Homeschooled

After being coerced into homeschool by a mother whose love threatens to consume him, Stefan must confront how an isolated childhood shrouded in secrecy will shape his life.

Stefan Merrill Block's memoir is titled Homeschooled.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
For Mom to have her little boy back in her
arms is like a kind of medicine, But when the
supply runs out, the crash will only be that much
more awful. For these few months of relief. But at
some point, even if I never find the courage to insist,
won't someone else make me go back? Anyway? Because I
am only now ten and know only our own narrow
experience of homeschooling, I still believe the answer must be yes. Mom,

(00:30):
I ask, are you sad all the time that I'm
growing up? She faces away, scrunches up her nose as
if pricked. I love the big kid version of you,
Steph so much, but I won't lie. I do miss
my baby boy. It's a parent's kurse. You know. Every
mother in the world wishes her kid wouldn't grow up
so fast. She holds my head against her chest as
she laughs. But I guess I'm the only one who's

(00:52):
actually doing something about it.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Right, that's Stephan Meryl Block, novelist and author of the
recent memoir Homeschool Stephens is a story of a maternal
bond grown profoundly awry and a son's conflicted heart as
he's forced over the years to choose between his mother
and himself. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,

(01:25):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. You have
this move between certain and fourth grade, where you move
from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, and that's kind of the

(01:46):
beginning of where a lot of things change.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
My memories of Indianapolis are very impressionistic. I remember being
a part of a very small and loving school community
in a older leafy neighborhood, you know, middle class neighborhood,
somewhere north of the city, and feeling profoundly secure, and

(02:12):
also feeling in that moment that my mom was a
profoundly joyful person. I remember when my friends would come
to play at our house, everyone was always envious because
my mother was the fun mom. She was the one
who was always playing with us kids. Whereas you know,
I go to my friend's houses and the moms would
be busy with whatever business they had or talking to

(02:34):
the other grownums. But my mom was always down there
on you know, kid level with us. I've probably in
some ways idealized this time in my life, but I
just remember it being a period of immense closeness and
also security. And then when I was eight, my father
lost his job and was headhunted for a new position

(02:58):
at a hospital in this town called Plano, Texas, which
in that year was just at the start of a
massive transformation. When we moved to town, West Plaino, where
we settled was essentially farm land, and you know, the
earth fare is nearly perfectly flat, and you could see

(03:19):
as far as the horizon in any direction. We lived
in a brand new housing subdivision, but all around us
were just wheat fields and dirt roads. So it was
we were sort of like the last satellite settlement of
the Dallas Fort Worth sprawling metroplex. But over the years
of living in Plano, and especially in those early years,

(03:40):
the growth of the city was just almost instantaneous. There'd
be a field one day, it felt like, and then
a shopping mall the next day, or you know, these
big box stores would just go up with like impossible speed.
And also the housing subdivisions, we just like conquer the
place lanes in you know, a matter of months. It's

(04:03):
almost like I remember like looking out the window to
my old view of you know, old Texas and just
wheat fields and the horizon and maybe a barn in
the distance, and then the next day there's there's you know,
nine hundred houses up there and just like a sea
of sort of tar shingle roofs. So Plano was a
place of where a lot of a lot of major

(04:25):
corporations were building their headquarters. It was the you know,
always rated very well by magazines, is like one of
the most affordable, healthiest places to raise a family. The
schools were considered to be very good. The problem I
think with Plano was that not nobody was really from there,
you know these It was like an an instant city

(04:47):
on the prairie, and so there was no sense of
what I had felt in Indianapolis, which was like the
sort of intergenerational connectedness and a feeling of being in
a home that had belonged to a community for long
period of time. Plano, I often joke, was like growing
up in the city size airport duty Free, where it's like,

(05:09):
you know, it's nice in there, but it's all the
same shops you could find in any other city, and
it's filled with people just on their way to somewhere else.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Stephan grows up in a family of four, his mother,
his father, and his older brother, Aaron. His father is
a psychologist with a very particular specialty pre surgical psychological screening.
It is his job to assess whether patients are psychologically
prepared for surgery and how they may fare afterwards. When

(05:41):
his father accepts a new position at a hospital in Plano,
the family uproots from Indianapolis. The move is supposed to
be an opportunity, the next step, but for Stephan's mother,
it feels like something else. Entirely. She has left without
her support system. She is suddenly acutely unfulfilled.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
I think that my family had hit a difficult spot,
and with my with my father's work in particular, and
you know, this sort of financial procarity. And I think
when he was offered this position in Plano, Plano seemed
to offer a lot, because I remember reading these articles
that she had found about how wonderful the schools supposedly were,

(06:25):
about what a nice house we could get. She was
excited by my father's larger salary, and it seemed like
a like a good news start and like the sort
of the most logical thing that we should we should do.
She moved it us there. I don't remember her writing
it or being resistant to it at all, but something
happened to her in that move. When we were preparing

(06:46):
to move, I remember she bought me this children's picture
book called Hula Motster's Meet You at the Airport. It
was about a kid whose family moves to the southwestern
where I think maybe Arizona, and it's just sort of
like preparing a child for a move in that direction.
But it wasn't Ela Musters that met us at the airport.
It was it was Mom's anger, and it came out
of what I can now see as some pretty dramatic

(07:09):
losses in her life. When we were in Indianapolis, she
had found a wonderful job as an editor of the
children's magazine owned by Highlights. She had this network of
close friends and one very very close best friend. And
what she had, and I think what was most fulfilling
to her, as she would say, was two small children

(07:32):
at home who needed her so much and so often.
And I think when we moved to Texas, you know,
she didn't have the job. Her friend was hundreds of
miles away. And this was in the time when phone
calls were expensive and the longestans phone calls were expensive,
So it wasn't you know, she wasn't in as regular
touch with with her best friend as she would have liked.

(07:52):
And now I was eight years old and my brother
was eleven years old, and we didn't need her in
the same ways. So I think she was struggling to
find a place for herself and for her energies, and
I think that's where her anger came from. But when
I remember my brother and I had this picture that
my father had taken of my brother, my mother, and

(08:14):
myself on the snowy Indiana morning, and you know, we're
all so rosy cheeked and happy, and we're pressed close
to each other, so the image of coziness. And in
the first year or two after we moved to Plain, Note,
my brother and I used to hide this picture. We
would hide it in the linen closet of our bathroom
and we would pull it out and look at the

(08:35):
picture together, and you would just say to each other,
what happened? Like she was so happy and we were
just trying to reckon with that shift in her persona.
She now became a person who yelled often and who
would speak to us in this like very intense and
sort of condescending way. She felt deeply unsettled.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
It seemed like there was a pattern to the way
that her rage would present itself, and if I were
to kind of make a map of it, it was
like any kind of attempt to individuate on the part
of you boys was met with rage, and then after

(09:19):
the rage would come a kind of shunning or a
kind of silent treatment that was just brutal, and at
some point you would capitulate, you know, whatever it was
that you had been doing to try to kind of
express yourself as an individual, you would kind of let
go of that.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
That's an interesting way of and I think a wise
way of observing that dynamic, and I think how I
experienced it was my mother had very certain views of
how the world operated, of what was right and what
was wrong, and she received any kind of pushback against

(10:00):
her position as betrayal. You couldn't argue with her without
her feeling like you were on the side of her
perceived enemies. And so when you did, like when I
once tried to gather my courage and confront her about
the changes we had seen in the sort of emergence
of this anger in her. She went silent on me,

