Fainting Goat Syndrome

Nicole is an illustrator, writer, zinster, podcaster, and educator. She's also the author of the graphic memoir calling Dr Laura, a story about discovering a secret hidden from her all her life that had to do with the bedrock of her identity. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

I grew up everywhere. I was born in Ohio. I was raised with my mom's side of the family, which is all Syrian, and I had a Lebanese stepgrandmother, and so I grew up with a big family and a lot of Lebanese food. I lived with my mom, and I lived with my two sisters, who were ten and twelve years older than me, and we quickly moved from Ohio to Maryland, and then from Maryland we moved to Florida,

and then we moved to Kansas. And so at a certain point, my sisters moved away and it was just me with my mom and at that point various step dads and I just really communed with animals. I stayed home all the time. I never went to school. I watched TV, made clothes for my stepped animals, trying to teach my turtle how to read, trying to you know, dress the dogs and clothes. I was like watching Phoebe's playhouse and then living my Pope's playhouse fantasy. What was

the reason for all the moving? We moved a lot for men. My mom was always kind of orbiting around whatever man was my stepfather or was, you know, was auditioning to be my next stepfather, And so we moved for other people's jobs. Generally, my extended family all lives in Ohio, you know, so that's that was where we kept coming back to, or that's where and that's where I was born. But then everywhere else we moved was for a step dad or someone my mom was with.

Tell me a bit about your mom of your childhood. What was she like. My mom's very charismatic, you know, she smiled all the time. She was a motivational speaker. At some point, she was also an eighties businesswoman. She had a huge life with a lot of things. When I was growing up, her temper to me was unpredictable, and she was always trying to keep it together and keep various secrets together from my stepdad's or whoever I

was dating. There was always something that we had to be conspiring about to keep from people, whether it be something about money or like don't tell your stepdad you haven't been to school this week, or things like that. You know, my mom was very warm. I've never had a home where, you know, someone didn't say I love you, or didn't give me a hug, or didn't you know. Food, I think is one of my original love languages. My mom was like always like rolling grape leaves and making

me food. And when I went vegan as a teenager, her trying to figure out how to make vegan food. She's always more than willing to do all of that stuff, and yet I always had this feeling of being de prioritized in favor of the men that were around, and feeling like I just really wanted some time alone with her and I couldn't get it. Her dance card was full.

When she would ask you to keep her secrets or you know, not tell the truth in the service of some kind of secret, was it an attempt to kind of kind of bond with you, like you and she were this team. What do you think that was? Absolutely, we were co conspirators. We were a team. There was some kind of the thing of, you know, us together.

It was almost like we were embattled, like us together against Bill in the blank so against the truancy officer, against my stepdad, against whomever from the outside wanted to look into our home and we didn't want them to know what was going on. There was kind of like a best friend quality, and there was also a co

conspirator bonding sort of vibe. And also some of these secrets were positioned to keep me safe or to keep me out of farms, like I had done something wrong, Like I had horrible stomach problems as a kid, and I had stomach problems in particular ways that like there was like I had the kinds of things that I feel I could have been cleared up very quickly, but lasted for a decade and I never went to school, And so my mom would basically be like, Okay, well,

well since you didn't go to school all week, we have to hide this from your step dad so you don't get in trouble or just it was like I had to keep myself as secret. I had to keep you know, the fact that I was like soiling myself secret, or the fact that this problem was happening secret. I had to keep like the financial situation of our home secret. There was just a lot of things is to keep

track of. It isn't until Nicole is an adult that she comes to realize that there is a term, a true medical definition for the crushing symptoms that plagued her as a child, and co priceis which is often caused by emotional distress or separation anxiety. The hallmark of it, at least as I was understanding it, is, you know, you had this terrible stomach trouble and just trouble going to the bathroom. Really like serious stuff that seems like it comes up most often with children who are like

really dealing with something that they don't understand. I don't mean the physical part. I mean the psychological and emotional part, Like there's something about what's going on that's just hidden and I don't know. I mean, does that make sense

to you? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It feels like, you know, as far as I can tell, And from researching it and being in therapy for a very long time and talking to people, it feels like, either you know something, it seems like a psychological problem, and it was being treated like a physical problem. It was being treated unreliably, so we would never see the same doctor twice. It was treated unliably as a physical problem or a failing on my part, like why don't you just go

