Introducing Family Secrets
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Hey, it's Britt. We're working hard on season two, I Keep Getting Distracted by Family Secrets. This show explores the hidden stories that shape our lives and relationships. Host Danny Shapiro talks with the guests about the family secrets they've uncovered and how these revelations have impacted them.

It touches on a lot of similar themes as my show. It uncovers hidden truths, complex family dynamics, and examining how the past influences the present. We'll be back next week with more Season 1 bonus episodes.

He's the most terrifying serial killer you've never heard of. Haddon Clark has confessed to several murders, but investigators say he could have over 100 victims. At the center of the mayhem, a cellmate of Haddon's that was able to get key evidence into Haddon's murder spree across America,

because Haddon thought he was Jesus Christ. Born Evil, the Serial Killer and the Savior, an ID true crime event. Premieres Monday, September 2nd at 9. Watch on ID or stream on Max. Set your DVR.

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Deep in the woods, deep in the woods, it was ringing real good. Ten inches down, ten inches down with a solid sound. That's Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and memoirist, Whit Hill.

Wits is a story of love, loss, tenacity, redemption, and the way secrets seep from one generation to the next without our knowing how or why until the lights finally blink on and we see what had been hiding in the shadows. And while finally knowing doesn't fix everything, it's a hell of a start. ♪ Baby ♪

I'm Dani 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 Manhattan in 1958, so the landscape was vertical. A lot of tall buildings and small buildings and hard edges, lots of brick and stone and cement and marble stairs and metal and lots of noise.

buses and trucks and honking and screeching of brakes. I was born in Mount Sinai, and they brought me home to this microscopic one-bedroom apartment. It's a third floor. The building was on the corner of First Avenue and 52nd Street.

My dad moved out when I was young, well, very young. Like, it's unclear. No one alive remembers when he moved out. So it was either maybe two or four, something like that. So I have no memories of my parents together. And so I grew up as an only child. My parents were both from the South. My mother was born in rural Mississippi, very poor family, farmers. She picked cotton as a child.

And my mother had two sisters, younger sisters, and little by little they moved to Columbus, Mississippi, which was an upgrade from the totally rural setting that she was born into.

And then got to go to public school, and she was very, very bright, but also kind of a tortured child. She felt very different, like she had been dropped into an environment that she was not fated for. She had great goals and aspirations. I remember her telling me once that she was in the outhouse back in the farmhouse that they first lived in, and she picked up a copy of a magazine that they used,

for other purposes. And she saw an article about New York City and delicatessens and decided that that's where she was going to end up. And she just kind of zeroed on that. And she was very bright and got a scholarship to what was then called Mississippi State College for Women. No one had ever said, Marianne, you should go to college. But she got a scholarship and graduated with a

degree in speech, I think it was, but also did a lot of theater. And the minute she got out of there, she headed north and ended up at a summer stock in Massachusetts, where she met my dad. And he, likewise, was from the South, well, from Appalachia.

He was the son of Armenian immigrants who had come to this country to escape the genocide. My grandfather opened a saloon called the Sanitary Lunch. And my father was their first son. Then they had twin boys, one of whom died young. And at that point, my father's mother disappeared. She was always a...

A troubled woman, according to what little my father remembers of her. How old was your father when she disappeared? I think he was 12 or 13, and his little brother was more like 8. My father grew up in coal country with miners in the saloon at night and my grandfather selling moonshine.

and speaking Armenian upstairs in the little apartment that they lived in and English the rest of the time. My dad, like my mom, was very smart, kind of different from everyone else, and was encouraged by...

teacher to really go for it. He went to college at Concord College, got a theater degree and started getting a master's degree, but ended up going to the same summer stock in Plymouth, Massachusetts that my mother went to in 1954. And the die was cast. I cannot get any information from my dad about how that happened or what sparked their relationship.

But when the summer was over, they moved to New York City and got an apartment together and married. And very, very quickly, they were a couple. I think they probably got married because there was a cheap apartment that they found out about and they took it. So they married in 1955. And it was three years before I was born.

And you have no memory of the three of you together as a family before your father moved out? No. It's hard to say because even though I would imagine things were a bit tempestuous at the time of the break, they really pulled it together and were quite civil with each other throughout the rest of my upbringing.

