Reed grew up with a camera in his hand. At first, the videos he made with his brothers were just for fun. But when their mom goes missing, the boys embark on a cinematic journey to solve the complex mystery of their mom’s disappearance.
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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. My guest today is Read Harkness, a filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. Reads is a story about turning his camera on a family, his family, specifically his younger half brother Sam, in a lifelong attempt to understand what happened, what went wrong, and how to make it right if such a thing as possible. Read's documentary, twenty five years in the making, Sam Now, is a powerful illustration of the way that art can drive us to a deeper truth. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood, just whatever the word landscape means to you.
I grew up on the West Coast. My parents divorced when I was a toddler, and my dad stayed in Seattle and my mom went back to her family home in Palo Alto, California. Most of my life I've lived along I five. I currently live in Portland, Oregon, but I'd say the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest is very much home to me. In Seattle. When I was about five, my dad remarried to Joyce, who came with my stepbrother Peter. He's about a year older than me. Not that long after they were married. They had two sons, Jared and then Sam, So in the summertimes when I was in Seattle, I had three brothers. It was a house full of boys.
And when you were with your mom in Palo Alto, were there any more kids in that household.
My mom remarried when I was about five, and a parallel thing happened, except she had two daughters. So I would go between one house majority women and one house majority boys. It was a really interesting experience for me.
So when Jared and Sam were growing up, you would see them mostly summers. Were there also sort of holidays in between?
Yeah, I'd be in Seattle every summer and pretty much every Christmas vacation. But I did school with my mom until I was a teenager and junior year. I did some part of high school in Seattle, and then right away after high school I moved up to Seattle.
When did you first pick up a camera?
M that's a gread question. What's funny is I remember not having a camera, but setting up scenes with cardboard and clay and creating these little sets. After watching those Will Vinton claymation specials, I would try to recreate those things, but I didn't have a camera, and I would just like move them around, all the clay around, and I'd like imagine them being animated. My first actual camera was a PXL two thousand made by Fisher Price. A friend borrowed it a week later and broke it. I think things like that kind of cement the passion. Sometimes. My grandmother had a VHS camera that she would let all of us cousins and my brothers use, and that was really the first like time where I felt like I can experiment. So grandma had a VHS camera that she kept in this old like floral suitcase, and I just remember the feeling of like un zipping that suitcase, getting the camera out, putting it huge VHS tape in and recording something with my cousins and brothers.
And what was it like for you being the filmmaker, being the director, if you will, Like, what did that do for you as a kid, you know, and sort of as a teenager when you began to really record it seems like just at every opportunity, we know, record as much of both life and sort of invention as you possibly could.
Yeah, I grew up being told no a lot, couldn't keep focus, and therefore, you know, was put into special ed classes and in a lot of ways maybe taught down to But I would go home after school and delve into projects, things like screen printing or airbrushing or taking apart machinery. I loved the experience of diving in and film all kinds of things. We shoot things like squibs and pretend we were getting shot. We would you know, create masks a lot of the time, like we like we were like casting our faces and you know, we're doing all these horror special effects. And then we just do things that were just spontaneous, like boys running around the neighborhood, raw energy stuff. And I think that that's the stuff that I started to get really interested in. And I think cameras and video became an interesting way for me to explore and I got to a place where I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna try to make my own films. I think before it was like goofing around and playfulness. And I saw my brother Sam, He's eight years younger than me, just sitting playing Nintendo on the floor, and I thought, Okay, Sam's really doesn't have anything planned for the day. I'm going to see if he'll do this this movie with me. And I had had this idea after watching Michael Aptead series. This is in ninety seven, the Up series. It's like a series is where they start, you know, seven year olds and then fourteen year olds, and they go on every seven years making a movie about the same group. And I thought it would be interesting if I started filming my brother as he's growing up, and I make this movie called Sam one, and then pretty much every year we make Sam two, Sam three, Sam four, Sam five. But in that the first one, I'm not approaching it like a documentary. I'm making a short film. It's a concepted film about you know, Sam's he's sick at school, he goes home, he's locked out of the house and he's like staring in the window in horror as an animated frog like eats his sack lunch that's on the table. It's very much an art film.
So Sam really became your subject. How old were you and how old was he?
Sam was around ten and I would have been seventeen or eighteen.
Why Sam, it wasn't Jared, it wasn't your step brother, It wasn't a kid from school.
I mean, for one thing, he was available. He was accessible to me, Like he was just literally sitting there on the floor playing video games. I was like, hey, come with me, and he was like okay. And I think that his personality is like he's down for an Adventure's something about me being up there in the summertime, you know, was always an exciting thing, I think for my younger brothers. And we loved connecting, we loved wrestling, we loved like being in the outdoors. And Sam was someone who he was the kid that he would fall down and he'd get right back up. And it was something a quality that I didn't have. I would fall down and stay down. I would feel it so hard if something happened.