(10:23):
and she wouldn't speak to me, you know, for a
long while. I mean, I remember it as being more
than a day that you know, I got this just
silent treatment because because I had not. It wasn't that
I had a difference of opinion. It was that that
I was sort of traitorous in expressing a different perspective
I had betrayed her.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
It's nineteen ninety Stephen's between second and third grade when
he and his family moved to Plano. He enters the
school system there at the start of third grade, and
he doesn't have an easy time of it.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Third grade was challenging. My new school in Plano was
quite different from the school I had come from. Our
school in Indianapolis was this small, nurturing, hippyish kind of
almost like a monossory esque model, and the school in

(11:18):
Plano was this brand new facility, like everything else in
the town was brand new, and it seemed to work
under a similar ethos as the rest of the town,
which was you know, everything was sort of wrote and
regimented and geared toward academic advancement and ultimately toward career advancement.
You know, it felt kind of like we were in

(11:38):
a factory for the processing of our brains. There were
ten thousand worksheets to fill out. It was just all
kind of jarring after my experience, in my brother's experience
of our previous school. But there was also a lot
of joy there I made. You know, there's a pleasure
that comes from that can come from this placement, which

(11:59):
is you learn the possibility of some form of self reinvention.
But also, I think more critically, you learn your ability
to create new communities where you land, and that there's
something empowering in that. And I did have a lot
of friends, and I was very pleased at how I
was able to make new friends. You know. The school

(12:20):
was not the happiest place for me, but my mother
and I as third grade changed over to fourth grade
and I was assigned to this new teacher who I
did not love and who in some ways I feared.
An interesting dynamic developed between my mother and me around school,
which was she was often in that time and as

(12:42):
I said, so kind of unsettled. She would get into
these kind of angry states, and I discovered that I
could displace that anger away from myself by talking about
how unhappy I was at school. There's something about presenting
school as the target that the target off of me.
I would tell her all these stories. You know, I'd

(13:04):
be at school, and if anything negative happened, if the
teacher acted in some way that I knew would make
mom unhappy, I'd be thrilled because I would get to
run home with the story of, you know how my
abusive teacher and the crazy things she did that day.
And you know, I think often I probably exaggerated those
stories so that, you know, my mother and I could

(13:24):
have this connectedness as we both just like student in
our disdain for the school. But little did I know
where it would all lead me.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Stephan and Aaron are four years apart and are very
different kids, with very different personalities and very different trajectories.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
My mother treated us quite differently. Aaron is was and
is a profoundly joyful person whose interests run towards he's
a computer scientist now, and he was always sort of
a computer scientist that art. You know, he was excited
by technical things and by you know, science fiction, fantasy,

(14:06):
and the subjects of his fascination were not my mother's.
And he was also a kind of loud and theatrical
kid in you know, I think ways that would be
charming to me now as an adult see in a kid,
but at the time I often felt like, you know,
he was the older brother who was like louder and
claimed a lot of the attention. And so I had

(14:30):
discovered that the way that I could get attention was
through quiet often and through a kind of sullenness. Like
I discovered that if I sort of exaggerated my feelings
of sadness, it was a way for my mother to
turn to me and to sort of take me to her.
And so, you know, this sort of codependent relationship developed

(14:52):
so early, you know, eight or nine, where you know,
I would sort of perform my unhappiness for her, whether
it be at school or just you know, outside of
school or whatever aspect of my life. I wanted to
present to her, and she would you know, hold me
to her. And it was a way I was winning
attention and also a way that I was diffusing her anger.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, well that makes so much sense, but then it,
shall we say, backfires. Yeah, the idea of homeschooling Stephan
takes root after that unhappy fall semester. By the time
spring rolls around, it has become a seta COMPLI the
prospect of homeschooling. Stephan also seems to bring his mother

(15:34):
a great deal of joy, which is his job to
bring her joy.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
I think it's important to say that at this moment,
which is nineteen now is nineteen ninety two, I had
never met any homeschoolers myself. I don't know that my
mother had ever met any Homeschooling today has become this
massive nationwide movement. In that time, it was still in
some places not fully legal, and Texas it had just

(16:02):
become sort of officially legal. It was met with a
lot of skepticism. There was a weirdness to it that
was a little bit scary to me. I did not
want to home school. I think we're if anything were.
I was hoping that all of these complaints and conversations
would lead to was to a different school that was
something more like the school I had left in Indianapolis.

(16:24):
But in that moment, I remember the conversation was, well,
we can't afford that kind of a school, but if
we do this, we don't have to pay anything, and
you know I can give My mother was saying, I
can give you, you know, the best education, a one
to one student teacher ratio, you know, and they'll be free.
And I remember well that the first time I had

(16:46):
even I heard the word homeschool come out of her mouth.
I was upstairs in my bedroom, just sort of like
laying in bed, I think, with a book, and I
heard my father and mother talking about my troubles at
school and what might be done about it. And I
heard her say the word homeschool, and I remember sitting
up in bed. That can't be a real possibility, can it.
I went downstairs and my mother had found some article

(17:09):
I kind of remember. It had like infographics about the
growth of homeschooling, and she was lit up with this
kind of excitement. You know, since the move to Texas,
she had really struggled to find a place to put
her energies and her enthusiasms, which were immense. She was
a person who would get fixated on a theory and
sort of give her all to it and you know,

(17:29):
just come to something with almost like religious zeal. And
so I could hear in her voice that she was
coming to homeschooling with that same kind of energy now,
and it scared me, and I started to ask these questions, well,
what will happen to my friendships? Will I know the
things I'm supposed to know to keep advancing in grades?

(17:50):
And at the time, she said, well, what we really
have to worry about is this one bad teacher you have.
We can just homeschool the rest of the year, then
you can go back in fifth grade. We'll make sure
you still have a social life, and you're going to
learn so much more in these months with me than
you would learn in school. And she said it'll be
like summer vacation all the time. You know, maybe a
little more structure, but basically summer vacation all the time.

(18:10):
That all sounded nice enough, but I still had enormous trepidation.
When she brought me in for the meeting with our
principal where she officially signed the papers to withdraw me
from the Texas school system. My principal said, are you
sure this is what you want? And she also said,
you know, you can come back to the school at
any time. I remember her reaching out to hold my hand,

(18:34):
and I remember feeling I remember feeling like it was
the first time I had ever touched my principle, and
I was so excited about that, and I wished in
that moment. I was like, oh, we've just sort of
repaired what was broken here for me, which is I
didn't feel, you know, closely nurtured by my school community,
and all of a sudden I did. But you know,

(18:56):
it was around this conversation of my leaving, and I
remember when she asked me, is this really what you want?
Maybe inside my mind I was thinking, of course not.
But then what I felt was my mother's anger over
the you know, the last year's, her unsettledness, and how
badly she wanted it. What I wanted more than to

(19:16):
be at school or not to be at school, was
to repair the broken world of my early years in Indianapolis.
I want. I wanted to be back and happy with
my mother, and so I said, yes, this is what
I want. Our homeschooling began with a shopping spree, and
it began with the you know, sort of elaborate and joyful,

