Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
This episode contains discussion of suicide and self harm. Listener discretion is advised.
I wanted to forget all the places I had slept, no one knowing where I was, always one step away from tragedy. All I'd wanted growing up was to read books and study, but instead I learned how few acceptable ways there were to need help. You had to be perfect, deserving, hurt in just the right way. Even then, adults were
so constrained in what they could offer. Everyone who dealt with disadvantaged kids, from therapists to college admissions officers, treated us as if we could overcome any abuse or neglect with sheer force of will.
In the present tense, I was sick of pretending to be so resilient, so I preferred to keep my mouth shut.
That's Emmy Neatfeld, software engineer and author of the recent memoir Acceptance, and Emmy's is, in fact a story of profound resilience, not the kind that is pretend or performed, but the real, true kind of inner compass that points again and again toward belief and hope and home. 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 was born in Minneapolis, and I lived in the.
City for the first five years of my life, and then my parents and I moved to a suburb just outside the city, where we lived basically through elementary school. My mom was a crimecy photographer and my dad stayed at home with me.
We were pretty really.
I was a state Bible memorization champion, and I really loved going to school and reading and learning. And I didn't have that many friends. I was kind of a nerd and was often on keemps with like on brush hair, dirty sock. But I really loved school and studying and had all these big dreams for my future, mostly dreams that involved like glorifying God and disproving evolution.
What did religion mean to you in those early years?
It was a place where I felt like I could be myself. I did not have good social skill. I came from a very strict household, and so I feel like I was not having as much fun as other people my age were having. My dad had a pretty bad temper, but I felt like in religion. I could imagine this future in which I would be like the most about, the most pious, and would be really rewarded and seen by God for my devotion. I had an older half brother, and he was the son of my
mom's first marriage. He really loved me. He is a great brother to me, but my dad felt a lot of hostility towards.
Him, and starting around when I was.
Around three years old, I was really prevented from seeing him.
And you were described as an only child, right, I mean they wanted you to think of yourself as.
An only child. Yeah.
Even my mom, who would never say that my brother wasn't anything but kind and loving to me. She would say, like, you know, you're the prototypical only child. She would describe me that way in from other people, even though I had a brother who I lived with for the first years of my life.
Any excels in school. She's a bit socially awkward, a self described nurse, very bookish. She loves to read and she loves to learn. One day, when she's nine years old, her dad picks her up from school and makes an announcement. He tells her something she's supposed to keep secret.
When I was in fourth grade.
My dad picked me up from school one day and told me I'm changing my name to Michelle. And I was a little bit shocked, but mostly I just wanted clarification. So I asked her, you know, does this mean you're going to be a woman now? And she said yes, and that I should you she her pronouns, but not tell my mom. It was still a secret from her. In Minnesota in two thousand and two, nobody around me had ever even heard of somebody being tramped, Like there
was no kind of cultural touchstones. There was no like Caitlyn Jenner or Transparent or even Oprah featuring somebody trans. This is pretty new and not something that I that I really knew about.
Like my church was very.
Anti gay, and I had it ingrained in me that being gay was a sin from a very young age, but I didn't really know how being trans was related, if it was being gay, and even if we were going to stay in the church anymore.
And so in Michelle asking you to not tell your mother, she was asking you to keep a secret.
When she asked me not to tell my mom, I recognized it as Michelle will tell my mom. Eventually that she's not ready yet, And it made a lot of sense to me that it.
Would be something where you wanted to be really prepared.
But it did put me in an awkward position, especially because I grew up with this really strong sense of morality. And on one hand, I wasn't supposed to lie to my parents, and keeping a secret can easily feel like lying. And on the other hand, I was supposed to obey my parents, especially my father, which is this role that Michelle had been playing. And luckily I only had to keep that secret for a couple months because Michelle did come out to my mom.
In my head, I really imagined that.
Michelle was going to come out and then my parents were going to stay together, and then it was going to take some time for Michelle to lay this groundwork so that we could continue being a family. And when Michelle did come out about two or three months after telling me, I was completely unprepared that my mom was not okay with it. My mom felt really betrayed, and I remember being in my bedroom and listening to my parents downstairs at the kitchen table, and Michelle was crying and telling.
My mom, you know, Jesus would accept me.
How I am, and my mom replied, I'm not Jesus and called my dad by her dead name. You know, I think I held out hope at that point that my parents were.
