Girl Planet

Published Nov 12, 2020, 10:08 PM

For the first 40 years of her life, Jennifer Finney Boylan figured the price of living her truth would be much too steep; by opening up about who she really was, she assumed she’d lose everything, including the love of her life. But over time, it became clear that hiding who she really was had taken its own toll—on herself, on her family, and on her marriage.

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Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. So let's let me paint a scene for you. Say it's four, I'm fifteen or sixteen years old, and everyone's gone out for the night. And there I am, this slender, feminine creature with shoulder length blonde hair, and I'm standing at a high window in my parents haunted house, big old, drafty, creepy house in what was once the country around Philadelphia. And I'm standing in a window and I'm looking down and I watched the pale lights of my sister, who's the last person to leave the house. She drives off on the Volkswagen. Now I'm alone in this house and I'm looking at the clock. Let's say it's so now I've got a couple of hours. So we sweep down the creaking steps from the third floor, and I grab a dress and all the kind of body patting that I'm going to need, and some pantios and some makeup, and you put your clothes on quick, and then you kind of stand before the mirror and you do your makeup and you look in the mirror and you know, I mean I was. I was a very feminine looking person, even when I wasn't on farm, and you know, for all the world there's a relatively normal looking and I know normal is a charged words, so maybe I should be careful. But there I am. If i'd left the house, which I would never have done that I've left no house, maybe you wouldn't have looked twice at me, like there's some hippie girl, you know. And I'm just kind of looking in the mirror with the sense of both profound joy because there's the person that I am. There is the girl that has lived in my heart but I never get to see except when no one is home, but also profound sorrow because I know I can't be this person, because I know I can't live in the world as myself. That's Jennifer Finney Boylan, writer, professor, transactivist, author most recently of Good Boy, My Life in Seven Dogs, as well as the classic memoir She's Not There. Jenny's is a story of the deepest kind of secret, the kind that we hold in a wordless place, the kind that will not let go of us, the kind that will force its way out from its depths until we release it, and when we release it, it finally releases us. I'm Danny Shapiro, And this is family secret. It's the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. It's like I've got the nuclear codes here and here it is. Here's the way. If I wanted to, I could blow up my life. All I'd have to do with you to walk outside, and I'm knowing that, you know, my parents are coming back from their dinner with their friends. My sister might come back. Anything could happen. Maybe my friends are going to stop by without telling me. Are all the doors in the house locked? They might not be. And sometimes people would come home and I have to, you know, do a quick retreat. But on this particular night, let's just say, when all is said and done, they put everything back, put the earrings back in the mother's jewelry box, put the clothes back on the hangars where they're supposed to come from. Then I hear the car coming in in the driveway, and my mother comes up the stairs, and of course I've I've now washed off the neckup, and I've done everything I have to do to look like myself again, as if you know, nothing has happened. And mom comes in, Did you have a nice night here? Yeah? What did you do? Well? I watched Carol Burnett show. Okay, we'll see you in the morning, and that was my reality. You know that I've had this just unbelievably powerful, both joyful and tragic experience alone in the creepy old house, and then everything would have to get restored, like nothing had happened to hide the scene of the crime, you know, And I'd wonder, was this dress facing this way or that way on the hangar? Will anyone know that I moved these ear rings? Describe the landscape of your childhood, Well, I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and it was a place where a engle road had been carved through a pretty deep pine forest, and our family lived on one side of the road and on the other side of the road. We're just lots and lots of trees that went on forever and through that forest. It sounds very like I don't know, Middle Earth or something, but through that forest there was an old I guess a cobblestone road from a hundred years before, and a lot of old stone houses that had been abandoned, and on some levels it was like the coolest thing if you were a kid, to be able to just you know, get up in the morning and disappear into those woods. And sometimes I have the dog with me. We had a Dalmatian named Playboy, who was like the worst dog in the world, but you know, not to me, and so I would disappear into those woods. In some ways, it was very much kind of a world of imagination. I was left on my own a lot as a kid, and there's a way it's funny. It's the one way in which I look back on anything. Wow, what a kind of a sad childhood, you know, it just kind of because I spent most of my time kind