(19:37):
kind of vitigenous thrill of assembling a kind of theater
of school, but still in after a couple of weeks
at past we hadn't gotten to any actual schooling. She
was so happy then, and you know, I remember she
would say, like, oh, you've never you know, I used
to play hooky all the time as a kid. You
should just you're a kid. You should enjoy playing hooky.
And we would like when we should have been at school,

(19:58):
we should have been learning. I was like at the
movie theater, at the ice cream shop, and my brother
would come home at the end of the day from
the school bus, and my dad would come back from work,
and we would just sort of lie about what we
had done that day because it was like the secret
between us, and the secret was giving her this great happiness. Eventually,

(20:18):
we did settle down a bit, and my mother had
a theory at the time that when you get to
fourth grade, the only subject that you're not going to
sort of learn by osmosis is math. You need to
have curriculum, it needs to be more regulated, but everything else,
you know, sort of comes on its own if you
just follow your curiosity. And so we had math in

(20:41):
the mornings. She had mail ordered the textbook that I
had had at my public school. She ordered the teachers
edition for herself, and she and I would sit there
and sometimes we do the math together. Often I would
do it alone. I would work through a lessoner two.
One of my favorite tricks was was one she would
leave the room to you know, take a phone call

(21:02):
or to cook something. I would steal her teacher's edition
and like copy down all the answers and then she'd
come back in the room and be like, oh my god,
you got all the answers right there. Took you five minutes.
My mother believed from when I was very young. Let's
say she convinced herself that I was in possession of
this immense intellect. This I mean she she would refer
to it as genius. And so, you know, she would

(21:24):
see these worksheets that I had cheated on, you know,
filled in the answers from her own book, and she
would just take it as evidence of this sort of
like god given genius that I was in possession of.
And she would say to me, you know, thank God
I pulled you out of that place, like look how
they were wasting a mind as exceptional as yours, you know.
And I loved the attention, and it made, you know,

(21:47):
my supposed gifts made her so happy that I was
very happy to continue that that theater. I was so
happy in that moment to feel loved and celebrated. But
what I felt was I don't think I was necessarily
questioning or not questioning her assessments of me at that
at that moment. But what I what I felt was

(22:07):
this anxiety about my return to school, which was supposedly
going to happen the following year. And I thought, well,
if I'm actually cheating, and if actually math is the
only subject we're doing, am I going to be prepared?
Am I actually despite all of her you know, claims
of my supposed genius going to be way behind, which I,

(22:28):
you know, suggests that I did not subscribe to her,
to her view of my of my brilliance. We would
go to the library and she would have me check
out these books on history's great thinkers like Benjamin Franklin
or William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, and she would we would
read the parts of these little kid biographies that concerned

(22:50):
their early childhood, and she would say, oh, at eight, Einstein,
was you know, getting seasoned math? Look how good you'res
you know, basically implying that I was already a track
that far exceeded Albert Einstein, and I think she believed it.
I mean that when she believed something, she committed to
it with such conviction that I see now that this

(23:12):
belief in my supposed brilliance was in some ways the
sort of central lie that helped everything together for us.
Because if I was so brilliant, then she must homeschool me.
She said, you know, I have to cultivate these talents.
You know. She compared me to Mozart and said, you know,
look at what Mozart's father did for Mozart. That he
wouldn't have been Mozart if he his father had sent
him off to some public school.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
You know, we'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. Stephan is nine or ten years old. His hair,

(23:57):
which was very light when he was a little kid,
is starting to grow darker. His mom wants it to
be blonde again, so she uses bleach to lighten it.
It's around this time, too, that Stephan begins his own
private mutiny against what's happening to him. He needs to
reclaim his own body, though he doesn't consciously realize it.

(24:20):
He finds a locust for his pain.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
She would often say to me, how the happiest moment
in her life was when I was, you know, three four,
and I would hold onto her body with both my
arms and my legs, and I call myself a baby sloth.
And she would you be able to walk around the
house like use her arms because I'd be holding onto
her so tightly. She also kept pictures around the house

(24:46):
of you know, my toddler self, and she, you know,
it was clear to me that this was, you know,
when I was like three and four was like the
moment of her greatest happiness. And also also when I,
in her estimation, was sort of at my most perfect.
She actually the first time I got a haircut at
probably at four, she kept clippings of that hair and

(25:10):
she would sometimes pull out these old clippings of my hair,
and so you know, you were like, you know, an
angel from a Renaissance Fresco. You were a perfect little
chair up baby. And she would look at my current hair,
which was brown, and she would say, you know, it
just breaks my heart, like what happened to this, my
perfect little baby. And what she was doing was was

(25:34):
putting lightner in my hair. She used sun in this
sort of it has like a hydrogen peroxide plus other
components to it. We had we had a swimming pool.
This was like the most exciting part of moving to
Texas was our house had a swimming pool out back.
And we'd have what she would call school time in

(25:54):
the pool, and she would cradle me in her arms
as if I wasn't infant, and she would talk about
that how you know, oh, in a pool, I can
hold you forever, like when you were a baby. And meanwhile,
my hair would be, you know, filled with this product,
and she'd be angling my head towards the sun so
that it would be, you know, doing its work to
sort of restore my hair to its rightful color. And
then we would go inside and she would you, we'd

(26:18):
rinse out the product and she would compare it against
the clippings of my toddler hair and she'd be like, oh,
not to not bear yet, you know. And so then
I would have to do another session of this. And
it went on and on for a long time. My
hair instead of turning to that color, she remembered to
turn this like bright fluorescent orange color. And then she
got so frustrated with the project and with this product

(26:38):
she had been using, that she just pulled out a
bottle of hydrogen bronzie from under the sink. I just
sort of started to like pour it track me on
to my head and I just remember this like immense
pain in my scalp. After a few applications directly on
my head of you know, it was just so painful
and my you know, my hair was starting to fall
out a bit and it was like this crazy color.

(27:00):
This is bright, bright lawn. And it never got to
where she wanted, but you know, eventually it was just like,
you know, I had this like wild dandruffe coming off
of my scalp. And she eventually called quits on that project.
But that was not the end of her projects to
sort of return me to infant. So my mother bought

(27:20):
these children's trivia cards that they still exist in They're
a wonderful product called brain Quest. There are trivia that
like a fourth grader should know. They have this one
for each grade level. My mom was convinced that the
if you knew everything on these trivia cards, like you
didn't need to worry. I had expressed all this anxiety
about do I know everything that a fourth grader should know?
And she said, if you know everything on these trivia

(27:42):
cards for fourth graders. You have nothing to worry about.
You know everything that you should know. And I tried
to believe her in that. So she would keep the
trivia cards on the edge of the pool and hold
me in her arms and like look over and ask
me a question from the card. And if I knew
the answer, she wouldn't dunk me. If I didn't know
the answer, she would put me under water, pull me
back up and tell me the correct answer. And honestly,

(28:02):
like that was a major part of our schooling for
that year. Like that that was, that was like our curriculum.
And she would she would as she helped me, she
would talk about how it was, you know, just like
having a baby back in her arm, and you know,
I was in my my swimming suit, and you know,
as this product was working on my hair, I just
felt like wholly exposed, Like I like she owned my

(28:23):
whole body. It was around this time I also became
extremely modest. My mother would always say to me, you know,
in fourth grade, like you went upstairs one day naked
and I put some clothes, and I never saw you
naked again. And I think that what I needed was
to have some part of my body that was mine
and not hers, and a part of that project, which

