As Bad As a Lie

Published Dec 7, 2023, 8:00 AM

Brittany’s early life is defined by the road; she and her mom are vagabonds of sorts, never settling for too long in one place. But at least they have each other. That is, until they don’t.

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This episode contains discussion of sexual assault and drug abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

Trying to follow a specific memory to any kind of conclusion is like driving toward a semi blinded by its headlights, compelled by survival instincts to swerve away. No amount of holding the steering wheel and place can keep you on the road.

If part of you.

However small, wants to survive. Thankfully, there's a lot of me that wants to survive.

That's Brittany Means, writer and editor, an author of the recent memoir Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways. Britney's is a story of extraordinary resilience and ultimately the triumph of an indomitable spirit trapped an impossible circumstances. It's an object lesson in the idea that as long as we're alive and breathing, anything is possible. I'm Danny 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. The place that I always begin, and in your case, it's particularly complicated and rich. I think to talk about is. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood and that could mean anything to you. Your childhood had a lot of landscapes.

Yeah, well landscape I think of Cornfield literally. But for the most part, it was me and my mom. We lived in a car a lot of the time. We were always on the move, and we stayed if we weren't in the car, we were in shelters or with friends or with family. You know. We stayed all sorts of different places, like a biker community, we stayed on an ostrich farm, we stayed with distant family. In Mississippi, there's always something new and people.

Who were new.

Did it feel like an adventure or what was that like for you?

It didn't feel strange to me that we were moving so much because that was what I knew. So I didn't really think to ask like when are we stopping or where are we going to stay? Because to me, like being in the car and always being somewhere new, it was just how things were, and the most important thing to me was just that I was with my mom, So I didn't I didn't really care too much about the instability because it didn't feel strange and she was there, My mom had me when she was nineteen, so she was fairly young when she started parenthood. And my conception was the result of a sexual assault. I think she was just a very traumatized person from her upbringing and from what had happened, and from being a single mother and then being in an abusive relationship. And I'm aware of all of those things now because I have a perspective. But when I was a kid, she was like the sun to me, and I loved her more than anything. She was like the source of all warmth and happiness and affirmation. You know. She could be very energetic and verbally loving, and we would like go on trips and go play laser tag and put putt and all these fun things. And then the next day, or maybe even later that same day, she would be like very emotionally just regulated. She would sleep for days, she would scream, she would have outbursts. So yeah, just in another way, not a lot of stability.

How old were you when you knew that you were the result of your mother having been raped?

I honestly don't really remember a time when I didn't know that. I wish I could remember the exact moment and how I felt about it, but it feels like something I just always knew. When I picture her, the first image is you know how I saw her When I was a kid. She had like brownish reddish, like rusty brown hair, and it was always a little frizzy, which is where I got it blue eyes. When I was a kid, she had like a gap between her two front teeth, and she ended up getting dentures later in life, and I remember my uncle actually crying because he was like, I loved the gap between her teeth. It gave her a personality like fit her very well, and she had a very pretty smile. She has like dimples and eyes that are really bright.

One of the moves Brittany and her mom make is precipitated by Mark, her mom's ex boyfriend at the time, but now they're running away from him. They flee to Britney's grandparents' home just off Indiana State Road sixty seven. Britney's grandparents are Pentecostal, and life there is extremely different from the life Britney is used to.

The main thing was the contrast. When we first got there, my mom and I used to love going to horror movies, we watched TV. We really loved like unsolved mysteries and watching like the Rose Red series. And then we also had no rules. We just kind of did whatever out on the road. And when we were with my grandparents, they were like, no TV because that's the sin. So suddenly this huge thing that we shared together was gone and I couldn't even really talk about it without.

Getting a speech.

And there were all these rules like about when we could come and go and the things that we could say and what we had to wear and cutting our hair. And it was really hard at first because I was so aware of the alternative to that, Like I knew there was a world out there with like beautiful, delicious television, and then there was this world where I only really got to listen to Bible stories.

And the reason at that point that you were staying with your grandparents was because your mom had pretty much run out of gas.

