Somebody’s Daughter

Ashley’s father is imprisoned when she’s eight months old. She has no real context for him until she visits him for the first time, when she’s seven. They forge as best a relationship they can, writing letters, and talking on the phone. It’s not until she’s fourteen when she discovers why he’s in jail. What she learns is shattering and confirms to her that the world is not always a safe place.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
episode contains descriptions of sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
The easiest way for a child to lose their seat
at the adult table is to speak. If no one

(00:20):
hears your voice for long enough, they forget you're there.
They let things slip, They say things they wouldn't normally
say in front of a child. Even the adults who
noticed and remember your presence will simply point a finger
in your direction and make direct eye contact. You better
not repeat any of this you hear. That's Ashley Seaford,

(00:46):
author of the memoir Somebody's Daughter. Ashley's is a story
of generational trauma and the ways our lives can be
shaped by what we do not yet know. It's also
a story of tremendous rise lands and the capacity to
turn what is most difficult into art. I'm Danny Shapiro,

(01:17):
and this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. The landscape of my childhood
is sort of as deceptively flat as Indiana. Indiana is

(01:43):
thought of as a very flat state, and I get
at I mean, whenever I take a road trip anywhere,
I can tell I'm somewhere else when it starts to
be visibly hilly or mountainous. But it's also a deception
because as there's a lot going on on the ground
in Indiana, and so no place is actually very flat,

(02:08):
things are growing in the places that other people would
call flat. And I think that my childhood was similarly
that way. I think it looked like I was having
a very normal experience and I was having within myself

(02:29):
something a lot more mountainous. Mm hmm. I love the
way you put that, So let's talk a little bit
about that inner mountainous terrain. Describe your mother for me.
The mother of your childhood, the mother of my childhood
is beautiful. She's my whole world in a lot of respects,

(02:53):
as most people's mothers are. She is both loving and volatile.
She is as charming in the world as she can
be full of rage in the home. She is young,
younger than I think it's possible to realize as a

(03:15):
child when she had you. How old was she one?
I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine being a parent at
a married parent at one, and then very quickly becoming,
you know, a single mom of two at Ashley's mom

(03:40):
became a single parent at Ashley and her younger brother
r C. Because her father was imprisoned. A few years later,
when Ashley is four, her mother is in a new
relationship and Ashley is starting to experience and be on
the receiving end of her mom's rage. Soon, Ashley is
sent to Missouri to live with their grandmother. What was

(04:03):
the landscape of that, like, you know, your grandmother's place. Oh,
it was it was a different life. I really took
to the country really quickly. It was you know, the
gravel driveways and the long grass that just grew everywhere,

(04:27):
the forest, you were surrounded by trees. There was just
something about being outside and sort of being expected to
be outside a lot that felt right to me and
felt good and natural to my body. And we lived
my grandmother and I. We lived in her stepfather. We

(04:49):
didn't live in the upstairs of the house with him.
We lived in the basement area, and we had a
staircase that went directly from the basement out into the backyard.
And there were always lizards and things like that in
that little stairway on our way out of the basement,

(05:10):
and I just there was something about living in that
place and being in that place where I was the
most comfortable my body has really ever felt. You wrote,
I was not always so afraid of the world or
nervous about the other people in it or what they
might do to me. So it seems that in your

(05:32):
early childhood the danger, if you felt danger, had to
do with your mother's rage and her sort of unpredictability. Yeah,
I was a very intense kid. I saw something on
TV that said cigarettes kill, and I was like, what,
my mom must not know this because she smoked cigarettes.

(05:54):
Like that was my whole thought process, and so I
took the cigarettes out of her bag and I just
threw them in the trash. I didn't even think about obviously,
Like I'm very young at this point, around four years old.
I'm not thinking about the consequences of my actions because
I my child, because my brain is not formed in

(06:15):
that way yet. And my mother's reaction to that, to
finding out that I had thrown away her cigarettes, was
to wook me, for it to hit me over and
over and over, and I remember that it hurt, and
I remember that I blamed myself. I didn't feel like

(06:42):
something had happened to me that I didn't deserve. I
felt like, yeah, I deserved to hurt. I deserved to
get hit for what I did, even though I didn't
know what I was doing, and I knew that I
didn't do it with mal intent. I wasn't trying to
hurt me. I wasn't trying to upset anybody, but I

