August 29, 2019 • 29 mins
We forget that our parents have their own lives, desires and, in some cases, secret lives that they’ve covered up in order to protect the family. But what happens when your elderly parent develops dementia, forgets to cover his tracks, and in doing so unleashes a Pandora’s box of secrets about his sexual escapades and misdeeds?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro, 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. It starts to
(00:29):
come together for my mother that he is literally forgetting
to lie, and my father sort of realizes that his
brain has betrayed him and he's admitted to this thing,
and he says, oh, oh, I did a bad thing.
My guest today is Sasha Rothschild. Sasha is a television
(00:49):
writer based in Los Angeles who made the recent discovery
that her father was not exactly the person she had
always thought him to be. This is a story of
a secret buried deep in a man's psyche. I grew
up in Miami Beach in the eighties, and at that
(01:11):
time it was sort of this forgotten place of old
age homes and crack houses and sort of a lawless town.
And my parents are incredibly I think of them as
submarine parents. They were always there, but opposite to like
(01:32):
a helicopter parent. They were never hovering. They were just
deep below the surface of my life and if I
needed something, I could go to them. But they weren't overbearing, UM,
and I kind of discovered my self and my childhood
and Miami on my own terms. Um. My mother was
(01:58):
this total free spirit who had lived a life of
a chameleon. She was a socialite in New York and
then she became a hippie, and then she met my father, UM,
who presented as this very upstanding journalists UM, and he
seemed like the normal one in the family. And so
(02:21):
growing up, my mother was sort of do whatever you
want as long as you're interesting, and then tell us
great stories at dinner. And my father didn't approve, but
he never gave boundaries or rules. So I grew up
running around Miami Beach, getting into trouble and doing drugs
(02:43):
and sleeping with older boys and sort of felt like
my parents were really interesting landlords, really interesting landlords. So
like if there was a problem with the sink or
the dishwashers, say, they would get somebody to come fix it.
But there wasn't huge parmental oversight that said. Sasha describes
(03:06):
her mom as one of her favorite people. She is
so smart and fascinating and nothing shocks her because it's
like she's done it all already, and so no matter
what I did growing up, I couldn't quite top her experiences,
and whatever I did, my father sort of was removed
(03:28):
from it. So when I started doing drugs, for example,
my mother said, you know, if you're going to do drugs,
just make sure you can trust your dealer, and just
make sure you never shoot up heroin. If you have to,
you know, smoke it because it's safer. That was sort
of her maternal advice, that that that definitely takes the
all the fun out of rebellion. Yes it did. It's so.
(03:50):
And my father's response was to put a lawyer on
retainer um in case legal matters came up. But his
response was never to like hug me or say are
you okay? Or you know, can I help or is
there anything I should be doing? So I felt alone
really as a child, and I have an older brother
and sister who were out of the house already for
(04:14):
a lot of my teen years, and um, I just
had this really strong sense of self preservation. So when
I started to really act out, I kind of pulled
myself back from the brink, and my parents were very like,
you know, see, you're an individual and you can take
care of yourself. And we raised you right. But one
(04:35):
thing that Sasha was always really clear about growing up
was how much her parents loved each other. It seemed
like a magical marriage. They were open with each other,
they laughed, they had intellectual debates, they traveled the world,
they had friends and adventures. This was one of those
marriages that wasn't primarily about the kids. It was about
(04:55):
two people in love. The kids kind of were an afterthought.
And as upsetting as that is, in a lot of ways,
I felt good about the fact that they were so
in love. And because I loved my mother so much,
um I hated my father less because he loved her.
(05:18):
And I never felt close to my father. I felt
like he was kind of an asshole. He had a temper,
not physically violent, but just sort of would fly into
a rage, you know, because there was bad traffic, or
you know, because I have all so many memories of
there's too many catchup bottles from Costco and why do
(05:38):
we need so much catchup? And he would just start
yelling about the catchup. Sort of all of his anger
was put into meaningless things. And I thought he was
a jerk, and I didn't feel close to him. And
because I didn't feel close to him. I wanted so
much for him to love me and to be proud
of me. So I followed in his footsteps, and I
(06:00):
desperately wanted to go to Yale, which is where he
went to college, and I ended up not getting in,
and it was the biggest tragedy of my life. At
that point, I learned that you can try and do
everything you can and still fail. And he's a writer,
and I grew up watching him sit in his office
off the garage writing and then all of a sudden
(06:22):
a book or an article would appear, and I thought
it was the most romantic like life and just uh,
you know, it's sitting there all day, seems not fun
at all, but like then this thing is in the world.
And I was mesmerized by that. And he really taught
me how to write. And so it's very complicated for
(06:45):
me because I never liked him, but I desperately wanted
to be just like him. When you say that he
taught you how to write, what do you mean by that,
aside from sort of by emulation. I remember, in like
seventh grade, we had to write a short story and
I wrote about um surfing, and I Umm, basically allergic
(07:11):
to the sun. I'm very pale. Growing up in Miami
was you know, I always wear hats and long sleeve
shirts and absolutely have never surfed a day in my life.
