Mermaid Manor

softness of our insights is sealed safely off forever. As I write this, my two toddlers are in the next room, cheerfully bolting out some interminable preschool song and throwing stuffed animals at each other. They're too young to ask me about my missing father or my never spoken of mother, or why I am the way I am. They're too young to understand how much they don't know. Then again, I haven't started lying to them yet. This is the story of digging out the biggest lie I was ever told.

That's Liz Shire, book editor, product developer, an author of the new memoir Never Simple. The graph to Lizz's book from the poet Adrian Rich goes like this. When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to re examine the universe to question the whole instinct and concept of trust for a while. We are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship or naming or

tenderness exists. We are brought close to formlessness. This is a story of lies, trust, and one woman's journey to be brought back from that bleak, jutting ledge and make herself whole. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and this good we keep from ourselves. I was born in New Yorkville, which is the very far east neighborhood in New York City. It is basically

falling off into the East River. And when you here grew up in New York City, I think a lot of people think gossip Girl, and that really could not have been further from the truth of my New York City. In the eighties and nineties, we were all very middle class um, a kind of Manhattan that doesn't really so

much exist anymore. I lived with my mother. We lived in a one bedroom apartment on eighty one Street, and it was a very typical setup for the time, where I lived in the bedroom and she had created out of the hall closet a little nook for herself where she had put a twin bed, and we lived there together. And I did not know at the time that it was unusual for a mother and daughter to share a home with nobody else there. It wasn't really true of

other people. I know once I got out to school, but as a small child, I didn't know any of that yet. And so there we worked, just the two of us together. Describe your mother for me. You know your mother during your childhood. My mother was an incredibly charming woman. She was brilliant. She had been an attorney when very few women were attorneys. She was one of the very few women in her law school class in

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

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

that she would illustrate her stories with. And she treated everything else in our lives as sort of incidental to the fact that we were going to have time together. So she would just take me out of school on a moment's notice it was a good sledding day in the park, or if there was something good at the map that she wanted to see when it wasn't too crowded. Um. And she just was not interested in anything that would get in her way. No, it doesn't sound like she

was very interested in rules. No, not particularly. And I thought everything in our lives was normal until I got to school and I started realizing that things and other kids lives weren't quite the same. My mother did not have a hold on her anger, and she had a lot of anger. There was no logical chain between an

occurrence and her reaction to the occurrence. So whether I did some the really terrible and misbehaved, or whether I left a water glass in the wrong place, you know, sort of one time out of every ten, the rage would come up, and it was like you know the movie The Terminator, It was like talking to her there with a red light would come on behind the eyes and the screaming would begin, and I would either lock myself in the bathroom or in the closet where just

sort of try to stay out of her reach. And you could see, if you were dumb enough to get close enough to see that there was just nobody driving the bus there, that she was completely out of control. And when the adrenaline wore off, then the self excoriation would come in. Then she would say to the ground, she would weep, what have I done to you? Why do I treat you like this? I'm so terrible and

such a terrible mother. Um, And I would just try to comfort her, because returning to that kind of normal before the rage was the best we could do. What did she actually look like when she would fly into one of these rages. So my mother was a small woman when she got pregnant with me. She didn't weigh an hundred pounds, and she had a sort of perfect blonde ploff if you can think of the seventies hair hairstyle of the with a flip in the front um.

And when she got really angry, you know, her face would turn red, the hair would flof up um and the spit would start flying. She would she would lose the ability to control her mouth or her body, and she became huge to me in my eyes, Like you know, was a very small child, and although she was not a large person, she became like a giant. What did you know about your father at that stage in your life? What was the story about your father and where he was?

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

married someone read out of college. They had been married for some time and divorced amicably, and because it was a second marriage, they had a very small ceremony. She had borrowed a pant suit from a friend, which she returned after they were done. They were only married for six months or so. He didn't have a living family, that didn't have a lot of friends. And one night he was driving and he got to a stop sign and he stopped, and the driver behind him didn't, and

he died instantly. And she was in such a storm of grief that she burned all his belongings, burned all the pictures of him, burned all the evidence that he had ever been there. And at the time, I believe this because you believe what your parents tell you. It wasn't until I was a little older that I started to realize that that story was extremely convenient. It didn't actually make any sense at all. It didn't fit together,