of alone, wandering around this forest. But on the other hand, being alone is just how I liked it. It's the place I actually wanted to be. And if my parents or my sister had actually asked me to take part in their world, which was a really different different from mine, it would have been have been nice to have been asked, but then I probably would have given him the slip. Anyway, Were you and your sister close in age, Um, she's about a year and a couple of months older than I am, So yeah, we're pretty close n Eche, but very different temperament. You know. So I was a boy then and and she was not. She was a great equestion, She wrote courses. She was just brilliant at you know, as a kid. She became one of the best writers in all of Pennsylvania. And it was you know, it's kind of like the stories you hear of people who have a sibling who is like a gymnast or an ice skater or I don't know, something, I was some kind of obscure athletic talent, you know. She like she was what's the thing with the brooms in the Olympics curling that that you throw of this little tattle and then people like go ice skating in front of it and they're like sweeping the ice. Well, it was like that. It was like being the sibling of a world class curler, and uh, their lives revolved around that. From the time I was you know, nine or so, the family would often disappear on the weekends to go to you know, horse shows wherever. My sister would right around in a ring from and um, meanwhile I was out in the woods, living in another world. My mother was an immigrant to this country. She um was born in East Prussia, which is a country they don't have anymore. She came to this country in the twenties and her English was not very good. She spoke German then, and she to the story of coming back from church and h she didn't understand. Why did American pastors say that your head was going to run over? What is her head running over? And it's like what he said, Yeah, he said, my cup runneth over. Well, for those of you who don't speak German, whause most people copped as the German word for head. So when she heard mine cup was running over, she was very confused. She was the second oldest of seven children. My grandmother, her mother was essentially a single mother. My grandfather would show up every year or so, get her pregnant, and then disappear again. And they lived at this kind of unbelievably hard life on what they called a dirt farm in New Jersey. And yeah, my mother had this unbelievable safe and optimism and buoyancy. And it's always kind of amazed that sometimes we think of people who are kind of cheerful and buoyant as people who are superficial and people who have to them, and yet my mother had being experienced about the most shocking poverty and the and the most shocking abuse from her um father and other men in that farm town, responded to all of that with this kind of steely buoyancy. And when we were sarcastic teenagers years and years later, decades later, the worst thing that anybody could call my mother was Glinda the good witch. That was that was their sarcastic name from my mother, because she very much had that thing, that Billy Burke thing. She was the good witch. My father was irish. His father died young also, and his mother remarried, each time a whole bunch of times, each time more disastrously than the one before, And eventually, by the time he was nigh school, he was living with friends back So both of my parents grew up essentially with a single parent and raised by friends and or by themselves. And my mother had said she would never get married. She just thought there's too much evil from men. And then she met my father. She was I think almost forty, she'd become a book buyer. She finally got out of New Jersey and invented a life for herself what was then called a book buyer back when books were sold on the first floor of department stores. She was the person who chose what books were for sale. And so she had this kind of glamorous publishing career in her thirties where she would take the take the train to New York City and have lunch with Bennett's surf. And she gave all that up when she was I think almost forty. My father was almost thirty. But there was like eleven years apart from them, and so here's this German woman marrying this Irish intellectual. Even now I still look at I think, what bizarre marriage. But they just a journ each other. Their names were Dick and Hilda Guard. I think that's probably important dimension. Also, I remember, as kneeds, You're being a little stone lying on the couch one day, thinking my parents are named Dick and Hilleguard, like there's no hope for me. Like my parents are Dick and hillde Guard, like whoa man. They had my sister and they had me, and we lived in the country in Pennsylvania. My father had wanted to be a medieval historian, but you know, there was no money for him to go to grad school, so he became a banker, and banking never I think quite treated him with the same love I think that medieval history would have. But he was the kind of quiet, quietly, funny, bookish men, and he loved his wife, he loved his kids, and he loved dogs. We had one terrible dog after another. So your father passed away when you were twenties six, I think, yeah. He had he had melanoma. He first got it when I was in uh, I think ninth grade, and they had a mole taken off