Going to find a way to make it work and they were going to stay together, especially because the church we were in really thought of divorce as a sin, and so I thought, you know, how could it be worse for my parents to stay together than for them to get divorced. But my mom told me a few weeks later that she was going to move out and once again told me not to tell Michelle.
After my parents separated.
I continued living with Michelle in the same house where we'd been, and I really wanted to stay with her. My parents started going through this divorce process and they were not going to agree on anything. They'd had a very contentious relationship and it was going to be an even more conscientious divorce. So I remember being taken into all these offices with social workers who asked me what I wanted, and I said, you know, I want.
To live with Michelle. She had been the person who was home with me, you know, every.
Day after school. We had that relationship. She wasn't perfect, but she was there and then the same social workers would tell me that I was too young and it didn't matter what I wanted, they were going to figure it out. And I encountered again and again people would assume, like, oh, you.
Must be really traumatized by the transition. It must have really.
Screwed you up, and basically viewed Michelle as a bad parent for transitioning, or as a bad.
Person or bad influence. And you know, it had been kind of little shocking, but I was nine, Like, I got.
Used to it really quickly, and even though Michelle had been really harsh at times and a strict disciplinarian, I don't think that she was always a great parent to me before that, but it all made a lot more sense once she came out and she was, you know,
kinder to me and nicer to me. But nobody around really seemed to recognize that, and instead I felt like everybody was just listening to my mom, and everyone had a lot of sympathy for my mom because her marriage had dissolved in this way, and you know, I think it is hard, but I think Michelle also deserves sympathy. Q It became extremely frustrating to me to feel like I was sharing what I wanted and it didn't matter. My mom was this super charismatic woman. She was really
really smart. As a girl, she had dreamed about going to Stanford and she had not gotten in and felt like it was a really close call. And she told everyone who would listen about her high IQ and her SAT score. And this sounds like something that would be really annoying, but she was just so personable and so easy to talk to, very gregarious, so she could convince people of almost anything. And meanwhile, she from the time that I basically could remember.
She was a big clearance shopper.
I remember coming to her office at work and seeing all of these bags from Target that were filled with like dozens of watches Winnie the Pooh watches printed with a tigger character with the little orange tags them that showed the low price, and it was such a good deal that she bought one hundred and my dad would not have tolerated that, so instead she had these bags like.
In her office at work, in her car, and it was something that.
I knew I was not supposed to talk about, otherwise she'd get in trouble with my dad.
So there was this contrast between this charismatic, articulate woman, very intelligent, you know, charming and seemingly together in some ways, and you know sort of the chaos that was lurking just beneath the surface of that.
Absolutely, yeah, I think my mom's chaos and her charm.
Developed in pandem where the charm was a defense that she could use. It's somebody disagree with her or they tried to challenge her, she always had a respond and she could always justify what she was doing. So I don't remember her ever really admitting that she was wrong or imperfect, or that there was something that could change the weekend before I started sixth grade, Michelle came home from a hearing.
And told me that my mom had one custody and that I.
Was moving in with her, and that she was going to arrive any minute then. And then she went to her room and slammed the door, and I was sitting there just completely shocked.
I had been.
Prepared to start sixth grade at middle school with my best friends, and now is going to be in a different school district, living with my mom in a different part of the Twin Cities.
And I went up to my room, you know, my space covered in tears.
I packed all my stuff into these black plastic trash bags before my mom arrived, and that night I moved in with her.
Before the custody evaluators came to do a home visit.
She had cleaned out her apartment by moving all of these boxes of stuff into an adjacent apartment. We lived in a duplex, and during that time, the top floor, which she normally rented out, became a storage facility for her junk. But by the time that I moved in, there were boxes of photo albums, receipts, packaging, empty water bottles, already kind of encroaching on our living area, you know. And I had hoped that my parents really split custody.
But a few weeks after my mom won custody, Michelle came to see me at school and she was moving across the country. And that was the last time that I ever saw her. And you were how old I was ten, about the turn eleven.
Suddenly, Emmy is living a whole new life. She's in a new place, in a new neighborhood, in an entirely new family dynamic. She's alone with her mother, whose chaos is tangible. Emmy's mom is hoarding amassing all sorts of stuff that spills into every corner of Emmy's world.