to the bathroom. But I think it was a psychological issue that started happening when I was a toddler. I mean it interests me in terms of the subject of this podcast two, because there's so much that I think happens to children when something really significant is being kept from them and they don't know it. You know, they don't. I shouldn't say they, I should say we, you know, we we don't know it. But yet it's kind of in the air all around us, like some sort of

like invisible poisonous gas. And when that happens and there's no ex pla nation for it, the child, even like really young children, just start feeling like there must be something really really wrong with them, and they turn it against themselves. And that's like it's one of the most

toxic elements of a secret being withheld. Tell me also a little bit about your relationship with your too much older sisters, like both when you were a child and then once they left home and you were left to send kind of for yourself, was your mom, and they were out of the house by the time you were, you know what, like eight years old. Yeah, my sisters went to college when I was six, and then when I was eight, my middle sister, Meg, she pretty much raised me. It was kind of like my sisters had

like a teen pregnancy. When my mom had me, she was very preoccupied with other things, and so my sister, who was ten years older than me, ended up, you know, taking me to the grocery store with her, picking me up from school, making sure I brushed my teeth, putting me to bed. She was entirely responsible for me more or less, and my mom kind of drilled into her that she was a big drag and drilled into me like, I just my mom will let me do whatever I wanted.

So if I wanted to eat a bunch of candy, if I threw a fit, if I was being a brat about something, my mom would be like, oh God, just give it to me. Who wants to hear that. But my sister Meg was the one that had to be kind of the uptight one and be like, no, this is here structure, here's rules, here's boundaries. And so

when my sister's left, it was devastating. It's actually something I'm still processing and therapy, is how heartbroken I was when my oldest sister Liz went to college and when my middle sister Meg went to college, and Meg had to be both of them had to be convinced to go to college. They both had survivor's guilt, and Meg in particular almost didn't go to college because she didn't

want to leave me behind as I was. You know, at the time, I had a pretty horrible stepdad who was emotional, who was abusive to my mom, and my sister just couldn't bear to as my guardian, my longtime guardian. She couldn't bear to leave me there, but somebody convinced her that she needed to save herself. How many step dads did you have? In all you know, I only had. I had two step dads from what I can put together. My mom left my dad to date a Saudi Arabian prince.

They did not get married. He was around for a couple of years with his entourage, and then she whenever he left. I had a stepdad in Florida, and then I had a stepdad directly after that, who my mom was still with to this day. Where was your father? What had happened to him? It was my understanding that he had died of colon cancer when I was a baby, and this kind of got fleshed out by my mom over the years that he died when I was a year and a half old. He was thirty three years old,

and it was very sad. But side note, he was a con man, and he was very funny, and he came from maybe a bad home. Those are all the things I knew. So every time as a kid, when I had stomach problems and I would go see a gastronologist, I would lead with that. My mom wouldn't say it, but I would be like, oh, and by the way, yeah, my dad died of calling cancer. It's like a you know, an eight year old to be like, maybe that's what's wrong with me. That was my understanding for a very

long time, and you're much older. Sisters also backed that story up. Yes, my sisters and my mom back that story up. And essentially people just really didn't talk about him. My mom once mentioned we were an a vintage store and she grabbed like a black hat with a veil and said, I wore a hat just like this to your dad's funeral. It was so sad. I think she was just freestyling there. And no one in my family

ever mentioned my dad. Ever. There was one time I can remember in my entire life where anyone else mentioned him, and it was an old woman at my grandfather's birthday party, because ninetieth birthday party, and she came up to me and she said, oh, you're you're David's daughter. And I had not even heard his name come out of a different person's mouth aside from my mom pretty much ever, and so I was fascinated, and she quickly got shooed

away from me. We'll be right back. When Nicole is twenty two years old, a woman she's dating named Verona gifts her as a belated birthday present with a palm reading with a psychic who she finds where all good psychics can be found in the back of the local newspaper. I went to the palm reader, and she said, you don't get along with your mother, I can tell from your hand, and you should talk to your father more often. And I said, I can't talk to him more often

because he's dead. And she said, maybe the man you think is your father is dead, but your real father is very much alive. And everything else she had said had been such nonsense. She had said so many things about me marrying an older man and having three pregnancies with two children, and she said, all this stuff, that's it seems fantastical, like you would imagine. And then she said this thing, and it just rung a bell that

