Dani Shapiro (1:50)

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Stefan Merrill Block (1:59)

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Dani Shapiro (2:14)

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Stefan Merrill Block (2:20)

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. For mom to have her little boy back in her arms is like a kind of medicine. But when the supply runs out, the crash will only be that much more awful. For these few months of relief. But at some point, even if I never find the courage to insist, won't someone else make me go back anyway? Because I am only now 10 and know only our own narrow experience of homeschooling, I still believe the answer must be yes. Mom, I ask, are you sad all the time that I'm growing up? She faces away, scrunches up her nose as if pricked. I love the big kid version of you, Steph, so much. But I won't lie. I do miss my baby boy. It's a parent's curse, you know, Every mother in the world wishes her kid wouldn't grow up so fast. She holds my head against her chest as she laughs. But I guess I'm the only one who's actually doing something about it, right?

Dani Shapiro (3:15)

That's Stefan Merrill Block, novelist and author of the recent memoir Homeschooled. Stefan's is a story of a maternal bond born, grown profoundly awry, and a son's conflicted heart as he's forced over the years to choose between his mother and himself. I'm Dani Shapiro and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Interviewer (3:55)

Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. You have this move between third and fourth grade where you move from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, and that's kind of the beginning of where a lot of things changed.

Stefan Merrill Block (4:10)

My memories of Indianapolis are very impressionistic. I remember being a part of the a very small and loving school community in a older leafy neighborhood, you know, middle class neighborhood somewhere north of the city, and feeling profoundly secure and also feeling in that moment that my mom was a profoundly joyful person. I remember when my friends would come to play at our house. Everyone was always envious because my mother was the fun mom. She was the one who was always playing with us kids. Whereas, you know, I go to my friends houses and the moms would be busy with whatever business they had or talking to the other grownups. But my mom was always down there on, you know, kid level with us. I probably in some ways idealized this time in my life, but I just remember it being a period of immense closeness and also of security. And then when I was eight, my father lost his job and was headhunted for a new position at a hospital in this town called Plano, Texas, which in that year was just at the start of a massive transformation when we moved to town. West Plano, where we settled, was essentially farmland, and the earth there is nearly perfectly flat and you could see as far as the horizon in any direction. We lived in a brand new housing subdivision, but all around us were just wheat fields and dirt roads. So it was. We were sort of like the last satellite settlement of the Dallas Fort Worth sprawling metroplex. But over the years of living in Plano, and especially in those, those early years, the growth of the city was just almost instantaneous. There'd be a field one day, it felt like, and then a shopping mall the next day, or, you know, these big box stores would just go up with, like, impossible speed. And also the. The housing subdivisions would just like conquer the plains in, you know, a matter of months. It's almost like I remember, like, looking out the window to my old view of, you know, old Texas, of just wheat fields on the horizon and maybe a barn in the distance. And then the next day there's, you know, 900 houses up there and just like a sea of sort of tar shingle roofs. So Plano was a place of where a lot of. A lot of major corporations were building their headquarters. It was, you know, always rated very well by magazines as like, one of the most affordable, healthiest places to raise a family. The schools were considered to be very good. The problem, I think, with Plano was that nobody was really from there. You know, it was like an instant city on the prairie. And so there was no sense of what I had felt in Indianapolis, which was like the sort of intergenerational connectedness and a feeling of being in a home that had belonged to a community for a long period of time. Plano, I often joke, was like growing up in a city sized airport, duty free, where it's like, you know, it's nice in there, but it's all the same shops you could find in any other city. And it's filled with people just on their way to somewhere else.

Dani Shapiro (7:40)

Stefan grows up in a family of four. His mother, his father, and his older brother Aaron. His father is a psychologist with a very particular specialty, pre surgical psychological screening. It is his job to assess whether patients are psychologically prepared for surgery and how they may fare afterwards. When his father accepts a new position at a hospital in Plano, the family uproots from Indianapolis. The move is supposed to be an opportunity, a next step. But for Stefan's mother, it feels like something else entirely. She is left without her support system. She is suddenly, acutely unfulfilled.

Stefan Merrill Block (8:23)

I think that my family had hit a difficult spot with my father's work in particular, and, you know, this sort of financial precarity. And I think when he was offered this position in Plano, Plano seemed to offer a lot. I remember reading these articles that she had found about how wonderful the schools supposedly were, about what a nice house we could get. She was excited by my father's larger salary, and it seemed like a good new start. And like the sort of the most logical thing that we should do. She moved us there. I don't remember her writing it or being resistant to it at all, but something happened to her in that move. When we were preparing to move, I remember she bought me this children's picture book called Gila Monsters Meet yout at the Airport. It was about a kid whose family moves to the Southwest somewhere. I think maybe Arizona. And it's just sort of like preparing a child for a move in that direction. But it wasn't Gila Monsters that met us at the airport. It was Mom's anger. And it came out of what I can now see as some pretty dramatic losses in her life. When we were in Indianapolis, she had found a wonderful job as an editor of Children's magazine owned by Highlights. She had this network of close friends and one very, very close best friend. And what she had. And I think what was most fulfilling to her, as she would say, was two small children at home who needed her so much and so often. And I think when we moved to Texas, you know, she didn't have the job. Her friend was hundreds of miles away. And this was in the time when phone calls were expensive, long distance phone calls were expensive. So it wasn't, you know, she wasn't in as regular touch with. With her best friend as she would have liked. And Now I was 8 years old and my brother was 11 years old, and we didn't need her in the same ways. So I think she was struggling to find a place for herself and for her energies. And I think that's where her anger came from. But. But I remember my brother and I had this picture that my father had taken of my brother, my mother and myself on this snowy Indiana morning. And, you know, we're all so rosy cheeked and happy, and we're pressed close to each other, so the image of coziness. And in the first year or two after we moved to Plano, my brother and I used to hide this picture. We would hide it in the linen closet of our bathroom, and we would pull it out and look at the picture together. And you would just say to each other, what happened? Like she would. She was so happy. And we were just trying to reckon with that shift in her Persona, she now became a person who yelled often and who would speak to us in this, like, very intense and sort of condescending way. She felt deeply unsettled.

Interviewer (11:15)

It seemed like there was a pattern to the way that her rage would present itself. And if I were to kind of make a map of it, it was like any kind of attempt to individuate on the part of you boys was met with rage. And then after the rage would come a kind of shunning or a kind of silent treatment that was just brutal. And at some point you would capitulate, you know, whatever it was that you had been doing to try to kind of express yourself as an individual, you would kind of let go of that.

Stefan Merrill Block (11:59)

That's an interesting way of. And I think a wise way of observing that dynamic. I mean, I think how I experienced it was my mother had very certain views of how the world operated, of what was right and what was wrong. And she received any kind of pushback against her position as betrayal. You couldn't argue with her without her feeling like you were on the side of her perceived enemies. And so when you did, like when I once tried to gather my courage and confront her about the changes we had seen and the sort of emergence of this anger in her, she went silent on me and she wouldn't speak to me, you know, for a long while. I mean, I remember it as being more than a day that, you know, I got this just silent treatment because I had not. It wasn't that I had a difference of opinion. It was that I was sort of traitorous in expressing a different perspective. I had betrayed her.

