Caring for the Mother Who Abandoned Her (Mental Health Mondays)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: All Of It – Mental Health Mondays: “Caring for the Mother Who Abandoned Her”

Host: Matt Katz (filling in for Alison Stewart)
Guest: Stephanie Claire Smith (poet, social worker, author of Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination)
Date: March 4, 2024

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Episode Overview

This powerful Mental Health Mondays episode features poet and social worker Stephanie Claire Smith, discussing her new memoir, Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination. The conversation centers on Smith’s experience of childhood abandonment, the trauma of sexual assault, and the complex journey of caring for the mother who once left her. Through candid and poetic reflections, Smith explores how trauma is carried and transformed, and how caregiving in adulthood forced her to re-examine her past and herself.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Stephanie’s Mother: Free Spirit and Flawed Caregiver

[01:52 – 03:34]

• Stephanie describes her mother as a “flawless and fantastic” figure in her childhood imagination—liberal, charming, and a vivacious modern dancer.
• As an adult, Stephanie recognizes her mother struggled as a single parent and prioritized “finding love again” over motherhood.
  • Quote [02:10]:
    “The way I saw her was the way I needed to see her, which was flawless and fantastic... kind of like a Judy Garland character.” – Stephanie Claire Smith

The Summer of 1973: Abandonment and Survival

[03:04 – 06:12]

• At age 14, Stephanie’s mother left her alone for an extended period while she traveled, a pattern of neglect that was already familiar.
• With no father or extended family to rely on, Stephanie felt responsible for her own survival.
• Writing the memoir was only possible after her mother's death, due to feelings of obligation and protection towards her.
  • Quote [05:12]:
    “Like many children who grow up in homes where parents are less than attentive... you're just so used to dedicating your life to them... it doesn't occur to you that they should be protecting you.” – Stephanie Claire Smith

Trauma and Aftermath: The Unspeakable

[08:32 – 10:58]

• Smith recounts her sexual assault during the summer her mother abandoned her. She highlights the lack of resources or language to process such trauma at that time.
• The societal expectation to move on from trauma is counterproductive:
  • Quote [09:08]:
    “I’m always upset when I hear people say, ‘oh, someone’s stuck in the past.’ In my thinking, it's the past that's stuck in the past.... That's not really moving on. That’s abandoning my past.” – Stephanie Claire Smith

Finding Voice in Literary Form

[06:12 – 08:03]

• The memoir’s poetic, vignette-style structure evolved organically from Smith’s practice as a poet and therapist; the format allowed her to “keep it really tight” and focus her storytelling.
  • [06:34]:
    “I didn't really set out to write this. I was in recovery after my mother died... I was writing poems... my poems spread out into paragraphs... I would get up and I'd write a page and go back to sleep… So I did.” – Stephanie Claire Smith

Legacy of Trauma: Social Work & Mediating for Others

[10:58 – 11:47]

• Her challenging upbringing made Smith well-suited for social work and mediation, roles that require subsuming personal needs to focus on others.
  • Quote [11:11]:
    “I was trying to work through my past by helping other people. And also I'd already grown up in a house where my needs weren't ever in the mix… that's kind of what you have to do as a mediator.” – Stephanie Claire Smith

Creating a Present: Moving from New York to Raleigh

[11:47 – 12:43]

• Stephanie now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, after finding New York “too fast.” Her journey has been one of searching for a place to feel attuned and at peace.
  • Quote [12:05]:
    “New York is just a little too fast for me... I just didn't want to be around any more snow.” – Stephanie Claire Smith

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• Mother’s Departure:
  “I asked her not to go… she put a good face on it, like, 'Oh, you’ll be fine, you won’t even want me to come back.' So I felt silly asking her to stay.” – Stephanie [03:04]
• Childhood Logic:
  “It never crossed my mind to turn to [my mother’s friends]... So I totally blamed myself for a long time.” – Stephanie [04:16]
• On Caregiving and Loyalty:
  References to Sinead O’Connor’s similar feelings of wanting to care for an abusive mother:
  “That’s where we’re getting our sense of love—from the love that we’re giving.” [05:12]
• Processing Trauma:
  “We need to find a way to bring our past into the present so that we can have a conversation with it, so that we can take care of it and be compassionate towards it. That took a lifetime.” – Stephanie [09:08]

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Important Timestamps

• [01:52] Stephanie describes her mother
• [03:04] The day her mother left and childhood feelings of responsibility
• [04:16] Lack of family support and internalized blame
• [06:12] Turning to memoir and the liberation of writing after her mother’s death
• [08:32] Recounting the trauma and the absence of resources
• [09:08] Unpacking the “move on” myth
• [10:58] How trauma shaped her professional caregiving
• [12:05] Life in Raleigh and looking for peace

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Tone & Style

The conversation is sincere, poetic, and unflinching in confronting pain and neglect. Both host and guest balance compassion for past selves with a clear-eyed view of harm, all while respecting the difficulty and complexity of memory, trauma, responsibility, and forgiveness.