Yeah, we didn't have money, and my grandparents would send money sometimes, but I think it was the situation was that they were like, we're not sending any more money. You need to come here and figure things out, and so that's what we did. I think that was around like kindergarten age. I have a really hard time pinning down exact ages, just because we were moving so much, and we went back to some places a lot at different ages, and so sometimes if I'm comparing a story with someone, I'll talk about a memory and they'll be like, oh, yeah, you were like nine when that happened. And I'm so shocked because I remember being very little in the same place, and the memories that I think I remember happening at one age happened at another. But I'm pretty sure when we were living with my grandparents in the house by the highway, it was some time.

Before I started school.

My earliest memories of going to church include just feeling well, one, really aware of how my mom and I didn't fit in, because you know, all the women were in like very long jean skirts down to their ankles or like long dresses. They all had very long hair, either hanging down their back or piled up on their head, and the men were in suits, and everyone was very clean and buttoned up and smiling and calling each other brother and sister. And my mom was wearing blue jeans and like a T shirt and had makeup on, and her hair was cut pretty short, and I was wearing the dress and my grandma.

Gave me, but I just felt really out of place.

It felt like way too nice of a place for us to be dressed the way we were, and I was embarrassed, but I was also kind of irritated because I didn't want to be there and I didn't have this language then, but now I understand, like I just didn't want to be.

Judged on terms that I didn't care about. And my grandma, I.

Remember people asking her like is she adopted about me? And my grandma telling at least one of her friends like, no, she's a rape baby, and you know, people telling my mom like, I'm so glad you came back.

But also I could see the way they.

Were looking at her, and you know, her pants and her hair and the makeup, and yeah, it was it was just a lot to take in and try and understand at a young age.

Yeah, do you have any memory of what it felt like to hear your grandmother describe you that way?

I don't remember feeling any kind of emotion about it, because I already knew the circumstances, So to me, it was just a fact.

I didn't really have.

The concept that I should be insulted or embarrassed or anything like that. So when we first got there, I had this feeling like my mom and I were kind of in cahoots and that we were both like, yeah, this sucks, but we'll get through it. It didn't occur to me that everyone else there knew her as someone who used to be very involved in the church and seeing in the and very you know, like godly and innocent. I never met that version of her, so I didn't know that that was something she would go back to.

And then she stood.

Up to give testimony and basically said she wanted to come home, which to her meant like come back to the church and feel that community that used to make her feel safe and loved before so many things went wrong. I think she just wanted to get back to that and feel like all of the missteps that she had taken and all the things that had happened to her could be washed away. I imagine was an irresistible feeling. And to me it was a shock because I was like, what do you mean you're buying into this? I thought we were gonna leave, and yeah, I just felt really alone because I didn't have my partner in crime anymore, and I also like I didn't connect with this church setting. I didn't feel what it seemed like everyone else was feeling. So I also had a lot of guilt like why can't I go there with her? And again, just a lot to try and implement into my way of thinking as I was forming a sense of self well.

And also the message that God sees everything and knows everything doesn't help.

With the guilt, yeah, exactly.

For a while, Brittany and her mother live with her grandparents. Her mom has been saved and is accepted back into the fold. It seems like life may continue to proceed this way, a new Pentecostal life. But Mark, the ex boyfriend they'd been running away from, he finds her. He shows up at the house on Indiana State Road sixty seven, and he takes her mother away.

This is something I didn't actually know about for a long time. I learned when I was an adult and my mom told me this story. He had found us, and he showed up in the middle of the night and he had a gun and he threatened to shoot my mom if she didn't come with him. He basically forced her to come with him, and they didn't take me. I don't really know why, because I really wasn't aware that all of this was going on. I just knew that I woke up and my mom was gone, and I was alone in this place I didn't want to be, and didn't have the context for why any of that happened for.

A long time.

I mean, it strikes me that your mom probably was trying to be protective of you by not bringing you in a situation where she's basically being abducted. Yeah, but I imagine that to be a kid like so young and to just wake up and your mom's gone and you don't know why, and nobody's talking, nobody's really filling in the blanks for you.

Yeah.

Brittany is left with her grandparents for a few months before Mark and her mom come back for her. During these months, she and her grandparents move from the little house by the highway into a barn.

So the barn was an old carriage house. There were horse stalls in it. It was an actual barn, had a black wood sighting and these two big silhouettes of rearing horses that were like bright white. So they stuck out against the barn and my grandpa converted it into He called it a mansion. It had thirteen bedrooms all together, and even put up a sign at the end of the driveway that was like, come see the thirteen bedroom mansion, and then people would show up and be super confused. It was like way out in the middle of the country, like surrounded by cornfields on one side and woods on the other.

