I just my mom will let me do whatever I wanted.
So if I wanted to eat a bunch of candy,
if I threw a fit, if I was being a
brat about something, my mom would be like, oh God,
just give it to me. Who wants to hear that.
But my sister Meg was the one that had to
be kind of the uptight one and be like, no,
this is here structure, here's rules, here's boundaries. And so
when my sister's left, it was devastating. It's actually something
(09:37):
I'm still processing and therapy, is how heartbroken I was
when my oldest sister Liz went to college and when
my middle sister Meg went to college, and Meg had
to be both of them had to be convinced to
go to college. They both had survivor's guilt, and Meg
in particular almost didn't go to college because she didn't
(09:58):
want to leave me behind as I was. You know,
at the time, I had a pretty horrible stepdad who
was emotional, who was abusive to my mom, and my
sister just couldn't bear to as my guardian, my longtime guardian.
She couldn't bear to leave me there, but somebody convinced
her that she needed to save herself. How many step
dads did you have? In all you know, I only had.
(10:21):
I had two step dads from what I can put together.
My mom left my dad to date a Saudi Arabian prince.
They did not get married. He was around for a
couple of years with his entourage, and then she whenever
he left. I had a stepdad in Florida, and then
I had a stepdad directly after that, who my mom
was still with to this day. Where was your father?
(10:43):
What had happened to him? It was my understanding that
he had died of colon cancer when I was a baby,
and this kind of got fleshed out by my mom
over the years that he died when I was a
year and a half old. He was thirty three years old,
and it was very sad. But side note, he was
a con man, and he was very funny, and he
(11:03):
came from maybe a bad home. Those are all the
things I knew. So every time as a kid, when
I had stomach problems and I would go see a gastronologist,
I would lead with that. My mom wouldn't say it,
but I would be like, oh, and by the way, yeah,
my dad died of calling cancer. It's like a you know,
an eight year old to be like, maybe that's what's
wrong with me. That was my understanding for a very
long time, and you're much older. Sisters also backed that
(11:27):
story up. Yes, my sisters and my mom back that
story up. And essentially people just really didn't talk about him.
My mom once mentioned we were an a vintage store
and she grabbed like a black hat with a veil
and said, I wore a hat just like this to
your dad's funeral. It was so sad. I think she
(11:49):
was just freestyling there. And no one in my family
ever mentioned my dad. Ever. There was one time I
can remember in my entire life where anyone else mentioned him,
and it was an old woman at my grandfather's birthday party,
because ninetieth birthday party, and she came up to me
and she said, oh, you're you're David's daughter. And I
(12:10):
had not even heard his name come out of a
different person's mouth aside from my mom pretty much ever,
and so I was fascinated, and she quickly got shooed
away from me. We'll be right back. When Nicole is
(12:35):
twenty two years old, a woman she's dating named Verona
gifts her as a belated birthday present with a palm
reading with a psychic who she finds where all good
psychics can be found in the back of the local newspaper.
I went to the palm reader, and she said, you
don't get along with your mother, I can tell from
(12:56):
your hand, and you should talk to your father more often.
And I said, I can't talk to him more often
because he's dead. And she said, maybe the man you
think is your father is dead, but your real father
is very much alive. And everything else she had said
had been such nonsense. She had said so many things
(13:19):
about me marrying an older man and having three pregnancies
with two children, and she said, all this stuff, that's
it seems fantastical, like you would imagine. And then she
said this thing, and it just rung a bell that
I couldn't unring. All the pieces, all the things that
I had worked so hard in my life to kind
of try and figure out, like why is everyone kind
(13:40):
of looking at each other over my heads? Why is
everyone talking around something? Is there something wrong with me?
There were so many things that I had supposed that
it was that people weren't telling me that this Tom
Reader saying this, it felt entirely plausible, Like it was
crystal clear that I was like, this is very possible. Yeah,
that's such an amazing that's such an amazing thing, right,
(14:02):
Like there's you know, you grew up in a house
where there were all of these secrets, but they were
like secrets in a minor key. They were not big,
gigantic secrets. They were don't tell your stepfather this, or
tell the truant officer that, or they were not like
the secret. And and then suddenly, now there's this possibility
that I guess really only occurs to you for the
(14:24):
first time. I mean, why would one ever have the thought,
you know, maybe my father, who I've been told died
of colon cancer when I was a year and a
half old, is really alive. You wouldn't have that thought.
Because we believe what we're told as children, then that
forms our identity, Like those just become the tent poles
and the pillars of the way that we grow up,
(14:44):
and we sort of form ourselves around that, even if
it doesn't really make sense. The fortune teller also tells
you two not tell anyone, to keep it to yourself,
right m hm? She said, yeah, whatever I tell you
in this room, it's nothing personal, and you need to
keep it to yourself for twenty four hours. And that
(15:05):
my friend and I we kind of exploded out the
door of this woman's place. It was a two for one.
So my friend also got her palm read and we
exploded out the door, and just as soon as we
hit the street, we were like, oh my god, what
does she tell you? And we told each other everything,
all of her like funny predictions about us being straight
and marrying these men and all this stuff. But I
didn't tell her. I didn't tell Verona about my dad.
(15:27):
I didn't tell anybody about it for a really long time.
I couldn't. It was too big. It was what was
like a Shortinger's cat. It was just like that box.
I just couldn't touch it right away. How did that
sit with you during that like nearly a year where
you didn't tell anyone that this had happened. Were you
(15:47):
thinking about it? Were you like lying awake at night
and wondering about it? Or did you kind of pack
it away a little bit? Of both. I kind of
would only allow myself to entertain it here and there,
because you know, I had just started going to therapy
I think the year before for the first time in
my life, and I had even started I had only
(16:08):
even started acknowledging that my upbringing was not normal very recently.
I was very young, and so I would think about
it sometimes at night or when I was alone. Otherwise,
I just kept myself very busy. I kept I felt
very busy with a lot of friends. I lived in
a house with a lot of roommates. I did volunteer work.
(16:29):
I had like two jobs at nonprofits. I hosted karaoke,
I just did There were so much I just packed
my days so full that there I really only processed
it a little bit in my diary. I've always kept
a diary, and sometimes it's the only place where my
reality has been reflected back to me. Especially when I
(16:50):
was growing up in such a chaotic way, that was
the only place where I dared to even talk about it.
Did you go back and revisit that diary later? I have, Well,
you know, a weird thing about me is that I
have the compulsion to publish everything, and so at that point,
I was doing a zine that was essentially just photocopy
(17:12):
diary entries. So I actually was just looking the other
day back at a zine I did in my early twenties,
like a fancy and a diary comic, and it has
me writing kind of cryptically about this secret and kind
of this like deep melancholy I felt. And everything was cryptic,
everything was kind of vague, everything was kind of sad.
But it just was like past, present and future, like
(17:35):
all here in the same moment as how I felt
about it. I felt overwhelming. And I had drawn some
picture of a vintage like a woman from the forties
that I had found in a magazine. I had drawn
this picture of her with kind of like a like
a scar across her head. I was very into drawing
people with like scars across their heads, like visible scars,
visible sewn up wounds. And that's how I expressed it
(17:57):
at the time. Wow, that's so interesting without knowing that
that's what you were doing, right, Yeah, it was the
you know, the outer expression of something that was so
internal that you couldn't really touch it, sort of like
a live wire inside of you. So you then end
up as happens like as one does when a secret
(18:21):
has been Like in this kind of pressure cooker of
being unspoken, you end up blurting out the story to
pretty much a stranger. Yeah. I didn't talk to anyone
in my life about I didn't talk to my sisters
about it. I didn't talk to my closest friends who
had known me. I just I was on essentially a
first date with a stranger, and I it was so
(18:43):
awkward that I just and I just was looking for
something to say, and so I told her this. I said, oh,
you know, I have a crazy story. A poem reader
told me my dad was alive what I've been told
he was dead my whole life, and she was like, what,
I feel like I told her almost to avoid emotional accountability,
because it's the kind of thing if I told one
(19:04):
of my friends, they would pause and reflect back how
hard they must be, and I would have to have
a feeling and before very vulnerable. And so it was
telling a stranger who doesn't have that relationship or reflection
of you. There was something about it that felt like
I was I don't know if I if I I
was almost removed from it, like trying to use it
(19:26):
as like a parlor trick instead of a very deep,
sad possibility. So how how long is it then before
you end up approaching one of your sisters and asking,
you know, so his dad really dead? And it was
at least another year, I think. So that person and
(19:48):
I ended up dating seriously, and she kept urging me
to ask about it. She was holding me accountable to
ask about it and to think about it, and that,
you know, maybe it was something I should consider finding
out if it was nagging at me that it might
be true, which it was, and so I asked my sister.
