Mermaid Manor

Liz Scheier’s mother is eccentric at best, and violent at worst. In the grips of mental illness, she keeps secrets and tells lies. It isn’t until Liz turns eighteen, when her mother finally divulges hidden truths about her past. Decades later, Liz is still trying to piece together the myriad levels of deception.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. No
one live like family. We lie to each other all
the time. We'd love to keep each other at a distance,
to give ourselves some elbow room and the claustrophobic nuclear unit,
to spare each other's steelers, to cut short of conversation

(00:20):
or to begin one, to ensure that the artichoke heart
softness of our insights is sealed safely off forever. As
I write this, my two toddlers are in the next room,
cheerfully bolting out some interminable preschool song and throwing stuffed
animals at each other. They're too young to ask me
about my missing father or my never spoken of mother,
or why I am the way I am. They're too

(00:41):
young to understand how much they don't know. Then again,
I haven't started lying to them yet. This is the
story of digging out the biggest lie I was ever told.
That's Liz Shire, book editor, product developer, an author of
the new memoir Never Simple. The graph to Lizz's book
from the poet Adrian Rich goes like this. When we

(01:05):
discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer,
it forces us to re examine the universe to question
the whole instinct and concept of trust for a while.
We are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge in
a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets
of rain, in a world before kinship or naming or

(01:27):
tenderness exists. We are brought close to formlessness. This is
a story of lies, trust, and one woman's journey to
be brought back from that bleak, jutting ledge and make
herself whole. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,

(01:56):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and this good we keep from ourselves.
I was born in New Yorkville, which is the very
far east neighborhood in New York City. It is basically
falling off into the East River. And when you here

(02:18):
grew up in New York City, I think a lot
of people think gossip Girl, and that really could not
have been further from the truth of my New York City.
In the eighties and nineties, we were all very middle
class um, a kind of Manhattan that doesn't really so
much exist anymore. I lived with my mother. We lived
in a one bedroom apartment on eighty one Street, and
it was a very typical setup for the time, where

(02:42):
I lived in the bedroom and she had created out
of the hall closet a little nook for herself where
she had put a twin bed, and we lived there together.
And I did not know at the time that it
was unusual for a mother and daughter to share a
home with nobody else there. It wasn't really true of
other people. I know once I got out to school,
but as a small child, I didn't know any of

(03:03):
that yet. And so there we worked, just the two
of us together. Describe your mother for me. You know
your mother during your childhood. My mother was an incredibly
charming woman. She was brilliant. She had been an attorney
when very few women were attorneys. She was one of
the very few women in her law school class in
the early sixties. She went to n y U, and

(03:24):
her professors would have ladies Night the first Monday of
every month, and that was the one day that they
would call on the women in their classes. And this
was something I knew about her, even though she no
longer worked as a lawyer, she was retired, and because
I was so young, I didn't then know that people
don't generally retire in their late thirties. I didn't know
that there was something wrong with that statement. But she

(03:47):
could be enormously charming. She was a lot of fun.
She told great stories with you know, the arms pinwheeling
to to gesture and illustrate what she was talking about.
She was a quite a smoker. She smoked between four
and six packs a day, depending on how stressed how
she was that particular week. Um. And so she had

(04:07):
this sort of deep throaty voice, in this deep chuffle
that she would illustrate her stories with. And she treated
everything else in our lives as sort of incidental to
the fact that we were going to have time together.
So she would just take me out of school on
a moment's notice it was a good sledding day in
the park, or if there was something good at the
map that she wanted to see when it wasn't too crowded. Um.

(04:28):
And she just was not interested in anything that would
get in her way. No, it doesn't sound like she
was very interested in rules. No, not particularly. And I
thought everything in our lives was normal until I got
to school and I started realizing that things and other
kids lives weren't quite the same. My mother did not

(04:50):
have a hold on her anger, and she had a
lot of anger. There was no logical chain between an
occurrence and her reaction to the occurrence. So whether I
did some the really terrible and misbehaved, or whether I
left a water glass in the wrong place, you know,
sort of one time out of every ten, the rage
would come up, and it was like you know the
movie The Terminator, It was like talking to her there

(05:11):
with a red light would come on behind the eyes
and the screaming would begin, and I would either lock
myself in the bathroom or in the closet where just
sort of try to stay out of her reach. And
you could see, if you were dumb enough to get
close enough to see that there was just nobody driving
the bus there, that she was completely out of control.
And when the adrenaline wore off, then the self excoriation

(05:35):
would come in. Then she would say to the ground,
she would weep, what have I done to you? Why
do I treat you like this? I'm so terrible and
such a terrible mother. Um, And I would just try
to comfort her, because returning to that kind of normal
before the rage was the best we could do. What
did she actually look like when she would fly into
one of these rages. So my mother was a small

(05:58):
woman when she got pregnant with me. She didn't weigh
an hundred pounds, and she had a sort of perfect
blonde ploff if you can think of the seventies hair
hairstyle of the with a flip in the front um.
And when she got really angry, you know, her face
would turn red, the hair would flof up um and
the spit would start flying. She would she would lose

(06:19):
the ability to control her mouth or her body, and
she became huge to me in my eyes, Like you know,
was a very small child, and although she was not
a large person, she became like a giant. What did
you know about your father at that stage in your life?
What was the story about your father and where he was?