And then inside the barn itself.

Like it had this really lush red carpet with all kinds of vines and flowers on it. There was like a giant chandelier when you came into the dining room in front of this huge window, and it had these octopus arms.

That's how I always thought of it.

It looked like a giant octopus like holding a bunch of little moons. And he put all kinds of furniture imported from I want to say.

France, but yeah.

It was like there was so much nice, expensive stuff in it. And then my grandpa really loved cutting corners, so then in between these really beautiful elements would be pretty cheap linoleum and Christmas trees from like big lots that were on sale or.

Something, and missing arms.

It was a bizarre place in part because of how beautiful and decadent, and the fact that it was converted from a barn, and also that my grandparents were hoarders.

There was I mean, when we very first.

Got there, I didn't really think that that was going on because everything was in boxes and it took forever to unpack. So I just assumed that that's what it was like when people moved. And then as I got older, stuff accrued and this long, beautiful hallway was just so full that you had to walk sideways to get through it.

So your brother been three and a half years younger than you, Yeah, and was the product or relationship that your mom had with someone other than Mark? Was his father someone that you knew when your mother was with him? What was the background of that.

It's basically my uncle's friend.

So you was just hanging out with all of them all the time, and they were young, so they were like why not, and their condom broke and they got pregnant and the rest of Ben's history.

Right, So it wasn't the result of a serious relationship.

No, no, not at all.

We'll be right back. Ben comes and goes during Brittany's childhood. He lives with his father some of the time and other times he spends with Brittany and her mother wherever they might be. Another on again, off again presence in Brittany's childhood is Mark. He and Britney's mom get back together, and Brittany even begins to think of him as her dad. But then their lives slide into a very dark place when Mark puts Brittany's mother to work as a stripper, and while Brittany's mom is out doing this, Mark begins to sexually abuse Brittany. In a grim parallel, Brittany and her mom are both doing things with their bodies that they don't want to be doing. It's a harrowing time, and at a certain point, someone reports the family to child protective Services.

I believe it was a family friend, is what they guessed at the time, but I don't think we ever really got exact confirmation.

You know, it could have been.

Someone out of school, It could have been someone near one of the motels where we were staying. Really could have been anybody.

So the thing that I was so struck by is that your mom and Mark essentially coach you in terms of what you should say to child protective services. So that certainly implies that your mom knew that there were things that you could say that would have you taken away from her.

Yeah, Mark knew exactly what they were going to ask and anticipated how I could answer without sounding like I had been coached. And I remember going through that coaching and just being like, I don't.

Want to do this. I'm bored.

I want to watch TV because I you know, so many awful things had been normalized. I wasn't thinking like this is going to keep me from getting help. I was thinking like, I got to get the answers right so that we can stop doing this boring thing.

And do something fun.

And you are at this point around how old.

I'm almost positive this is also before school. I might have started kindergarten, but I was homeschooled for some of kindergarten, so it's really hard to say.

You also try to tell other people and really bravely try to talk to Mark's sister Dana, and she doesn't believe you. No, she did not, So there's there's no protection at that stage in your life. I mean, you try, and you I would imagine that would have felt like well, and there's just no point trying because no one believes me.

Yeah, like I remember the conversation pretty vividly, and her telling me, like, you shouldn't make things up. And even though I knew I wasn't making anything up, and if people told me I was lying about something, when I was a kid, I would get mad. If I knew I wasn't lying about this thing, I wasn't mad. I just felt immediate shame, like I had done something wrong. And I didn't have this language then, But now I think it was that I understood that it wasn't so much that she thought I was lying, but that saying it out loud to someone was somehow as bad as a lie.

Now I understand. I think she just couldn't or didn't want to believe it.

And it was easier to assume that, like a kid, was making something up, because then you don't have to do anything.

You can just scold the kid and walk away.

Whereas if she had believed me, her whole life would have been upended and it would have led to a lot of hard conversations. And that's not totally understandable, no problem, just more that I can see how someone makes a really bad decision. I can understand all of the even subconscious things that are happening to lead to them doing something that creates ripples for the rest of someone's life.

