Shownotes Transcript
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. It's almost a vacuum of emotion. Like in the movie where all the voices and all the noises go real, real quiet and there's just nothing for a moment and you come back to some state of consciousness. Almost just pure shock. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.
You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 244. What if you could never make him proud?
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We were a regular family. We were not overly rich, not overly poor. I feel like in the 60s when I was born, my parents were successful for being African American parents in the 60s. They were both well-educated. My mom stayed home initially, but then she did go to work. My dad had a good job. So we were fairly comfortable.
We lived in a county in Maryland, and we were the first African-American family to integrate that county. I have a sister and two brothers. I'm the youngest by about six or seven years.
When I was really young, like around four or five, my sister, who is much older, used to do a lot of caregiving for me, which was great. And she was the one that kind of noticed that I had a growth on my chest, like a big pimple or like a cyst protruding outward. And I remember her asking me, you know, what is this? Four-year-old boy, I had no fucking clue. So she's, you know, went and showed my mom.
You know, we went to the doctor. The next thing I know, I'm having surgery and I wake up and my chest is covered in bandages. And, you know, everything's cool. I'm like, all right, bet. My parents were like, you're all better now and that's fine. The only thing that kind of was different after that was I had to then go to the doctor every week and get these shots. The shots really kind of sucked.
They hurt very much when they went in and it lasted for like a half hour or so. So after a certain amount of time, I put up a huge fight every time. I was like, I'm not doing this. I'm not going. And my mom was like, yeah, you're going. This is something that's happening. And they would take a doctor and orderly and a couple of nurses to hold me down and keep me still. But it sucked. And that was the deal every time, every week.
During that time period when I was getting those shots, I would throw up on occasion. I would have lots and lots of stomach and abdominal pains. I really didn't understand what was happening. From my perspective, it was just all part of the process. But the shots went away. I started to feel better. I started to really grow quickly, like growing out of pants in a month or two months. After that, everything seemed to be pretty cool.
In my house growing up, it was a strict environment. And you did what your father said and you did what your mother said. You answered yes ma'am, no ma'am, yes sir, no sir. When they called you, you got your ass up and went to where they were and said yes sir. If you answered a question wrong or if you didn't do something right, that was going to blow back. If you fucked up, you definitely got spanking, you got a belt.
And that was just what it was. And that shit was hurtful. Absolutely. It was annoying and it made you mad. But that's how we grew up in our house. And it was strict. But we considered that to be normal. As my siblings got older, I noticed more fighting between the siblings and my father, between my mom and my father, arguing and then some abuse.
I was seeing my siblings get older and trying new things and pressing back on my dad's grip on the family. And I thought to myself, they're being dumb. You're going to do what dad doesn't want you to do. And of course, you're going to get thrown up against the wall or of course, you're going to get cussed out. You're stupid. And I thought to myself, I'm not going to make those mistakes.
My oldest brother got into pot smoking and got into trouble with that. And after a certain amount of time, my dad was like, hey, you're out of the house. You're leaving. You're leaving today. My brother was like, well, where am I going? Well, you got a few days to find a place, but you don't live here anymore. Threw his ass out, man. I was like, holy shit.
So at this point in my life, one sibling is out struggling because he got kicked out of the house. My sister is in college, but also kind of struggling. My dad keeps threatening to bring her home for this or that infraction or she didn't do this right or she joined Black Student Association. She should be focusing on college. She had decided she was going to be in a co-ed dorm. He lost it.
The next brother down the road, he went to the Air Force Academy and he never came home. He came home once a year for Christmas. So I went through middle school and high school and didn't make any of those mistakes. So I thought I wasn't going to fuck up like my other siblings did. I mean, shit, one of them got kicked out of the house. I'm not fucking around. I felt I could navigate better than they could. So I felt like I got better treatment.
But really what it was, was that I just wasn't defying him yet. I wasn't setting out my own path to independence yet. The relationship with my mom was definitely different than with my dad. She was a very typical, loving, soft, warm mom.
She was always supportive of us, more so than my father. When we get yelled at or if we got in trouble and got a spanking or a whipping, she would never stop it from happening, but she would be the one to make it better at the end of the day. And there was no way she could stop it. I mean, my dad was a big guy and she was not a big woman.
My dad was the main power figure in the house, and everybody did what he said, including my mother. There were fun times, too. When we were younger, we would meet and have pizza on Friday nights, and that was always really fun and really a good time. Christmas was always really fun. Holidays were always fun. So there was a lot of joy in the childhood, too. One of the things I always wanted to do from middle school on was play football.