I couldn't unring. All the pieces, all the things that I had worked so hard in my life to kind of try and figure out, like why is everyone kind of looking at each other over my heads? Why is everyone talking around something? Is there something wrong with me? There were so many things that I had supposed that it was that people weren't telling me that this Tom Reader saying this, it felt entirely plausible, Like it was

crystal clear that I was like, this is very possible. Yeah, that's such an amazing that's such an amazing thing, right, Like there's you know, you grew up in a house where there were all of these secrets, but they were like secrets in a minor key. They were not big, gigantic secrets. They were don't tell your stepfather this, or tell the truant officer that, or they were not like the secret. And and then suddenly, now there's this possibility that I guess really only occurs to you for the

first time. I mean, why would one ever have the thought, you know, maybe my father, who I've been told died of colon cancer when I was a year and a half old, is really alive. You wouldn't have that thought. Because we believe what we're told as children, then that forms our identity, Like those just become the tent poles and the pillars of the way that we grow up, and we sort of form ourselves around that, even if

it doesn't really make sense. The fortune teller also tells you two not tell anyone, to keep it to yourself, right m hm? She said, yeah, whatever I tell you in this room, it's nothing personal, and you need to keep it to yourself for twenty four hours. And that my friend and I we kind of exploded out the door of this woman's place. It was a two for one. So my friend also got her palm read and we exploded out the door, and just as soon as we hit the street, we were like, oh my god, what

does she tell you? And we told each other everything, all of her like funny predictions about us being straight and marrying these men and all this stuff. But I didn't tell her. I didn't tell Verona about my dad. I didn't tell anybody about it for a really long time. I couldn't. It was too big. It was what was like a Shortinger's cat. It was just like that box. I just couldn't touch it right away. How did that sit with you during that like nearly a year where

you didn't tell anyone that this had happened. Were you thinking about it? Were you like lying awake at night and wondering about it? Or did you kind of pack it away a little bit? Of both. I kind of would only allow myself to entertain it here and there, because you know, I had just started going to therapy I think the year before for the first time in my life, and I had even started I had only even started acknowledging that my upbringing was not normal very recently.

I was very young, and so I would think about it sometimes at night or when I was alone. Otherwise, I just kept myself very busy. I kept I felt very busy with a lot of friends. I lived in a house with a lot of roommates. I did volunteer work. I had like two jobs at nonprofits. I hosted karaoke, I just did There were so much I just packed my days so full that there I really only processed it a little bit in my diary. I've always kept a diary, and sometimes it's the only place where my

reality has been reflected back to me. Especially when I was growing up in such a chaotic way, that was the only place where I dared to even talk about it. Did you go back and revisit that diary later? I have, Well, you know, a weird thing about me is that I have the compulsion to publish everything, and so at that point, I was doing a zine that was essentially just photocopy

diary entries. So I actually was just looking the other day back at a zine I did in my early twenties, like a fancy and a diary comic, and it has me writing kind of cryptically about this secret and kind of this like deep melancholy I felt. And everything was cryptic, everything was kind of vague, everything was kind of sad. But it just was like past, present and future, like all here in the same moment as how I felt

about it. I felt overwhelming. And I had drawn some picture of a vintage like a woman from the forties that I had found in a magazine. I had drawn this picture of her with kind of like a like a scar across her head. I was very into drawing people with like scars across their heads, like visible scars, visible sewn up wounds. And that's how I expressed it

at the time. Wow, that's so interesting without knowing that that's what you were doing, right, Yeah, it was the you know, the outer expression of something that was so internal that you couldn't really touch it, sort of like a live wire inside of you. So you then end up as happens like as one does when a secret has been Like in this kind of pressure cooker of being unspoken, you end up blurting out the story to

pretty much a stranger. Yeah. I didn't talk to anyone in my life about I didn't talk to my sisters about it. I didn't talk to my closest friends who had known me. I just I was on essentially a first date with a stranger, and I it was so awkward that I just and I just was looking for something to say, and so I told her this. I said, oh,