But surfing was cool and it was the cute boys
were surfers. So I wrote the story about surfing, and um,
he's He read it and he said, you know, this
is a false story. This isn't you. You don't know
(07:33):
about surfing. It doesn't come off as anything real and compelling,
and I think you should rewrite it. And I was
really angry because I knew that I would get in
a It was fine, the teacher would like it, who cares.
But I couldn't let that go. And so I thought about,
all right, what's a real story that I can tell?
(07:54):
And I ended up writing a story about a turtle
who really wanted to be a superhero and no one
would take him seriously because he was so slow. And
that story my father loved. He's like, there's meaning in
this and there's something personal, and he was right and
that in that way, he taught me how to be
(08:14):
a good writer, to not ever sort of take the
easy way out, and to really investigate why I'm writing something,
and I remember when I was in AP English in
high school and you're taught the very structured, you know,
five paragraph essays. My father really sat down with me
and told me, yes, it's important that you have a
statement saying what the article will be about, and you
(08:37):
back that up. But you don't want to feed your
reader everything up front. You want to sort of slowly
build tension and then have a twist or reveal or
an emotional something emotionally powerful. And those are the kind
of things that you don't necessarily learn in school when
you learn to write. Um, but I was sort of
taught every single day because he read what I wrote,
(09:01):
and my mother always encouraged me to write everything down.
And I think that was the one way that I
was able to really bond with him, because there were
no other ways that he and I had a real
conversation about anything. Let's take a quick break here. So
(09:32):
Sasha and her dad have this one shared language, the
language of writing. This was the way they communicated. Sasha
goes off to college determined to become a writer. She
goes to Boston College, where she majors in theater and
playwriting and graduates Phi Beta Kappa. At graduation, she's awarded
the highest honor in the theater program. Only one person
(09:53):
in each major gets an award. So there is this beautiful,
very small ceremony for like thirty five students, and I decided,
instead of going to graduation, my family should come and
watch that ceremony because it's really personal and I'm really
proud and I've accomplished all this stuff. And my name
is called, and I walk up on the stage and
(10:15):
I just so want my father to be proud. And
I look out and my entire family is sitting in
a row doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, looking
down with their little pens in their papers, and they
each have their own paper. I just feel like, nothing,
nothing I do, is going to get the attention that
(10:39):
i'd like desperately want. And that sort of feeling stayed
with me. I moved right to l A to start
my writing career, and I stopped sending my father things
that I had written, also because he was not someone
who understood scripts. He was definitely understood like sort of
(11:01):
you know, long form writing, but he didn't he wasn't
good at reading scripts or movie scripts or TV scripts,
which is what I was focusing on. And when I
started to become an adult, UM, I still talked to
my mother on the phone like every day because I
have so much fun talking to her. We gossip. She
knows everything about my life. My father and I. You know,
he'll sort of yell in the background, like how she
(11:24):
doing or put her on, and I'll talk to him,
but it's like small talk. It's it's just meaningless. And
I think for most of my adult life I felt
very disconnected from him, and yet still knowing that I'm
trying to make a living doing this thing that he
(11:44):
inspired me to do to a great extent. So when
she's writing her first book, Sasha calls her father for
advice and he offers it. He tells her, the minute
you don't want to write a thing, you have to
write it because that's where the good stuff is so true.
She takes his advice and writes a memoir about her
(12:04):
first marriage that's real and raw and scary. During that
year of her books publication, the two of them grow closer.
I felt really connected with him, and then it again
sort of slipped away. And then it wasn't until several
years later that we started to notice that his memory
(12:28):
was going and he was no longer writing. He said
he was retired, but we had realized he had been
trying to write a new article about something he was
interested in and couldn't quite get it done, which is
something that had never happened him before. What were the
signs of his memory going. One of the first things
(12:51):
I remember being very concerned about him is he didn't
know which side the espresso pod went into the machine.
And he had been using this machine, you know, every
day for years, and all of a sudden, this pod
in his hand seemed foreign to him. Um, that was
the first time I thought, oh my god, there's something
wrong with his brain. And then actually another thing happened
(13:14):
with the espresso machine, which it was broken. The thing
about me being out of town and my brother and
sister were all out of town. We would come visit
every few months and see my parents, and because we
had three or four months in between every visits, we
could really see him declining, whereas my mother, who was
with him every day, didn't see it as clearly. And
also there's a great deal of denial when your spouse
(13:36):
has Alzheimers. It's a horrible slow thing, and and she
really didn't see it for a long time. Another thing
happened where he started to confuse my husband with my
sister's partner. Um just sort of not quite sure who
was with who. And that's you know, was completely not
(13:57):
like him as distant did as he was in our lives.
Sometimes he absolutely, like you know, knew who are husbands were.