(07:03):
was treated like it was intentional. When you go live
with your grandma, it's in the wake of this that
you were more comfortable and more in your body, more
at home in yourself. Yeah. Soon though, Ashley is sent
back to Indiana to be with her mom, it's a

(07:25):
surprise to her that she has a new baby sister
waiting at home too. I didn't know it was coming,
but there' she was um, and you know, thank God,
because she's the best. But I definitely wasn't expecting to
come back to a different kind of family formation. Tell

(07:48):
me about what you knew of or what you remembered
of your father as when you were a child. At first,
almost nothing. He was more of an idea. I guess,
like I knew I had a dad out there in
some respect, but I knew nothing about him. I didn't
know what he looked like. Um, I didn't know who

(08:09):
he was in any respect. And it wasn't until I
found a picture of him in my grandmother's closet and
she explained to me who he was that I suddenly
felt that it was important to try to remember who
he was, and that that was information I should have
and I should hold on to. And then, you know,

(08:33):
I don't remember visiting my dad until I was around
seven years old that I saw him in person. I mean,
after hugging him and forming that memory of him as
a person, as a full human being, it was different.
He occupied a much bigger space in my mind. Yeah,

(08:54):
that makes so much sense. And there's a lot that
you write about about making memories, which I found really
interesting because, of course, you know, in many ways we're
not in control of our memories, and our memories change
in the retelling um again and again. You know, this
kind of sense of in a way spiraling back but
always coming to a new understanding or a new thought,

(09:16):
a new memory. But the idea of making memory is
like I want to freeze this in time in some way,
or I want to hold onto this and I can
imagine what it must have felt like to be a
seven year old really meeting your father for the first time. Yeah,
but some years before Ashley meets her father, there is

(09:38):
another male presence in her life, her baby sister's father.
His name is Alan. Alan was probably six ft tall.
He was just, like, you know, a regular dude. I guess.
He was usually wearing his blue uniform. He was a

(09:59):
Santa Haitian worker, and he just wore that uniform all
the time. And he had a brown hat that he
wore all the time. He was kind of like the
cartoon character Doug from Nickelodeon who always had on the
same clothes, staying clothes over and over and over. Unless
it was a holiday or a special day, he might

(10:20):
have on regular clothes. But I really owned, like I
would say, at the time I saw him in his uniform,
when my sister was around a year. Somewhere between a
year and two years old is when he started to
consistently be Around the time that I remember them getting together,
I'm about oh, six or seven years old, and they

(10:45):
did not break up until my freshman year of college.
And in all of that time, as much as he
was around, he never spent the night in our home.
M I can't say that I know why, but I
know that the entire time it was a point of
contention and and hurtful to my mother, and that it

(11:10):
was something that he would bring up, you know, as
like when he was upset with her, as like you know,
almost like the punishment, like and this is why I
don't spend the night, And how did he treat you
like a nuisance? And unless he could use me to
get under my mom's skin, um, which probably happened twice

(11:34):
before I realized that that's what was happening and just
refused to be part of that anymore. But yeah, he
was very dismissive. He was sarcastic. He was highly critical
of not just my mother, you know, as we got older,
he would make fun of us. He would say things

(11:57):
about our bodies, and it was pretty gross and it
was disturbing, and it was like if a forty year
old man was hanging around and he had retained the
sense of humor of a twelve year old boy. That
says at all. By this time, Allen and Ashley's mother

(12:20):
have had another child, Jorian. The familiar atmosphere is fraught
Ashley and her siblings grow up with a sense that
danger is everywhere, at school, at church, and even at home.
She writes, protecting my body became my number one goal.
They're the familial expectations that you will do whatever you

(12:44):
can to mitigate any unwanted attention from men or boys.
And then there's the spiritual side of it, where you
know when you grow up in a town where there's
a church on every corner, and you know you don't
necessarily just ask people what school they go to, you
also ask what church they go to, because everybody goes

(13:06):
to church. You get the message over and over and
over as a young girl from the church that it
is your responsibility and your responsibility at all alone to
protect what is essentially your value and what your value
will be to any man or partner or man who