you know, I have a crazy story. A poem reader told me my dad was alive what I've been told he was dead my whole life, and she was like, what, I feel like I told her almost to avoid emotional accountability, because it's the kind of thing if I told one of my friends, they would pause and reflect back how hard they must be, and I would have to have a feeling and before very vulnerable. And so it was telling a stranger who doesn't have that relationship or reflection

of you. There was something about it that felt like I was I don't know if I if I I was almost removed from it, like trying to use it as like a parlor trick instead of a very deep, sad possibility. So how how long is it then before you end up approaching one of your sisters and asking, you know, so his dad really dead? And it was at least another year, I think. So that person and I ended up dating seriously, and she kept urging me

to ask about it. She was holding me accountable to ask about it and to think about it, and that, you know, maybe it was something I should consider finding out if it was nagging at me that it might be true, which it was, and so I asked my sister. I asked my oldest sister, Liz. She had been kind of cryptically telling my girlfriend that she had something she really wanted to tell me and that she loved me

a lot. This was happening simultaneously. She didn't know that I knew, but she was like, I love Nicole so much. I have something I really need to tell her, and I was giving me a lot of anxiety, and so I really just I blurted it out. I went to visit her in San Francisco on tour with my band, and after our show, you know, it was probably like twelve thirty in the morning, and I had like one sip of one beer and was like, oh, so was my dad really dead? And she just immediately broke and

was like, no, no, he's not. And she immediately just dissolved into tears, and I was like, I'm so sorry. I you know, please don't hate me. I've always wanted to tell you, and I you know, I it really never crossed my mind to hate my sisters. It had crossed my mind to hate my mom over the secret, but I knew that they were hostages basically to my mom's reality, just like I was. And it was so hard to see how much pain the secret had caused

them to keep all this time. What did it feel like at that moment to have that confirmation there was really overwhelming. I mean every step of this process has just completely, um like overwhelmed my nervous system. I felt very sad for my sisters, and I felt it kind of just blew my mind that it was true. And I think on some level I knew it was true,

or else I wouldn't have asked. But I think part of the reason it felt overwhelming is because there wasn't a place in my household for that kind of emotional raw vulnerability and honesty. That wasn't how our house was where we grew up, and so I was really we were both very vulnerable of each other for my whole life. So us just communing in this way felt very particular. Well, I think it's also being an unwilling secret keeper is

its own kind of hell. I can only imagine because now as an adult, any time I have a secret from somebody, any kind of secret, even if I only keep it for ten minutes, it will give me a migraine. It will tear me, it will eat me up. It

makes me so uncomfortable. So to think about, like my sister Meg, being ten years old or eleven and a half, you know, raising an infant, and then having your mother implicate you in this secret and having to hold it for your whole life from somebody who you care about that much. I feel devastated for both of them that they had their child, that piece of their childhoods and that ability to bond with me taken away. Regular listeners of this podcast, no that trauma lives in the body.

Just listen to my bonus episodes with Dr Bessel vander Kolk and Dr Rachel Yehuda for starters. Seriously, if you haven't listened to those, I hope you will. Trauma lodges itself within us and becomes, in a very real physical sense, like a slumbering giant. In her graphic memoir calling Dr Laura Nicole illustrates this with the story of fainting goat syndrome. Yes, you heard that right. You've probably heard of fight or

flight as a response to a fearful situation. Well, there's also freeze, and there is apparently faint and it's not just for goats. There's something that I call fainting goat syndrome, and I've heard some other people call it this too, But basically, there's this kind of goat where if they get scared or overwhelmed, like if a predator is coming at them, they will freeze up. Their bodies will completely freeze up, and they'll have a temporary paralysis and just

fall over. And so they're called fainting goats. And I felt like I had this anytime somebody wanted to process, or lesbian process as I call it, basically just sitting down and talking about our feelings, talking about hard feelings. It was so overwhelming to me that I would get so tired and just fall asleep. And as a kid, my mom would joke to like, oh, my little narcaleptic, because I would I would just fall asleep all the time. I would fall asleep in the car, I would fall

asleep during a hard conversation. I would just it overwhelmed my whole body. And so around this time, when I was dealing with this with my sister and with my partner at the time, I would sometimes get so overwhelmed by all the information I would just start kind of nodding off or getting very drowsy. That's something I've outgrown

