Making Yourself Up

Summary

Family Secrets: "Making Yourself Up" (June 11, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Family Secrets, host Dani Shapiro sits down with Dr. Darcy Ballantine, Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and Black Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Darcy shares her remarkable journey of discovery around her true origins, the complexities of transracial adoption, family deception, and the ongoing process of reassembling her identity. Her story is one of secrecy, cultural estrangement, revelation, and, ultimately, a quest for belonging.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Childhood in a Rural, White Family

[04:24 – 05:45]

• Darcy was the youngest of 12 children in a large, white family in rural Southwestern Ontario.
  • “I was the youngest of those 12 and the only one who was adopted.” — Darcy Ballantine (05:45)
• Lived among cornfields and livestock in a big, dilapidated house, though the family were not themselves farmers.

2. Early Consciousness of Difference and Adoption

[05:45 – 11:44]

• Darcy had no memory of life before age four and a half, the official time of her legal adoption, learning details only later in life from documentation.
• She was not explicitly told she was adopted and initially lacked awareness of her difference, only recognizing her distinctiveness when a classmate drew attention to her skin color at school.
  • “I could understand that brown was different than white, and brown skin was something quite different than white skin.” (07:09)
• Her mother responded to questions about race with colorblind platitudes — “We don’t even see color, and you’re just like everybody else.” (10:37) — but lacked the language or perhaps the willingness to discuss their difference.

3. Societal Narratives and Internalization

[11:44 – 14:22]

• Darcy experienced patronizing comments from acquaintances and strangers, such as “You’re so lucky your mother took you in,” which she connects to deeper cultural narratives of white benevolence in interracial adoptions.
  • “There has always been a sense that children of color, orphans of color... are always better off with white adoptive parents.” (11:56)
• This ongoing societal feedback contributed to Darcy’s confusion and sense of otherness.

4. Isolation, Inwardness, and Self-Discovery

[14:22 – 19:15]

• Darcy describes herself as becoming a loner, finding solace in running, her solitary activity and form of therapy.
• She felt desperate for understanding, particularly during COVID-19 and after George Floyd’s death, which reawakened the sense that her plight — of isolation and lacking black community — was inescapable.
  • “I might never be able to have a way to figure out what this blackness of mine means and what it means to grow up in a context that, from my perspective then as a kid, was entirely white.” (14:22)
• She notes the absence of any Black or Indigenous history or literature in her schooling, fueling her later academic pursuits.

5. The Revelation: Sister as Mother

[19:15 – 26:31]

• As a teenager, Darcy is taken on what she thinks is a special visit to her eldest sister in Vancouver, but on that trip, her “sister” reveals herself to be Darcy’s biological mother.
  • “She simply said, I’m your real mother. And... I could not logically connect the two things. I recall being really stunned and not knowing what to say.” (19:47)
• The realization dawns: the “parents” are her grandparents; her siblings are aunts and uncles. This reframing of her family structure is “shocking” and alters her relationships with all family members.

6. After the Secret: Emotional Fallout and Complications

[30:38 – 34:30]

• Darcy recounts a visceral, physical recoil from her biological mother and grandmother post-revelation, refusing touch and wanting only to return home.
  • “I couldn’t bear to be touched by them... I had a really visceral response to the news and then to their proximity in the same room.” (30:57)
• The responsibility is left to Darcy to decide whether to keep or share the secret with her “siblings,” which she does soon after returning home.
  • “So I think because I grew up socialized into the lie... it in many instances is just easier to say to people, oh, yeah, well, I’m adopted, and these are the white people who adopted me, rather than go through the whole [story].” (32:59)

7. The Mystery of Her Father and Developing Black Identity

[35:07 – 41:13]

• Along with the revelation, Darcy is given the name of her black biological father, Austin Clarke, an acclaimed Caribbean Canadian writer. For years, this information lies dormant while she navigates adolescence.
• At university, she encounters his books and forms a “textual relationship” with him, discovering her black heritage and history through his fiction before meeting him in person.
  • “So my first encounters with him and the way in which I got to know him, those were textual encounters, they weren’t in person encounters.” (37:11)
  • “I began to sense a whole history that was mine that I knew nothing about.” (37:11)

8. Estrangement from Biological Mother

[41:13 – 42:31]

• She remains emotionally and relationally distant from her biological mother, who becomes part of the betrayal for keeping Darcy’s origins secret.
• Darcy speculates, but cannot know, whether her mother was pressured by her parents to relinquish her, and still lacks the full story.

9. Claiming Her Father — Encounters and Relationship

[46:05 – 56:10]

• Through academic circles, Darcy’s scholarly and personal lives begin to intersect — her advisor is close with Austin Clarke.
• When given the chance to meet Clarke at a conference, Darcy confides in her advisor and, at her urging, rekindles contact with him.
  • “This is your dissertation work. You cannot do this work without working on Austin Clarke. And this is a perfect opportunity.” (46:46)
  • First meeting: formal, polite, British (“He served me tea. We had what I... would characterize as, you know, kind of polite conversation.”), but little follow-up contact.
  • Decades later, in her 40s, Darcy reaches out again, this time as a doctoral student and part of the black academic community; their relationship grows from there.
    • “When we did spend time together, I had a sense anyway, that we were meeting as equals, which is something that wasn’t the case earlier.” (46:46 – 55:35)

10. The Legacy of Belonging, Truth, and Ancestry

[56:10 – 59:51]

• The developing relationship with her father becomes a revelation — not just the personal connection, but an “ancestral” one.
  • “...it’s not just history, it’s my history. And these people that I had previously thought of as victims of enslavement... were actually my people, like my own people.” (56:10)
• Austin Clarke gives her a legacy: connection to a black past, intellectual focus, and a sense of rootedness distinct from her upbringing.