Dani Shapiro (13:06)

It's 1990, Stefan's between second and third grade when he and his family move to Plano. He enters the school system there at the start of third grade, and he doesn't have an easy time of it.

Stefan Merrill Block (13:19)

Third grade was challenging. My new school in Plano was quite different from the school I had come from. Our school in Indianapolis was this small, nurturing, hippie, ish, kind of almost like a Montessori esque model. And the school in Plano was this brand new facility, like everything else in the town was brand new. And it seemed to work under a similar ethos as the rest of the town, which was, you know, everything was sort of rote and regimented and geared toward academic advancement and ultimately toward career advancement. You know, it felt kind of like we were in a factory for the processing of our brains. There were 10,000 worksheets to fill out. It was just all kind of jarring after my experience and my brother's experience of our previous school. But there was also a lot of joy there. I made. You know, there's a pleasure that comes from. That can come from displacement, which is you learn the possibility of some form of self reinvention, but also, I think, more critically, you learn your ability to create new communities where you land. And there's something empowering in that. And I did have a lot of friends, and I was. I was very, like, pleased at how I was able to make new friends. You know, the school was not the happiest place for me, but my mother and I, as third grade changed over to fourth grade, and I. I was assigned to this new teacher who I did not love and who. Who, in some ways, I. I feared. An interesting dynamic developed between my mother and me around school, which was. She was often in that time and, as I said, so kind of unsettled. She would get into these kind of angry states. And I discovered that I could displace that anger away from myself by talking about how unhappy I was at school. There's something about presenting school as the target that moved the target off of me. I would tell her all these stories. You know, I'd be at school, and if anything negative happened, if the teacher acted in some way that I knew would make mom unhappy, I would. I'd be thrilled because I would get to run home with the story of, you know, how my abusive teacher and the crazy things she did that day. And, you know, I think often I probably exaggerated those stories so that, you know, my mother and I could have this connectedness as we both just, like, stewed in our disdain for the school. But little did I know where it would all lead me.

Dani Shapiro (15:55)

Stefan and Aaron are four years apart from and are very different kids with very different personalities and very different trajectories.

Stefan Merrill Block (16:04)

My mother treated us quite differently. Aaron is. Was and is a profoundly joyful person whose interests run toward. He's a computer scientist now, and he was always sort of a computer scientist at heart. You know, he was excited by technical things and by, you know, science fiction, fantasy. And the subjects of his fascination were not my mother's. And he. He was also a kind of loud and theatrical kid in, you know, I think, ways that would be charming to me now as an adult seeing in a kid. But at the time, I often felt like, you know, he was the older brother who was like, louder and claimed a lot of the attention. And so I had discovered that the way that I could get attention Was through quiet often and through a kind of sullenness. Like, I discovered that if I sort of exaggerated my feelings of sadness, it was a way for my mother to turn to me and to sort of take me to her. And so, you know, this sort of codependent relationship developed so early, you know, eight or nine, where, you know, I would sort of perform my unhappiness for her, whether it be at school, school, or just, you know, outside of school, Whatever aspect of my life I wanted to present to her, and she would, you know, hold me to her. And it was a way I was winning attention and also a way that I was diffusing her anger.

Dani Shapiro (17:33)

Yeah.

Interviewer (17:33)

Oh, that makes so much sense. But then it, shall we say, backfires.

Stefan Merrill Block (17:37)

Yeah.

Dani Shapiro (17:40)

The idea of homeschooling Stefan takes root after that unhappy fall semester. By the time spring rolls around, it has become a ferrecompli the prospect of homeschooling. Stefan also seems to bring his mother a great deal of joy, which is his job to bring her joy.

Stefan Merrill Block (18:00)

I think it's important to say that at this moment, which is 19 now, it's 1992, I had never met any homeschoolers myself. I don't know that my mother had ever met any. Homeschooling today has become this massive nationwide movement. In that time, it was still in some places, not fully legal. In Texas, it had just become sort of officially legal. It was met with a lot of skepticism. There is a weirdness to it that was a little bit scary to me. I did not want to homeschool. I think if anything, I was hoping that all of these complaints and conversations would lead to. Was to a different school that was something more like the school I had left in Indianapolis. But in that moment, I remember the conversation was, well, we can't afford that kind of a school, but if we do this, we don't have to pay anything. And, you know, I can give. My mother was saying, I can give you, you know, the best education, A one to one student teacher ratio, you know, and they'll be free. And I remember, well, that the first time I. I had even. I heard the word homeschool come out of her mouth. I was upstairs in my bedroom, just sort of like laying in bed, I think, with a book. And I heard my father and mother talking about my troubles at school and what might be done about it. And I heard her say the word homeschool. And I remember sitting up in bed thinking, that can't be a real possibility, can it? I went downstairs and my mother had found some article. I. I kind of remember it had, like, infographics about the growth of homeschooling. And she was lit up with this kind of excitement, you know, since the move to Texas, she had really struggled to find a place to put her energies and her enthusiasms, which were immense. She was a person who would get fixated on a theory and sort of give her all to it and, you know, just come to something with almost like, religious zeal. And so I could hear in her voice that she was coming to homeschooling with that. That same kind of energy now. And it scared me. And I started to ask these questions, well, what will happen to my friendships? Will I know the things that I'm supposed to know to keep advancing in grades? And at the time, she said, well, what we really have to worry about is this one bad teacher you have. We can just homeschool the rest of the year. Then you can go back in fifth grade. We'll make sure you still have a social life, and you're going to learn so much more in these months with me than you would learn in school. And she said, it'll be like summer vacation all the time. You know, maybe a little more structure, but basically summer vacation all the time. That all sounded nice enough. But I still had enormous trepidation when she brought me in for the meeting with our principal, where she officially signed the papers to withdraw me from the Texas school system. My principal said, are you sure this is what you want? And she also said, you know, you can come back to the school at any time. I remember her reaching out to hold my hand. And I remember feeling. I remember feeling like it was the first time I had ever touched my principal. And I was so excited about that. And I wished at that moment I was like, oh, we've just sort of repaired what was broken here for me, which is I didn't feel closely nurtured by my school community, and all of a sudden I did. But it was around this conversation of my leaving. And I remember when she asked me, is this really what you want? Maybe inside my mind, I was thinking, of course not. But then what I felt was my mother's anger over the, you know, the last years, her unsettledness, and how badly she wanted it. What I wanted more than to be at school or not to be at school was to repair the broken world of my early years in Indianapolis. I wanted to be back and happy with my mother. And so I said, yes, this is what I want. Our homeschooling began With a shopping spree. And it began with the, you know, sort of elaborate and joyful kind of vertiginous thrill of assembling a kind of theater of school. But still, after a couple weeks had passed, we hadn't gotten to any actual schooling. She was so happy then. And, you know, I remember she would say, like, oh, you've never, you know, I used to play hooky all the time as a kid. You should just. You're a kid, you should enjoy playing hooky. And we would, like, when we should have been at school, we should have been learning. I was like, at the movie theater, at the ice cream shop. And my brother would come home at the end of the day from the school bus, and my dad would come back from work, and we would just sort of lie about what we had done that day, because it was like the secret between us, and the secret was giving her this great happiness. Eventually, we did settle down a bit. And my mother had a theory at the time that when you get to fourth grade, the only subject that you're not going to sort of learn by osmosis is math. You need to have curriculum, it needs to be more regulated. But everything else, you know, sort of comes on its own if you just follow your curiosity. And so we had math in the mornings. She had mail ordered the textbook that I had had at my public school. She ordered the teacher's edition for herself. And she and I would sit there and sometimes we'd do the math together. Often I would do it alone. I would work through a lesson or two. One of my favorite tricks was when she would leave the room to take a phone call or to cook something. I would steal her teacher's edition and copy down all the answers. And then she'd come back in the room and be like, oh, my God, you got all the answers right. It took you five minutes. My mother believed from when I was very young, let's say, she convinced herself that I was in possession of this, like, immense intellect. This. I mean, she would refer to it as genius. And so, you know, she would see these worksheets that I had cheated on, you know, filled in the answers from her own book, and she would just take it as evidence of this sort of like God given genius that I was in possession of. And she would say to me, you know, thank you, God. I pulled you out of that place. Like, look how they were wasting a mind as exceptional as yours, you know, And I loved the attention. And it made, you know, my supposed gifts, made her so happy that I was very happy to continue that theater. I was so happy in that moment to feel loved and celebrated. But what I felt was, I don't think I was necessarily questioning or not questioning her assessments of me at that moment. But what I felt was this anxiety about my return to school, which was supposedly going to happen the following year. And I thought, well, if I'm actually cheating and if actually math is the only subject we're doing, am I going to be prepared? Am I actually, despite all of her, you know, claims of my supposed genius going to be way behind, which I, you know, suggests that I did not subscribe to her view of my, of my brilliance. We would go to the library and she would have me check out these books on like history's great thinkers like Benjamin Franklin or William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein. And she would, we'd read this parts of these little kid biographies that concerned their early childhood and she would say, oh, at 8, Einstein was, you know, getting seasoned math. Look how good you're, you know, basically implying that I was already on a track that far exceeded Albert Einstein. And I think she believed it. I mean, when she believed something, she committed to it with such conviction that I see now that this belief in my supposed brilliance was in some ways the sort of central lie that held everything together for us. Because if I was so brilliant, then she must homeschool me. She said, you know, I have to cultivate these talents. I, you know, she compared me to Mozart and said, you know, look at what Mozart's father did for Mozart. He wouldn't have been Mozart if he, his father had sent him off to some public school, you know.