How old was he at this point? And how old
is your mom? He was sixty nine when we really
started to notice things happened, and my mother is seven
years older than him, so she was seventy six. We're
(14:21):
going to take a quick break when we get back.
Sasha talks about how her father's failing memory at first
changes him into a nicer, kinder guy, and then inadvertently
opens the door to a lifetime's worth of massive secrets.
(14:46):
Something that started happening for me was my father while
his memory started to go, he became a really different person.
He was so patient and calm, and if there was traffic,
he said, that's okay, you know, we'll get there. When
we get there, his entire demeanor changed and he really
(15:07):
became like this loving, kind person. And I felt like
I have a few years now with him where I
can change our dynamic and call him and talk to
him and visit. I tried to visit every month. Um.
And at one point he said he was proud of me,
(15:29):
and it was the first time he had said that
in my entire life. And he was also physical for
the first time in my life. My family are not
a physical family. We barely hug each other like I
don't think we maybe kissed each other on the cheek
three times in my entire life. And all of a sudden,
my father was like hugging me and sort of putting
his hand on my shoulder, and um, and I struggled
(15:51):
with is this the real him? And all these years
he was just an asshole because of stress and career
in life and who knows or is it not the
real him? And it's just you know, brain damage. But
in a way I didn't care because I was getting this,
like this nurturing in these nice moments with him. And
(16:13):
when I would go to visit, I would make sure
that we always had his favorite playlists from the nineteen
fifties playing on Spotify, and I would want to make
sure to do things that he would enjoy, and I
would get annoyed that my mother seemed a little bit callous,
and she wanted to listen to NPR, but I could
see that it was confusing to him and jarring, and
(16:33):
he didn't it wasn't good for him, and I wanted
my mother to be more patient. So Sasha lets her
guard down. She enjoys her father and feels loved and
nurtured by him, admired by him, possibly for the first
time in her life. No matter how successful she is
as a television writer, she has longed for this kind
of connection with her dad. But then she gets a
(16:56):
call from her mother. Something huge has happened. So my
father and mother are walking. And one thing about my father,
um is he was always very jealous. He was very
conservative in certain ways. He didn't want to talk about sex,
he didn't want to know about sex. He thought pornography
(17:19):
was disgusting. Really sort of antiquated possessive behavior from my father.
So they were taking a walk in this little old
man on the side of the road says hi to
my mother, he's probably you know, ninety, and my mother
says hi back, and my mother sort of says, I think,
you know, I think Bob might have a little crush
(17:42):
on me, and all of a sudden, my father says, really, well,
then I'm going to get back together with Karen. Karen
was an friend of my mother's um, a friend of
the families for a long time, someone my father spent
a lot of time with. And my other whipped around
and said, what do you mean you're going to get
(18:04):
back together with Karen. You were with Karen? And my
father says, yes, I was with Karen for years. We were,
you know, madly in love or something like that, and
then it was gone. Whether it was gone because his brain,
you know, it falls through like Swiss cheese, which is
what happens when you have Alzheimer's, or he just pretended
(18:24):
in the moment because he didn't want to talk about it.
But my mother realized he had had an affair with
her friend. Your mother knew that this was I mean,
she knew in her bones that this was true, That
it wasn't yes, a fantasy that you know, some Alzheimer's
fueled fantasy that that actually Alzheimer's was opening the door
to a piece of truth. Yes, she knew it was true.
And we had always sort of joked to like, oh,
(18:49):
you know, my father's in Karen, what are they up to? Like?
But it was so my parents were so open about
their past that I didn't realize they had private lives
because they were so open about everything that I was
so shocked to find out that my father had this
(19:11):
private life, even from my mother. But once he said
it out loud, it completely made sense to all of us.
Shortly after Sasha's father's bombshell about Karen, she's with her
mother and sister in Aspen at their parents summer home,
and there there is Sasha's father's laptop just sitting there,
(19:33):
begging to be accessed. He hasn't been able to use
it for a few years because he no longer understands computers.
Sasha's sister goes into his laptop and searches for the
name Karen. What ended coming up was sort of a
lifetime of lies. He had kept a journal, and I
definitely have mixed feelings because it's an invasion of privacy
(19:57):
that we read this, or I read part of it
and then decided I don't need to read anymore. He
wrote in great detail about all of his sexual exploits,
and it was almost like a teenage boy was writing it.
It was really in his he's he's a wonderful writer, um.