with time. I mean it just as a it's a it's been a actice of getting used to being vulnerable, saying my feelings, understanding that like criticism isn't the worst thing in the world, and that being accountable is okay. But it's been a long it's been a long road well, And it seems like you learned that sort of at

your mother's feet. You know, you describe what it was like to ever have any kind of confrontation with your mother or a fight with your mother, and you didn't grow up learning that it was okay to be emotionally vulnerable. Absolutely not. I mean I I learned to come at any kind of confrontation or uncomfortable conversation to get in a defensive crouch, to be just like all horns and thorns,

and just like clowse out like everyone defend themselves. Because I mean also when I grew up, if there was a vulnerable conversation, if there was a conversation with my mom that took a turn through outsized responses or anger or name calling, we're so unpredictable that I think it.

You know, I feel like my brain was always trying to find an order to it or a reason and being like, oh, well, maybe if she disunderstands that I didn't mean to hurt her, or maybe this, or I'm not quite sure what set her off, my brain will be working so fast trying to find reason in order

to the chaos that was in front of me. But I think it just overwhelmed my whole system, and it wasn't a place where I could take vulnerable, soft feelings and get any kind of have anybody emotionally meet me there or reflect back to me like oh that seems really hard or I'm so sorry that happened, you know, it wasn't that. It was either like somebody hurt you. Now there our enemy, or I hurt you. No, I didn't. I'll give you something to cry about. What are you

crying like? I got? I got the very soothing I'll give you something to cry about. That's kind of how my feelings were held when I was young. So Nicole is understandably terrified and resistant about the idea of confronting her mother. It's nearing the holidays, and her mother's spidy sense kicks into gear. She starts calling more than usual, stalking Nicole. The more Nicole keeps her at a distance,

the more her mother pursues. Nicole is also hiding from her mother the fact that her roommate, a woman named Radar, is actually her girlfriend. It's around this time that Nicole decides to reach out to Dr Laura. Yes, that Doctor Laura, the famous radio personality known for dolling out harsh advice.

Nicole's mom has been a fan of Doctor Laura's for many years, and Nicole grew up stuck in the car listening to her, So it seems somehow logical that she a left leaning lesbian who has recently learned that she's been lied to all her life about her dad called the conservative super hetero radio shrink whose m o is just plain mean. It's strange. I I didn't think about my mom here in the episode. I thought if she did hear the episode, it was a little bit like

I was like an edgewalker or something. I didn't imagine she was going to hear the episode because she had decided at some poy that Dr Laura was too mean and had stopped listening to her. Yet I her, you know, radical feminist gay daughter had continued to listen to Dr Laura. So I didn't think my mom would listen to it. But I did think if she did. Dr Laura felt like an adult in the room. It felt like a

different adult giving a perspective on something. I started listening to Dr Laura with my mom and I thought she I also thought she was mean. I was like, who is this evil woman yelling at people? And then something turned and I you know, it kind of went from me turning off the radio, to um suffering through it,

to then actually preferring it. And I liked I like to formulate quality, and I like somebody who just feels like there's a plan for life, and they know what to do, and they know what to tell you to do that there's like a lot of boundaries. She doesn't like the word boundaries, Dr Laura, but she is like

nothing but rules. She loves rules. And I realized at some point that actually I appreciated that she was telling people to choose their children over themselves or over their romantic relationships, and so I at some point started I just I think that I really enjoyed that element. You know,

there's so many other parts. I'm so used to the I don't know if it's cognitive distance or what, but you know, growing up as like a gay, radical feminist in a home where my mom had just converted to Catholicism, and there were so many things about her that didn't align with me, there were so many things I had to take with a grain of salt at all times that I was used to that grain of salt, and I just applied it to Dr Laura, where I was like, Okay,

she's very pro life, she's very anti feminist. She has questionable views about gay people. However, I appreciate that she's yelling at these people to choose their children because your mother did not choose you. I didn't feel chosen. No, so you called Dr Laura. You're actually thinking of what pseudonym you're going to use, and then you just is your real name? Yeah, I was. I was practicing in my head. I was like, are you going to say your name is Amber? They're twenty two, you know your

name Stacy. You live in Palm Springs. And I just was like, oh, Nicole, Nicole, here's my exact dature's exactly where I lived. I froze and I was like, my name is Nicole. And then I was compulsively honest and just rattled off my story. And Dr Laura got mad at me, even though I tried to follow the rules that I know. She doesn't want too many details. She wanted to know why I was mad at my mom for keeping this man from me, who probably could have found me if he wanted to anyway. So that was