and he was okay for six or seven years, and then another mole taken off, and then he was okay for three years or four years, and then uh and then the last time you got it, you know, as the saying goes, they didn't get at all. And so he was in remission I think three times, and then when it finally laid him low, he was he was gone within the year. So yeah, it was in my twenties. Do you ever think about what it would have been like to come out to your father, Um, I guess I've thought about that. I think it would have gone badly, so I don't think about it a lot. Um. He was an open minded man, but He also had a very strong sense of the consequences of your decisions and if they affect other people. One of his best friends from high school who was called my uncle so and so, you know when I was a kid, that's he was one of those people that you weren't related to that you called your uncle. Um divorced his wife and married someone else midlife, the way people do. And my father never gave me and never spoke to him again, like it was dead to him because he had four children. And my father just felt, you know, you've done you've done the wrong term, so he cut him off. I guess that's a fine line between having between morals and moralistic. Also in their circle that you know, they just didn't know gay people, they didn't know queer people. It's a very repressive culture. And um, I mean they had a two or three friends that were just obviously gay. You'd have to be completely blind not to know that these men were gay. And yet nearly to her dying day, and my mother would never would always say, oh, well, I hope ed finds the right woman some day. I'm like, um, but you know, I guess that's just the culture that they grew up with in the thirties and forties. You know, my life is not easy, but it was a lot easier than it would have benified grown up in that era. I know you've said that when you think about your childhood, you do you think of it as a boyhood? Do you still feel that way or The reason that I always tiptoe around that is because, um, I'm aware that for other transgender women, they have a narrative which I respect and which is real, and the fact that my experience is a little different doesn't mean that there's should not be respected. You know, there are a lot of transgender women who would say I went through transition when I was thirty, but I was always a woman, And I mean, and that's true for me also in a kind of spiritual a in a kind of private way. But you know, I also I lived in the world as a boy. I mean, I knew, I knew what the truth was about who I was from a very very early age, but I didn't tell anybody because I figured, I don't know, like, I didn't have the language for it. It It just seemed insane, and there were I just didn't know that there were other transgender people in the world. So I kept it private and I lived as far as the rest of the world could see as a boy. And I didn't go through transition until I was prety, you know, So I did live in that body for all those decades and socialized male. That doesn't make me less of a woman now post transition, and there's nothing to apologize for. But I do think of it as a boyhood, you know, not a boyhood like the other boys that I knew, that's for sure. But you know, it was what it was, and it wasn't the life that I wanted, and it wasn't a life that I understood, and it just felt weird, man, I mean it was. It was a really strange way to be in the world because not only do you have the sense of yourself of being different and having a problem that you can't solve, but you also have a pretty big secret. You have a an atomic secret that you don't have a language for. You don't know how to to share your what's in your heart, your most fundamental truth with the people who love you, and it's a pretty hard thing for an eight year old to carry around on their shoulders. So my way of dealing with it was just to become this tremendously hysterical person. You know, I was disruptive in school. I was it was pretty funny at times. Some of my material was pretty good. But I also I was just kind of driven to constantly be creating, you know, b Arnie hand over foot. You know, I would make up songs, and I make up stories, and I would go charging off into the woods and invent you know, a whole other other worlds that felt like a safer and more forgiving place to be than the world I lived in. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. It's so interesting, Jenny, because you're talking about in not having the language for something that is so huge, but literally does not having the words, not having ing the terms, not having access to being able to describe it, not just two other people, but to yourself. It strikes me listening to you that that's also the birth of a writer in a certain way, because at least the way that I always think about the impulse to write is finding the words, finding the language, or intervening in the dynamics of loss or or childhood where there wasn't the ability back then too to speak, Yeah, and to and to find a narrative of your own life that makes that makes sense, that can actually change the payoffs of your the life that you're experiencing into something that has form and function and logic. It remains to this day a very difficult thing to explain to other people who don't feel the thing that you