Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio M I always knew my mother had a secret. She guarded it fiercely, keeping it under lock and key. That was how I envisioned it, hidden chamber, tucked away in the recesses of my mother's twisted mind. But her secret was too big to be contained, and it would use out like a thick slurry, poisoning her thoughts and covering our family in darkness. That's Justine Cowen, attorney and writer, author of the recent memoir The Secret Life of Dorothy Solmes.
Justine's is a story about the long reach of secrecy and its power to shape our deepest relationships. 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 began my life in San Francisco, and when we were six, we moved to a wealthy enclave of San Francisco called Hillsboro, UM, which had wide, beautiful streets and estates throughout the town UM,
and it was so exclusive. There were actually no stores in Hillsboro UM, just winding roads and that sort of thing. And on the outside, our lives looked really perfect. We had a beautiful Mediterranean house that my mother kept sparkling
clean and wonderfully decorated. And Um, every day I would wake up and it would probably start with maybe a violin lesson, and then I would go off to a good school and my mother would pick me up after school and we would go down to Woodside, California, which was about twenty minutes away, where I would take riding lessons, and um, we'd come home for a home cooked meal.
Following the meal, I might have some diction lessons with my mother so that I could hopefully get the English accent that she had, although that obviously did not work, and then maybe some reading before bed. And so my life was filled with tutors and lessons and nice things. Tell me about your mother from that time. My mother
was beautiful. She had lovely, silky dark brown hair and beautiful hazel eyes, and she carried herself with style and always wore a perfectly put together outfit and just exuded class. But that was the persona that she showed to the outside world. Um, inside the house she was much more her curial and some sometimes she could be volatile. I remember some incidences where, for example, she threw my dullhouse
across the room and it smashed pieces. And another time she slend the glass coffee table in the living room and shattered it into pieces. So life inside her home was not the same as what it appeared to those that might be appearing in. What would set her off when she would fly into these rages, I never really knew, and I think that was part of what created some fear in me not wanting to set her off, is
because you never really knew what the trigger was. I mean, sometimes there were some things that you knew would upset her. Sometimes she would retreat to her room and sit alone in the dark, and I didn't know why. My earlier memories were that I didn't want to upset her, and I didn't want to do anything wrong, and that was always very important that I don't do anything, And so
there was a fear. But then as I grew older, that fear turned into anger, which turned into hatred, and I harbored very deep resentful feelings towards my mother for pretty much most of my life. And tell me about your father. Oh, I loved my father. Um. He was kind and very even I only remember him raising his voice me once or twice in my entire life. He was an attorney and he would come home after work and I would run down the hall and see him, and it was just the most exciting part of the day.
And on the weekends he would bring work home um and he would sit in the library and read briefs or whatever he may be doing, and I would lie on the harbor floor beneath the table where he was working and read books while he was there. And it just felt comforting to be in his presence. And at the same time, there were these moments, these incidents with your mother. You write about your first memory of her
being awakened because she's screaming because she's having a nightmare. Yes, And it was when we were in San Francisco, and I just heard her screaming, and I ran into the bedroom and I remember seeing my father holding my mother and she continued to scream, and he told me to
go back to bed, and then she eventually stopped. And you know, later I was told that it was because the air raid sirens that are sprinkled around San Francisco that had originally been put in in the event the Japanese flew across the ocean in World War Two, but we're now used for other purposes in San Francisco, such as I suppose there was a tsunami or something like that had gone off accidentally and it had triggered memories
of World War Two from my mother. And what were some of the stories you were told about your mother, or you know, told by your mother about herself while you were growing up? You know, I think with with family's secrets, so often there are clues um things that we don't even register as clues until we have a lot more information. But when you're a child, you accept the stories that are told to you, you know, by your parents, because they're your parents, and it's all you
really know. Well, I knew that my mother was from England, and she had always told me that she came from blue Blood, which I came to understand at an early age meant some sort of aristocratic blood from England. I also knew that she was illegitimate. My mother told me that she was from blue Blood, but I have no memory of anyone telling me that she was illegitimate, but I always knew it. That's so interesting, and yet you can't locate how you discovered it or whether you were
told it's just something that you knew. Yes, it was something that I always knew. And I also I knew that I should never ask about my mother's background. I shouldn't ask who my grandmother was. I shouldn't ask anything about my grandfather that would trigger an event with my mother. I knew that was one of the things that would and she would become angry, or she would get upset, or she would retreat back to her room. And so I just need better than to ask, and so I
just didn't. In the ninth grade, Justine leaves the manicured streets of Hillsboro to attend a prestigious boarding school down the coast of California in a town called Ojai. Always wanted to put a premium on her daughter's education. Justine's mother is the one who pushes her to attend. Justine doesn't really want to go, but she goes anyway. Boarding school is only one of the many ways Justine's mother
attempts to shape and groom her throughout her childhood. She learns as many skills as humanly possible, musical instruments, languages, athletics, even lessons in penmanship and diction. Years later, when she asks her father, why did I have to go to boarding school? Why did you support it, he says, to
get you away from your mother. After boarding school, Justine goes to Berkeley, which is only forty five minutes from where she was raised, but might as well be a million miles away in terms of the culture of the University of California Berkeley, where she's studying. There, she begins to build a life on her own terms. She's finally distancing herself from her mother's grip nineteen years old and trying to create her own path. But one day the
phone rings. It's her father calling to tell Justine that she needs to come home immediately. It's her mother. She's in some sort of trouble. He had called me and said that my mother had gotten into her car and was driving um to the hospital, and that he'd have to go after her and get her to pull over
her car and then bring her back home. And I asked him if there was anything wrong, why was she going to the hospital, And he just didn't really respond to that, and just asked that I come home and take care of her so that he could go to court.