11. The Incomplete Picture: Making Yourself Up

[60:18 – 63:16]

• Darcy reflects on taking (and then dropping) a class with the first assignment, "Making Yourself Up," which would require her to assemble baby pictures and family lore — relics she simply doesn’t have.
  • “I have no idea where I was... who held you first, who changed your diapers, where you were living when you were 1 and 2 and 3. Was that a good context? Those are the mysteries in my life, and I will probably never have access to those mysteries.” (60:18)
• She ponders the elusive nature of knowledge about her origins, the comfort she finds in making meaning for herself, and the possibility that total knowledge might be more troubling than liberating.
  • “There is, I think, a kind of comfort in being able to relinquish the desire to know every last detail and rather to reconstruct oneself and a history that has meaning for the person that I’ve become...” (60:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Realizing She Was Different:

  “I wasn’t sophisticated to have developed a language with which to talk about issues of race and racial difference. But I could understand that brown was different than white.”
  — Darcy Ballantine (07:09)

• On Adoptive Mother's Response:

  “We don’t even see color, and you’re just like everybody else.”
  — Darcy Ballantine paraphrasing her mother (10:37)

• On Family and Social Narratives:

  “There has always been a sense... that children of color... are always better off with white adoptive parents.”
  — Darcy Ballantine (11:56)

• On the Moment of Revelation:

  “She simply said, I’m your real mother... I could not logically connect the two things. I recall being really stunned and not knowing what to say.”
  — Darcy Ballantine (19:47)

• On the Need for Belonging:

  “I just wanted to go home to the familiar, to the landscape, to the sounds, to the people that I knew and that I’d grown up with as brothers and sisters.”
  — Darcy Ballantine (30:57)

• On Her Relationship with Her Father:

  “Those were textual encounters, they weren’t in person encounters... I began to sense a whole history that was mine that I knew nothing about.”
  — Darcy Ballantine (37:11)

• On Finding Her Black Heritage:

  “It’s not just history, it’s my history. These people that I had previously thought of as victims of enslavement... were actually my people.”
  — Darcy Ballantine (56:10)

• On Reconstructing Herself:

  “There is... a kind of comfort in being able to relinquish the desire to know every last detail and rather to reconstruct oneself and a history that has meaning for the person that I’ve become...”
  — Darcy Ballantine (60:18)

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Important Timestamps by Segment

• Introduction and Childhood: 03:40 – 05:45
• Awareness of Adoption and Racial Difference: 05:45 – 11:44
• Cultural Narratives & Internalized Messages: 11:44 – 14:22
• Isolation and Search for Identity: 14:22 – 19:15
• The Vancouver Trip and Revelation: 19:15 – 26:31
• Immediate Aftermath of the Secret: 30:38 – 34:30
• Her Father’s Name, Identity Search: 35:07 – 41:13
• Estrangement from Biological Mother: 41:13 – 42:31
• Academic/Personal Reunion with Austin Clarke: 46:05 – 56:10
• Making Peace with an Unfinished Story: 60:18 – 63:16

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Themes and Takeaways

• Identity is Complex and Continuously Made: Darcy’s journey underscores the continual process of renegotiating identity in the wake of secrecy and revelation.
• The Power and Pain of Family Secrets: Secrets, especially within family systems, have ripple effects across generations and self-understanding.
• The Challenges of Transracial Adoption: Silence around racial difference, societal narratives, and cultural disconnect pose unique, often isolating complications.
• The Limits and Gifts of Knowledge: Sometimes, the inability to know every detail about one’s origin story leads to a kind of freedom — the space to make oneself up, to choose roots and legacy.
• Making Meaning from Fragmented Histories: Through scholarship, literature, and reclaimed heritage, Darcy constructs belonging and a sense of self beyond the lies she was told.

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“If there’s a way to achieve a state of equilibrium in the wake of this kind of betrayal, I still haven’t found it.”
— Darcy Ballantine (59:51)

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Family Secrets, hosted by Dani Shapiro and produced by iHeartPodcasts, continues to provide a compassionate, inquisitive space for exploring how family histories—whether hidden, invented, or reclaimed—influence who we become.

Transcript

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[Darcy Ballantine]

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[Narrator]

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. My guest today is Darcy Ballantine, Assistant professor in the Departments of English and Black Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Darcy's is a story about bedrock identity and the troubles and complexities of deception. A secret is kept from her that shapes her from the inside out and the outside in. It's also a story of the way so often the truth emerges in profoundly unexpected ways.

[Interviewer / Host]

Darcy, tell me about the landscape of your childhood.

[Darcy Ballantine]

I love the way that you formulate that question, because I often think of my youth in terms of geography. So I grew up in what was essentially a farming community, even though my parents were not farmers in South Western Ontario. We lived outside of a small town called Sarnia. So while we lived on a rural route surrounded by wheat fields and soybean fields and so on, in a big dilapidated red brick house, my parents did not farm, but I think we ended up living there because there were so many of us that they needed a really big house in order to accommodate 12 children themselves and a bunch of farm animals. A really, really big family which I think was probably more common at that particular moment in history. So we're talking 1960s, 1970s. I think a lot of people assume that there were 12 of us because my parents needed extra hands to help with chores and, you know, planting season and harvest season. But they just happened to have a lot of children. And I was the youngest of those 12 and the only one who was adopted.