it didn't fit with our lives. You know, people and just disappear off the planet, unable to be found, and that it just wasn't incredible that nobody who had known him was still alive or reachable, And so I thought, if she is lying about his death, it must be that he's still alive. I couldn't imagine a reason why he would have died one way, and she would tell me a different way. So I assume that he was

somewhere still around. And so, you know, we would walk around New York and I would just sort of look at all the men who were, you know, roughly the right age and blonde and might potentially look enough like us, and thinking, is that you are you the one? I thought that there must be some really romantic, adventurous story as to why he was still alive, but nobody would let me talk to him. Write that he was a spy or you know, wrongfully imprisoned, or an astronaut abandoned

on a distant planet or something um. And then as I got into middle school in high school and got to be disaffected, I thought, maybe he's just married. But I knew that I was being told something that was

evidently untrue. I just didn't figure out why. Liz goes to middle school at Hunter, an excellent, highly competitive public school in Manhattan, and during this time, her mother's rage escalates she's violent towards Liz, and Liz's sense that things just don't add up about her father is really sinking in. Liz grows more and more depressed. Her mother's volatility and her father's elusiveness sit at the center of her middle school years. I was kind of a weird kid that

was very socially awkward. I was depressed. I don't think we knew at the time what depression looked like in teenagers or young teenagers. Now, I think it would have been diagnosed much earlier and probably treated. But I was super, super unpopular. You know, there were bullies in my school that made my life pretty hard, and I knew that in a way, they were right that there was something wrong with me. There was something wrong with my house.

And you know, every twelve or thirteen year old kid thinks that, but in my case it was really true. We were not living a normal life, um and I took that very much to heart and thought it was something integral to me. The fact that my father was not there just really meant that there was no one there to see us. We lived this life like a panic room in the middle of this city of eight and a half billion people. But there were no eyes on us. No one knew what was happening in the apartment,

door closed, and my mother was enormously protective. I was not allowed to go to friends houses for the most part, I was largely not allowed to leave the apartment without her eyes on me or the eyes of friends parents who she trusted, and so there was just no one, no one to see what was happening. And so I despaired because to me, there was something irretrievably wrong with our lives, and there was no reason to think it

could ever get better. A lot of this came to a head when I was about fifteen and I had, unbeknownst to my mother, started dating an older boy at my high school. And he was a guitar player and a baseball player, and you know, all those things that are very very attractive to fifteen year old girls. And my mother at that time, I don't remember what it was.

I think maybe she was taking a class. I knew she was out one afternoon week And so, you know, when you grew up in New York City, there's not a lot of places to sneak away and make out right because there's no basements, So there's no reddy couches and there's no river banks, so there's no words, just sort of sneak away. You really have to work at

it to find somewhere private. So I sneaked him into my apartment and my mother came home early and caught us, and she went ballistic and ended up sending me to my godparents house in New Jersey, where I stayed for a couple of months until she calmed down. And that was really this kind of oasis of time living with them, when I started to realize that other people do not live on this sort of precipice of constant anger and rage and sadness. Many people lived with an even kielan nows.

Many people never screamed at each other at all, which was a totally novel concept. And even though I was not living in my mother's house at the time, she decided that I had to be tracked uh And so she went to the principle of my teachers and she had them all sit down together with the guidance counselor, and she presented them with a plan for her unmarriageable daughter, in which she was going to hire a Barnard student

to follow me in the streets. Should I ever come home, I would not have access to the phone, of course, the only plandlines at the time, and every time I went to a class, I was going to have to sign in, and we didn't do that at my school. She required them to put together this whole system of clipboards and signatures, and half the time they of course