Dani Shapiro (25:58)

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

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Stefan Merrill Block (28:12)

I'll come back up for you.

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Really? I'm gonna have another one.

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Dani Shapiro (29:46)

Stefan is 9 or 10 years old. His hair, which was very light when he was a little kid, is starting to grow darker. His mom wants it to be blonde again, so she uses bleach to lighten it. It's around this time, too, that Stefan begins his own private mutiny against what's happening to him. He needs to reclaim his own body. Though he doesn't consciously realize it, he finds a locus for his pain.

Stefan Merrill Block (30:17)

She would often say to me how the happiest moment in her life was when I was, you know, three, four. And I would hold onto her body with both my arms and my legs, and I would call myself a baby sloth. And she would, you know, be able to walk around the house, like, use her arms because I'd be holding onto her so tightly. She also kept pictures around the house of, you know, my. My toddler self. And she, you know, it was clear to me that. That this was when I was, like, 3 and 4, was, like, the moment of her greatest happiness. And also, also when I, in her estimation, was sort of at my most perfect. She. She actually, the first time I got a haircut at probably at 4, she kept clippings of that hair, and she would sometimes pull out these old clippings of my hair and say, you know, you were like, you know, an angel from a Renaissance fresco. You were a perfect little cherub baby. And she would look at my current hair, which was brown, and she would say, you know, it just breaks my heart, like, what happened to this, my perfect little baby. And what she was doing was putting lightener in my hair. She used to sun in this sort of. It has, like, a hydrogen peroxide plus other components to it. We had. We had a swimming pool. This was, like, the most exciting part of moving to Texas was our house had a swimming pool out back. And we'd have what she would call school time in the pool. And she would cradle me in her arms as if I was an infant. And she would talk about that, about how, you know, oh, in the pool, I can hold you forever, like, when you were a baby. And meanwhile, my hair would be, you know, filled with this product, and she'd be angling my head towards the sun so that it would be, you Know, doing its work to sort of restore my hair to its rightful color. And then we would go inside, and she would. We'd rinse out the product, and she would compare it against the clippings of my toddler hair, and she'd be like, oh, not. Not there yet. You know, and so then I would have to do another session of this. And it went on and on for a long time. My hair, instead of turning to that color she remembered, turned this, like, bright fluorescent orange color. And then she got so frustrated with the project and with this. This product she had been using that she just pulled out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from under the sink and just started to, like, pour it directly onto my head. And I just remember this, like, immense pain in my scalp after a few applications directly on my head of. You know, it was just so painful. And my. You know, my hair was starting to fall out a bit, and it was like this crazy color, this bright, bright blonde. And it never got to where she wanted. But, you know, eventually it was just like, you know, I had this, like, wild dandruff coming off of my scalp. And she eventually called quits on that project, but that was not the end of her projects to sort of return me to infanthood. So my mother bought these children's trivia cards that they still exist, and they're a wonderful product called BrainQuest. They're a trivia that, like, a fourth grader should know. They have this one for each grade level. My mom was convinced that the. That if you knew everything on these trivia cards, like, you didn't need to worry. I had expressed all this anxiety about, do I know everything that a fourth grader should know? And she said, if you know everything on these trivia cards for fourth graders, you have nothing to worry about. You know, everything that you should know. And I. I tried to believe her in that. So she would keep the trivia cards on the edge of the pool and hold me in her arms and, like, look over and ask me a question from the card. And if I knew the answer, she wouldn't dunk me. If I didn't know the answer, she. She would put me underwater and pull me back up and tell me the correct answer. And honestly, like, that was a major part of our schooling for that year. Like, that. That was. That was, like, our curriculum. And she would. She would. As she held me, she would talk about how it was, you know, just like, having a baby back in her arm. And, you know, I was in my. My swimming suit, and, you know, as this product was working on my hair, I just felt, like, wholly exposed, like I. Like she owned my whole body. It was around this time that I also became extremely modest. My mother would always say to me, you know, in fourth grade, like, you went upstairs one day naked, and I put on some clothes, and I never saw you naked again. And I think that what I needed was to have some part of my body that was mine and not her, hers. And a part of that project, which. I mean, this is how I interpreted it at the time, I think, was I had this metal compass that you. You know, of the sort that you use to draw a circle, I guess, a sort of geometry class tool. When I was alone in my room, I would take the point of this compass and made a test of how far I could poke it into the skin at my hip. And I would. You know, sometimes I would. If I made it bleed, that was like a sort of successful test. And I, as an adult, looking at that, I see, you know, it was a way of expressing pain that I. Or of. Of trying to empty myself of pain that I. I wasn't even conscious I was experiencing, necessarily. But at the time, I do remember, I thought, these wounds on me are something that mom does not know about. And it was like my thing that. And it was under my bathing suit where she couldn't see.