[Interviewer / Host]

You were adopted at the age of four and a half and brought into this family. Do you have any memories prior to age four and a half?

[Darcy Ballantine]

I don't. And the only reason that I know for certain that I was legally adopted by the people who raised me at four and a half is because at some point after my adoptive mother died, I received a copy of my legal adoption order. And so I can date. I can give a precise date to the moment when I was adopted. But I don't have any memories of my life before that moment. And I have to say that a lot of my memories of childhood are either vague or simply not there. I have a difficult time recalling distinct memories of childhood. And, of course, I don't think it's uncommon for adults to have difficulty recalling what they did and what kind of person they were and particular events when they were very young. But I think I must have developed a kind of mechanism to protect myself from things that were difficult to have to remember.

[Interviewer / Host]

So you knew that you were adopted?

[Darcy Ballantine]

I don't think I was told in so many words. And I think that before attending, probably kindergarten, I didn't have a very good idea of what made me different than my adoptive siblings. But I guess over time, I sensed that there was something different. And I think it wasn't until a little kid on the playground, probably at recess, pointed out the fact that my skin was a different color that I began to realize that it was that thing. It was color. I wasn't sophisticated to have developed a language with which to talk about issues of race and racial difference. But I could understand that brown was different than white, and brown skin was something quite different than white skin. So I think it was quite a gradual process of coming into a realization that there was something quite distinct and remarkable that was different, that made me sort of stand out from everyone else. And I think it was from there that I began to ask my mother questions.

[Interviewer / Host]

A couple things strike me. One is, given that you were adopted at four and a half was probably just a matter of months from the time you came into this family to the time you went to kindergarten. And so in that period of time, nothing about the fact that this large family was white and you were black. Nothing about that ever came up or

[Darcy Ballantine]

was spoken about, not that I recall. Now, the paper, the documentation says that I was legally adopted when I was four and a half, But I could very possibly have been been with them in, you know, the months before the legal adoption. And in fact, I think it's probably a requirement. I mean, I doubt that I could have been identified as someone who needed to be adopted and then was adopted within a matter of weeks. So I'm guessing that the legal process of adoption would have taken some time. And so I can't say with any sense of conviction or where I may have been in the months before or the years even before I was legally adopted.

[Interviewer / Host]

Many people may have this thought that if one knows in some kind of clear way, you know, where one comes from, and there are documents, there's a birth certificate, there's family stories, there is a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to one's origins. That in the absence of that, I'm struck by the fact that you don't and you can't know. You know, was I three? Was I two? Was I four? It's impossible to know. That moment on the playground in kindergarten, which was the first time in your life that you are aware of that someone said to you, you know, why do you look the way you do? Why is your skin brown? Is that a memory for you? Is that it may be the first time it happened, but is that something that you then really sort of. You didn't tuck it away. You went home and said to your mother or your parents, why did this boy say this to me?

[Darcy Ballantine]

It was a moment that really began what has been a very long process of gradually asking questions.

[Interviewer / Host]

So how did your mother respond when you asked that question? What did she say?

[Darcy Ballantine]

I think that she probably said what a lot of people at work this historical moment would have said, which was, we don't even see color, and you're just like everybody else. And my guess is that that was in part out of frustration. Maybe it was because she didn't know herself what to say about racial difference and didn't want to have that kind of conversation. And I'm sure in part she also wanted to protect me from, you know, school ground bullies and so on. But it seems to me when I think about those moments now, she as well, lacked a language for talking about the fact that this young child that she had legally adopted was a black child and that there needed or there should have been A kind of conversation about that. The kind of conversation that would initiate me slowly into the idea that, racially speaking, I was different than the people who were raising me and the people who were my adoptive siblings who surrounded me.

[Interviewer / Host]

And later, you would also receive comments from acquaintances or even strangers along the lines of, you're so lucky you were taken in by good people.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Yeah. And again, I think that, at least in my experience, that's been very common. And I'm still not quite sure why that is the case. But I've even had people in the last decade or so, people who know me fairly well, people who have a lot of world experience, who have traveled the world, who have friendships and relationships with people of color, who will still say, despite knowing my story, or at least part of my story, will still say, oh, well, you're still really lucky that your mother took you in. And I'm not sure quite what is at the core of that, other than a still really pervasive sense that there is a goodness that goes along with whiteness. And I think that in my experience, and in the experience now beginning to do research into interracial adoption, that there has always been a sense, at least in the Canadian context, since the 1960s, which is the period that I'm beginning to look into, there has always been a sense that children of color, orphans of color, whether black, biracial, Asian, indigenous, certainly in this country, the history of indigenous adoption is very fraught that those kinds of orphans, those kinds of children who have been, for whatever set of reasons, relinquished by the people who gave birth to them, are always better off with white adoptive parents. And so, despite knowing part or all of my story, I still encounter people that I know who are part of my circle who will still say, you're so lucky that good people, that these good people adopted you.

[Interviewer / Host]

So now you're out in the world going to school, you're fielding comments that then, when you come home, are being sort of shut down. And in an essay that you wrote, you describe turning increasingly inward. And I'm wondering, what did that feel like for you and look like for you, as you were, you know, in that stage in sort of elementary school, middle school, heading into becoming a teenager? That inwardness, how did it express itself?