And what did you discover when you got home? When I went home, Um, I walked down the hall and looking for my mother and knocked on the bedroom door, and my mother was in bed in her nightgown and had a notepad in her hand, and she was writing something that I couldn't see, and she called me over to her, and I looked down at this notepad and I still remember what it looks like. It's just seared
in my memory. It was one of those yellow legal notepads with the light green lines, and she had a pencil in her hand, and she was just writing over and over and over again. Name that I had never heard before, Dorothy Sulms, Dorothy Sulms, Dorothy Sulms. And what did you, as a college student, a young woman, make of that at the time, or did you just want to get back to your life and sort of tuck
that away. I was surprised by what she had said, and didn't know who Dorothy Sulms was, But at the time I didn't want to know, and so I did whatever I could to get out of that room and to just extract myself from the situation. Um. You know, by that point, I just didn't want to get into it with her and was really working on distancing myself from her, because that's really when I was most happy. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
In the Ten Commandments, the fourth commandment states honor thy father and thy mother. But sometimes, as in Justine's case, it just isn't possible, And the only thing that is possible for self preservation and survival is either to completely break ties or create a very powerful set of boundaries. The first boundaries that I thought up was just geographical.
I moved to Japan, and then I moved to Washington, c And I always made sure to keep a physical distance from my mother because I remember when I would go home for the holidays, because that was expected, and I mean I had to do that, I would start to feel anxiety and depression. And two months before I would go home, and when I would see my mother and she wanted to touch me, and she wanted to hug me, um, I would recoil, which you could see it on her face that it broke her heart. But
I couldn't bring myself to hug her. So the best thing for me to do was to just stay away as much as I could. Staying away works for a while. Justine has a lovely early adulthood. She surrounds herself with good friends. She becomes an attorney working in environmental law, following her beloved of father's footsteps. But even though she's moving on, her relationship with her mother continues to weigh her down, as does the secret at the core of
her mother's history and identity. To Justine's knowledge, her mother's name is Eileen Thompson. So who in the world is Dorothy Solmes and why does she loom so large in her mother's past. The first hint that I had about her past, what more than a hint when she started to try to tell me about it, was and when I was in my late twenties, and she sent me
a letter. It was a short letter, just a page or two, but in it she mentioned that she was a foundling, and I had never heard the term foundling before, and it was clear that she wanted me to pick up the phone and call her and talked to her about it, but I decided I didn't want to, so we didn't speak of it. Several years later, when I was probably in my early to mid thirties, an envelope showed up from my mother, and I always knew it
was from her because she had this wonderful handwriting. And I opened it up and there was a six stack of pages, and I looked at the front and it was clear that it was a memoir, a memoir that my mother had written about her life. Did it have a title it did? It said Coreum Girl, And I didn't know what that meant. I had no idea what a Korum girl was, and I didn't want to know um. At that point in my life, I was finally creating happiness for myself. I was keeping distant from my mother,
and quite honestly, it felt manipulative. UM. I had wanted to know the history of our family for years and years, and it wasn't until I had really kind of broken free and created my own life that suddenly my mother wanted to tell all. And it felt to me like she was trying to reel me back in. So I put it in an envelope and put it in the back of a file cabinet. I mean, I must have known that it was important and that I shouldn't just
toss it away. I saved it as I did the letter that she sent years before, but I didn't want to read it. When it comes to family's secrets, um, there has to be a certain kind of readiness involved, Otherwise finding something out at the wrong moment can actually end up being destructive, and that we do have some
kind of internal radar for that. You had a hard one life at that point, and you had overcome a lot of psychological obstacles and instability that it really could be drawn pretty much directly right back to the way that your mother had raised you and the way that she had been And so that is not a point where you wanted to go there. But as you say, you tucked it away, it's not like you burned it. I must have known that one day I would revisit it. I just knew that that wasn't the day. I didn't