And this is the first instance where something is beginning to be off. My parents had said to me, no, you can't play football. You're not big enough. That always was a little bit confusing because I was definitely the tallest kid in class or the second to tallest and definitely was one of the bigger kids in class. But I'm still not big enough to play football. It never sat right. This is weird. This doesn't make sense.
But I did wrestle and I did martial arts. One of the qualities I had early on was pretty serious. I didn't like to play a lot. I used to be kind of a jokester and make a lot of jokes. And that shit ended when the school called and told my father about that shit. Guess what? The next day, no more jokes. No more jokes all the way through high school.
So I was pretty serious, serious academically, serious about my life. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, you know, there wasn't a whole lot of other black kids around. They're called microaggressions now, but back when I was growing up, you just had to kind of deal with that bullshit of being the only black kid around. And when you're in that environment, you're always a little bit unsure.
Because you don't know if a teacher is giving you a hard time because you just did the problem wrong or if they're giving you an extra hard time because you're black. You don't know if you didn't get invited to the birthday party. Is it because they don't like me or is it because I'm black? There was always that little bit of unsettling that you had to kind of deal with growing up.
And it made me, as a person, value good friends a lot. And to be a good friend of mine, you kind of had to pass a lot of my own internal test. And you just always have the idea. You're a person that's always on your toes because you're wondering, I'm black. How's this person going to handle that? How's this teacher going to handle that? How's this girl's parents that I'm going to want to date going to handle that?
My science teacher said in front of the whole class, you know, black people can't swim as well as white people because their muscle tissue is denser in front of the whole class. A completely fucking wrong. And we're not even talking about swimming. Like, why is this even coming up? And everybody's staring at me.
That just makes you angrier at the end of the day, deep down. That just makes you more mad. And you can't say shit about it when you get home because, you know, my father and mother, their experiences were racism were so much worse.
If I said something to my dad, he'd be like, well, what are you complaining about? You're in this great neighborhood and you're safe and that's how the white man is and that's how your life is going to be and you better get used to it and you shouldn't expect anything more.
There was no place for a dialogue that validated the racism I experienced and at the same time provided ways to help me understand and manage it and rise above it. The ways I dealt with it was internalizing that shit and being angry about it. Doing stuff on the wrestling team, getting in fights where irrelevant. That was really the avenues at the time.
There was no way to be rageful or angry at my father because you would just get it back. You would get it back times 10, you know, and if it got to a certain point, it would be physical. There was never this free expression. There was never be what you want to be, man. We're going to support you and love you no matter what.
I definitely felt I had to suppress aspects of my personality. I spoke as clearly and as eloquently as I possibly could all the time. I tried to be as mainstream as possible. I didn't wear a lot of whatever the black kids were wearing because I wanted to be serious. I wanted to be focused and I wanted to be taken seriously.
Conforming to get along in some ways was really part of the way I was growing up. I didn't really stand out in too many ways and that was on purpose. I would stand out academically as best I could. I was class president for three years, SGA president for the fourth year. I would not stand out in a way that was a behavior issue.
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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,
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. So high school's done and I'm now in college and I was doing fine academically.
And one of the things I began to notice was that as I began to exert my independence, all the quote unquote successful navigation I had done to avoid my father's wrath started to disappear. And suddenly I was the recipient of this negativity from my father. Well, you know, I don't know if you're really at the best college for you.
Your college doesn't have a good name. Your college doesn't do this. The chemistry program isn't the best in the country. You should come home and go to this college.
All these different reasons to try to pull me out of college, which made no sense to me. At that time in America, you know, in the 80s, black kids were getting killed all the time. Kids were doing drugs all the time. It was like that. I'm a young black male. I'm in college and I'm doing well. Why are you fucking with this? It never made any sense. They're unsettling.
As I got older, I began to see, well, shit, I'm not making all the mistakes my siblings made, but I'm still getting the same treatment they got.
I'm beginning to learn that if I do things a certain way, he's happy. If I do things a different way from the way he wants them, now he's not happy. And now I'm a moron. Now I shouldn't be in college. Now I need to come home and work till I get my priorities right. And I began to really process the kind of person my father was.
sophomore year, we're in another one of these conversations where my father is telling me I need to come home and go to a different college. And I finally mustered up the courage to say, I don't want to. That then led to another 45 minutes of ranting at me that I was lucky to be in college. And who did I think I was? All this negative ranting,
That's where I begin to now think, what the fuck is up with my father? And at that point, I realized this person is not here to help me succeed. But it's not a person. It's your father. I realized I'm not sure there is a way to make my father proud of me. And I begin to see that by processing what my older siblings had gone through.
