Loading summary
Transcript19 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Commercial Narrator
Guaranteed Human Amazon Pharmacy Presents Painful Thoughts
- [00:10]
Sophia Donner
it's been a long, bumpy road dealing with yet another bladder infection and driving to the pharmacy to pick up meds. I went over a pothole and a little pee came out, so now I get to stand in line with pee pee pants.
- [00:24]
Commercial Narrator
Next time, skip the pain and get fast free delivery with Amazon Pharmacy. Healthcare just got less painful. During Memorial Day at Lowe's. Shop household must haves for less. Save $80 on a Char Broil Performance Series 4 Burner Grill to chef up something special plus get up to 45% off select major appliances to keep things fresh. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's Lowe's we help you Save valid through 527 while supplies last selection varies by location.
- [00:58]
Sophia Donner
Seeloes.com for details, visit your nearby Lowes Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebglis.
- [01:12]
Podcast Announcer
After an initial dosing phase, about 4
- [01:14]
Sophia Donner
in 10 people taking EBGLIS achieved itch
- [01:16]
Podcast Announcer
relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks.
- [01:18]
Sophia Donner
And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [01:23]
Pharmaceutical Advertiser
EBGLIS Librekizumab LBKZ a 250mg per 2mg the ML injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebgliss can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief?
- [01:57]
Sophia Donner
Ask your doctor about epgliss and visit
- [01:59]
Podcast Announcer
epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [02:06]
Kel Penn
Hey everyone, it's Kel Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:35]
Sophia Donner
Hi Family Secrets Family the season is not remotely over, but this week, this Christmas day, I'm going to do something a little different. A gift for you, and perhaps a gift for myself as well. Over six years and now 13 seasons of hosting this podcast, I've heard hundreds of stories of family secrets and the way what we don't know, what has been hidden from us acts upon us nonetheless. Long before I discovered the secret that had shaped me, there were other secrets. As a child, I simply felt them hungry ghosts in the room. When I grew up and became a writer, I began to write about these secrets, digging for them in my fiction and my nonfiction, trying to get to the essential why? Why had I been born into such a legacy of secrecy? In 1998, I wrote a personal history piece for the New Yorker magazine. I was terrified. It was a huge opportunity for a young writer. But that wasn't the only reason it scared me. It scared me because I was going to have to dig without knowing what I would come up with, how complex and painful I might find it. I'm going to tell you that story, which is titled the Secret Wife. I may interrupt myself as I'm telling it, annotate it in a way, because when I wrote this story about my father and what I thought was his most profound secret, of course I did not yet know his biggest secret of all, which is that I was not his biological daughter. So let's go on this adventure together. Here's the Secret Life in 1953, nine years before I was born, my father fell in love with a young woman named Dorothy Grivitz. She was a beautiful Orthodox Jewish girl who was, at 27, startlingly old to still be single in the moneyed religious urban world of my father and his family. My father was fresh out of a miserable marriage, stinging from a custody battle for his six year old daughter, Susie. He married Darcy in the living room of her parents modest Brooklyn apartment on April 11, 1954. She wore ivory satin and carried a bouquet of pale flowers streaming with ribbons. Her enormous blue green eyes were hidden beneath her veil and a tiara rested on her dark wavy hair. My father was handsome in a morning suit and silk ascot. His best friend and best man, Danny Schachter, stood behind him. The rabbi placed a glass wrapped in a cloth napkin on the floor and my father raised his foot to perform the ritual that ends every Jewish wedding. He stamped hard and smashed the glass. The guests shouted Mazel tov. And applauded as he and Dorothy kissed. My father was beginning his marriage with a secret that only a few people shared. At the end of the evening, after the dancing, cigars and toasts, when he and Dorothy ran laughing out of the building and into the brand new Oldsmobile coupe her father had given them as a wedding gift, Dorothy was bundled up in her sealskin coat and jaunty hat. A bit of black netting drifted over her pretty eyes. She looked the way any bride might, embarking on a life with plans and expectations. Dorothy was my father's second wife. My mother was his third. I was 17 before I ever knew Dorothy had existed. My half sister Susie let