Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Support comes from Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations, and at trial, when the lawyer you choose matters most. Online at Zuckerman.com.
The Moth Podcast is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Quote now at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary.
This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows from New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more. The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.
To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Ellison, producer of this radio show, and today we'll hear about lessons our parents teach us, whether they mean to or not.
Our first storyteller is Brigette Davis. She told her story at the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Detroit, Michigan, where The Moth was presented by Michigan Radio. Here's Brigette Davis live at The Moth. I was in my first grade class one day, and I had just shown my teacher, Miss Miller, an assignment. We had to color paper petals, cut them out, and paste them onto a picture of a flower.
And as I'm returning to my seat, Ms. Miller stops me and she says, "You sure do have a lot of shoes." The week before, she had asked me what my father did for a living, and I said, "He doesn't work." And she said, "Well, what does your mother do?" And I froze. I knew I could not tell her that. My mom was in the numbers.
which was a lot like today's lottery, except that it was underground. And it really existed for decades before the state basically took it over. My mom was a numbers runner. That means that every day, except Sunday,
She would take people's bets on three-digit numbers, collect their money when they didn't win, pay out their winnings when they did, and profit from the difference. And the thing is, the numbers was wildly popular. It generated millions of dollars in every major city in the country.
And so you can imagine that a lot of that money circulated through the black community. And those dollars turned over many, many times.
I mean, numbers money helped to provide services that black folks desperately needed. It really helped with launching small businesses and providing college scholarships, and it helped folks get home loans, and it even helped a fledgling NAACP stay afloat for years. My mom was high-ranking. She wasn't just a numbers runner. She was a banker.
And that means that she didn't just have her own customers, but other bookies turned their business into her. And she was the only woman in Detroit operating at that level for a long time. That's how she was able to give us a solid middle-class life. A solid middle-class life. And so you can imagine that
I was really, really, really proud of my mom. I just thought, "This is really incredible that she's able to give us this kind of middle-class life." But what I loved most of all was, I mean, I can do it now. I can conjure the sound of her voice.
on the phone taking her customers bets. She would say, "Okay, Miss Queenie, I'm ready to take your numbers. 692, straight for 50 cents, 788, box for a dollar." And folks had these really creative ways of coming up with numbers to play.
They had all kinds of ways they would think about what three digits they wanted to play. They could play their birth dates or their anniversaries or their addresses or their license plates. Some people even like to play their favorite Bible verse. And for me,
To just hear my mom reciting those numbers every morning, it was like a daytime lullaby because it meant that everything was right in the world, you know, because my mom was handling her business. On the other hand, it is true that it was a livelihood based on a daily win or lose gamble. So
Yes, I also remember how we would all gather around and wait for that phone call every evening that would announce the day's winning numbers. They were based on racetrack results. It was like this tense silence moved through our home like a nervous prayer. And when we actually heard the winning numbers, we took our cues from Mama. Either she looked nervous,
relieved or she looked worried. Either she'd been lucky that day or one of her customers had been. And it wasn't that she ever resented her customers winning. She would always say, folks play numbers to hit so you cannot be mad when they do. I was so proud of my mom. I knew she was not like any of my friends' mothers. I knew she was running things.
And one day I decided I was going to organize all of her numbers running materials. Yeah. And so I went through the house gathering everything into this shallow cardboard box.
her spiral notebooks and her white scratch pads and her black binders and her red ink pens. And then I very carefully painted on the side of the box, Mama's numbers. And I used bright pink nail polish. I was so impressed with myself because I remember the possessive S.
So I proudly show this to my mom, and she takes one look and says, you cannot put my business out in the street like that. And that's when it hit me that I had to keep my admiration for my mom private. And it's not that she was ever apologetic or embarrassed about what she did. There was no shame attached to it. My mom made it very clear that
that the numbers was a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. And she had all of these ways to help to mitigate the risk of exposure. My mom basically lived a low-key lifestyle. She never flaunted her wealth. Yes, she always drove a new car, but it was a Buick Riviera and not a Cadillac.
and we lived in a lovely home on a tree-lined street. But we did not live in one of the big houses in an exclusive enclave in Detroit. And we were well-dressed. My mom was the best dressed of all. But her style was understated, you know? She was classic and classy. No one would have ever described my mother as flashy. My mom's edict was...
keep your head up and your mouth shut. Be proud, but be private. And that's why when my first grade teacher asked me what my mom did for a living, I knew I could not tell her the truth. I knew I could not reveal the family business. We all knew to keep that secret. The only problem was I hadn't been told what I should say. So I said to Ms. Miller,
I'm not sure what my mom does. And after Ms. Miller said to me, "You sure do have a lot of shoes," she said to me, "Before you sit down, I want you to name every pair of shoes you have. Go ahead."