Dani Shapiro (35:30)

Yeah.

Interviewer (35:30)

That makes so much sense. I mean, both interpretations make sense, right? Like, it's not one or the other.

Stefan Merrill Block (35:36)

Yeah.

Interviewer (35:37)

So one of the things that's really striking is that for several years, from spring of fourth grade all the way to the end of eighth grade, each year, you think, this is the moment I'm going to tell her I can't do this anymore. This is the moment I'm going to tell her that I'm going back to school. And there was always a reason why that became impossible.

Stefan Merrill Block (36:03)

Yeah.

Dani Shapiro (36:06)

Stefan's grandmothers are essentially the only ones from the outside who ever really step into the family's world. And when they do, they're offered just a glimpse of what life looks like inside the family bubble. The first summer after homeschooling begins, the family goes up to their old cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, the singular place where Stefan's mother can let loose and be joyful. There, she laughs easily. She moves differently. The tension that usually hums beneath her surface quiets. But then, when Nana, Stefan's mother's mother, arrives, it becomes clear that she isn't quite herself. At first, it's small things, little slips. Then it becomes clear her mind is beginning to fray.

Stefan Merrill Block (36:53)

The other thing that was happening that I wasn't really fully aware of until we made a trip to the family cottage that summer was the advancement of my grandmother's mental deterioration. She had seemed, like, a little, you know, kind of fuzzy and maybe like, a little abstracted for a couple years. But it was that summer. It was. It had just become undeniable. There was a sort of heated conversation between my grandmother, Nana, and who I called Nana, and my mother, about my mother's older sister, with whom my mother had a very contentious relationship. And my mother said to my grandmother, you know, I need you to see what my childhood was like with her. I need you to appreciate the pain she put me through. And my grandmother said, that's so awful. But my question is, where were her parents? Meaning, where were her own daughter's parents? And my mother, I just remember her face, the pain in her face at the moment, you know, what she was looking for, she would never find, you know, because my grandmother wasn't capable of it any longer. And that night, I found my mother crying in her room. And I had come to the cottage that summer. This was after our first semester of homeschooling, filled with these plans to tell her, we've done our semester. I'm going back for fifth grade. I'm worried about falling behind. I miss my friends, all these things. But then it was then that. That my mother, you know, I felt the depths of her grief. And then the next morning, she took me out for this kayaking trip where she told me this long story of the greatest traumas of her childhood. And the moral of the story of her great traumas was you can't trust institutions, and you can't trust what other people tell you. You have to make your own way in this world. And so, you know, it doesn't matter what. If anyone else thinks it's crazy, we must keep homeschooling.

Interviewer (38:59)

And it's this combination, too, of her philosophy in that regard. But also she's sharing some really painful details of, you know, her own traumatic memories with you. So how are you, as this kid, gonna go against that and take that away from her? It was very, incredibly complicated. You know, just this combination of her fervor and her certainty and also her kind of extraordinary manipulation.

Stefan Merrill Block (39:30)

You know, as you're saying this to me, I have not quite realized this. I've written a memoir on this subject, but I like yet to quite put this together, that she and I both were using pain to draw each Other, closer. I mean, I must have. In some. I learned it from her. I don't want to act like I'm wholly blameless, but I was. I was, in fact, nine years old. So in some ways, I was, by definition, you know, fairly blameless. I have to think that, like, her choosing to tell me the story in that moment, she must have said. We had been silent on the topic of my return to school. We had agreed when she first pulled me out that that's when I would return. But we had. There was a sort of curious silence around the subject. And it was coming soon. It was the summertime, school was about to start, and I was the moment she chose to share these great traumas with me of her childhood. She had been falsely diagnosed with polio when she was three and separated from her family and put into this polio quarantine. And it was. Her first memory was of being on one side of the glass and, like, pounding on the glass, begging to see her family, which is just on the other side of the glass. And they wouldn't let her. And then in the end, apparently, she, you know, didn't have polio at all. They thought, you know, I could see how her skepticism of institutions might grow out of that moment. And I think in some ways, like when I look at the whole scope of her life, there's something almost tragic in a Greek mode about it, about this early childhood trauma and how it steered the course of her life. And eventually, like her demise as well, like, it was such a powerful memory that was so determinative of who she became.

Interviewer (41:07)

You write at one point, mom's history was our core curriculum. And in a way, in her sharing with you in that moment on the kayak, a place where there's no getting away, telling you those stories, the timing of that just really struck me that that was how she was going to convince you to continue in that way.

Stefan Merrill Block (41:37)

You know, when I was reflecting on this as an adult, I was just struck by the sort of perfect, weird symbolism of this moment. The way that she supposedly contracted polio was by playing in a swamp that was near the cottage that was downstream from a dumping site and, you know, perhaps contained. Probably did contain some contaminated waters. She and her cousins were swimming and kind of having a. They're like, fighting with muckballs in the swamp. And she became very ill that night and was rushed to the emergency room, and they, you know, assumed polio. And then that's how she was put into quarantine. So. So that morning, when I was going to Tell her, you know, I'm going back to school. And also the. The morning after, or very near to, when her mother had forgotten her own relationship to her daughter. Mom kayaked us out to the exact place where that. To that swamp where she had gotten so sick. And so she took me to the literal place of her worst memory. And we were in this kayak, and the swamp there is. The water level is very low. There's lots of logs and mucky things, and it's hard to maneuver. And we got stuck. There we were, as she's telling me this story, you know, a memory in which she is psychically stuck. We were literally stuck in that space, unable to turn around. And I think of that still when I think of the power of that memory in her life. But yet all of her memories, you know, I think this was a big part of her project in homeschooling me is. It's interesting to think about, too, that she always wanted to write, and she was a good storyteller, and she always wanted to tell stories. She never could quite pull that together. But she always encouraged my literary aspirations, and she told me her stories like I was the sort of reader for her, and I took that job very seriously. And I still. I think I take it seriously. Part of the obligation I feel in writing about her is carrying those stories forward, even if she's no longer here.

Dani Shapiro (43:45)

Stefan doesn't tell his mother that he wants to go back to elementary school. He continues to be homeschooled. One day, his mom decides that it would be fun for them to drive by during recess. His classmates are all now in fifth grade.