At first, I was really lonely and sad, and I did my best to move forward and to make new friends, make new hobbies. But as the year went on, it became increasingly difficult to live with.
My mom in her house.
Almost every night after school, she would pick me up and we would go shopping, and we had a rotation of the late local drug store, target, the grocery store, home depot, and we would stay out at these places, laid into the night. My mom had legal debt from the divorce, and then pretty soon she had these big credit card bills from shopping, and the piles of stuff in our home were just closing in on me and my mom. Maybe she saw that I was struggling, and
she took me to therapy. And I think a lot of parents in her position they would take their kids the therapy if they could, but it was not really a place for me.
To talk about how I was feeling.
Instead, we went to the family therapy and my mom told the therapist like, there's something wrong with Emmie, And her first complaint was telling him I think Emmy has add and my mom had attention deficit disorder, and she thought maybe my brother had to and so she told the doctor, you know, she's disheveled, she's chronically late, and you know, I was ten, right, how can a ten
year old be chronically late? But he gave my mom a questionnaire and my teacher a questionnaire, and after cube appointments, I was diagnosed and.
Referred for medication.
I was perscribed concerta and my first week taking it, I hit a kid over the head with a textbook. And then I was given Vanak to help me deal with the panife that I felt from the concerta, and my mom gave me her leftover adderall and the doctor prescribed me adderall on the condition that my mom would stop giving me.
Medication that wasn't prescribed.
And it just went from like one medication to another, and after a while I believed that I was really.
Sick because I believe what the doctor.
Said, like, oh, this medication is going to fix me. It's going to make me feel better, and that the problems that I'm feeling are all in my head and there's something wrong with me. And when the drugs weren't working, it felt like it was just confirmation that I was messed up and that nothing was going to help me, and then I was never going to be happy.
We'll be right back. In addition to feeling unwell and unhappy, Emmy is also feeling frustrated nobody is listening to her. She wants the medical professionals to actually evaluate her. She wants them to pay attention to her mom's disposition too, to come see where and how they live.
In my house, there was one rule where which was don't let people inside, especially not people from the government. And even though we had that rule, when my mom took me to the doctor, I told them, I said, you need to come see our house, see how we're living. For months, we didn't have hot water and we couldn't
take a shower. It was the winter Minnesota, and it was all because the pilot light was off on the water here, but we legitimately couldn't get access to it for six months because that's how bad the boarding was.
And I told all of these professionals, therapists, doctors, social workers, and nobody came or even treated it like there was a possibility that something real was going on at home that was responsible for the way that I was feeling, and nobody flagged either that it was weird that my mom was taking me to the doctor, first because she thought I had add and then adding on other problems that she thought I was having, like seizures or eating disorder.
Just one thing after another. She was taking me to the doctor, sometimes two or three times a week.
And even though the doctors could be how many times I've been in, nobody seems.
To pull the alarm or come to interview or even investigate.
This is all taking a serious toll on Emmy. The myriad medications are basically fighting with each other in her system, and she begins to exhibit a number of alarming symptoms, both physical and psychological.
I did become really depressed, and I started hurting myself, mostly scratching myself To say to him, I did start making myself pro love and not eating and abusing adderall that was left over from the medication and all this stuff was expected of me, and I felt like I was doing what people expected. And also it helped me try to deal with the feeling of not having any control over my life and just feeling so bad that I had to do something to make myself feel better.
And when I was thirteen, I was going off of one medication and having really bad withdrawal, and I had been suicidal for a while, just feeling like there was really no way out and that the medication wasn't going to help me, adults weren't going to help me, and.
I really thought it's going to be like this for the rest of my life. So that summer I overdosed and tried to kill myself.
After Emmy's suicide attempt, she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. There she encounters the first medical professional who truly listens to her, who recognizes that perhaps Emmy isn't the troubled one here, perhaps it's her mom.
When there was finally one psychiatrist who thought, Okay, my mom is the.
Problem, my mom got really.
Suspicious of him, and she took me out of the hospital against medical advice. He had contacted Hennepin County where I lived, and I had then referred to a social worker. And this wasn't like a Child Protective Services complaint. She was a case for her who worked with teenage girls who were deemed thick.
Enough to be their own problems.
But finally she wasbody who my Mom was not able to shake, like she could not just make this woman go away. Ingrid had been working as a social worker for a number of years and she came to my house one afternoon. And I had been begging people for years, you know, come.