(06:43):
So I didn't know much when I was very young.
I didn't really have a firm grasp on the idea
that there was such a thing as a father. I
understood that there were men, we knew men, but I
didn't understand that there was, you know, at least a
man genetically related to each child. When I was very young,
she told me a story about my father that went
like this. My father was her second husband. She had

(07:05):
married someone read out of college. They had been married
for some time and divorced amicably, and because it was
a second marriage, they had a very small ceremony. She
had borrowed a pant suit from a friend, which she
returned after they were done. They were only married for
six months or so. He didn't have a living family,
that didn't have a lot of friends. And one night

(07:27):
he was driving and he got to a stop sign
and he stopped, and the driver behind him didn't, and
he died instantly. And she was in such a storm
of grief that she burned all his belongings, burned all
the pictures of him, burned all the evidence that he
had ever been there. And at the time, I believe
this because you believe what your parents tell you. It

(07:49):
wasn't until I was a little older that I started
to realize that that story was extremely convenient. It didn't
actually make any sense at all. It didn't fit together,
it didn't fit with our lives. You know, people and
just disappear off the planet, unable to be found, and
that it just wasn't incredible that nobody who had known
him was still alive or reachable, And so I thought,

(08:10):
if she is lying about his death, it must be
that he's still alive. I couldn't imagine a reason why
he would have died one way, and she would tell
me a different way. So I assume that he was
somewhere still around. And so, you know, we would walk
around New York and I would just sort of look
at all the men who were, you know, roughly the
right age and blonde and might potentially look enough like us,

(08:32):
and thinking, is that you are you the one? I
thought that there must be some really romantic, adventurous story
as to why he was still alive, but nobody would
let me talk to him. Write that he was a
spy or you know, wrongfully imprisoned, or an astronaut abandoned
on a distant planet or something um. And then as
I got into middle school in high school and got
to be disaffected, I thought, maybe he's just married. But

(08:55):
I knew that I was being told something that was
evidently untrue. I just didn't figure out why. Liz goes
to middle school at Hunter, an excellent, highly competitive public
school in Manhattan, and during this time, her mother's rage
escalates she's violent towards Liz, and Liz's sense that things
just don't add up about her father is really sinking in.

(09:17):
Liz grows more and more depressed. Her mother's volatility and
her father's elusiveness sit at the center of her middle
school years. I was kind of a weird kid that
was very socially awkward. I was depressed. I don't think
we knew at the time what depression looked like in
teenagers or young teenagers. Now, I think it would have
been diagnosed much earlier and probably treated. But I was super,

(09:42):
super unpopular. You know, there were bullies in my school
that made my life pretty hard, and I knew that
in a way, they were right that there was something
wrong with me. There was something wrong with my house.
And you know, every twelve or thirteen year old kid
thinks that, but in my case it was really true.
We were not living a normal life, um and I

(10:02):
took that very much to heart and thought it was
something integral to me. The fact that my father was
not there just really meant that there was no one
there to see us. We lived this life like a
panic room in the middle of this city of eight
and a half billion people. But there were no eyes
on us. No one knew what was happening in the apartment,
door closed, and my mother was enormously protective. I was

(10:23):
not allowed to go to friends houses for the most part,
I was largely not allowed to leave the apartment without
her eyes on me or the eyes of friends parents
who she trusted, and so there was just no one,
no one to see what was happening. And so I
despaired because to me, there was something irretrievably wrong with
our lives, and there was no reason to think it
could ever get better. A lot of this came to

(10:45):
a head when I was about fifteen and I had,
unbeknownst to my mother, started dating an older boy at
my high school. And he was a guitar player and
a baseball player, and you know, all those things that
are very very attractive to fifteen year old girls. And
my mother at that time, I don't remember what it was.
I think maybe she was taking a class. I knew

(11:06):
she was out one afternoon week And so, you know,
when you grew up in New York City, there's not
a lot of places to sneak away and make out
right because there's no basements, So there's no reddy couches
and there's no river banks, so there's no words, just
sort of sneak away. You really have to work at
it to find somewhere private. So I sneaked him into
my apartment and my mother came home early and caught us,

(11:27):
and she went ballistic and ended up sending me to
my godparents house in New Jersey, where I stayed for
a couple of months until she calmed down. And that
was really this kind of oasis of time living with them,
when I started to realize that other people do not
live on this sort of precipice of constant anger and

(11:50):
rage and sadness. Many people lived with an even kielan nows.
Many people never screamed at each other at all, which
was a totally novel concept. And even though I was
not living in my mother's house at the time, she
decided that I had to be tracked uh And so
she went to the principle of my teachers and she
had them all sit down together with the guidance counselor,

(12:12):
and she presented them with a plan for her unmarriageable daughter,
in which she was going to hire a Barnard student
to follow me in the streets. Should I ever come home,
I would not have access to the phone, of course,
the only plandlines at the time, and every time I
went to a class, I was going to have to
sign in, and we didn't do that at my school.
She required them to put together this whole system of
clipboards and signatures, and half the time they of course

(12:35):
forgot that that was supposed to happen at all. This
really moving thing happened on one day where I was
sitting in the hallway in a free period and my
most terrifying teacher came up to me, and I thought,
what have I done wrong? And she said so about
this signing in business? And I said yes, And she
said I want you to know that none of us

(12:56):
have seen you do anything wrong, and whatever happens, none
plus will. And that really blew me over because at
that moment I understood that when they sat in that
room Princilo in the guidance counselor, they weren't nodding along
going oh, yes, totally, you know, terrible out of control teenager.
What can we do to rein her back in? They