Along the way, there are people who reach out to help, who try to intervene and offer sanctuary, including Britney's mother's brother, her uncle John, but their situation is constantly too much for friends or relatives to handle. Britney's mom and Mark are on the outs again, so when Brittany is ten and Ben is six, they moved back to the barn with their grandparents. Brittany a door's Ben and Relish is the time they get to spend together, but this time there's nothing but fear and worry.

My brother and I were staying with my grandma. I believe my mom was at a doctor's appointment, and he went out to play and I was playing on my game boy, and my grandma asked me to go check on him, and instead of going outside, I just looked out the window and I saw him playing. He really liked building forts out of stuff, and my grandpa had all kinds of materials from his business, so he was building a fort. He had like a little plywood roof on some saw horses, and then you know, I sat back down and I remember my grandma sighing because I was being lazy and she wanted me to go outside and ask. But rather than tell me, like hey, I wanted you to do, this was just.

Sighing so I would feel bad, which I did.

But then sometime later I had a friend who lived in a little house at the end of the driveway, and I went over to see her, and then when I came back, he was gone. I assumed that he was inside with my grandma, but when I got in, she was panicked and she couldn't find him.

So we looked all over the barn.

We looked in the backyard, and again there were cornfields on one side for miles and then woods on the other side for miles. It was just very quickly, like this horrifying thing, like did he get lost? Did someone take him? And honestly I didn't have any reason to think that he had been taken, but that's where my brain went because when we were kids, I think, just because things were so hectic, we were always hearing, you know, don't talk to strangers, don't get anyone's car, kids get taken all the time, don't walk for me in the store, And that always felt like someone taking you away. Whether it was CPS or a stranger or the boogeyman, it was like the worst thing that could happen, and so my mind went to the worst thing, and I just built this story in my head that someone had taken him, and that's what happened.

And I eventually saw an.

Ambulance down by the highway and ran to it, and he was in there, and the police took us to the hospital, and my mom showed up, and they did all kinds of tests on him, and he ended up going back with his dad that night, and I didn't see him.

Again for a while.

But what had happened was that a man who had been kind of infamous in the town called the Reverend, had sexually assaulted other young boys in the community, but he hadn't ever gone to jail for it. He'd been in treatment after committing arson. But he told these boys that if they told anyone, he would kill their families, and so of course they didn't want to testify against him. And then he took my brother.

He threatened him with.

The same thing he assaulted him, and they ended up finding him and he did end up going to prison.

It was a big shifting moment.

In our childhoods, because like things were already hard, but then there was this huge evil event and then my brother was gone, and then I also got moved away.

Where did you get moved to? I moved back with Mark, so the barn was deemed not suitable for kids, so you were moved back to Mark because that would be more suitable. And where was your mother?

I really, I don't know.

That's also a time that I really have trouble tracking because it was in a series of traumas.

It was like the big trauma.

I think a lot of older sisters understand this feeling like it's it's your job to keep your little siblings safe. And even if you punch them in the face sometimes or force feed them soy sauce, which I did to the end, you still always, when it comes down to it, you think like you would do anything to protect them from someone who wanted to hurt them. And it was like I failed the ultimate test of being a big sister. And then and then he was gone and I couldn't even talk to him about it or apologize or make sure that nothing else happened. And then I was in this new place with Mark and Mark's new family, and I didn't even really understand that that was upset for myself being back with this person who had abused me, because I was like completely distraught about Ben and it felt like he had died and I would never talk.

To him again.

Her grandparents drive to Indianapolis to essentially to rescue you. You know, it's so interesting about your story, Brittany, because there's so much in it that is, you know, people behaving in some of the most difficult ways that human beings can. And also, I mean, your grandparents were not easy. Would it be fair to say they were trying to be protective of you?

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I think they were really complicated people, and they didn't always know exactly what would be the healthiest for a kid because of their age and their backgrounds and their own traumas. But yeah, when it came down to it, they really did want to keep us safe. You know, my grandma had guilt for a really long time, I think, honestly, probably until she passed away about what happened with Ben because she was watching us. But it's not like she could get up and down the stairs to check on him.

That's why she asked me.

And they never wanted any of the things that happened to us to happen to us.

They loved us.