Stefan Merrill Block (44:00)

It was one way of sort of reminding me of the supposed freedom I had as a. As a homeschooler. And I think she was proud of giving me that freedom. She often thought that I was sort of too serious and too rule abiding. And she tried to bring out this sort of more rebellious streak that she had so enjoyed in herself as a child. But, yes, she drove me back to the school that I had left and parked in the lot that was not so far from the playground where my whole class that I had left was, you know, climbing over the jungle gyms and, you know, playing catch, and she rolled down the windows and blasted my favorite song, which was I Get around by the Beach Boys. Head started to turn over the playground. And then she said, look at those suckers. And I. And I was just trying to have the moment end. I was so uncomfortable. And I was like, yeah, yeah, what's suckers? And she said, say it louder. I was like, suckers. She said, come on. Really do it stuff. And so I yelled suckers out the window. And then she. You know, it was like we had just pulled off a heist. She, like, went squealing away. And like, my former class is watching on. On the one hand, it was like. I think she saw it as an expression of joy and freedom, but maybe didn't think about. Or maybe this was subconsciously also the point, that it was a way to distance me from my last connections to that group of friends.

Dani Shapiro (45:27)

Noah, Stefan's one remaining friend from school, and the last thread connecting him to that world says to him the next day, that was you. Was that you? Noah recognizes the car, Stefan's mom's minivan. Stefan's mother seems determined to keep him separate from his peers, from the outside world, from any influence that might draw him back toward a life beyond her reach. But Noah's home life is challenging, too. His family's struggling financially, and he's being raised by a single mother. He spends a lot of time at Stefan's house. And at one point, Stefan's mother decides that this time together should come at a price that Noah's mother ought to pay her. A babysitting fee, a request that, of course, would completely change the boy's relationship, would make their friendship next to impossible.

Stefan Merrill Block (46:20)

My mother would get these theories and, you know, come to these conclusions and would be so unshakable in her certainty that she was correct. And this theory that she hatched was, well, I was begging for as much time as I could get with Noah. He was my one friend. He, like, showed me what people were talking about back at school. He was, like, delivering me the news of school, telling me the things that fifth graders need to learn from each other. So I wanted as much time as I could get with him, which was often. And so he was around a lot in my fourth grade year and then going into fifth grade. But, yeah, my mother decided her theory was that if he was at our house, you know, more than a certain number of days a week, I think it was more than two days a week, that we had become a de facto daycare and that she should be paid for it. And so she called up Noah's mother, who, you know, I mean, I don't know their exact financial situation, but I think not as strong as ours, and demanded a babysitting fee for Noah to come play with me. Amazingly, she agreed. But that meant that now Noah came five days a week. Now we were a Baby, we were a daycare for Noah. And it created all of this terrible touching. It became impossible at first, be friends, because, of course, yeah, there was resentment over her mother paying for us to play together. I had another friend for a while in fourth grade who would also come over, and I guess my mother and his mother were talking about their finances, and his mother felt anxious over the state of, you know, their money. And my mom offered to hire her as our housekeeper. So then my friend's mom was coming to clean her house. And again, that, you know, in both cases, my mother used these financial arrangements to create an impossible barrier between myself and my friends. And both of those friendships were doomed in the same way the last couple.

Interviewer (48:15)

Of years that she was homeschooling you. And in a way, sort of beginning with the babysitting of Noah, but then it turns into, I mean, not. Not in terms of Noah, but she begins to take on after school tutoring of kids, and it turns into this very popular business for her. And your house is filled with kids who have been going to school all day and are now getting tutored. And you're the boy upstairs in your room who is ostensibly the reason why, like, she kind of shows you off as her great homeschooling achievement or her genius son. And this is part of what she's with the tutoring of these kids. And it was so striking to me that you were still so isolated. But meanwhile, your house is like, you know, the doorbell's ringing, and it's like filling up with kid after kid after kid who's been living, you know, just sort of like a regular high school or, you know, or middle school life.

Stefan Merrill Block (49:14)

It was a great and painful irony that I was so alone. And yet at 3 o' clock every day, you know, hordes of, usually girls, but they were often my age, would come into the house. And my mother had turned the sort of home office into a classroom where she would tutor these girls in their math work. She was good with them, they loved her, and she connected with them. And sort of the lost mother that I was still searching for, the one that I remembered from my Indianapolis days, was the one that they got. Like, I would hear her being her sort of warmer, you know, more performative, like, fun self. And the home office was directly below my room. So I would be alone in my room, like, you know, just sort of like vacantly watching old TV sitcoms on my beanbag chair. And I could hear through the floorboards the sound of all these kids and my mother, like, laughing together. And being together. And you know, this like Lost World was about two lost world. I mean the lost world of like my closeness with my mother and also the lost world of school and other kids. It was all right there like literal feet from me and I was, you know, excluded from it.

Dani Shapiro (50:28)

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

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Stefan Merrill Block (52:42)

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Dani Shapiro (54:16)

It's fifth grade when Stefan's mother becomes fixated on his handwriting, searching for meaning in every uneven curve of every letter. She does some research, and then she finds a theory, something she reads or maybe interprets that explains everything, at least to her. She decides that the problem isn't the handwriting itself, but something deeper, something developmental. Stefan and Erin hadn't crawled as babies. They'd scooted, then stood, then walked. And so, she reasons, maybe that skipped step left something unfinished. Her solution is both literal and deeply strange. Stefan must learn to crawl, to return to that lost stage, as though retracing it could somehow fix what she believes went wrong.

Stefan Merrill Block (55:07)

She had read somewhere the study that connected an infant's crawling phase to the development of fine motor control, and I don't believe the study came to this conclusion. But my mother, you know, cracked one of her theories and came to the conclusion that the reason why my handwriting and my brother's handwriting was never very good was because we hadn't crawled long enough as babies. And then she decided that it probably wasn't too late, that if we crawled we would maybe develop, hone our fine motor control and it would become you know, our handwriting would improve. And so for months, she had me crawl around the house. I would. I would wake up in the morning. I remember, like, I had worked out this way on all fours to come down the stairs backward so that I wouldn't stumble coming down. I would crawl to the kitchen for my cereal. I would crawl to the table to do my schoolwork. I would crawl to the bathroom. And once I got into the bathroom, I was pleased to stand up. I wouldn't crawl once I was there. And then my brother went to school every day, so he got to walk around on his feet all day. But then when he came home from school, he would have to crawl, too. And there was a curious silence in my family around my mother and her theories. She was so vehement. And the pain of disagreeing with her, as I've said, was taken as such an immense betrayal. And the consequences were so severe. It was shunning. We were afraid to admit to each other that this wasn't a pleasant situation. So my brother and I would like, sort of like, eye one another as we were both crawling around with. And she wasn't even watching, but we never said a word about it, and we just kept on.

Interviewer (56:55)

So your grandmother, who is slipping further into dementia, it's kind of decided by your mother and her sisters that she's going to spend time in each of their homes. So Nanna comes to visit, and when she comes to visit, you and Aaron are not crawling. So unsafe. Your mother knows that this is very strange and not okay and that Nana wouldn't approve. So, like that period of time when Nana's there and Nana is appalled anyway, it seems even though she is in the throes of sort of dementia, her being appalled breaks through. But during that period of time, you and Aaron are walking around, it's not until Nanna leaves that you go back to crawling.