(13:17):
were thinking, this mother is crazy. And it was the
first time that I understood that people outside of our lives,
we're seeing that her behavior was completely out of the
realm of reason, and that her reactions could only kindly
be classified as only overreactions, and that someone actually saw
what was going on. So that was a really seminal

(13:40):
moment during those years. These seminal moments are so important
in our lives, the ones during which we're seen, recognized, witnessed. Thankfully,
now some eyes are on Liz and her mother, and
she no longer feels like the two of them are
entirely shrouded, their troubles invisible. Their dynamic has been so

(14:02):
deeply toxic, so much so that when her mother really
gets angry, she threatens Liz by telling her she's going
to put her beloved dog to sleep. But now, after
this encounter with her teachers at school, a bit of
life begins to dawn. Her teachers aren't out to get her, No,
they're actively protecting her. The years passed and Liz takes

(14:23):
off for college. She's still in touch with her mom,
but she's trying to keep her distance. Then she's home
from school on vacation when the damn breaks yet again,
this time with a number of surprising declarations, bombshells really
from her mother. I was home for fall break and
I was sort of sprawled on the couch in the
living room reading something, and she came in, you know,

(14:46):
wearing one of her crazy movemos. She by that time
rarely left the apartment and often rarely left her bedroom.
She was severely a grophobic. So she came and started
sidling with the door and absolutely very nervous, which is
definitely not hermilius. I mean, something was up. And she said, so,
you said you're going to try to get a learner's
permit while you're home from college. And if I'd gone

(15:09):
to college and found out the people outside New York
City drive and that was sonning to me. So I
was going to go do this thing. And I said, yeah,
that's that's right. And she said you're not going to
be able to do that and I said, okay, why
and she said, well, you don't have a birth certificate
and I said, oh, I can just get a copy.
And she said, no, no no, no, not, you don't have
a copy of your birth certificate. I never filed a

(15:30):
birth certificate for you. There's no record of your birth
at all. And I said, okay, why, and she then
came out with this life changing line, I was married
when you were born, but not to your father. And
it turns out all of this that I discovered over
that next twenty minutes or so, that the first part

(15:52):
of the story she told me was true. She was
married to this, by all accounts, very lovely man after college.
They were married for it or ten years, divorced and
went their separate ways. What I did not know was
that she had married a second man, a man named Meryl,
sometime after that, and in the car on the way
back from their wedding ceremony, he pulled the car over

(16:13):
to the side of the road and popped the hood
because the voices from the engine were talking to him
and he needed to answer them. So there were clearly
there was there was a lot going on with this man,
not the least of which was that he was beating
the crap out of my mother, and she ultimately left him.
She uh, you know, she would call the police, and
and it was the seventies, out of big domestic abuse

(16:34):
was even a term, and they would come and say,
you know, this is between a man and his wife,
and then they would leave again. And so she finally
left him up and she would call, she would refuse
to talk to him, and eventually he stopped calling. But
really the key point here is that they never divorced,
and so until he died when I was a junior,
a senior in high school, my mother was married to

(16:55):
a man I had never heard of. And looking back,
even at all of the kind of weird and crazy
things that happened, I think that's what strikes me as
the strangest. That she and I were living in this
like incredibly codependent, tiny, claustrophobic towsome and there was this
major thing about her that I didn't know. Twenty minutes,

(17:19):
twenty minutes and a lifetime the information is on rushing
a torrent. Lizz's mom tells her the truth for the
first time, the truth of her father. He was this
beautiful man ten years younger than she was. He picked
her up in Central Park by asking for a piece
of her New York Times, a classic nineteen seventies pick
up if there ever was one. They embarked on a

(17:41):
love affair that lasted six months, maybe a year. They
were both fairly depressed. One day, she realized she hadn't
heard from him in a little while, so she called
his apartment and his ex wife picked up the phone.
The week before, he had jumped from the roof of
his building and fallen sixteen stories to the concrete below,
where died. And so my mother went into an even

(18:05):
greater depression. And after some months she stirred herself to
have a doctor so as that she was not feeling well,
and she was seeing the sort of daughtering old character
of the doctor. And he ransom blood tests and said,
you have a tomer on your patuitary glance, and you
are dying. And so she and her grief kicked herself
up and gets on the plane and flies to California,

(18:26):
where her brother is living, who had married a woman
with the four young children who they were raising together.
And my aunt took one look at her when she
got off the plan and said, honey, you're not dying.
You are pregnant. And by that time she was almost
five months long, and there was nothing to do about it.
And her idea was that she would put me up

(18:47):
for adoption when I was born. She had never intended
to have children. She was alone. What it was not
not something she had intended to take on, and when
I was born, apparently I didn't cry, and she felt, well,
even maybe it's quiet, I could just slit see along
this last And on day twelve she thought, maybe this
kid is mute. And she poked me with a diaper
band and it turned out of his and she decided

(19:10):
to keep me, and you know, being my mother, she
didn't name me for the first six months because there
was no need to distinguish me from anybody else. There
are only two of us in the apartments. That the
baby was enough, and so we went done, And so
they went on. Liz graduates from college and begins working
and publishing. She's living in New York City in a

(19:32):
relationship with a woman. She's making her way, but there's
always the specter of her mother, the possibility of a
phone call that will up end her hard one equilibrium.
Once Liz is at her job when she receives a
call from her mother and she's using what Liz describes
as her tranquilizer voice. Her mom tells Liz that she's