Dr Laura's main takeaway. Oh yeah, she said, you've suffered enough, go have Christmas. She basically said that my mom had created stability for me today and I should appreciate that instead of bringing up the past and sing it all up. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. M Nicole goes home and heeds Dr Laura's advice. She doesn't talk to her mom about any of it, not the massive lie about her dad, not the fact of

her sexuality, none of the secrets. Meanwhile, Radar has made her promise that she'd confront her mom by saying, all in one go, I'm gay, who's my dad? I've decided to stay closeted. And I just had an incredible migraine the whole time. You know, my mom at by this point, had reached substability with my you know, she had been with my current stepdad for many years. They had the same house that I was in from high school forward. She really, you know, she said at the guest room.

She put her dogs in jingle bell collars, She made me all my favorite foods. She was really trying to host me. And I grew up feeling an allegiance to her that she instilled in me. So it felt like anything. I felt like a little bit like don't go against the family. It felt like a betrayal. I felt like not telling her I knew this information, and actually me even discovering her secret, I felt like I had somehow

betrayed her or I was feeling shame. Instead of me being like, oh, this is someone's going to be accountable to me, it just was like me feeling like I had betrayed her. And then I was like, and now I have this secret that I'm gay and I can't tell her, and it's going to disappoint her, and everything's

going to disappoint her or betray her. And you, Wilso, had the additional pressure of the fact that you knew that Radar was going to be really pissed if you came home and you hadn't told your mother the truth,

particularly about being gay. Yeah, it was you know, Radar somebody who had come out really young and who was butch in a way where she couldn't hide that she was gay, and so it fell to her like a betrayal to our relationship and also like me using a kind of privilege as a betrayal to her to like go and just you know, pass as a straight person and pretend like she was my roommate and pretend like this whole life we had built together with like too many dogs in a band and a house, you know,

we were partnered, and to pretend like that person was my roommate felt like a betrayal to her. She's somebody who had no choice but to live in her honesty, and she was seeing me make a different choice. Nicole returns home, back to her life with Radar, all the unsaid words and feelings still stuck inside of her. What's more,

now her romantic relationship is on the rocks. So I came home from Kansas, and shortly thereafter, you know, I had kind of been able to get away with not thinking about the dad issue because I had built a chosen family, you know, as a queer person and a person who came from a fraud household. I had a lot of stock in chosen family and my community, my artistic community, and then my relationships with my queer friends

and with my partner. And when I got home, I found out pretty soon after that my partner, Radar, had been cheating on me and then replaced me in our band with someone that she had been cheating on me with.

And so all at once it was like my chosen family of the person who I lived with, who I had partnered with, whose dogs I had taken care of, who I had let room my house, this person had left me, and not only that, she had implicated community members like people who I trusted with my creative projects and friends of mine. They knew about it or they

were part of it. And it just I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me and I hit what at that time was my complete rock bottom, and I just felt like I had nothing left to lose. I felt so low that it didn't matter to me what my mom said. I just already like the worst heartbreak I could possibly handle happened. And so I just was like, you know what, I'm almost again aggressively wanting

to come visit Portland's. And I was like, all right, if this lady wants to come visit Portland's so bad, she needs to know everything before she buys a ticket, because I don't want her to buy a ticket under false pretenses. And so I just emailed her and I said, you know, Radar was not my roommate. She was my girlfriend. We were in love and now we're not very sad, and that's the secret I've been keeping from you. But I know that you have a secret to I found

out that my dad was alive. Nobody told me. I found out from a psychic and um, I just want you to know that. And she didn't respond for a few days, but she later told me that she cried for three days and three nights and her husband almost took her to the hospital because she couldn't stop crying, which I I don't even know if that's the thing. But she finally wrote me back at a camera, which she basically spun it as he was a bad guy

and he abandoned you and I was protecting you. She basically I'm sorry, you're heartbroken, and basically, you know, in her classic fashion of people becoming the enemy. Then Radar became her enemy for breaking my heart, and she came to visit. And the way that my mom is, I had known that if I came to her with this,