(20:09):
I asked my oldest sister, Liz. She had been kind
of cryptically telling my girlfriend that she had something she
really wanted to tell me and that she loved me
a lot. This was happening simultaneously. She didn't know that
I knew, but she was like, I love Nicole so much.
I have something I really need to tell her, and
I was giving me a lot of anxiety, and so
I really just I blurted it out. I went to
(20:31):
visit her in San Francisco on tour with my band,
and after our show, you know, it was probably like
twelve thirty in the morning, and I had like one
sip of one beer and was like, oh, so was
my dad really dead? And she just immediately broke and
was like, no, no, he's not. And she immediately just
(20:53):
dissolved into tears, and I was like, I'm so sorry.
I you know, please don't hate me. I've always wanted
to tell you, and I you know, I it really
never crossed my mind to hate my sisters. It had
crossed my mind to hate my mom over the secret,
but I knew that they were hostages basically to my
mom's reality, just like I was. And it was so
(21:14):
hard to see how much pain the secret had caused
them to keep all this time. What did it feel
like at that moment to have that confirmation there was
really overwhelming. I mean every step of this process has
just completely, um like overwhelmed my nervous system. I felt
(21:35):
very sad for my sisters, and I felt it kind
of just blew my mind that it was true. And
I think on some level I knew it was true,
or else I wouldn't have asked. But I think part
of the reason it felt overwhelming is because there wasn't
a place in my household for that kind of emotional
(21:56):
raw vulnerability and honesty. That wasn't how our house was
where we grew up, and so I was really we
were both very vulnerable of each other for my whole life.
So us just communing in this way felt very particular. Well,
I think it's also being an unwilling secret keeper is
(22:17):
its own kind of hell. I can only imagine because
now as an adult, any time I have a secret
from somebody, any kind of secret, even if I only
keep it for ten minutes, it will give me a migraine.
It will tear me, it will eat me up. It
makes me so uncomfortable. So to think about, like my
sister Meg, being ten years old or eleven and a half,
(22:40):
you know, raising an infant, and then having your mother
implicate you in this secret and having to hold it
for your whole life from somebody who you care about
that much. I feel devastated for both of them that
they had their child, that piece of their childhoods and
that ability to bond with me taken away. Regular listeners
of this podcast, no that trauma lives in the body.
(23:03):
Just listen to my bonus episodes with Dr Bessel vander
Kolk and Dr Rachel Yehuda for starters. Seriously, if you
haven't listened to those, I hope you will. Trauma lodges
itself within us and becomes, in a very real physical sense,
like a slumbering giant. In her graphic memoir calling Dr
Laura Nicole illustrates this with the story of fainting goat syndrome. Yes,
(23:30):
you heard that right. You've probably heard of fight or
flight as a response to a fearful situation. Well, there's
also freeze, and there is apparently faint and it's not
just for goats. There's something that I call fainting goat syndrome,
and I've heard some other people call it this too,
But basically, there's this kind of goat where if they
(23:55):
get scared or overwhelmed, like if a predator is coming
at them, they will freeze up. Their bodies will completely
freeze up, and they'll have a temporary paralysis and just
fall over. And so they're called fainting goats. And I
felt like I had this anytime somebody wanted to process,
(24:16):
or lesbian process as I call it, basically just sitting
down and talking about our feelings, talking about hard feelings.
It was so overwhelming to me that I would get
so tired and just fall asleep. And as a kid,
my mom would joke to like, oh, my little narcaleptic,
because I would I would just fall asleep all the time.
I would fall asleep in the car, I would fall
(24:37):
asleep during a hard conversation. I would just it overwhelmed
my whole body. And so around this time, when I
was dealing with this with my sister and with my
partner at the time, I would sometimes get so overwhelmed
by all the information I would just start kind of
nodding off or getting very drowsy. That's something I've outgrown
(24:57):
with time. I mean it just as a it's a
it's been a actice of getting used to being vulnerable,
saying my feelings, understanding that like criticism isn't the worst
thing in the world, and that being accountable is okay.
But it's been a long it's been a long road well,
And it seems like you learned that sort of at
your mother's feet. You know, you describe what it was
(25:20):
like to ever have any kind of confrontation with your
mother or a fight with your mother, and you didn't
grow up learning that it was okay to be emotionally vulnerable.
Absolutely not. I mean I I learned to come at
any kind of confrontation or uncomfortable conversation to get in
a defensive crouch, to be just like all horns and thorns,
(25:43):
and just like clowse out like everyone defend themselves. Because
I mean also when I grew up, if there was
a vulnerable conversation, if there was a conversation with my
mom that took a turn through outsized responses or anger
or name calling, we're so unpredictable that I think it.
You know, I feel like my brain was always trying
(26:03):
to find an order to it or a reason and
being like, oh, well, maybe if she disunderstands that I
didn't mean to hurt her, or maybe this, or I'm
not quite sure what set her off, my brain will
be working so fast trying to find reason in order
to the chaos that was in front of me. But
I think it just overwhelmed my whole system, and it
wasn't a place where I could take vulnerable, soft feelings
(26:27):
and get any kind of have anybody emotionally meet me
there or reflect back to me like oh that seems
really hard or I'm so sorry that happened, you know,
it wasn't that. It was either like somebody hurt you.
Now there our enemy, or I hurt you. No, I didn't.
I'll give you something to cry about. What are you
(26:47):
crying like? I got? I got the very soothing I'll
give you something to cry about. That's kind of how
my feelings were held when I was young. So Nicole
is understandably terrified and resistant about the idea of confronting
her mother. It's nearing the holidays, and her mother's spidy
sense kicks into gear. She starts calling more than usual,
(27:08):
stalking Nicole. The more Nicole keeps her at a distance,
the more her mother pursues. Nicole is also hiding from
her mother the fact that her roommate, a woman named Radar,
is actually her girlfriend. It's around this time that Nicole
decides to reach out to Dr Laura. Yes, that Doctor Laura,
the famous radio personality known for dolling out harsh advice.
(27:33):
Nicole's mom has been a fan of Doctor Laura's for
many years, and Nicole grew up stuck in the car
listening to her, So it seems somehow logical that she
a left leaning lesbian who has recently learned that she's
been lied to all her life about her dad called
the conservative super hetero radio shrink whose m o is
just plain mean. It's strange. I I didn't think about
(27:57):
my mom here in the episode. I thought if she
did hear the episode, it was a little bit like
I was like an edgewalker or something. I didn't imagine
she was going to hear the episode because she had
decided at some poy that Dr Laura was too mean
and had stopped listening to her. Yet I her, you know,
radical feminist gay daughter had continued to listen to Dr Laura.
(28:22):
So I didn't think my mom would listen to it.
But I did think if she did. Dr Laura felt
like an adult in the room. It felt like a
different adult giving a perspective on something. I started listening
to Dr Laura with my mom and I thought she
I also thought she was mean. I was like, who
is this evil woman yelling at people? And then something
turned and I you know, it kind of went from
(28:42):
me turning off the radio, to um suffering through it,
to then actually preferring it. And I liked I like
to formulate quality, and I like somebody who just feels
like there's a plan for life, and they know what
to do, and they know what to tell you to
do that there's like a lot of boundaries. She doesn't
like the word boundaries, Dr Laura, but she is like
(29:02):
nothing but rules. She loves rules. And I realized at
some point that actually I appreciated that she was telling
people to choose their children over themselves or over their
romantic relationships, and so I at some point started I
just I think that I really enjoyed that element. You know,
(29:23):
there's so many other parts. I'm so used to the
I don't know if it's cognitive distance or what, but
you know, growing up as like a gay, radical feminist
in a home where my mom had just converted to Catholicism,
and there were so many things about her that didn't
align with me, there were so many things I had
to take with a grain of salt at all times
that I was used to that grain of salt, and
I just applied it to Dr Laura, where I was like, Okay,
(29:46):
she's very pro life, she's very anti feminist. She has
questionable views about gay people. However, I appreciate that she's
yelling at these people to choose their children because your
mother did not choose you. I didn't feel chosen. No,
so you called Dr Laura. You're actually thinking of what
pseudonym you're going to use, and then you just is
(30:06):
your real name? Yeah, I was. I was practicing in
my head. I was like, are you going to say
your name is Amber? They're twenty two, you know your
name Stacy. You live in Palm Springs. And I just
was like, oh, Nicole, Nicole, here's my exact dature's exactly
where I lived. I froze and I was like, my
name is Nicole. And then I was compulsively honest and
(30:28):
just rattled off my story. And Dr Laura got mad
at me, even though I tried to follow the rules
that I know. She doesn't want too many details. She
wanted to know why I was mad at my mom
for keeping this man from me, who probably could have
found me if he wanted to anyway. So that was
Dr Laura's main takeaway. Oh yeah, she said, you've suffered enough,
(30:51):
go have Christmas. She basically said that my mom had
created stability for me today and I should appreciate that
instead of bringing up the past and sing it all up.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(31:20):
M Nicole goes home and heeds Dr Laura's advice. She
doesn't talk to her mom about any of it, not
the massive lie about her dad, not the fact of
her sexuality, none of the secrets. Meanwhile, Radar has made
her promise that she'd confront her mom by saying, all
in one go, I'm gay, who's my dad? I've decided
(31:44):
to stay closeted. And I just had an incredible migraine
the whole time. You know, my mom at by this point,
had reached substability with my you know, she had been
with my current stepdad for many years. They had the
same house that I was in from high school forward.