In a fractured and constantly shifting life, the Barn continues to be a strange and gothic home base. Britney wanders far. At one point she lives in a biker camp with a boyfriend of her mom's, but inevitably she returns. Rural Indiana isn't an easy place to be, not for a brown girl surrounded by a landscape of whiteness. Nobody in high school wants to be different, and so Brittany tries to maintain the image of the white girl who at the time she wants to be. She avoids the sun, she dyes her hair, she tries to blend in.

Just a very small town.

And you know, it was the nineties and then early two thousands, and yeah, I didn't have basically any exposure.

To people who looked like me.

You know, my mom had blue eyes, my brother had blonde hair, blue eyes. A lot of my family they were you know, blonde, blue eyes, pale. And I knew on some level that I was different, and I understood why at least the basics of why. But I was kind of in denial. At a certain point. I was embarrassed of how I looked, and I avoided the sun. I saw a magazine in the store and I picked it up and there were tips on how to lighten your skin if you have dark spots, and translated that too, Okay, I'm going to add lemon juice to my bath and I would dunk my hair and bleach.

And the thing is, I'm biracial. My mom's white.

And it's not like I looked incredibly different, you know. I just looked different enough that I was aware of it and ashamed of it, and I really wanted.

To change it.

And you kids will find any reason to make fun of you if you're a little bit different at a certain age. And yeah, I had kids who made fun of me. I had the nickname.

Mexico, which is like, at least be creative. You know.

It was hard and isolating, but everything felt hard and isolating, so it was like, why.

Not this too.

Eventually, Brittany does see Ben again. He resumes his rhythm of going back and forths between his dad and mom, but at some point he emphatically wants out. Brittany's sad about it, but she understands why Ben wants to leave. Their mother has become addicted to drugs. She's always used, but it's not until now that her addiction really comes to define her. When Ben says he wants to live with his dad full time, their mother reacts with horror and fury. At this point, young Brittany assumes the role of the parent, the mature adult. She polices her mom, even confronts her about her addiction.

She used through most of my child I wasn't really aware of it, and it's hard to say how much of her behavior can be attributed to drug use and how much of it was you know, she was struggling with her mental health and with emotional regulation, like my uncle. I tried to explain it to me when I was younger that my mom had an addiction. Other people had tried talking to me about it, but I never wanted to listen. I just wouldn't accept that, you know, she could do anything wrong. And then when I was in middle school, it started to become undeniable.

I don't know.

If it was just that I was more aware, or more self possessed or that she was using something different, or struggling more with how much she was using. May have been a combination of all of those things. I just know that I found some of her paraphernalia, and I tried kind of her about it like one time, and it basically broke the biggest rule, which is, like it was never a spoken rule, but it was an unspoken rule, which is, don't acknowledge this thing and don't challenge me on it. Just love me back and go with me wherever, and be okay when I'm not here.

To be okay when I'm not here turns out to be a prescriptive sort of warning. When Brittany is a freshman in high school, she and her mom move into another little house by the highway, a property owned by her grandfather. One day, her mom leaves without any indication of how long she'll be gone or where she's going. A week goes by, then another Britney is running out of food.

Yeah. I spent many years in denial about things and just kind of avoiding the conversation. And then suddenly I was alone in the house, waiting to see if she would come back, and feeling like maybe she won't this time. And maybe it's because I addressed things and it was like being trapped in a bubble of actually acknowledging that things were as bad as they were.

And that led you to call this guy named Clay.

Yeah.

We had dated in middle school through the beginning of my freshman year, and we broke up. He wanted to date another girl. I was a kid, and I was devastated. And then we stayed friends and we would talk on the phone sometimes and it was usually just me feeling really sad that we weren't still together, but happy that he still talked to me. And so it was also close to his family because we had dated for I think a year. And then when my mom left, I called him because it really know what else to do, and I told him what was going on, and then he told his mom, and his mom came and picked me up and said that I could stay with them until my mom came back. I was staying with them, I want to say it was for two weeks, and they realized that my mom had already been gone.

I told them it was a week.