See how we live.
And then she was finally there. And it was a summer afternoon when my mom was at work, and she probably knew this, and she asked me, would you let me inside?
Can I just come in?
I immediately recognized that, you know, it felt like a trap, right. She didn't have a warrant to come in or anything like that, and so if I let her in, it was going to be my choice. And even though I'd wanted people to come, I could imagine what was going
to happen if Ingrid did come inside. And I just I kept looking at her car, which was this white like government looking forward, and I knew that if I opened the door, I would be taken away and I would be placed in Child protectives and Services again involved, I would be placed in the foster care system, and my mom's house would probably be condemned. And even though my mom had so many.
Challenges and was doing things that really really hurt me.
She was also my biggest advocate and I couldn't imagine hurting her like that. You know, when the social worker when Ingrid came to my house, I felt completely hopeless about my future. But I thought, at least if I stay with my mom, I can kill myself, because she wasn't supervising me to twenty four to seven, and.
She opened doors that otherwise wouldn't be open.
She had just proven her power by signing me out of the hospital against medical advice, and that gave me the sense of there's certain things that parents can do that nobody else in the world can do for me. And at the time, it made me feel hopeless in a way because it's like this is the parent that I'm stuck with, right and she is my only hope. Shortly after that, I was hospitalized again, and from there
I was sent to a residential treatment center. But when I was in the hospital, something unexpected happened, which is that I was sent to a even disorder unit in the suburbs. And before that, I I've been in psych words in the city filled with kids who were a lot like me, who were working class like I was, and there wasn't a lot of like talk about our future. But at this hospital eating disorder unit, the doctor asked
me where do you want to go to college? And it was the first time anyone in a medical capacity had taken such a serious interest in my future. And even though I ended up being taken from that place in restraints in an ambulance and taken.
To this locked facility, I had.
This sense of purpose for my life that I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to go to college. Early I was living in this facility that was locked three times by three different doors. There were bars are over the windows, and we spent hours a day in quiet time, just sitting alone in our room. But when I got an act test prep book, I felt like, for the first time my life had this purpose and that if I could just study and I get a good act score, I might be able to go to college in the next few.
Years and have the escape that I was looking for, the.
Escape that really didn't feel possible when I was living with my mom, and so I put really all of my hope into this idea of going to college, and it was for me a reason to live. But the adults who were who were watching me and the other kids. They did not approve of this ambition, and they told me, you know, you're avoiding your problems.
You're not still busing on treatment.
And they took away the Act book.
And all my other books and said that.
From then on, I was only allowed to read appropriate teen fiction that they had specifically approved. And when they did this, my mom was the person who advocated on my behalf, and they didn't listen to her, and they didn't give me the books back. But she was the person who was there saying, you know, my daughter's smart, she can go to college. You should honor that about her and let her read the book.
What do you make of that, Emmy, That particular way of your mother advocating for you, as you say, it's one thing that you really shared and were kind of aligned with her about, was that that you could have that kind of ambition and that you could end up going to you know, prestigious university, and that you were that smart.
My mom really believed in me. She had so much face that I was brilliant, I was a genius, that I was destined to do great things. And when she talked like this in front of doctors, it made her sound crazy, Like I could tell that something was changing in the eyes of the medical professionals when they heard her speak about me like this, almost like they wanted to prove her wrong. And in hindsight, I do think that a lot of my mom's faith in me was irrational.
And I grew up with this narrative for my mom of her saying all the time, I almost got into Stanford, you know, I almost got into Stamford. And that was how she interpreted a rejection from Stanford, was I almost got in. But you know, as a kid, and I believed it because she was really smart, you know, even though she didn't go to Stanford. And if one of the smartest people I knew was telling me that I was smart, I was like, okay, I better.
Believe in this, you know. And it didn't really matter to me as.
A kid if it was rational or not, because I felt that warmth of having someone believe in me. And how even though there were all these ways in which she was failing me, there was this one really important way in which she had my back. After I got out of the residential treatment center, I went into foster care.
And most kids who are going into foster care it's after an investigation from child Protective Services where they deemed the parent unfit because of abuse or neglect, and there's a court proceeding and the parents have their rights taken away.
And that was not what happened in my case.
Instead, I was deemed to need extra emotional support that my mom couldn't give, and so it went through another channel where basically I was placed with a foster home without really an investigation or looking into my mom, and she maintained the power to agree to let me go to foster care and also to remove me at any time.