She really, you know, she said at the guest room.
(32:04):
She put her dogs in jingle bell collars, She made
me all my favorite foods. She was really trying to
host me. And I grew up feeling an allegiance to
her that she instilled in me. So it felt like anything.
I felt like a little bit like don't go against
the family. It felt like a betrayal. I felt like
not telling her I knew this information, and actually me
(32:26):
even discovering her secret, I felt like I had somehow
betrayed her or I was feeling shame. Instead of me
being like, oh, this is someone's going to be accountable
to me, it just was like me feeling like I
had betrayed her. And then I was like, and now
I have this secret that I'm gay and I can't
tell her, and it's going to disappoint her, and everything's
going to disappoint her or betray her. And you, Wilso,
had the additional pressure of the fact that you knew
(32:48):
that Radar was going to be really pissed if you
came home and you hadn't told your mother the truth,
particularly about being gay. Yeah, it was you know, Radar
somebody who had come out really young and who was
butch in a way where she couldn't hide that she
was gay, and so it fell to her like a
betrayal to our relationship and also like me using a
(33:08):
kind of privilege as a betrayal to her to like
go and just you know, pass as a straight person
and pretend like she was my roommate and pretend like
this whole life we had built together with like too
many dogs in a band and a house, you know,
we were partnered, and to pretend like that person was
my roommate felt like a betrayal to her. She's somebody
(33:31):
who had no choice but to live in her honesty,
and she was seeing me make a different choice. Nicole
returns home, back to her life with Radar, all the
unsaid words and feelings still stuck inside of her. What's more,
now her romantic relationship is on the rocks. So I
came home from Kansas, and shortly thereafter, you know, I
(33:57):
had kind of been able to get away with not
thinking about the dad issue because I had built a
chosen family, you know, as a queer person and a
person who came from a fraud household. I had a
lot of stock in chosen family and my community, my
artistic community, and then my relationships with my queer friends
(34:17):
and with my partner. And when I got home, I
found out pretty soon after that my partner, Radar, had
been cheating on me and then replaced me in our
band with someone that she had been cheating on me with.
And so all at once it was like my chosen
family of the person who I lived with, who I
had partnered with, whose dogs I had taken care of,
(34:39):
who I had let room my house, this person had
left me, and not only that, she had implicated community
members like people who I trusted with my creative projects
and friends of mine. They knew about it or they
were part of it. And it just I felt like
the rug was pulled out from under me and I
hit what at that time was my complete rock bottom,
and I just felt like I had nothing left to lose.
(35:00):
I felt so low that it didn't matter to me
what my mom said. I just already like the worst
heartbreak I could possibly handle happened. And so I just
was like, you know what, I'm almost again aggressively wanting
to come visit Portland's. And I was like, all right,
if this lady wants to come visit Portland's so bad,
she needs to know everything before she buys a ticket,
because I don't want her to buy a ticket under
(35:21):
false pretenses. And so I just emailed her and I said,
you know, Radar was not my roommate. She was my girlfriend.
We were in love and now we're not very sad,
and that's the secret I've been keeping from you. But
I know that you have a secret to I found
out that my dad was alive. Nobody told me. I
(35:44):
found out from a psychic and um, I just want
you to know that. And she didn't respond for a
few days, but she later told me that she cried
for three days and three nights and her husband almost
took her to the hospital because she couldn't stop crying,
which I I don't even know if that's the thing.
But she finally wrote me back at a camera, which
(36:05):
she basically spun it as he was a bad guy
and he abandoned you and I was protecting you. She
basically I'm sorry, you're heartbroken, and basically, you know, in
her classic fashion of people becoming the enemy. Then Radar
became her enemy for breaking my heart, and she came
to visit. And the way that my mom is, I
had known that if I came to her with this,
(36:27):
she would defend herself. She would get in that low
defensive crouch and find a way to spin it so
that she didn't have to acknowledge blame or that she
had made this decision out of shame and then really
had to stick with it for so long. And that's
exactly what happened. So it was a rather anticlimactic series
(36:48):
of events. You're you know, you're finally coming out and
telling your mother that you know about your father. Yeah,
it was almost like I was telling her that I
was bad, like I had to steal myself. I had
tried to say, like, you know, let's just clear the
board and just start from scratch, and she was like,
we are not equals. I am your mother, so we
couldn't start from scratch. And it wasn't a moment in
(37:09):
which I was parented. It was this anti climactic moment
where I had to kind of put on my old
armor from when I was a kid and was vulnerable. Um,
but now I wasn't adult. And she was sitting in
my living room and she was like, yeah, he abandoned you,
he didn't want you. But I'm essentially the hero because
(37:30):
I did want you. And guess what, I'm not going
to make a big deal out of you being gay, basically,
like she was like, I'm not going to abuse emotionally
abuse you for being a homosexual. So you're welcome, and
I saved you from your debt. You're welcome. It was
kind of like that. It was kind of like, you're welcome,
and then I had to forge this path on my own.
(37:50):
So there it all is. Or so Nicole thinks the
information about David, her father. She occasionally does half hearted
Google search that leads to a dead end. Maybe there's
nothing more to know. Maybe she should leave well enough
alone now, maybe this David really is a bad guy.
(38:11):
But eventually she gets serious she wants to know more.
I honestly only did it at that moment for the
sake of my art in my book. There was something
in me that felt so compelled to tell people about
this story within the Kookie framework of I called Dr
(38:32):
Laura that I toured the country with this story, and
I got a literary agent who was like, will you
would you consider doing a graphic memoir about this? And
I always wanted to do that because I've always been
drawing comics and doing diaries. And I got, you know,
a few years into this graphic memoir, and it just
felt like I needed to do it in service of
(38:52):
the book and in service of my art. What's so
interesting to call is that I think sometimes that for
those of us who are artists and writers, that we
actually kind of need the permission that the making of
the work grants us in a way, like it's too
(39:13):
scary to anxiety producing. There's too much resistance to it
to just go ahead and do it. But if you're
doing it for the book, you know, or you're doing
it for the story, then suddenly there's just more permission.
There's a feeling of like, well, I have a job
to do and so I have to do it, when
(39:33):
in fact, really deep down on some level, I think
we really want to do it. Does that resonate at
all completely? And it's not like I been paid like
a trillion dollars for this book and I had an
editor saying you better find him, like it was none
of that. It really was me. You know, there was
a draft of the book that existed where I don't
(39:54):
find him, but it just, yeah, there was something that
compulsed me to do it. But it feels like doing
it in service for my art, like my art maybe
exists for some other kind of soul piece of me
that I wouldn't acknowledge otherwise for whatever reason. So I
put some money into a detective website and I found
(40:16):
David with He has a very common last name, and
I found him connected to my mom, and then I
saw him connected to another woman named Tina and some kids.
And what my sister Mega told me that he had
a couple of sons named Brendan and Jason. So I
went on Facebook again with this new information and I
found Brennan and Jason, and then I found my dad's
(40:37):
name and I clicked on it. But the person I
was very young. The person looked like they were maybe
like in their mid to late twenties, and he was
very handsome, but he was connected to all these people
I had seen on that detective website. I liled him
right away. As soon as I found him, I just said,
(40:58):
you know, this is probably gonna sound crazy, but I
think I might be your sister. Is your dad's name, David.
I was told he was dead my whole life. I
found out he was alive through a psychic and I
just wanted to know. I think we might be related,
and if you have any information, I would really love it,
but if not, I understand. And he wrote me back
(41:19):
right away. He brought me back within a day and said, yeah,
I did know David. I you know, I did know him,
and I actually have heard about you. He said he
was heartbroken that your mom told him she was going
to tell you that he was dead. And I said, oh, well,
you know you're talking about in the past. Tense. I
heard he was a dead beat. He must have left
(41:40):
you too. Do you know if there's any way I
can find him? You know, how long was he in
your life? And he said, oh, you know, he was
around for my whole life. He was a great dad.