(28:44):
I mean, this is how I interpreted it at the
time I think was was. I had this this metal
compass that you you know, of the sort that you
used to draw a circle, I guess, a sort of
geometry class tool. When I was alone in my room,
I would take the point of this compass and made
a test of how far I could poke it into
the skin at my hip, and I, you know, sometimes

(29:06):
I would if I made it bleed. That was like
a sort of successful test. And I, as an adult
looking at that, I see, you know, it was a
way of expressing pain that or of trying to empty
myself of pain that I wasn't even conscious I was
experiencing necessarily. But at the time I do remember I thought,

(29:27):
these wounds on me are something that mom does not
know about, and it was like my thing that belonged
to me alone, and it was under my baiting zoo
where she couldn't see.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I mean, both interpretations
make sense, right, Like it's.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Not one or the other. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
So one of the things that's really striking is that
for several years from spring of fourth grade all the
way to the end of eighth grade. Each year, you think,
this is the moment I'm going to tell her I
can't do this anymore. This is the moment I'm going
to tell her that I'm going back to school. And
there was always a reason why that became impossible. Yeah,

(30:13):
Stephan's grandmothers are essentially the only ones from the outside
who ever really step into the family's world, and when
they do, there offered just a glimpse of what life
looks like inside the family bubble. The first summer after
homeschooling begins, the family goes up to their old cottage
on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, the singular place where

(30:36):
Stephan's mother can let loose and be joyful. There, she
laughs easily, she moves differently, The tension that usually hums
beneath her surface quiets. But then when Nana, Stephan's mother's
mother arrives, it becomes clear that she isn't quite herself.
At first, it's small things, little slips. Then it becomes

(30:57):
clear her mind is beginning to fray.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
The other thing that was happening that I wasn't really
fully aware of until we made a trip to the
family college that summer was the advancement of my grandmother's
mental deterioration. She had seemed like a little, you know,
kind of fuzzy and maybe like a little abstracted for
a couple of years, but it was that summer, it
was it had just become undeniable. There was a sort

(31:22):
of heated conversation between my grandmother, Nana and who I
called Nana, and my mother about my mother's older sister
with whom my mother had a very contentious relationship. And
my mother said to my grandmother, you know, I need
you to see what my childhood was like with her.
I need you to appreciate the pain she put me through.

(31:44):
And my grandmother said, so, that's so awful. But my
question is where were her parents? Meaning where were her
own daughter's parents? And my mother I just remember her face,
the pain in her face of them moment. You know
what she was looking for. She would never find, you

(32:05):
know that, because she was my grandmother wasn't capable of
any longer. And that night I found my mother crying
in her room, and you know I had I had
come to the cottage that summer. This was after our
first semester of homeschooling, like filled with these plans to
tell her this is, We've done our semester, I'm going

(32:27):
back for fifth grade. I'm worried about falling behind, I
missed my friends, all these things. But then it was
it was then that my mother, you know, I felt
the depths of her grief. And then the next morning
she took me out for this this kayaking trip where
she told me this long story of the greatest traumas

(32:48):
of her childhood. And the moral of the story of
her great traumas was you can't trust institutions, and you
can't trust what other people tell you. You have to
make your own way in this world. And so you know,
it doesn't matter what if anyone else thinks it's crazy.
We must keep homeschooling.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
And it's this combination too, of her philosophy in that regard,
but also she's sharing some really painful details of her
own traumatic memories with you. So how are you, as
this kid, gonna go against that and take that away

(33:27):
from her? It was very incredibly complicated, you know, just
this combination of her fervor and her certainty and also
her kind of extraordinary manipulation.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
You know, as you're saying this to me, I have
not quite realized this. I have written a memoir on
this subject. I like yet to quite put this together,
that she and I both were using pain to draw
each other closer. I mean I must have in some
way learned it from her. I don't want to like
I'm wholly blameless, but I was. I was, in fact

(33:59):
nine years old, so in some ways it was, by definition,
you know, fairly playless. I have to think that like
for choosing to tell me the story in that moment,
she must have since we had been silent on the
topic of my return to school. We had agree when
she first pulled me out that that's when I would return,
but we had there was a serf of curious silence
around the subject. And it was coming soon. It was

(34:21):
the summertime, school was about to start, and I was
the moment she chose to share these great traumas with
me of her childhood. She had been falsely diagnosed with
polio when she was three, and separated from her family
and put into this polio quarantine, and it was her
first memory was of being on one side of the
glass and like pounding on the glass begging to see

(34:42):
her family, which is just on the out side of
the glass, and they wouldn't let her. And then and
then in the end, apparently she you know, didn't have
polio at all, they thought, you know, I could see
how her skepticism of institutions might grow out of that moment.
And I think in some ways, like when I look
at the whole scope of her life, there's something almost
tragic in a Greek mode about it about this early

(35:04):
childhood trauma and how it steered the course of her
life and eventually like her demise as well, Like it
was such a powerful memory that was so determinative of
who she became.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
You write, at one point, Mom's history was our core curriculum,
and in a way, in her sharing with you in
that moment on the kayak, a place where there's no
there's no getting away, telling you those stories, the timing
of that just really struck me that that was how

(35:38):
she was going to convince you to continue in that way.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
You know. And when I was reflecting on this as
an adult, I was just struck by a sort of perfect,
weird symbolism of this moment, the way that she supposedly
contracted polio was by playing in a swamp that was
near the cottage, that was downstream from a dumping site

(36:05):
and you know, but perhaps contained probably did contain some
contaminated waters. She and her cousins were swimming and kind
of having there, like fighting with muckballs in the swamp,
and she became very ill that night and was rushed
for the emergency room, and they you know, assumed polio,
and then that's how she was put into quarantine. So
so that morning when I was going to tell her,

(36:26):
you know, I'm going back to school. Also the morning
after or very near to, when her mother had forgotten
her own relationship to her daughter, Mom kayaked us out
to the exact place where that to that swamp where
she had gotten so sick. And so she took me
to the literal place of her worst memory. And we

(36:47):
were in this kayak and that you know, the swamp
there is the water level is very low, there's lots
of logs and you know, mucky things, and it's hard
to maneuver, and we got stuck there. We were, as
she's telling me this story, you know, a memory in
which she is psychically stuck. We were literally stuck in
that space unable to turn around. And I think of

(37:12):
that still when I think of the power of that
memory in her life. But yeah, all of her memories,
you know. I think this was a big part of
her project in homeschooling me. Is It's interesting to think
about it too, that she always wanted to write, and
she was a good storyteller, and she always wanted to
tell stories. She never could quite pull that together, but

(37:32):
she always encouraged my literary aspirations, and she told me
her stories like I was the sort of reader for her.
And I took that job very seriously, and I still
I think I take it seriously. Part of the obligation
I feel in writing about her is carrying those stories forward,
even if she's no longer here.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
Stephen doesn't tell his mother that he wants to go
back to elementary school. He continues to be homeschooled. One day,
his mom decides that it would be fun for them
to drive by during recess. His classmates are all now
in fifth grade.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
It was one way of sort of reminding me of
the supposed freedom I had as a homeschooler, and I
think she was proud of giving me that freedom. She
often thought that I was sort of too serious and
too rule a biting, and she tried to bring out
this sort of more rebellious streak that she had so
enjoyed in herself as a child. But yes, she drove