Do you mean that both physically and metaphorically.
Yeah, I feel things really strongly. And Sam, he would fall out of like a treehouse, hit the ground with a thought, and then get right back up. Everybody's thinking, we need to call an ambulance. He had this confidence that it was really fun and also strange, and my cousin, and I called him Candy Bones because he just like he seemed like he could never get hurt. He was just bounced right back up. So I was fascinated by that because I'm not somebody that does that. I haven't broken many bones or anything, but I definitely like have been really hurt. And I think that if I fall off that highev, I would There's no way that I would have liked just got up like Sam did.
Contributing to this household of raw energy, as Reed calls it, is Joyce and her effervescence. She's a big and joyful presence in the boy's life. What they don't know at the time is that her big presence will soon become a big absence.
In my youth. Joyce was a really interesting step parent to me. I remember her being the one that would be like she would set out like a whole tray full of water balloons and it's like, all right, guys, water balloon fight, and then she'd be like throwing water balloons out of the kitchen window outside at us too. She had this quality that was like the super fun mom who loved to, you know, get the party started. She also was very creative and very like arts focused and like to you know, sort of encourage us to listen to music, you know, watch interesting content. She introduced me to Pee Wee's Playhouse. I remember, and I remember that being like, Okay, this is like kind of a weird kids show, but it's really awesome. It was just really interested in creativity and you know, playfulness, and she really seemed to like bomb with us around playful energy. She really brought a lot of that out. She inspired a lot of that, like you know, keep going and like she was really excited when I started making the Sam movies. You thought it was like the coolest project. I think that in hindsight, what's strange is that my youth and my in my childhood home with my dad and stepmom was normal. It was something normal to me. Now when I look back and I sort of like pick apart things, I can see patterns of things to come. Like I could see, especially in hearing stories from my dad, how he was in a lot of pain in that relationship, and that there would be things that you know, we're pretty manic where something really surprising would just happened out of the blue, and you know, Joyce would would have a really strong reaction and leave the house and as kids who are really engaged with other kids like I'm just I'm connecting more with my brothers than I am with with my parents. I wasn't really that aware of it.
Read and Sam continue to make their movies together. To watch their movies is to see the sheer joy of two brothers creating stories together creatively on fire. They both love it, but their regular filmmaking is disrupted in the fall of nineteen ninety nine when Reid moves to Portland for an animation job. Sam still occasionally comes to visit and stay with his older brother so that they can continue making their films. But then a different kind of disruption happens, a much bigger one. When Sam is thirteen, his mother reads stepmother, Joyce, disappears. It's the year two thousand and Reid doesn't have the details, but he knows something has happened. He hears from family members bits and pieces of where they think might have gone and if or when they think she's coming back. When Sam comes out to Portland to film and spend time with Reid, they don't talk about the fact that Joyce has vanished, and nobody has heard from her.
It had become this taboo in our family where nobody wanted to bring it up with Sam and Jared. They had a discomfort with the unknown. And then my dad was in a place where he really didn't want to pursue contact with her, so he wasn't encouraging conversation around it. And then the extended family, like my grandmother, my aunt Cindy, there was like these like ripples of like different people in the family are really harboring the emotion and anger of this and not knowing what to do. Cindy told me later that she kind of wanted to adopt Sam and Jared during those years, my aunt and it was really heartbreaking because our family is very tight knit, not just a nuclear family, but like the whole Harkness family, which is like a really big group of aunts and uncles and cousins, and we all congregate at my grandmother's house regularly. Were all It just seemed like the ideal support system regarding family, the whole It takes a village, you know. That was my family. They were like we were always together, we were always doing things. There was like open door policy at Grandma's. There was always cookies. There was always food in the fridge. The support system was there, it just was failing to operate around the taboo of you know, Joyce is gone, what do we do?
And do you think that that was because the larger net of the family, they were taking their cues from your father, and he really didn't want to talk about it, so then nobody talked about it. Like the silence became kind of contagious.