(13:32):
you would want to be with, because anybody would who
would have you after you had been damaged or violated
in some way was a lesser man in the eyes
of God. So you know it's coming at you from
all sides. It's coming at you at school. You go

(13:54):
to school and there are rules about your body, and
you see who rules pertained to and who the rules
don't pertain to, and you think it's you. You think
that it must be you because everybody else has decided
that it's already. Tell me a little bit more about

(14:16):
who the rules pertained to and who the rules don't
pertain to. Well, I was a person um, a girl
whose body matured before adults were comfortable talking about a
girl's body maturing. I had breast when I was in
the third grade, I got my first minstreul cycle. Between

(14:38):
fourth and fifth grade, I developed, and the reaction of
the adults around me to my developing body was close considered.
Like if I wore the same shirt as my best
friend at the time, who had not hit puberty yet

(15:00):
and who still very much looked the way people would
expect girls our age to look, we would have on
almost the exact same outfit, and I would get sent
to the principle's office every time it gets to a
point where it feels like harassment. This was a consistent
thing for me in school, having the fact of my

(15:23):
body constantly policed by the adults who were in charge
of me, constantly being told that the way I looked,
the way I was shaped, just the shape of my
body was inappropriate, and I'm still dealing with the shame

(15:44):
that came with believing that and having to adhered policies
that forced me to believe it. One New Year's Eve,
when Ashley is a young girl, she's faced with an
other terribly inappropriate response to her body. A family friend,

(16:04):
an older man, kisses her at midnight. I knew it was.
It immediately felt wrong, and I also realized almost immediately
that I had to wagh whether or not that moment
was worth possibly destroying a person, possibly destroying a gathering,

(16:33):
a family, essentially really a family. I thought, if I
say something, it could destroy my family, and uh, yeah,
that was really really sad and unfortunate. So that becomes
a secret, something that you know, you bury somewhere within

(16:55):
your body, within your psyche. And the sense that you
had and that you write about that scene was danger
was everywhere. So in a way it's corroborated. You know,
your mother tells you she wants you to see danger everywhere,
and then lo and behold, there's danger right in the
same room as her. We'll be right back in all

(17:32):
these years growing up with danger ever present, her father
is ever absent. This absence is a defining quality in
her life, and when finally she gets to know him,
she gets to know herself too. When my dad was arrested,
I was about eight months old. The first time that

(17:53):
you really remember going to visit him and you know,
you want to make a memory and you start feeling
the significance of the fact that he's your father in
your life is when you're seven. Yes, I think anybody
who knows what it's like to see and talk to
another person and feel like a piece of the puzzle

(18:19):
has just locked into place. You know, whether that's like
lost sibling, a lover, who you need, who you can
tell is going to be important in your story and
you feel that thing lock into place. That's kind of
what it was like to have that moment and to

(18:41):
see my dad and to really be cognizant of him
and and cognizant of wanting to remember this moment with him.
You know, nobody had ever looked at me like that before,
Nobody had ever looked at me and their whole face

(19:03):
lit up like I was the best thing in the
world that it never happened to me before. And not
only was that happening in that moment, but the person
who had that look on their face was my dad.
And it's not like I didn't know people who were
dads or people who had dads. I never saw their

(19:26):
dad's look at them like that. But look at how
my dad looked at me. And I think that I
had had all this reason before then to suspect that
I was kind of bad, But in that moment, just
because of the way my dad looked at me, I
started to suspect that maybe I could be like especially

(19:49):
good in some way. Maybe the badness wasn't a special
thing about me. You know, it's amazing how in our
childhood's if there's one person, maybe it's a parent, maybe
it's a teacher, maybe it's a grandparent, and maybe it's

(20:11):
not often maybe it's a moment or an experience like
that where we have that feeling of being seen and
loved and held that can really go such a long
way to saving us. Absolutely, you know. Tony Morrison wrote
about this, talking about how when her children walked into

(20:34):
the room, she made sure that her face lit up
whenever they walked into a room. Whatever she was doing,
she always tried to make sure that the first thing
she did when they walk into a room was light up,
and I remember reading that and thinking that, oh, my god,
like that might be it, like that might be the secret,

(20:58):
because I knew how that moment had, you know, altered
my perception of myself as a child. It isn't until
actually is twelve that she asks an uncle why exactly
her father is in jail? Why do you think you
hadn't asked before? I think I specifically hadn't asked my