(38:30):
me back to the school that I had left and
parked in the lot that was not so far from
the playground where my whole class that I had left was,
you know, climbing over the jungle gyms and you know,
playing catch. And she rolled down the windows and blasted
my favorite song, which was I Get Around by the
beach boys had started to turn over the playground and

(38:53):
then she said, look at those suckers. And I was
just trying to have the moment and I was so
uncomfortable and get yeah, what what suckers? And she said
say it louder. I was like the suckers. She said,
come on, really do it stuff, And so I yelled
suckers out out the window. And then she you know,
it was like we had just pulled off a heist.
She like went squealing away and like my former classes

(39:16):
watching on. On the one hand, it was like I
think she saw as an expression of joy and freedom,
but maybe didn't think about or maybe this was subconsciously
also the point that it was a way to distance
me from my last connections to that group of friends.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Noah, Stephan's one remaining friend from school and the last
thread connecting him to that world, says to him the
next day that was you. Was that you? Noah recognizes
the car Stephan's mom's Minivam. Stephan's mother seems determined to
keep him separate from his peers, from the outside world,

(39:55):
from any influence that might draw him back toward a
life beyond her reach. But Noah's home life is challenging too.
His family's struggling financially, and he's being raised by a
single mother. He spends a lot of time at Stephan's house,
and at one point, Stephan's mother decides that this time
together should come at a price. That Noah's mother ought

(40:17):
to pay her a babysitting fee, a request that of course,
would completely change the boy's relationship, would make their friendship
next to impossible.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
My mother would would get these theories and you know,
come to these conclusions, and would be so unshakable and
her certainty that she was correct, and this theory that
she hatched was well. I was begging for as much
time as I could get with Noah. He was my
one friend. He showed me what people were talking about
back at school. He was like delivering me the news

(40:49):
of school, telling me the things that fifth graders need
to learn from each other. So I wanted as much
time as I could get with him, which was often,
and so he was. He was around the lot in
my fourth grade year and then going into fifth grade.
But yeah, my mother decided. Her theory was that if
he was at our house, you know, more than a
certain number of days a week, I think it was

(41:09):
more than two days a week, that we had become
a de facto daycare, and that she should be paid
for it. And so she called up Noah's mother, who's
you know, I may, I don't know their exact financial situation,
but I think not as strong as ours, and demanded
a babysitting fee for Noah to come play with me. Amazingly,

(41:32):
she agreed. But that meant that now Noah came five
days a week. Now we were a baby, We were
a daycare for Noah, and it created all of this
terrible at tenching, it became impossible for us to be friends.
Because of course, there was resentment over her mother paying
for us to play together. I had another friend for
a while, a fourth grade who would also come over,

(41:54):
and I guess my mother and his mother were talking
about their finances, and his mother felt anxious over the
state of their money, and my mom offered to hire
her as our housekeeper. So then my friend's mom was
coming to clean her house. And again that you know,
in both cases, my mother used these financial arrangements to

(42:15):
create an impossible barrier between myself and my friends, and
both of those friendships were doomed in the same way.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
The last couple of years that she was homeschooling you,
and in a way sort of beginning with the babysitting
of Noah, but then it turns into I mean not
in terms of Noah, but she begins to take on
after school tutoring of kids, and it turns into this
very popular business for her. And your house is filled

(42:45):
with kids who have been going to school all day
and are now getting tutored, and you're the boy upstairs
in your room who is ostensibly the reason why. Like
she kind of shows you off as her great homeschooling
a she's or her genius son, and this is part
of what she's doing with the tutoring of these kids.

(43:06):
And it was so striking to me that you were
still so isolated. But meanwhile, your house is like you know,
the doorbells ringing, and it's like filling up with kid
after kid after kid who's been living you know, just
sort of like a regular high school or you know,
or middle school life.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
It was a great and painful irony that I was
so alone, and yet at three o'clock every day, you know,
hordes of usually girls but they were often my age
would would come into the house and my mother had
turned the sort of home office into a classroom where
she would tutor these girls in their math work. She

(43:42):
was good with them, They loved her, and she connected
with them, and sort of the lost mother that I
was still searching for, the one that I remembered from
my Indianapolis days, was the one that they got. Like
I would hear her being her sort of warmer, you know,
more performative, like fun self. And the home office was
directly below my room, so I would be alone in

(44:04):
my room, like you know, just sort of like vacantly
watching old TV sitcoms on my being back chair, and
I could hear through the floorboards the sound of all
these kids and my mother like laughing together and being together.
And you know this like lost world was a both
two lost world. I mean the lost world of like
my closeness with my mother and also the lost world

(44:25):
of school and other kids. It was all right there,
like literal feet from me, and I was, you know,
excluded from it.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
It's fifth grade when Stephan's mother becomes fixated on his handwriting,

(44:57):
searching for meaning in every uneven curve, every letter. She
does some research, and then she finds a theory something
she reads or maybe interprets that explains everything, at least
to her. She decides that the problem isn't the handwriting itself,
but something deeper, something developmental. Stephan and Aaron hadn't crawled

(45:19):
as babies. They'd scooted, then stood, then walked, and so
she reasons, maybe that skipped step left something unfinished. Her
solution is both literal and deeply strange. Stephan must learn
to crawl, to return to that lost stage, as though
retracing it could somehow fix what she believes went wrong.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
She had read somewhere the study that connected an infants
crawling phase to the development of fine motor control. And
I don't believe the study came to this conclusion. But
my mother, you know, cracked one of her theories and
came to the conclusion that the reason why my handwriting

(46:04):
and my brother's handwriting was never very good was because
we hadn't crawled long enough as babies. And then she
decided that it probably wasn't too late, that if we crawled,
we would maybe develop hone our fine motor control, and
it would become you know, our handwriting would improve. And

(46:26):
so for months she had me crawl around the house.
I would I would wake up in the morning. I remember,
like I had worked out this way to like on
all fours to come down the stairs backward, so that
would I wouldn't stumble coming down. I would crawl, you know,
to the kitchen for my cereal. I would crawl to
the table to do my school work. I would crawl

(46:47):
to the bathroom, and once I got into the bathroom,
I was pleased to stand up. I wouldn't I wouldn't
crawl once I was there. And then, you know, my
brother went to school every day, so he got to
walk around on his on his feet all day, but
then when he came home from school, he would have
to crawl too. And there is a curious silence in
my family around my mother and her theories. She was

(47:08):
so vehement, and the pain of disagreeing with her, as
I've said, was taking us such an immense betrayal, and
the consequences were so severe it was shunning. We were
afraid to admit to each other that this wasn't a
pleasant situation. So my brother and I would like sort
of like eye one another as we were both crawling
around with and she wasn't even watching, but we never

(47:28):
said a word about it, and we just kept on.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
So your grandmother, who is slipping further into dementia, it's
kind of decided by you know, your mother and her
sisters that she's going to spend time in each of
their homes. So Nana comes to visit. And when she
comes to visit, you and Aaron are not crawling. So
on some level, your mother knows that this is very

(47:57):
strange and not okay, and that Nana wouldn't approve. So
like that period of time when Nana's there and Nana
is appalled anyway. It seems even even though she is
in the throes of sort of of dementia, her being
appalled breaks through. But during that period of time you
and Aaron are walking around. It's not until Nana leaves
that you go back to crawling.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
That's right. But I don't think that she knew on
some level that it was not okay. I think it
was more that she knew that it might not be
interpreted well, or that other people might see it as crazy.
I mean, you know, she would like really go on
and on about how like my brother and I were
the first crawl students ever and this was going to
be a revolutionary technique that was going to improve the

(48:41):
handwriting of you know, millions of children, and that we
were going to maybe even become famous as the first
students that had ever had gone through her program.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
Did your father express anything during that time? I mean,
he's a psychologist. Your father's attention was like a focused,
narrow beam.