Yeah, I would say the silence became contagious. I think that. But there's a thing with men and boys not talking about difficult stuff generally, and I think in the Pacific Northwest it's like even more amplified. And then I think that you know, this is this is a family that's made up mostly of educators, even very specifically childhood educators. My dad is was a first grade teacher for thirty years, and my grandmother worked like her whole career in early childhood education, you know, learning about like the most pioneering methods, and these are really cool aspects that like really do help shape like who we are, these kind of free range kids that are like able to lean into adventuresome spirit and a lot of creative play. But I think something that comes with being in a classroom and being an educator and being that kind of observer to things that might happen. And I think I'm thinking of my dad here, Like I remember helping out in his classroom, so like I remember the challenge that he would face every day and how you know, just keeping order, keeping things, keeping things moving, keeping a smile on his face. I'm sure that this had had an impact. And I'm sure that there was many things. Many factors in his view were things that you just you didn't address, you didn't talk about, but you knew. So I think that he may have become conditioned to just keeping things going and being stable, yet not addressing some of the elephants in the room directly.
And it seems like both Sam and Jared both had very different responses to Joyce's disappearing. Jared, he wears it all kind of outwardly. He stops going to school. He's completely signaling you know, I am not okay. He shows it, whereas Sam bottles it up and nothing seems like it's really affecting him. And he has this great laugh and he just is always laughing it off in a way and performing and so they have these two really different ways of coping during those years.
Yeah, and this is the high dive. You know, Sam fell off the high dive in real life, as you know, an eight year old and landed on the on the cement and walked away. And he did the same thing emotionally when Joyce left, he sprung back. I think that also there's a factor here where, you know, seeing Jared being so depressed, just crumpled in a ball on the floor, not going to school at all. I think he was like he cut class for like sixty days or something ridiculous. He was like figuring out some way, Well, my dad was at work to you know, make it seem like he was at school. And I think Sam saw that and wanted to take the high road. What I saw was like he started associating with like, you know, the honorall kids, even though he wasn't Jared was the academic. Sam was definitely not the a student, and he started getting into school sports too. He was into wrestling and then he found the sport of ultimate frisbee, which ultimately became like his his big life passion and getting in with those groups, you know, those social groups where there's a lot of like camaraderie and like encouragement. I think that he was able to sort of ride this wave of like we can power through. I can like be physically strong, I can be mentally stronger than this.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Nearly three years past was no word from Joyce. Sometimes she sends packages though boxes full of random stuff. There's never a note or a letter. It all feels so impersonal that the boys speculate that the packages might not even be from her. The boxes have her name on them, but no return address, a clear indication that she does not want to be found. One year, during Christmas, one such box arrives. This time it contains homemade fudge.
The setting is It's Christmas, I'm visiting my family in Seattle. And the year before Sam and Jared and I on Christmas Day went up to the mountains and went sledding and had like one of my favorite days ever. The ski slopes were closed, and so we just like hyped up the ski slopes and were just like sledding down for what felt like miles. We had such a good time that we wanted to recreate that the next year and we had talked about this. Sam was so excited. Jared was immovable. He was just like on the floor. He's just like no, no, no, no, like just would not come with us. And we imagine both of these like really excited brothers just trying to like drag him, pull him, encourage him, you know remember last year all that, and he's not able to won't. So it's just me and Sam. Sam offered me some fudge and I said who made the fudge? And he's like Mom. And I was like, who's mom? And he's like mom, And I was like really, I was in such disbelief that that could be possible. So that's the same day that we go up sledding and it's just me and Sam and we're on this mountain. We're hiking up this old logging road and you know, it's snowing, and we've got these two sleds and we as we're hiking where we're imagining it, we're just gonna have the longest sled run ever. We're gonna like hike up as long as we can and then just sled all the way down the mountain, so it would be like a couple miles maybe, and we get to the point where it's like the sun setting, and we're like, okay, now we need to turn around, and we set our sleds down and we're like, let's race, and we're like one, two, three, go, and we realized that it's not steep enough to actually sled, So then we're walking back with a totally different energy. Instead of this idea that we're gonna hike all the way up to have a fun ride down, we're now just walking down. And on this walk we start talking about the next film we're gonna make. It would be Sam six, and Sam has these ideas. He's got these ideas about this Apple Ganger alter identity of his called the Blue Panther, who's just this goofy mock superhero who wears a wrestling mask and a too small wet suit. And he's telling me about how the Blue Panther is going to battle twin robots and his girlfriend at the time is a twin and so she's going to play this twin character, and then the twins are going to divide