feel, and so because they don't feel the thing that you feel, they assume that what you feel must be something you don't feel, or it must be something that that is. You're just crazy, you're just wrong. The experience of a lot of transgender people, you know, it reminds me of that. There's I think it's a heny youngman joke where guy isn't it the doctor and he says, doctor, doctor, I've I get a terrible paint every time I go like this, what should I do? And the doctor says, don't go like that. You know, you know, and people will argue with you. They'll say that, well, your chromosome says you're this, so that's that you should I've been tweeting with you for thirty seconds. But I understand your life, but I than you do. I think to some degree, there's also a desire to to explain things to other people. And I think in my my first memoir, Um, She's Not There, which is an account of transition, there's a tone and I mean I wrote that book going on twenty years ago now, but there's a there's a feeling to that book now when I read it, I feel a tone of apology or justification to it, because you know, in those days, you know, twenty years ago, there was so little um discourse around trans identity that you know, I think people felt like I'd made the whole thing up myself. So a lot of that book, a tone of it from author to reader, is a tone of someone saying, please forgive me, I'm so sorry, uh for for being myself and for feeling the things I felt. I hope you'll toss this out with me. And it's the thing looking at it now seems really I don't want to say dated, but it's certainly I wouldn't write anything about translegdentity with that attitude. Now now I've my attitude be much more like, well, I'm here on the planet. Isn't this great busness a gift? How lucky was I to experience the world and in these different ways? And if you can't ride on this train with me. Well, that's okay, we'll stop the train. We'll throw you off. When a difference twenty years makes well, I think it's just the result of people coming out. It's the result of more and more people being known. It's the result of their being more different kinds of transgender people in the public eye. I mean, it used to be that kind of nice, possible. Middle aged white ladies were the only transgender people you saw, except for drag queens who interacted with the world in a very in a very different way. But you know, now we've got all kinds of trance stories out there. We have a saying, um, if you've met one transgender person, you've met one transgender person. And I'm not ignorant, I know that this is all still really new for a lot of people, and a lot of people are still catching up, but increasingly and to our children's generation, um, this is this is just kind of the way things are, and it's just not that big a deal. And in a way, that's sorrel. I always wanted to live in a world where I was born, where it was just not that big a deal and I could just be myself and no one would have to have a heart attack about it. I've often thought that the change in my life was not a change about going from male the female. The thing that changed me was going from a person who had a secret to a person who doesn't have a secret. And if you have a secret, it is like having a Saint Bernard. It's something like an invisible Saint Bernard that that follows you everywhere, like you can't leave the house unless the secret comes with you, and the secret has to be tended, you know. I remember being in like a social situation when I was like sixteen, and somebody mentioning um a transgender person, although that wasn't the language that was used back in those days, but someone would say that word and I would freeze, and my heart beat a triple and sweat would start to pour down the signs of my face because I knew that I then had to imitate a person for whom this topic was of no special interest, and sometimes it was very hard to remember what those people acted like. But it means you're also not telling the truth of the person that you love by the person you love. Jenny's referring to her wife. Did the two of them have been together? Well for a very long time, and what a ride it has been. I mean, so I've been married now for what thirty two years I think now um Dee and I have been been together, so it's twelve years as husband and wife and twenty years as a wife and wife. Well, for the twelve years that I was married before I came out, my wife died. Whom I love I did not know because how did she not know? Because I didn't tell her? Why did I not tell her? Because I didn't tell myself because I didn't want it to be true, because I figured if I said this out loud, it would open the door to a life of marginality and suffering and violence and possibly murder. I mean, in the stories of transgender people that I knew. That's what happened to people. I didn't know there was a way of being in the world. So I had to keep the secret from myself. But it also been keeping the secret from the person that I love. You know, the whole point of being in love with someone and embarking upon the adventure of marriage and sharing a life together. It's pretty hard when you're trying to keep the secret from that person. But then you're also trying to keep that secret from yourself. It's crushing. And there are people, they're millions of people. And it's not just transgender