she would defend herself. She would get in that low defensive crouch and find a way to spin it so that she didn't have to acknowledge blame or that she had made this decision out of shame and then really had to stick with it for so long. And that's exactly what happened. So it was a rather anticlimactic series of events. You're you know, you're finally coming out and telling your mother that you know about your father. Yeah, it was almost like I was telling her that I

was bad, like I had to steal myself. I had tried to say, like, you know, let's just clear the board and just start from scratch, and she was like, we are not equals. I am your mother, so we couldn't start from scratch. And it wasn't a moment in which I was parented. It was this anti climactic moment where I had to kind of put on my old armor from when I was a kid and was vulnerable. Um, but now I wasn't adult. And she was sitting in my living room and she was like, yeah, he abandoned you,

he didn't want you. But I'm essentially the hero because I did want you. And guess what, I'm not going to make a big deal out of you being gay, basically, like she was like, I'm not going to abuse emotionally abuse you for being a homosexual. So you're welcome, and I saved you from your debt. You're welcome. It was kind of like that. It was kind of like, you're welcome, and then I had to forge this path on my own. So there it all is. Or so Nicole thinks the

information about David, her father. She occasionally does half hearted Google search that leads to a dead end. Maybe there's nothing more to know. Maybe she should leave well enough alone now, maybe this David really is a bad guy. But eventually she gets serious she wants to know more. I honestly only did it at that moment for the

sake of my art in my book. There was something in me that felt so compelled to tell people about this story within the Kookie framework of I called Dr Laura that I toured the country with this story, and I got a literary agent who was like, will you would you consider doing a graphic memoir about this? And I always wanted to do that because I've always been

drawing comics and doing diaries. And I got, you know, a few years into this graphic memoir, and it just felt like I needed to do it in service of the book and in service of my art. What's so interesting to call is that I think sometimes that for those of us who are artists and writers, that we actually kind of need the permission that the making of the work grants us in a way, like it's too scary to anxiety producing. There's too much resistance to it

to just go ahead and do it. But if you're doing it for the book, you know, or you're doing it for the story, then suddenly there's just more permission. There's a feeling of like, well, I have a job to do and so I have to do it, when in fact, really deep down on some level, I think we really want to do it. Does that resonate at all completely? And it's not like I been paid like a trillion dollars for this book and I had an editor saying you better find him, like it was none

of that. It really was me. You know, there was a draft of the book that existed where I don't find him, but it just, yeah, there was something that compulsed me to do it. But it feels like doing it in service for my art, like my art maybe exists for some other kind of soul piece of me

that I wouldn't acknowledge otherwise for whatever reason. So I put some money into a detective website and I found David with He has a very common last name, and I found him connected to my mom, and then I saw him connected to another woman named Tina and some kids. And what my sister Mega told me that he had a couple of sons named Brendan and Jason. So I went on Facebook again with this new information and I found Brennan and Jason, and then I found my dad's

name and I clicked on it. But the person I was very young. The person looked like they were maybe like in their mid to late twenties, and he was very handsome, but he was connected to all these people I had seen on that detective website. I liled him right away. As soon as I found him, I just said, you know, this is probably gonna sound crazy, but I think I might be your sister. Is your dad's name, David. I was told he was dead my whole life. I found out he was alive through a psychic and I

just wanted to know. I think we might be related, and if you have any information, I would really love it, but if not, I understand. And he wrote me back right away. He brought me back within a day and said, yeah, I did know David. I you know, I did know him, and I actually have heard about you. He said he was heartbroken that your mom told him she was going to tell you that he was dead. And I said, oh, well, you know you're talking about in the past. Tense. I

heard he was a dead beat. He must have left you too. Do you know if there's any way I can find him? You know, how long was he in your life? And he said, oh, you know, he was around for my whole life. He was a great dad. He was not a con man or a dirt bag at all. He was my football coach. And I'm so sorry to tell you, but you he died like a year ago. He missed him by just about year ago, and um, it's too bad. I heard that he had your baby picture in his wallet for his entire life.