into more twins, so there'll be like four twins fighting the Blue Panther. And I'm thinking about this this conflict I'm thinking about this like idea of Sam and his alter ego and how he really wants to take on this, like I'm going to take on like four people, you know, And I'm just thinking about like how we've done a lot of really childish filmmaking. I love it. I love all the youthful filmmaking that we do. But I'm at a point, you know, where I'm kind of like, I want to do something serious. And so I just turned to him and I say, Sam, how about the blue panther his mom? And then he stopped talking and it was quiet and it's just footsteps in the snow, and then he comes back with yeah, And I was like really, and he's like yeah. We drive home and we talk about it a little more. I kind of put it away a little bit. It really felt like that was sort of the big taboo. It really felt like that might have really hurt Sam for me to say that, But he presented something different or unexpected, which was that he kind of wanted he wanted to engage with me around it, and so we continue to have conversations about what that would be like, and he wanted to go at his midwinter break, which was in February, so it's like two months away. He wanted to go and go in a road trip and try to try to find her, and I'm thinking that sounds really crazy, but I'm also thinking, hey, wants to go on a road trip with me, and this is kind of like also our dream, and this is also something that we a place where we thrive and even if nothing happens, you know, it might be a really good experience. I'm somebody who's like, you know, read a lot of like Joseph Campbell and been really interested in things like Rites of Passage, and I'm thinking about our relationship and I'm thinking about, you know how I always wanted a big brother, and I'm thinking, hey, this could be really cool. It's like I become a detective. I kind of put down my filmmaker hat, like I was like, Okay, this is not really going to be the blue Panther finds his mom. I have to get some pieces together. I have to actually figure out where we're going on this road trip. And that turns out to be a big challenge. I talk to like everybody I can find that new joice, and everybody's got different ideas. It's like, oh, maybe she's in Texas, maybe she's in California, she's a seminar somewhere. So there's like no concrete evidence, and like the person who seems to have like the most intel is my stepbrother Peter. Seems like he had done some research and he had found this like professor done in southern California who might have been in contact with her. But then he's like reluctant to give me his name, and I like, you know, I'm doing all these searches, and then finally we get this name of this professor and a really basic plan, because we don't have any other leads to where anyone else that knows her is. We're gonna drive down I five to southern California and we're gonna meet this professor on his office hours which are posted online, and just like approach him in person. This is like I didn't even have a cell phone. I'm just gonna walk in there and hopefully he'll just like see us and be like I can't turn you away and I'll help you. And along the way, Chwis' family lives in Medford, Oregon, so we'll we'll talk to them and see if they've heard from her.
Yeah, that's a particularly riveting part of your film where you you do meet with Joyce's adoptive mother and brother and sister, and it's such a stark contrast to the family scenes that we see of your family. It's like it's like it's like in a different key, it's in a different palette.
The Taylor family. Yeah, you know, I think of our the Harkness family is being very connected, very interested in play, very much like you know, there's kind of a lot of like laughter and smiling and kind of kind of an encouraging vibe. I couldn't help but feel that we talk about the sort of family secret part of like okay, nobody really wants to talk about Joyce leaving, But then meeting and talking to the Taylor family, they were so much more closed off. I mean they were they were like, they're honest, they're forthcoming. But her mom said when she left her kids, I just wiped her out of my life. When Joyce made the decision to abandon Sam and Jared, I abandon her basically, And that's something that has really hard to reconcile. That kind of attitude.
Read and Sam make it down to southern California to meet this mysterious professor with the camera on. Of course, Sam shows up at the university during the professor's office hours, but when they arrive, they learn that the professor is on an extended and semi permanent leave of absence. This had been their only lead. The door cracked open, now seems like it is slammed shut. It seems like this might be the end of the road, but they stay in the area and try other tactics. They post missing Mom flyers. At one point, Sam uses a paper megaphone to shout into the beautiful hills of California, mother, where are you mother? The stakes are high, but Read and Sam possess that harkness sense of play that their filmmaking has always allowed them. They are full of light and energy. The brothers are stymied, but undaunted. They're not ready to give up, not yet. They returned to a list they'd made of other phone numbers linked to the professor's name. There's one number on the list they haven't tried. Sam calls it, and there's a recording stating that the number has been disconnected, but a new number is provided on the recording. Sam calls that new number and Joyce answers the phone.
So that was so unbelievable. I'm still like, how did that happen?
Was there some part of you that thought, this is never going to happen, but it's going to be the journey. We're going to be on our hero's journey, and the journey is the destination. The journey is what matters. And then you actually do find her.
Yeah, I think that I had two voices. One it was like, hey, this will like, no matter what happens, this will be a beneficial experience.
You know.