(21:23):
uncle Clarence before, because I genuinely worried that he didn't know.
At that point, I didn't realize that, oh, it's just
me and my brother who don't know. I thought maybe
it was that a lot of our family doesn't know,

(21:47):
and I asked him, you know, do you know? Like
that was my first question to him, was do you
know why my dad is in present? I wasn't sure
that he knew, and my mind wasn't sophisticated enough I
guess to assume that he would, but you know, he
reacted by saying that he didn't think it was his

(22:08):
place to tell us, right, And it's it's so interesting
because it sounds like you were actually being kind of
protective of him when you're twelve and you ask him that,
And so this is really the first time that you
understand that there are people in your family who know
things that you don't know about this. Yes, the world

(22:32):
around Ashley confirms once again that danger is everywhere. In
high school, she has a boyfriend, Bradley, who violently assaults her.
Both during and in the aftermath of that assault, Ashley dissociates.
She essentially floats away from her body, and she doesn't
tell anyone. Most notably, she doesn't tell her mother. What

(22:54):
I've realized as an adult is that a good part
of the reason why I didn't tell anybody was because
I genuinely did not believe that anybody would be on
my side. I did not believe that I would be
treated like something had happened to me. I thought that

(23:19):
I would be treated like I had allowed something to
happen to me. And so not only was I ashamed
of it, I was afraid of what it meant about
me and who I was and what I wanted versus
I guess what my words and my body told people

(23:42):
I wanted. Was there at difference? Yeah? It was not good.
It was terrible. And so you hold this secret again,
you know it lodges somewhere inside of you, which is
what secret to do. They never go away, so you
don't how anyone in your family. I guess one of

(24:03):
the things I was wondering about was who is your
father to you? During those years when you think of him,
you know, we're making memories of him and his adoration
of you, and his pride in you and his belief
in your goodness? Did that in any way help to
kind of sustain you during that time? Did you ever

(24:25):
think about talking to him about it? It's actually when
things sort of shifted, um, and my idea of my
father lived more in a fantasy place than in reality,
because the reality, in reality, this thing had happened to me.

(24:48):
And I didn't want my idea of my father to
be anywhere near this thing that had happened to me.
I wanted them to be separate, you know. And this
is sort of the start of like issues. I started
to have the dissociation, though I wouldn't have known to
call it that then, but yeah, because in that dissociated place,

(25:11):
I was still twelve, and I was still the girl
that my dad saw the last time I saw him,
and I was still worthy of all of the letters
I had from him, and all of the kind things
he had said to me, and all of the belief
I had in myself and in my goodness through those moments,

(25:35):
you know, in my mind, in that fantasy place, I
was still worth those things. And whenever I had to
be back in my body and reality, I was, in
one way or another forced to face the fact that
I wasn't that growing, that what had happened to me
had changed me, that my body was changing, that my

(25:57):
perspectives were changing, and the person who I was becoming
felt so much third year than the person my dad loved.
My father wrote to me, I would say three or
four times a year, which doesn't sound like a whole

(26:19):
lot until kind of have the factor in that, like
inmates have to be or at least at that time,
they had to be able to afford envelopes and paper
and stamps like they have to buy them. And the
only way to get those things and also money to
make phone calls and all that stuff is by having

(26:39):
an institutional job. And you know, even now, like in
if you have an institutional job, you could get paid,
like around in Indiana, it's about fourteen cents an hour
and then all the prices on everything are hyked up
in there. So you gotta think about how long somebody

(27:00):
has to work in order to be able to afford soap,
any toiletries. They might need, phone calls, plus any media,
any form of entertainment whatsoever. It's like three or four
times a year. There's a lot of money to write

(27:20):
both of your children individual letters that I mean, it
was just you know, you're my favorite girl. I hope
you smile today. I hope you think about me, you smile.
I can't wait to hug you someday. I can't wait
for the day where we can see each other every day.
You know, we can see each other all the time,

(27:41):
and you know, and I would think, man, I can't
wait for that day either. My dad's letters were really
full of dreams for the kind of life maybe we
would have if he were here, if he hadn't done
what he'd done, and if you hadn't gone to prison,

(28:02):
you know, And I really liked to dream with her.
When Ashley is fourteen, she finally learns why her father
is in prison. Her grandmother tells her, my grandmother, God rest,
her soul, tact and appropriateness was never really her her forte.