He was not a con man or a dirt bag
at all. He was my football coach. And I'm so
sorry to tell you, but you he died like a
year ago. He missed him by just about year ago,
(42:01):
and um, it's too bad. I heard that he had
your baby picture in his wallet for his entire life.
I felt the weight of my mom's secret hit me.
I've been missing the point all this time, um, because
I just never really understood what a dad was for.
But there was something about hearing that he wasn't a
(42:23):
dirt bag and that he had always wanted to find me,
or that he had always thought about me, And I
just felt the full implication of everything, and also the
implication of them telling me he was a dirt bag,
which is what led me to stall for so long
that I missed him by a year. Did now meeting
(42:44):
a new half sibling, you know, this half brother, has
that been something that has been healing in any way
to have like some some connection to David through through
his son. Yeah, you know, A couple of things happened
after that where I went to Texas and I met
David Jr. I also have a sister named Summer in
(43:08):
my dad's widow, Tina, and they are so warm and
they're so close, and they were so excited to tell
me about my dad, who they still I mean, you
know currently it's been a long time since he died,
and they will still tear up to this day because
they miss him so much and they loved him so much,
and so they have such a It really helps fill
(43:30):
out the picture of who I was told he was needing.
David Jr. In Summer. Of course I noticed, like we
have the same eyes. My sister was like, you have
the same nail beds. It was all these things. But
I also after that, I was found via Facebook by
(43:50):
my grandma, my dad's mom, because my book came out.
My grandma found me and she had been looking for
me my whole using telephone books. You know, I thought
a piece of this feeling of comfort for meeting David Jr.
And their side of the family, but also it was
so different than how I had heard he was that.
(44:12):
I had to take that with a grain of salt
because I feel like the truth is probably somewhere in
the middle. But meeting my grandma was the feeling, like
I heard you say that, you know, meeting your dad
it felt like the country you were from. That's how
it felt when I met my grandma. When I met
David's mom is it felt like I understood biology for
a second, and I understood that piece of it and
(44:33):
finding people that spoke a language that was the same
as mine that I had been born with. Where did
this leave you in terms of your mom? And you
know now that you know the depths and the breadth
and the implications and the ripple effect of what she
(44:55):
chose to do by keeping secrets and telling lies, what
do you do with that? I still don't know. After
calling Dr Laura came out, my mom gave it a
one star Amazon review, and it's under her real name.
She's very you know, she's a real anti fan. And
(45:16):
after the book came out she wrote me and she
was like, oh, I've heard you to head your book
about your pitiful life, and you should write about how
much the George's family loved you. Maybe I'll write a book.
Maybe I'll write a book about how much I loved
how you were so loved. And I was like, okay,
you can. And my stepdad started calling me, be like
I forbid you to talk to your mother about your
(45:38):
supposed father and your so called lifestyle, and they're really
bullying me. She wrote all that without even reading. She
wrote all that from the description, and then I think
she read it, and she sent me a voicemail, and
in that moment she really changed his moment to moment.
But in that moment, she was teary and she just
said I read your book. I'm humbled, I'm sorry, ye,
(46:01):
And that voicemail was enough for me. It was a
huge moment, you know, as you can imagine from everything
I told you about how these things go and how
vulnerability goes. Was huge. Had she ever apologized to you
before about anything? Never in my life had I ever
been apologized to buy her for anything she had done.
(46:23):
The first time a friend apologized to me as an adult,
when I was like twenty one or twenty two, I
couldn't handle it and I burst into tears. I had
never been apologized to I didn't even know that I
deserved that, or I was worth that, or like that
someone could be accountable to me, or acknowledge that they
had hurt me. So basically, my mom and I live
(46:44):
in different realities. She will refer to the book as
a fairy tale. If it's in passing, she will jokingly
refer to it to me as her favorite book. And
recently on the phone, she went off the rails and
called me a backstabber and said it was so backstabby,
and said that, you know, she was the one who
held me close, she was the one who wanted me,
(47:05):
and how could I do this to her? And so
we're just we're doing some different realities. And I just
I'm trying to accept the love that she has right now,
and I'm trying to just give her love back. You know,
she's in her seventies, she is mellowed. She just wants
to tell me she's praying for me some mean religious
medallions and like recipes. And I want to be able
to accept that as much as I can. You know,
(47:27):
it's just it's heart. It is what it is, and
I understand some of this. It's just gonna be mine
to deal with, Like Okay, I have forgiven her for
keeping this secret about my dad. But as time goes
on and I learned more information, I keep finding out
new things that I have to forgive her for, you know,
(47:48):
like meeting my grandma and having my grandma say, oh,
I tried to keep in touch with you, and your
mom told me I could only speak to you on
the phone if I didn't say who I was, And
I told you I was just a family, a friend,
like my grandmother on her deathbed and tears saying I
try to call you when you were five years old,
and your mom said, you'll never talk to Nicole again
(48:08):
unless you can only hear her voice right now if
you tell her that you're a friend of the family,
and like that kind of thing, and learning that it's
just I feel like it's like I have a little
backpack full of like you know, when you get to it,
you know, forgive people for these things. Every time I've
cleaned it out, something else gets dropped. In That Family's
(48:40):
Secrets is a production of My Heart Media. Dylan Fagin
and Bethman Mcalouso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is
our audio editor. If you have a secret, you'd like
to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could
appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is eight
(49:01):
Secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook
at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter
at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to know
about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check out
(49:22):
my New York Times best selling memoir Inheritance. For more
(49:43):
podcasts from 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. That
was it the anti climax of my whole parented life.
Mom reacted as expected. She kicked her mistake under the
couch and kept moving. If I wanted to keep a parent,
(00:22):
I needed to forgive and accept her as she was
a sixty year old woman with an enormous capacity to
love in the present but never reconcile the past. I
cut my losses and moved forward. That's Nicole J. George's.
Nicole is an illustrator, writer, zinster, podcaster, and educator. She's
(00:46):
also the author of the graphic memoir calling Dr Laura,
a story about discovering a secret hidden from her all
her life that had to do with the bedrock of
her identity. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets,
(01:13):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I grew up everywhere. I was born in Ohio. I
was raised with my mom's side of the family, which
(01:35):
is all Syrian, and I had a Lebanese stepgrandmother, and
so I grew up with a big family and a
lot of Lebanese food. I lived with my mom, and
I lived with my two sisters, who were ten and
twelve years older than me, and we quickly moved from
Ohio to Maryland, and then from Maryland we moved to Florida,
(01:55):
and then we moved to Kansas. And so at a
certain point, my sisters moved away and it was just
me with my mom and at that point various step
dads and I just really communed with animals. I stayed
home all the time. I never went to school. I
watched TV, made clothes for my stepped animals, trying to
(02:17):
teach my turtle how to read, trying to you know,
dress the dogs and clothes. I was like watching Phoebe's
playhouse and then living my Pope's playhouse fantasy. What was
the reason for all the moving? We moved a lot
for men. My mom was always kind of orbiting around
(02:37):
whatever man was my stepfather or was, you know, was
auditioning to be my next stepfather, And so we moved
for other people's jobs. Generally, my extended family all lives
in Ohio, you know, so that's that was where we
kept coming back to, or that's where and that's where
I was born. But then everywhere else we moved was
for a step dad or someone my mom was with.
(02:59):
Tell me a bit about your mom of your childhood.
What was she like. My mom's very charismatic, you know,
she smiled all the time. She was a motivational speaker.
At some point, she was also an eighties businesswoman. She
had a huge life with a lot of things. When
I was growing up, her temper to me was unpredictable,
(03:24):
and she was always trying to keep it together and
keep various secrets together from my stepdad's or whoever I
was dating. There was always something that we had to
be conspiring about to keep from people, whether it be
something about money or like don't tell your stepdad you
haven't been to school this week, or things like that.
(03:46):
You know, my mom was very warm. I've never had
a home where, you know, someone didn't say I love you,
or didn't give me a hug, or didn't you know. Food,
I think is one of my original love languages. My
mom was like always like rolling grape leaves and making
me food. And when I went vegan as a teenager,
her trying to figure out how to make vegan food.
She's always more than willing to do all of that stuff,
(04:07):
and yet I always had this feeling of being de
prioritized in favor of the men that were around, and
feeling like I just really wanted some time alone with
her and I couldn't get it. Her dance card was full.
When she would ask you to keep her secrets or
you know, not tell the truth in the service of
(04:28):
some kind of secret, was it an attempt to kind
of kind of bond with you, like you and she
were this team. What do you think that was? Absolutely,
we were co conspirators. We were a team. There was
some kind of the thing of, you know, us together.