My father moved very close, just down the block. My mother could lean out her window and look to the right, and my father could lean out his window and look to the left, and I could walk between their buildings. And so they really kept up appearances and were quite civil with each other, which was great. And so we did things together sometimes. There were times we all vacationed at the same house. Some family friends...

lived across the hall from my mother. Their names were Tom and Margaret Knight, and they became my godparents. And I thought of them as another set of parents. They were a childless couple, older than my parents, and just the best people. And I loved them so much. And they were very invested in me. And I ended up thinking of my parents as

And Tom and Margaret as being the four legs of my table. In my mind, that's how I saw them, that they were these four people that supported me and that I loved to distraction. And Tom and Margaret had a house, a little tiny cottage on Cape Cod. And when I was three years old, I started going there, sometimes just with Tom and Margaret, sometimes with my mother, sometimes with my father, sometimes all of us together. It was very progressive experience.

Considering what happened later, my life with my parents very much revolved around theater, but also any kind of creativity. It was quite clear to me from early on I would be some kind of performing artist. It was destined. And I say that from their perspective. And, you know, happily, I was interested in that, how much of that was because I sensed their investment in me and

But there certainly was a lot in me that responded to that. I was very comfortable on stages. They brought me on stages all the time. One of my earliest pictures of me is on a stage with some actors. I don't even know who they were. And I loved it. You know, I loved the idea of theater and plays and music and dance. I always had music lessons and dance lessons growing up.

And, you know, I'm happy about that, of course. And my mother in particular was extremely invested in that for me. I look back on it and it just seems kind of golden and just so cool how I was encouraged to do anything. If I didn't want to go to school because I wanted to write a short story about an avocado, I could stay home and do that. And she didn't care. And, you know, I'd finish the story in like 15 minutes and watch TV the rest of the day and nobody would know.

And the same with my dad. They were just very encouraging of my interests. That said, things in the apartment with my mom were, I mean, this is a hackneyed word, but complicated. I mean, she was a very anxious person. She was moody. How much she drank, I'm not sure, but there were many trips to the liquor store. And she could turn on a dime.

There could be, you know, bluebirds and rainbows one minute and then just coldness and abuse. She was physically really abusive to me at times in ways that it's really difficult for me to even describe. And it was incredibly scarring, emotionally scarring and confusing because this was somebody I loved and I just felt so accepted by and so loved.

I remember going off to college and telling my roommate and my friends at college, oh, my mom and I are so close. It's like we're one person in two bodies. And I thought that was great. I thought they'd be jealous of me or something. And everybody just looked at me like there was something wrong, which of course there was something very wrong with that. It's one of the things that comes up again and again on this show and when we talk about

and family is that as children, whatever our reality is in our family just seems like it must be the reality, you know, and that surely everybody's family is like this. Oh, right. Yes. When I go and visit my friends that had both parents at home and they'd all sit around the dinner table together and read stories while the kids ate and

I was like, my eyes were wide open. It was like, wow, this is the thing that happens. And I never was jealous. It just was so different. Early on, I mean, there were times when it was just so fun and I felt like we were buddies in the apartment.

But I was left alone a lot. When she finally realized she could leave me alone in the apartment, she did. And it didn't bother me. I mean, we were just on top of each other all the time in that tiny space. I mean, we shared a one bedroom. And I remember I spent a lot of time looking out the windows. And if I looked out the living room window, it was onto First Avenue and I could just watch this river of cars going by. And I would stare at it just for hours. It was like,

watching the sun on distant mountains or something like that. It has always changed and it was always fascinating to me, the movement and the

The fact that it always flowed in one direction. And if I went and looked out my bedroom window, I looked out onto 52nd Street and it was quieter there, but not much. And there was a building across the street, kind of a large, much nicer building than ours with many, many windows. And I could stare in those windows at night and just watch all kinds of things happen, which was very instructive to me growing up and fascinating.

And I remember I did this thing where I would write notes and I would say, I am very happy. I am a very happy child. And I would crumple them up and throw them out the window.

and then watch to see if anyone would pick them up. And I look at that now and I think, what was I doing? Was I trying to be rescued? And I didn't even realize it. Basically, what I was doing was littering because nobody ever picked it up. Not one time. And I did that at the bank, too. If I went in a bank, I would...

find a deposit slip at the bottom of the stack of deposit slips and write how happy I was on the deposit slip and slip it in for somebody to read, which was, I don't understand that. Do you think that you were trying to convince yourself that you were a happy child, or what do you think your motivation was? I think subconsciously it was probably a bit of a message in a bottle kind of thing.

But I do think looking back that all the window gazing was, I really saw myself as Rapunzel and like the princess in a tower. The only thing I didn't have was the braid because my mother kept my hair chopped really short. I begged her for long hair. I had a long haired wig that I wear around the house because I wanted long hair so badly. She had long hair, but I couldn't.