(28:27):
So she was just kind of upset with me because
my mother and I had gotten into an argument before
my grandma and I caught the bus to go to
the mall, and my mom told me not to talk
to my grandma about our argument because they had this
whole thing between them where, you know, even though they

(28:49):
were super close and always in each other's business, they
were always trying to keep the other one out of
their business and it was a ship show, um. And
my grandma wanted me to talk about why I was
upset or why I was upset when she had gotten
there from the argument with my mom, and I didn't
want to talk about it because I didn't want it

(29:10):
to become a thing. And she started telling me when
we were walking around the mall that I needed to
be nicer to my mom because I didn't know what
my mom had been through, and that I didn't even
know why my father was in prison, and I just,
for some reason, I got kind of bold about, you know,

(29:34):
why is he a prison? You know, I wanted to know,
and my grandma did this thing where she would act
like she wasn't gonna tell me because if she told
me that I'd tell my mom, and she told me,
and I was like, no, I won't, you know. And
we were sitting in the food court and eating really
bad americanized chat eas food, and she just told me,

(29:59):
she told me, your dad's in prison because he raped
two women, and then she just looked at me. She
kept looking at me, and I knew that she was
looking at me to watch my reaction and make sure
that I didn't get what she would consider hysterical, which

(30:21):
would be showing any emotion at all. So I raised
my eyebrows enough to be like, huh, you know, and
then I just went back to eating my food because
it was the only way that I could not look
at her looking at me and think my thoughts and

(30:44):
have the moment to process. And then we took the
bus home, and I, you know, I had to sort
of spend the rest of the time acting as normal
as possible, because if I had been even a little
bit off, it would have been problem. And then when
I got home, I called my best friend at the time.

(31:07):
Brent had told him that I was going to come over,
and I did, and I told him what I had
just learned about my dad, and he just helped me,
and I just cried and cried and cried because I
was devastated. I was so devastated. Have you had in

(31:29):
your earlier years fantasy is about what he might be
in prison for or did you really just kind of
shut that down for yourself when you were a kid.
I mean, I had all kinds of ideas about why
he might need it there, you know, and reasons and
excuses for why he may have done those things and

(31:51):
why he may have gotten wrongfully accused or anything. And
the one thing I didn't want it to be this
is this. Almost anything else, I felt like I could
find some way to rationalize it, Like my brain could
find some way to think that maybe it's this, maybe

(32:13):
it's this specific way that this could happen where it's
not really his fault. But there's no way. There's no
way that could happen with me. There's just no way.
And it forever altered, you know, my perception of my dad,

(32:33):
you know, forever altered my perception of him. He had to,
it was always going to, but that was the moment
that it happened for me. Yeah, there's a passage in
your book where right after you know your grandmother's told
you this, and you go over to Brett's house and
you write, my father's crimes repulsed me, and I felt
for some reason that I should have known better. I

(32:55):
convinced myself something about his letters, his drawings, or the
tone of his voice should have revealed to me what
he had done, but I hadn't noticed, because I hadn't
wanted to. And then you write, my naivete shamed me,
and I accepted that shame as my own. In the
dark at night, the saddest parts of me assumed my
father's crimes were the source of the crime committed upon me. Now,

(33:19):
that is just so complex and layered and sort of
boomerangs all the way back to it's a bad world.
It's a dangerous world. Your body causes danger, women's bodies
caused danger. When you think about it now and you've
processed so much and you've done so much work, do

(33:40):
you feel that that lurking secret of the reason why
your father was convicted and sent to prison, that that
was kind of like the noxious gas in the air,
where the whole idea of men are danger us and

(34:01):
you're internalizing things so much as being bad or good,
yourself as bad you know, the fault being yours. It
just feels very knotted up in what wasn't being said
for all those years. Mm hmm. I think it's a
lot of it. But I also have to consider the

(34:24):
fact that my grandmother had five girls. You know, I
have four aunts. We all lived in the same neighborhood,
were like all there together, and they all have daughters. Nobody,
you know, except for except for one aunt, only has sons,
but everybody else has daughters. There's a lot of women,
and my family has a history of women who have

(34:50):
been violated, who have been assaulted, who have been beaten,
who have been cut, who have been the victims of
people in and outside of their own family. So that
legacy of pain and of expected pain from men, the

(35:14):
foundation for that had been laid long before anything happened,
you know, with my dad. But I think that for
me personally, it's not necessarily that it affirmed their fears
about men in general, are about the world in general.