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

plus will. And that really blew me over because at that moment I understood that when they sat in that room Princilo in the guidance counselor, they weren't nodding along going oh, yes, totally, you know, terrible out of control teenager. What can we do to rein her back in? They

were thinking, this mother is crazy. And it was the first time that I understood that people outside of our lives, we're seeing that her behavior was completely out of the realm of reason, and that her reactions could only kindly be classified as only overreactions, and that someone actually saw what was going on. So that was a really seminal moment during those years. These seminal moments are so important

in our lives, the ones during which we're seen, recognized, witnessed. Thankfully, now some eyes are on Liz and her mother, and she no longer feels like the two of them are entirely shrouded, their troubles invisible. Their dynamic has been so deeply toxic, so much so that when her mother really gets angry, she threatens Liz by telling her she's going to put her beloved dog to sleep. But now, after this encounter with her teachers at school, a bit of

life begins to dawn. Her teachers aren't out to get her, No, they're actively protecting her. The years passed and Liz takes off for college. She's still in touch with her mom, but she's trying to keep her distance. Then she's home from school on vacation when the damn breaks yet again, this time with a number of surprising declarations, bombshells really

from her mother. I was home for fall break and I was sort of sprawled on the couch in the living room reading something, and she came in, you know, wearing one of her crazy movemos. She by that time rarely left the apartment and often rarely left her bedroom. She was severely a grophobic. So she came and started sidling with the door and absolutely very nervous, which is definitely not hermilius. I mean, something was up. And she said, so, you said you're going to try to get a learner's

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

birth certificate for you. There's no record of your birth at all. And I said, okay, why, and she then came out with this life changing line, I was married when you were born, but not to your father. And it turns out all of this that I discovered over that next twenty minutes or so, that the first part of the story she told me was true. She was married to this, by all accounts, very lovely man after college. They were married for it or ten years, divorced and

went their separate ways. What I did not know was that she had married a second man, a man named Meryl, sometime after that, and in the car on the way back from their wedding ceremony, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and popped the hood because the voices from the engine were talking to him

and he needed to answer them. So there were clearly there was there was a lot going on with this man, not the least of which was that he was beating the crap out of my mother, and she ultimately left him. She uh, you know, she would call the police, and and it was the seventies, out of big domestic abuse was even a term, and they would come and say, you know, this is between a man and his wife, and then they would leave again. And so she finally left him up and she would call, she would refuse

to talk to him, and eventually he stopped calling. But really the key point here is that they never divorced, and so until he died when I was a junior, a senior in high school, my mother was married to a man I had never heard of. And looking back, even at all of the kind of weird and crazy things that happened, I think that's what strikes me as the strangest. That she and I were living in this like incredibly codependent, tiny, claustrophobic towsome and there was this

major thing about her that I didn't know. Twenty minutes, twenty minutes and a lifetime the information is on rushing a torrent. Lizz's mom tells her the truth for the first time, the truth of her father. He was this beautiful man ten years younger than she was. He picked her up in Central Park by asking for a piece of her New York Times, a classic nineteen seventies pick up if there ever was one. They embarked on a love affair that lasted six months, maybe a year. They

were both fairly depressed. One day, she realized she hadn't heard from him in a little while, so she called his apartment and his ex wife picked up the phone. The week before, he had jumped from the roof of his building and fallen sixteen stories to the concrete below, where died. And so my mother went into an even greater depression. And after some months she stirred herself to have a doctor so as that she was not feeling well, and she was seeing the sort of daughtering old character

of the doctor. And he ransom blood tests and said, you have a tomer on your patuitary glance, and you are dying. And so she and her grief kicked herself up and gets on the plane and flies to California, where her brother is living, who had married a woman with the four young children who they were raising together. And my aunt took one look at her when she got off the plan and said, honey, you're not dying.

You are pregnant. And by that time she was almost five months long, and there was nothing to do about it. And her idea was that she would put me up for adoption when I was born. She had never intended to have children. She was alone. What it was not not something she had intended to take on, and when I was born, apparently I didn't cry, and she felt, well, even maybe it's quiet, I could just slit see along this last And on day twelve she thought, maybe this

kid is mute. And she poked me with a diaper band and it turned out of his and she decided to keep me, and you know, being my mother, she didn't name me for the first six months because there was no need to distinguish me from anybody else. There are only two of us in the apartments. That the baby was enough, and so we went done, And so they went on. Liz graduates from college and begins working and publishing. She's living in New York City in a

relationship with a woman. She's making her way, but there's always the specter of her mother, the possibility of a phone call that will up end her hard one equilibrium. Once Liz is at her job when she receives a call from her mother and she's using what Liz describes as her tranquilizer voice. Her mom tells Liz that she's missing her own mother, who has been dead for forty years, and that she has a brilliant idea she knows Liz