[Darcy Ballantine]

Well, I think that I became quite a loner. I did not have a big group of friends. I was not part of the cool kids, the kids who took music classes, the basketball team, anything like that. I really isolated myself, and I took up running for a few reasons. But one of those reasons was to sort of give myself a space in which, physically and intellectually, I could begin working through some of the issues that I was grappling with. So I would go on long runs down country lanes by myself. Rather than joining a team or becoming part of a. A group of people. Group of young people who were meeting regularly. And I think that I realized during the COVID 19 lockdowns that the kind of desperation and sense of wondering whether there could be something different than what I was experiencing at the moment when I was a young person reasserted itself. Or at least I felt the same kind of desperation about my plight during COVID 19, after George Floyd was murdered and so on. As I felt to a certain extent when I was a younger person. That is to say, I felt a kind of creeping desperation, a relentless kind of worry and stress that this might be all that there is. And that I might never get out of this plight that I found myself in. And I might never be able to have a way to figure out what this blackness of mine means and what it means to grow up in a context that, from my perspective then as a kid, was entirely white. I mean, I grew up in the country. I went to a small town school. My country neighborhood was, from my perspective, all white. I don't recall myself meeting anyone else who was black until I think I was in grade eight. And I believe a family moved into the. The town, and a couple of children from that family ended up at the school that I was at. And even that was shocking to me because I. I had been socialized into believing a certain kind of whiteness. And I believed in all the stories about blackness and black people that I had been socialized into. And so I was really anxious to suddenly see a couple of other black people at my school. And I did not know what to do with that. I was not interested in being friendly with them. I don't remember their names. I don't think I ever played with them or had a conversation with them. I suppose I figured out a way to exist as invisibly and as quietly as possible, on my own, surrounded by whiteness. And so when there were suddenly a couple of other black kids at my school, I found it very disconcerting and didn't quite know what to do with it. I've gone to therapy several times over the years to try to work out a variety of different issues, But I always come back to the running because it is a kind of therapy, and it allows me to get in touch with my body in a deeply corporeal sense. And then also to give my head the time and maybe the extra oxygen as well, to sort of work out all of these issues that I guess I didn't have a context in which to work them out when I was younger, which is why I ended up in the academy, because I felt like there was so much I was not taught. And then in the, you know, in the ways in which I was schooled and experienced, school from kindergarten to, you know, the end of high school, was a particular kind of learning. So, you know, we didn't study any kind of black history, not even black Canadian history, Not even the history of, you know, really historically important black communities on the east coast of Canada and the west coast of Canada. And, you know, we weren't reading the work of black authors or indigenous authors. And so I felt like I needed to unlearn everything that I'd been taught both formally and informally, and then teach myself how to think differently, not just about the world, but how to think differently about myself and myself in the world as a black woman.

[Narrator]

When Darcy is a young teenager, her mother takes her on a summer trip to the west coast to visit her oldest sister. This sister doesn't come home often, and the trip is billed as a special visit, especially since that sister's last trip home had been cut short. Darcy is excited about the trip. This kind of travel just doesn't happen in their family. It's unusual. This should have been a clue, but it wasn't because we cannot suspect what we cannot imagine.

[Darcy Ballantine]

So the trip, yes, was billed as a really exciting trip to the west coast, but it was prefaced by an event that happened the Christmas before. So several of the older kids in the family had already moved away from home, and the oldest girl in the family had long lived on the west coast and probably elsewhere. But I don't really know a lot about her life. But she came home for Christmas, and I believe that she came home with one of the other older sisters who was also living in the western part of the country. And the younger kids who were at home. We were very excited because we didn't see them all that frequently, and we were thrilled that they were both home free. My mother was preparing foods and Christmas cake, and we weren't at school, and we would go tobogganing. The older kids took us tobogganing and ice skating. And so it was all a really exciting time. So we, the younger kids in the family, all went to bed earlier than the older kids in the family on Christmas Eve, excited of Course, for Christmas morning, getting up, lining up outside the door to the living room, which would always be closed. We'd have to line up outside the door in order of age. So I would be the first at the door when it was opened, and then the door would open and we'd all pour into the living room and open our Christmas gifts. But when we woke up that morning, the oldest sister in the family was not there. So, of course, we were all incredibly baffled, maybe a bit concerned. But I think that, personally, I was too young to be concerned. I was just disappointed that she was not there and confused as to why in the world she would not be there for the most exciting day of the year. And I'm not quite sure when I was told the story about why she was not there, but the story was that she'd received a phone call sometime after we were in bed, and it was her work calling her back to the West Coast. And so the story was that she had to pack up her things and immediately go back to Vancouver. Now, I didn't have a great sense of precisely where Vancouver was. It all seemed pretty exotic and wonderful to me. So I think I didn't go through any logical process as to how in the world would she have gotten from our house way out in the country, where she would have had to have, you know, fought her way through snowbanks just to get to the end of our driveway and into a taxicab. If there had been the possibility of getting a taxicab that late at night, and there wouldn't have been any trains to take her from Sarnia to Toronto at that time of night. And how could she have changed her tickets so quickly to fly back to Vancouver? So, of course, as an older person, I realized that this was just an impossible story. I'm not quite sure how it all happened, but nonetheless, she was not there on Christmas morning. And much, much later on, I was told that I, for some reason, was the lucky one in the family who was going with mom to Vancouver for the summer holiday, which would have been, I think we would have gotten out of school at the end of June, and school would not have resumed until the beginning of September. So I got out of school, packed my bags, flew to the west coast with Mom. I was really excited about being there, really excited about spending time with my big sister. And I think it was only a couple of days into the trip that she and I, meaning the person I thought was my sister, she and I, I believe, went for a drive somewhere. She was living someplace in Downtown Vancouver, which was really eye opening to me because the landscape I grew up on was deeply rural. You know, it was not uncommon to see tractors and combines and cows and horses and pigs and so on. So it was really interesting to be in downtown Vancouver. And I believe that the two of us went for a drive and it was nice. It was summertime, and I seem to recall the sound of trickling water. So I'm assuming that we were, I don't know, maybe beside False Creek or a body of water close to the downtown where she lived. We were not sitting there for all that long. So I believe that she simply said, I'm your real mother. And I think she would have used that term, I'm your real mother. Not your biological mother or your birth mother, but I'm your real mother. And there was so much distance between my idea of where I may have come from and this big sister sitting beside me that I could not logically connect the two things. And I recall being really stunned and not knowing what to say. And I think feeling a combination of shock and, for some reason, embarrassment. I don't know why.