I was so nervous because it felt like a test. And so I didn't want to get it wrong. I went through this mental inventory of all the shoes that lined my closet shelf, and I just started naming them. The black and white polka dotted ones with the bow tie, the buckled ruby red ones, the salmon pink lace ups. And I managed to get through 10 pairs of shoes.
And Miss Miller said to me, "Ten pairs is an awful lot." And I could hear something bad in her voice as she ordered me to take my seat. And then, the next day in class, Miss Miller called me back to her desk. And she said, "You did not tell me you had white shoes." I looked down at my feet, and I felt like I had been caught in a lie.
I knew I had disappointed my teacher, and the rest of the day I was so worried that I was in trouble. And so that evening, after my mother was finished taking her customers' bets, and before the day's winning numbers came out, during that brief expectant pause in the day when she was least distracted and still in a good mood, I told her what happened at school.
I confessed that I forgot to tell Miss Miller about the 11th pair of shoes. I have never seen my mother get so angry. She was furious, and I thought, I am about to get a spanking. But in fact, my mom said to me, that is none of her damn business. Who does she think she is?
And then my mom stood up and said, "Get your coat." And I thought, "Oh my God, we are going back to school and she's going to confront Ms. Miller." But in fact, my mom took me to Saks Fifth Avenue where we made our way to the children's shoe department.
She pointed to the most beautiful pair of yellow patent leather shoes and she said, "Those are pretty. I'm telling you, I still can remember when my mother pulled out a $100 bill and paid for those shoes, the saleswoman looked at her the way Miss Miller had looked at me. On the way home,
My mom said, "You're going to wear these to school tomorrow. And you better tell that damn teacher of yours that you actually have a dozen pair of shoes. You hear me?" The next day, I wore my new shoes with a matching yellow knit dress. And in class, I was so nervous, but I did as I was told. I walked up to my teacher's desk and I said, "Miss Miller, I have 12 pairs of shoes.
She looked down at my feet and then she leveled her blue eyes at my face and she said, "Sit down." Miss Miller never said another word to me. Sending me to school that day in those decidedly unsubtle bright yellow shoes, my mom really did risk raising Miss Miller's suspicions, but she did it to make a point.
And it was one that I understood and heard loud and clear. No one can tell me ever what I'm entitled to. My mom used material things as armor against a world designed to convince us black working class children of migrants that we didn't deserve a good life. And her mission was to make sure we knew otherwise.
So, yes, 12 pairs of shoes for a six-year-old girl who's going to outgrow them in a few months might seem excessive, but for my mom, it was an investment in how I walked into the future with my head up. But I did continue to keep my mouth shut. For decades, I never told anyone what my mother did for a living.
Not even after Michigan's daily lottery became legal. And not even after my mother died. Which means I never got to tell anyone how proud I was of her. Until now. Thank you. That was Bridgette Davis.
Every day, Brigette plays the New York lottery game, which is actually called numbers, at a bodega near her home. She plays 675, her home address, which according to her favorite dream book, also plays for her mom's name, Fanny.
Since publishing her memoir on this subject, Brigette has received dozens of emails from people of all backgrounds, Greek, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Polish, Lebanese, Panamanian, Ukrainian, and more, revealing how their family members once played or operated the numbers. Nearly all were sharing their stories for the first time.
To see photos of Brigette and her mom, along with a picture of her mother taking a customer's number over the phone, visit themoth.org. Coming up, the surprising lessons of a nine-alarm fire when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange PRX.org. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. Our next story in this hour about parental lessons comes from Ellie Lee. A couple of minutes into her story, Ellie talks about a coat her father designed for her when she was a kid, and she holds it up for the audience to see.
We don't want you to feel left out, so if you want to see a picture of the coat, it's on our website, themoth.org. Here's Ellie Lee, live at The Moth. So there's a kind of wisdom that fathers have, and then there's the kind of wisdom that my father has.