Speaker 2 (48:59):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
And it strikes me too, not to get overly analytical
about this, but that his profession as a psychologist being
one where he would see patients for a very brief
period of time. Yeah, it's almost like that focused narrow
beam could work there. But I don't know what did
your father make of crawl school, you know, I.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Can't really speak to what he made of it. I
think that my mother projected such certainty, and if anything,
I remember my father being somewhat amused by it, Like
I think he was sort of indulging her theory and
maybe maybe not focused on what it might be like
for me to crawl around all day in the house.

(49:42):
I think his focus was on keeping our family going
and providing this life for us, you know, at work largely,
and you know, and like the practical matters of every
day like that. You know, for a lot of my homeschool,
and my mother wasn't working, and so you know, he
was like holding the whole thing together. One point out

(50:03):
that at this point in my life, I'm twelve years old,
probably you know, my mother's project of returning me to
infant hood was basically complete. Right, Like she had dyed
my hair back. We would still occasionally do these peroxide treatments,
so my hair was blonde. I was with her all
day with almost no connection to the outside world, crawling

(50:26):
around the house like an infant. Like I don't think
that she at all consciously was like I'm going to
actually make you into a baby again. But she had,
you know, likes as close as as possible. She had.
She had restored me to this infant state. And the
thing that hurts the most when I remember it is,
you know, I didn't like. Crawling hurt sometimes on my knees,

(50:47):
and my hands hurt after a day of crawling, the
peroxide in my hair hurt. But the hard part was
the isolation. And it's just hard to convey, like, you know,
I have two children now, and I see how they
need other kids and other people in the way like
a plant needs sunshine. And I didn't have that. I
was so my days were so solitary. And we're talking

(51:11):
about the punishment of her anchor of my speaking back.
What it's like to be shunned when you have one
person in your life, when it's your mother and your
teacher and your only friend and your principal, you know,
and that person won't speak to you is so profoundly
painful that I would not disagree with her either. And
I came to this point of just sort of like

(51:32):
acceptance of a lot of this.

Speaker 3 (51:36):
A lot happens during this time to a twelve year
old boy alone in his room. It's the very early
days of online culture, and Stephan discovers a forum, Blapatorium,
which was supposed to be a place to exchange ideas
about music and movies, but in reality is a tween
and early teen meat market. Stephan starts an online relationship

(51:57):
with a girl his age, who turns out to be
a thirty year old man preying on him, further increasing
his isolation. His grandma Mimi, his father's mother, comes to
visit and is appalled by what she sees. She's the
first adult who asks him, are you okay? What's really
going on? And Stephan tells her. When this comes to light,

(52:22):
Stephan's mother feels betrayed and she goes into her betrayal
response silence followed by shunning, followed by rage. In her rage,
she pushes Stephan so hard that he falls and hits
his head to the point where he's dizzy disoriented. Also
during this time, Stephan and Aaron have a pair of

(52:44):
hamsters who have a huge litter of baby hamsters. They're
briefly excited by this development until well, here's what happens next.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
I see the lowest part of my homeschooling life, when
I felt like so lonely. We bought this hamster couple
from the pet store, and I would spend so much
time with these hamsters. We built them this elaborate house
of you know, sort of plastic components, and we you know,
all these games for the hamster to play and stuff,

(53:15):
and I loved washing them. And then when Harriet the
hamster got pregnant, it was like a joy, you know,
like like our family is getting big for you know.
And then Harriet gave birth all these tiny little hamster pups,
and I was just thrilled, and I would like put
all the little pups in my hands at the same
time and sort of carry them around. I really felt
like I was in it with with Harriet. The cork

(53:38):
at the pet store told us that you can't keep
hamsters that many hamsters in a cage together for that long,
that they could start to hurt each other or hurt
themselves or something, and that we had to take the
pups to the store at some point and they'd be
given good homes. And I couldn't. I couldn't bear to
do it for a while. And it gave me this

(53:59):
sort of off full empathy for mom, for you know,
this desire to stop time, and like, can't you just
be babies a little bit longer so we get to
keep you, you know. But then we did, and I
remember when we took them to the pet store and
we drove home from you know, from the pet store
with the baby's gone. I remember thinking, well, this, what

(54:20):
I'm feeling now is something like what Mom will feel
when I finally have a courage to tell her I'm
going back. And it's awful and I feel so sad,
but I'm going to be okay. She's going to be okay.
We're going to survive this. And then the next morning,
I wake up and I go to the hamster cage
to see how Harriet's doing now of her children have

(54:42):
been taken, and I found her dead in a tube
of the of the cage. She had just like died
of heartbreak. I mean, I guess I can't extrapolate hamster
psychology too much, but the loss of the pups had
killed her, and it was a devastating blow. I thought
that that's what the pain is. It's so immense that
it could be deadly.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Freshman year of high school. After years away, Stephen finally
returns to a classroom, but he doesn't derive empty handed.
He arrives with a typewriter. His mother has written to
the school explaining that he needs it because of his
dysgraphia his difficulty with handwriting. The typewriter is too heavy

(55:27):
for a backpack, so she finds a plastic rolling filing
cabinet for him to carry it in to her is
practical and almost visionary. To Stephan, it's mortifying. He's already
anxious about standing out after so long away from school.
Now he'll be rolling a clunky cabinet down the halls.

(55:50):
His mother insists it'll be cool. She covers it with
stickers bright ironic loud one reads Where's the Beef? From
that old Wendy's commercial. She imagines it'll start a trend,
making him popular. Instead, it makes him a target. Where's
the Beef becomes his nickname, another well intentioned act of

(56:12):
helping that turns into something else, entirely an ostracization. Academically, too,
Stephan is struggling. Homeschooling hasn't prepared him for tests for structure,
for the rhythm of school life. He's failing classes, falling behind,
watching everything around him collapse just as he's trying to

(56:33):
begin again.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
On the day I finally gathered the courage after five
years to tell her that I had to go back
to school, it was the spring semester of eighth grade.
I was worried. At that time. It seemed very hard
to get into college from homeschool. You know, there wasn't.
I think now it's it's more of a root for that.

