252: What if you watched your mother disappear?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. You're 10 or 11 years old. You can't drive. You can't go somewhere. You're stuck. So what do you do? You have to put up with it. You have to cope with it. Your feelings just, you have to compartmentalize those things when you're going through that or you're going to absolutely go nuts.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 252. What if you watched your mother disappear?

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My mother was adopted and we don't know her natural birth parents, but her natural mother was 14. And this was back in the mid 1940s, 1946. At that time, obviously the 14 year old had her out of wedlock, was probably put away. And back in the 40s, they would place you in an orphanage and she was not adopted until about three months after that.

She was obviously not nurtured, not cared for, maybe didn't eat or drink when she needed to. So it was a very controlled environment, probably very non-sensitive to their needs. Obviously, we know a lot more about the effects of that now. But then it's commonplace for somebody born on a wedlock to be thrust away. So I think that she was very detached emotionally.

Her parents, as she was growing up, her adopted parents were not nurturing either. They did drink quite a bit. They took care of her. They were well off. They had a nice house, all of that stuff. But it lacked everything emotionally that I'm sure she needed. She would come home and have straight A's. She did very, very well at school. She was very, very smart.

There was no acknowledgement for her accomplishments, and whether it was athletic, whether it was cerebral, academically, whatever, was just not acknowledged. So there was a deep cry for attention that stemmed from being that detached baby, and it never really left. I think it was around the age of 12 or 13, living in Minnesota,

My mother had a boyfriend that was going to be doing big things and she was very attached to, obviously a very young age, kind of puppy love, but she was very attached to him. All of this was stripped away when they moved from Minnesota to Florida and I believe she was 12 or 13 at that point.

She was maybe 15 when she met my dad in Florida. And then at that point, it wasn't that long after that my dad basically got her out of the situation. They got married and I think she was 16 when they got married. When you're in a family, you live in kind of a bubble and you don't know what's ordinary and what's not ordinary. When we would go to a restaurant to eat, my mom would go for a walk. You know, she just didn't eat with us.

She was always feeding us and wanting us to eat a ton of food, but I could count on two hands in my entire life that she sat at the table and ate dinner with us. My mother was very fixated on herself. If there was a holiday, a birthday, you could mark it on your calendar that that would be as sick as she would be all year.

My sister and I, there was never really attention given to us. They loved us. They were a middle-class family. We did well. But there was no sense of unconditional love, if you will. There was attention given to us, but it always kind of circled around how my mother was feeling, how she was doing, what she was doing. My whole life centered around that.

My mother had a vacuum cleaner, but she also had a carpet rake. She would rake the carpet in the living room and dining room. It was like walking on quicksand if you touched it. She would walk around for half an hour, 45 minutes with lemon pledge and everything that was wood.

braze it, go to the next piece of furniture, braze it, go to the next piece of furniture, braze it, and repeat that at least 20 to 25 times. She might do it 20 to 25 times, three to four times a day. We had a pool table. The outer base of that pool table was wooden. She would walk around and do it while we were trying to play pool. We'd have to tell her to stop, which would hurt her feelings.

Once we were tucked in, and this is when I was very young, she would open the door, say, I love you, close the door, and she would do that throughout the night. She was very, very OCD. The feeling I had when she was cleaning, raking everything, Lysol all over, it felt like a prison. And it felt like if you step on the carpet after she had just vacuumed and raked it, I knew it would upset her.

So I did the best I could to just avoid the carpet, literally, the living room. You would just avoid it. But we did have to walk on the carpet. It's hard not to walk in the living room as a kid. And of course, if you touched where she was rummaging, pledged around the coffee table or whatever furniture was in the living room, that was a no-no as well. And if you did touch it, you did feel guilty. You knew that it would disturb her.

And then you, of course, feel like, you know, I messed her up. I didn't mean to do that. The good thing that came out of that is I became a very, very avid reader. Spent a lot of time in my room. This is one place where her OCD didn't come into play. I think I was six or seven years old when she was sitting in bed and was going to surgery. I think it was for mole removal.

When she came home, that's when things really went downhill. She started losing a tremendous amount of weight. She would exercise on the floor incessantly on the carpet right in front of the TV. Her exercise regimen of walking was amped up. I think she was walking a few miles a day prior to that, and it became impossible.

an obsession. It became six to seven miles. She would want me to walk with her all the time with a little black portable radio every single day. She had a thousand stuffed animals in her bedroom, kind of a childlike room. I mean, she was big on Snoopy. And I remember that being very odd.