doesn't want to have children, her health. But maybe Liz could give birth to a stillborn baby, Yes, stay with it, a stillborn baby who could then be buried with her long dead mother so that she wouldn't be lonely in the cemetery. Imagine being on the receiving end of that phone call, sitting in an office surrounded by coworkers, colleagues. Liz has been trying to understand her mother all her life. Now she has to consider is her mother mentally ill,

heavily medicated, eccentric, dangerous, hurting all of the above. At that stage, she was calling it a couple of times a day. Probably she did not have bipolar disorder, but

she did have manic CASA. She would have swings where these frequent calls would happen, and then if she took enough tranquilizers, it would come out in situations where, just as an example, she would decide that it was the right thing for me to somehow orchestrate is still worth And then I don't know what she thought we would do, sneak into the graveyard in the middle of the n I don't know which a logical chain there was, but Danny I realized that it may sound change to say

this now. But I actually found those moments kind of validating, because so often her behavior was just on the edge of eccentric and really out of the realm of normal, and those moments reminding like, this actually is not normal, Like most parents don't do this, Most parents do not call and request that you have still one baby. This

is not this is not in the normal woods. And so sometimes these were very comforting conversations because they reminded me that I was dealing with something that I could not predict, and that if my response to it was not perfectly formulated or sufficiently comforting, because of course I felt responsible for her, uh that that was not some deficiency in me, It was that the situation was inherently bananas.

Bananas is one word for it, but there's also another. One. Afternoon, Liz and her mother are having lunch outdoors at a restaurant in Manhattan. When her mother lights up a cigarette.

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

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

didn't know what it was. And having a diagnosis just meant the world to me, just that there was now something I could read, there was something I could research. This happened to other people, but this wasn't something that we were just the two of us tussling around between us. But this was something out in the world that psychiatristn't dealt with and had written articles on. And I could

read those articles. And so I went and looked up the symptoms of borderline personality disorder, and people with borderline personality disorder obviously have a wide range of severity and symptoms,

but it's characterized by extreme fear of abandonment. Usually that comes from some kind of trauma and childhood, and so people who are suffering with this cannot abide the idea of the distinction between them and another person, particularly between them and their children, and so so much started to fall into place. Her her inability to let go of me in any way, her screaming fits of rage when as an adult, for example, I would failed to send

her a Valentine's Day card. These kinds of things made her livid, and I never understood why, And that helped me understand that those those things where I was not responding to the way that she wanted, where I was not prioritizing her as the sole thing in my life, sent her into her absolute panic that she had been abandoned in the bottom of figuratively the bottom of a deep well with no getting out of it. That's a

great description. So in this period of time of young adulthood, your girlfriend at the time has a wealthy aunt who just really wants to help you figure out more about who your father was and find out more as much as you possibly can about him. So she offers to hire a private investigator. So that was an absolutely amazing and shocking conversation I had with We called her Auntie because that had, frankly, just never occurred to me at that time. I had thought, this man is gone, he

is dead. There there's no way I'll ever find out about him. So it was astonishing to have this avenue opened. And so I found out this story when Andy called me. I was at work. I was an editorial assistant at Random House, and the way it was set up was that the cubicles were in the middle of the aisle, and there were offices to either side, so you were like in a little moat in the middle of the stream with people just walking by another side. And Andy

Collins and says, we have to talk. I had the private investigator on the line and found out something about your father, and you know, I look up and there's seven fifteen people standing around me talking about publicity plans, and so I just start of put my shoulders up around my ears and tried to make a little climate controlled dome around myself. It turns out that Liz's father's father, her paternal grandfather, had been a very popular entertainer. He

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

I had never really thought of before. In the face of the one more immediate loss, I just didn't think beyond my father's absence, and then other people had known them. That many people, thousands and millions of people knew who my grandfather had been, and that was absolutely shocking. I also discovered that I had an aunt's living and living on Roselt Island, which is a small island that that sits alongside Manhattan, Um, and she was married and had

two children, that I had cousins living. And these were people who were just, you know, half a mile from where I grew up, and I had never known they were there. So I called my aunt at home that evening and she had been prepped by her husband. So it was not a complete shock that I was calling out of the blue, and I needed to stress here or that none of these people knew my mother had existed.