(04:50):
It was almost like we were embattled, like us together
against Bill in the blank so against the truancy officer,
against my stepdad, against whomever from the outside wanted to
look into our home and we didn't want them to
know what was going on. There was kind of like
a best friend quality, and there was also a co
conspirator bonding sort of vibe. And also some of these
(05:13):
secrets were positioned to keep me safe or to keep
me out of farms, like I had done something wrong,
Like I had horrible stomach problems as a kid, and
I had stomach problems in particular ways that like there
was like I had the kinds of things that I
feel I could have been cleared up very quickly, but
lasted for a decade and I never went to school,
(05:36):
And so my mom would basically be like, Okay, well,
well since you didn't go to school all week, we
have to hide this from your step dad so you
don't get in trouble or just it was like I
had to keep myself as secret. I had to keep
you know, the fact that I was like soiling myself secret,
or the fact that this problem was happening secret. I
had to keep like the financial situation of our home secret.
(05:58):
There was just a lot of things is to keep
track of. It isn't until Nicole is an adult that
she comes to realize that there is a term, a
true medical definition for the crushing symptoms that plagued her
as a child, and co priceis which is often caused
by emotional distress or separation anxiety. The hallmark of it,
(06:21):
at least as I was understanding it, is, you know,
you had this terrible stomach trouble and just trouble going
to the bathroom. Really like serious stuff that seems like
it comes up most often with children who are like
really dealing with something that they don't understand. I don't
mean the physical part. I mean the psychological and emotional part,
(06:44):
Like there's something about what's going on that's just hidden
and I don't know. I mean, does that make sense
to you? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It feels like,
you know, as far as I can tell, And from
researching it and being in therapy for a very long
time and talking to people, it feels like, either you
(07:07):
know something, it seems like a psychological problem, and it
was being treated like a physical problem. It was being
treated unreliably, so we would never see the same doctor twice.
It was treated unliably as a physical problem or a
failing on my part, like why don't you just go
to the bathroom. But I think it was a psychological
issue that started happening when I was a toddler. I
(07:28):
mean it interests me in terms of the subject of
this podcast two, because there's so much that I think
happens to children when something really significant is being kept
from them and they don't know it. You know, they don't.
I shouldn't say they, I should say we, you know,
we we don't know it. But yet it's kind of
(07:51):
in the air all around us, like some sort of
like invisible poisonous gas. And when that happens and there's
no ex pla nation for it, the child, even like
really young children, just start feeling like there must be
something really really wrong with them, and they turn it
against themselves. And that's like it's one of the most
(08:12):
toxic elements of a secret being withheld. Tell me also
a little bit about your relationship with your too much
older sisters, like both when you were a child and
then once they left home and you were left to
send kind of for yourself, was your mom, and they
(08:33):
were out of the house by the time you were,
you know what, like eight years old. Yeah, my sisters
went to college when I was six, and then when
I was eight, my middle sister, Meg, she pretty much
raised me. It was kind of like my sisters had
like a teen pregnancy. When my mom had me, she
(08:54):
was very preoccupied with other things, and so my sister,
who was ten years older than me, ended up, you know,
taking me to the grocery store with her, picking me
up from school, making sure I brushed my teeth, putting
me to bed. She was entirely responsible for me more
or less, and my mom kind of drilled into her
that she was a big drag and drilled into me like,
(09:15):
I just my mom will let me do whatever I wanted.
So if I wanted to eat a bunch of candy,
if I threw a fit, if I was being a
brat about something, my mom would be like, oh God,
just give it to me. Who wants to hear that.
But my sister Meg was the one that had to
be kind of the uptight one and be like, no,
this is here structure, here's rules, here's boundaries. And so
when my sister's left, it was devastating. It's actually something
(09:37):
I'm still processing and therapy, is how heartbroken I was
when my oldest sister Liz went to college and when
my middle sister Meg went to college, and Meg had
to be both of them had to be convinced to
go to college. They both had survivor's guilt, and Meg
in particular almost didn't go to college because she didn't
(09:58):
want to leave me behind as I was. You know,
at the time, I had a pretty horrible stepdad who
was emotional, who was abusive to my mom, and my
sister just couldn't bear to as my guardian, my longtime guardian.
She couldn't bear to leave me there, but somebody convinced
her that she needed to save herself. How many step
dads did you have? In all you know, I only had.
(10:21):
I had two step dads from what I can put together.
My mom left my dad to date a Saudi Arabian prince.
They did not get married. He was around for a
couple of years with his entourage, and then she whenever
he left. I had a stepdad in Florida, and then
I had a stepdad directly after that, who my mom
was still with to this day. Where was your father?
(10:43):
What had happened to him? It was my understanding that
he had died of colon cancer when I was a baby,
and this kind of got fleshed out by my mom
over the years that he died when I was a
year and a half old. He was thirty three years old,
and it was very sad. But side note, he was
a con man, and he was very funny, and he
(11:03):
came from maybe a bad home. Those are all the
things I knew. So every time as a kid, when
I had stomach problems and I would go see a gastronologist,
I would lead with that. My mom wouldn't say it,
but I would be like, oh, and by the way, yeah,
my dad died of calling cancer. It's like a you know,
an eight year old to be like, maybe that's what's
wrong with me. That was my understanding for a very
long time, and you're much older. Sisters also backed that
(11:27):
story up. Yes, my sisters and my mom back that
story up. And essentially people just really didn't talk about him.
My mom once mentioned we were an a vintage store
and she grabbed like a black hat with a veil
and said, I wore a hat just like this to
your dad's funeral. It was so sad. I think she
(11:49):
was just freestyling there. And no one in my family
ever mentioned my dad. Ever. There was one time I
can remember in my entire life where anyone else mentioned him,
and it was an old woman at my grandfather's birthday party,
because ninetieth birthday party, and she came up to me
and she said, oh, you're you're David's daughter. And I
(12:10):
had not even heard his name come out of a
different person's mouth aside from my mom pretty much ever,
and so I was fascinated, and she quickly got shooed
away from me. We'll be right back. When Nicole is
(12:35):
twenty two years old, a woman she's dating named Verona
gifts her as a belated birthday present with a palm
reading with a psychic who she finds where all good
psychics can be found in the back of the local newspaper.
I went to the palm reader, and she said, you
don't get along with your mother, I can tell from
(12:56):
your hand, and you should talk to your father more often.
And I said, I can't talk to him more often
because he's dead. And she said, maybe the man you
think is your father is dead, but your real father
is very much alive. And everything else she had said
had been such nonsense. She had said so many things
(13:19):
about me marrying an older man and having three pregnancies
with two children, and she said, all this stuff, that's
it seems fantastical, like you would imagine. And then she
said this thing, and it just rung a bell that
I couldn't unring. All the pieces, all the things that
I had worked so hard in my life to kind
of try and figure out, like why is everyone kind
(13:40):
of looking at each other over my heads? Why is
everyone talking around something? Is there something wrong with me?
There were so many things that I had supposed that
it was that people weren't telling me that this Tom
Reader saying this, it felt entirely plausible, Like it was
crystal clear that I was like, this is very possible. Yeah,
that's such an amazing that's such an amazing thing, right,
(14:02):
Like there's you know, you grew up in a house
where there were all of these secrets, but they were
like secrets in a minor key. They were not big,
gigantic secrets. They were don't tell your stepfather this, or
tell the truant officer that, or they were not like
the secret. And and then suddenly, now there's this possibility
that I guess really only occurs to you for the
(14:24):
first time. I mean, why would one ever have the thought,
you know, maybe my father, who I've been told died
of colon cancer when I was a year and a
half old, is really alive. You wouldn't have that thought.
Because we believe what we're told as children, then that
forms our identity, Like those just become the tent poles
and the pillars of the way that we grow up,
(14:44):
and we sort of form ourselves around that, even if
it doesn't really make sense. The fortune teller also tells
you two not tell anyone, to keep it to yourself,
right m hm? She said, yeah, whatever I tell you
in this room, it's nothing personal, and you need to
keep it to yourself for twenty four hours. And that
(15:05):
my friend and I we kind of exploded out the
door of this woman's place. It was a two for one.
So my friend also got her palm read and we
exploded out the door, and just as soon as we
hit the street, we were like, oh my god, what
does she tell you? And we told each other everything,
all of her like funny predictions about us being straight
and marrying these men and all this stuff. But I
didn't tell her. I didn't tell Verona about my dad.
(15:27):
I didn't tell anybody about it for a really long time.
I couldn't. It was too big. It was what was
like a Shortinger's cat. It was just like that box.