And she would just chop it off with scissors and threw out my childhood until I was probably about 10 until I really laid it down the law and said, I'm growing my hair out and that's just what it is. Until then, I had just this very strange chopped haircut. Why do you think she did that? I don't know. I've never understood why she did that. It looked terrible. I mean, it looked ridiculous in pictures.

Witt has taken on the role of the observer, as only children often do. She watches and listens. She continues to look out her windows and into the windows of others. And when her mom leaves her home alone, in many ways, things are better, more calm. After all, Witt never knows which version of her mother she's going to get. So in her mom's absence, Witt does her best to connect with herself and with the world.

She gazes out at the traffic on the street below and tosses notes to the sidewalk. She blasts the stereo and dances in the living room as hard and as long as she wants. She creates a whole world for herself, alone in that apartment. Outside the apartment, she has a world, too. She's just gotten accepted to the high school for performing arts. Oh, my God. When I got into that school, my mother was just over the moon. Everything was going according to plan.

I was a drama student, but I was also dancing. And midway through my time at performing arts, I wanted to switch to the dance department. And my mother was all for it. She wanted me to be a dancer more than anything. I don't know what that was about. The fact that I wanted to switch majors and be a dance major was huge for my mom. And the school said that I could not do that.

that I would not get a degree from the High School of Performing Arts if I switched majors. And you would think that the school had sent me to Siberia for the amount of rage that that instilled in her. When Witt finishes high school, as a drama major, alas, she leaves for college to study dance. She spends her first two years at the State University of New York and then transfers to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Witt flourishes there, excelling academically and creatively. She meets a guy. He's a dancer and carpenter, an enticing combination. They begin dating, and after graduation they move to New York City together. With all the changes, their relationship becomes rocky, but they're in it. Then Witt becomes unexpectedly pregnant.

She thinks back on how her mother had always made it very, almost abundantly clear to her that women had abortion rights. But Witt doesn't want an abortion. She wants to have the child. It wasn't an ideal relationship, but I felt like we could make it work. I had heard from my dad and probably from Tom and Margaret how distressed my mother was when she got pregnant with me. And I know that she threatened suicide.

My father had to physically restrain her from throwing herself down the stairs of our apartment building. And I also know that she starved herself. She told me that her doctor said, don't gain too much weight. And so she took that to mean to not eat. And they say that by the time I was born, she was skin and bones.

And I was fine. You know, I took what I needed and was a healthy baby, a small but healthy baby. And that was a clue that became really apparent in later years that there was a connection between what happened when she was pregnant and what happened when I got pregnant. When were you told that this was the case and this was the way that your mother was when she was pregnant with you? That's one of those things that...

where you just kind of always knew it, and you don't remember who told you or how. So it was just part of legend. Ha ha ha, Marion tried to throw herself down the stairs. Ha ha ha. Oh, she was so skinny as sort of family lore, but it was not presented in this, within hushed tones. It was just part of family legend. That's so interesting because you'd think that that could be pretty...

traumatizing for a child or a teenager, you know, a young person to hear about the way their mother felt about being pregnant with them. That it, you know, that it wouldn't be like, oh, presented with, you know, some sense of lightness and hilarity around it. You're so right. And in my memory, that's how it was presented. And I don't remember taking it personally. I was like, yeah, she's a little weird. Yeah, whatever. I'm here. Woohoo. Everything's great.

It's September 14th, 1980, the day of what Witt now calls the telling, the day she tells her mother the news of her pregnancy. It's a beautiful day, and Witt takes the train up Lexington Avenue and walks the same blocks she's walked thousands of times, from the subway station to the apartment she grew up in with her mom. But despite the familiar steps, a sense of foreboding weighs her down. And I told her I was pregnant.

And it hung there in the space and all the cars and the trucks are zooming by and the whole world is completely unconcerned about what's going on in here. And I remember she was standing over by the window of the doorway to the kitchen and she just turned to me and she said, get it taken care of. And I knew what she meant. And I said, no, no.

We're not going to do that. I don't want to. It's going to be fine. We're going to get married and we're going to move to Cape Cod. And we had already planned to move to Cape Cod and renovate this old theater. And that plan was in the works and we were so excited about it. And so I said, that's what we're going to do. And it's going to be fine. Don't worry. We're going to get married. And she said, you're going to be fine.

barefoot and pregnant on Cape Cod. I said, "No, I'm not. It's going to be fine." And it was just like talking to a snarling dog. It was terrifying. She was like a frozen human. And then she said, "Then there can be nothing more between us." And I don't remember anything after that. I guess I grabbed my bag and went to the door and went downstairs.