What I was thinking was like I kept holding the idea of like no expectations, like reduce my expectations because I have no idea what's going to happen. I don't know if Sam's going to break down, you know, at like day one or day two or day five, and you know, it really felt like when we get there and the professor's on a leave, he's just like, you know, his offices has turned over someone else. Actually I started to break down. I started to be the one that was like losing it a bit and just like I don't know what to do now. And it was Sam who kind of held me up. And was like, come on, let's go through a frisbee and we go to the beach and we started tossing the frisbee and you know, while we're doing that, I'm starting to regulate a little bit and get to this place of like, oh, okay, wait a minute. We have this notebook full of numbers that you know, we could just start calling numbers, and Joyce answers the phone. And what happens next is so amazing because Sam doesn't ask her questions. He just fills her in on everything that's happened over the last three years in his life. Jared and I got girlfriends, I went to Japan, I started playing ultimate frisbee, Like he just wants to let her know what's been going on in his life. And then she invites us to come see her. She's not in southern California. She's actually in southern Oregon, and we immediately start driving up there, and this is like back to the energy of like, oh my gosh, this is the most exciting thing. I can't believe this's happening, like, but we're also nervous, and I remember asking Sam multiple times, like what are you going to say? What's gonna happen, and he's just like it's gonna be cool. It's like, we just got to go. He was so excited. And we get there and knock on the door and she answers and welcomes us in, and the professor's there with her. They're in our relationship, and it was like as if nothing had happened. She had like Sam's favorite sushi ready to go. She had like these sodas. I think it was like blue Sky sodas that she always had stocked in the fridge at her in Seattle, and it was like, oh, yeah, come over. It was like as if three years hadn't passed, and instead it was just, hey, I started in a relationship and I'm I'm down here now and like come on down anytime you're ready. It was like that. It was like, Okay, there was excitement, and there was like pure joy of reconnection, and then there wasn't. There wasn't anything further until we go to this coffee shop nearby her house and she just breaks down mostly to me why she left, in a kind of a really fast rant that I've watched so many times, and it's really emotionally charged and and complex and cutting and confusing and in the most clear way, like true to her thought process. It's like I had to escape the control of everybody. I do escape control.
The thing that really struck me during that time in the coffee shop was that she says with so much like with no charge, seemingly certainly no sense of apology. She says, I know I'm going to go down in history as the woman who broke up whole bunch of rules, But I'm happy. I had to save myself. And she repeats a number of times that she's happy, and I don't get the sense that, at least there that she's overly concerned about the pain that she's inflicted.
Yeah, this is one of the hardest things to understand in this story. I think that she felt like she was losing her mind and that she was going to start acting out in ways that would potentially be more hurtful than if she if she stayed. But you know this part of like, I had to get out, I had to go, and I walked through a portal and now I'm happy. Oof. It's so that stuff just like hit me in the weirdest way. I still can't really wrap my head around. I mean, because I have a mom who is very much connected and is like the kind of mom where it's like I could count on her pretty much always be there, Like she would be there if I was in the hospital tomorrow, she would be calling or be there. And to have this really different perspective of like, nope, I have to take care of myself and be gone and I'm happy without the part of just saying like and I'm sorry that I hurt you, and I take accountability for any pain or trauma. It just was so hard. And here I am, too, in this place where it's like I've basically made this deal with Sam to help him find his mom my stepmom, and then we get to these places where it's like emotionally really confusing for me, and I'm in this like place of I'm helping Sam, and I can't burn bridges. I have to sort of like follow his lead.
We'll be right back. Overall, for Sam, reuniting with Joyce is a positive experience. Finding Joyce is a big deal, and when the brothers get back home, they tell the whole extended family about their discovery. The family is gathered for someone's birthday and when Sam and reads share this monumental news. The tone of the room doesn't change as much as they expect it might. Nobody seems terribly impressed or surprised by this news. Nobody continues to talk about it. Do they not realize the gravity of what's happened? Do they not care? Everyone is just going about their evening, laughing and having a good time. At this point, Reid is moved to do something quite out of character. He comes out from behind the camera, He hands his camera to a relative, asks them to keep filming, and confronts his family. He's clearly uncomfortably full of emotion. What Sam did was so incredibly brave, and you're not talking about it? Why aren't we talking about it?
Yeah, it's like this reveal moment where I've played this role of I'm recording what's going on, I'm in taking I'm observing everything, and I'm definitely I'm a sensitive, emotional human who's taking it all in and I'm not exposing that in the filming because I want to allow for other people's stories and opinions and emotions to matter. And also when I'm trying to follow the story of Sam, who is emotionally disconnected like he struggles with connecting with his emotions, and I wanted to let that lead, let that kind of hero be When it's so easy to connect to somebody that has like strong emotions, I wanted to let that more nuanced thing live and breathe and be focused on because it happens for a lot of people. You know, it's very real for a lot of people to suppress their emotions. Anyway, We've just come back from finding Joye and it's too much for me, and the elephant in the room is too big. And I step up on the stage of the family room and I say something, and I'm trembling and I'm not sure what I'm doing. It's one of the most uncomfortable moments in my life. And I and I try to convey the power of what's happened, and it's really messing with the energy of the room, where everyone wants to keep things light, everyone wants to just kind of laugh and like, hey, let's not get awkward. But I realized that, you know that, like families are really uncomfortable addressing discomfort, Like families will avoid it all costs, addressing these kinds of discomforts. And I see that as a major oversight in family support just in general, like, as we raise our kids, as we are family to each other, how is it that we can't Maybe some families do this totally well. Anyway, my family wasn't operating that way, and it was a really uncomfortable experience for me to just be like, you guys, you guys, can you see this? You know? And I don't know, you know, even with me doing that, Like what the power of that was? I just know that I was, I was speaking from I was naming the skeleton in the closet. I was definitely like pointing at it when everybody wanted to turn away.