I was trying to know Doll the edge a little bit of the situation, but it had been two weeks by the time I called them, and then it was two weeks at their house and they were like, she's been gone for almost a month. Does this happen often? And the truth was that it did. She was never gone for that long. She would leave for like a few days sometimes and I might be alone, or I would stay with someone else, or she would stay gone for longer, maybe a few months if I was with my grandparents. But yeah, I told them that it was it's fairly regular for her to leave, and so they were like, well, that's not a good situation for you, and what do you think about staying here indefinitely? Which was like a dream come true for me.

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Living with Clay's family, the Smiths, is life altering. Clay's older brother Luis has been deployed to Iraq and Brittany stays in his room. The Smiths are like guardian angels to Brittany. They've offered her the kind of sanctuary that has eluded her all her life. But her relationship with Clay becomes complicated.

Because we had dated, we had a history, he had a girlfriend, and so my assumption was.

Just that's done.

I'm going to try to like not make my heartbrokenness to a parent. I just want to be good and not make trouble in the house and.

You know, keep clean.

And I wanted to feel like I was worthy of being in a place that felt so nice. We were teenagers and living together, and even though the Smiths had told us like you can't, I think the exact phrase they use was no hanky panky while you're living under the same roof, which is what any responsible person would say in that situation. But we were young and we had a history, and so we ended up fooling around and secret and it turned into well, for a while, it was fooling around and me not being sure, like why is he still with his girlfriend? And am I a bad person? And then even after they broke up, it was still a secret because we knew that I would have to leave. And then it's hard to say that there was any one moment where things turned. But he would get very mad at me, and you would say really awful things to me. At the time, I just thought of it as rough housing, like he would hit me on the arm, or hit me on the leg, or do this weird crimping thing to my finger that hurt really bad. It was always some little thing to just hurt me a little bit, and it didn't feel I was like, well, he's not hitting me in the face, or he's not like pushing me on the ground and wailing on me.

And I had seen that in my life.

So I didn't think that it was anything exceptionally bad, just you know, playing around, and if I would say, like stop and get serious, I was ruining the fun. It got to be a really bad situation. But I didn't feel like I could tell the Smiths because I knew that I would have to leave. And it was the first time I had had like a clean, stable, otherwise loving environment, and I was finally getting good grades, I was taking ap classes, and I just didn't want to risk all of that, And even if that meant living in this terrible situation where I just had no self worth. I never knew what version of him I was going to get.

It was hard.

And then your mom eventually does show up, and you're also in this situation where she wants you to come back. You do not want to go back.

Yeah, you know, one of the worst things about that time was that I just blocked everything out because I was in this all consuming relationship. So I didn't even know if my brother, who I loved and had been through so much with, was like back with my mom or with his dad or just visiting, or like what was going on in his life.

Had tunnel vision.

Well, you were trying to save yourself.

Yeah.

In the meantime, Britney's mom signs over a third party custody to the Smiths, making it legal. Brittany has another very real family. Others continue to try and help her too. More guardian angels appear, more hands reach out. Many are from trusted and supportive adults.

At school, you know, I was like a kid from a movie who eats lunch in the stairwell crying because things were bad and I didn't feel like I fit anywhere, and everything was hard. And I had an English teacher, mister Wagner, who would let me eat lunch in his classroom, and I had my guidance counselor mister Brown. He would let me come in and just vent and cry, and then he was the one who really pushed the idea of college. And until then I just never felt like a possibility. So I didn't know why I would bother thinking about it. And then I joined the Academic to caathlon, and my coach for that one encouraged me to go to college and helped me figure out how to write things for applications and how to do interviews. And I had a creative writing teacher, Kenneth Barrett, who was the first person to tell me that I was talented writer and that I should take it more seriously. So I had all of these people who created space for me and made sure that I knew that I could get out and that they were there for me through that, and I'm endlessly thankful for them.

The encouragement Brittany receives in school inspires her to really focus on getting out, going to college, and starting a new life for herself. She cobbles together grants and scholarships, she works a bunch of jobs, and soon she's admitted to Ball State. Ben too has successfully gone and out and gets a full ride to another university. These are impressive achievements for anyone, but ones that had previously seemed impossible for Brittany and her brother. For some of college, Brittany and Clay continue to have a romantic relationship, but eventually they end things. She is still very much part of the family though, and when she comes back for visits, Louise is home from Iraq now and she's able to get to know this big brother figure in whose room she has lived. Some years later, Brittany is in graduate school and she's found her person, a man named Jeff. She and Clay have lost touch, but one day Clay calls with terrible news Louise has died from a drug related overdose. Britney's phone rings again soon, this time from missus Smith, Diane, and she's calling about Louise's ashes.