But this this was almost like a different side of him,
(20:19):
of sort of a teenage boy bragging, um. And he
went way back into his past, and it was sort
of writing about all of his times he lied to
my mother and cheated on her and the friends of
hers that he had hit on, and that he had
cheated on his first wife as well, and he had
(20:39):
made up some business trips. He was a mountain climber,
that was one of his hobbies, and he would talk
about mountain climbing so often that my mother used to joke,
I almost wish he was having an affair because then
I wouldn't have to hear about it. And he even
referenced that joke while saying, ha ha, I am having
(21:00):
an affair right under her nose with her friend. And
there was a moment in his journal that he wrote
about having sex in my bed with this woman and
not changing the sheets. And that was when I decided
I didn't need to read anymore of his journal, because
(21:24):
I knew that I didn't know who he was ever,
and um, that was enough information for me to know
that I needed to just now work on reframing my
own childhood and looking back and figuring some things out
for myself, but that this was a man who was
(21:47):
beyond for me anything that I could even try and comprehend. Yeah,
it's as if you it's almost like there's three acts
here in your relationship with your father, and it's the
emulating him, wanting his approval, his his distance, and then
(22:07):
having this brief period of time of his becoming this
other person, this loving, kind, thoughtful person who would hug
you and say I love you, and then losing that
person to what had been the truth all along. It's
like all of these layers, how do you? How do
(22:28):
you untangle that? One one of my first thoughts was, I, like,
I want my three years of compassion back. I was
loving and and kind to him, and yelled at my
mother for not, you know, turning off the NPR and
I should have. You know, I wanted my I wanted
my compassion back. And then I you know, worked through
(22:50):
that and realized it's always healthy and wonderful to be compassionate.
It's never going to hurt you to be compassionate, and
wanting that back isn't the way to go. Um. But
then I thought my instincts growing up were actually correct,
that he was unreachable, that he was guarded, and I
(23:12):
didn't really ever know him. A discovery and adulthood that
forces us to reckon with our childhood memories and re
understand them is often one of the legacies of a
family secret. In Sasha's case, she looks back and certain
memories now means something altogether different. She recalled the time
(23:35):
in her childhood when she was seven or eight and
she was alone with her father. He woke her up
late at night to say that he had to leave.
He had food poisoning brought on from bad cevich, as
he put it, and was going to the hospital. And
I remember this so clearly because cevich was a word
that I had just learned, and it sounded really fancy
(23:56):
to me. And he said he had to go to
the hospital because he had this food poisoning, but he
would be back in the morning and just to stay
inside and I'll be fine. And so he left me
home alone overnight. And now looking back on that, I'm
I'm he didn't have food poisoning. No grown man leaves
their child alone in the middle of the night because
they have food poisoning, they throw up, or they bring
(24:17):
their child to the to the e R with them
if there's really a problem. But he I'm sure went
off and met some woman or some hooker, God only
knows um and its memories like that that make a
lot more sense to me that he was an addict, Uh,
I mean, this is my like a sex addict, or
he lived this other life that sort of sort of
(24:38):
adds up and in a way that's helpful now for
me to sort of heal. That makes sense. I think
that there's something, you know, in all of this exploration
that I've been doing a family secrets, there's a kind
of liberation and finally understanding what was sort of hiding
(25:02):
in plain sight, that there was always something that didn't
add up. And then no matter how painful or awful
it is to find out what that thing is, there's
something that is also, ultimately I think, pretty grounding and
freeing about that. Yeah, and this idea that I wanted
to be just like him, and I realized in so
(25:24):
many ways I am such a better person than he is,
and I don't need to be like him, and I
don't want to be like him, And that's sort of
what I'm trying to take and move forward for my
own life. Are you glad? You know? I am glad
I know, mostly because I do think it has released
(25:48):
my mother from spending the rest of her days caring
for him, and she's now having some fun and she's
spending time with family and friends, and she's taking care
of herself and she's having adventures. And he is in
a really nice home where you know, we check on
him and he's being cared for. But I'm really glad
I know so she can have a nice life. And
(26:13):
I'm also glad I know because I it makes me
feel less crazy to know that he actually was so damaged.
It was not my fault that I couldn't find a
connection with him. So yes, I am glad, I know, right.
And I suppose there's a lesson in that too, in
that it is in the inner work, in in the
(26:33):
work that you're doing on yourself, that we all do
on ourselves where we where we do find that sense
of peace or of closure, as you say, or of freedom.
No one can give that to us. Yeah, do you
still feel that he helped to give you the gift
of writing? Is that like one gift that you still
(26:53):
feel connects to him, or does it all feel like
you've had to kind of unhook entirely. I do feel
that writing is the one gift he gave to me,
and I think that when he would write, UM, that
was him at his most authentic, and that is why
we could connect. I think the advice he gave me
(27:16):
about writing the hard stuff is the most honest thing
he's ever said to me, and I think it has
served me incredibly well. And I think the great irony
of the bigger picture is now I'm writing about him
and the things he's done, which I'm sure, if he understood,
would probably be very ashamed to know that everyone knew.
(27:38):
But on the other hand, maybe part of him would
be proud that I'm doing the exact thing he taught
me to do. So I'm not letting this turn of
events of his sort of double life effect my love
for writing, and have been able to separate that that
is the one amazing thing that he gave to me,
and he's my father. Half of me comes from him.
(28:14):
I'd like to thank Sasha Rothchild for sharing her story.