(19:52):
missing her own mother, who has been dead for forty years,
and that she has a brilliant idea she knows Liz
doesn't want to have children, her health. But maybe Liz
could give birth to a stillborn baby, Yes, stay with it,
a stillborn baby who could then be buried with her
long dead mother so that she wouldn't be lonely in
the cemetery. Imagine being on the receiving end of that

(20:17):
phone call, sitting in an office surrounded by coworkers, colleagues.
Liz has been trying to understand her mother all her life.
Now she has to consider is her mother mentally ill,
heavily medicated, eccentric, dangerous, hurting all of the above. At
that stage, she was calling it a couple of times

(20:39):
a day. Probably she did not have bipolar disorder, but
she did have manic CASA. She would have swings where
these frequent calls would happen, and then if she took
enough tranquilizers, it would come out in situations where, just
as an example, she would decide that it was the
right thing for me to somehow orchestrate is still worth
And then I don't know what she thought we would do,

(21:00):
sneak into the graveyard in the middle of the n
I don't know which a logical chain there was, but
Danny I realized that it may sound change to say
this now. But I actually found those moments kind of validating,
because so often her behavior was just on the edge
of eccentric and really out of the realm of normal,
and those moments reminding like, this actually is not normal,

(21:23):
Like most parents don't do this, Most parents do not
call and request that you have still one baby. This
is not this is not in the normal woods. And
so sometimes these were very comforting conversations because they reminded
me that I was dealing with something that I could
not predict, and that if my response to it was
not perfectly formulated or sufficiently comforting, because of course I

(21:47):
felt responsible for her, uh that that was not some
deficiency in me, It was that the situation was inherently bananas.
Bananas is one word for it, but there's also another. One. Afternoon,
Liz and her mother are having lunch outdoors at a
restaurant in Manhattan. When her mother lights up a cigarette.

(22:08):
The waitress comes over and tells her that smoking is
against the law, and her mom she goes completely crazy
on the waitress, livid at being told what to do,
and then Lizza's mother uses a word for the first time,
just slips it into the conversation after the waitress walks away,
and that word is borderline, And you know the moment

(22:29):
she said that word, I think. I think in all
of this story there are these pivot points, like one
of those old yardsticks that were foldable, and the whole
thing just completely goes off into a direction I wasn't expecting.
And the moment she said borderline was one of those moments.
Because again, for all of this time, I had known
she was eccentric. I had known there was something odd
about her. I had known that people didn't respond to

(22:53):
her the way they responded to other people, but I
didn't know what it was. And having a diagnosis just
meant the world to me, just that there was now
something I could read, there was something I could research.
This happened to other people, but this wasn't something that
we were just the two of us tussling around between us.
But this was something out in the world that psychiatristn't

(23:16):
dealt with and had written articles on. And I could
read those articles. And so I went and looked up
the symptoms of borderline personality disorder, and people with borderline
personality disorder obviously have a wide range of severity and symptoms,
but it's characterized by extreme fear of abandonment. Usually that
comes from some kind of trauma and childhood, and so

(23:39):
people who are suffering with this cannot abide the idea
of the distinction between them and another person, particularly between
them and their children, and so so much started to
fall into place. Her her inability to let go of
me in any way, her screaming fits of rage when
as an adult, for example, I would failed to send
her a Valentine's Day card. These kinds of things made

(24:00):
her livid, and I never understood why, And that helped
me understand that those those things where I was not
responding to the way that she wanted, where I was
not prioritizing her as the sole thing in my life,
sent her into her absolute panic that she had been
abandoned in the bottom of figuratively the bottom of a

(24:22):
deep well with no getting out of it. That's a
great description. So in this period of time of young adulthood,
your girlfriend at the time has a wealthy aunt who
just really wants to help you figure out more about
who your father was and find out more as much
as you possibly can about him. So she offers to

(24:45):
hire a private investigator. So that was an absolutely amazing
and shocking conversation I had with We called her Auntie
because that had, frankly, just never occurred to me at
that time. I had thought, this man is gone, he
is dead. There there's no way I'll ever find out
about him. So it was astonishing to have this avenue opened.
And so I found out this story when Andy called me.

(25:06):
I was at work. I was an editorial assistant at
Random House, and the way it was set up was
that the cubicles were in the middle of the aisle,
and there were offices to either side, so you were
like in a little moat in the middle of the
stream with people just walking by another side. And Andy
Collins and says, we have to talk. I had the
private investigator on the line and found out something about
your father, and you know, I look up and there's

(25:27):
seven fifteen people standing around me talking about publicity plans,
and so I just start of put my shoulders up
around my ears and tried to make a little climate
controlled dome around myself. It turns out that Liz's father's father,
her paternal grandfather, had been a very popular entertainer. He

(25:48):
had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He
was in a movie in the nineteen forties. He wrote
hundreds of songs that were constantly on the radio, and
he was a fantastically popular children's entertainer. And as the
investigator was reading this, he said, you know, I used
to listen to Frank Luther stuff when I was a kid.
Isn't that amazing? And it was just so astonishing to

(26:10):
me that, first of all, I had had grandparents, which
I had never really thought of before. In the face
of the one more immediate loss, I just didn't think
beyond my father's absence, and then other people had known them.
That many people, thousands and millions of people knew who
my grandfather had been, and that was absolutely shocking. I
also discovered that I had an aunt's living and living

(26:32):
on Roselt Island, which is a small island that that
sits alongside Manhattan, Um, and she was married and had
two children, that I had cousins living. And these were
people who were just, you know, half a mile from
where I grew up, and I had never known they
were there. So I called my aunt at home that
evening and she had been prepped by her husband. So