They certainly didn't know that I existed. So this is really just the past coming back twenty five years later or whatever. It was really as a shock to all of these people. And so, you know, my heart thumping

in my throat, I make this call. And we had a you know, perfectly pleasant, maybe five or ten minute conversation where I asked some some general questions, where hating gone to high school, what was he like, those sorts of things, and she gave me perfectly polite but short answers, and over the course of conversation, she let me know that she and my father had not gotten along. They

were not close. There was clearly something else there. There was a lot of history between them that was not perhaps always very positive, that she remembered him with a great deal of pain, and that maybe she viewed my coming, my popping up out of nowhere, not not with any joy, not with any surer eyes, that all I was doing was reminding her of a painful time in her life. And then we hung up, and I thought to myself, that you know. Number one, I didn't want to cause

someone pain. That certainly wasn't my intention. And then number two, if I was going to find out anything about my father, my mother remembered almost nothing about him, just a handful of things that maybe I didn't want it to be from someone who hadn't gotten along with him. Maybe I wanted to be from someone who could remember him only with with love. And during that conversation, that brief conversation, she did agree your request to send you a photograph

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

the idea that it will ever come. Reflecting on this, she writes, it's a hard lesson that when your needs bump up against a stranger's pain, their pain always takes precedence. But later that year, the holidays arrive and she receives a Christmas card from her aunt with photos in it. I open it and into my hand follows these four pictures. Remember what pictures look like from that time, They sort of CPA toned, you know, colorized with CPIA toned square,

but with the corners rounded off. And they fall into my hand and I was I had just come into the house with my girlfriend at the time, and I just sat down right in the middle of the kitchen floor, um, and it was, you know, the world went white around me. I was just in absolute shock because there he was. The pictures were taken a couple of years before he died. He died at eight, so he was must have been twenty six pages a young man, and you know the

age I was at the time. We were contemporaries. And at that moment I understood why I looked nothing like my mother, because he and I could have been. I happen to have at that point in my life, very short hair. We could have been exchanged for each other from the neck up, and it would have been difficult to tell us apart. We had the same in bullbot snows and the same sloping chin and the same infuriating cowlick um. And it was the first time I had looked at someone who looked like me, and I was

really just an incredible moment. We'll be right back. As time moves on and Liz continues to build her life as a young adult with all the professional and personal changes that entails, all the while she keeps seeking out information about her father. She eventually is able to get in touch with her father's ex wife, Lydia, who, unlike her aunt, responds to Liz and the situation with kindness,

not self protectiveness. I had had a sort of strange milestone in my life where I had just had an absolutely terrible breakup, had major surgery, lost my job, and moved all in the course of a couple of months. And so suddenly I found myself that's time on my hands, and I hired a forensic genealogist. M Again. It turns out, just like with the private investigator, that these things which remain mysteries for decades, can be found just for the for the price of finding a professional um. And she

put me in touch with my father's wife. They were not officially divorced at his death. So she wrote an email to Lydia just saying, there's someone who would like to know about this man. And she wrote back absolutely lovely response, telling me more in that two pages than I had ever known about at him before, and ending saying I'd be very curious to know who this relative is and how this person is connected to the Luther family.

And again I'm in this this quandary of I am about to bring my own pain potentially into someone else's life. It turned out my father had been an alcoholic and they had split when he was unable to stop drinking. Finally they reconciled he was going to move back in with her. He arrives at the door drunk, and she turns him away, and he leaves the apartment door, takes the stairs, goes up to the roof, and jumps off.

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

is that you're his daughter. Yeah, And I sent her a picture of myself at about the same age he was when he died, and I thought to myself, you know, there's there's a lot of ways this could go. She could she could laugh at me, and she could say no, get a de sect to me, like you're you're definitely not his daughter, and I could have to start all over again, like this could all have been a mistake,

this could not have been the guy. And I was really trepidacious about losing this one lead that I had. But I sent this picture and she said something to the effect of I don't need a DNA test to know that you are his daughter. So that was quite

quite a moment um. She shared some more pictures with me that of course I had not seen, and told me about what he had been like as a young man, which was charming, athletic, loving, affectionate, and in the grip of an illness that was ultimate late because of his death. She also tells you where she scattered his ashes. Yes, and it turned out that she had taken the ashes and scattered them in turtle pond. Under Belvede or castle