You can find Sasha at her Twitter handle Sasha Rothschild
and on Sasha Rothchild dot com. Family Secrets is an
I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer,
Lowell Roulante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
(28:37):
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and
you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
(29:31):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro, 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. It starts to
(00:29):
come together for my mother that he is literally forgetting
to lie, and my father sort of realizes that his
brain has betrayed him and he's admitted to this thing,
and he says, oh, oh, I did a bad thing.
My guest today is Sasha Rothschild. Sasha is a television
(00:49):
writer based in Los Angeles who made the recent discovery
that her father was not exactly the person she had
always thought him to be. This is a story of
a secret buried deep in a man's psyche. I grew
up in Miami Beach in the eighties, and at that
(01:11):
time it was sort of this forgotten place of old
age homes and crack houses and sort of a lawless town.
And my parents are incredibly I think of them as
submarine parents. They were always there, but opposite to like
(01:32):
a helicopter parent. They were never hovering. They were just
deep below the surface of my life and if I
needed something, I could go to them. But they weren't overbearing, UM,
and I kind of discovered my self and my childhood
and Miami on my own terms. Um. My mother was
(01:58):
this total free spirit who had lived a life of
a chameleon. She was a socialite in New York and
then she became a hippie, and then she met my father, UM,
who presented as this very upstanding journalists UM, and he
seemed like the normal one in the family. And so
(02:21):
growing up, my mother was sort of do whatever you
want as long as you're interesting, and then tell us
great stories at dinner. And my father didn't approve, but
he never gave boundaries or rules. So I grew up
running around Miami Beach, getting into trouble and doing drugs
(02:43):
and sleeping with older boys and sort of felt like
my parents were really interesting landlords, really interesting landlords. So
like if there was a problem with the sink or
the dishwashers, say, they would get somebody to come fix it.
But there wasn't huge parmental oversight that said. Sasha describes
(03:06):
her mom as one of her favorite people. She is
so smart and fascinating and nothing shocks her because it's
like she's done it all already, and so no matter
what I did growing up, I couldn't quite top her experiences,
and whatever I did, my father sort of was removed
(03:28):
from it. So when I started doing drugs, for example,
my mother said, you know, if you're going to do drugs,
just make sure you can trust your dealer, and just
make sure you never shoot up heroin. If you have to,
you know, smoke it because it's safer. That was sort
of her maternal advice, that that that definitely takes the
all the fun out of rebellion. Yes it did. It's so.
(03:50):
And my father's response was to put a lawyer on
retainer um in case legal matters came up. But his
response was never to like hug me or say are
you okay? Or you know, can I help or is
there anything I should be doing? So I felt alone
really as a child, and I have an older brother
and sister who were out of the house already for
(04:14):
a lot of my teen years, and um, I just
had this really strong sense of self preservation. So when
I started to really act out, I kind of pulled
myself back from the brink, and my parents were very like,
you know, see, you're an individual and you can take
care of yourself. And we raised you right. But one
(04:35):
thing that Sasha was always really clear about growing up
was how much her parents loved each other. It seemed
like a magical marriage. They were open with each other,
they laughed, they had intellectual debates, they traveled the world,
they had friends and adventures. This was one of those
marriages that wasn't primarily about the kids. It was about
(04:55):
two people in love. The kids kind of were an afterthought.
And as upsetting as that is, in a lot of ways,
I felt good about the fact that they were so
in love. And because I loved my mother so much,
um I hated my father less because he loved her.
(05:18):
And I never felt close to my father. I felt
like he was kind of an asshole. He had a temper,
not physically violent, but just sort of would fly into
a rage, you know, because there was bad traffic, or
you know, because I have all so many memories of
there's too many catchup bottles from Costco and why do
(05:38):
we need so much catchup? And he would just start
yelling about the catchup. Sort of all of his anger
was put into meaningless things. And I thought he was
a jerk, and I didn't feel close to him. And
because I didn't feel close to him. I wanted so
much for him to love me and to be proud
of me. So I followed in his footsteps, and I
(06:00):
desperately wanted to go to Yale, which is where he
went to college, and I ended up not getting in,
and it was the biggest tragedy of my life. At
that point, I learned that you can try and do
everything you can and still fail. And he's a writer,
and I grew up watching him sit in his office
off the garage writing and then all of a sudden
(06:22):
a book or an article would appear, and I thought
it was the most romantic like life and just uh,
you know, it's sitting there all day, seems not fun
at all, but like then this thing is in the world.
And I was mesmerized by that. And he really taught
me how to write. And so it's very complicated for
(06:45):
me because I never liked him, but I desperately wanted
to be just like him. When you say that he
taught you how to write, what do you mean by that,
aside from sort of by emulation. I remember, in like
seventh grade, we had to write a short story and
I wrote about um surfing, and I Umm, basically allergic
(07:11):
to the sun. I'm very pale. Growing up in Miami
was you know, I always wear hats and long sleeve
shirts and absolutely have never surfed a day in my life.