So I looked at my sister who went to a great college, got a great degree and was working. Wasn't good enough. From my father's perspective, she wasn't going to amount to anything. I look at my brother, his career in the Air Force. Okay, he graduated from the Air Force Academy. Well, everybody gets that at first, but next year he's going to have to do this and this and this to be successful.
Then the next year comes along. Guess who's successful? Gets promoted. My brother. Well, everybody gets that second promotion. Well, damn, Dad. And I begin to see clearly that I don't think it matters what any of us do. It's never going to be enough.
You know, when you graduate college, a thousand things happen. You know, you say goodbye to these people that you've been friends with for four years and you've gone through the ringer with. I had a very serious girlfriend at the time and I did have a job to go to. So I could be, I was independent of him. I had a place to live. I had a job to go to. So there really wasn't like shit he could say. And I started my next job, which I hated, but it was for the government. So my parents were happy.
Six months into that government job, I said, I'm not doing this anymore. I used skills that I developed as a computer geek and got myself another job with a small company. And as you can imagine, this blew my father's mind. Why would you leave your government job? Well, dad, here's the thing. Well, they don't have health care. Well, dad, yes, they do.
And this is my dad's response. No, they won't. You're an idiot. That's not smart. You won't be successful there. On and on and on. I took that job, definitely, because it was much more interesting. My life went forward and, you know, my wife and I developed our relationship and eventually got married. And I made a decision at that time in my life that my father offers me nothing as a father. My father offers me nothing personally.
As a friend, my father offers me nothing as his son. And I said to myself, "I don't need this person in my life." I told my wife that I was going to essentially not engage with my father anymore on any issues. She didn't understand it at all, bless her heart, because she grew up in a normal family. I told my sister. She understood very clearly and she supported me 100%. And then I told my mom.
And I think she was very devastated. But I also know she understood. From that date on, I didn't engage my father anymore ever for anything. I didn't ask him for anything ever again. We didn't go over to the house for Christmas anymore or Thanksgiving anymore. They didn't come to our house for Christmas or Thanksgiving. It sounds hard and it sounds like how could you do this? But when I tell you, when I made that decision, it changed my life.
All for the better. Everything was better. We moved into a house my father never would have approved of and never would have supported. I signed up for a grad school program. My father never would have supported this grad school program. And I would have listened to his bullshit and never applied. But I applied. I got in and I did outstanding. And it helped me in my career to this day. So while it was hard,
It was the best thing I ever did in my life. The emotions were just freedom. Lifting the weight off the shoulders of this. You can't. You don't know how. You will never. Didn't matter what you did. I literally could be a surgeon and he would say, well, you're not a surgeon general. As I learned later, this narcissistic behavior where everything has to be about what he can do or control. That was gone.
It was amazing to see and it was amazing to feel it. And anytime I wasn't sure, I could just look to any sibling and see the bullshit they were going through and think, "Yep, I made the right decision." After this moment of deciding to estrange myself from my father, life was fine. My wife and I, like I said, were married. We moved into this house we were trying to renovate. Logically, the next step was, "Let's have some children."
You know, at some point we realized we weren't getting pregnant at all and we should get checked out. So we started with that process. The doctor said, "Well, you know, I think we can pinpoint the problem. You have a very low count. Do you know of anything in your life growing up that would account for this?" And I said, "No, but I'll ask my mom."
I called my mom and I said, "Hey mom, is there anything from my childhood I should be aware of?" She paused and said, "You know what? Why don't we meet for lunch and we can talk about it?" And I thought, "That's weird, but okay, sure." We met at Cheesecake Factory and I was with my wife. I said, "You know, mom, what's going on?" She paused and she said, "When you were very young,
You had cancer and you had aggressive chemotherapy. I'm 30 fucking years old and the first time my mom is telling me I had cancer is now. My mind at this moment is literally blown. Cancer, chemotherapy. I look over at my wife and she is like, what the actual fuck?
How do you not know this? And how does your mom not tell you this? We talked for a little bit longer. I'm trying to be cool. It's kind of like initially kind of just washed over me like, wow, what the fuck? Okay, well, what kind? Do you know? It was so long ago she didn't remember the exact kind.
You know, she told me about the chemotherapy and how it hurt. And then that began to at least tie in going and getting these shots and how I would fight. And she's like, yeah, because the chemotherapy drugs stung the whole time they went in. I was completely blown away. When you had the chemotherapy, the doctors told us at the time your growth may be stunted and you may have some fertility issues later in life.