(35:37):
For me, it affirmed my fears about me, that something
really was wrong with me, that I was bad, because
the only person who had ever looked at me like
I was good had done such a terrible thing. M Yeah,

(36:03):
we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
In the years that followed this shattering, discovery actually focuses
on healing, on having healthy relationships with men, but perhaps

(36:25):
more importantly, a healthy relationship with herself. I gave myself
therapy as an eighteenth birthday president. Even before that, you know,
I was lucky to have a couple of adults around
me who were not counselors or anything like that, but
who listened to me, you know, who just listened to

(36:48):
me when I was hurting, when I was scared. I
had a couple of people who I could count on
and who would listen to me, who were adults. And
I got therapy as soon as I could, and I
stayed in therapy for as long as I could, and
I just never stopped doing that. I think something in me,

(37:11):
some part of me, realized that I didn't necessarily need
my goodness to be affirmed by somebody else. I needed
to trust myself enough to see it in myself, to
find it in myself and believe it. And that wasn't
going to happen without a lot of work. And I

(37:35):
don't know if it's because I'm an oldest daughter, or
a Capricorn or what it is. But work has never
been the scariest thing to me. You know. The scariest
thing to me has been giving in or or giving up,
or deciding that I'm not worthy, not battling that thought

(37:57):
that I already have, you know, getting into it. A
lot of time when I was growing up, I felt
like my mom was giving in to other people, to
what they thought, to what they wanted. You know, I
felt like my mom traded herself in a lot and
didn't get a lot back. And if I didn't know

(38:20):
exactly what I wanted to do, I knew that I
didn't want to do that. When we talk about identity
and sort of how we become ourselves, you know, sometimes
if we're lucky, we're partly formed by positive role models
and modeling other people's behavior sometimes, and I don't I

(38:40):
think it doesn't get talked about enough. We form ourselves
kind of in opposition to well, I don't know what
I do want it to look like, but I do
know what I don't want it to look like. Yeah, absolutely,
you know. When I was growing up, one of the
things that was really really common were movies where adults

(39:04):
forgot what it was like to be kids and their
lives fell apart. M hm. I guess I just watched
the adults around me at the time do things that
I thought, like, you know, you've forgotten what it was
like to be a kid. You wouldn't do that if
you remembered what it was like to be a kid.

(39:25):
You wouldn't say that. You wouldn't behave that way if
you remembered what it was like to be a kid. Now,
as an adult, I have a more sophisticated view of that,
which is more so like, you wouldn't say that if
you didn't kind of hate your child self, if you
didn't kind of think your child self was weak and

(39:47):
think that they deserved to be hurt or harmed. That's
why you think it's okay to hurt hard kids. It's
because you think you deserved it. When you work, I
knew I was watching a lot of things happen that
I did not want to repeat. It's not like I
was a perfect kid. It's you know, it's not like
I was a specifically delightful and well behaved kid. Like

(40:11):
you know, I was a kid, and there were things
I did when I was in middle school. I kept
a box of note cards where every time my mom
did something that I thought was a bad parent moment,
I wrote it down. And I was going to keep
that box until I was a parent, so that I

(40:32):
could go through it and remember all of the things
that I did not want to do to my kids.
And one day, after keeping this box for months, almost
a year, one day it suddenly occurred to me that
if my mom ever found this box, it would, I thought,

(40:53):
destroy her emotionally, and so I threw it away. I
threw away the whole box of car that I have
been keeping because I didn't want to do that. I
also didn't want to hurt her. And like, that is
kind of the struggle of the book and even like
of my life, which is that you know, I'm already

(41:13):
making notes about what I don't want to do, and
all in that list is hurt my mother. And those
two desires can exist in the same place, but the
outcome can't always exist in the same place. Yeah, that's

(41:34):
really that's really beautifully put. Ashley does not visit her
father from the time she learns of the reason for
his imprisonment at the age of fourteen until she's twenty five.
Her mother is sick, and she becomes painfully aware that
she may soon be without any parent at all. She