So the Smiths were in Indiana and at the time, I was in Iowa in the graduate program, and Diane called me and said, Louis's ashes are in this car and it's been impounded and they're going to basically destroy the car with the ashes in there.

And I asked if they would mail them back, and they're refusing.

And this was in San Diego, so I got a ticket and I flew there, and luckily I just happened to have a friend who lived there and picked me up from the airport and drove me straight to the impound lot and I went in and kind of I felt like tearing the place apart with my bare hands, but I just explained and I'm really sorry. I know this is an inconvenience and all of this, and eventually they let me go in and look around the car and I found his ashes.

And then, you know, because my flight was the next day.

Oh, it was Thanksgiving also, so like everything was closed, and I had a friend who lived there and was letting me stay at his place, but he was out of town for the holiday, so I was just alone on the other side of the country. I had never flown before that, I had never been to California with these ashes. And then yeah, I brought them back and I had them with me in Iowa for a little while until I went back for the holiday and I took them home, and yeah, it was it was a wild trip, and it was like a brief journey.

Yeah, well in a journey of a kind of repair in a way.

Yeah, I mean.

To the degree that repair was possible.

I think before I wrote the book, it all felt like just something that I was holding all the time, and it was overwhelming and it was loud, and I couldn't stop thinking about certain things, and I was having panic attacks and nightmares, and I wrote the book and part to process it, and I went to therapy and like actually committed to therapy rather than what I'd done when I was a kid, which was lied to the therapist because I didn't want I heard like CPS will take you away. And so I finally I started going to therapy and telling the truth and really committing to taking care of myself.

And I talked a lot to Ben, like we.

Just like delved through everything that had happened, which the more I think about that lately, it's like when you go through a lot with someone, it would be completely understandable. If I had tried to call him one day and say like, hey, you remember that time this awful thing happened. If he had responded like, I'm out of that now and I don't want to talk about it, I would have understood. But the fact that he immediately was like, yeah, let's.

Let's talk about it.

How messed up was that I was huge just having someone who like understood it intimately and could confirm things and deconstruct them with me and affirm like, oh, we're both here now, and it's not like perfect but we're making it.

Indeed, they are making it. Brittany is a published author living in Albuquerque with her partner Jeff. She gives public readings to large audiences, some of which include the very teachers from her past that made this journey possible. Ben is a family counselor. Britney's relationship with her mom is okay, but continues to be fraught when she tells her she's going to write this book. Her mom tells her to do what she needs to do.

I feel like I've kind of exercised it in a way. It's not like anything will ever be completely easy, or like those things didn't happen a that I've written about them, But I feel like I'm not so obsessed with thinking about these things, and I have way fewer panic attacks. I can't say I have none, but mostly I just feel like I processed it.

I did what I wanted to do.

And now when I have people who will come to me and say your book gave me context for things happening in my own life or helped me find ways to talk about it, that means the world to me, because I didn't just write it to process it. It was a huge part of why I wrote it, but just the idea that it can go beyond me.

It's like everything.

Near the end of her memoir, Brittany also includes a moving scene in which she shares draft after draft of her manuscript with Ben. She hopes and praise that he won't feel she has somehow usurped his story by telling her own. She writes, is that what I'm doing to you? I ask Ben after he reads my latest draft, I'm telling your story too. Someone had to tell it, he says. I'm glad it's you, and so are we. Here's Brittany reading one last passage from her powerful.

Memoir, The truth is.

I spent so long imagining a perfect future so I could get through a profoundly imperfect present. I'd close my eyes and build beautiful houses where nothing could ever go wrong. I needed that to hold me up. But now I have to let it go. The world will never be entirely safe. Troubles will come, loved ones will die, and landlords will reject my offer of free eggs in exchange for an exception from the terms of my lease. Now I'm the clattish adult who controls my life, so I have to stop waiting for perfect conditions and trust that I can handle what comes. Planting a seed is easy. Tending to it so it can grow is the hard part.

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur 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 one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Family Secrets

Family Secrets. We all have them. And while the discovery of family secrets can initially be terrify 
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