people either. There are millions of people in the world who are burying that secret and are bearing it every single day. We're bearing some secret, something that if they admit to themselves, will atomize the world they live in, or think that it will. And I think for men in particular, there's a sense that so I was I was brought up, is that is your job to protect the people around you. And you know, not not just women, but you know especially women and children that you have children, that it's your job to stand between the people you love and trouble. If there are arrows coming in, you want to be in a position that they're going to hit you and let the people that you love escape. So to be the person who's suddenly responsible for trouble, to be the person who's actually the fact of your life, the secret that you reveal, be the source of the trouble, it's just a very very agonizing and terrible thing. And so again for me, that was the big thing. It wasn't it wasn't being trapped so much as it was having something that I hadn't been honest about to the person that I care most about in the world. So what was the turning point for you? After twelve years of what you're describing as a kind of knowing but not fully articulating to yourself that this was the case, There was a day which i'll describe to you. But before that day, I mean, which was like a turning point. I would describe it more though as an erosion rather than a decision. It wasn't like one day I said, you know, now I shall change my name to Tiffany Shaniel and I you know, and I walked down the stairs and sequence. It wasn't like that, although actually I know, I hope people who have done that too, and that's you know, and that's fine, But um, you know, you can think about it if you're walking along the road with a stone in your shoe, a little, tiny little stone in your shoe, and you could probably walk a mile or so. In fact, here's the story. We lived in Ireland in our kids were little, they were under the age of five or six, and I loved living in Cork. I had a job teaching at University College Cork, and one day, we had some people over and doorbell rang and somebody turned quickly in a wine glass fell onto the floor. In fact, maybe the wine glass had fallen days before. But what remembers that that there was a tiny little chart of the glass, like you know, the size of like just a tiny little sliver of a fingernail. Anyway, I must step on that as I went to answer the door. So I got this little sliver of glass in the heel of my foot, which is so little that I probably didn't even recognize it at the time. And uh, you know, a couple of days later and they were thinking, oh, my foot kind of hurts, but you know, I'll just keep walking, because what are you gonna do, you know. And then a few days later went by and it got worse and worse, no worse. And you know, I walked all over that city because that's what you wouldn't know what you do when you live, especially there there was not a lot of driving cars. I walked everywhere, and slowly but surely I realized that I was going to have to go to the hospital and I had this thing taken out of a foot well, which I finally did. And I'll spare you the description of the hospital in Cork, Ireland, which was surprisingly the opposite of modern. It was really gruesome and uh, to get this thing out of my foot, they had to do an operation and there was not good anesthetic and it was really, really horrible. And finally my wife picked me up in the car the end of the day and we went to go get because there were some pain killers, so she went into the apothecary to get the pain killers. When she came out, she found me in the car sobbing my brains out, sobbing harder than I think she maybe had ever seen me cry in a dozen years of marriage and knowing each other for twenty years before that. And it was clear to me what I was crying about wasn't the fact that I did I'd hurt my foot. What I was crying about is the fact that that was my life. I've been walking year after year, day after day with this little thing that I was caring that I was pretending I didn't hurt, but it did hurt, and you, I mean, and finally you just reach to day where you're like, I can't walk another step. We got back from Ireland and I started therapy with the following autumn. So you know why, then the real question is why not years and years and years before. Why did it picks along? I don't know. Because I was a coward, because I was afraid, um, I felt like I had too much to lose. You know, it's making me think of one of my favorite quotes is from Gnostic Gospels, from the Gospel of St. Thomas, which goes, um, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. That's right. I remember that St. Thomas. You're good, Danny Shapiro. I mean you make me think about the spiritual aspect of all this. I have become more faithful and spiritual. I think post transition um in part because I got to see the power of what love can do. Because when I did finally tell my wife t D it wasn't an easy passage, but in the end she decided that she was going to stay with me, which I didn't know she would, And my children continued to love me, and in some ways, the thing that surprised me most was when I came out to my mother, who was when I came out to her. She was in her early eighties, evangelical, Christian, conservative, Republican women in