realize that it would be twenty years. What is the day? How did that come about? Was it a slow build? Was it sort of haunting you in some way? Or was there just this eureka moment of now it's a time and I need to know. Well, it was after another's death, and my mother's death really took me by surprise in terms of how it impacted me emotionally. I worked so hard to keep an emotional distance from her, and when she died, I was at her deathbed and I was overwrought. I ran from the room. I saw
obed like I had never sobbed before. Justine's mother had died of Alzheimer's, so Justina is surprised by her reaction to her mother's death because the death itself was not sudden. Her mother's decline had been gradual, as it so often is with Alzheimer's disease. She had been losing her memory for years plus. You'd think the history between Justine and her mother and the distance between them wouldn't provoke such
a tidal wave of grief. When I went back home to the home that I had with my husband Patrick, I was exhausted. I could barely get off the couch for days. And even after that, I was just fatigued, and I would go out and I would cry for no reason. And I was stunned at my reaction. And then I just put it away. Um, you know, it faded over time, and I just tucked it into the back of my mind and went on and life was really happy. I had this wonderful man that I had met,
so loving and kind. His entire family brought me in and life was just wonderful. And we went on a month long trip to Europe and my husband said, let's go to London. Well, I had never been to England, and I've traveled quite a bit, but I intentionally never went to England because it felt too emotionally powerful, because I knew that's where my mother was from. But I said, oh, it's gonna be fine. There's not going to be a problem here, and I'm gonna be with my husband and
my mother's you know, two died years ago. It's going to be fine. And I went to London and we walked around the streets and I could not stop thinking about my mother and I didn't know why. And when we came back from Europe, when we landed, I again became emotional, and it was because I knew that my mother wasn't going to call me, even though I never wanted my mother to call me. So I sat at my computer and I typed in the words that I had heard only once before, thirty years before, Dorothy Sums.
And that didn't get me very far. But then I remembered the other word that I had learned when my mother had reached out when I was in my late twenties. In that letter the word Foundling, and I put in Foundling and London, and then there it was the Foundling Hospital. And that was the first step. And I emailed someone at the Foundling Hospital which is now called Quorum and said,
I think my mother might have been Dorothy Sums. Now, how you've put something together here and you think maybe your mother was known as Darthy Solmes when she was a child, when she was a foundling at the Foundling Hospital. Yes, yeah, we'll be right back. Justine dives into research. She digs into the history of the Foundling Hospital, both during the time her mother was there and the institution's history dating
back to seventeen thirty nine. She also returns to her mother's manuscript, which is so painful to read that she can only read it a few pages at a time. It's interesting, looking back on it, that the first thing that I did was reach out to a complete stranger in London to start my research instead of just going into my foul cabinet and picking up my mother's manuscript to get me started. Why do you think that was?
Because I think it was going to be too painful, and I was afraid what I was going to learn. And I think that as an attorney, I'm very accustomed to research, and that being able to do the research in the way that I would handle any sort of case that I was working on allowed me to do it in a way that didn't feel frightening and it felt comforting. And that makes a lot of sense. To understand what my mother went through, you really have to
go back to the beginning of the Family Hospital. It started in the mid seventeen hundreds, and it was created two raise illegitimate children to pay degree changed chamber pots for Britain's elite, and to serve them. It served a second purpose, and the second purpose was to take a woman who had had an unfortunate pregnancy and two restore her back to her prior position. The only way that that could be done is to take the child and to keep the child a secret, and that secret that
the child itself was a secret and was shameful. That's really what shaped the founding hospital for the next two centuries and what also shaped my mother. In the early nineteen thirties, my grandmother and her name was Lena Weston m a name that I had never heard before until I had gone to London and dug through the files. She had become pregnant and her brother had kicked her out, and she had nowhere to go, so she reached out to the founding hospital and asked that they take her child.