For example, when he does things, he thinks he's totally brilliant, and I just think he's crazy. For example, when we first immigrated from Hong Kong, he thought it would be a good idea for all of us to have American names, which would make sense, because it would make the transition a lot easier. And so my dad chose the American name Ming, even though it's not even his Chinese name. It's just another Chinese name. It's like a dynasty. So...
So when we came over to this country, we really had nothing. We were penniless. So in order to save money, my dad thought it was a really smart idea to make and design my first winter coat. I was three years old. And to this day, he thinks it's like the best design. There you go. But seriously, he thinks it's like, oh, this is great. We should market this.
That's the wisdom that my father has. One more example of his wisdom. One day he came home and there was a sale on belts and he bought a monogram belt and he was so excited. He's like, look at this. It had this big shiny letter A on it, even though our family name is Lee. And I was like, Dad, why did you get a letter A belt? That doesn't make any sense. He's like, oh, I got A because A is for ace.
Which is, you have to understand something about Chinese people. Chinese people are obsessed about being number one. Like, I have a belt now that says so. I'm number one, ace.
And that's something, like, if you've ever noticed in Chinatowns across the country, like, Chinese business people, like, they always have to find, you know, the best number one name for their business in order to bring in all the money and the good fortune, which is why everything's like an imperial dynasty, lucky dragon, number one kitchen. Like, that's the whole, that is my dad. Like, that's his mentality. Yeah.
So in the first few years of being in this country, he had no time off and worked like crazy and managed to save up a little money to start up his own business. It was a very modest grocery store in Boston's Chinatown. And of course, he called it Ming's Market. But in Chinese, the name of it was Penga Xixiang, which literally means cheap price market.
And it was that, even as a little kid, like I didn't understand, like literally he told me one day that he would like mark up something by five cents, you know, like mark up another thing by 10 cents. And I was just like, how are you ever going to make money? Like this business model is insane. It was the wisdom of that, you know, but, but, you know, strangely enough, like almost immediately he developed a really loyal following in Boston's Chinatown.
Because for the first time, I think working families and working poor families actually had a place where they could buy affordable, healthy, good groceries and eat well, which is, you know, no small thing when you're poor. So my dad, after about 10 years of having this grocery store, he built it up to be a very successful business. And by 1989, he had moved into an enormous space. It became New England's largest Asian market.
And at the same time that year, I mean, you know, I was a snotty teenager. I still thought, well, you're crazy. You're a successful businessman, but you're nuts. You know, crazy ideas. And, you know, at the same time, there was this, he's been renting a first floor in this vacant building that had been vacant for like 20, no, 30 years.
And the landlord was trying to renovate the other floors to try to rent it out as a retail space, but he was doing everything on the cheap. So instead of hiring a contractor, he was like welding and renovating on his own without pulling permits.
So one day, as you can probably expect, something got out of hand and this big fire broke out as he was welding. But it was okay, you know, they got all the, they evacuated the building, about 150 people, and the fire trucks arrived immediately and everything was fine until the fire department hooked up their hoses to the hydrants and there was no water to fight the fire. And they were like, oh, that's weird, you know, so they went down a couple of blocks and tried the next hydrant and it was totally dry.
What had happened was that the city of Boston, a few months prior, they were doing road construction and generally when you drill, if they drill deep, they turn off the water pressure in case they hit a water main. And when they sealed up the road, they forgot to turn the pressure back up. So the firefighters had no tools to fight the fire. And it was just a disaster. I mean, it was just like an hour later, the building's still on fire and there's no water. They're trying to jerry-rig something from a nearby hydrant like, you know, like 10 blocks away. Um...
And if things couldn't get worse, the fire jumped an alley and the building next door caught on fire. And on the top floor was 10,000 square feet of illegally stashed fireworks. So, you know, and so firefighters couldn't scale the ladders. And so there's like, I mean, it was a surreal moment because things were exploding from, you know, like in celebration, you know, normally you'd have fireworks. As my dad stood there completely helpless, watching his life's work just be destroyed in a moment through no fault of his own.
So I got a call, I was a sophomore at the time in college, and I went out to the store the next day when it was kind of just like smoldering, it wasn't on fire anymore. And as I made my approach to the store, I remember seeing like three elderly women across the street and they were crying. And so I went up to them and I said,
"You know, is everything okay? Why are you crying?" And the lady looked at me, and then she looked at my dad's store, burned down store, and pointed and teary-eyed said, "You know, where are we gonna go now that we don't have a home?"