When she was growing up, she was a phenomenal student. She was very, very, very smart. But again, her adopted parents, when she'd come home with straight A's, just kind of blew her off and didn't really give her any acknowledgement. So continuing to keep that childlike demeanor because of what she potentially missed in her childhood and maybe some of her childhood there was stripped away as well.

As we were growing up, my mother would talk to me about very light sexual stuff with my dad. And this is like 9, 10, 11. She would call us in when she was taking a bath. She would walk around with a robe with nothing underneath.

I think the times when my mother was in the bathtub or walking around with a robe that barely covered her hips, where you could see everything, she was extremely thin. And even as a young child seeing other women, I knew this wasn't the picture of what a woman should look like. It was very odd to me.

I even knew then it wasn't normal to be seeing this on a semi-regular basis. She was taking a bath or, you know, or she'd just be walking around in the bathroom. Hey, could I talk to you? And so it's abnormal to see your mother naked or in panties or whatever the heck she would be wearing. It's another thing when my mother was five foot four, probably at that time, 90 pounds.

So it was both abnormal in the sense that your mother shouldn't be doing that even at a young age, but it was also disgusting that this person is thin and it's hard to explain how it just doesn't look right, the anatomy of it. But it was very abnormal. Even me as a child knew that, that it was just not right.

After a period of time, it just became a normal thing. I'd look away. When I went in the bathroom or she was walking around polishing stuff with her OCD throughout the house, I just didn't look.

She tried to tuck us in at night and, you know, said goodnight and, you know, love you was said a lot in our house and all of that. But there was just complete obliviousness to her children and how they would perceive it was just incredibly confusing. And really, as I'm talking about it and reflecting, it's hard to really put into words. If you're beaten all the time, then that's your normality.

If you were put on a pedestal consistently and you're special to the world and you're special, that's your reality. When your mother doesn't eat with you and calls you in the bathroom while she's in the bathtub naked, it becomes your normality. So my father was definitely an enabler. I guess he didn't want to rock the boat. He didn't want to upset her. He would definitely defend her very strange and repetitive OCD behavior.

I learned how to, with all the subliminal sexual connotations, with the food, with the OCD, just to be numb. And when I wasn't numb, I was funny. I was happy. I had to be humorous. Humor was my escape, and that was the way I masked the emotions. I was just a clown.

So I learned how to completely cope with everything, smile while doing it, and then behind her back, lie to her, do whatever it took for me to be able to cope. I do remember that we could never have people over, ever. We could never have kids spend the night. I would beg to spend the night at somebody else's house to get that feel of normality, to get the feel of what other normal parents were.

they had me involved in all kinds i played soccer i played football i played basketball i played everything you can think of and enjoyed every minute of of being out of the house it was almost like a prison my mother would make food just a ton of food and a lot of times it was too much to eat if you told her hey you know i'm not hungry i can't eat all this

She was beyond offended. And again, that's where the guilt trip would come back in with the eating side of it. She prepared all this food and worked hard at it. And I mean, that went for any time that we were eating, not to tell her I was full. I learned to, you know, if we had a napkin, I would I was able to sneak it out, throw it away, hide the food.

Anorexia wasn't really well known. I think Karen Carpenter died from it in 83, something like that. I didn't have a clue of what it was. What I do remember, what she always complained about was her stomach would hurt real bad. She was in the bathroom constantly. I didn't know this at the time, but I do know that, you know, my dad was feeding her

Tons of laxatives, which has its own issues. So basically, she was sick all the time. My mother and father were very involved in peewee football for me. My sister was a cheerleader. That was a big thing for our family to do. That was something for them to be proud of me for, proud of my sister for.

She was able to go to the peewee game. She was able to go on vacations. We had to stop a ton of times. And a lot of times we were late to things or delayed because she was in the bathroom. And basically, it was always told to my sister and I that she had stomach ailments and kidney ailments and liver ailments and all of that. And again, this is prior to vast knowledge of anorexia. That's what we thought it was. It was slow organ failure.

My birthday, my sister's birthday, my dad's birthday, her birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, you name it. Any holiday you could pretty much dream of that included people getting together and celebrating. She was sick. Christmas was a nightmare. Thanksgiving was a nightmare. And Mother's Day, all of them. It was those times that she would talk about wanting to die.