Stefan Merrill Block (57:42)

That's right. But I don't think that she knew on some level that it was not okay. I think it was more that she knew that it might not be interpreted well or that other people might see it as crazy. I mean, she would really go on and on about how my brother and I were the first Crawl students ever, and this was going to be a revolutionary technique that was going to improve the handwriting of, you know, millions of children and that we were going to maybe even become famous as the first students that had ever. That had ever gone through her program.

Interviewer (58:14)

Did your father express anything during that time? I mean, he's a psychologist. Your father's attention was Like a focused, narrow beam.

Stefan Merrill Block (58:23)

Yeah.

Interviewer (58:23)

You know, and it strikes me, too, not to get overly analytical about this, but that his profession as a psychologist, because being one where he would see patients for a very brief period of time. Yeah, it's almost like that focused, narrow beam could work there. But I don't know. What did your father make of crawl school?

Stefan Merrill Block (58:43)

You know, I can't really speak to what he made of it. I think that my mother projected such certainty, and if anything, I remember my father being somewhat amused by it. Like, I think he was sort of. Of indulging her theory and maybe. Maybe not focused on what it might be like for me to crawl around all day in the house. I think his focus was on keeping our family going and providing this life for us, you know, at work largely, and, you know, and like, the practical matters of everyday life. You know, for a lot of my homeschooling, my mother wasn't working. And so, you know, he was sort of like, holding the whole thing together. I want to point out that at this point in my life, I'm 12 years old, probably, you know, my mother's project of returning me to infanthood was basically complete. Right. Like, she had dyed my hair back. We would still occasionally do these peroxide treatments. So I. My hair was. Was blonde. I was with her all day with almost no connection to the outside world, crawling around the house like an infant. Like, I. I don't think that she at all consciously was like, I'm going to actually make you into a baby again. But she had, you know, like, as. As close as is possible. She had. She had restored me to this infant state. And the thing that hurts the most when I remember it is, you know, I didn't like crawling. It hurt sometimes on my knees, and my. My hands hurt. After a day of crawling, the peroxide in my hair hurt. But the hard part was the isolation. And it's just hard to convey. Like, you know, I. I have two children now, and I see how they need other kids and other people in the way like a plant needs sunshine. And I didn't have that. I was. I was so. My days were so solitary. And we're talking about the punishment of her anger, of my speaking back. What it's like to be shunned when you have one person in your life, when it's your mother and your teacher and your only friend and your principal and that person won't speak to you, is so profoundly painful that I would not disagree with her either. And I came to this point of just sort of acceptance of a lot of this.

Dani Shapiro (61:00)

A lot happens during this time to a 12 year old boy alone in his room. It's the very early days of online culture and Stefan discovers a forum, blabatorium, which was supposed to be a place to exchange ideas about music and movies, but in reality is a tween and early teen meat market. Stefan starts an online relationship with a girl his age who turns out to be a 30 year old man preying on him, further increasing his isolation. His grandma Mimi, his father's mother, comes to visit and is appalled by what she sees. She's the first adult who asks him, are you okay? What's really going on? And Stefan tells her. When this comes to light, Stefan's mother feels betrayed and she goes into her betrayal response. Silence, followed by shunning, followed by rage. In her rage, she pushes Stefan so hard that he falls and hits his head to the point where he's dizzy, disoriented. Also during this time, Stefan and Aaron have a pair of hamsters who have a huge litter of baby hamsters. They're briefly excited by this development until, well, here's what happens next.

Stefan Merrill Block (62:18)

I'd say the lowest part of my homeschooling life when I felt like so lonely. We bought this hamster couple from the pet store and I would spend so much time with these hamsters. We built them this elaborate house of, you know, sort of plastic components and we, you know, all these games for the hamster to play in and stuff. And I loved watching them. And then when Harriet the hamster got pregnant, it was like a joy, you know, like, like our family's getting bigger, you know. And then Harriet gave birth to all these tiny little hamster pups and I was just thrilled. And I would like put all the little pups in my hands at the same time and sort of carry them around. I really felt like I was in it with Harriet. The clerk at the pet store told us that you can't keep hamsters, that many hamsters in a cage together for that long, that they could start to hurt each other or hurt themselves or something. And that we had to take the pups to the store at some point and they would be given good homes. And I couldn't bear to do it for a while. And it gave me this sort of awful empathy for mom, for this desire to stop time and like, can't you just be babies a little bit longer so we get to keep you? You know? But then we, we did. And I, I remember when we took them to the pet store. And we, we drove home from, you know, from the pet store with the baby's gone. I remember thinking, well, this. What I'm feeling now is something like what mom will feel when I finally have the courage to tell her I'm going back. And it's awful and I feel so sad, but I'm going to be okay and she's going to be okay. We're going to survive this. And then the next morning I wake up and I go to the hamster cage to see how Harriet's doing now that her children have been taken. And I found her dead in a tube of the. Of the cage. She had just like, died of heartbreak. I mean, I guess I can't extrapolate hamster psychology too much, but the loss of the pups had killed her. And it was a devastating blow. I thought that's what the pain is. It's so immense that it could be deadly.

Dani Shapiro (64:30)

Freshman year of high school, after years away, Stefan finally returns to a classroom. But he doesn't arrive empty handed. He arrives with a typewriter. His mother has written to the school explaining that he needs it because of his dysgraphia, his difficulty with handwriting. The typewriter is too heavy for a backpack. So she finds a plastic rolling filing cabinet for him to carry it in. To her, it's practical and almost visionary. To Stefan, it's mortifying. He's already anxious about standing out after so long away from school. Now he'll be rolling a clunky cabinet down the halls. His mother insists it'll be cool. She covers it with stickers. Bright, ironic, loud. One reads, where's the beef from that old Wendy's commercial? She imagines it'll start a trend, making him popular. Instead, it makes him a target. Where's the beef? Becomes his nickname, another well intentioned act of helping that turns into something else entirely.

Interviewer (65:39)

An ostracization.

Dani Shapiro (65:41)

Academically too, Stefan is struggling. Homeschooling hasn't prepared him for tests for structure, for the rhythm of school life. He's failing classes, falling behind, watching everything around him collapse just as he's trying to begin again.