And that was kind of like a turning point for me. I hadn't really thought about my dad's store in that way. Like, you know, I just thought it was something he was doing to provide for the family. But in fact, he was kind of providing for a greater community. Like, you know, these elderly women, they didn't have a community center to go to. They didn't have a public park in Chinatown. And this was the only place where they would actually run into their friends. And they spent a lot of time there. In a way, it was like a second home.
And I guess it is true, it sounds corny, but you only really do realize what you have when you lose it. And so in the months that followed, I kept begging my dad for more stories. And one time he told me a story about how a little boy, I asked him what he did with people who were shoplifters, because I was really curious. And he said, well, one day I caught a kid shoplifting. He was only 10.
And he didn't know who I was. I was kind of following him around. He was just like taking stuff, like stuffing it in his bag, putting it in his pockets. And at one moment, like he actually took a break from stealing and sat down and started eating the food he had stolen. Like he was just right in the middle of an aisle. And my dad came up to him. He didn't know who he was. He said, hey, little boy, have you had enough to eat?
And the little boy rubbed his belly. He's like, almost. And my dad's like, hey, so where are your parents? He's like, well, they're at work. He's like, oh, well, why aren't you at home? He's like, because there's no food at home. And my dad said, well, you know, when you take stuff, especially if it's at a store and you don't pay for it, it's actually stealing.
And the little boy starts getting really nervous, like, oh my God, this guy's going to get me in trouble. You know, and he's kind of angling for a way to get out. And my dad's like, you know, so in the future, if you don't have anything to eat at home, would you just please just come and find me and ask me for whatever you need? Like, if you ask, I'll give you whatever you want. Just don't steal because stealing is wrong.
And in the months that followed, I think my dad really looked forward to seeing the little boy. And it was these stories that I was craving and I was asking my dad, because in some way, I think I was trying to recreate something that I had lost or had kind of taken for granted.
So whenever we went to Chinatown, I remember lots of people would come up to us and say, please, we need a store like this again. When are you going to open up your store? And it was hard because my dad was basically kind of penniless. Like the fire had caused about $20 million worth of damage and he barely had enough insurance to cover it. I mean, it was like not just inventory, but like
the bean sprout machine, like the machine that he leased to wash and dry beans, I mean stuff like that. And so he really had no money, but he had this idea that maybe he could pool together what little money he did have with a lot of the original employees, people for whom they were immigrants and they got their first jobs through my dad at the store. I've been working there since the 70s. So they pooled together, it was a big risk, the only location they could find was just on the outskirts of Chinatown, which in the early 90s during the last recession,
It was like a no man's land. It's like this area really, like it was so unsafe and the only reason you would ever go there is to like get a prostitute or drugs, you know. It was like, it was so unsafe and at the time I remember in college thinking like what's the wisdom of that? Like why are you going there? It's so unsafe, no one's gonna go. It's just gonna, you're gonna lose your life savings.
But he did it anyways, because he's crazy. And almost kind of overnight, the place was revitalized. There were really loyal people that families from the suburbs came and gave patronage to my dad. People walked from Chinatown. And then soon thereafter, more and more businesses started popping up.
And then there was more and more foot traffic, and then families started moving back into the neighborhood. And it was an amazing thing. Like, he kind of helped revitalize this neighborhood to the point that then 15 years later, it became one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Boston, which is why my dad got an eviction notice from the owner, because he wanted to kick my dad out and knock down the whole block and build luxury condos. This was a few years ago.
So I remember my dad at the time was 70 and I said, you know, dad, what do you want to do? Like you have like 90 employees and like they're all in their 40s and 50s. You know, they don't speak English. They're kind of very hard to employ. Like what's going to happen to them? And I remember at the time my dad said, you know, you know, I'm 70 years old. I'm too old for this. You know, I'm too old to fight.
And I understand when my dad says that, but at the time I decided that I wasn't too old to fight. So I organized the community and, sorry, I organized the community and led this grassroots movement to fight City Hall and fight one of the largest developers in all of Boston to try to hold ground. Thank you.