But the boys don't turn away from the situation or from Joyce. They continue to be in touch. She gets in touch with Jared too, and spends time with them both. Jared even moves in with her for a while. On the surface, things seem to be going really well. Having Joyce back in their lives is great for Sam, until it isn't. Some years later, the abandonment, the rejection, the secrecy, the childhood loss, it all catches up with him. Sam's in his late twenties and he's falling apart. He's afraid of relationships. He's afraid of abandoning others, and he starts to really wreck him with how destructive this experience has been for him. He feels he might be repeating some of the patterns his mother has instilled in him, hurting others without remorse. He writes Joyce a letter to convey this turmoil.
In that letter, he says something about how he misses the mom he had when he was eleven, and he asks her if she could be more present in his life because in this time, even though he's found her, you know, and it's been over a decade of them being reconnected, he doesn't see her making much of an effort. He's the one that always has to contact her and plan any visits with her, and she never was coming up to Seattle to visit Jared, Sam and Peter live in Seattle and Joyce's in southern Oregon, and he wanted her to, you know, just come up and spend time with the three of them, and that hadn't happened since the reconnection. So she comes up to do that. Sam, Joyce and I have breakfast together and everything's just kind of normal. It's like we're just chit chatting and things seem pretty good. She's in good spirits. Sam's in a good mood. It's nice. And then my dad calls Sam and Sam immediately like hangs up the phone like doesn't doesn't answer, and Joyce is like, who is that and Sam's like it was Dad, and then she's like why didn't you answer? And then he's like, well, you know, we're like having breakfast, and she's like he should have answered, and then she's like, let's go see him, and so we get in the car and head over to my dad's house. So we just head over and we get there and knock on the door and my dad's in his pjs and he doesn't recognize Joyce and Joyce thinks it's hysterical and we go in and it's so awkward. I feel like we just ambushed my dad on like Jackass the movie. And we go in and my dad is makes the connection. He's like, oh my gosh, it's Joyce and he's just like whoa, okay, hold on, let me get dressed. And he comes back out and he's really uncomfortable. Sam's like, this is getting really weird, and then he starts to talk to Joyce. I'm filming too. That makes things weird, right, So there's the camera, there's my dad hasn't seen Joyce in twelve years. He's caught off guard, and then they have a conversation and it's like, well, brought you here, and she's just like I just decided to come up and it just like and all this so I was like her story is like, oh, just any other you know, like I haven't seen you in twelve years, but like, oh, you know, just decided to drop by. And she's so giddy and like thinks it's like really funny and fun and my dad's like on edge. And then he calls his mom, mother Doris, who lives a few blocks away, and is like, Joyce is here, and so then we go over to her house and then it's like a bigger group and my grandmother's reaction to seeing Joyce is like total embrace. She gives her like a minute long hug and they're both crying and she's, you know, the ultimate grandma. She just welcomes us all in, is like let me put on some tea, and like everyone's gathered in the family room and it's just this sort of like the mood changes to like this kind of like happy gathering all of a sudden, and then something really bizarre happens, which is she sort of draws Joyce into this conversation about narcissism, and she happens to have this book out about narcissism, and she's like, that's not where you're at, right, is like, yep, that's me. And she like defines in her own words how this pattern that she has of getting whipped up into a tailspin and either hurting herself or other people.
Why did your grandmother have the book on narcissism out?
That's a really good question. She had the book out to give to another family member who was dealing with somebody who had narcissistic patterns, and then mentioned it. Somehow it came up maybe she had been thinking about this regarding Joyce, but she brought it up in a really friendly, kind curious way, and Joyce's response to it was like, yep, that's me. Peter ends up coming over it to my grandma's house too, and then it's like a bigger group. Some family members are called and decline coming. It's too much for them.