[Interviewer / Host]

Well, you go in one moment from the story that you've understood to be true of yourself all your life, which is that you were adopted by these good people, by these good white people, and you're so lucky. And you have all of these many, many, many older adoptive brothers and sisters to, in one moment, whether you could have processed it in that moment or not, which I suspect you could not have, that your oldest sister was your mother, and that that meant that the adoptive parents who had raised you were your grandparents. And that meant that all of the brothers and sisters who you had grown up with, thinking that they were your adoptive brothers and sisters, were actually your aunts and uncles.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Yes. And I'm not quite sure how long it took me to begin thinking about that and the rippling effects of this new information and what it meant in the wider context of my entire family and the entirety of my young life. But, yes, eventually it dawned on me that mom and we all called my adoptive father Pop. It dawned on me that mom and Pa were not only my maternal grandparents, but they had lied to me all this time. And that really changed my relationship with them and with the entire family.

[Narrator]

We'll be right back.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Kalpen (Kal Penn)]

Hey everyone, it's Kalpen, host of Irsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I'm sitting down with Wil Wheaton, who played Gordie Lachance in Stand by Me 40 years ago and now narrates Stephen King's the Body, the novella that inspired it all. We talk about what it's like to return to a story that shaped his life, channeling his memories of River Phoenix in the recording booth and why the friendships you have at 12 might be the most important ones you'll ever have.

[Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

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[Kalpen (Kal Penn)]

I am Gordy La Chance.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Like, I mean, even when I was

[Kalpen (Kal Penn)]

a little kid, I was Gordy la Chance when I didn't know it. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Darcy Ballantine]

If you're feeling off fatigue, mood changes, skin shifts, yet your labs say everything's normal. You're not alone. Meet Oestra from Inner Balance, the first all in one prescription strength bioidentical hormone cream that's natural and effective and only takes one drop, 10 seconds a day. Oestra replaces five to six products women typically use to treat symptoms and is third party tested to ensure the highest quality. Visit innerbalance.com today to start feeling like yourself again. That's innerbalance.com.

[Narrator]

In the wake of this enormous revelation, Darcy finds herself physically unable to even look at these women. Her sister is now her biological mother. Her adoptive mother is now her grandmother. Tangled up in the thorns of this new configuration, she recoils.

[Darcy Ballantine]

I couldn't bear to be touched by them. And I remember it was possibly the afternoon of, or maybe the day after this big revelation. My sister, and now I had this new knowledge that she was my biological mother, was cutting my hair, I believe, on the back porch of the house that she was probably sharing with some others. And as she was, you know, sort of moving from my side to my back to cut my hair, I recall distinctly moving away from her touch. And I don't know quite what that is about. I mean, we have never been a touchy feely family. Our parents did not hug us or, you know, express their love for us. That's just not who they were. And I think in this moment after the revelation, there was perhaps a desire on their part to reaffirm the fact that they cared for me and loved me. But I was not interested at all. So I, I had a really visceral response to the news and then to their proximity in the same room. I didn't want to be around them and I demanded to go back home. And I think it was probably intended that I spend the entire summer in Vancouver or perhaps that I stay behind and begin a new life there. But I was having none of it. I just wanted to go home to the familiar, to the landscape, to the sounds, to the people that I knew and that I'd grown up with as brothers and sisters.

[Interviewer / Host]

And it's also left to you to tell or not tell your brothers and sisters who don't know anything about this. It's on you to either continue to keep this a secret about yourself or to speak it.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Right, right. And I was probably not a sophisticated enough young person to go through any kind of intellectual process to determine whether it was beneficial to keep the secret or to reveal the secret. I think I was so deeply in shock and I was beginning to feel angry that in my recollection, I told my brothers and sisters as soon as I got home. I was listening to a documentary by an American academic, June Cross, where she talks about the fact that she sometimes still lies when people ask her questions about her connection to her white birth mother and white stepfather because it's just easier to continue the lie. So I think because I grew up socialized into the sly, and it became who I am, and I've always thought of myself in the ways in which I was told to think about myself, that it in many instances is just easier to say to people, oh, yeah, well, I'm adopted, and these are the white people who adopted me, rather than go through the whole.

[Interviewer / Host]

Well, of course.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Which is a whole history.

[Interviewer / Host]

It's a whole history. And also sharing it and talking about it can actually be re. Traumatizing no matter how many years have gone by.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Yes, yes, exactly. It is, you know, because it gets to the core of precisely who we are. And if we are told a lie and then encouraged to keep that lie and to reproduce it because it is the family secret, then at least for myself, there's a kind of guilt in revealing that secret. Every time someone, you know, has a probing question about, well, who are you and who are your family? And what do you mean these white people are your family? So it's a difficult sort of catch 22.

[Interviewer / Host]

When you return home from this trip to Vancouver, you have another new piece of information, which is the name of your father.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Right.