And at our first public hearing, it was a really amazing turnout, and we got enough press that even the mayor changed his tune and started supporting where we were coming from. It was an incredible thing. So after the first initial hearing, I remember going to the store afterwards and saying,
And immediately when I walked in, there was these two older women who were my dad's employees. And they rushed right up to me and said, thank you so much for what you did last night. You know, we normally don't think that we have a voice and we normally don't think we can advocate for ourselves in that kind of way. So thank you for doing what you did.
And when I looked into their eyes, I think I felt like the same feeling probably that my dad felt when he saw the boy that once shoplifted or saw the old women outside the store weeping. And when I looked into their eyes, I saw so much compassion and humility and grace. And it was at that moment that I understood the wisdom that my father had given me. Thank you.
Ellie Lee is an award-winning director, writer, and producer of fiction, animated, and documentary films. She is a five-time National Emmy Award nominee. Currently, she's writing two screenplays, one of which is loosely based on her family's stories in Boston's Chinatown in the 1980s. The fire in her dad's store was a nine-alarm fire, one of the biggest in Boston's history.
Ellie's parents immigrated to Boston from Hong Kong when she was a baby. Her father picked Boston because he wanted his kids to get a good education, and the only schools he'd ever heard of were Harvard and MIT. Ellie is a graduate of Harvard University. Coming up, a rebellious teenager and a mother struggling with bipolar disorder, when the Moth Radio Hour continues. ♪♪
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org.
You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this show. Next up, Jason Shomer, who told this story about his mother's wisdom in the Twin Cities at a Moth Grand Slam. The theme of the night was growing pains. Here's Jason, live at the Moth. Growing up, we never fought. But the few times we did, it was off the charts. Yeah.
I was furious. I grabbed a handful of money, I stomped out of the house, and I walked all the way to Pomida. Once I got in that store, I headed right to Health and Beauty and I snatched a home perm kit right off the shelf. I was gonna perm my hair for my senior photos and no one was gonna stop me. Not even my mom, who said it was a terrible idea.
Now, growing up in a small town, I was different. I stuck out like a sore thumb. Back in the fourth grade, my parents moved from Minneapolis to Little Falls, Minnesota, a small, conservative, rural farming community. My life was basically footloose. Only we could dance, and I didn't look like Kevin Bacon. Now, we just did not fit in with my peers and my classmates.
Every day walking through the halls of school, I was lost in a sea of mullets and Wrangler Jean. Two different worlds colliding. They liked to smoke in woodshop class. I liked theater arts. They headbanged to AC/DC. I vogued to Madonna. They wore cowboy boots. I had penny loafers. So as I left Pameida, I called my friend Heidi from the payphone on the street corner.
And I told her, I'm coming over. And I hung up. Now, Heidi was the queen of bad decisions. Heidi loved to skip school, and she even failed gym class. And she was also dating a boy from Juvie. Heidi opened her door before I could even knock. She knew something big was about to happen, and she wanted in. So I threw that perm box on the table. She grabbed a towel. We were doing it.
So we did the perm, and let me tell you this, it took hours. It was a nightmare. I almost lost an eye. Chemical was everywhere. My scalp was burning. We lost a couple of chunks of hair. But I knew it would be worth it. Because I figured I am changing my identity. I'm going to be a new person. When I go to school, all the kids are going to stare as I walk in, slow motion. And they're going to be thinking...
"Wow, who's that new cool kid? "And how can I be friends with him?" Sadly, it was just me getting high from the fumes from the perm. So the next day, my mom and I drove over to the portrait studio so I could have my senior photos taken. The silence in that car was deafening. As my mom was mute with seething rage,
And I was smug with victory. Now prior to the perm, my hair was long, straight, and brown. I had an asymmetrical haircut, which was where one end is a lot longer than the other end. And it flipped over to the left. It was very Flock of Seagulls, 1980s. So once I permed it, the length of my hair caused these giant ringlets.
that bounced like crazy every time I took a step or snapped my neck. My hair had so much drama, Beyonce would be jealous. So once we were in the portrait studio, I took a can of mousse, I flipped off the cap, made the giant mound of foam, worked it into my hair, and it was frozen in time. A few minutes later, it was frozen in eternity as the flashbulb in my senior photo was taken.