in Central Park, or what would become Turtle Pond. And I mean I spent half my childhood running up and down those steps, which is one of the things that that in retrospect is so startling to me. That he grew up in this very wealthy, very troubled family lots of people, and I grew up just being my mother about a mile away, and our lives were overlaid over this map of a very small area of the earth. And I had been in proximity to his family, his living family, and to his remains in the place I

was playing as a child. And so I went to Turtle Pond, and I sat down, and I talked to him for a while. And you know, in Central Park, I certainly wasn't the only person having a visible come station with myself that day didn't trouble anyone. And I said goodbye to him there in a way that I had not thought I would be able to. As her father's life begins to crystallize for Liz, her own life gains focus too. She's no longer in flux between jobs

and relationships. She's advancing her career and starting a family with her partner Ari she's pregnant when they get married. At their wedding, Liz's mother, whose physical and mental health has been on the decline, makes a bit of a statement, she's only did she um. I think at heart, what she wanted was to have that connection with me and to be the last person who saw me before the wedding. She wanted the movie moment of pushing the bobby pins into my hair and giving me something blue and all

of that, But we didn't have that relationship. By that time. She was even more just jointed from reality than she had been in previous years. It had been a very challenging a couple of years, and we were not close

at all. And so the way she decided to make that happen was by throwing a fit as I was standing upstairs waiting to process Dennie aisle for the wedding um and say that if if I did not let her walk me down the aisle, which had never been the plan, she was going to stand in the middle of the synagogue and scream, and she instead I did go to the lobby and start screaming until I agreed to see her and the you know, the rabbi came up and said, we can do whatever you want. Here.

You can see her. We can hold off the ceremony until she calms down, we can have security take her out. We will do whatever you want. And I realized that, you know, Ari and I had known each other then for twenty five years, We had known each other since

summer camp, but his family didn't know me. We hadn't been dating a year at that point, and that would be the first thing they knew about me was that their golden child, the son slash nephews slash cousin, had just married a woman who got her mother arrested at the wedding. And I didn't want that to be the story. And I think my mother knew that that I wouldn't let that happen, and so I agreed to see her.

And she came up and she, you know, patted me on the head and said something nice, and then she sat down perfectly nicely and let the wedding occur. But that was another one of those pivot points in our relationship. Another pivot point in your relationship is that once you become a mother yourself, you have two children, you're able to see your mother's inability to be a functional grandparent much earlier than you ever have been able to understand

her inability to be a parent. Which I think is something that's so universal when somebody has had an extraordinarily difficult parent, is that when you become a parent yourself, suddenly you see the level of dysfunction or mental illness and the cost of it, and you're not going to let them happen to your children the thing that happened

to you. Yes. Yet another pivot point occurs when Liz receives a call that her mother is being evicted from the apartment she's lived in for years, the same apartment that Liz has co signed the lease with her each year. So one day when I was pregnant with my second and had I had my kids in very quick succession. So I'm holding You've got Rachel in a in a wrap and the bump seven months bump of David it looked like a camel on inside, um, you know, swawing

through the GC heat. We have moved at DUC for ours job and the phone rings and its adult protective services in New York. Asking if I'm planning on showing up for any of the court appearances and I say, what court appearances, And it turns out that she had stopped paying rent about a year earlier. And the back story on this is that since very soon after college,

I had started paying some of her bills. Another one of the sort of mysteries around my childhood was that my mother had worked since the early seventies be whore I was born, and to this day, I don't know what her source of income was. I don't know how she raised me. In high school, she had rented out the additional rooms in the apartment to international students. She would run about and breakfast, that kind of thing. The apartment was her one asset, her her rent stabilized least

was her one asset. And she had called me in the middle of that awful breakup and said, I need a little help with at rent this month. And I said, I'm in the middle of a move. Things are going badly at work. I think I'm going to lose my job. I just don't have it right now. And she said, fun, don't worry about it. I'll make it. Don't worry about it. And it seemed like she had things under control, But it turned out that was the last month she had

her paid runs. Now a year later, it turns out she has been going to housing court all this time. She has a court appointed lawyer from the from the city, but every time the judge says, and where is the lawyer for the other Midshire? She just sat there silently, and so I had never shown up. I didn't know

what was happening. Adult Protective Services was very concerned. She did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation, and over the next two years that she lived in that apartment, RI and I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to find her housing that she would accept. If you are impoverished and elderly, you are actually in a somewhat better situation than if you are middle class,

because there are no assets to spend down. She had qualified for Medicaid, you know, years and years before she had neither income nor assets. I think her total income was something like seven dollars a month, and in Social Security and food stamps and so there are places that take Social Security or Medicaid subsidies, but she wouldn't agree to go to them. She would throw out what seemed to me to be totally insane refusals like it's in Brooklyn,