[Interviewer / Host]

So you have this name. You don't do anything with this name for a while. It seems to me like you have enough on your plate and you just kind of file it away.

[Darcy Ballantine]

I mean, I was a teenager, and like most teenagers dealing with all of the kinds of things like hormones and crushes and all of the things that teenagers, for the most part, deal with, and then to have to deal with this new information related to the fact that the person I have always assumed is my older, you know, somewhat exotic sister from Vancouver, is my biological mother. The people who are raising me are my maternal white biological grandparents who have lied to me all this time. And the people I thought were my adoptive siblings are aunts and uncles. So I had a lot on my plate and I think I ignored everything for quite some time, to be honest. And it wasn't until I was probably in late high school that I started wondering, okay, who is this other person then? And of course, the name meant absolutely nothing to me.

[Narrator]

Darcy leaves home after high school, goes to college for a year, then leaves college for a while and works as a nanny. She's become interested in her blackness and what it means to be black in this pretty ideologically conservative white landscape. And that name, the name of her birth father, Austin Clark, is a name that begins to appear on course lists. As a prominent Caribbean Canadian writer, Darcy becomes increasingly fascinated and curious. Could this writer, this perfect stranger, be her biological father?

[Darcy Ballantine]

I recall going to my university library where I was doing my undergraduate degree and taking out his books. And so my first encounters with him and the way in which I got to know him, those were textual encounters, they weren't in person encounters. So I got to know a sense of his history as a Caribbean born, Barbados born writer who immigrated to Canada, came to Toronto in, I think it was 1955 to go to the University of Toronto. So as I developed a textual relationship with him through his literary fiction, I began to sense a whole history that was mine that I knew nothing about. And because English literature was my forte academically, I really slowly began to grow into the field of black literature and became increasingly sort of enamored of the idea that I could access my own history via this body of work without necessarily knowing the person.

[Interviewer / Host]

How did it feel to you during that period of time? I mean, you say that you developed a textual relationship which is so fascinating because it's almost a form of snooping.

[Darcy Ballantine]

It is.

[Interviewer / Host]

It's a form of wow, there are clues scattered throughout these pages. And, you know, this person is my biological father, but he doesn't know that I'm reading his work, but I'm reading his work and I'm reading it deeply. And like a detective. Would it have been fine with you at that time to never actually meet him, to just continue having this textual relationship? Or was there a longing or a feeling of wanting more grounding than what you had?

[Darcy Ballantine]

That feeling was definitely beginning to develop. But I also felt a certain sense of trepidation because even when I was in my undergraduate degree in Waterloo, Ontario. I did not have a lot or maybe even any contact with black people. I had a couple of black acquaintances, but I did not have a rich black life. The extent of my black life was me and my journey to try to figure out what it meant to be me and to be black. So I felt an increasing sense of curiosity. I wanted to meet him. I recall feeling a need to be in his presence and see him in person as a way to reaffirm myself and my connection to him. I mean, to me, it was quite obvious that we were connected because I do look quite a bit like him. There was an increasing sense that I wanted to reach out to him and to meet him physically after getting to know him as much as I could via his writing. Although I have to say that a lot of what he wrote and a lot of what I read, his short stories and his longer fiction was difficult for me to connect with because he was writing about issues that I had no experience with. You know, the afterlife of slavery and the logics of the plantation and the particular brand of Canadian prejudice and anti black racism. And while I had experienced my share of anti black racism, I found it difficult to see myself as being in direct relationship with the kinds of histories that he was probing in his literature.

[Interviewer / Host]

And during this time, you had pretty much no relationship with your biological mother. Was she in your life at all?

[Darcy Ballantine]

No, not in any significant sense. And she never has been in a significant sense. I know that she was deeply disappointed that I did not move to Vancouver and move in with her. There was, on my part, there was just no sense of a connection. And I've never thought of her as my mother. We've never had that kind of relationship.

[Interviewer / Host]

Well, she was also part of the betrayal, right?

[Darcy Ballantine]

Yes. Yes, she was. And, I mean, there are layers of stories there. I still really don't have a full understanding, and I probably never will have a full understanding of precisely what happened. Was she pressured to relinquish me? I don't know. She could have been. Was there a lot of tension when her parents, her white parents, found out that she was pregnant with a black man's child? I don't know. I can speculate that, yes, that was probably part of what was happening, but I can't say with any sense of certainty.

[Narrator]

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

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Summer is here and the sun is out. Make sure you take care of your skin this summer. Now through June 23rd. Shop for you Save days and get great savings on all your favorite skincare Essentials and earn 4 times points. Shop in store or online and save on sunblock from Neutrogena Sun Bum, Hawaiian Tropic, Banana Boat and coppertone and earn 4 times points to use for future savings on groceries or gas. Offer ends June 23rd. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.

[Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

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MGLIS Lebrecizumab LBKZ a 250mg per 2ml 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. Epglis 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 ebglis. Before starting ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit eglis.lilly.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.

[Kalpen (Kal Penn)]

Hey everyone, it's Kalpen, host of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I'm sitting down with Wil Wheaton, who played Gordie Lachance in stand by me 40 years ago and now narrates Stephen King's the Body, the novella that inspired it all, we talk about what it's like to return to a story that shaped his life, channeling his memories of River Phoenix in the recording booth and why the friendships you have at 12 might be the most important ones you'll ever have.

[Darcy Ballantine]

I I know Gordy La Chance.

[Kalpen (Kal Penn)]

I am Gordy Lachance.