it slip one day once when dad, Dorothy, and I were upstate, she began, and I interrupted her. Who's Dorothy? The few details I learned that day of this marriage of my father's, a marriage so painful he never spoke of it, were all I knew for a long time, but still it made deep emotional sense to me. My father had been missing for most of my childhood. He had retreated behind a wall of pills and prayer, occasionally playing ball with him in the backyard on a beautiful summer morning, I would catch a glimpse of the young man he must once have been. A deep belly laugh, a crushing hug, a sudden sparkle in his eyes, and I would want to reach out and hold on to him and to make things better for him, without ever knowing what had gone wrong. In a photograph snapped seconds before I was married last year, I am standing next to my husband to be under a canopy draped with my late father's ivory and white striped tallis. In front of us, a rabbi recites a my heart is racing. I know this isn't a case of premarital jitters. I have no second thoughts, no doubts about the man I'm about to marry. Before we leave for Paris, I call my doctor and ask for a prescription for tranquilizers. I have never taken pills before. Pills make me think of my father. He was addicted to Valium, Percodan, and Emperon for most of his life. I have a childhood memory of him sitting at the kitchen table in front of a lazy Susan filled with prescription bottles, checking his pulse. Two fingers pressed against the side of his neck, his face contorted with fear. I spend my honeymoon certain that I'm about to die. I feel this, not in an abstract, intellectual way, but in my bones, and I take the first tranquilizer of my Life in order to get on the plane home. I have been married three times. Once at 19, then at 28, and now for the third time at 35. My first husband was a shop owner, a boyish, free spirit. He took off on buying trips for months at a time. I was a teenager unprepared for marriage or solitude. I threw dinner parties, cooked the one dish I knew, and pretended to be a grown up. Less than a year after the wedding, I left. I don't think either of us was surprised, but I was now a divorcee at 20 and ashamed of it. My second husband was an investment banker. He was exactly the man I'd been brought up to marry. Jewish, stable, financially secure, with a life planned down to the last millisecond. I felt numb. I was giving up at the age of 28. The marriages had just this in common. They marked the only times in my life when I had been governed by severe crippling anxiety. As soon as I met Michael, I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. The insanity of those earlier alliances became even starker when for the first time, I realized what love actually felt like. Yet the panic persisted. Why did I equate being a wife with being destroyed? My father's first wedding to Susie's mother had been a gala candlelit affair in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, marking the union of two powerful Orthodox clans. Elaine Brodie was from a textile and real estate dynasty whose properties included the Essex House and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Her great grandfather had been the chief Orthodox Rabbi of New York. My father never even proposed to Elaine. His parents proposed to hers. After the wedding, he began to work at his father's silk mill in Blackstone, Virginia, and would travel there for two weeks of each month. My grandfather was a self made millionaire and my father was firmly under his control. He didn't even receive a salary. Whatever he needed in the way of money he had to petition for. When Susie was a toddler, my father and Elaine moved into an apartment on Park Avenue. But Elaine never accepted the role of traditional Jewish wife. She had been a serious pianist before getting married and wanted to continue to perform and even perhaps pursue a doctorate. Nine years into their marriage, my father returned home from a trip to Blackstone to find the apartment empty. His wife and child were gone. The furniture was gone. Only his clothes remained, folded neatly on the top shelves of the closets. Divorce was unheard of in their circle. A rarefied community of Eastern European Jews who had brought their Old World values with them to America. Everyone knew something about it. Elaine had always been too ambitious for her own good. People gossiped over ice cream sodas at Schrafts or lunches at the Tiptoe Inn on Broadway and 87th Street. She had left my father without even a bed to sleep in. And then there was talk that she had been having an affair with Susie's pediatrician. My father first met Dorothy Gribitz at the Brunswick Hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey. Since his separation, he'd been trying to meet eligible Orthodox women going to kosher resorts like Grossinger's or the Concord and