I didn't think she was going to die. I didn't think she was going to do anything to herself to make that happen. I really frighteningly was somewhat numb to that. She was sick so often that you would drive your own self crazy.

It became, after a period of time, the boy crying wolf to me. Even at that age, I thought, she just loves the attention, man, and everything's about her. I became numb to it, but was able to act very concerned, compassionate. What can I do for you? My job was to give her attention, give her empathy, give her sympathy. If there's anything I can do for you, let me know, and then get the hell out of that room as fast as I could.

You're 10 or 11 years old. You can't drive. You can't go somewhere. You're stuck. So what do you do? You have to put up with it. You have to cope with it. Your feelings just, you have to compartmentalize those things when you're going through that or you're going to absolutely go nuts.

So I got into my high school years. I was very involved in sports. I was very involved in football and basketball. Once I turned 16, once I got the car, I had freedom. I could get out of that prison. I started dabbling in drugs. Marijuana turned into dropping some acid, and this is probably at the age of 16.

I was doing cocaine and I was just experimenting with a bunch of different things, trying to get different feelings. I was a writer at the time, so I loved to write. I was the athlete that played football. I was second team all district in Texas 5A football, which is a big deal. But my friends were introverted druggies. It was an escape. That escape and that feeling of ecstasy or whatever you want to call it, or it was definitely better than anywhere I'd been. It definitely masked the guilt.

The guilt I felt, it's implanted in you, I think. Her need for attention was so strong that I couldn't help but feel guilty if I couldn't cater to every whim. She would have just ridiculous favors that she would need.

And this was the other thing. It was always at a horrible time for me. I had to go to football practice. I had to go to school. I had something that was important that I had to do. That's typically when these favors came up. And it was as if it was a test of my loyalty or my love for her. I think just I naturally felt guilty about that.

The guilt of not appreciating the food that she cooked, not liking it, not eating all of it. God forbid if you even had that look that you didn't like the meatloaf, whatever it was she was cooking, she would smell that out like a dog and make you feel bad about it. And then you feel guilty about that. And just all of those things just led to a childhood of feeling guilty about everything.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. My relationship with my father was really good. We did a lot of things together. He was very much into all of the sports I was doing. Every game he could be at, every practice he could be at, he would be there. He loved me. He showed it.

But I knew that I came second, a distant second to my mother, as did my sister. And I think that was part of the resentment. My mother, at that point, as I was getting into high school, was getting progressively worse, very obviously worse. Our tension got worse. My father and I's relationship was becoming quite tenuous. We got in a fight. And I think it was about my mom. By the washer and dryer, I'll never forget it. He hit me.

And as she got worse and worse, I started to get more and more cold and more and more realized that nothing's going to ever really change. And that's why I latched on to mentally getting into another state. And that was probably partially to cope with the guilt of becoming even more cold and numb than I was before. I was, I believe, 17, probably 1984 in the summer.

It was a little waterhole that we would go to. It has a waterfall. It's well known. It had a cliff, minimum 75 to 80 feet. People were dying by breaking their necks, jumping off this thing. If you're off at all, you could be severely injured or die. I was aware of this. I went out with my girlfriend at the time. I was with some friends. We'd been definitely drinking a little bit.

I believe I was on probably a couple of different drugs. I was like, well, to heck with it. I'm going to try it. So when I went up there, I kind of went to the edge. And this is after somebody had jumped. I looked down. And of course, a couple of my buddies are behind me. Hey, hey, do it, do it, do it, do it. A couple of things went in my mind. I imagined dying.

I wasn't suicidal, but really not caring what would happen. I thought I'm making through this. It's cool. It's fine. Not really knowing if I'd be fine or not. But again, at 17, you're invincible. But again, even at 17, you're aware of the risk. This could kill you for sure.

I just remember it kind of encapsulated, it was kind of symbolic for me of my life at that point. This was something that if I make it, great. And if I don't, I don't make it. So I stepped out and looked way too long, which you should never do. If you're going to do it, just do it.

I stepped to the edge. I looked down for a long time, looked to the left at the waterfall, looked to the right at the beach where I could see my girlfriend and others just peering directly at me. Stepped to the very edge. And of course, there was a little wind and took a deep breath, stepped off, jumped. It's amazing how it seems like it lasted 10 minutes. And by the same token, it lasted a split second, which is actually about what it lasted.