But surfing was cool and it was the cute boys
were surfers. So I wrote the story about surfing, and um,
he's He read it and he said, you know, this
is a false story. This isn't you. You don't know
(07:33):
about surfing. It doesn't come off as anything real and compelling,
and I think you should rewrite it. And I was
really angry because I knew that I would get in
a It was fine, the teacher would like it, who cares.
But I couldn't let that go. And so I thought about,
all right, what's a real story that I can tell?
(07:54):
And I ended up writing a story about a turtle
who really wanted to be a superhero and no one
would take him seriously because he was so slow. And
that story my father loved. He's like, there's meaning in
this and there's something personal, and he was right and
that in that way, he taught me how to be
(08:14):
a good writer, to not ever sort of take the
easy way out, and to really investigate why I'm writing something,
and I remember when I was in AP English in
high school and you're taught the very structured, you know,
five paragraph essays. My father really sat down with me
and told me, yes, it's important that you have a
statement saying what the article will be about, and you
(08:37):
back that up. But you don't want to feed your
reader everything up front. You want to sort of slowly
build tension and then have a twist or reveal or
an emotional something emotionally powerful. And those are the kind
of things that you don't necessarily learn in school when
you learn to write. Um, but I was sort of
taught every single day because he read what I wrote,
(09:01):
and my mother always encouraged me to write everything down.
And I think that was the one way that I
was able to really bond with him, because there were
no other ways that he and I had a real
conversation about anything. Let's take a quick break here. So
(09:32):
Sasha and her dad have this one shared language, the
language of writing. This was the way they communicated. Sasha
goes off to college determined to become a writer. She
goes to Boston College, where she majors in theater and
playwriting and graduates Phi Beta Kappa. At graduation, she's awarded
the highest honor in the theater program. Only one person
(09:53):
in each major gets an award. So there is this beautiful,
very small ceremony for like thirty five students, and I decided,
instead of going to graduation, my family should come and
watch that ceremony because it's really personal and I'm really
proud and I've accomplished all this stuff. And my name
is called, and I walk up on the stage and
(10:15):
I just so want my father to be proud. And
I look out and my entire family is sitting in
a row doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, looking
down with their little pens in their papers, and they
each have their own paper. I just feel like, nothing,
nothing I do, is going to get the attention that
(10:39):
i'd like desperately want. And that sort of feeling stayed
with me. I moved right to l A to start
my writing career, and I stopped sending my father things
that I had written, also because he was not someone
who understood scripts. He was definitely understood like sort of
(11:01):
you know, long form writing, but he didn't he wasn't
good at reading scripts or movie scripts or TV scripts,
which is what I was focusing on. And when I
started to become an adult, UM, I still talked to
my mother on the phone like every day because I
have so much fun talking to her. We gossip. She
knows everything about my life. My father and I. You know,
he'll sort of yell in the background, like how she
(11:24):
doing or put her on, and I'll talk to him,
but it's like small talk. It's it's just meaningless. And
I think for most of my adult life I felt
very disconnected from him, and yet still knowing that I'm
trying to make a living doing this thing that he
(11:44):
inspired me to do to a great extent. So when
she's writing her first book, Sasha calls her father for
advice and he offers it. He tells her, the minute
you don't want to write a thing, you have to
write it because that's where the good stuff is so true.
She takes his advice and writes a memoir about her
(12:04):
first marriage that's real and raw and scary. During that
year of her books publication, the two of them grow closer.
I felt really connected with him, and then it again
sort of slipped away. And then it wasn't until several
years later that we started to notice that his memory
(12:28):
was going and he was no longer writing. He said
he was retired, but we had realized he had been
trying to write a new article about something he was
interested in and couldn't quite get it done, which is
something that had never happened him before. What were the
signs of his memory going. One of the first things
(12:51):
I remember being very concerned about him is he didn't
know which side the espresso pod went into the machine.
And he had been using this machine, you know, every
day for years, and all of a sudden, this pod
in his hand seemed foreign to him. Um, that was
the first time I thought, oh my god, there's something
wrong with his brain. And then actually another thing happened
(13:14):
with the espresso machine, which it was broken. The thing
about me being out of town and my brother and
sister were all out of town. We would come visit
every few months and see my parents, and because we
had three or four months in between every visits, we
could really see him declining, whereas my mother, who was
with him every day, didn't see it as clearly. And
also there's a great deal of denial when your spouse
(13:36):
has Alzheimers. It's a horrible slow thing, and and she
really didn't see it for a long time. Another thing
happened where he started to confuse my husband with my
sister's partner. Um just sort of not quite sure who
was with who. And that's you know, was completely not
(13:57):
like him as distant did as he was in our lives.
Sometimes he absolutely, like you know, knew who are husbands were.
How old was he at this point? And how old
is your mom? He was sixty nine when we really
started to notice things happened, and my mother is seven
years older than him, so she was seventy six. We're
(14:21):
going to take a quick break when we get back.