the Catskills or the Brunswick, where Darcy was staying with her parents. She was devout, educated, with a degree from Cornell and a master's from Columbia, and warm. She was kind to Susie. Orthodox jews in the 1950s weren't as strictly observant as they've since become, and my father and Dorothy had a courtship typical of its time. She saved the orchids he sent her each week and pinned them to her bedroom wall on their Saturday night dates. After Shabbos, they'd stop into a cocktail lounge for Cuba libros. They'd go ballroom dancing at the Plaza or the Pier. For a nice kosher dinner, they'd go to Lu g. Siegel's on 38th Street. My father presented Dorothy with an emerald cut diamond engagement ring, and this time he proposed himself. The summer before she met my father, Dorothy had a cough she couldn't shake. Her doctor told her it was whooping cough, and he hospitalized her briefly. While Dorothy was having tea at the Waldorf Astoria the winter before her wedding, my father's younger sister, Shirley noticed her carefully examining her cup. Before taking a sip, Dorothy explained that she had caught a virus in Nantucket the summer before, and she believed it was from drinking tea out of a cracked cup. My father's family became concerned Dorothy would grow suddenly pale and unnaturally dark circles would appear under her eyes. On the advice of his parents, my father called Dorothy's internist. The doctor assured him that Dorothy was fine. But a distant cousin of my father's who was an intern at the same hospital had interpreted Dorothy's pattern of symptoms, and he didn't think she was fine. He stole a peek at her medical records and saw page after page of scrawled blood test results. She had Hodgkin's lymphoma at the time, a uniformly fatal illness. Once diagnosed, most patients could be expected to live about a year. Not knowing what to do with this information, the cousin called my father's best friend Danny and told him what he had learned. Danny was married to the daughter of the renowned Rabbi Joseph H. Lukestein, and he immediately went to his father in law for advice. The rabbi was emphatic. Danny had to tell my father what he knew. The wedding was two weeks away. That night Danny went to see my father who was camping out in his parents study. A black and gold book lined room 27 floors above Central Park West. Oil paintings of the Shapiro ancestors, the men with white double beards and black skull caps, hung on the walls. Then he broke the news to him. Dorothy was dying. She didn't know. Only the doctors and her father knew the truth and a decision had been made to protect her. Danny advised him not to marry Dorothy for the sake of his future. His reputation was already tarnished as a divorced orthodox man in 1954 and for the sake of his six year old who had already lost enough. The morning after Danny's visit, my father took a checker cab to Brooklyn to see Dorothy's father. Lewis Gribitz was a short, wiry man, a respected attorney who had written a book about Mayor Jimmie Walker and made an unsuccessful run for city council. He had studied for the rabbinate. He would have known that Talma generally prohibits telling a terminally ill patient the truth about her condition. Dorothy was the oldest of his three children. Eleven years earlier, the youngest, a son named Stanley, had died at the age of seven of rheumatic fever. Lewis, in his living room high above Grand Army Plaza that night, explained to my father that he hadn't told him because he wanted his daughter to know happiness in the last months of her life. My father postponed his wedding to Dorothy for 10 days. He had a boil on his stomach and he checked into Beth Israel Hospital on Friday morning to have it removed and to buy time. He didn't get in touch with Dorothy to let her know. And once it was sundown on Friday, the Sabbath, he wouldn't be able to call her until at least sundown on Saturday. In the meantime, his sister Shirley made arrangements to come down on the overnight train from Boston. My father was determined that his parents shouldn't be told about Dorothy's illness. He had been under his father's sum his whole life. This time he was going to make his own decision. But he needed advice. The next day, through a series of favors and connections, Shirley Rivda made an appointment to see the Grand Lubovature Rebbe menachem Schneerson in 1954, decades before he was thought of as the Messiah by many of The Lubashir community. Rabbi Schneerson was already a mythic figure. While my family were considered Orthodox by most standards, Hasidim would have considered them assimilated. The Shapiros and their crowd kept their religious practices private. They didn't wear yarmulkes on the street. They ate dairy or fish in regular non kosher restaurants. Men and women danced together cheek to cheek. Shirley and my father knew that their parents had met Schneerson