When I hit, I was a little off, landed on my rear end and came up for air. It was a serious pain, but I knew I was fine and I was alive. Swam up to the beach, swam up to my girlfriend. I remember not being able to sit down. I was in such pain there, but I felt elated at the accomplishment, elated I was alive.

I think that it was symbolic for me in the, you know, I can survive this prison I'm in at home. I can survive life. I can make it. And maybe that was part of the reason I wanted to do it. It had nothing to do with showing off in front of my friends or my girlfriend. It had nothing to do with pride, whatever you want to call it. It was very symbolic of just being able to make it, being able to survive.

As I got out of high school, I did get accepted to a university in Central Texas. And I was working and commuting about 60 miles to this university. I was working as a personal trainer. And that's where I met my wife. She was a receptionist. And she said, if you're going to continue to do cocaine or whatever else it is you're doing, you're not going to date me.

And then lo and behold, I completely fell in love with her. And we married seven months after that. I've been married to her since. She was the rock that kind of got me out of that drug infusion. And I dropped out of college and just started working all kinds of different jobs. I was working in the hospitality industry. I was bartending. I was working at a hotel doing room service. And then two and a half years later, we had our first child.

Everything's rocking along. I'm working a lot, busy. And anytime my wife was not feeling really well, I wasn't real tolerant. Once my second child was born, I have two kids now, and I had an affair. I think it was bartending at the time, and she came at me very sharply with pictures of our children and all of that. So I went back to her.

Still married to the same woman 35 years later. So it all worked out. My mother, she couldn't stand my wife. You know, we would go over there and this is where we would bring our grandkids over for Christmas.

When my kids would go over to my mom and dad's house again, the whole raking the carpet thing, vacuuming thing, it's the same pattern. I had to keep them at bay. My wife and I both had to keep them off the carpet as much as possible. And the inner turmoil and anger and angst I had, seeing my mom have angst over her grandchildren, just getting on the carpet a little bit was just indescribable.

And yeah, it would bring me back to me being a kid and them having to suffer through that was just angered me internally to no end. I was appeasing. If she needed me to visit here and there, things were going awful. That's fine. And of course, there were a few times, a few spells in there that she ended up in the hospital. One of them was a Vicodin overdose. Come to find out later, I think she was probably trying to kill herself. My mom is probably...

80 pounds. Because at this point, she was spending most of her time, she wasn't getting out as much for sure. And she was spending more of her time in the bathroom and just smoking. And it was about that time that we went to a hotel to have Thanksgiving.

When we were at the table, I remember my mother, I don't know if she snuck my four-year-old son off, but anyway, she was very, very frail and took off with my four-year-old son and wanted to take him for a walk. That triggered me when she got back and my wife was not happy about it and I wasn't happy about it.

That triggered me to go into a rage. I just boiled up in public and I loaded out on her. You're selfish. You've been selfish all your life. You're sick. You need help. You need therapy. You're dying before our eyes. You're withering away. I just, I just lost it.

I basically just went off and screamed and made a scene and freaked everybody out at our table and freaked out a number of the guests at other tables. My father was aghast, flabbergasted.

My mother, after I told her how selfish she was and how she messed up my life, she cried very, I wouldn't call it uncontrollably, but she was definitely crying. I definitely, at that point, was completely numb to it, completely didn't care. My wife, this is mid-dinner, mid-Thanksgiving feast, we took off.

We left, and of course I felt guilty about that after the fact, but I felt good getting all of that out. And again, I was 27, 28, 29. It just felt good. I didn't feel bad. I felt justified, all that good stuff. But of course, internally guilty. My sister and I, we took a walk in the woods, and that was the discussion about

come into grips with the fact even at that age that she indeed wasn't going to change. It didn't matter what she said, what I said. My dad was an enabler. There was nothing he was going to do to confront the issue. So I think what happened as life went on and I had my burst at Thanksgiving table and I'm sure I had a few other minor discussions

it just wasn't going to change and the denial whenever you did bring up eating disorder anorexia it was no no no it's my my organs you know my stomach my intestines are all messed up they were messed up from the surgery i had in the early 70s to remove a mole that was always her story i always had a hope that she would change and but i also knew that she wasn't going to

Particularly with the denial, you have to be able to see within yourself that you do want to change, that you can change, that you do have an issue. If you don't recognize it within yourself, you're not going to solve anything no matter what anybody else does. I knew that. I think it was probably a good month before we talked again. And we lived in the same city and we were 15, 20 minutes from them. And of course, that came from me calling to apologize.