I just couldn't touch it right away. How did that
sit with you during that like nearly a year where
you didn't tell anyone that this had happened. Were you
(15:47):
thinking about it? Were you like lying awake at night
and wondering about it? Or did you kind of pack
it away a little bit? Of both. I kind of
would only allow myself to entertain it here and there,
because you know, I had just started going to therapy
I think the year before for the first time in
my life, and I had even started I had only
(16:08):
even started acknowledging that my upbringing was not normal very recently.
I was very young, and so I would think about
it sometimes at night or when I was alone. Otherwise,
I just kept myself very busy. I kept I felt
very busy with a lot of friends. I lived in
a house with a lot of roommates. I did volunteer work.
(16:29):
I had like two jobs at nonprofits. I hosted karaoke,
I just did There were so much I just packed
my days so full that there I really only processed
it a little bit in my diary. I've always kept
a diary, and sometimes it's the only place where my
reality has been reflected back to me. Especially when I
(16:50):
was growing up in such a chaotic way, that was
the only place where I dared to even talk about it.
Did you go back and revisit that diary later? I have, Well,
you know, a weird thing about me is that I
have the compulsion to publish everything, and so at that point,
I was doing a zine that was essentially just photocopy
(17:12):
diary entries. So I actually was just looking the other
day back at a zine I did in my early twenties,
like a fancy and a diary comic, and it has
me writing kind of cryptically about this secret and kind
of this like deep melancholy I felt. And everything was cryptic,
everything was kind of vague, everything was kind of sad.
But it just was like past, present and future, like
(17:35):
all here in the same moment as how I felt
about it. I felt overwhelming. And I had drawn some
picture of a vintage like a woman from the forties
that I had found in a magazine. I had drawn
this picture of her with kind of like a like
a scar across her head. I was very into drawing
people with like scars across their heads, like visible scars,
visible sewn up wounds. And that's how I expressed it
(17:57):
at the time. Wow, that's so interesting without knowing that
that's what you were doing, right, Yeah, it was the
you know, the outer expression of something that was so
internal that you couldn't really touch it, sort of like
a live wire inside of you. So you then end
up as happens like as one does when a secret
(18:21):
has been Like in this kind of pressure cooker of
being unspoken, you end up blurting out the story to
pretty much a stranger. Yeah. I didn't talk to anyone
in my life about I didn't talk to my sisters
about it. I didn't talk to my closest friends who
had known me. I just I was on essentially a
first date with a stranger, and I it was so
(18:43):
awkward that I just and I just was looking for
something to say, and so I told her this. I said, oh,
you know, I have a crazy story. A poem reader
told me my dad was alive what I've been told
he was dead my whole life, and she was like, what,
I feel like I told her almost to avoid emotional accountability,
because it's the kind of thing if I told one
(19:04):
of my friends, they would pause and reflect back how
hard they must be, and I would have to have
a feeling and before very vulnerable. And so it was
telling a stranger who doesn't have that relationship or reflection
of you. There was something about it that felt like
I was I don't know if I if I I
was almost removed from it, like trying to use it
(19:26):
as like a parlor trick instead of a very deep,
sad possibility. So how how long is it then before
you end up approaching one of your sisters and asking,
you know, so his dad really dead? And it was
at least another year, I think. So that person and
(19:48):
I ended up dating seriously, and she kept urging me
to ask about it. She was holding me accountable to
ask about it and to think about it, and that,
you know, maybe it was something I should consider finding
out if it was nagging at me that it might
be true, which it was, and so I asked my sister.
(20:09):
I asked my oldest sister, Liz. She had been kind
of cryptically telling my girlfriend that she had something she
really wanted to tell me and that she loved me
a lot. This was happening simultaneously. She didn't know that
I knew, but she was like, I love Nicole so much.
I have something I really need to tell her, and
I was giving me a lot of anxiety, and so
I really just I blurted it out. I went to
(20:31):
visit her in San Francisco on tour with my band,
and after our show, you know, it was probably like
twelve thirty in the morning, and I had like one
sip of one beer and was like, oh, so was
my dad really dead? And she just immediately broke and
was like, no, no, he's not. And she immediately just
(20:53):
dissolved into tears, and I was like, I'm so sorry.
I you know, please don't hate me. I've always wanted
to tell you, and I you know, I it really
never crossed my mind to hate my sisters. It had
crossed my mind to hate my mom over the secret,
but I knew that they were hostages basically to my
mom's reality, just like I was. And it was so
(21:14):
hard to see how much pain the secret had caused
them to keep all this time. What did it feel
like at that moment to have that confirmation there was
really overwhelming. I mean every step of this process has
just completely, um like overwhelmed my nervous system. I felt
(21:35):
very sad for my sisters, and I felt it kind
of just blew my mind that it was true. And
I think on some level I knew it was true,
or else I wouldn't have asked. But I think part
of the reason it felt overwhelming is because there wasn't
a place in my household for that kind of emotional
(21:56):
raw vulnerability and honesty. That wasn't how our house was
where we grew up, and so I was really we
were both very vulnerable of each other for my whole life.
So us just communing in this way felt very particular. Well,
I think it's also being an unwilling secret keeper is
(22:17):
its own kind of hell. I can only imagine because
now as an adult, any time I have a secret
from somebody, any kind of secret, even if I only
keep it for ten minutes, it will give me a migraine.
It will tear me, it will eat me up. It
makes me so uncomfortable. So to think about, like my
sister Meg, being ten years old or eleven and a half,
(22:40):
you know, raising an infant, and then having your mother
implicate you in this secret and having to hold it
for your whole life from somebody who you care about
that much. I feel devastated for both of them that
they had their child, that piece of their childhoods and
that ability to bond with me taken away. Regular listeners
of this podcast, no that trauma lives in the body.
(23:03):
Just listen to my bonus episodes with Dr Bessel vander
Kolk and Dr Rachel Yehuda for starters. Seriously, if you
haven't listened to those, I hope you will. Trauma lodges
itself within us and becomes, in a very real physical sense,
like a slumbering giant. In her graphic memoir calling Dr
Laura Nicole illustrates this with the story of fainting goat syndrome. Yes,
(23:30):
you heard that right. You've probably heard of fight or
flight as a response to a fearful situation. Well, there's
also freeze, and there is apparently faint and it's not
just for goats. There's something that I call fainting goat syndrome,
and I've heard some other people call it this too,
But basically, there's this kind of goat where if they
(23:55):
get scared or overwhelmed, like if a predator is coming
at them, they will freeze up. Their bodies will completely
freeze up, and they'll have a temporary paralysis and just
fall over. And so they're called fainting goats. And I
felt like I had this anytime somebody wanted to process,
(24:16):
or lesbian process as I call it, basically just sitting
down and talking about our feelings, talking about hard feelings.
It was so overwhelming to me that I would get
so tired and just fall asleep. And as a kid,
my mom would joke to like, oh, my little narcaleptic,
because I would I would just fall asleep all the time.
I would fall asleep in the car, I would fall
(24:37):
asleep during a hard conversation. I would just it overwhelmed
my whole body. And so around this time, when I
was dealing with this with my sister and with my
partner at the time, I would sometimes get so overwhelmed
by all the information I would just start kind of
nodding off or getting very drowsy. That's something I've outgrown
(24:57):
with time. I mean it just as a it's a
it's been a actice of getting used to being vulnerable,
saying my feelings, understanding that like criticism isn't the worst
thing in the world, and that being accountable is okay.
But it's been a long it's been a long road well,
And it seems like you learned that sort of at
your mother's feet. You know, you describe what it was
(25:20):
like to ever have any kind of confrontation with your
mother or a fight with your mother, and you didn't
grow up learning that it was okay to be emotionally vulnerable.
Absolutely not. I mean I I learned to come at
any kind of confrontation or uncomfortable conversation to get in
a defensive crouch, to be just like all horns and thorns,
(25:43):
and just like clowse out like everyone defend themselves. Because
I mean also when I grew up, if there was
a vulnerable conversation, if there was a conversation with my
mom that took a turn through outsized responses or anger
or name calling, we're so unpredictable that I think it.
You know, I feel like my brain was always trying
(26:03):
to find an order to it or a reason and
being like, oh, well, maybe if she disunderstands that I
didn't mean to hurt her, or maybe this, or I'm
not quite sure what set her off, my brain will
be working so fast trying to find reason in order
to the chaos that was in front of me. But
I think it just overwhelmed my whole system, and it
wasn't a place where I could take vulnerable, soft feelings
(26:27):
and get any kind of have anybody emotionally meet me
there or reflect back to me like oh that seems
really hard or I'm so sorry that happened, you know,
it wasn't that. It was either like somebody hurt you.
Now there our enemy, or I hurt you. No, I didn't.