and respected him. But in turning to him, they were moving outside their social circle. Shirley is now 74 and the grandmother of 20. I'm actually going to insert there that Shirley is now 103 and the great grandmother of countless, countless great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. Her oldest son is an Orthodox rabbi, and most of her male grandchildren wear pious and dark clothes. I haven't visited her often. By the time I was born, my father had moved or perhaps was pushed away from the Orthodox fold as Shirley and her family became even more deeply involved in it. My father had been divorced, then widowed, and then had married a woman, my mother, who wasn't religious. With each move, he drifted further away from the Manhattan shoals of his youth and the community that went along with them. I'm also going to insert here that after writing this piece I became extremely close with my Aunt Shirley and have remained so ever since. That day I took a taxi to Crown Heights. Shirley told me I was wearing my suit from Saks, but I was worried that I didn't look religious enough to meet the Rebbe. So I had the taxi stop at a store on Delancey and I ran inside and bought a tichel, a black rag. I took off my fancy hat and tied the tichel under my chin. When I got to 770 Eastern Parkway, I was shown straight into the Rebbe's study. He was such a handsome man with clear, clear eyes and a snap brim fedora. His desk was absolutely clean. He sat quietly while I told him the story. And when I finished, he was quiet for a few minutes and then he said, tell your brother to postpone and postpone. When Shirley got back to Beth Israel, prepared to convey the Rabbi's advice to my father, there was Darcy, sitting on my father's bed, holding his hand, looking incandescent in a coral colored dress that set off her dark hair and a black velvet hat. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes shone. Cheryl, can you imagine? I was trying on my wedding veil when I heard Paul was in the hospital. My father was ashen, propped up in bed, still weak from his surgery, his head was bowed and he was stroking the inside of Dorothy's wrist, tracing the map of pale blue veins. Later, when Dorothy left, Shirley told my father about Niersen's advice. I can't do that to Dorothy, he said. I also want to add here that Shirley had the most extraordinary memory. Her memory of what Dorothy was wearing, her memory verbatim of what the Rebbe had said. I never would have been able to write or publish this piece in the New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checking process, without having had the incredible generosity of my extraordinary aunt, who for whom it was not easy to tell this story. It was such a painful story for her and for everyone who knew my dad. After the wedding, Dorothy said she wanted to start a family as soon as she felt better. But late that summer she was hospitalized. She had a lymph node removed from under her arm and she was treated with mustard gas. When she came home, she had weakened considerably. She was no longer able to get up in the morning on Shabbos to set the table. So she did it with Susie's help the night before. She never complained. But my father told Susie to be especially gentle with Dorothy. She wasn't feeling well. Just before the High holidays, my father and Dorothy moved into an apartment at 50 Plaza street on the same floor as Dorothy's parents. It was an apartment big enough for a family, and it had views of Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Museum. For Dorothy, it was an exciting new beginning. She began to furnish the apartment lovingly, ordering curtains, sofas, rolls of wall to wall carpeting. But for my father, being near Dorothy's parents probably meant to that he'd have more help with Darcy when the time came. On Rosh Hashanah morning, Darcy and her sister Grace were dressing for shul in their old girlhood bedroom. Dorothy was wearing an ivory silk blouse with silk covered buttons. Suddenly she sat down on the bed, her face white, the black circles appearing. I'm too sick to go to shul, she whispered. Then she unbuttoned her blouse with shaking fingers. Grace, will you wear this to shul for me? That way at least part of me will be there. As Grace was putting on Dorothy's blouse, Susie came bouncing into the room in a new dress, excited about going to temple, wanting to see what was taking so long. Susie, I can't go to shul, Dorothy told her. But will you say a prayer for me? You can't say a prayer for another person, Susie replied. You have to pray for yourself. In October, on Sukkot the holiday that celebrates the autumn harvest. Dorothy was in bed reading a magazine when she began to have trouble breathing. My father sent Susie outside to roller skate. He called an ambulance, and Dorothy was taken into Manhattan to Memorial Hospital. My grandfather