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Everywhere the Undrowned: A Memoir of Survival and Imagination is available now.

Transcript

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Listener support, WNYC Studios.

[Matt Katz]

This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Matt Katz filling in for Alison Stewart. We continue our ongoing series Mental Health Mondays with a new memoir about survival and trauma. Listeners, we want to let you know that this segment may deal with sexual assault. If at any time you feel you need support, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline. That number is 1-800-656-4673. In the summer of 1973, 14 year old Stephanie Claire Smith found herself home alone in New Orleans after her mother abandoned her to go on a road trip out west. And in her mother's absence, Stephanie missed her mother deeply and felt a sense of responsibility to take care of things until she returned. She went to her summer school algebra class, but she also wandered around the city alone, formed an intimate relationship with a streetcar operator, a man twice her age, and found herself at the mercy of a man with a knife who forced himself onto her in the back of his truck. Decades later, in her 40s and 50s, poet and social worker Stephanie found herself grappling with these difficult memories after she became became the primary caretaker for her mother, who was diagnosed with dementia. Her memoir now is titled Everywhere the A Memoir of Survival and Imagination and is on shelves today and author Stephanie Claire Smith joins us to discuss. Stephanie, welcome to all of it.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Matt Katz]

In in this memoir, you said your mother was a freelance modern dancer hired by the city to teach dance in public schools. Tell us about her. What kind of person was she and how would you describe her outlook on life as a kid? How did you see her as a parent?

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Oh, those are different questions. The way I saw her was the way I needed to see her, which was flawless and fantastic and everyone wanted to be around her, kind of like a Judy Garland character. She was appealing to everyone. She was very liberal thinking and, and just a free spirit. I also think as an adult, looking back, you know, she had no intention of being a single parent during the 60s and 70s. So it was tough. And her priority was really to find love again. And that drove a lot of her.

[Matt Katz]

Decisions, I think, and that drove monumental decision. I mean, when tell me about what your mother said to you before she left you home alone in the summer of 73.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Yeah. So I asked her not to go. And I recount this in the book, how she just put a good face on it, like, oh, you'll be fine, you know, you won't even want me to come back. And so I felt silly asking her to stay. You know, I. People ask me later, like, didn't you think it was unusual? Didn't you think this or that? No, I felt like I was getting skipped ahead a few grades and I needed to really live up to this test that I was being too clingy and needy.

[Matt Katz]

Had she ever left you home alone before for any period of time?

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Yeah, so this wasn't the first time. I already had developed a lot of muscles and taking care of myself, she would, she wouldn't leave me alone that long, but she certainly was out a lot late and would often times forget to pick me up places. Yeah, that happened quite a bit. So there were many cases before that where she would forget or she would figure I'd find some way to get home. Yeah.

[Matt Katz]

And your, your father, other extended family? Was there anybody else you were able to rely on in such circumstances?

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

No. And that's why I needed my mother to be as perfect as I could create. So my father left when I was five and he lived in a different state. I saw him about once a year and there were not any family members for long in New Orleans. Her other family members moved or she wasn't connected to them anymore. She had a slew of friends herself who I adored, but they weren't necessarily close to us. And I. It never crossed my mind to like turn to them. I didn't really even know how to reach them during that summer. So I totally blamed myself for a long time and didn't see the connection to her being gone to. As to what happened to me and.

[Matt Katz]

Later, years later, and when you're starting to make that connection and see the. The significance of this summer, is that how you came about to try to put this pen to paper and write a memoir about the experience?

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Exactly. I really couldn't afford to do that until after she died. So again, my mother had many winning qualities. Imagine, you know, a Judy Garland type person. There's all this wonderful quality qualities to her. So I could only really focus on those. And like many children who grow up in homes where parents are less than attentive, neglectful, you, you're just so used to dedicating your life to them, taking care of them, that they need to be protected in so many ways. It doesn't occur to you that they should be protecting you. It just doesn't cross your mind. So I heard interview with Sinead Okonor who talked about that, who talked about if her mother, who horribly abused her, that if her mother was back al she would want to take care of her mother. Again, that's where we're getting our sense of love is from the love that we're giving. So it was after she died that I could slowly start to put the pieces together and see that, you know, her neglect actually was the engine that pulled all of this forward.