(56:57):
But at the time I thought, if I don't do
this now, like this could be it. Like I could
end up not going to college. I could end up
without a high school degree. You know. She had pleaded
for me to try a little bit longer, to try
homeschooling for high school, and I finally just my fear
about my future one out and I insisted, and so
she yes. She sent me back to school with with

(57:18):
this electronic typewriter that made the most horrentous sound when
when I used it in class, Like it was like
the sound of like a rainstick turned upside down. It
was like, you know, I would I would type it
and you can like proof a ligne in the typewriter
and then you hit enter it and we go click clickicklickicklick.
You know, it deafening the room, and everyone was just
scowling at me. Yeah, and I was. I went back

(57:39):
wheeling around this file cabinet. Looking back on it now,
it does feel like maybe a form of sabotage is
how how am I possibly going to fit into, you know,
a class of my peers with with this, you know,
twenty pound typewriter and a filing cabinet. But you know,
the more profound way in which I was not prepared was,
you know, in my homeschooling years. By the end up homeschooling,
we had basically no curriculum at all. My education was

(58:01):
my responsibility. And what that meant was I would spend
my days alone in my room. Maybe I'd write a
short story, maybe I'd copy some pictures out of a
comic book, and then I would show them to her,
and my mom would be like, you are one of
history's great artists. Like, look at what you can do.
You know, everything was a plus plus plus. You're a genius.
And I get to school. I haven't taken the test

(58:22):
in five years. You know, I don't know how to
memorize things. I don't know how to study they're huge
gaps in my knowledge. And so what happened was I
took my first test in that I remember it was
in history class, and the teacher had asked, you know,
a practical question about you know, ancient summer and you
have to like name the reasons why it succeeded as

(58:44):
like one of the world's for civilizations. And I responded
with this kind of like high flute and bologna. That
would impress my mom. I'd be like, I wrote something
like since the time of Aristotle, man has been curious
about yesteryear, you know, just just this like nonsense, this gobbledygook.
And you know, my mom, if the word Aristotle came
out my mouth, you'd like, how do you know Aristotle?
You know. But my history teacher was not so impressed,

(59:05):
as she failed that quiz. And I remember, like, you know,
just the shock of that of, you know, my worst
fears confirmed that I had fallen so far behind. And
you know, not only was I not the genius my
mother had said, I was way behind and maybe maybe
like not sharp enough for this you know techt of
public school.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
But Stefan does turn things around. He's determined to figure
out a path forward, he becomes rigorous about his academics,
making up for lost time. He gets to know his teachers,
expanding his circle of adults around him. One of these
teachers is his ap science teacher, Missus Shepherd, who everyone
calls Shep. Stephan's on a winning team from his high school,

(59:49):
and Shep takes them all to the ceremony in Louisville, Kentucky,
and Stephan's mom insists on coming along. Shep tells Stephan
that in all her years, she's never a mother do this,
and then she says something tougher. She tells Stephan that
he's going to need to leave his mother, that this
will be the toughest thing he's ever done, but that

(01:00:10):
he will survive and his mother will survive. Stephan goes
off to college at Washington University in Saint Louis He
continues to attempt to differentiate himself from his mother. When
he comes home during freshman year, it's with bright red
hair that he's dyed himself. He's no longer her baby.

(01:00:30):
He's making his own decisions. The more Stephan tries to
become himself, the more his mother pushes back. She no
longer wants him to be the greatest writer who ever lived.
Now she wants him to go to medical school so
he can eventually return home and take over his father's practice,
as if father and son's psychology teams might be a thing.

(01:00:54):
But Stephan does not go pre med. He's making his way.
He moves to New York City after graduation and supports
himself as a videographer while trying to be a writer.
The kids are growing up. Aaron now has a serious girlfriend, Nikki,
who has not gotten a memo about what happens with
their mother. If you argue back, it was.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
The first member of her family to you know, express
opposing opinion without you know, fear or reluctance, and I
think that was a great shock to her.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
So in a way, your mother's beginning too. It always
had to happen. I mean, at one point she says
something to you about, you know, the horrors of the
empty nest, and someday you're going to understand that that
it's just like a disease without a cure, this empty
nest thing. So this was always going to happen, because

(01:01:49):
the tragedy would have been if it didn't happen. But
the tragedy is also that as it's happening, as you're
moving into your adult life, you're making your own decisions
about who you want to be in the world. Aaron
is with Nikki, and your mother says some things to
him about like if you stay with her, you're going
to be dead by the time you're forty five, like

(01:02:10):
just some really totally horrendous things. But Aaron manages to
also stay the course and do what he wants to do.
And as it's happening, your mother literally starts shrinking.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
She was declining. She was, you know, in her fifties,
but she was shrinking. She was losing height, she was
having osteophorosis, and her health was deteriorating much more quickly
than I would have ever expected. And it didn't seem
to be anything in particularly wrong with her. She said
directly to me, in fact, many times, that her decline

(01:02:44):
was directly related to my decisions to live my own life.
And she would say, you know, if you have a baby,
if you have a family, like what is going to
happen to me? And so she directly linked her physical
decline to my coming into my own life.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, just the like the definition of
like just the biggest guilt trip imaginable. And you know,
at one point you say to her, I'm killing you
by living my own life. That's what you're saying. And
her response is, no, I'm telling you how much I
love you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
That's right. That exchange. It's one of those moments in
a relationship when you see it with sudden clarity and
you're like, this is the heart of the problem, and
this is it right here.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Despite his mother's suggestion that her health would suffer if
Stephan went on to have a family, he does just this.
About seven years past, he's married, he has a one
year old daughter. Life finally feels like his own until
his mother calls. She says she wants to move to
New York to live nearby to help, especially. She says

(01:03:55):
if there's a second child. It sounds generous, even eternal,
But Stephan knows what it really means. To say yes
would be to surrender the boundaries he's built, to invite
her back into the center of his life, into the
raising of his own children. So he does the hardest thing,

(01:04:16):
the right thing. He says no again. She tells him
that his choices have made her sick. Then she mentions
Harriet the hamster. He understands immediately she's telling him his
no means she'll die. It's not my choice, Steph, she says,

(01:04:36):
it's just biology. Months later, she's diagnosed with stage four
lung cancer. It's the pandemic. As she fades, Stephan does
have a second child, another daughter. His mother holds on
long enough to meet her on a screen across the distance,
literal and otherwise before letting go.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
I have like two pictures of them on Zoom together,
and it was, you know, it was this moment of
profound grace really that like I hadn't made this choice
to live my own life, and we were never gonna
see eye to eye on the choices I had made,
and I was you know, there are elements of like
the way she laid the guilt of her illness upon me,
that you know, our heart to forgive. But I just

(01:05:26):
felt at the end like such the profundity of her
love for me and for my children, and it was
like the most healing thing that could have happened. Really.
There's still a pain to me that that happened on
zoom and that we couldn't all be together, but it
was I don't know it was. It was like a
weirdly healing episode. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:43):
I was just very very struck by that, and both
the grace in that and the pain in that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
She said to me, you know, they knew that her
therapy was no longer working. She had days left to live.
And my you know, our second daughter was two days
old or something, and she she looked at her at
the zoom call and said, you know, I don't know
how it works up there, but maybe there's a reason
why she's arriving as I'm leaving. And she said, I
want you to know that if I can choose, I'm

(01:06:11):
going to come back as your daughter Ffalus. And I
was like, I don't think that's how it works. Like
she's already it's like the room's occupied, You're you're gonna
have to just go on living for a while instead. Yeah.
And I remember this moment when my father called to
tell me that she had died. I looked over. Alice
was taking a nap on the on the bed, and

(01:06:33):
I looked over and she did this thing with her
arms where like she suddenly looked like she was like
flexing her muscles, like she had suddenly like received this
enormous amount of strength from the ether, and I was like,
oh my god, maybe maybe it's happened, but I don't
think so. Now Now, now Alice is five years old
and she's not my mother. After my mom died, my

(01:06:54):
dad had been so much her sort of right hand,
and had you know, supported her so holy and I
had never heard him, you know, push back or criticize
or express unhappiness in their relationship. I really worried about
what would happen to my father. I thought he was
going to become one of these like widowers that will
never betray the wife's memory, and that he was going