And I walked to 2nd Avenue, and then I walked to 3rd Avenue, and then I turned right, and I went down in the subway and went back to SoHo. And I remember calling my aunt. My mother had these two magnificent sisters who I just loved. And I called my aunt Celia, and I was crying and saying, you know, telling her what had happened.

And my Aunt Celia said, "Oh honey, you know, of course she's shocked right now, but she'll be fine. She'll get over it and it's going to be fine." And I really took that to heart. And it wasn't fine. It was never fine after that. Perhaps she just needs some space, Witt thinks. And thankfully, that space is filled with the support and love from others. Witt's dad is over the moon, optimistic as he's always been. Tom and Margaret are thrilled too.

So, hard as it is, Witt doesn't reach out to her mom. She lets it rest. Some weeks later, one of Witt's medical bills of $20 is routed to her mom's apartment, as her mom still has Witt on her insurance plan. Soon after, Witt receives a frosty note from her mom with the bill attached, saying, "If this is the way things are going to go, you're going to have to pay your own bills."

Witt is struck by her mom's tone, but of course, she'll take care of the bills, not a problem. And yet, the problem, the big problem, persists. In the fall, Witt and her boyfriend decide to get married, despite the fact that their relationship is still unsteady. It's a small affair, just friends, her dad, Tom and Margaret, and her future mother-in-law. After the wedding, the two move to Cape Cod, to the same town where Tom and Margaret had their summer house.

It's a place that I loved. It's this town called South Yarmouth. We rented this little old house on Main Street from the 1800s, and it was just beautiful. I love old things and old houses, and it had those shiny, wide pine floors. And he sold the loft. You know, he sold the fixtures to the loft, and he moved up a couple of months after me, and we just sort of settled in.

In May of that year, I had this baby in the house with my husband and a college friend who took the train in from Boston. And it was fantastic. It was magical. And, you know, through this entire gestation period, I wrote to my mom constantly. I thought, I'm just going to keep writing and pretend everything's okay.

She's got to wonder how I'm doing. I wrote all these little chatty little letters about, oh, and then we went to the movies, and then we went for a walk on the beach, and the baby's growing, and I can feel her kicking, you know, all the stuff that you would write to a mother. And I just sent them out into the world. And sometimes I'd say, you know, I don't even know if you're reading these letters. If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? And, you know, ha, ha, ha, and just keeping it light.

And talking about how I felt and how much I missed her and that maybe we could work it out. And so many letters. And she never answered them. It's so interesting with the parallel between throwing those notes saying, I am happy, out your window as a kid, into the void. Yes, you're so right. I never thought about that.

After the baby is born, the new family of three moves back to Michigan, where Wit's husband goes to graduate school. And Wit falls absolutely in love with motherhood. She's living a rich and fulfilling life that combines being a mom, the very thing her own mother abhorred, with eventually returning to dance, teaching classes, and founding her own dance company. She's actively making up for the loss she's experienced with her mother.

adapting to a new life without her. In 1986, she has another child, a boy named Sam. And all through this, I'm writing to my mom and also going to therapy, a lot of therapy. I couldn't afford anything, but I paid for that therapy. And the therapists uniformly were horrified.

which was gratifying to me. I would have been upset if they'd said, ah, just get over it. No, they were like, what happened? She what? And they said, well, of course you're having a hard time. You have no closure. You have to find out about this. You need to reach out. And one of them suggested that I call her. And I remember being in the kitchen of my house. My kids were asleep. And

It was a beautiful day, and I just did it. I called my number. This was the number of my childhood. And to be honest, I had called it many times. I had called it dozens of times. I would call it and just let it ring, and then I'd hang up. I just wanted to own my home. You know, I didn't just lose my mom. I lost my home, my apartment, where I'd lived for 18 years. And I wanted...

to own it. I wanted to be there. I wanted to see my stuff, but I'd always hung up. And this time, I let her answer. And she answered and she said, yes. My mother never said hello. She always said yes. And I just said, it's me. And I said, I just need to know if this is permanent. Is there any chance for us moving forward? And oh my God, it was so bad. She screamed.

She screamed into the phone and she screamed, "I can't stand it. I can't stand it," over and over again. And I just hung up. And it was, oh, it was the worst. It was so painful. But then this weird thing happened. A few days later, I got a card in the mail from her and she apologized. And it was the weirdest note. It said, "I'm so sorry I screamed." And she said, "None of this is your fault.

She said, it's my bête noire and mine alone. And of course, I took French. That means black beast. And she said something about, I hope you're as happy as you deserve to be. And then she said, if I was thinking any part of this was warm, she closed with, if it ever is profitable to make contact, I will contact you. And then she just signed it with her initials.