I'll give you something to cry about. What are you
(26:47):
crying like? I got? I got the very soothing I'll
give you something to cry about. That's kind of how
my feelings were held when I was young. So Nicole
is understandably terrified and resistant about the idea of confronting
her mother. It's nearing the holidays, and her mother's spidy
sense kicks into gear. She starts calling more than usual,
(27:08):
stalking Nicole. The more Nicole keeps her at a distance,
the more her mother pursues. Nicole is also hiding from
her mother the fact that her roommate, a woman named Radar,
is actually her girlfriend. It's around this time that Nicole
decides to reach out to Dr Laura. Yes, that Doctor Laura,
the famous radio personality known for dolling out harsh advice.
(27:33):
Nicole's mom has been a fan of Doctor Laura's for
many years, and Nicole grew up stuck in the car
listening to her, So it seems somehow logical that she
a left leaning lesbian who has recently learned that she's
been lied to all her life about her dad called
the conservative super hetero radio shrink whose m o is
just plain mean. It's strange. I I didn't think about
(27:57):
my mom here in the episode. I thought if she
did hear the episode, it was a little bit like
I was like an edgewalker or something. I didn't imagine
she was going to hear the episode because she had
decided at some poy that Dr Laura was too mean
and had stopped listening to her. Yet I her, you know,
radical feminist gay daughter had continued to listen to Dr Laura.
(28:22):
So I didn't think my mom would listen to it.
But I did think if she did. Dr Laura felt
like an adult in the room. It felt like a
different adult giving a perspective on something. I started listening
to Dr Laura with my mom and I thought she
I also thought she was mean. I was like, who
is this evil woman yelling at people? And then something
turned and I you know, it kind of went from
(28:42):
me turning off the radio, to um suffering through it,
to then actually preferring it. And I liked I like
to formulate quality, and I like somebody who just feels
like there's a plan for life, and they know what
to do, and they know what to tell you to
do that there's like a lot of boundaries. She doesn't
like the word boundaries, Dr Laura, but she is like
(29:02):
nothing but rules. She loves rules. And I realized at
some point that actually I appreciated that she was telling
people to choose their children over themselves or over their
romantic relationships, and so I at some point started I
just I think that I really enjoyed that element. You know,
(29:23):
there's so many other parts. I'm so used to the
I don't know if it's cognitive distance or what, but
you know, growing up as like a gay, radical feminist
in a home where my mom had just converted to Catholicism,
and there were so many things about her that didn't
align with me, there were so many things I had
to take with a grain of salt at all times
that I was used to that grain of salt, and
I just applied it to Dr Laura, where I was like, Okay,
(29:46):
she's very pro life, she's very anti feminist. She has
questionable views about gay people. However, I appreciate that she's
yelling at these people to choose their children because your
mother did not choose you. I didn't feel chosen. No,
so you called Dr Laura. You're actually thinking of what
pseudonym you're going to use, and then you just is
(30:06):
your real name? Yeah, I was. I was practicing in
my head. I was like, are you going to say
your name is Amber? They're twenty two, you know your
name Stacy. You live in Palm Springs. And I just
was like, oh, Nicole, Nicole, here's my exact dature's exactly
where I lived. I froze and I was like, my
name is Nicole. And then I was compulsively honest and
(30:28):
just rattled off my story. And Dr Laura got mad
at me, even though I tried to follow the rules
that I know. She doesn't want too many details. She
wanted to know why I was mad at my mom
for keeping this man from me, who probably could have
found me if he wanted to anyway. So that was
Dr Laura's main takeaway. Oh yeah, she said, you've suffered enough,
(30:51):
go have Christmas. She basically said that my mom had
created stability for me today and I should appreciate that
instead of bringing up the past and sing it all up.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(31:20):
M Nicole goes home and heeds Dr Laura's advice. She
doesn't talk to her mom about any of it, not
the massive lie about her dad, not the fact of
her sexuality, none of the secrets. Meanwhile, Radar has made
her promise that she'd confront her mom by saying, all
in one go, I'm gay, who's my dad? I've decided
(31:44):
to stay closeted. And I just had an incredible migraine
the whole time. You know, my mom at by this point,
had reached substability with my you know, she had been
with my current stepdad for many years. They had the
same house that I was in from high school forward.
She really, you know, she said at the guest room.
(32:04):
She put her dogs in jingle bell collars, She made
me all my favorite foods. She was really trying to
host me. And I grew up feeling an allegiance to
her that she instilled in me. So it felt like anything.
I felt like a little bit like don't go against
the family. It felt like a betrayal. I felt like
not telling her I knew this information, and actually me
(32:26):
even discovering her secret, I felt like I had somehow
betrayed her or I was feeling shame. Instead of me
being like, oh, this is someone's going to be accountable
to me, it just was like me feeling like I
had betrayed her. And then I was like, and now
I have this secret that I'm gay and I can't
tell her, and it's going to disappoint her, and everything's
going to disappoint her or betray her. And you, Wilso,
had the additional pressure of the fact that you knew
(32:48):
that Radar was going to be really pissed if you
came home and you hadn't told your mother the truth,
particularly about being gay. Yeah, it was you know, Radar
somebody who had come out really young and who was
butch in a way where she couldn't hide that she
was gay, and so it fell to her like a
betrayal to our relationship and also like me using a
(33:08):
kind of privilege as a betrayal to her to like
go and just you know, pass as a straight person
and pretend like she was my roommate and pretend like
this whole life we had built together with like too
many dogs in a band and a house, you know,
we were partnered, and to pretend like that person was
my roommate felt like a betrayal to her. She's somebody
(33:31):
who had no choice but to live in her honesty,
and she was seeing me make a different choice. Nicole
returns home, back to her life with Radar, all the
unsaid words and feelings still stuck inside of her. What's more,
now her romantic relationship is on the rocks. So I
came home from Kansas, and shortly thereafter, you know, I
(33:57):
had kind of been able to get away with not
thinking about the dad issue because I had built a
chosen family, you know, as a queer person and a
person who came from a fraud household. I had a
lot of stock in chosen family and my community, my
artistic community, and then my relationships with my queer friends
(34:17):
and with my partner. And when I got home, I
found out pretty soon after that my partner, Radar, had
been cheating on me and then replaced me in our
band with someone that she had been cheating on me with.
And so all at once it was like my chosen
family of the person who I lived with, who I
had partnered with, whose dogs I had taken care of,
(34:39):
who I had let room my house, this person had
left me, and not only that, she had implicated community
members like people who I trusted with my creative projects
and friends of mine. They knew about it or they
were part of it. And it just I felt like
the rug was pulled out from under me and I
hit what at that time was my complete rock bottom,
and I just felt like I had nothing left to lose.
(35:00):
I felt so low that it didn't matter to me
what my mom said. I just already like the worst
heartbreak I could possibly handle happened. And so I just
was like, you know what, I'm almost again aggressively wanting
to come visit Portland's. And I was like, all right,
if this lady wants to come visit Portland's so bad,
she needs to know everything before she buys a ticket,
because I don't want her to buy a ticket under
(35:21):
false pretenses. And so I just emailed her and I said,
you know, Radar was not my roommate. She was my girlfriend.
We were in love and now we're not very sad,
and that's the secret I've been keeping from you. But
I know that you have a secret to I found
out that my dad was alive. Nobody told me. I
(35:44):
found out from a psychic and um, I just want
you to know that. And she didn't respond for a
few days, but she later told me that she cried
for three days and three nights and her husband almost
took her to the hospital because she couldn't stop crying,
which I I don't even know if that's the thing.
But she finally wrote me back at a camera, which
(36:05):
she basically spun it as he was a bad guy
and he abandoned you and I was protecting you. She
basically I'm sorry, you're heartbroken, and basically, you know, in
her classic fashion of people becoming the enemy. Then Radar
became her enemy for breaking my heart, and she came
to visit. And the way that my mom is, I
had known that if I came to her with this,
(36:27):
she would defend herself. She would get in that low
defensive crouch and find a way to spin it so
that she didn't have to acknowledge blame or that she
had made this decision out of shame and then really
had to stick with it for so long. And that's
exactly what happened. So it was a rather anticlimactic series
(36:48):
of events. You're you know, you're finally coming out and
telling your mother that you know about your father. Yeah,
it was almost like I was telling her that I
was bad, like I had to steal myself. I had
tried to say, like, you know, let's just clear the
board and just start from scratch, and she was like,
we are not equals. I am your mother, so we
couldn't start from scratch. And it wasn't a moment in
(37:09):
which I was parented. It was this anti climactic moment
where I had to kind of put on my old
armor from when I was a kid and was vulnerable. Um,
but now I wasn't adult. And she was sitting in
my living room and she was like, yeah, he abandoned you,
he didn't want you. But I'm essentially the hero because
(37:30):
I did want you. And guess what, I'm not going
to make a big deal out of you being gay, basically,
like she was like, I'm not going to abuse emotionally
abuse you for being a homosexual. So you're welcome, and
I saved you from your debt. You're welcome. It was
kind of like that. It was kind of like, you're welcome,
and then I had to forge this path on my own.