And at 30, this is the first time I'm hearing about that. Even in that moment, there was no way to express rage towards my mother. And my father wasn't there, of course, so there was no rage to be expressed to him. It's almost a vacuum of emotion. Like in the movie where all the voices and all the noises go real, real quiet, and there's just nothing for a moment, and you come back to some state of consciousness. Almost just pure shock.
And when I came back to that state of consciousness, I was like, okay, we got to go. And the whole drive home, my wife, she had a thousand questions for me. I had zero answers. I got home and I called my sister immediately. I just couldn't comprehend this. I said, sis, mom just told me I had cancer growing up. Did you know? And she was like, yeah, we all knew. So my whole family knew.
And nobody told me your hair is falling out because you have cancer. You aren't growing because you're under aggressive chemotherapy. Your hair is falling out because you're undergoing chemotherapy. You're throwing up because the drugs are making you sick. So now you have all these abdominal cramping pains. Nobody told me any of that shit. Nobody told me when I was fucking 5, 10, 15. Hey man, you're going to college now. You got to fill out your health forms.
How about when I'm a fucking adult and I'm going to my fucking doctor for my fucking exam. And you know, the form where it says, have you ever had cancer before? That might be a good point to check the box. No, I'm right on there. I've never had cancer. When my sister told me, everybody knew I literally had to sit down.
I was angry and mad and confused, felt betrayed, like, what the fuck? We had to sit in that for a few days. I wasn't speaking to my dad, couldn't rage at him. And that's when I knew my siblings didn't tell me because he told them not to because he wanted to control this shit. And I began to realize his power,
Over them kept them from saying something even as I entered into adulthood So I had my rage, but I had to really get that empathy going too. It was the only way Not to write off my entire family forever and ever I had to pause and understand how much control a motherfucker has over you to make you not share that information and
So when I learned this information, then I looked back over everything that I had experienced. It was crazy emotions and crazy questions and crazy revelations. Talking to my sister, she said the chemo affected you in so many different ways at that young age. Messed up your hand-eye coordination.
That's why I could never get my handwriting. And then you think about the stunted growth for however long I had the chemo. For a while, I was a sick, skinny, scrawny kid. And that's at that age where the image of you gets cemented and formulated in your parents' mind. So they saw me that way even after chemo, even after I grew and filled out. They saw me as small and weak. And that's why I couldn't play football.
And that's why my dad would always say, you're too small to do that. Them identifying me as small, that has stuck with me my entire life. I always have considered myself kind of small and scrawny. I'm six feet, 250 pounds. But still to this day, I exercise all the time, always trying to be bigger.
If I had known that I had cancer and I had stunted growth, then they would have said, you're too small to play football. I would have had something to argue against, something against which to compare. Those revelations, that new information about my life was a lot. And then over time, it completely validated that I made the right decision and estranged myself from my father.
But the really hard thing that took many, many years and is still processing was the shift towards my mother. Like I had said before, my mom was always amazingly supportive and still is. But the fact of the abuse she must have suffered to not say to her son, this is what happened to you. I understand that. But it took me a while to
to be upset with her for not telling me because I was being empathetic to her plight, but I was still mad and I was still hurt and I was still confused.
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conceived without the use of in vitro, another baby girl. So when I said to my wife, "I'm not going to engage my father anymore," I knew that there would be no more conversations. He would not get from my drastic action. I should change my ways. I must be doing something wrong. I knew that wasn't going to happen.
And I said to her over time, this isn't going to have a Hollywood ending. We are never going to talk again. And he's going to go to his grave and we won't resolve this. Very good friends of mine said, you're going to have to resolve this before he dies. And I said to them, no, there is no resolving. I don't want him in my life anymore. That's the ending. And he will never understand that.
that that has something to do with him. It'll always be my fault that I chose not to interact with him anymore. He will never have the ability to say, "What did I do to drive my own son away from me?" He's been dead for three or four years now. I didn't talk to him the entire time. We didn't engage for 20 years or so. Never met my kids.
I never wanted him to meet my kids because he would play that same bullshit on them that he tried on me. I was like, they don't need it. So I never had a chance to say, why did you not tell me? So the idea of getting to the bottom of why didn't they tell me is a question that for a while I definitely was asking every day. Why? Why the fuck? But over time, the why is kind of clear. Abuse.
The why's less important because it doesn't matter. The next question is, well, what about your mom? And I thought about really engaging her on it. But at some point, I kind of realized as I was thinking about that, like if she could come to me and say, here's why we never told you, it wouldn't be like, oh, OK, I get it.