That hurt. That just hurt. The word profitable is... Profitable. What do you think she meant by that? Well, profitable for her. Throughout this whole experience of losing someone this way, the part that has been so hard is that she was never uniformly horrible. I mean, I loved her. She snuggled with me. She rubbed my back.

She said she loved me and then she'd hit me like crazy. And then she'd want to hear my every thought and then she wouldn't speak to me. And then the disowning and then this letter that seems apologetic and like she's owning her shit, you know, it's my fault and mine alone. And then ending with this, it's so back and forth. It's so ambiguous that it's hard. It was always so hard for me to know

how to feel about her. I'm the kind of person that wants to know. I want to know how to feel. I wonder what my role is. I wonder what your role is. I never got that with her, and it just got worse and worse through this process. And through the years, I found that I did get stronger, and I started writing less, in part just because I was so busy with life. Not only is life busy, but it's also pretty wonderful.

Witt has fantastic kids, a fantastic dance company, and now positions teaching dance at universities too. She has a robust group of cool, creative friends, and she thinks to herself more than once, "My mom would love these people. Why did this have to happen? Everything would be so different if she were still in my life." As she gets closer to these friends, inevitably people start to ask her about her family.

She doesn't know how to handle the fact of her estrangement from her mother. I really never quite knew what to say, and I had all these stock answers, none of which were good. And one of them was, oh, yeah, she lives in New York. Changed subject immediately. Another one was, yeah, my parents are divorced, and, you know, we're not terribly close. Changed subject immediately. And then sometimes I'd say, yeah, I'm

She lives in New York. I guess you could call it living. And that would shut the conversation down. It was a little hostile, and I didn't know which one was right. And it really put me in this kind of awful situation to have to answer that question. Well, it's interesting, too, because...

The desire to shut it down, you know, in the sense of, you know, mothers and daughters. You know, they're supposed to be together in some fairytale way forever. I mean, to be someone's mother is, you know, that is an identity-shifting thing. Once you are somebody's mother, you are always somebody's mother. Right. And I would imagine that, you know, in meeting new people, making new friends...

Part of not wanting to talk about it is there's something that's so kind of dark and secretive that you might have felt that it reflected on you and not only on your mother. Exactly. Those conversations were hard. Like if it was somebody and I just said, I'm throwing caution to the wind and I'm going to tell this nice person what happened. They were horrified. And also filled with disbelief. They didn't believe that such a thing could happen.

And I didn't really want to get into the minutia of what happened. And I didn't want them to think that I was a bad person because maybe they think I'm a bad person because what mother would do something like that? And I did internalize this line of questioning brings this around to how I internalized this stuff. I did feel sometimes like, did I do something really bad that I don't remember?

And that became kind of this sneaky snake in my mind that kind of undermined me in my life. You know, I've always been an artist, a performing artist, an actor or a dancer, you know, and now a songwriter and writer. And there's an undercurrent in me of, you know, I'm just making my little dances and

oh, I'm writing my little thing and it won't make any difference in the world. And I'm sort of comparing her life to mine and undercutting the value that I've put into the world. I'm not saying I'm the greatest person in the world at all. Of course not. But I've looked from the outside at myself and my lack of drive and my lack of ambition and my willingness to sort of undermine my successes and

And now, whether that's because of what my mom did or whether that's how I'm wired, I don't know. I can't say for sure. While all this was happening for me and my little world of my family and friends in Michigan, this happened to my family, too, to my mother's family. Before this happened, we had these fantastic holidays together, Christmas and Easter and

You know, we weren't a huge family, but I had four cousins that I was very close to, more or less my age, and we adored each other. And my two aunts, who I just absolutely can't even tell you how much I adored them and their families. And we got together every possible chance. And this affected them, too, because they were forced to take sides. My mother was like the puppeteer.

And you know, her name was Marion. And it was years later when I thought, she's like the Marionette. And she's like this grand puppeteer telling everybody in our family how to behave. She shut down any mention of me. And she's a powerful personality. Everybody felt that. She's the kind of person who walks in the room and you feel her power. And positive or negative.

And everybody was a little spirit of Marian. And so nobody wanted to bring me up. If there was going to be Christmas down in Baton Rouge one year, I might get a very cautious little phone call saying, just so you know, your mom's coming down this Christmas. And I'd go, okay, well, I won't come. And that was painful. I hated that. I didn't even get to go to my grandparents' funerals.

I mean, I volunteered to not go. I didn't want to make a scene. I thought, oh, you know, they're her parents. She gets the custody of the funeral. You know, it's just these ridiculous decisions that had to be made. And everybody was just trying their best to keep the peace. And some of them thought, oh, you know, if we just keep the peace long enough, she'll come around. And I knew she wouldn't. And of course she didn't.