It was my mother. They didn't just take the child. Instead, my grandmother had to go through a very rigorous process in which she had to prove that she was a respectable woman and that if they took this child away from her, that she would be able to return to a virtuous life. The process included reaching out to, of course the men in her life, her doctor, her pastor, and her brother, and they all had to attest that
she was a virtuous woman. And then she actually had to have an in person interview with the governors of the hospital, who were all very well to do men who um presumably quizzed her on how it was that she came to be in this situation and how she would conduct her life if they granted her the favor of taking her child from her. Apparently she was virtuous enough, and she had to go and on a particular day turned my mother over to the Fothering Hospital when my
mother was two months old. And what year was this, That was nineteen two. Justine's mother spends twelve years in the Foundling Hospital's care. The first five years she lives with a foster mother, which was a practice dating back to the Foundling Hospital's early history. When the children who were in the hospital were discovered not to be doing very well, they'd be shipped off to the country to
be wet nursed at the age of five. No matter whether the foster mother um and sometimes a foster father loved their foster child or not, the child would be taken away and sent to the institutional facility, which when my mother as a child was in Brokemstaed just outside of London, and they would be dropped off unceremoniously. Most of them were not told that they were even leaving.
Their countless stories of children just being placed on a bus or a coach as they called it, and they thought they were coming back home at the end of the day, but instead they were dropped off at the family hospital. They were taken in, their clothes were removed, they were put in bathtubs, you know, two or three at a time. They would never see those clothes again. They would share their heads and they would sit there shivering and then sobbing, not knowing what was going on.
Really just treated like prisoners and put in these uniforms, uniforms that had not changed since they were first designed in the mid sev hundreds, and then that would start their life at the family hospital. As Justine learns more about the way the foundlings were treated, living their lives in shapeless uniforms with sheared heads, she can't help but sink back to some of the strange aspects of our
own childhood too. The clothes her mother bought her were always too big, extremely unfashionable, baggy sack like garments that must have resembled, perhaps subconsciously, to Eileen, the clothes she had been forced to wear as a child. And once, when Justine tried to cut her own hair in the style of her favorite Charlie's Angel, she botched it, of course, and this sent her mother into a panic. Promptly, Eileen arranged to have Justine's hair fixed by a fancy San
Francisco stylist. What must have crossed her mother's mind when she saw her child with her hair all chopped off. Justine also soon discovers there are striking physical similarities between
the Foundling Hospital and her own childhood home. I still remember being in the Founding Museum and walking into the room, and it was a very earnate room, and it contained a lot of the furniture that the governors used, and there across the room were these two chairs that were so familiar to me because they were the two They looked almost exactly like the two chairs that sat in our living room as a child. And I looked at those chairs and began to cry and just was very emotional.
And at the time, I don't think I understood why, And later I understood that when I was at the Founding Museum for the first time, I was making the connection between what had happened in the past two years ago, this institution that brutalized thousands of children, um and how that connected to our family, and it put a pin in a sense of telling me, this is what happened
to my family. Because the relationship between my mother and I was always so fraught that I could never ever completely understand why, and that time, when I saw those chairs, it was symbolic to me that what had happened to our family was bigger than me and my mother, and that we had been swept up in this institution that had served Britain's ruling class for over two hundred years. And in a way, through this journey, I've actually felt lucky that I have been able to uncover everything that
happened to my family. Having this troubled relationship with someone that you're supposed to love is more common than I'd ever thought. Of course, learns that that is far from the case. But I'm fortunate and that I can put something. I can put it in this tangible box of this is what happened to our family. I can trace it all the way back to the seventeen hundreds and move all the way forward. The shame that was put on those women in the seventeen hundreds existed in my childhood home.