Sasha talks about how her father's failing memory at first
changes him into a nicer, kinder guy, and then inadvertently
opens the door to a lifetime's worth of massive secrets.
(14:46):
Something that started happening for me was my father while
his memory started to go, he became a really different person.
He was so patient and calm, and if there was traffic,
he said, that's okay, you know, we'll get there. When
we get there, his entire demeanor changed and he really
(15:07):
became like this loving, kind person. And I felt like
I have a few years now with him where I
can change our dynamic and call him and talk to
him and visit. I tried to visit every month. Um.
And at one point he said he was proud of me,
(15:29):
and it was the first time he had said that
in my entire life. And he was also physical for
the first time in my life. My family are not
a physical family. We barely hug each other like I
don't think we maybe kissed each other on the cheek
three times in my entire life. And all of a sudden,
my father was like hugging me and sort of putting
his hand on my shoulder, and um, and I struggled
(15:51):
with is this the real him? And all these years
he was just an asshole because of stress and career
in life and who knows or is it not the
real him? And it's just you know, brain damage. But
in a way I didn't care because I was getting this,
like this nurturing in these nice moments with him. And
(16:13):
when I would go to visit, I would make sure
that we always had his favorite playlists from the nineteen
fifties playing on Spotify, and I would want to make
sure to do things that he would enjoy, and I
would get annoyed that my mother seemed a little bit callous,
and she wanted to listen to NPR, but I could
see that it was confusing to him and jarring, and
(16:33):
he didn't it wasn't good for him, and I wanted
my mother to be more patient. So Sasha lets her
guard down. She enjoys her father and feels loved and
nurtured by him, admired by him, possibly for the first
time in her life. No matter how successful she is
as a television writer, she has longed for this kind
of connection with her dad. But then she gets a
(16:56):
call from her mother. Something huge has happened. So my
father and mother are walking. And one thing about my father,
um is he was always very jealous. He was very
conservative in certain ways. He didn't want to talk about sex,
he didn't want to know about sex. He thought pornography
(17:19):
was disgusting. Really sort of antiquated possessive behavior from my father.
So they were taking a walk in this little old
man on the side of the road says hi to
my mother, he's probably you know, ninety, and my mother
says hi back, and my mother sort of says, I think,
you know, I think Bob might have a little crush
(17:42):
on me, and all of a sudden, my father says, really, well,
then I'm going to get back together with Karen. Karen
was an friend of my mother's um, a friend of
the families for a long time, someone my father spent
a lot of time with. And my other whipped around
and said, what do you mean you're going to get
(18:04):
back together with Karen. You were with Karen? And my
father says, yes, I was with Karen for years. We were,
you know, madly in love or something like that, and
then it was gone. Whether it was gone because his brain,
you know, it falls through like Swiss cheese, which is
what happens when you have Alzheimer's, or he just pretended
(18:24):
in the moment because he didn't want to talk about it.
But my mother realized he had had an affair with
her friend. Your mother knew that this was I mean,
she knew in her bones that this was true, That
it wasn't yes, a fantasy that you know, some Alzheimer's
fueled fantasy that that actually Alzheimer's was opening the door
to a piece of truth. Yes, she knew it was true.
And we had always sort of joked to like, oh,
(18:49):
you know, my father's in Karen, what are they up to? Like?
But it was so my parents were so open about
their past that I didn't realize they had private lives
because they were so open about everything that I was
so shocked to find out that my father had this
(19:11):
private life, even from my mother. But once he said
it out loud, it completely made sense to all of us.
Shortly after Sasha's father's bombshell about Karen, she's with her
mother and sister in Aspen at their parents summer home,
and there there is Sasha's father's laptop just sitting there,
(19:33):
begging to be accessed. He hasn't been able to use
it for a few years because he no longer understands computers.
Sasha's sister goes into his laptop and searches for the
name Karen. What ended coming up was sort of a
lifetime of lies. He had kept a journal, and I
definitely have mixed feelings because it's an invasion of privacy
(19:57):
that we read this, or I read part of it
and then decided I don't need to read anymore. He
wrote in great detail about all of his sexual exploits,
and it was almost like a teenage boy was writing it.
It was really in his he's he's a wonderful writer, um.