But Wit continues to thrive. Her dance company is successful. She begins writing songs as well. She is creatively on fire. She and her first husband divorce. And a few years later, Wit marries a musician in Ann Arbor and becomes part of his wonderful, warm, open family. His mom steps in and treats Wit like a daughter. Eventually, Wit is ready to step back from dancing, which has become hard on her body after so many years.

She and her husband relocate to Nashville. She writes more and more music. And it's been a long time since she's tried to contact her mom. Life has great momentum, and she's in the right place at the right time, in the flow. And then comes the pandemic. And though she worries about her mother, she doesn't reach out. She's just going to upset an old woman. There's just no point.

In June of 2020, my aunt calls me on the phone and says, she always calls me little chick, said, little chick, I can't reach your mother. And there, you know, the bottom kind of dropped out of my stomach because I knew, I figured at some point I'd get a call like that, but I didn't know how it would happen. And she said, yeah, I've been calling since Wednesday and there's no response. I leave messages on the machine and she doesn't answer. And

And then we got a hold of the business office of her apartment building, and they said that she had been taken to a hospital. They didn't know which one. And my aunt was like, how are we going to find out which hospital she's at? And I said, I'll call you right back. And I called two hospitals nearby and found her at a nearby hospital. And of course, the operator said, do you want me to connect you? I said, no, thank you.

And I called Judy back and gave her the number. And the story was that she had broken her leg, broken her femur. My mother said, "Judy, I've broken my femur and I'm going home to die in three weeks." None of which made any sense. My mother didn't want anybody to have found her. She was furious that Judy had tracked her down and didn't want anybody to come up. She didn't want any help.

But little by little, word came out that she had had cancer for years. Nobody knew about it. And she had broken her hip or her leg. And she probably was in her last weeks or months. She worsened. She came home to be cared for by a woman who cleaned her house. That's the only person she wanted with her.

And I immediately go into this, I could help. You know, maybe I could help in some way. And just my brain just kept going, what can I do? And then, wait, you're not involved. You're not involved in this. But I want, maybe I could, she loves tomato sandwiches. Maybe I can arrange to have a really good tomato sandwich sent to her apartment and then stop. That makes no sense. No one is going to send, it's a pandemic. No one's going to bring her a sandwich. You know, just these crazy thoughts of wanting something

to ultimately know what happened, be forgiven, be spoken to, be involved in some way. And it was a strange place to be, just liminal place between being a daughter and a nobody. And as she worsened, her attorney contacted me, and he knew about this disowning,

And he didn't have to reach out to me, but he did, but didn't really tell me very much. She died on July 23rd in her apartment with her housekeeper. And my Aunt Judy called and told me, and I cried a very particular cry. You know, I was in my 60s, and I just felt like a kid abandoned all over, which is ridiculous, but, you know, you feel what you feel.

Yeah, it doesn't strike me as ridiculous at all because you were that kid, you know? All of those selves are always alive inside of us and you never got closure. And the, you know, the idea that there could possibly be closure was always there, even as this most remote possibility while she was still alive. And that died with her. Yeah. I mean, the lawyer...

Bless him, he went over to her apartment and said, you really need to talk to your daughter. Would you like to talk to her? She's ready to talk to you if you like. And she just wouldn't even respond to him. And at that point, I just said, Mike, that was the lawyer. I said, Mike, just let it go. It's not going to happen. And I had pity for her at this point. She's suffering and dying, and I didn't want to make it worse for her. So, of course, I'm not going to push that.

And then came the realization that she had remembered me in her will and that my aunt and I had full custody of all her belongings. Her entire apartment, which was filled with beautiful antiques and art, paintings and silver. A few months later, my husband and I were visiting my dad, and I got a call from the attorney that

He had made arrangements with the superintendent of the building to let me into the apartment. Could we be there in six hours? I was like, okay, we'll be there. And we were actually getting ready to return to Nashville, so we just packed up our stuff a little early. We drove into Manhattan and parked across the street from her building, and we went in. And it was like walking into an Egyptian tomb, I would imagine, where you feel like

The world has stopped. The world from a different time is preserved. And that was just me with my life experience feeling that. I mean, it was just an apartment filled with stuff. An apartment you'd never been in before. I had never been in this apartment, but there were things, oh, there were things that I remembered. And those were the things that I looked for and wanted a certain cabinet for.

that our telephone sat on. A tiny little table that sat in front of the sofa when I was growing up. And my dad used to turn that table upside down and I'd get inside it and he'd swing me around. I wanted the things from my childhood. And I looked for the sculptures. When I was young, my mom went and had her bust made by a very good artist, a sculptor. And

It sat in our living room, the head of my mother with these hollowed out eyeballs. It was very beautiful bronze, very life-sized. And I remember when I was a child, she said, oh, this sculptor would like to do your sculpture too. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know about that. And she talked me into it. And for a couple of months...