(41:57):
asks her friend Trent to drive her to prison, which
is three hours from where she lives. The visit lasts
two hours and forty seven minutes. Ashley is her father's
first visitor in five years, and in that visit, which
is filled with mutual kindness and affection and a lot
of catching up, it becomes clear that it is possible

(42:19):
that someone you love can do heinous and completely unacceptable things,
things that have impacted your life tremendously, but still be
someone you love. It was just so much information at once,
and then you know, to get into the room, to
see him, to have him stand up because he sees me,

(42:42):
and to be able to hug him, but then not
be able to touch him, you know, like anymore, like
not be able to touch his hand or anything like
that's against the rules. And it was just trying to
talk to each other, just trying to figure out the
language of that kind of anticipation for a conversation, for

(43:07):
a connection with another person. It is a wild, wild
feeling that in some ways will is are indescribable even
to myself, but It was a good visit. You know.
I got to talk to my dad about my friends
and what I like to read and what I like

(43:29):
to listen, to the fact that I fancied myself a writer,
and that I was writing about me and writing about
him and writing about the world around me, and having
him just want more, more and more, to just want
me to say more and more and more about who
I am and what I'm up to and all of that.

(43:51):
It was hetty, It was wild in terms of your
writing about him. What were you hoping for from him?
You know, I was hoping for him to sort of
give me his blessing, to give me his permission to
write about those things. I don't know that if I
hadn't gotten it, that that means I wouldn't have kept

(44:12):
writing about it, you know, because I know how I am. Um,
I don't think that would have happened. But I think
what I was looking for in that moment was sort
of just the affirmation of my right to do it,
of my right to talk about what I saw, what

(44:33):
I heard, what happened. Um what I know, what I
don't know, what my life had been up until that point.
I wanted him to affirm that, like, yeah, that that's
yours and you get to do what you want with that.
And that's what I got. That is such an extension

(44:54):
of the way that you described the way that he
looked at you, you know, when when you were seven
years old, kind of a different version of that. After
this visit, Ashley is empowered as a writer, and she's
carving out her own life in New York City with
her partner Kelly. The city embraces her in that magical

(45:18):
way that can happen when you're right where you're supposed
to be, when the world and the people in it
are the opposite of danger, when they find you and
guide you and mentor you. She's with someone she loves,
and she's existing in both worlds, loving and honoring the
complexities of her family and her past, but also creating
distance and living in her new present, carving out her future.

(45:42):
She writes, I could exist in both as me fully me.
I think at a certain point what I did really
was just accept reality. I accepted what the reality was,
and the reality was that I'm a bad pretend and
I'm a bad liar, and I don't like to pretend,

(46:04):
and I don't like to lie. And I didn't want
to be around my family as a palatable version of
me and have to lie to them about who I
was and how I felt and what I thought. And
you know, for a long time, I just thought my

(46:25):
family couldn't handle that. I thought they wouldn't allow it.
I thought that it couldn't be because it had never
really been before. And I had to have a bigger
imagination about what they could handle, what I could handle,
and the kind of boundaries that would allow us to

(46:45):
remain in each other's lives. And when I expanded my
imagination about those possibilities and allowed for some of those experience,
it worked out. It really worked out. We had a
family reunion a month after in my book came out.
I went, it was great. We had a great time.

(47:06):
Everybody was great. They were proud of me. What a
beautiful idea, the idea of expanding the imagination. Sometimes we're
limited by what we can imagine. Yet other times, in
the most unlikely ways, even the hardest things can work out.
Here's Ashley reading the words her father spoke to her

(47:29):
that day of her visit in prison, words that gave
her permission. So, look, I don't know what all you're writing,
And maybe it don't make me sound too good, but
that's not your fault. That's on me. This is something
I can give you if you need it. You need
my permission, you got it. Do me a favor, actually,

(47:52):
and you write about you and me. Just tell the truth,
your truth. Don't worry about nobody's feelings, especially really not mine.
You've gotta be tough to tell your truth. But it's
the only thing we're doing next to Loving some money.

(48:27):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly
z a Core 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 Secret zero. That's the number zero. You

(48:48):
can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And
if you'd like to know more about the story that
inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more

(49:19):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.