(26:53):
it was not a complete shock that I was calling
out of the blue, and I needed to stress here
or that none of these people knew my mother had existed.
They certainly didn't know that I existed. So this is
really just the past coming back twenty five years later
or whatever. It was really as a shock to all

(27:14):
of these people. And so, you know, my heart thumping
in my throat, I make this call. And we had
a you know, perfectly pleasant, maybe five or ten minute
conversation where I asked some some general questions, where hating
gone to high school, what was he like, those sorts
of things, and she gave me perfectly polite but short answers,
and over the course of conversation, she let me know

(27:37):
that she and my father had not gotten along. They
were not close. There was clearly something else there. There
was a lot of history between them that was not
perhaps always very positive, that she remembered him with a
great deal of pain, and that maybe she viewed my coming,
my popping up out of nowhere, not not with any joy,

(27:59):
not with any surer eyes, that all I was doing
was reminding her of a painful time in her life.
And then we hung up, and I thought to myself,
that you know. Number one, I didn't want to cause
someone pain. That certainly wasn't my intention. And then number two,
if I was going to find out anything about my father,
my mother remembered almost nothing about him, just a handful

(28:19):
of things that maybe I didn't want it to be
from someone who hadn't gotten along with him. Maybe I
wanted to be from someone who could remember him only
with with love. And during that conversation, that brief conversation,
she did agree your request to send you a photograph
of him. He had ever seen a photograph of him,

(28:42):
But my mother had saved an Oldsmobile add that she
cut out of a magazine from I think seventy seven
or seventy eight that she had seen when she already
knew she was pregnant, where there was a model who
looked enough like my father that she thought would suffice
that she could say, this is what he looked like.
But she had no actual pictures of the game. But
the photograph doesn't come right away, Liz gives up on

(29:04):
the idea that it will ever come. Reflecting on this,
she writes, it's a hard lesson that when your needs
bump up against a stranger's pain, their pain always takes precedence.
But later that year, the holidays arrive and she receives
a Christmas card from her aunt with photos in it.

(29:26):
I open it and into my hand follows these four pictures.
Remember what pictures look like from that time, They sort
of CPA toned, you know, colorized with CPIA toned square,
but with the corners rounded off. And they fall into
my hand and I was I had just come into
the house with my girlfriend at the time, and I
just sat down right in the middle of the kitchen floor, um,

(29:48):
and it was, you know, the world went white around me.
I was just in absolute shock because there he was.
The pictures were taken a couple of years before he died.
He died at eight, so he was must have been
twenty six pages a young man, and you know the
age I was at the time. We were contemporaries. And
at that moment I understood why I looked nothing like

(30:09):
my mother, because he and I could have been. I
happen to have at that point in my life, very
short hair. We could have been exchanged for each other
from the neck up, and it would have been difficult
to tell us apart. We had the same in bullbot
snows and the same sloping chin and the same infuriating
cowlick um. And it was the first time I had

(30:30):
looked at someone who looked like me, and I was
really just an incredible moment. We'll be right back. As

(30:52):
time moves on and Liz continues to build her life
as a young adult with all the professional and personal
changes that entails, all the while she keeps seeking out
information about her father. She eventually is able to get
in touch with her father's ex wife, Lydia, who, unlike
her aunt, responds to Liz and the situation with kindness,
not self protectiveness. I had had a sort of strange

(31:17):
milestone in my life where I had just had an
absolutely terrible breakup, had major surgery, lost my job, and
moved all in the course of a couple of months.
And so suddenly I found myself that's time on my hands,
and I hired a forensic genealogist. M Again. It turns out,
just like with the private investigator, that these things which
remain mysteries for decades, can be found just for the

(31:38):
for the price of finding a professional um. And she
put me in touch with my father's wife. They were
not officially divorced at his death. So she wrote an
email to Lydia just saying, there's someone who would like
to know about this man. And she wrote back absolutely
lovely response, telling me more in that two pages than

(31:58):
I had ever known about at him before, and ending
saying I'd be very curious to know who this relative
is and how this person is connected to the Luther family.
And again I'm in this this quandary of I am
about to bring my own pain potentially into someone else's life.

(32:20):
It turned out my father had been an alcoholic and
they had split when he was unable to stop drinking.
Finally they reconciled he was going to move back in
with her. He arrives at the door drunk, and she
turns him away, and he leaves the apartment door, takes
the stairs, goes up to the roof, and jumps off.

(32:40):
And now that I know this, I'm thinking, how can
I bring up these memories again, things that she has
surely put to rest, just because I am desperate to
know anything about him. But she was enormously generous in
sharing that information with me, even though it must have
brought up quite a bit of veried sadness. And you

(33:01):
tell her that the way that you're related to him
is that you're his daughter. Yeah, And I sent her
a picture of myself at about the same age he
was when he died, and I thought to myself, you know,
there's there's a lot of ways this could go. She
could she could laugh at me, and she could say no,
get a de sect to me, like you're you're definitely

(33:21):
not his daughter, and I could have to start all
over again, like this could all have been a mistake,
this could not have been the guy. And I was
really trepidacious about losing this one lead that I had.
But I sent this picture and she said something to
the effect of I don't need a DNA test to
know that you are his daughter. So that was quite
quite a moment um. She shared some more pictures with