I felt the weight of my mom's secret hit me. I've been missing the point all this time, um, because I just never really understood what a dad was for. But there was something about hearing that he wasn't a dirt bag and that he had always wanted to find me, or that he had always thought about me, And I just felt the full implication of everything, and also the implication of them telling me he was a dirt bag, which is what led me to stall for so long

that I missed him by a year. Did now meeting a new half sibling, you know, this half brother, has that been something that has been healing in any way to have like some some connection to David through through

his son. Yeah, you know, A couple of things happened after that where I went to Texas and I met David Jr. I also have a sister named Summer in my dad's widow, Tina, and they are so warm and they're so close, and they were so excited to tell me about my dad, who they still I mean, you know currently it's been a long time since he died, and they will still tear up to this day because they miss him so much and they loved him so much, and so they have such a It really helps fill

out the picture of who I was told he was needing. David Jr. In Summer. Of course I noticed, like we have the same eyes. My sister was like, you have the same nail beds. It was all these things. But I also after that, I was found via Facebook by my grandma, my dad's mom, because my book came out. My grandma found me and she had been looking for

me my whole using telephone books. You know, I thought a piece of this feeling of comfort for meeting David Jr. And their side of the family, but also it was so different than how I had heard he was that. I had to take that with a grain of salt because I feel like the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But meeting my grandma was the feeling, like I heard you say that, you know, meeting your dad it felt like the country you were from. That's how

it felt when I met my grandma. When I met David's mom is it felt like I understood biology for a second, and I understood that piece of it and finding people that spoke a language that was the same as mine that I had been born with. Where did this leave you in terms of your mom? And you know now that you know the depths and the breadth and the implications and the ripple effect of what she chose to do by keeping secrets and telling lies, what

do you do with that? I still don't know. After calling Dr Laura came out, my mom gave it a one star Amazon review, and it's under her real name. She's very you know, she's a real anti fan. And after the book came out she wrote me and she was like, oh, I've heard you to head your book about your pitiful life, and you should write about how much the George's family loved you. Maybe I'll write a book. Maybe I'll write a book about how much I loved how you were so loved. And I was like, okay,

you can. And my stepdad started calling me, be like I forbid you to talk to your mother about your supposed father and your so called lifestyle, and they're really bullying me. She wrote all that without even reading. She wrote all that from the description, and then I think she read it, and she sent me a voicemail, and in that moment she really changed his moment to moment. But in that moment, she was teary and she just said I read your book. I'm humbled, I'm sorry, ye,

And that voicemail was enough for me. It was a huge moment, you know, as you can imagine from everything I told you about how these things go and how vulnerability goes. Was huge. Had she ever apologized to you before about anything? Never in my life had I ever been apologized to buy her for anything she had done. The first time a friend apologized to me as an adult, when I was like twenty one or twenty two, I

couldn't handle it and I burst into tears. I had never been apologized to I didn't even know that I deserved that, or I was worth that, or like that someone could be accountable to me, or acknowledge that they had hurt me. So basically, my mom and I live in different realities. She will refer to the book as a fairy tale. If it's in passing, she will jokingly

refer to it to me as her favorite book. And recently on the phone, she went off the rails and called me a backstabber and said it was so backstabby, and said that, you know, she was the one who held me close, she was the one who wanted me, and how could I do this to her? And so we're just we're doing some different realities. And I just I'm trying to accept the love that she has right now, and I'm trying to just give her love back. You know,

she's in her seventies, she is mellowed. She just wants to tell me she's praying for me some mean religious medallions and like recipes. And I want to be able to accept that as much as I can. You know, it's just it's heart. It is what it is, and I understand some of this. It's just gonna be mine to deal with, Like Okay, I have forgiven her for

keeping this secret about my dad. But as time goes on and I learned more information, I keep finding out new things that I have to forgive her for, you know, like meeting my grandma and having my grandma say, oh, I tried to keep in touch with you, and your mom told me I could only speak to you on the phone if I didn't say who I was, And I told you I was just a family, a friend, like my grandmother on her deathbed and tears saying I try to call you when you were five years old,

and your mom said, you'll never talk to Nicole again unless you can only hear her voice right now if you tell her that you're a friend of the family, and like that kind of thing, and learning that it's just I feel like it's like I have a little backpack full of like you know, when you get to it, you know, forgive people for these things. Every time I've cleaned it out, something else gets dropped. In That Family's Secrets is a production of My Heart Media. Dylan Fagin

and Bethman Mcalouso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a secret, you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is eight Secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter

at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to know about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check out my New York Times best selling memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,