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

was probably a spectrum. Probably at the beginning she was doing a ship because she was scared, but by the end of it, she really did not seem to have any concept of what was going on. And by the very end, after the I don't know the tenth of the eleventh hearing, a judge came and did a bedside hearing and ultimately decided that there was no point in continuing them because she just kept repeating, these people should

leave me alone. I have a month's rent saved, not realizing that by that time she was three years in the hole, and she's also put you and your own finances and therefore your family in a kind of jeopardy. Yeah, she she sure had um. I did not know that there was a laws out there naming me and had gone to a judgment that would have what if an adult version of going on need a permanent record? Is? You know where we're in DC. It's a it's a

government town. Most jobs require background check. I couldn't have passed the security clearance anywhere. We couldn't get insurance at one point, just because there was a lawsuit at standing. It took a long time. We ultimately did extricate ourselves from it, but but my mother obviously remained. He remained in the crosstairs. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Liz stops returning her mother's calls. She's

calling ten fifteen times a day. She calls every Friday evening and leave the message wishing her a good shop is a good sabbath. But Liz won't be pulled back in, As she writes, I did what women have always done. I cut off the risk to my children. The reminder of how dangerous she could be made me quail when I thought of them caught up in her vortex. I did for them what I had never been able in forty years to do for myself. Admit that taking responsibility

for insanity only spreads the insanity around. So your mother is evicted. Yes, So, after a little bit over three years, the judgment finally went through and the marshall arrived with a drill and drill through the lock, and they brought my mother to an intake shelter in the Bronx. I don't know if she was surprised or she had expected

it happened. Her aid had packed her a suitcase and took her personal stuff with her, but I think they give you half an hour to pack and she was gone shortly after Liz's mother is forced to leave the apartment, it falls on Liz to go clear out her things. Amid the detritus of a life. There are boxes, files, documents that is proof in the form of letters and exchanges from neighbors who had expressed worry over Liz and

the sounds that were coming out of the apartment. Liz also makes a staggering discovery when she finds a certain book. Her mother quite amazingly owns a book titled Understanding the Borderline Mother by an author named Christine Larson. Further proof. By owning this book, on some level, her mother must have known she was so sick, yet not so sick that she didn't know that this was the very malady

that plagued her. It was an extraordinary moment that the dust chapter was off the book and I lift open the front cover and I just bellowed with astonishment that this was what I had found. And you know that, to this day, I'm not sure why she bought that book.

My mother was a ferocious reader of all kinds of books and a lot of self help, and it wasn't clear to me because borderline personality sort of can be passed down from parent to child, as the parents who is in such pain creates a traumatic experience for the for the next child. And now, having read her mother's letters to other family members, I believe that she also

suffered in the same way. So I don't know if my mother bought it seeing herself as the adult child of someone of BPD, or if she saw herself in it as the parents. And either way, you know there was a Dengel cleaning reminder card tucked into page their team. She clearly didn't get very far one way or the other. You describe reading passages from that book allowed to Ari in bed. You know that that feeling of just being completely understood in a book of just yeah, that's exactly it.

That's what went on between us. It was incredible to read about other people who had had similar experiences. There were stories in there that were far worse than what my mother and stuff. There were people in the book talking about how they slept with a knife under their pillow all through their childhood. My mother was capable of hurting me, but I knew she would not kill me. That was that was never my concern. But it was amazing to read other stories of people who had grown

up in this entirely constructed fairytale life. You know, my mother had created the story for us that you know, she was mourning her dead husband, living in austere celibacy, and that she had the sort of perfect hie, achieving child and everything looks great, except, of course, I was a greeting depressed mass. She had been having an affair with a married man for the majority of her adult life. She was not ogado, she had never been married to my father. She had me living under a false Social

Security number. I mean, she just constructed the Truman show for us, and none of it was real. Lizz's mother is taken to a shelter with a limit for a stay. As opposed to be two weeks, she stays for five. At one point, a social worker at the shelter caused Liz to tell her that her mother had stopped showering.