You know, you spoke earlier about the recoiling from your mother, literally the sort of inability to bear her touch or to touch her, and you liken it too, or you draw a line in a way through time to how she must have been treated in the very very formative early you know, weeks and months of of her infancy and not being held and not being touched, and that's the stuff that you don't get to redo, and it
it lingers in a kind of traumatic way. And the whole idea of inherited trauma or epo genetic trauma, that perhaps your feeling of recoiling was part of that same pattern, which is very painful, but I think also healing because there's at last the possibility of an explanation for it. I used to make lists of things that my mother had done and go over them in my head in a sense to justify how I felt about her. And
the list was never good enough. And I always knew that the fact that you know, she turned my doll house across the room or in a table, that those really weren't the reasons why I felt the way I did about my mother, but I never could understand why, and I frequently thought that meant there was something wrong with me, um that I was a bad daughter, or you know, all sorts of feelings would swirl around in my head, some that I wasn't even aware of, and
you know, it wasn't until I undercovered the story that I realized that I wasn't to blame, but also my mother wasn't to blame, but that we'd really been caught up in this tragic story. Ultimately, Justine is able to access a lot of her mother's files, files her mother had never been able to see because of our cane laws designed to continue the secret and protect it until
all parties are no longer living. Justine discovers that her grandmother, Lena, had been trying for years, heartbreaking Lisa to send things to Eileen slash Dorothy, money, letters, asking after her, and then, finally, when the war comes to England and there are air raids, Lena begs the governors of the Foundling hospital to allow her to take her daughter away where she'll be safer. The governors are not inclined to bend or break the rules,
but how else to say this? Because Eileen slash Dorothy has been such a difficult foundling, rebelling, breaking the rules, even running away, they decide that it's perfectly fine for her to be taken off their hands. So mother and daughter actually are reunited. Que the violins right, not so much, After twelve years, a lot of damage has already been done. It was heartbreaking when I discovered the letters that my
grandmother had written. In the archives in London, and it was very emotional to see not just a few letters, but letter after letter after letter that she had written by hand and on any scrap of paper that she could find. I mean, some of it was during wartime and she would write and write and asking about her little girl, and you could feel the love. And then you think about my mother um as a little girl who had never been touched in a loving way, which
was by design. They were being raised to be servants and love and comfort and affection had no place in that kind of training. And when they were reunited, I had this hope myself that somehow there would be this loving bond created. You know, years later it it didn't happen, and it's clear they became estranged at some point in time. And I think that once the bond is broken or not allowed to form, sometimes there's not a lot that
can be done. And I think a lot about the bond between my mother and myself, and I think, well, the founding hospital in the social maories that forced my grandmother to give up her child broke the bonds between her and her daughter, and that carried down into the next generation. All these broken bonds between mothers and daughters complicate Justine's feelings about the possibility of becoming a mother herself.
I definitely was afraid that I would be a good mother, and that I would repeat the mistakes that my mother had made. But actually my greatest fear was that I would have a daughter that felt about me the way that I thought about my mother, and that terrified me. And since I've gotten married, I have nieces, and some of them I have developed just an extraordinary bond with. And just the other day I was talking with my husband and I said, you know, I think I would
have been a good mother. You end up being able to meet with two different women who had known your mother back before your mother came to the United States, Bernice and Lydia, who had been in the Foundling hospital with your mother. As you're speaking with Lydia, you're worried that she's kind of getting this sense that this journey of yours to learn as much as you possibly can about your mother's history had been motivated by your great love for your mother, and you don't want to sort
of falsely let that stand. And you say to Lydia that your relationship with your mother was troubled, and Lydia responds in this beautiful way. She says to you, of course it was how would she have known how to be a mother? And it felt to me like that was some kind of turning point for you, or in all the layers, sort of sluffing away of permission to have this be the story that it is and have it not be your fault and not be your doing. That felt like the last piece of it sort of
falling into place. Did it feel that way to you, Well, it was a very powerful moment for me, and it did give me some permission to at least start exploring for giving myself, and that was part of the journey. I didn't even realize that I was going to undertake here. To close out this remarkable story, is Justine reading from the deeply moving ending of her memoir. My mother and I were about the same age when we each felt an irresistible pull to understand the past and how it
had shaped who we had become. I can't claim to fully understand what finally compelled me to uncover my mother's secrets, an obsession that spanned the course of two years. I do know that the anger I had shouldered for much of my life had taken its toll, the sheer intensity of my feelings for my mother, the loathing that was always simmering just under the surface, where burdens with a palpable weight. Perhaps I had hoped that understanding my mother's
past might provide me with a sense of peace. But my mother's journey was not about anger. It was about shame. It is lonely to have no love for one's mother. Well, I had hoped that my feelings would change. Love cannot be forced or conjured up. Perhaps she was not the only one with rounds too deep to heal. But in my quest to learn about my mother's past, I realized that I had come to know someone special, someone I
wanted to hold the comfort and protect. That person was a little girl with a smattering of freckles and silky brown hair, feisty and courageous, and probably full of dreams. I had grown to love that little girl. Her name was Dorothy Songs. M h Family Secrets is a production of My Heart Radio. Molly's a Core is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an
upcoming episode. Our number is one eight 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. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.