But this this was almost like a different side of him,
(20:19):
of sort of a teenage boy bragging, um. And he
went way back into his past, and it was sort
of writing about all of his times he lied to
my mother and cheated on her and the friends of
hers that he had hit on, and that he had
cheated on his first wife as well, and he had
(20:39):
made up some business trips. He was a mountain climber,
that was one of his hobbies, and he would talk
about mountain climbing so often that my mother used to joke,
I almost wish he was having an affair because then
I wouldn't have to hear about it. And he even
referenced that joke while saying, ha ha, I am having
(21:00):
an affair right under her nose with her friend. And
there was a moment in his journal that he wrote
about having sex in my bed with this woman and
not changing the sheets. And that was when I decided
I didn't need to read anymore of his journal, because
(21:24):
I knew that I didn't know who he was ever,
and um, that was enough information for me to know
that I needed to just now work on reframing my
own childhood and looking back and figuring some things out
for myself, but that this was a man who was
(21:47):
beyond for me anything that I could even try and comprehend. Yeah,
it's as if you it's almost like there's three acts
here in your relationship with your father, and it's the
emulating him, wanting his approval, his his distance, and then
(22:07):
having this brief period of time of his becoming this
other person, this loving, kind, thoughtful person who would hug
you and say I love you, and then losing that
person to what had been the truth all along. It's
like all of these layers, how do you? How do
(22:28):
you untangle that? One one of my first thoughts was, I, like,
I want my three years of compassion back. I was
loving and and kind to him, and yelled at my
mother for not, you know, turning off the NPR and
I should have. You know, I wanted my I wanted
my compassion back. And then I you know, worked through
(22:50):
that and realized it's always healthy and wonderful to be compassionate.
It's never going to hurt you to be compassionate, and
wanting that back isn't the way to go. Um. But
then I thought my instincts growing up were actually correct,
that he was unreachable, that he was guarded, and I
(23:12):
didn't really ever know him. A discovery and adulthood that
forces us to reckon with our childhood memories and re
understand them is often one of the legacies of a
family secret. In Sasha's case, she looks back and certain
memories now means something altogether different. She recalled the time
(23:35):
in her childhood when she was seven or eight and
she was alone with her father. He woke her up
late at night to say that he had to leave.
He had food poisoning brought on from bad cevich, as
he put it, and was going to the hospital. And
I remember this so clearly because cevich was a word
that I had just learned, and it sounded really fancy
(23:56):
to me. And he said he had to go to
the hospital because he had this food poisoning, but he
would be back in the morning and just to stay
inside and I'll be fine. And so he left me
home alone overnight. And now looking back on that, I'm
I'm he didn't have food poisoning. No grown man leaves
their child alone in the middle of the night because
they have food poisoning, they throw up, or they bring
(24:17):
their child to the to the e R with them
if there's really a problem. But he I'm sure went
off and met some woman or some hooker, God only
knows um and its memories like that that make a
lot more sense to me that he was an addict, Uh,
I mean, this is my like a sex addict, or
he lived this other life that sort of sort of
(24:38):
adds up and in a way that's helpful now for
me to sort of heal. That makes sense. I think
that there's something, you know, in all of this exploration
that I've been doing a family secrets, there's a kind
of liberation and finally understanding what was sort of hiding
(25:02):
in plain sight, that there was always something that didn't
add up. And then no matter how painful or awful
it is to find out what that thing is, there's
something that is also, ultimately I think, pretty grounding and
freeing about that. Yeah, and this idea that I wanted
to be just like him, and I realized in so
(25:24):
many ways I am such a better person than he is,
and I don't need to be like him, and I
don't want to be like him, And that's sort of
what I'm trying to take and move forward for my
own life. Are you glad? You know? I am glad
I know, mostly because I do think it has released
(25:48):
my mother from spending the rest of her days caring
for him, and she's now having some fun and she's
spending time with family and friends, and she's taking care
of herself and she's having adventures. And he is in
a really nice home where you know, we check on
him and he's being cared for. But I'm really glad
I know so she can have a nice life. And
(26:13):
I'm also glad I know because I it makes me
feel less crazy to know that he actually was so damaged.
It was not my fault that I couldn't find a
connection with him. So yes, I am glad, I know, right.
And I suppose there's a lesson in that too, in
that it is in the inner work, in in the
(26:33):
work that you're doing on yourself, that we all do
on ourselves where we where we do find that sense
of peace or of closure, as you say, or of freedom.
No one can give that to us. Yeah, do you
still feel that he helped to give you the gift
of writing? Is that like one gift that you still
(26:53):
feel connects to him, or does it all feel like
you've had to kind of unhook entirely. I do feel
that writing is the one gift he gave to me,
and I think that when he would write, UM, that
was him at his most authentic, and that is why
we could connect. I think the advice he gave me
(27:16):
about writing the hard stuff is the most honest thing
he's ever said to me, and I think it has
served me incredibly well. And I think the great irony
of the bigger picture is now I'm writing about him
and the things he's done, which I'm sure, if he understood,
would probably be very ashamed to know that everyone knew.
(27:38):
But on the other hand, maybe part of him would
be proud that I'm doing the exact thing he taught
me to do. So I'm not letting this turn of
events of his sort of double life effect my love
for writing, and have been able to separate that that
is the one amazing thing that he gave to me,
and he's my father. Half of me comes from him.
(28:14):
I'd like to thank Sasha Rothchild for sharing her story.
You can find Sasha at her Twitter handle Sasha Rothschild
and on Sasha Rothchild dot com. Family Secrets is an
I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer,
Lowell Roulante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
(28:37):
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and
you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
(29:31):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows,
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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