My mom hung the photo up in our living room and displayed it prominently. She'd never miss an opportunity to tell anyone who came over to the house, "Oh, have you seen Jason's senior photo?" "Why, yes, it is a perm. It is. Uh-huh. Yeah, I told him not to, but no one listens to mom. Right, Jason?" Which I always responded with, "Okay, okay, listen, it was popular at the time." But the sad reality was the perm was never popular, and I was never popular.
One day I finally admitted to my mom, I go, I get it mom, it was a mistake. Can we just take the photo down? And she looked at me and she said, oh honey, we all make mistakes. That's how we figure out who we are in life. Unfortunately though, sometimes mistakes live in a frame on the living room wall forever. That was Jason Shulman.
Jason is a stand-up comedian and storyteller. He spent two years as the opening act for comedy icon Louie Anderson. Jason says 14 years ago, his mom unfortunately lost her battle with cancer, but she would have been proud to see how things turned out and would have loved this story.
Everyone always asks, they're like, where's the picture of the perm now? Like, did you put it back up? And I can honestly say, yes, the picture of me in the perm is back up on the wall where my mom would want it to be. To see photos of Jason and his mom, and of course that perm photo, visit our website, themoth.org.
Our final story and parental lesson in this hour is from Louise Newton Keogh. Louise told this story at an open mic story slam competition in Melbourne, Australia, where we partner with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ABCRN. Here's Louise. Okay, so when I was younger, whenever my mother would say the words to me, I love you, I would die a little bit inside.
Not because she didn't love me and not because I didn't love her, because she did and I do, but because that meant she was starting on another manic episode. You see, my mother struggled all her life with bipolar disorder that was undiagnosed and untreated until she was in her 50s. And it made for an interesting upbringing. Some of it was a lot of fun. We had some wacky times, like when she dragged us out of bed at two in the morning to worship the moon.
And when she, I don't know how she did it, but she got a whole stash of fireworks and we had our own fireworks night in the backyard. Neighbours didn't like it, but we loved it. But for the most part, growing up with a parent with a mental illness was really tough and challenging, particularly after my dad left. He had his own set of circumstances and he left when I was 10. Particularly after that, it was just us and her. And it was a really steep learning curve for
We learnt more from Mum than we did, than I did in 20 years of schooling. We learnt that every year or so, this sweet, gentle, kind, beautiful woman would have what was termed then as a nervous breakdown and would transform into someone we didn't know. It was a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, only it was Mum and what we called Nutbag Mum. We learnt that it was possible...
to have nutbag mum, scream abuse in your face, steal from whatever meagre little bits you earn from your paper round or whatever jobs we got from the neighbours, call your teachers to tell them what a terrible, horrible human being you were. She even called one of my uni lectures once. I don't know how she got his home number, but she did. It was possible for her to do all that and for that to be okay and for us to get past it and to forgive. We learnt compassion.
Because for as much as we suffered, and we did, it was obvious even from that young age that there was nobody who was struggling more than mum, that she and she alone bore the brunt of this and she would have done anything to rid herself of what she saw as a curse. We learnt that the medical system fails people with mental health issues. It did then, it does now. Nothing's changed. And we learnt to rely on each other.
We knew from a very young age that the only way we were going to get through this was if we rallied together, my brother and my three sisters and I, and protected ourselves and our mum. So my brother, when he was in year seven, took over all of the finances. That included talking to bank managers about the debts mum racked up, organising how to pay bills, organising a budget for the weekly shopping.
My sister Mary, at about the same age, started taking a nano jeep and going down to the supermarket and buying things so we had food so that mum couldn't spend it all on nothing. My job was to make sure my two younger sisters did their homework so the school wouldn't come knocking on our door to see what was wrong. We learnt to look after each other and we took it in turns to look after mum, to bear the brunt of the rages, to make sure she was OK, to just be there for her when the inevitable collapse came.
But we also learnt to be vigilant because even in the stable times, and there were a lot of very good stable times, we were always on the lookout for the next time, the next episode. And unfortunately, one of the main pointers for that was, I love you. I've lost track of the amount of times I've had conversations with my siblings and I would go something like, hey, mum loves me again. And the response would be, oh, crap, here we go. And it didn't just stop there.
You know, the I love you's got more and more extreme the further she elevated, often coming at the end of some hideous insult. You know, you're a horrible person and I wish you'd never been born, but I love you. As if that made it okay. But it didn't. It tainted those three beautiful words for me. And it made it almost impossible for me to be able to say them back.