[Matt Katz]

Wow. You're a poet. And the memoir, it feels poetic in many, just in the way it's structured in the writing. What felt right about telling the story in the way you did using. Using prose, but. But bringing your. Your poetry background into it.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Yeah. So, you know, I didn't really set out to write this. I was in recovery after my mother died. I got back into writing because I had to put all that to the side and was writing poems and I was doing all this inner work on this trauma and this childhood I had, and I was in therapy. That was the real artwork. The poetry was the offsh work that I was doing. So I was writing all these poems. And then I came across Maggie Nelson's book Bluettes, which is written in these really tight little paragraphs. Yeah, it's poetic, but it's not necessarily a poem. And as I would fall asleep at night, my poems that I was working on kind of spread out into these paragraphs. They had more to say. So I would get up and I'd write a page and go back to sleep, and this would happen, you know, for several nights. And so I eventually got to 13 pages and showed it to a poet friend who said, well, I don't know what it is, but keep going. So I did. And I just kept that form because I liked it. And I also had the attention for it. It was something about it created attention to keep it really tight. And that's the way I tell stories, very succinctly. And so then after I had about 50 pages, I showed it to a fellow writer who encouraged me to really write some more now about the present and about caregiving. And so I tell you about. In about nine months, I was done. I wrote like in this white heat. Wow. As I was processing everything, the hard part was, you know, getting an agent, finding a publisher. Sure.

[Matt Katz]

Right. Well, did you have to do any research or investigation into your own. It's your own life in order to make sure you were having the right context for things a little bit.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

I mean, trauma kind of sears things into your memory. So I didn't have to do a lot in that area, but certain dates, and if I was remembering certain dates correctly, certain letters that I had, things like that.

[Matt Katz]

Yes, you write about this summer of 1973, and you write about this awful encounter with a. With a man who forced himself on you in the back of a truck. Why did you feel it was important to share this? And what could. There must have been no resources for somebody in your situation at that time. You must have felt like there was nowhere to go.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Yeah, there was nowhere to go. This was way before rape crisis centers, that they may have started somewhere, but they weren't in New Orleans.

[Matt Katz]

Yeah.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

And it wasn't even in our lexicon, you know, that just wasn't a thing. So, yeah, I didn't feel like there were many places to go in the places I go I went to, you know, were horrible for me. So I just learned not to talk about it anymore and. And run away from it, basically. So I'm always upset when I hear people say, oh, someone's stuck in the past. You know, in my thinking, it's the past that stuck in the past. And I was a perfect example of somebody who moved away from my past as quickly and as far as I could and never looked back. That's not really moving on. That's abandoning my past. And now it's twitching in the background somewhere, still affecting me. I mean, the. Is all around us. So instead, it's more like we need to find a way to bring our past into the present so that we can have a conversation with it, so that we can take care of it and be compassionate towards it. That took a lifetime. That took a lifetime. I was much more interested in ignoring it because anytime I did try to talk about it, people didn't understand or it was met most people. I mean, some people understood, but not very many. Not. And I never shared all the details because, again, I didn't want to out my mother. Yeah. So writing this story has been very hard in that regard because it's been. It's outed my mother. But in terms of why did I write about that? Because it was the most horrible and traumatic event of my life. And when I hear other women who are abducted, because abduction has its own version of hell, and I would hear other women talk about their experiences, and it really changed my life to hear what they were thinking of those. That first hour of their abduction. Very similar to the first hour for me. So if my story could also do something like that for someone else, then we're less alone.

[Matt Katz]

I wonder if you also brought your past into your. Your present through your. Through your work. I mean, those experiences clearly, like, must have led you in some way to your career as A social worker and a mediator, right?

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. I think unconsciously, you know, I was trying to work through my past by helping other people. And also I'd already grown up in a house where my needs weren't ever in the mix. So I'd already learned to swallow all that. And that's kind of what you have to do as a mediator, is mediate other people's concerns. Your concerns are not, you know, obviously going to be part of the mix. So I, I, my personality was already primed for that role. And then the work that I do with at risk families, ye. It was, I think, an unconscious way for me to try to work on some of that.

[Matt Katz]

And, and your, your career has taken you from, you were in New York City for quite some time and then you ended up in, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Is that right?

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

That's right, yeah.

[Matt Katz]

Tell me, tell me where you, yeah, tell, tell me about your life now and, and, and why you ended up down there.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Well, New York is just a little too fast for me. I grew up in New Orleans and so I think the first year in New York I could never even sit down on the train. I couldn't even get into a train. So it was hard. So yeah, as soon as I could, I, I wanted to come back where it was a little warmer and a little slower and a job came up in Raleigh and I took it. I mean, New Orleans is a hard place to live and even harder now. So I didn't. And it was really hard to get a job in New Orleans at the time. So I just ended up here. I could ended up anywhere. I just didn't want to be around any more snow.

[Matt Katz]

Yeah, that's a very fair answer. We are going to leave it here, but congratulations on the memoir. It's a remarkable work. Everywhere the Undround A Memoir of Survival and Imaginations. Excuse me. Everywhere the Undrowned A Memoir of Survival and Imagination is in stores now. I've been speaking with author Stephanie Claire Smith. Thank you so much for joining us, Stephanie.

[Stephanie Claire Smith]

Thank you. I appreciate it.

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