Stefan Merrill Block (65:59)

On the day I finally gathered the courage after five years to tell her that I had to go back to school. It was the spring semester of 8th grade. I was worried at that time. It seemed very hard to get into college from home school. You know, there wasn't. I think now, now it's a. There's more of a root for that. But. But at the time I thought, if I don't do this now, like this could be it. Like, I could end up not going to college. I could end up without a high school degree. You know, she had pleaded for me to try a little bit longer, to try homeschooling for high school. And I finally just. My fear about my future went out, and I insisted. And so, yeah, she sent me back to school with this electronic typewriter that made the most horrendous sound when. When I used it in class. Like, it was like the sound of like a rain stick turned upside down. It was like, you know, I would. I would type in, and you could, like, proof a line in the typewriter, and then you hit enter and it would go click, click, click, click, you know, deafening the room. And everyone was just scowling at me. Yeah. And I was. I went back wheeling around this file cabinet. Looking back on it now, it does feel like maybe a form of sabotage, because how am I possibly going to fit into, you know, a class of my peers with. With this, you know, 20 pound typewriter and a filing cabinet? But, you know, the more profound way in which I was not prepared was, you know, in my homeschooling years. By the end of homeschooling, we had basically no curriculum at all. My education was my responsibility. And what that meant was I would spend my days alone in my room. Maybe I'd write a short story, maybe I would copy some pictures out of a comic book, and then I would show them to her. And my mom would be like, you are one of history's great artists. Like, look at what you can do. You know, everything was a. You're a genius. And I get to school, I haven't taken the test in five years. You know, I don't know how to memorize things. I don't know how to study. There are huge gaps in my knowledge. And so what happened was I took my first test in the. I remember it was in history class, and the teacher had asked, you know, a practical question about, you know, ancient sumer. And you have to, like, name the reasons why it succeeded as, like, one of the world's first civilizations. And I responded with this kind of, like, high flute and baloney that would impress my mom. I'd be like, I wrote something like, since the time of Aristotle, man has been curious about yesteryear. You know, just. Just this, like, nonsense, this gobbledygook. And, you know, my mom, if the word Aristotle came out of my mouth, she'd be like, how do you know Aristotle? You know? But my history teacher was not so impressed. She failed that quiz And I remember, like, you know, just the shock of that, of, you know, my worst fears confirmed that I had fallen so far behind. And, you know, not only was I not the genius, my mother had said I was way behind and maybe. Maybe, like, not sharp enough for this, you know, Texas public school.

Dani Shapiro (68:49)

But Stefan does turn things around. He's determined to figure out a path forward. He becomes rigorous about his academics, making up for lost time. He gets to know his teachers, expanding his circle of adults around him. One of these teachers is his AP science teacher, Mrs. Shepherd, who everyone calls Shep. Stefan's on a winning team from his high school, and Shep takes them all to the ceremony in Louisville, Kentucky, And Stefan's mom insists on coming along. Shep tells Stefan that in all her years, she's never seen a mother do this. And then she says something tougher. She tells Stefan that he's going to need to leave his mother, that this will be the toughest thing he's ever done, but that he will survive and his mother will survive. Stefan goes off to college at Washington University in St. Louis. He continues to attempt to differentiate himself from his mother. When he comes home during freshman year, it's with bright red hair that he's dyed himself. He's no longer her baby. He's making his own decisions. The more Stefan tries to become himself, the more his mother pushes back. She no longer wants him to be the greatest writer who ever lived. Now she wants him to go to medical school so he can eventually return home and take over his father's practice, as if father and son psychology teams might be a thing. But Stefan does not go pre med. He's making his way. He moves to New York City after graduation and supports himself as a videographer while trying to be a writer. The kids are growing up. Aaron now has a serious girlfriend, Nikki, who has not gotten a memo about what happens with their mother. If you argue back, it was the.

Stefan Merrill Block (70:41)

First member of her family to, you know, express opposing opinion without, you know, fear or reluctance. And I think that was a great shock to her.

Interviewer (70:50)

So, in a way, your mother's beginning to. It always had to happen. I mean, at one point, she says something to you about, you know, the horrors of the empty nest and that someday you're going to understand that it's just like a disease without a cure, this empty nest thing. So this was always gonna happen because the tragedy would have been if it didn't happen. But the tragedy is also that as it's happening, as you're moving into your adult life, you're making your own decisions about who you want to be in the world. Aaron is with Nikki, and your mother says some things to him about, like, if you stay with her, you're going to be dead by the time you're 45. Like, just some really totally horrendous things. But Aaron manages to also stay the course and do what he wants to do. And as it's happening, your mother literally starts shrinking.

Stefan Merrill Block (71:46)

She was declining. She was, you know, in her 50s, but she was shrinking. She was losing height, she was having osteoporosis, and her health was deteriorating much more quickly than I would have ever expected. And there didn't seem to be anything in particularly wrong with her. She said directly to me, in fact, many times, that her decline was directly related to my decisions to live my own life. And she would say, you know, if you have a baby, if you have a family, like, what is going to happen to me? And so she directly linked her physical decline to my coming into my own life.

Interviewer (72:22)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, just the. It's like the definition of, like, just the biggest guilt trip imaginable. And, you know, at one point you say to her, I'm killing you by living my own life. That's what you're saying. And her response is, no, I'm telling you how much I love you.

Stefan Merrill Block (72:42)

That's right. That. That exchange is one of those moments in a relationship when you say, see it with sudden clarity, and you're like, this is the heart of the problem. This is it right here.

Dani Shapiro (72:55)

Despite his mother's suggestion that her health would suffer if Stefan went on to have a family, he does just this. About seven years pass. He's married. He has a one year old daughter. Life finally feels like his own. Until his mother calls. She says she wants to move to New York to live nearby, to help especially, she says, if there's a second child. It sounds generous, even maternal. But Stefan knows what it really means. To say yes would be to surrender the boundaries he's built, to invite her back into the center of his life, into the raising of his own children. So he does the hardest thing, the right thing. He says no again. She tells him that his choices have made her sick. Then she mentions Harriet the Hamster. He understands immediately. She's telling him his no means she'll die. It's not my choice, Steph, she says. It's just biology. Months later, she's diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. It's the pandemic. As she fades. Stefan does have a second child, another daughter. His mother holds on long enough to meet her on a screen across the distance, literal and otherwise, before letting go.

Stefan Merrill Block (74:24)

I have, like, two pictures of them on Zoom together. And it was, you know, it was this moment of profound grace, really, that, like, I had made this choice to live my own life, and we were never gonna see eye to eye on the choices I had made. And I was. You know, there are elements of, like, the way she laid the guilt of her illness upon me that, you know, are hard to forgive. But I just felt at the end, like, such the profundity of her love for me and for my children. And it was like, the most healing thing that could have happened, really. There's still a pain to me that happened on Zoom and that we couldn't all be together, but it was. I don't know, it was like a weirdly healing episode.

Dani Shapiro (75:07)

Yeah.

Interviewer (75:07)

I was just very, very struck by that and by both the grace in that and the pain in that.

Stefan Merrill Block (75:14)

She said to me, heck, you know, they knew that her therapy was no longer working. She had days left to live. And my, you know, our second daughter was two days older still thing. And she looked at her in the Zoom call and said, you know, I don't know how it works up there, but maybe there's a reason why she's arriving as I'm leaving. And she said, I want you to know that if I can choose, I'm going to come back as your daughter. And I was like, I don't think that's how it works. Like, she's already here. It's like the room's occupied. I think you're going to have to just go on living for a while instead. Yeah. And I remember this moment when my father called to tell me that she had died. I looked over. Alice was taking a nap on the. On the bed, and I looked over, and she did this thing with her arms where, like, she suddenly looked like she was, like, flexing her muscles, like she had suddenly, like, received this enormous amount of strength from the ether. I was like, oh, my God, Maybe. Maybe it's happening, but I don't think so now.