And I don't know what it was, but it stuck like a block in my chest. And I'd find myself, if someone said, "Love you", "Yeah, thanks for that, that's good, cool, great, yeah, good on ya." But I wasn't able to say, you know. It was hard. Until a few years ago, my mum had what we thought was the mother of all episodes, but it actually turned out to be an even worse condition. She had developed a condition called Lewy Body Syndrome, which is a form of dementia.
that is rapid and unrelenting and has destroyed her body and her mind in equal parts. She now is in a really lovely care facility and she can no longer walk or feed herself or clean herself and she can barely talk. And I see her every Sunday and I hold her hand and sit with her. And sometimes I talk and sometimes we listen to music, but most of the time mum and I just sit in silence. And it's very healing sometimes.
And it's very peaceful. And I know she likes me there. But the lessons still haven't stopped because my mother says two things to me. And she said only two things to me for the last year. The first one is when I get there and she says, oh, it's you, in great surprise. And she's so pleased. I say, yes, it is me. And we sit together. And then when I'm leaving, she holds my hand and she smiles happily.
with her eyes and she says, I love you, Lou. And somehow it doesn't hurt me anymore. It doesn't make me cringe. It actually feels right. It feels perfect. It feels beautiful. So I guess the lesson I've learnt, perhaps the last lesson I'll ever learn from my mother, is how to hear those words, I love you, and how to say them back. I love you, mum. See you soon.
That was Louise Newton Keogh. Louise is a freelance writer and university administrator from Melbourne, Australia. When she's not working, Louise spends her time writing, reading, baking celebration cakes, or walking the beautiful tree-lined streets of her neighborhood. She says her driving passion is family, and she's the proud mother of four mostly adult children and a spoodle called Atticus.
Louise has always been the teller of her family's stories, a role she cherishes. Mum died early in the new year of 2018. It was a gentle death. She slipped away in her sleep without pain or struggle. My last visit to her was on New Year's Eve. I held her hand, played music to her and read to her a chapter of her favourite book, Little Women. By that stage, she had virtually lost the power of speech, but she did smile often and
And as I left, she looked into my eyes and whispered, "I love you" one last time. It has been nearly two years now since mum passed away and I still miss having her in my life. But I like to think of her as free now, free of the mental illness that she fought so bravely for so long and the dementia that cruelled her final few years. And that somewhere, somehow, she is smiling at having her story told.
And I will be forever grateful that the last words she heard me say were, I love you too, Mom. To see photos of Louise and her mother, you can visit our website, themoth.org.
Do you have a story you'd like to tell us? We welcome your pitches. You can record them right on our site, that's themoth.org, or call 877-799-MOTH. That's 877-799-6684. We listen to all of them. The best ones are developed for moth shows all around the world. Hi, my story is about my ill-fated attempt to help my 11-year-old son, Luke, get over his fear of being beamed by a baseball bat.
and it involves me taking him up to the coin-operated batting cages in San Rafael and forcing him to watch me get voluntarily struck by a pitch just so that he could see that it wasn't that big of a deal. Except, of course, that it kind of was a big deal. I don't think either of us will ever forget the sound that ball made as it ricocheted off my elbow.
And I know I'll never forget the pain. It was so exquisite. And I'll never forget the fact that my son saw me cry for the very first time. Not my best day. Even worse, that little incident did not help Luke get over his fear of getting beamed. In fact, if it accomplished anything, it's that we're both now terrified of batting cages.
He's 15 now, and he's free of the tyranny of organized sports. But I hope that he knows he has a dad who, while often misguided in his attempts to find solutions, is still very eager to help his son with life's problems. Remember, you can pitch us at 877-799-MOTH or online at themoth.org.
You can share these stories or any others from the Moth Archive and find out about moth storytelling events in your area all through our website, themoth.org. There are moth events year-round. You can find a show near you and come out and tell us a story. Find us on social media, too. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at The Moth. That's it for this hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the moth.
The stories in this show were directed by Catherine Burns and Meg Bowles, with additional coaching by Michelle Jalowski. The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Ginesse, and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Emily Couch. Our pitch came from Peter Rudy.
Moth Stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Julian Lodge, Tin Hat Trio, Blue Dot Sessions, and Lotus. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange PRX.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