came up from Virginia when he heard the news. He stood in the doorway of the waiting room and looked at Shirley through his pince nez. He was an imposing man, portly and bald, and most people's first reaction to him was fear. What's wrong with Darcy? He asked. Shirley looked up at him, shaking her head slightly. The word cancer was never uttered. She's very, very sick, dad. My father led my grandfather into Dorothy's room. She was propped up in bed and there were tubes and wires everywhere. Finally, she looked every bit as sick as she was. She was drawn and thin, and her eyes were sunken. I wanted to say this in front of you, dad, she said to my grandfather. I want to thank Paul for giving me the happiest six months of my life. Afterwards, when it was all over, my father returned to the apartment, stepped over the still rolled up carpeting Dorothy had ordered only weeks before, and headed down the long corridor into their bedroom. There on the bed was the magazine she had been reading just before she was taken to the hospital. It was open to an article about Hodgkin's lymphoma. After the ambulance came and took Dorothy away, I didn't see dad for two weeks, susie says as we sit in her East Village apartment. He called me every night, and every night I'd ask him where he was and he'd say, where do you think I am? And I'd say, the hospital, and then I'd ask how Dorothy was and he'd tell me she was resting. He picked me up on a Wednesday night after those two weeks had gone by. He looked like hell and he was quieter than usual. We were in a taxi going through Central park on our way to Grammy and Grampy's when I asked him how Dorothy was and he told me that Dorothy had died. She had died a week before they had the funeral, buried her, sat shiva, all without telling me. I am going to interject here that all these many, many, many years later, Susie and I have virtually no relationship. And a big part of the reason that we have no relationship is all of this history, all of this pain, all of this. All of this unnecessary secrecy. They were very much people of their time, and their time was a time in which you didn't say the word cancer and you didn't tell children when someone had died and the children didn't come to the funeral and were never able to have any closure and carry that pain with them throughout their entire lives. And reading this all these years later, reading this out loud for all of you, is a very emotional experience for me and a very moving one. My father was an extraordinary man, extraordinarily brave and kind and. Yeah, I'm just going to keep reading. My parents kept secrets. Dorothy was only one of them, to which I really need to interject. Here. No shit. Sorry. My mother's first marriage, an aunt's nervous breakdown, an uncle's attempted suicide, all were kept secret. On the surface, everything seemed perfect. But why was my father so unhappy all the time? Why did my mother seem so constantly on edge? Here I will also interject. I didn't have all the information, and all the information I did have. And everything that I wrote in this piece was, in fact, completely true. It just wasn't the whole truth. I didn't know all the secrets. Some of the friction between my parents had to do with my father's strict religious beliefs. My mother was fun loving and glamorous, the head of her own small advertising agency. When she met my father, she had no idea that becoming Orthodox meant more than keeping a kosher home and going to shul on holidays. Orthodoxy was its own universe, a universe as suspicious of her as she was of it. As the years went by, we rarely saw my father's family, and when we did, they seemed foreign to me. With their yarmulkes and thick glasses, they were pale and wan, with something called yeshiva pallor. On our way home from visiting, my mother would make fun of them and my father would become even quieter than usual. I grew up in a house full of fear. We were protected by three different kinds of alarm systems. Paths on the floors, under the rugs, a motion detector and panic buttons that could be pressed in an emergency. I wasn't allowed to run barefoot on the lawn. I was slathered with sun lotion year round. If a bee buzzed near me, my mother would swoop down and rush me into the house. I never had chickenpox, measles or mumps, any of the childhood diseases. I wasn't around children enough to have them. But the real dangers were inside our house. What I remember is the silence. Most of the time it was as quiet as a wax museum. And my parents spoke to each other, at least in front of me, with brittle politeness. And then every once in a while, there would be the booming sound of my father's voice. Or the loud slam of the back door as my mother went outside to sit on the cold aluminum of the milk can and smoke a cigarette. These fights didn't seem to have beginnings or ends, but I knew my parents