I was placed with a family I called the foster parents, Dave and Jan, and they lived in a suburb about an hour away from Minneapolis, in the big mcmmansion on a cul de sac and in a really good school district. I had been afraid that foster here was going to be like this place where there were a million kids being neglected. It wasn't bad at all in my case, and I had pretty much the best case scenario, but it was not easy. Dave and Jan were taking me
in trying to do a good thing. It's really hard to find homes for teenagers, and they were offering that, but we quickly ran into conflict, especially around school, where I wanted to be studying and doing homework, and Dave and Jan were convinced that I was miserable and depressed, not because I was in foster care or because my family was spelling apart, but because I was too ambitious for my own good, and they wanted to help me by teaching me that I was normal like everybody else,
not special, and have a normal life, which was a life just like there. And all of this was made worse by conflict with my mom, who was constantly pushing their boundaries and being critical of them. But she wasn't the bad guy. There was no bad guy besides me because there had never been an investigation or a trial or anything like that.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Emmy's time with Dave and Jan is made fraught and complicated by the fact that her mother is always late, very late whenever she comes to see Emmy or drop her off after a visit. She's constantly impinging on their plans, which is ironic because Emmy's mother had identified Emmy as
the one who had issues with chronic lateness. Emmy has also started a new high school, which she loves, but her schoolwork becomes a point of friction with Dave and jam.
At my new high school, I really flourished, especially in art classes, and one of the early big conflicts that I had with Dave and Jan was over my advanced placement.
Art history homework.
I had to print out pictures of famous artwork and attach them to note cards. And one day, after I sent my images to the family printer, I was intercepted by Dave, and that night Jan called me down to the TV room and asked me what I was doing with the pictures and that they did not want to have pornography in their home.
And I was so confused.
About what they were talking about until she showed me a sheet that had to print it out black and white picture of Michelangelo's David. That was what she meant by pornography. It was just such a different culture than the way that I was raised. It was just a completely different attitude towards life, which peeped into all of our interactions.
As a result of yet another tenuous home dynamic, Emmy is backed even further into a corner. She continues to self harm. She cuts herself and makes herself throw up. She believes there's nothing else to do and nowhere else to go until there is summer camp.
When I was in foster hair my photography feature miss Day. She was one of the few people who.
Knew about my living situation, and she would ask me if I miss my mom.
She knew about my visits.
With her because my mom and I would take photos together, and she suggested that I applied.
To summer camp.
She wrote me a letter of recommendation and I got into this photography camp at interlock In in Michigan.
It was very complicated for me to actually go.
My foster parents did not support the plan, and going to camp meant that I would give up my foster care placement and I would have to find a new home if I came back to foster care. But while I was at summer camp, I was recruited for the boarding school that interlock In ran, and I ended up getting a scholarship to attend for my junior year of high school. I said that I was able to leave foster care and really focus on my dream, which was to attend in Ivy League college.
How were you mentally and emotionally during that time, you know, once you're closer to your dream. You're living away from home, you're living away from your mother, you're no longer in foster care, You're at this prestigious and very art centered and academically challenging place. How were you when, for the first time in your life, you were in a place that sort of matched up with who you were.
When I got to camp, I was so amazed by just how happy I was. I had felt for so many years like an outcast or unwanted or bad, and suddenly I was just the thousands of other teenage artists, and we were all aware the same uniform, which feels like such a small thing, but for once I actually
fit in. And a few days into summer camp there was a barbecue, and afterwards I went to go make myself grow up, just because, you know, a routine that I had, And before I did it, I really stopped to ask myself why, and I found that I no longer really had a reason that for once in my life, I felt happy, And once I got to boarding school, distresses of my life outside did not go away, and it was a stressful time, in part because the Great recession was really at its full swing, and I worried
about my financial future, but I just had so much more emotional stability being in.
This place where I felt supported.
And I was free in many ways from my mom and from my foster parents at some of these adults who are well meaning but were not able to actually help me.
Interlockn is finally a place where no one is stopping Emmy from dreaming big. She begins to look at colleges and wants to aim sky high. She discovers a college counselor based in New York City, a woman named Kat Cohen, who runs a company called Ivy Wise. Emmy notes on doctor Kat's website that she does some pro bono work, so she does what she's always done. She asks for help, and this time she gets it. Doctor Kat takes Emmy on. She believes in her. Emmy begins the college application process,
applying pretty much exclusively to Ivy League universities. But then the thin letters of rejection begin to drift in, and when she receives these we regret to inform you letters, she resorts to old behaviors. She starts cutting herself again.