Dani Shapiro (76:11)

Now.

Stefan Merrill Block (76:11)

Now Alice is 5 years old, and she's not my mother. After my mom died, my dad had been so much her sort of right hand and had, you know, supported her so wholly. And I had never heard him, you know, push back or criticize or express unhappiness in their relationship. I really worried about what would happen to my father. I thought he was going to become one of these, like, widowers that will Never betray the wife's memory and that he was going to be alone. It's not at all what happened. He went right on J date and he had suppressed his Judaism for almost the entirety of his marriage. But as soon as she died, he like reemerged as this like uber Jew. And he like, he, you know, when a 66 year old widower walks into a temple, like it is like cocks in the head, you know, like. Yeah, he had a lot of feeding frenzy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess that's a better way of saying it. And dated almost immediately and then, you know, played the field briefly and then met someone that he, you know, felt very fondly toward and she became his girlfriend very quickly. I was, you know, honestly uncomfortable with it, just the sort of speed of it. It wasn't that I was uncomfortable with the idea of him finding someone new. I wanted that. I think what made me uncomfortable was that there was a silence that had yet to be punctured. And I wondered, you know, are we just going to jump into this new life where now you're in love with somebody else, now you're marrying somebody else without any kind of reckoning with what we had all lost and what our family had been in this time when, you know, he's moving on to this new life and is reluctant to speak really at all about my mother, it was too painful, I think, you know, I think we were all avoiding pain by not really speaking, speaking about her. So my father and my brother and I sort of carried on with this like, code of silence around her, as we always had and might have kept on. But I just started to have this immense, crushing feeling that when my mother died, the only other witness to my, you know, to massive parts of my childhood had vanished. Which meant like, the only other sort of like citizen of this nation of two was gone. And so I was the last surviving member of this time and place and what had happened there. And I just felt like if I didn't start to write these memories down and do something with them, then it was as if it didn't happen. And it was. It was really just sort of to validate my own memory and to find a space for it that I began to write about mom and what happened in those years, in particular in those homeschool years. And it was in the process of writing about myself and placing myself in a narrative and then reading that narrative back and seeing the boy who I was and, you know, having a kind of empathy, as now a parent myself, I've seen The predicament that this child was in, that I started to feel like maybe silence was a problem all along and it needed to be broken. And so, you know, I started to speak with my brother first about our childhood. And I was amazed at how, you know, this code of silence instantly broke. It was all it took was, you know, like, like one or two words. It was like we had these pent up feelings that had been there and unactionable for all this time. And as soon as they were expressed, like the floodgates opened and my brother and I began by, you know, talking, talking and talking about our memories of our childhoods and what hadn't felt right and also what we missed about our mother. And we were just speaking honestly for the first time with my father. You know, as, as I started to sort of conceive this, these memories, and as I started to think of it as a book, I started to sort of interview my dad a bit, just talking about memories. And I think that began the conversation. But the scariest moment didn't happen until I shared the whole book with him. I realized it was going to come out and I thought, I still haven't said a lot of these things out loud to him. And maybe I couldn't, you know, maybe, maybe this is why I had to write a book. So I could tell him these things, you know, and show him how it felt to me. Not out of anger, but just because I needed that conversation and that engagement. And I sent it to him and I was sick with anxiety and this profound guilt. I was just walking around my neighborhood, like shaking over what he would make of this. It's such a profoundly radical act. It's like the central law of our family dynamic is that we don't talk about this. And now I've put it all on the page, thought about it, honed it, gotten it down to what feels truest to be me, and sent it to him. I said, you don't have to read it if you don't choose to, but here it is. It's up to you to make what you will of it. I didn't know what to expect, but I thought maybe I wouldn't hear from him until he had read the whole thing. Maybe he would be furious, maybe he would be apologetic. I mean, who knows? But he called me after reading the first chapter with his voice shaking and he, I think, felt appended by it. And he said, I never saw it this way. He recognized all facts in the story, of course, but hadn't really ever put together how that had felt for me. And it began this painful but profoundly healing reckoning with him over our whole history. And we had hard, hard conversations, and it went on. The process took weeks. You know, he would read another chapter, and then we would talk about it. And I would see the call coming in, and I would think, I don't have, like, the strength to now get to this next chapter of our lives. And, like, what had happened there. But I took the call and we had the conversation. And on the other side of that is, I feel like we have a more profound and loving and close relationship than I could have ever conceived we could have. And it was just speaking the truth in sharing my story and how things had felt to me. There were things that he didn't know. You know, he had been at work and we had been at home. He didn't know all the things that had happened. I had been afraid to say them or, you know, like, we just never spoke about them. So he was surprised and disturbed by a lot of the things that had happened. He told me something I didn't know. And it changed my whole perception of my mother, especially in her later years, in a way that I'm still trying to make sense of, really, which was, I said to him, my mother became very paranoid at the end of her life. She was afraid to see doctors, which is why, you know, when she went in, finally, when she could hardly breathe, she had stage four cancer and had metastasized through her body because she hadn't been to a doctor in years, really. She became convinced that the FBI was parked across the street and that there are certain things we couldn't talk about on the phone, you know, because the FBI was tapping the phone. I asked my dad about this. I said, what was that like? Was she always so paranoid, or was it just something that worsened? And he said, oh, well, that was her alcoholism. And I said, her what? And he was like, her alcoholism? And then he told me that she had been drinking a half a bottle of vodka a day, basically since the day I left for college, and that she had cirrhosis and brain damage from years of alcoholism. You know, it's one of these obvious truths that you choose not to see. You know, like, I saw that she was declining. I had already written the book when I learned this fact. And I. I remember I called my editor and I said, hold the presses. There's this new major fact about her, and I think it's going to change how I'm thinking about her. And he said, well, what is it? And I said it was her alcoholism. I explained what my dad had said, and he said, well, I already know that. I said, what? And he said. He said, no. You describe an alcoholic.

Interviewer (84:16)

Yeah, it's in the book. Without and I did not know.

Stefan Merrill Block (84:18)

Honestly, Dani, I did not know. And I look back and I see I was lying to myself. You know, I don't know, like, why I didn't permit myself to see that particular pain.

Dani Shapiro (84:32)

Here's Stefan reading one more passage from his beautiful, heartbreaking memoir.

Stefan Merrill Block (84:39)

You were happy, weren't you? She asked me one afternoon when I was back in Plano. What's that? I couldn't have known then that this would be the last time I'd share a room with her, that the pandemic we'd been hearing about on the news would soon put up a final barrier between us. Mom looked at her pale fingers as she braided the tassels of her throw blanket. She bit a lip, her eyes spilling over. Weren't we so happy here in the house when it was just the two of us? Weren't those just the happiest years? I let her take my hand, but even then I could not bring myself to give her the answer she needed. Minutes later, I laced up once more and run away from the question. I ran out the door and through my hometown one last time.

Dani Shapiro (85:34)

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number 0. You can also find me on Instagram. Danny Writer and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.

Stefan Merrill Block (86:20)

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

Dani Shapiro (86:25)

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