(33:43):
me that of course I had not seen, and told
me about what he had been like as a young man,
which was charming, athletic, loving, affectionate, and in the grip
of an illness that was ultimate late because of his death.
She also tells you where she scattered his ashes. Yes,

(34:08):
and it turned out that she had taken the ashes
and scattered them in turtle pond. Under Belvede or castle
in Central Park, or what would become Turtle Pond. And
I mean I spent half my childhood running up and
down those steps, which is one of the things that
that in retrospect is so startling to me. That he
grew up in this very wealthy, very troubled family lots

(34:31):
of people, and I grew up just being my mother
about a mile away, and our lives were overlaid over
this map of a very small area of the earth.
And I had been in proximity to his family, his
living family, and to his remains in the place I
was playing as a child. And so I went to

(34:52):
Turtle Pond, and I sat down, and I talked to
him for a while. And you know, in Central Park,
I certainly wasn't the only person having a visible come
station with myself that day didn't trouble anyone. And I
said goodbye to him there in a way that I
had not thought I would be able to. As her

(35:15):
father's life begins to crystallize for Liz, her own life
gains focus too. She's no longer in flux between jobs
and relationships. She's advancing her career and starting a family
with her partner Ari she's pregnant when they get married.
At their wedding, Liz's mother, whose physical and mental health
has been on the decline, makes a bit of a statement,

(35:38):
she's only did she um. I think at heart, what
she wanted was to have that connection with me and
to be the last person who saw me before the wedding.
She wanted the movie moment of pushing the bobby pins
into my hair and giving me something blue and all
of that, But we didn't have that relationship. By that time.
She was even more just jointed from reality than she

(36:00):
had been in previous years. It had been a very
challenging a couple of years, and we were not close
at all. And so the way she decided to make
that happen was by throwing a fit as I was
standing upstairs waiting to process Dennie aisle for the wedding
um and say that if if I did not let

(36:20):
her walk me down the aisle, which had never been
the plan, she was going to stand in the middle
of the synagogue and scream, and she instead I did
go to the lobby and start screaming until I agreed
to see her and the you know, the rabbi came
up and said, we can do whatever you want. Here.
You can see her. We can hold off the ceremony

(36:42):
until she calms down, we can have security take her out.
We will do whatever you want. And I realized that,
you know, Ari and I had known each other then
for twenty five years, We had known each other since
summer camp, but his family didn't know me. We hadn't
been dating a year at that point, and that would
be the first thing they knew about me was that
their golden child, the son slash nephews slash cousin, had

(37:06):
just married a woman who got her mother arrested at
the wedding. And I didn't want that to be the story.
And I think my mother knew that that I wouldn't
let that happen, and so I agreed to see her.
And she came up and she, you know, patted me
on the head and said something nice, and then she
sat down perfectly nicely and let the wedding occur. But
that was another one of those pivot points in our relationship.

(37:30):
Another pivot point in your relationship is that once you
become a mother yourself, you have two children, you're able
to see your mother's inability to be a functional grandparent
much earlier than you ever have been able to understand
her inability to be a parent. Which I think is
something that's so universal when somebody has had an extraordinarily

(37:51):
difficult parent, is that when you become a parent yourself,
suddenly you see the level of dysfunction or mental illness
and the cost of it, and you're not going to
let them happen to your children the thing that happened
to you. Yes. Yet another pivot point occurs when Liz

(38:12):
receives a call that her mother is being evicted from
the apartment she's lived in for years, the same apartment
that Liz has co signed the lease with her each year.
So one day when I was pregnant with my second
and had I had my kids in very quick succession.
So I'm holding You've got Rachel in a in a
wrap and the bump seven months bump of David it

(38:34):
looked like a camel on inside, um, you know, swawing
through the GC heat. We have moved at DUC for
ours job and the phone rings and its adult protective
services in New York. Asking if I'm planning on showing
up for any of the court appearances and I say,
what court appearances, And it turns out that she had

(38:55):
stopped paying rent about a year earlier. And the back
story on this is that since very soon after college,
I had started paying some of her bills. Another one
of the sort of mysteries around my childhood was that
my mother had worked since the early seventies be whore
I was born, and to this day, I don't know
what her source of income was. I don't know how
she raised me. In high school, she had rented out

(39:17):
the additional rooms in the apartment to international students. She
would run about and breakfast, that kind of thing. The
apartment was her one asset, her her rent stabilized least
was her one asset. And she had called me in
the middle of that awful breakup and said, I need
a little help with at rent this month. And I said,
I'm in the middle of a move. Things are going

(39:37):
badly at work. I think I'm going to lose my job.
I just don't have it right now. And she said, fun,
don't worry about it. I'll make it. Don't worry about it.
And it seemed like she had things under control, But
it turned out that was the last month she had
her paid runs. Now a year later, it turns out
she has been going to housing court all this time.
She has a court appointed lawyer from the from the city,

(39:58):
but every time the judge says, and where is the
lawyer for the other Midshire? She just sat there silently,
and so I had never shown up. I didn't know
what was happening. Adult Protective Services was very concerned. She
did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation,
and over the next two years that she lived in

(40:19):
that apartment, RI and I spent hundreds and hundreds of
hours trying to find her housing that she would accept.
If you are impoverished and elderly, you are actually in
a somewhat better situation than if you are middle class,
because there are no assets to spend down. She had

(40:41):
qualified for Medicaid, you know, years and years before she
had neither income nor assets. I think her total income
was something like seven dollars a month, and in Social
Security and food stamps and so there are places that
take Social Security or Medicaid subsidies, but she wouldn't agree
to go to them. She would throw out what seemed

(41:03):
to me to be totally insane refusals like it's in Brooklyn,
you know, I don't do Brooklyn. Or there's a shared fridge.
How would I ever go someone with a share fridge?
And I couldn't tell if it was her doing her
like elderly Kent tankers, Jewish lady persona thing, or she
genuinely didn't understand that she was in the process of
being evicted and that she would not have anywhere to go.