That really shook me out. My mother was very big on cleanliness, and that, I think really let me know that what was happening was no longer stubbornness and no longer her putting on any kind of stick, but that she was really descending into this last phase in her life. And when you know, telling friends about it, I said that I could see a couple of outcome. Either she would neglect her hygiene so much she would you get

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

in her life that something was going to change. And sure enough, um after about five weeks, the social worker called to let me know that she had been taken to assist living facility in Coney Island, Brooklyn, with the unbelievably amazing name of Mermaid Matter. And if I'm ever get to write to TV series, I will call it Mermaid Matter because this is just the fact that such a place is. This just tickles me so much. And we felt that it was this was the dream come true.

This was the answer that we have been looking for, because all along we kept thinking, should we just go rescue her? Should we just go pick her up? You know, everyone who called me the court evaluator of the social workers kept saying, when are you coming to get her? And then I would explain she wasn't allowed access to my children because she could be too violent, and then there would be this silence, right and we would try to figure out what if we pay her rent? What

if we do this, what if we do that? And every solution we came up with uh would not solve the problem because she had reached a point where she could no longer pay the rent and she would not willingly live anywhere else, And so we thought, maybe this is the magic solution where she is now somewhere safe. You know, she has one roommateance that six, they're feeding her, if there's someone watching after her, it's gonna be okay.

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

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

with doctors. I knew that the disaster for her would be extending her life, and so I said, I said, no, don't, don't intubate her, let her go, and so they put me on speaker phone, and I just listened for six or seven minutes as I heard nurses rustling around and you know, clipboard being put down, and what I had never before thought to think of as the sounds of death, which are very logistical in a lot of the ways.

I heard the sheets rustling, you know, she she coughed, I heard a little choke, and then there was silence and footsteps and the doctor, whose voice is wavering because my mother had had herself checked into the roomatology word when she arrived. I imagine you dont have a lot of deaths in rooms, tells me that that she has gone, And because I'm not there, all I can do is imagine it right that this there has been this death. The two great dramas of our lives are birth and death.

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

She was so powerful, and she had always been sick, but she had never been dying until she was dead. Do you think that there's something about the dynamic of having a mother like yours where it seems impossible that they will predecease you, that you're just going to be in it together forever and ever there there so all powerful that somehow it's never gonna end. I absolutely thought my mother was going to be the first modern woman

to live to the age of a hundred sixty. She was going to be the Jewish medistla and she was going to outlive all of us, running on a pure diet of emtam and sheet cakes in vitriol. I could not have imagined a world in when she was dead until very, very suvely she was y you rode, and God did I relate to this um? The world without her felt safer than it ever had before. Yeah. Um, life as my mother's daughter could be very booby trapped.

My mother had seen at one stage in her life hypnotist in addition to a psychiatrist when she was trying to stop smoke, and she found it very helpful, but she couldn't afford to go very often, so she made tapes of the sessions and saved them. And after her death, I found these recordings of her therapy sessions, and I went through this whole ethical quandary. You know, I would be man, I would be curious if someone ever listened

to taps in my therapy. But on the other hand, maybe there were stories on there, Maybe there was more news. Maybe there was something about my father she hadn't that I never knew. Maybe there's something about her that I

never knew. Write so many mysteries still to be found out, and listening to them was very validating because she she presents all these stories to the psychiatrists of how I have betrayed her and let her down, and those stories were such things as I had gone on vacation with my first girlfriend during which time, it turns out, and she relates to the stories that these are totally reasonable things to do. She had gotten some of her friends and mind to research the hotel she knew were staying

at on the internet. And sent her pictures of it. She called the front desk and a security to watch me. Those kinds of things were for her the acts of the loving mother. And that went on for years and years, and in the three years when she was declining and caught it in the legal system, we just kept finding out more things that I hadn't known, more things about the doctor who it turns out, was catching her social Security checks, more ways in which she had angered the landlord.

And when she died, there was this line in the sands that there might still be things to find out, there might still be papers I haven't found, but she can't spring anymore on me. That story is that vant Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly z Achor is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is

one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Writer. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.