[Darcy Ballantine]

Like, I mean, even when I was

[Kalpen (Kal Penn)]

a little kid I was Gordy la Chance when I didn't know it. Listen to Earsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway for you. Save days are here now through June 23rd. Find hot deals throughout the store and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from General Mills, Pillsbury, Snickers, Oreo, Chillamook, Ziploc, Gold, Peak and Heinz. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings. When you shop in store or online for easy pickup or delivery, restrictions apply. See the website for full terms and conditions.

[Darcy Ballantine]

If you're feeling off fatigue, mood changes, skin shifts, yet your labs say everything's normal. You're not alone. Meet Oestra from Inner Balance, the first all in one prescription strength bioidentical hormone cream that's natural and effective and only takes one drop, 10 seconds a day. Oestra replaces five to six products women typically use to treat symptoms and is third party tested to ensure the highest quality. Visit innerbalance.com today to start feeling like yourself again. That's innerbalance.com.

[Narrator]

So Darcy is reading her father. He's a blank slate in a way, but she is discovering a lot about him on the page. It turns out that Austin Clark is friends with Darcy's academic advisor. The circles are beginning to overlap intersect. She doesn't tell her advisor for a while about her connection to Austin Clark, but he's a big deal in the field in which she's pursuing a doctorate. And then Darcy's advisor asks her to be a greeter at a conference to hand participants their welcome packets. And when Darcy looks at the list of participants, there he is. Austin Clark.

[Darcy Ballantine]

I'd volunteered to do some work on a Black Musics conference for my dissertation supervisor, and she asked me to be one of the people at the front door of the venue who would greet attendees and give them their information package and their name plaque. And I was happy to do that, amongst other things. And one afternoon just before the conference was about to begin, I was going through the list of those who had confirmed their attendance and lo and behold, Austin Clark was coming to the conference. I think this was the day before the conference, and so I thought, I cannot do this. I just can't do this. And so I told my supervisor that there was an issue and we went into her office and I closed the door behind me. And she has said multiple times that that was her first indication that something serious was up because, you know, she had an open door policy and there was really no need otherwise to close the door. And so I told her that I would do anything else she wanted me to do for this conference, but I could not be one of the greeters at the front door because I said, you know, there's someone on the list of attendees that I, you know, I just don't want to meet, to encounter in this way. And, you know, she insisted I tell her who it was. So I said, well, it's Austin Clark. And her response? By this time, I'd made it clear that I wanted to work with her as my supervisor and that my dissertation project was going to be on a set of contemporary black Canadian writers. And she said, well, I mean, this is your dissertation work. You cannot do this work without working on Austin Clark. And this is a perfect opportunity. So I said, well, he's actually my biological father. And she tells me that she almost fell off her chair when I told her that, because she was really, she is an American born academic whose doctoral work is in black American theater and the black arts movement. And she introduced Austin Clark's fiction to the university where I did my PhD. So she not only had an intellectual relationship with him and his entire corpus of work and, you know, the work that he had done helping set up black studies in the American context, but they were close friends. So it was really very stunning for her to realize that this, this person whom she had worked with already for a couple of years in the PhD program, was the daughter of Austin Clark. And suddenly all of my contacts, some of my friends, my colleagues, my peers were people who were also either black folks, black scholars, or working on black literature. And so there were many points at which my life was beginning to intersect with him. And it just seemed probably to my supervisor, firstly, sort of ridiculous that we weren't, you know, sitting with each other and beginning to get to know each other and have a conversation with each other, which is what you said I should do. So I did. I met him when I was younger. One time I was in my 20s and I came to Toronto from Waterloo, where I was in my undergraduate program. I just cold called him and said, I'm your daughter. And he was of course stunned and said that yes, he would meet with me. And the following day I met him and we spent an afternoon together. My first and my enduring impression is that he was very formal, very polite, very British, having been born in Barbados and colonized by the Brits. He served me tea. We had what I. I guess I would characterize as, you know, kind of polite conversation. And then a few hours after that, I was on my way and that I hoped that that first encounter would lead to the beginning of at least a friendship. But it did not. He was not interested. And one of the things I recall most distinctly from that visit is our conversation about university. And he wanted to know what I was doing. And I said, well, I'm at the University of Waterloo doing a degree in English Literature. And he immediately told me where his two daughters were attending university. And they were at the Ivy League. So they are a few years older than I am. They are his two daughters with his one and only wife, and they were at Ivy Leagues in America. And that seemed very important to him. But, you know, I was proud of where I was, and I was proud that I had scraped enough money together to go to university to learn, you know, what a university was. The context in which I grew up was one that was not all that concerned with higher education. So I was really happy to be at university. I was late to start my undergraduate degree, but I was really proud that I was there. And I didn't quite understand what it meant to be at the kind of university that I was at versus an American Ivy League university or even a Canadian Ivy League university. But that was a kind of sticking point in that conversation. But we lost contact almost immediately after that. And he did not reach out, maybe other than, you know, one phone call after that very first encounter. And then a couple of decades went by and we had no contact at all. Then, of course, at my dissertation supervisors prodding, I reached out to him again. By this time, I'm in my 40s. I've kind of been a late arrival to everything, to all of the milestones. So I was what they used to call a mature student at each step of the way. My undergrad, my BA, my MA and my PhD. And I thought about it for a while, and then I just sent him a card in the snail mail and said, I'm here doing a PhD. This is who I'm working with on my doctoral project. And these are the other folks whose work I'm studying and would you like to meet for a Drake? And he wrote back to me fairly quickly and said that he'd be delighted. And it was as if the first encounter had never happened. I really felt that I was meeting him for the first time. And perhaps that's because he sensed that we were on more equal grounds, and I was part of a community that he understood. And I think there was sort of a de facto sense that I'd been approved by someone who had great meaning for him, meaning my doctoral supervisor. So I'd obviously been approved by her. I was in this, I think, at the time, fairly small circle of black scholars and academics and intellectuals and writers. So I think that he felt a sense of comfort around me that was absent the first time. And so this second encounter it took. And not that we ever really had a father daughter relationship, because, of course, it was way too late for that, but we had the kind of relationship we had until he died in 2016. We had around a decade in which to get to know each other. And I would say that it was at the beginning, certainly a pretty tentative relationship. We were probably sounding each other out. And this is a man who was at his full writerly and intellectual powers and after long years of struggle, was winning major literary prizes and traveling around the world. So it wasn't that we were in each other's space all the time, but when we did spend time together, I had a sense anyway, that we were meeting as equals, which is something that wasn't the case earlier.