(41:26):
And I think, looking back on it, I think there
was probably a spectrum. Probably at the beginning she was
doing a ship because she was scared, but by the
end of it, she really did not seem to have
any concept of what was going on. And by the
very end, after the I don't know the tenth of
the eleventh hearing, a judge came and did a bedside
hearing and ultimately decided that there was no point in

(41:47):
continuing them because she just kept repeating, these people should
leave me alone. I have a month's rent saved, not
realizing that by that time she was three years in
the hole, and she's also put you and your own
finances and therefore your family in a kind of jeopardy. Yeah,
she she sure had um. I did not know that
there was a laws out there naming me and had

(42:10):
gone to a judgment that would have what if an
adult version of going on need a permanent record? Is?
You know where we're in DC. It's a it's a
government town. Most jobs require background check. I couldn't have
passed the security clearance anywhere. We couldn't get insurance at
one point, just because there was a lawsuit at standing.
It took a long time. We ultimately did extricate ourselves

(42:32):
from it, but but my mother obviously remained. He remained
in the crosstairs. We'll be back in a moment with
more family secrets. Liz stops returning her mother's calls. She's

(42:56):
calling ten fifteen times a day. She calls every Friday
evening and leave the message wishing her a good shop
is a good sabbath. But Liz won't be pulled back in,
As she writes, I did what women have always done.
I cut off the risk to my children. The reminder
of how dangerous she could be made me quail when

(43:18):
I thought of them caught up in her vortex. I
did for them what I had never been able in
forty years to do for myself. Admit that taking responsibility
for insanity only spreads the insanity around. So your mother
is evicted. Yes, So, after a little bit over three years,

(43:39):
the judgment finally went through and the marshall arrived with
a drill and drill through the lock, and they brought
my mother to an intake shelter in the Bronx. I
don't know if she was surprised or she had expected
it happened. Her aid had packed her a suitcase and
took her personal stuff with her, but I think they

(44:01):
give you half an hour to pack and she was
gone shortly after Liz's mother is forced to leave the apartment,
it falls on Liz to go clear out her things.
Amid the detritus of a life. There are boxes, files,
documents that is proof in the form of letters and
exchanges from neighbors who had expressed worry over Liz and

(44:24):
the sounds that were coming out of the apartment. Liz
also makes a staggering discovery when she finds a certain book.
Her mother quite amazingly owns a book titled Understanding the
Borderline Mother by an author named Christine Larson. Further proof.
By owning this book, on some level, her mother must

(44:47):
have known she was so sick, yet not so sick
that she didn't know that this was the very malady
that plagued her. It was an extraordinary moment that the
dust chapter was off the book and I lift open
the front cover and I just bellowed with astonishment that
this was what I had found. And you know that,

(45:10):
to this day, I'm not sure why she bought that book.
My mother was a ferocious reader of all kinds of
books and a lot of self help, and it wasn't
clear to me because borderline personality sort of can be
passed down from parent to child, as the parents who
is in such pain creates a traumatic experience for the
for the next child. And now, having read her mother's

(45:33):
letters to other family members, I believe that she also
suffered in the same way. So I don't know if
my mother bought it seeing herself as the adult child
of someone of BPD, or if she saw herself in
it as the parents. And either way, you know there
was a Dengel cleaning reminder card tucked into page their team.

(45:56):
She clearly didn't get very far one way or the other.
You describe reading passages from that book allowed to Ari
in bed. You know that that feeling of just being
completely understood in a book of just yeah, that's exactly it.
That's what went on between us. It was incredible to

(46:18):
read about other people who had had similar experiences. There
were stories in there that were far worse than what
my mother and stuff. There were people in the book
talking about how they slept with a knife under their
pillow all through their childhood. My mother was capable of
hurting me, but I knew she would not kill me.
That was that was never my concern. But it was

(46:38):
amazing to read other stories of people who had grown
up in this entirely constructed fairytale life. You know, my
mother had created the story for us that you know,
she was mourning her dead husband, living in austere celibacy,
and that she had the sort of perfect hie, achieving
child and everything looks great, except, of course, I was

(47:01):
a greeting depressed mass. She had been having an affair
with a married man for the majority of her adult life.
She was not ogado, she had never been married to
my father. She had me living under a false Social
Security number. I mean, she just constructed the Truman show
for us, and none of it was real. Lizz's mother

(47:23):
is taken to a shelter with a limit for a stay.
As opposed to be two weeks, she stays for five.
At one point, a social worker at the shelter caused
Liz to tell her that her mother had stopped showering.
That really shook me out. My mother was very big
on cleanliness, and that, I think really let me know

(47:43):
that what was happening was no longer stubbornness and no
longer her putting on any kind of stick, but that
she was really descending into this last phase in her life.
And when you know, telling friends about it, I said
that I could see a couple of outcome. Either she
would neglect her hygiene so much she would you get

(48:05):
an infection and die. Or she would get in a
fight with someone and would be arrested and the justice
system would take over where the shelter system had stopped.
Or she would get sick in some other way and
go to the hospital and then the health system would
take over. But that we had now reached a crisis
point where this three years couldn't just unschool forever anymore,