I don't know if I'd have ever heard from them if I hadn't come forth and apologized. That apology was 100% attributed to something I had to do. That was a necessity. They were grandparents to my kids. They were not the role models of grandparents. We didn't like going to their house, et cetera, et cetera. They were still grandparents. I didn't want to destroy that. So that was just a necessary thing that I had to do.

And shortly thereafter, my wife and I moved to another city in the dark of the night, if you will. And I didn't tell my parents. And I think I called them, I don't know, two weeks to a month later, told them where I was, made a video for them actually to show them the house because I didn't know if they could get up there to travel.

That was probably in my life when I first started feeling comfortable at my house with my kids, with my wife, where I really started to feel like I could be me. Fast forward two years, I get a call from, I think it was my sister. She said, mom and dad are both in ICU.

I hopped in the car, went to the hospital. They ended up finding out that, A, my mom, I think, had overdosed again and had scratched skin off of the very little skin she had. So they had to do skin grafts. It was another Vicodin overdose. And my father was bleeding from his nose and they learned that he had multiple myeloma. Stage four, cancer. I'm outside with my sister.

She's crying and bawling and, you know, I'm upset. I said, man, I need a medication or something. I need to like it. And I looked at her and I said, you don't need anything. I said, this is natural emotion. You cry. That's fine. Let it out. Shortly after that, my mom and dad ended up going to an apartment and my dad was wheeling around in a wheelchair and she could walk around the apartment, but she was able to walk with a walker. Mind you, she's 52 at this point.

It got to the point to where she finally went to the hospital and had to get a feeding tube to eat, to digest, because she had mucked up her organs so bad through all the laxatives she had taken through all of the years. I still had to go over and help her out. And just to be there, there would be nights she would call and say, hey, can you come over and just talk and

You know, and there were times I would go over at 9 or 10 at night. You know, and here I am married. I've got two kids. I've got my own company going. That need to give her attention, to feed her, to make her the center of the universe was still there. I mean, even, you know, in my early 30s doing that. And it caused a little strife in my wife and I. She understood it. But, you know, once you're past the age of 40 or 50, you're not going to change anything.

And it was really at that point that I recognized that, okay, I need to love her. I need to give her what I can without ruining my relationship with my family, my relationship with my kids. I need to give what I can that's reasonable and love her through this because she's not going to be around forever.

It took me that many years probably to truly learn how to turn that resentment into compassion, to turn it into empathy due to the fact that we're not going to be here forever. I'm not going to change her. What good is it going to do for me to beat it in her to, hey, admit you have anorexia. Hey, admit that you're selfish. Admit that our whole lives, our entire lives revolved around you. You know, what good is that going to do?

I was on a road trip for my company. I got a call. I think it was about nine at night from my mother. And she said to me, hey, how you doing? I said, I'm doing well. How are you? And she said, I'm going to die tonight. And I said, do me a favor. I get back into town Wednesday. Can you wait till like Thursday? So I was joking with her, right? Because that was our relationship. She goes, no, no, no, I'm fine.

I'm going to die tonight. I just want to tell you a few things. And as the conversation got deeper, I said, in case something happens, I need to be on my game here. Told her how thankful I was with her and how I loved her. And she was a great mom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Said, I love you to each other. Got off the phone. 530 that morning, I got a call from my sister and she had passed away. Oddly, that numbness that I had developed as a child carried on to her death and it

I didn't cry. The death certificate said anorexia nervosa, so I didn't see anything having to do with any kind of overdose or anything. Her heart just gave out. She was 56 pounds at the time of death. The last couple of weeks, it was feeding tube. It was very clear she was going downhill.

It's hard to explain how thin. I'll just say that, you know, you look at the pictures of the Holocaust and people that were buried. I mean, that's what her body looked like. And I'm not exaggerating. That is literally what she looked like. 56 pounds and 5 foot 4. It's very, very tough to look at her. You could see the bones of her cheeks and it was pretty rough.