(01:07:16):
to be alone. It's not at all what happened. He
went right on Jay Day, and he had suppressed his
judaism for almost the entirety of his marriage. But as
soon as she died, he like re emerged as this
like uber shoe and he like he you know, when
a sixties six year old widower walks into a temple,
like it is like cox in the head that yeah,

(01:07:39):
he had a lot of fitty frenzy. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I guess that's a better way of say it. And
dated almost immediately, and then you know, played the field
briefly and then met someone that he, you know, felt
very fondly toward, and she became his girlfriend very quickly.
I was, you know, honestly uncomfortable with it, just the

(01:08:00):
sort of speed of it. It wasn't that I was
uncomfortable with the idea of him buying someone new. I
wanted that. I think what made me uncomfortable was that
there was a silence that had yet to be punctured,
and I wondered, you know, are we just going to
jump into this new life where now you're in love
with somebody else, now you're marrying somebody else, without any

(01:08:20):
kind of reckoning with what we had all lost and
what our family had been in this time. When when
you know, he's moving on to this new life and
is reluctant to speak really at all about my mother,
it was too painful, I think, you know, I think
we were all all avoiding pain by not really speaking
about her. So my father and my brother and I

(01:08:41):
sort of carried on with this like code of silence
around her as we always had, and it might have
kept on, but I just started to have this immense
crushing feeling that when my mother died, the only other
witness to my you know, to massive parts of my
childhood had vanished, which met like the only other sort

(01:09:02):
of like citizen of this nation of two was gone,
and so I was the last surviving member of this
time and place and what had happened there. And I
just felt like if I didn't start to write these
memories down and do something with them, then it was
as if it didn't happen, and it was. It was
really just sort of to validate my own memory and

(01:09:23):
to find a space for it that I began to
write about mom and what happened in those years, in
particular in those homeschool years. And it was in the
process of writing about myself and placing myself in a
narrative and then reading that narrative back and seeing the
boy who I was, and you know, having a kind
of empathy as now a parent myself, I've seen the

(01:09:45):
predicament that this child was in that I started to
feel like maybe silence was a problem all along and
it needed to be broken. And so, you know, I
started to speak with my brother first about our childhood,
and I was amazed at how, you know, this code
of silence instantly broke. It was all it took was,

(01:10:06):
you know, like like one or two words. It was
like we had these pent up feelings that had been
there and unactionable for all this time. And as soon
as they were expressed, like the floodgates opened, and my
brother and I began by, you know, talking, talking and
talking about our memories of our childhoods and what hadn't
felt right and also what we missed about our mother,

(01:10:28):
and we were just speaking honestly for the first time
with my father. You know. As I started to sort
of conceive this, these memories, and as I started to
think of it as a book, I started to sort
of interview my dad a bit, just started talking about memories,
and I think that began the conversation. But the scariest

(01:10:49):
moment didn't happen until I shared the whole book with him.
I realized it was going to come out, and I thought,
I still haven't said a lot of these things out
loud to him, and maybe I couldn't, you know, maybe
this is why I had to write a book, so
I could tell him these things, you know, and show
him how it felt to me. Not out of anger,

(01:11:11):
but just because I needed that conversation and that engagement,
and I sent it to him, and I was sick
with anxiety and this profound guilt. I was just walking
around my neighborhood like shaking over what he would make
of this. It's such a profoundly radical act. It's like
the central law of our family dynamic is that, you know,

(01:11:35):
we all talk about this, and now I've put it
all on the page, thought about it, honed it, dotten
it down to what feels truest to me, and sent
it to him. I said, you don't have to read
it if you don't choose to, but here it is.
It's up to you to make what you will of it.
I didn't know what to expect. I thought maybe I
wouldn't hear from him until he had read the whole thing.
Maybe he would be furious, maybe he would be, you know, apologetic.

(01:11:59):
I mean, who knows. But he called me after reading
the first chapter with his voice shaking, and he, I think,
felt appended by it. And he said, I never saw
it this way. He recognized all facts in the story,
of course, but hadn't really ever put together how that

(01:12:21):
had felt for me. And it began this painful but
profoundly healing reckoning with him over our whole history, and
we had hard, hard conversations and it went on. The
process took weeks. You know, he would read another chapter
and then we would talk about it, and I would

(01:12:41):
see the call coming in and I would think, I
don't have like the strength to now get to this
next chapter of our lives and like what had happened there.
But I took the call and we had the conversation,
and on the other side of that is I feel
like we have a more profound and loving and close
relationship than I could have ever conceive we could have.
And it was just speaking the truth and sharing my

(01:13:05):
story and how things had felt to me. There were
things that he didn't know. You know, he had been
at work and we had been at home. He didn't
know all the things that had happened. I had been
afraid to say them, or you know, like we just
never spoke about them. So he was surprised and disturbed
by a lot of the things that had happened. He
told me something I didn't know, and it changed my
whole perception of my mother, especially in her later years,

(01:13:28):
in a way that I'm still trying to make sense of. Really,
which was I said to him, my mother became very
paranoid at the end of her life. She was afraid
to see doctors, which is why, you know, when she
went in finally, when she can hardly breathe, she had
stage four cancer and you know, had metastasized through her
body because she hadn't been to a doctor in years. Really,
she became convinced that the FBI was parked across the street,

(01:13:49):
and that there are certain things we couldn't talk about
on the phone, you know, because the FBI was tapping
the phone. I asked my dad about this, I said,
what was that, Like, was she always so paranoid or
was it just something that worsened? And he said, oh, well,
that was her alcoholism. And I said her what and
he was like, yeah, her alcoholism. And then he told
me that she had been drinking a half a bottle

(01:14:11):
of vodka a day, basically since the day I left
for college, and that she had orrhosis and brain damage
from years of alcoholism. You know, it's one of these
obvious truths that you choose not to see, you know,
like I saw that she was declining. I had already
written a book when I learned this fact, and I

(01:14:33):
remember I called my editor and I said, pull the presses.
There's this new major fact about her, and I think
it's gonna change how I'm thinking about her. And he said, well,
what is it? And I said it was her alcoholism.
I explained what my dad had said, and he said, well,
I already know that. He said what and he said,
he said, you know you describe an alcoholic.

Speaker 3 (01:14:52):
Yeah, it's in the book without.

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):
And I did not know. Honestly, Danny, I did not know.
And I look back and I see I was lying
to myself. You know, I know why I didn't permit
myself to see that particular pain.

Speaker 3 (01:15:08):
Here's Stefan reading one more passage from his beautiful, heartbreaking memoir.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
You were happy, weren't you? She asked me one afternoon
when I was back in Plano. What's that. I couldn't
have known then that this would be the last time
I'd share a room with her, that the pandemic we've
been hearing about on the news would soon put up
a final barrier between us. Mom looked at her pale
fingers as she braided the tassels of her throat blanket.

(01:15:35):
She bit a lip, her eyes spilling over weren't we
so happy here in the house when it was just
the two of us? Weren't those just the happiest years?
I let her take my hand, but even then I
could not bring myself to give her the answer she needed.
Minutes later, I'd laced up once more and run away
from the question. I ran out the door and through

(01:15:56):
my hometown one last time.

Speaker 3 (01:16:10):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Acre
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd

(01:16:34):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 1 (01:16:56):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Potodcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.