I would still be like, that was still something you should have told me. Even if you didn't tell me when I was a little kid because you wanted to protect me. What about when I was 18 and went to college? What about when I was 25 and working for a living? What about when I got married and you knew we would want to have kids? So we didn't waste five years trying or whatever, how long it took before we like, let's get help. What doesn't matter the reason? What matters for me is like not repeating that to my kids.
I don't have time to be in the past with this. This should happen, man. It's done. Nothing's going to change it. I can wallow in it for a minute. And sometimes I do. But then it's back to what do your kids need? What does your wife need? What do you need? Because there's not an answer that provides peace. It's not easy. Sometimes it still hurts.
The only thing to do is how do I move forward as a father and don't make the same mistakes? So how do you do that? The very first fundamental thing is unconditional love. Making sure my girls know that I love them no matter what. You might get talked to sternly. You might get on a father's nerves on occasion. But I still love you very much. And no matter what you do, if you fuck up in school,
drop and break my new iPad. All right, let's fix it. I'm not going to scream and yell at you for a fucking hour and a half about how you're irresponsible because you dropped the iPad. We'll fix it. And then making sure that like they just feel empowered to pursue what they want to pursue with their life, that what they're doing are their interests validated.
So I'm trying to be that kind of father that just is supportive as best I can be. Now I have to fight some of those narcissistic tendencies that I learned and I have to fight some of that. That's where I'm trying to be now. I want to be that empowering figure. I want to be your teammate. I want to be the person that helps you succeed. I don't want to be that motherfucker that's against you. That's how I'm trying to break that generational curse.
And sometimes you have to learn from your own kid. You have to shut the fuck up and listen. And that's something that never happened in my house. That never listened to us. The most difficult thing for me was truly comprehending and accepting that your family, everybody in your family lied to you, deceived you for so long. One of the aspects that was so hard was just how utterly...
disappointing it was at the end of the day. The other thing was how much pain and fear and hurt all of my siblings must have experienced and my mother to perpetrate a lie like that. So while I'm busy being hurt and confused, I'm also so sad for them that they were in such a place that
That was their reaction. It's hard to understand what influence a person can have on another person. Utter disappointment and nobody telling me and just sort of a betrayal and hurt. But then also just a very, very deep sadness. That is the house we grew up in. They were so scared. They were so brainwashed that they thought it was okay too.
I don't feel like I've been able to come into my real true self. Just I feel like maybe in the last three to four or five years. I'll give you a really clear example of ways I was able to be more myself over time. One thing I love is fashion and clothes. And a while back, my wife was like, you should start
posting on Instagram and I was like no that's not what serious people do but then I started it's kind of fun then I have a decent following and I've started to build a little bit of a styling business out of this which is very expressive to me I put together clothes I like and I show them to people so you're kind of making yourself vulnerable you're kind of just putting yourself out there
But most of all, I like doing it for me. And I like doing it without necessarily a purpose. All my life, everything had to have a purpose and a value. This is not that. I've also taken up woodworking. So I do a lot of woodworking now. And that is purely just for me. I'm going to be who I want to be. And I think learning I had this cancer and dealing with what all of that meant
has circled back to escaping that thumb, that wrath, that shadow of my father and becoming really my own person. At the end of the day, when I kind of processed everything, I realized I had cancer and I survived. I didn't die. And at a very young age, I got a second chance. I'm just learning about this second chance now.
And I have to value that second chance I have. So I think that once I got through the rage and the confusion and all that shit, I wanted to make sure that I was living and enjoying and valuing my life that I have. You could have died and you didn't. That's got to mean something.
Whether it means try not to spend too much time being bitter about slights. Stop judging other people. You don't know what the fuck is going on with them. Not passing along a generational curse to your daughters. Maybe have a couple extra scotches. Enjoy some friends. Laugh some more with your kids. Just don't waste it.
Today's storyteller was originally featured on the incredible podcast, The Secret Room, created and hosted by Ben Ham. Ben's guests share stories they've never told before, giving you a front row seat to the hidden lives of people all around you. Ben and I have collaborated before on a previous episode, and if you love This Is Actually Happening, you should definitely check out The Secret Room. The Secret Room
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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me and Sarah Marinelli, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.
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BP added more than $130 billion to the U.S. economy over the past two years by making investments from coast to coast. Investments like acquiring America's largest biogas producer, Arkea Energy, and starting up new infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico. It's and, not or. See what doing both means for energy nationwide at BP.com slash investinginamerica.