(37:50):
So there it all is. Or so Nicole thinks the
information about David, her father. She occasionally does half hearted
Google search that leads to a dead end. Maybe there's
nothing more to know. Maybe she should leave well enough
alone now, maybe this David really is a bad guy.
(38:11):
But eventually she gets serious she wants to know more.
I honestly only did it at that moment for the
sake of my art in my book. There was something
in me that felt so compelled to tell people about
this story within the Kookie framework of I called Dr
(38:32):
Laura that I toured the country with this story, and
I got a literary agent who was like, will you
would you consider doing a graphic memoir about this? And
I always wanted to do that because I've always been
drawing comics and doing diaries. And I got, you know,
a few years into this graphic memoir, and it just
felt like I needed to do it in service of
(38:52):
the book and in service of my art. What's so
interesting to call is that I think sometimes that for
those of us who are artists and writers, that we
actually kind of need the permission that the making of
the work grants us in a way, like it's too
(39:13):
scary to anxiety producing. There's too much resistance to it
to just go ahead and do it. But if you're
doing it for the book, you know, or you're doing
it for the story, then suddenly there's just more permission.
There's a feeling of like, well, I have a job
to do and so I have to do it, when
(39:33):
in fact, really deep down on some level, I think
we really want to do it. Does that resonate at
all completely? And it's not like I been paid like
a trillion dollars for this book and I had an
editor saying you better find him, like it was none
of that. It really was me. You know, there was
a draft of the book that existed where I don't
(39:54):
find him, but it just, yeah, there was something that
compulsed me to do it. But it feels like doing
it in service for my art, like my art maybe
exists for some other kind of soul piece of me
that I wouldn't acknowledge otherwise for whatever reason. So I
put some money into a detective website and I found
(40:16):
David with He has a very common last name, and
I found him connected to my mom, and then I
saw him connected to another woman named Tina and some kids.
And what my sister Mega told me that he had
a couple of sons named Brendan and Jason. So I
went on Facebook again with this new information and I
found Brennan and Jason, and then I found my dad's
(40:37):
name and I clicked on it. But the person I
was very young. The person looked like they were maybe
like in their mid to late twenties, and he was
very handsome, but he was connected to all these people
I had seen on that detective website. I liled him
right away. As soon as I found him, I just said,
(40:58):
you know, this is probably gonna sound crazy, but I
think I might be your sister. Is your dad's name, David.
I was told he was dead my whole life. I
found out he was alive through a psychic and I
just wanted to know. I think we might be related,
and if you have any information, I would really love it,
but if not, I understand. And he wrote me back
(41:19):
right away. He brought me back within a day and said, yeah,
I did know David. I you know, I did know him,
and I actually have heard about you. He said he
was heartbroken that your mom told him she was going
to tell you that he was dead. And I said, oh, well,
you know you're talking about in the past. Tense. I
heard he was a dead beat. He must have left
(41:40):
you too. Do you know if there's any way I
can find him? You know, how long was he in
your life? And he said, oh, you know, he was
around for my whole life. He was a great dad.
He was not a con man or a dirt bag
at all. He was my football coach. And I'm so
sorry to tell you, but you he died like a
year ago. He missed him by just about year ago,
(42:01):
and um, it's too bad. I heard that he had
your baby picture in his wallet for his entire life.
I felt the weight of my mom's secret hit me.
I've been missing the point all this time, um, because
I just never really understood what a dad was for.
But there was something about hearing that he wasn't a
(42:23):
dirt bag and that he had always wanted to find me,
or that he had always thought about me, And I
just felt the full implication of everything, and also the
implication of them telling me he was a dirt bag,
which is what led me to stall for so long
that I missed him by a year. Did now meeting
(42:44):
a new half sibling, you know, this half brother, has
that been something that has been healing in any way
to have like some some connection to David through through
his son. Yeah, you know, A couple of things happened
after that where I went to Texas and I met
David Jr. I also have a sister named Summer in
(43:08):
my dad's widow, Tina, and they are so warm and
they're so close, and they were so excited to tell
me about my dad, who they still I mean, you
know currently it's been a long time since he died,
and they will still tear up to this day because
they miss him so much and they loved him so much,
and so they have such a It really helps fill
(43:30):
out the picture of who I was told he was needing.
David Jr. In Summer. Of course I noticed, like we
have the same eyes. My sister was like, you have
the same nail beds. It was all these things. But
I also after that, I was found via Facebook by
(43:50):
my grandma, my dad's mom, because my book came out.
My grandma found me and she had been looking for
me my whole using telephone books. You know, I thought
a piece of this feeling of comfort for meeting David Jr.
And their side of the family, but also it was
so different than how I had heard he was that.
(44:12):
I had to take that with a grain of salt
because I feel like the truth is probably somewhere in
the middle. But meeting my grandma was the feeling, like
I heard you say that, you know, meeting your dad
it felt like the country you were from. That's how
it felt when I met my grandma. When I met
David's mom is it felt like I understood biology for
a second, and I understood that piece of it and
(44:33):
finding people that spoke a language that was the same
as mine that I had been born with. Where did
this leave you in terms of your mom? And you
know now that you know the depths and the breadth
and the implications and the ripple effect of what she
(44:55):
chose to do by keeping secrets and telling lies, what
do you do with that? I still don't know. After
calling Dr Laura came out, my mom gave it a
one star Amazon review, and it's under her real name.
She's very you know, she's a real anti fan. And
(45:16):
after the book came out she wrote me and she
was like, oh, I've heard you to head your book
about your pitiful life, and you should write about how
much the George's family loved you. Maybe I'll write a book.
Maybe I'll write a book about how much I loved
how you were so loved. And I was like, okay,
you can. And my stepdad started calling me, be like
I forbid you to talk to your mother about your
(45:38):
supposed father and your so called lifestyle, and they're really
bullying me. She wrote all that without even reading. She
wrote all that from the description, and then I think
she read it, and she sent me a voicemail, and
in that moment she really changed his moment to moment.
But in that moment, she was teary and she just
said I read your book. I'm humbled, I'm sorry, ye,
(46:01):
And that voicemail was enough for me. It was a
huge moment, you know, as you can imagine from everything
I told you about how these things go and how
vulnerability goes. Was huge. Had she ever apologized to you
before about anything? Never in my life had I ever
been apologized to buy her for anything she had done.
(46:23):
The first time a friend apologized to me as an adult,
when I was like twenty one or twenty two, I
couldn't handle it and I burst into tears. I had
never been apologized to I didn't even know that I
deserved that, or I was worth that, or like that
someone could be accountable to me, or acknowledge that they
had hurt me. So basically, my mom and I live
(46:44):
in different realities. She will refer to the book as
a fairy tale. If it's in passing, she will jokingly
refer to it to me as her favorite book. And
recently on the phone, she went off the rails and
called me a backstabber and said it was so backstabby,
and said that, you know, she was the one who
held me close, she was the one who wanted me,
(47:05):
and how could I do this to her? And so
we're just we're doing some different realities. And I just
I'm trying to accept the love that she has right now,
and I'm trying to just give her love back. You know,
she's in her seventies, she is mellowed. She just wants
to tell me she's praying for me some mean religious
medallions and like recipes. And I want to be able
to accept that as much as I can. You know,
(47:27):
it's just it's heart. It is what it is, and
I understand some of this. It's just gonna be mine
to deal with, Like Okay, I have forgiven her for
keeping this secret about my dad. But as time goes
on and I learned more information, I keep finding out
new things that I have to forgive her for, you know,
(47:48):
like meeting my grandma and having my grandma say, oh,
I tried to keep in touch with you, and your
mom told me I could only speak to you on
the phone if I didn't say who I was, And
I told you I was just a family, a friend,
like my grandmother on her deathbed and tears saying I
try to call you when you were five years old,
and your mom said, you'll never talk to Nicole again
(48:08):
unless you can only hear her voice right now if
you tell her that you're a friend of the family,
and like that kind of thing, and learning that it's
just I feel like it's like I have a little
backpack full of like you know, when you get to it,
you know, forgive people for these things. Every time I've
cleaned it out, something else gets dropped. In That Family's
(48:40):
Secrets is a production of My Heart Media. Dylan Fagin
and Bethman Mcalouso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is
our audio editor. If you have a secret, you'd like
to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could
appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is eight
(49:01):
Secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook
at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter
at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to know
about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check out
(49:22):
my New York Times best selling memoir Inheritance. For more
(49:43):
podcasts from 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
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com