(48:27):
she could stall anymore. There were now enough people involved
in her life that something was going to change. And
sure enough, um after about five weeks, the social worker
called to let me know that she had been taken
to assist living facility in Coney Island, Brooklyn, with the
unbelievably amazing name of Mermaid Matter. And if I'm ever

(48:52):
get to write to TV series, I will call it
Mermaid Matter because this is just the fact that such
a place is. This just tickles me so much. And
we felt that it was this was the dream come true.
This was the answer that we have been looking for,
because all along we kept thinking, should we just go
rescue her? Should we just go pick her up? You know,

(49:12):
everyone who called me the court evaluator of the social
workers kept saying, when are you coming to get her?
And then I would explain she wasn't allowed access to
my children because she could be too violent, and then
there would be this silence, right and we would try
to figure out what if we pay her rent? What
if we do this, what if we do that? And
every solution we came up with uh would not solve

(49:34):
the problem because she had reached a point where she
could no longer pay the rent and she would not
willingly live anywhere else, And so we thought, maybe this
is the magic solution where she is now somewhere safe.
You know, she has one roommateance that six, they're feeding her,
if there's someone watching after her, it's gonna be okay.
And for two weeks I would talk to her every
now and then and like she had found her dentries again.

(49:56):
She sounded normal, she sounded chipper, it's id seemed like
things are gonna be great. And then after two weeks,
I get a cough from their social worker saying, your
mother has gone to the hospital and she hasn't come back.
So she ends up in the hospital for about a week,
and she refused to let anyone examine or touch her.

(50:16):
And so you know, one day that the doctor calls
me and says, we have a few minutes I can
intubate her, but she is dying right now. And I
was alone in the house. I had just gotten home
from work, and I knew that my mother hated medical care.
She had me at home in so that she wouldn't

(50:37):
have to go to a hospital or have any truck
with doctors. I knew that the disaster for her would
be extending her life, and so I said, I said, no, don't,
don't intubate her, let her go, and so they put
me on speaker phone, and I just listened for six
or seven minutes as I heard nurses rustling around and

(50:57):
you know, clipboard being put down, and what I had
never before thought to think of as the sounds of death,
which are very logistical in a lot of the ways.
I heard the sheets rustling, you know, she she coughed,
I heard a little choke, and then there was silence
and footsteps and the doctor, whose voice is wavering because

(51:23):
my mother had had herself checked into the roomatology word
when she arrived. I imagine you dont have a lot
of deaths in rooms, tells me that that she has gone,
And because I'm not there, all I can do is
imagine it right that this there has been this death.
The two great dramas of our lives are birth and death.
And now we have the death and is over and

(51:43):
now they have to pull up the sheet and do
the paperwork, and we hang up, and I'm just standing
alone in my living room and I've been listening to
a podcast when the call came in. And so this
American life just turns right back home and starts squeaking
through earbuds, and it was the most surreal thing that
had happened, because to me, my mother, despite how much

(52:04):
she had become diminished, was still that gorgon of my childhood.
She was so powerful, and she had always been sick,
but she had never been dying until she was dead.
Do you think that there's something about the dynamic of
having a mother like yours where it seems impossible that

(52:28):
they will predecease you, that you're just going to be
in it together forever and ever there there so all
powerful that somehow it's never gonna end. I absolutely thought
my mother was going to be the first modern woman
to live to the age of a hundred sixty. She
was going to be the Jewish medistla and she was
going to outlive all of us, running on a pure

(52:51):
diet of emtam and sheet cakes in vitriol. I could
not have imagined a world in when she was dead
until very, very suvely she was y you rode, and
God did I relate to this um? The world without
her felt safer than it ever had before. Yeah. Um,

(53:14):
life as my mother's daughter could be very booby trapped.
My mother had seen at one stage in her life
hypnotist in addition to a psychiatrist when she was trying
to stop smoke, and she found it very helpful, but
she couldn't afford to go very often, so she made
tapes of the sessions and saved them. And after her death,
I found these recordings of her therapy sessions, and I

(53:35):
went through this whole ethical quandary. You know, I would
be man, I would be curious if someone ever listened
to taps in my therapy. But on the other hand,
maybe there were stories on there, Maybe there was more news.
Maybe there was something about my father she hadn't that
I never knew. Maybe there's something about her that I
never knew. Write so many mysteries still to be found out,

(53:56):
and listening to them was very validating because she she
presents all these stories to the psychiatrists of how I
have betrayed her and let her down, and those stories
were such things as I had gone on vacation with
my first girlfriend during which time, it turns out, and
she relates to the stories that these are totally reasonable
things to do. She had gotten some of her friends

(54:16):
and mind to research the hotel she knew were staying
at on the internet. And sent her pictures of it.
She called the front desk and a security to watch me.
Those kinds of things were for her the acts of
the loving mother. And that went on for years and years,
and in the three years when she was declining and
caught it in the legal system, we just kept finding

(54:38):
out more things that I hadn't known, more things about
the doctor who it turns out, was catching her social
Security checks, more ways in which she had angered the landlord.
And when she died, there was this line in the
sands that there might still be things to find out,
there might still be papers I haven't found, but she

(54:59):
can't spring anymore on me. That story is that vant

(55:19):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly
z Achor is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You

(55:39):
can also find me on Instagram at Danny Writer. And
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance Yeah for

(56:08):
more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.