I had to go down to this creepy, cold, filthy artist studio in the West 20s somewhere, before that was cool, and climb up these filthy stairs and put on a leotard and stand in front of this sculptor. I mean, she was with me.

But it was cold and uncomfortable, and I didn't understand why we were doing this. And she sort of had me in similar pose to the little ballerina at the Met. And so I had my arms crossed, but I did not look anything like the little ballerina at the Met, let me tell you. And it was like maybe three feet high when it was finished, and she had it cast in bronze and put it on the bookshelf next to her.

So we were there together, cast in bronze, and those were there long after she disowned me. And I remember relatives saying, yeah, we went to the apartment and that sculpture of you is still there. And so I went into her apartment after she died and I thought maybe I would find those things and they weren't there. And all I can imagine is they wound up in goodwill and

I hope whoever has them enjoys them. Or if they were melted down, maybe they were turned into something good. Or maybe they were separated. I actually think that the bust, she returned to the sculptor. I saw some paperwork about that. She returned the bust to the sculptor, but I don't know what happened to my sculpture. Metaphors abound. Metaphors abound, absolutely. Instead of her mom's sculptures, what Witt does end up with are her mom's journals, of which there are many.

She grabs all the notebooks and papers she can find, hoping that something must be recorded somewhere that would explain, in her mom's eyes, what happened between the two of them. Something that is perhaps introspective, self-aware. Some snippet that perhaps can provide answers and closure. When I got home with all her writing, I remember sitting in my room that I often write in and

Just looking around thinking there's got to be something in here. This got to be the reason. And I started writing, you know, my own accounts of what had happened and staring at these journals. And I suddenly realized one day that in her travel journals, they were dated. And I had my journals that were dated. And I thought, what if I compare them?

my journals with her journals on specific days. Then I could answer this question that I'd asked myself so many times. And that question was, I wonder what she's doing right now. And it worked. I was able to match up my life with hers on specific dates. And I looked at my journal for April 22nd, 1986, which was when

My son was born and I was in labor in my house in Ann Arbor and giving birth and all that that entailed. And I just, I had kind of this hour by hour account of what had happened. And I looked in her travel journals and she was in Kenya at the time at a safari. And I accounted for the time change and I matched up.

What was happening, like when I was roaming the house in the middle of the night by myself in labor and looking out the window at the snow, and then I could look at her journal and know that what she was doing, she was having little traumas.

tea cakes for breakfast and then going out on her first safari of the day and looking for the tigers and the hyenas and the lions. And she wanted to see the cubs. And it was fascinating to see. And, you know, I don't know that there is any psychic relevance to that, but boy, it sure felt amazing.

It was so interesting to me. And there were more. There were more instances of that. And I ended up writing about those connections. I called them connections, but, you know, I think they were just coincidences that I tried to make into connections. So one connection that you do make is there's a letter from her. Yeah.

So my mother's belongings were brought to a storage facility in Alabama. And my cousin, while going through a desk drawer, found a letter, actually more like notes for a letter to me. And they're dated November of 1980. So just a short bit after the separation. And my cousin

made a PDF of the document and emailed it to me. And in the email, she said, Kazi, this is going to be painful and I'm so sorry. And I knew that this was going to be bad. And in this document, which is torn and tattered, and it's really just notes, scribbled and also typewritten notes, but she's trying to explain what happened. And there's a lot, but the part that I found really, really interesting is

is this, and I'll just quote a little bit of it. She said,

My deeper problems have to do with, if you will, a psychological warp, the origins of which are vague, buried under nearly 50 years of fears, denials, confusions, ignorance regarding pregnancy and birth. And the bottom line adds up to a response of passionate, hysterical revulsion. Since the time of my own pregnancy, of which yours is turning out to be a replay emotion-wise,

I've obviously known something was wrong, perhaps unconsciously. I believed and hoped you would make other sets of choices so that I'd not have to deal with it. The clincher. I now wade into the ever deeper, darker. Maybe I never loved you. All my life with you as a mother was a performance, designed to atone for never having wanted you. An attempt to make good."

There are so many layers to that. Yeah. So many. And one thing that strikes me is that you were different from her.