would never divorce. I couldn't have articulated it back then, but my parents seemed to be holding their fragile world together with some sort of tacit agreement that their histories and secrets, the whole of their past lives, could be kept from each other and from me. Again, Extraordinary that I understood on a such some level. This speaks to what listeners of this podcast know I talk about a lot in various episodes, about the unsought known right here, buried in my own words. Before I ever knew that my dad wasn't my biological father, that my parents had used a sperm donor, that they had never spoken a word of their fertility journey, or their use of donor sperm, or the fact that he wasn't my biological father ever again, I'll never know. But I believe they never spoke of it to each other. And I'm certain that they never spoke of it to anyone. Most definitely not to me. So how's that for a tacit agreement? Once I knew about Darcy, from time to time I would ask my mother about her. They tricked your father into marrying her, she'd say. It was a terrible thing they did. For my mother, it was as if my father's second wife had barely existed. But Dorothy was very real for my father. The one time I asked him about her, I glimpsed pain in his eyes so intense that I never asked again. Grace Gribbitz Glesser, Dorothy's younger sister, wasn't easy for me to track down. She's married to I, Leo Glasser, the federal judge who presided over the John Gotti trial, and they lead a quiet, private life in a prosperous, protected section of Rockaway park, facing the ocean. But when I visited her almost a year into my new marriage, she seemed entirely unfazed that her late sister's husband's daughter would have come looking for her. Hello dear, she said, as if she had been expecting me. I recognized her face from wedding photos, a wide eyed young woman holding her sister's bouquet. She's now 69, with silver hair. You look like your father, she said, ushering me in. It was a few days before Purim between us. On her kitchen table was a shoebox full of photographs of Dorothy. Grace was 25 when Dorothy died. She has four children and nine grandchildren. Her oldest daughter is named Darcy. Together we shuffled through the photographs, Dorothy on a picnic blanket with one boyfriend on the beach with another Dorothy and my father at their wedding. Grace handed me a photo of my father in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and silver tie, his hand resting on the back of a chair as he turns to the camera, laughing. I had never seen this expression of pure, unadulterated joy on my father's face. I used to meet your father for lunch every once in a while, grace said. I remember he called me when you were getting married. When was that? I knew she was referring to my first marriage, the one for which my father was still alive. He was worried, she continued. He wasn't happy about it at all. I wondered if my mother knew that my father had stayed in touch with Dorothy's sister. I doubt it. Now I follow her down a hall and into her bedroom. The life she has. The children, the grandchildren, the hamantaschen in the oven. That was the life my father was supposed to have had with Dorothy. Darcy and my father would have lived in Brooklyn or on Central park west or on the beach at Rockaway Park. They would have been active in their local synagogue, had a bunch of children, and lived an observant life. Grace opened a walk in closet and I heard the scrape and rattle of hangers. She emerged from the closet carrying a blouse. It was once ivory silk with ivory silk covered buttons. Now it was yellow and stained and much too big for her small frame. I've worn it to shul every Rosh Hashanah for 44 years, she said. Her voice was sweet and sorrowful. It's so stained now I can't even take off my jacket. I wish my sister were here to meet you, she says. But if she were here, you wouldn't be. Is that ever true? After Dorothy died, my father looked for a new apartment. There was a building going up on East Ninth street near Broadway, and he went with his sister to see it. They were sitting in the rental office when an impeccably dressed dark haired woman in her early 30s walked in the door. Shirley noticed that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring and nudged my father. A few months later, after my father had moved into that building, he saw the dark haired woman on the street. It was Shabbos and she was carrying a hammer. Modern girl that she was, on her way home to install bookcases. Obviously she wasn't observant. A hammer on Shabbos, but he was pretty sure she was Jewish. They stopped and chatted and he caught her first name, Irene. He knew she lived on the block, and the next day he spent his morning poring through the Manhattan phone book, looking for Irene's on East ninth Street. During my parents courtship, my father continued