And Joyce seems so surprised by that. There's these really interesting interactions, like you know, Joyce at one point says to your mother, well, it did occur to us for a minute that you'd be surprised, and your father says, that's an understatement. And he also there's this moment where he actually like sort of slaps himself on the cheek a couple of times, like you know, am I in a fiction here? Like what is happening in this house? And it's like that's the voice of reason in that moment, right, which is like, this is wild. He hasn't seen his ex wife in decades since one day she just walked out, and now she's come back and she's laughing and everybody's laughing.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's what is that I'm trying to put my finger on this quality of how Joyce is in that scene, and it feels to me like this sort of clown, Like she's playing the role of clown in order to make things light, like maybe there will be some levity if I'm kind of fun and laughing and that that'll take off some of the seriousness and the pressure and the discomfort of this whole thing, and maybe it backfires and it's like super unreal and super ungrounding, and my dad is just like, what is going on? He does slap his face and he's like, is this some kind of fiction that's going on here? And Sam is having the same look on his face, And I'm like, am I, you know, like I'm not saying it much because I'm recording, but I'm like, am I contributing to this by having a camera? And you know, it definitely chills out at Grandma's house, But in my dad's house it is just a very very strange, like a practical joke feeling. Twelve years later, surprise.
This flippant tone is all too familiar to Read. The temperature in the room is so similar to how it had been when Read and Sam first told their family about finding Joyce. Things are there's laughter. The family defaults to levity for better or worse. At least this time, the elephant in the room is in fact in the room. Joyce is right there with them in person, and it's harder to stay cavalier, as evidenced by their grandma bringing up the book on narcissism and their dad slapping himself on the cheek. The levity, it seems, has worn sin as a coping mechanism.
Yeah, the elephant herself is in the room, and you really can see sort of like a little more the dynamic between Joyce and my dad. And then right after that, I'm in the car driving with my grandmother and my dad and I'm asking my grandmother what was that like for you to see Joyce after all these years, And she's like, it was really good. And at the same time, my dad he thinks I'm asking him the question, and he's speaking over her and saying it was freakish, for it was freakish, And my grandmother continues and she's like, it was just really good to connect with her after all these years, and there's this quality to it where it's like my grandmother's doing this radical acceptance thing where she's just like, I'm gonna embrace Joyce. I know that this is something that is like, has been a real pain in our family, and I'm just gonna embrace her. And then my dad is feeling pain and my grandmother is failing to connect with his pain and putting Joyce first, saying that like, I think she needs this. I think that she needs this connection with me. And I think about this and I'm thinking like my grandmother's hip. She's like done all these years of early childhood experience. She really knows what's going on, and she's like, oh my gosh, Joyce, narcissism, abandonment, adoption. She really hasn't had like warm, connective parental figures. However, I am that for her a little bit, and I can be that and I will play that role now. At the same time, in the same beat, she's failing to connect with her son over this pain, and my dad he's somebody who has felt abused by Joyce in their marriage. I feel for the whole situation. It's like, here's grandmother trying to heal some ancient wound with Joyce, trying to like, you know, provide this maternal role to her. Joyce didn't feel like her adoptive parents really loved her. She was put up for adoption at eighteen months by her mother never reconnected with her. And then here's Grandma Dorris, who has been a mother role to her mother in law role to her, saying like I accept you, I welcome you back in. Yet my dad is very distraught and she's failing to see that there in the car. This is a further level of elephant in the room. I go with Sam later that night, he's making his Halloween costume. I've been talking about clowns and all this. You know, Joyce might be putting on a little bit of a show for Halloween, but I don't know. And I asked Sam how that was, and he's like, the jury's out. I'm going to put off thinking about it. That was too much for me. It definitely wasn't what I expected. I never expected Joyce to like be at Grandma's house ever again. So he's just he's just really confused, and this is another level of kind of waking up. I think for Sam. I think that there's many levels of fantasy involved in this story. You know, some are like, hey, I'm going to be the Blue Panton. I'm going to like you know, I'm going to go and like find my mom, you know. And then there's levels of like I can tolerate this, like this is something I can handle. And then there's when my mom comes up, It'll be like old times. And I think that that's the most sad part for me, is just like the holding onto hope of like that he will get his mom back in the way that he hopes. You know that this sort of like like when we were all living together, like when he used to be easy, and you know, I'd see her all the time and we talk all the time. And I think that that's the sad reality is just that like the fantasy that you know that Sam seems to hold around it over time is like slowly crushed. And I think that what's extra sad about it for me is just thinking about how knowing two stable parents, my mom and my dad, I can kind of like refer back to nostalgic times with them and kind of see a through line to now. When I think about Sam and Joyce and Jared and Joyce, they think about how this disruption and time really did cause a permanent shift that would need like a great amount of repair work to get back to some level of trust and security. I think that Jared got that a bit more than Sam by living with her and like really kind of immersing into her new world. Sam did not get that, and it's been really challenging, and his process with her has been more of a slow drip. And they do, you know, they'll do phone calls maybe once or twice a month and talk about the weather, but nothing to tend not to talk about like emotional things or like about the abandonment or about the movie. They just keep it really basic. And then when they do have visits, which is is like every few years now, it seems like at the fastest clip, it's like visit for a day and then leave. It's like, in Sam's words, about as much as they can take of each other.