When I applied to college, I had so much riding on the decisions. I thought, if I get in, my life is going to be totally different.
I'm going to have stability.
I'm going to continue to be in this place free from my mom's influence, where I can be myself and I can be stable. And so when I applied to Yale early and then I was rejected, I was completely crushed because I had really let myself hope that the waiting would be over and that my future would be set. It became clear that things were not going to be that easy for me. And so I did the only thing that I could think of, and I went and
I taught myself. And I hadn't done it for a year and a half at that point, but I reverted to it and it made me feel calm, And then I also felt dumb. I felt like it was a melodramatic thing to do.
Emmy ends up completely revising her applications and essays to better reflect her truth. She writes what is known in the world of academic admissions as a letter of extenuating circumstances.
Writing my college applications felt like the hardest thing that I.
Had ever done.
Doctor Kat told me that I had to be completely straightforward with colleges about my parents, about what they did, about my background, and I didn't even know where to art because even though I had been through all of this therapy and quote unquote treatment, I had never really talked frankly about my parents' problems. It was always I'm the problem, or I did something bad and I need to confess.
And so I found myself trying.
To write these essays basically telling colleges everything I had ever done wrong because I didn't have another model for looking at the world, and doctor Kat told me, you have to just say I was in foster care, I was sleeping in my car during school breaks, I was homeless, and that felt like such a betrayal to my parents. It felt like, even though it was actually accurate, it felt untrue because I was so used to taking responsibility that laying out what had happened to me just felt
completely wrong. But at the same time, I knew that my future depended on it, so I.
Really had no choice but to do it.
After a few excruciating months of waiting, not being able to sleep, really engaging in bad habits, I finally on April first, twenty ten, got the email from Harvard saying that I had gotten in. I was at the public library on spring break, all alone, and my scream just builled up the atrium of the library and I ran outside, just.
Screaming yes, yes, yes, yes.
And I knew that my life was going to change, even though I could only begin to imagine the ways that that it would be. After I graduated from Harvard, I was working as a software engineer at Google, and I lived in Silicon Valley and then in New York with a guy that I met while I was an intern.
His name is Byron, and he was one of the few.
People who I told about my past, only really the broad stroke, but he still loved me, and I had been really worried that I wasn't going to be able.
To have a normal relationship.
But we were really happy together and set up our first apartment together in Manhattan, which had been a dream of mine for years.
And I was getting promoted at work.
And just had the type of life that I had fantasized about when I was a teenager and that I never really believed could be mine or that I could be capable of enjoying.
And where was your mother during this period of time.
My mom texted me a lot, especially once Tyne and I got engaged. She took it upon herself to help with our wedding by buying me things like, you know, two thousand candles for a daytime wedding in a venue that didn't allow eplain. Her texts were super well meaning, but they really highlighted for me all that we hadn't been talking about, both between us and for me.
And other people in my life.
And so, six weeks before the wedding, Byron and I were going out to Minnesota to finalize our preparations, and Byron's parents decided that they were going to come out to because they wanted to meet my mom.
And that was.
When I realized, you know, maybe I needed to tell them something, because even though I'd been dating Byron for four years and spent all those holidays with his family, I had only told them that I went to boarding school, and that was really all that they knew about my past.
And Byron as well.
Byron knew a little bit more. He knew that I had been in foster care and that I had self harmed, but he didn't really know all the details either, and so suddenly I was confronted with the decision of how much am I going to tell these people in my life and how are they going to treat me after they know. I called Iron's mom before our parents met, and I did tell her that my mom was a
hoarder and that I'd been with foster care. And when she came to meet them, it went as well as it possibly could have, but I was really shaken by the experience. I felt like, you know, there's more there that I'm not talking about, and I wanted more than anything to have a normal relationship with my mom. I still hadn't spoken to Michelle in many, many years, like since I was eleven, and I had come to accept
that Michelle we couldn't really be in contact. So my mom almost the one the one parent that I still.
Had, and I.