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I didn't wish her to die, but for the pain that she now was physically definitely suffering, this wasn't anything made up. She was deteriorating so rapidly, so badly that I was gradually mourning her all through that. So when it actually happened, it was more relief. Well, good. She's out of pain. All is well. So it was actually a very ironically, very relieving for me.

She had been, in my mind, dead for a long time. I was sad. Everything she missed in her life, everything I might have missed in my life, everything my dad might have missed in our lives, my sister, there's so much that was left out. I mean, we did things. We traveled here and there, but it was always skewed. It was always, you know, the attention drawn to her. So that's what it was. It was painful.

sadness for what she missed out on. I mourned my dad feeling the absolute need to enable her throughout the entire process, to have to, to his kids, defend her, to deny the truth. I mourned not being able to be myself in my home when I grew up. When she did pass, there's a void. It's your mother.

I truly believe in my mind she tried as hard as she could within herself to be a good mom, to be a good person and all that. But she was just so skewed from the start from, you know, whether it was adoption, whether it was alcoholic parents. Knowing that she didn't want to help herself, knowing that she had anorexia, knowing that she denied it, she never said she had it, caused resentment. As I transitioned from

The resentment and the cold and the numbness I felt and was able to more or less eradicate the cold and numbness. It was euphoric. I was truly able to be myself. I was truly able to relate better to my wife, relate better to my kids who are now in their high school years. I was able to be present. I was able to be me.

And me was not this funny running around extroverted clown. It was a very thoughtful and sympathetic and compassionate person. I have my issues, certainly, but nothing like what it was. This is another weird thing I thought about, the freedom that my father was going to have now, not having to take care of her hand and foot 24-7. He could actually live. At that point, my dad is three years in with cancer.

He was in the apartment alone. My mom had passed away. We were in church and my dad said, hey, would you mind if I lived with you? So we took him in. Five years later, he passed. As a man, when your dad passes away, I don't care if he got along or not. And we did get along those last years for sure. You go through just a weird transformation that it's difficult to articulate. But the only way you can articulate it is

shedding all of the things that I went through. There's a reality, you know, now I'm the next to handle things for my kids and grandkids. I'm the next to go, so to speak. So that gives you a completely different light on life. And we're all here for a very, very, very short time, relatively speaking. But one thing we can do is be compassionate with one another, be kind to that

waiter, be kind to that housekeeper in your hotel, be kind to that convenience store clerk, be kind to everybody because you have no idea what they're going through, what struggles they have. Those little things in life, it's funny, all of that really manifested after my dad's passing. Truly feeling genuinely compassionate for other people.

That's who I am today. And that's really what I attribute that to. I can't give enough credit to my wife. She has been the rock that has guided me along through this whole process, the one I could talk to. The hardest thing for me, looking back now, is truly looking at a life that was wasted. She didn't get to live.

Whether it was hypochondria initially that turned into anorexia, whether it was that lack of attention, whatever the case is, she was very, very mentally sick. She got married at 16 to escape her house. She got out of that and from the time she was married five or six years till her death, she didn't live.

it's a life missed and then uh it goes for my dad too after she passed i tried to come to some conclusion that there's some life in there that was worth living she had two kids and her kids grew up to be normal and fine and have their own kids and their kids are doing fine and all that good stuff of course she didn't get to see that past the age of 10 of my my kids but she was a funny vibrant person

Loved music, loved to dance. She loved sports. So there's many things she got to do that doesn't say it wasn't a complete waste of life, but there were so many other attributes that she had. She was very smart. She never worked. She never drove, never learned to drive a car, never had a license. She could have gone places, been her own person.

I mourn the fact that she never found her own identity by getting married so quick and just got married and never really found herself. Maybe that would have been helpful to be able to heal herself, to be able to love someone else. Once you find that you love yourself, I don't think she ever had the opportunity to love herself. She would have been brilliant at whatever job she might have had. There's just numerous possibilities here.

I mourn that, but I've come to grips with the fact that trying to extrapolate the good things. I've got two healthy, successful kids. My sister's doing fine and she has a child and grandkids and all of that came out of it. So that's all good stuff. We're as normal as we can possibly be under the circumstances. So it didn't completely destroy us.

Today's guest requested to remain anonymous, but if you'd like to reach out to him directly, you can email at viking0531 at gmail.com. That's v-i-k-i-n-g 0531 at gmail.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If

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