And this was Sam choosing, really choosing himself for a period of time, stop being in touch with Joyce and then now having this much much more distanced, much more sporadic relationship with her. I mean, there's a moment where she says, because he's distanced himself that she felt that he was punishing her, And it's said in such a kind of befuddled way, like why would he do that?
Why would he?
Yeah, Sam does choose himself, and in so doing he builds a life that, while certainly shaped by Joyce's abandonment, also makes meaning out of his emotionally complex and traumatic experience. This is all we can do, right, take what life has handed us and make something true, something real, something powerful from the ashes. By the time Read's film ends in twenty twenty, Sam has a longtime partner. Bailey Reid asks the couple whether they think they'll have kids. They look at each other in a way, and then they say that they're thinking about fostering and adopting. That's the way they want to make a family. And that has also become Sam's life's work. He does youth social work with unhoused kids.
It's so hard to know these things, right, I mean, you know, Sam choosing to go into social work, Sam choosing to work with young people who also are experiencing like alienation from their parents, street youth. I think of this. I think of, like, how how many youth are on the street that are like disconnected from their parents, and why all those trust issues, all these kind of same things. Sam works with people like that. Now he's doing domestic violence work, where he'll work with like high school sports teams and like help them understand relationship concepts. He works with survivors and domestic violence and does an amazing work. The through line is so incredible. It's like his personal pain, like this really big thing in his world is what he's most committed to giving back and where he feels the strongest calling. I find that really interesting and I'd be interested to know if that's If that's true for a lot of people in social work.
I think it's true in my experience on this podcast and just in my life of hearing a lot of stories of a lot of trauma, that the capacity to make meaning out of it is what saves us. And there are multiple ways of making meaning out of trauma. Some people make art out of trauma. Some people write books out of trauma, some people make films out of trauma. Some people go into the healing arts out of trauma, some people go into psychology and social work out of trauma. And you know, it strikes me as such an incredibly healthy adaptation, because if we can make meaning out of something, then we've stripped it of its power over us because we've made something good out of it.
Yeah. I like that, And I like how Sam sort of uses this as a pattern breaking in his life too, where he's like actively engaging in other people's stories and learning about all these different tools and methods for how to talk about relationships, like just being on the pioneering side of relationship conversations, and that that is providing for him this understanding, you know, for work that he needs to do for himself. It's keeping him aware of it. Yet at the same time he says things like, I think a lot of my life has been helping other people, so I don't have to face my own shit, you know, like, oh, this person has it really rough, I'm gonna focus on their thing. But also I see the awareness of trauma, childhood trauma, the awareness of of like patterns in life, and how you know, he starts replaying some of the patterns that were handed down and how he's he begins to actively say things like I want to break I want to be the one to step out of this. So these are the things where it's like what does it take to truly break a generational pattern? But you know, we've got Joyce's mother has in Japan put her up for adoption. There's like maybe a first observation of an abandonment, and then she's adopted to this American family who Joyce claims didn't really love her or connect with her in a way that would bring about security, and so there's another level of abandonment. And then Joyce you know, of course, like you know, gets to this point where she abandons her own children, and then Sam comes to the awareness that like he's capable of abandoning people. He's really scared of that idea. And he has just kind of had these relationships with girlfriends where he's just sort of walked away with no feeling no oh, I just heard that person. And he has become aware of it. He's done therapy and he's like kind of like, oh my gosh, what is this? So you know, lifetimes, lifetimes are happening. And then we get to Sam and then Sam's like, how do I address this? And you know, and I'm a part of that too, with like, hey, I'm I'm recording this all and I'm putting it out so that you have it and also so that other families can look at this. And then there's the patterning in the Harkness family too, where it's like, what are the ways in which we support these patterns that aren't seen? And I think that that's the elephant in the room stuff, the secrecy, the part where it's like it's uncomfortable to talk about some things. That's where the things are allowed to ride on forever unless we look at them, unless we feel the fear and the pain of them. I think that they just they'll just ride on. They'll stay there. The skeletons will stay there. They'll stay right there in the closet unless you open the door and look at it and think about what it is, and then and then it can potentially be free.
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 Rider. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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