Earlier in our conversation, when you quoted her as saying something like, you know, now you're going to be barefoot and pregnant in Cape Cod, the thought that went through my mind was, and what's wrong with that? Of course. Right? I know. For her, it was a nightmare. But for you, you weren't her. You weren't her. Yeah. You know, we had to separate at some point. I mean, every therapist I ever have spoken to has said, you know, you were incredibly enmeshed with this woman. Yeah.

And you knew that in some way that this gave you the perfect out. You had to separate so that you could be a mom and live the life you were intended to live, the life that you wanted to live. And so at the end of it, she basically just says, I can do you no good except by absenting myself from you, which is what she did. And she meant it.

Witt learns that there is actually a clinical term from what her mother suffered from, one that shaped their entire relationship, tocophobia, a fear and revulsion revolving around pregnancy. In her journals, Witt's mom writes extensively about her own childhood experience of watching her mother give birth and how it terrified her.

Heartbreakingly, Witt also discovers all of the letters she wrote to her mother over the years. All those letters filled with hopeful updates on her life. They were tied together in a bundle, unopened. I figured she would have thrown them out. So I thought it was interesting that she saved them. In a way, that was a message. Like, I'm just going to save these so that when I die, you will know that I never even opened your letters. So I thought that was...

That's communication. There is some sort of communication going on there. It surely is. But it's been fascinating to open them. I could only do like one or two at a time because it's just too much. It's just overwhelming to hear my own voice change as I grew older. My written voice, you know, it's just so young and so...

positive and we're going to get through this and oh, it's going to be fine. And oh, I went to the library today and I wish you would respond, but it's okay if you don't because I'm still here. You know, just that voice compared to the one in later years where in the 90s, it's like, where are your manners? I sent you a letter. Why don't you respond? I became a little bit more hard edged. Alongside all of these discoveries, Witt makes another one.

But this time, it isn't a secret she discovers or a stack of papers. It's a hobby, possibly the most poetic hobby you could ever imagine. Witt has taken up metal detecting. She finds a metal detector on Craigslist for $250 and takes the plunge.

It changed my life. Nashville is a great place to metal detect. There have been people here for centuries and centuries, and I've dug Indian artifacts, native artifacts in my garden. This is a place where people have lived since before time. And so I started metal detecting, and it provided this enormous amount of relief for me. I've always been a little tightly wound, a little anxious, and...

It is the most meditative, meaningful hobby, and anyone who does it knows. I joined a club. I joined the Middle Tennessee Metal Detecting Club, and I started in the backyard and dug up Civil War bullets and musket balls, and I've dug Spanish reals from the 1700s right in my neighborhood. And yeah, there's meaning to it. When you're looking in the dirt and it's chaos,

chaos in the dirt. It's roots and rocks and mud and bits of grass. And then all of a sudden you see something shiny and you pull it out and it's a Liberty Dime from 1922. And it's as shiny as it was when it fell out of someone's pocket. And you hold it in your hand and you think about the person who dropped it. And there's this connection to the past. And not everybody has that, but people who metal detect have that. They get this history rush.

We want to connect with people from the past. And I think that's probably one reason this thing with my mom has been so painful. It's because I feel connected to her. I felt connected to her even when she did terrible things to me. Even remembering the things she did when I was a child that were really not good. I felt connected to her. And I told her that. I said, Mom, I feel like we're connected by a silver band. And that no matter where we are, we have a connection together.

with a silver band. She appreciated that and she liked that. She liked to know that I loved her. But, you know, it didn't last. And then she went off and had her freedom and saw the world. And in all the writings, in all the journals, there was only one place in all of that writing where she mentioned me. And it was the saddest thing I've ever seen. And she had written it in the middle of the night after having a dream.

And she just talked about me being a baby. It's too sad to even say. But it was very short, just a couple of lines. And it showed her ability to self-reflect and to look at herself and to acknowledge that what had happened was really sad. And so, you know, I found that. And it happened in a hotel in Tokyo. And I just, I don't really know the meaning of it. I just know that she did dream about me. So there was that.

Where this lives inside me now, I will tell you that a long time ago, when I was in the throes of it, and she was still alive, and I thought about her a lot, and so often I would think, oh, she woke up today and she's still not calling me. Even the thousands and thousands of days later, I'd still think that.

And it would hurt. She made the decision every day to let this happen. And I remember sitting with a girlfriend of mine in Ann Arbor, and I was crying and remembering this because it still hurt and I would still cry. And I said, how am I going to feel when she dies? If we haven't worked this out, how am I going to feel? And my friend looked at me and she said, relieved. You're going to feel relieved. That had never occurred to me. And that's how I feel.

It's over. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zakur 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 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at dannyreiter.

And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance. Under the sand, under the sand...