to spend weekends at Grossinger's and the Concord in search of an orthodox woman. It was unheard of to marry outside orthodoxy. It was almost like marrying out of the faith. But on September 4, 1957, he and Irene were married at Young Israel on 16th Street. A photograph of my parents at their wedding hangs over the desk where I write. They are walking up the aisle and my mother is smiling triumphantly. My father's hand is balled into a fist. Within a year he had injured his back and become addicted to painkillers and tranquilizers. For all the years of my childhood, my father walked gingerly, as if constantly aware that collapse was possible. And as the tension in our home grew, he became quieter and quieter. Sometimes I would catch his eye to wink at him, to let him know I understood. But I didn't understand. And he continued sliding away. So that is the end of the story that I wrote in 1998. It was the year 2016 before I learned what my parents had gone through in those early years of their marriage. Their attempt to time and time again to have a child, to create a family together. And ultimately, what drew them to the very unusual and completely secretive decision to use a sperm donor to create a family. Which was something that in the early 1960s, it happened. It happened plenty. But it was illegal, it was considered immoral, it was frowned upon and forbidden by every religion. I could have been taken away from my father. Legally, I would have been considered not his child. He knew all that and he loved me with every cell in his being. I know that. And he was a wonderful father in so many ways. But he and my mother harbored this tremendous secret on top of all of those other secrets. Their reasons for shivering over me are now reasons that I understand so much better. His depression, his sorrow, the compounding of all of those secrets in his life must really have been too much for him to bear. And it's one of the great honors of my life as an artist, as a writer, as a podcaster, to be able to tell his story, to be able to tell my mother's story, to be able to in a way, honor them by sharing what was really a very, very difficult life. When I wrote in this piece, just reading it to you now aloud, that I knew they would never divorce. I did know they would never divorce. I think they couldn't have tolerated divorcing also if they had divorced. It's possible that my mother could have taken me away from my father. My father was never going to leave her. I don't think that she was ever going to leave him either. And instead they lived with their secrets and they lived with their pain until each of them took those secrets to the grave with them. So here I am. Family secrets. Family on this Christmas Day, or wherever this finds you whenever you listen to this. What an extraordinary experience for me to have just come back revisited this story. This story that thrums beneath all the other stories that I have learned since and that have liberated me from so much that I didn't understand. Foreign.
- [39:08]
Kel Penn
Hey everyone, it's Kel Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [39:36]
Podcast Announcer
This is Sophia Donner from OK Storytime this summer. Find your next obsession on Prime Video and listen. We're not saying you need another obsession, but there could be a lot worse ones. Steamy romance, addictive love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice, so why not watch them a third time off campus? L the Love Hypothesis and more. More Slow Burns Second Chances chemistry you can feel through the screen and it makes you wish you were actually in that movie. We've got binge worthy series can't miss movies perfect for when you're ignoring your own problems or procrastinating as one does. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime.
- [40:13]
Pharmaceutical Advertiser
If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Grainger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters, Grainger offers diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem. With Grainger, you can be confident you have everything you need to keep your facility running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by. Grainger are the ones who get it done.
- [40:43]
Commercial Narrator
It never happens at a good time. The pipe bursts at midnight. The heater quits on the coldest night. Suddenly you're overwhelmed. That's when HomeServ is here for $4.99 a month. You're never alone. Just call their 247 hotline and a local pro is on the way. Trusted by millions, HomeServe delivers peace of mind when you need it most. For plans Starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com that's homeserve.com not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month. Your first year terms apply on covered repairs.
- [41:13]
Podcast Announcer
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.