[Interviewer / Host]

What was the feeling after this lifetime of having been lied to? The whole reshuffling and re understanding of, you know, being raised as this black child and girl and teenager in a world where no one is black, pretty much. And you're left to figure that out for yourself. To be in your 40s and, you know, in the presence of this person who strikes me like a tent pole in some way, I think that it

[Darcy Ballantine]

was a real revelation to me to have the opportunity to get to know someone in a more personal and intimate way and have a window into a full and a rich black life that included black community, black family, black ancestors. And there were several moments over the course of that decade when I began to realize, and certainly after his death as well, that what I had just thought of as history, you know, the history of chattel slavery, the history of. Of the plantation in the Caribbean and in Barbados specifically, it was certainly, for me, compelling and horrifying history. But then I slowly began to realize that it's not just history, it's my history. And these people that I had previously thought of as victims of enslavement, the middle passage, the plantocracy, et cetera, were actually my people, like my own people. And that was really sort of mind blowing for me when I made that switch. And it wasn't like I was looking to make the switch, it just suddenly began happening. And I think that that is one of the things that Austin really gave me. Without knowing that he gave that to me or was in the process of giving it to me, I think that as the real legacy that he left for me, of course, there's the whole rich body of his work, his writing and his intellectual work, his social activism, but there is also the legacy of a history and a past and an ancestry that I was not connected to previously. So at an emotional level that really has, you know, deep and sort of forever meaning for me. Because in a way, he gave me what I'd been searching for since I found out about this whole family secret. He gave me the black past that I'd been looking for and the history and the connection to my own roots, which are very different than the roots that I retain on the white side of my family. So that's definitely one of the things that he has given me. And also, I have to say that, yes, I was interested in studying black Canadian literatures and cultures before I began focusing on my father's writing. But in the last few years, the other thing that he's given me is an intellectual and a radical research focus. Because now more than ever, I'm focusing on not just his writing, but his intellectual life and his participation in helping to articulate what black studies could be in America, you know, and has been since the 1960s forward, but also what black studies in the Canadian context could and should look like. And so all these years later, here I am, one of the black scholars hired in those post George Floyd years to teach in a black studies program

[Narrator]

before she died. Darcy's grandmother never did explain to her how and why there was so much subterfuge about her identity. There are still so many unknowns about her early life. There are still so many fictions and so many lies. Darcy writes, if there's a way to achieve a state of equilibrium in the wake of this kind of betrayal, I still haven't found it.

[Darcy Ballantine]

I recall in the first year of my PhD registering for a class that I then dropped out of because the first assignment was called making yourself up. And the instructor asked us to go home and talk to our parents, siblings, et cetera, and gather together all the home movies and pictures when we were first born and pictures of proud mom and dad holding us and create a story about that. And I remember walking out of that class thinking, I'm dropping this class. There are no videos. I have no idea where I was I know now who my biological parents are, but there are still no photographs. And there was no celebration, I don't believe, certainly not the kind of celebration that we associate with the arrival of an anticipated and desired baby in a family. So there is something, I think, luxurious and intellectually interesting in being able to, to make yourself up. On the other hand, of course, there's also something quite grounding in knowing who you are and where you came from, where you were born, who held you first, who changed your diapers, where you were living when you were 1 and 2 and 3. Was that a good context? Were you, did someone read to you every night? Those are the mysteries in my life, and I will probably never have access to those mysteries. And I'm not sure if there was a way that I could have all of this knowledge. I'm not even sure at this point that I would want it because, I don't know, it might be more horrifying than I imagine it is, or it might, for a variety of reasons, be more upsetting than the memories that I suppose I've constructed based on what people in my family have told me over the years. So there is, I think, a kind of comfort in being able to relinquish the desire to know every last detail and rather to reconstruct oneself and a history that has meaning for the person that I've become or that I'm in the midst of becoming based on, you know, my own research and my own reading of my history and my own reading of the body of work that Austin Clark has left me.

[Narrator]

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.

[Interviewer / Host]

That's the number 0.

[Narrator]

You can also find me on Instagram, Annir. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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

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[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Darcy Ballantine]

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[Ryan Seacrest]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway for you. Save days are here now through June 23rd. Find hot deals throughout the store and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from General Mills, Pillsbury, Snickers, Oreo, Tillamook, Ziploc, Gold Peak and Heinz. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy pickling or delivery. Restrictions apply. See the website for full terms and conditions.

[Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with ebglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema after an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking ebglis achieved itch relief in clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

EBGLIS Librekizumab LBKZ A the 250mg per 2ml 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. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are 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 Ebglis before starting Ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebglislily.com or call 1-800-lily Rx or 1-800-545-979. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.