Had been in denial about the nature of our relationship until I really got married and started to have this this family of my own and had someone who could notice how I felt after my mom texted me or after our rare phone calls, and could see the way that all that we weren't talking about was weighing me down.
Even so many.
Years later, about a year after I got married, I started calling my mom and asking to talk about what she remembered, and I really believed that she would tell me her set of the story and we would find a middle ground that we could agree on and that would be kind of the foundation for our relationship moving forward.
One evening, I called.
Her and I asked her about a family therapy session that we'd had back when I was an eating disorder treatment, and she immediately shut it down and said that never happened.
We never had family therapy there. It's impossible.
And I was left totally stunned because I remembered this conversation so clearly, where she had told the therapist Emmy's really lost her breath and that that was what concerned her about my eating disorder. And it was so shocking. It felt like this isn't the kind of thing that I would make up. But I found myself questioning my
memory and my sense of reality. But I was an adult, and I had tools at my disposal that I hadn't had when I was a teenager, and I was able to get the insurance billing statements from my health insurance company back then and find the receipt for the therapy appointments that matched up with what I remembered, and that was how far I had to go in order to
convince myself that my memory was accurate. And my mom refused to see my side of things or acknowledge that she could be wrong or that things could happen that she didn't remember. And I found as I was trying to talk about these very real memories that had shaped my life, that she was unwilling to engage.
After I brought up some of.
These things, my mom would punish me with her silence, sometimes not messaging me for months at a time.
Once I started talking to other people from my.
Past, I learned so much many things that had been kept from me When I was a teenager. I had assumed that my brother and sister in law didn't want to see me because they thought that I was crazy and was bad influence on their kids, and meeting up with them and asking them was one of the hardest conversations.
That I've ever had, and I.
Was totally stunned when they told me that they tried to have me move in with them instead of going into fostercare. They had told my mom that they had an extra bedroom My sister in law was a stay at home mom of two boys, and they had plenty of space and room in their family, and my mom.
Completely goes to them.
Kinship placements, where kids live with relatives are really common in foster care, and most eight and the federal government have laws that stayd kids have a right with the family first. But in my case, even though everyone knew that I had an older brother, nobody talked to him, and I discovered that there were other opportunities as well.
I had other family members who, when they eventually learned about what was going on, expressed so much sadness that they hadn't known back then because they also had.
Extra room in their house.
And I had a mentor who was really essential to my life in high school, and I learned that even she had tried to take me in.
In her case it wouldn't work out.
But she had also filed multiple maltreatment reports with the Kinnecan County and it seemed like nothing had been done about them.
This really shook my world because even as an adult.
I had been living with this idea that I was bad and I was the problem, and then I was living with this really pessimistic idea that the way things unfolded for me was really the only way that they could have happened, and there was no use being upset because there were no better alternatives.
But then all of that.
Was challenged, and I was forced to confront how, you know, for all the ways that my mom loved me, she had made decisions that prevented me from having a relatively
normal adolescent surrounded by my family. That was really, really hard, but it also helped me forgive myself for the suffering that I went through as a teenager and some of the unhealthy decisions that I made, and stop seeing myself as responsible for what happened when I was a kid, and instead blamed the systems that really failed me and my family for keeping these secrets that prevented me from getting help.
Here's Emmy reading from her moving memoir, A powerful testament to the tenacity that allows us to overcome secrets and betrayals and instead of turning against ourselves, facing outward bravely and meeting our true selves in the wider world.
The more I researched, the more I realized how little I understood about my own adoleccums as a teenager. I'd only known what I was told, and many things had been kept from me. In the absence of all the facts and any larger context in which to understand them, I felt responsible for everything that transpire. Instead of making a life that would redeem the past an impossible feat, I.
Thought out a life I could live with.
For the first time, I felt lucky for the little things, to wake up in the morning in my own bed, to eat breakfast, to do my work. It was no longer so important to me to choose something great because I was happy to be alive, which.
Had seemed impossible and tenuous.
I became grateful for the passing of time, each milestone that brings me away from then into now, my marriage, buying an apartment, changing jobs one day, a child our own, for whom I swear I will not make the same mistake, so I know a fall short sum regard. On my wall, I have a poster that always reminds me of when I was growing up. A girl stares out the window at a city while a plane crosses.
In front of the moon.
Every time I see it, I say a prayer of gratitude for my younger felt for delivering me here into adulthood where I can bake biope with what I learned along the way.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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