the Philadelphia suburbs, and you know that pretty good feeling. This is not going to be her idea of a good way to improve our relationship. But you know, I told her, and I said, I'm sorry I didn't tell you this when I was six years old, but I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore. And you know, around on queue, I started weeping. And then my little mother got out of her chair and she sat down next to me, and she put her arms around me, and she said, I would never turn my back on my child. She said I'll always love you. And I said, yeah, okay, but when everyone finds out that I'm your daughter now, isn't that going to be embarrassing and a scandal. And she said, well, quite frankly, yes, But she said I will adjust. And she wiped the tears off my eyes, and she said love will prevail, and she quoted First Corinthians, these three remain hope, they ape and love, but the greatest abuses love. And she died nine years ago at the age of but I still carry that around. Love will prevail, because in my life love has prevailed, and that's part of what I think has turned me towards having a faith again. We'll be right back. I've often thought of Jenny's life and what happened in the aftermath of her transition as really at its core being about the triumph of love, the human struggle to become ourselves and to trust that the people who love us will love us down to the core of our authentic being, because isn't that what it's all about in the end. So now sixty two years old, now i'm generously you could call me a middle aged woman. And the person that I dreamed of being except older is the person that I see in the mirror in the morning. And I don't even think about it. I mean I don't even think about gender most of the time anymore. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I read the paper, I write my column for the New York Times, which is usually not about transgender people. So the thing that was once the most profound impossible thing in the world is now the thing that is. It's not gone, but it is receded. And in some ways I'm living the life that I never thought was even remotely possible. And part of that is because I was very lucky. Part of it was because I was surrounded by people who chose when they were given the chance to love me, rather than two run away. Three years ago, my older child came to me and told me that they too were treads and had already embarked upon transition. And I think back to when I told my mother, and my mother told me that loved will prevail, and she put her arms around me. My reaction to my own child was in fact, possibly less generous. I was freaked out. I thought, did I do this? Did I somehow make this look like it was fun? And I was oddly or maybe maybe not so udly at all. I guess my first thought was just that my life has been really, really hard, and I don't want I didn't want my child's life to be hard and the way that my life was hard. But then, I hope not too much time later, I understood that it wasn't about me for once, and also that the world that my daughter is living in is different. And in part can I say this, in part because some of the work that I had a hand in doing, in part because a lot of transgender people over the last twenty years have lived their lives out and without shame, and have told the stories of their lives so that my daughter's generation lives in the world which is more forgiving and free. And when she came out, she didn't spend a year or two going around to everybody she knew apologizing and asking for forgiveness. She went on Facebook and said, well, I'm trance. This is my new name, and most of her friends were like, oh, good for you. So that's what happened in twenty years. It's astonishing and wonderful. I mean, I my son is twenty one, and I see that in his world and his friends and for the last six seven years since high school, you know, just a kind of very very different way of thinking and being in the world, and a lack of a need to put people in and people's identities and genders and um sexualities and ways of identifying themselves into boxes. They just don't do it. Yeah, you know what, I wonder, Danny, I wonder if I were fourteen now, would I still be hiding myself? Would I still you know, head off into the into the woods with the dog and kind of play the game I used to play, which was Girl Planet, which I would pretend that I was an astronaut who crashed on a alien planet where the atmosphere turned you into a girl. Would I spend you know, a Friday night hurriedly putting on, you know, my sister's hippie dress, or would I be as cool as my children are and their friends are and and say, yeah, sure, I'm trance, you know whatever. I don't know. It might just be that I'm naturally. It seems weird to say a shy person for someone who is so constantly in the public eye. But um, I think I've always cared a lot about what other people think, which I know is stupid. You know, I've always sought for approval outside of myself, which is I know, stupid. Um And I've always wanted to fit in, which is I know stupid. Well, I don't know. I think I would be different. But it's funny now to look back on all this, because the world is more in some places to some degree, a more forgiving place. But you know, it happened. I mean, it happened because of the work that I was part of, but it also happened, you know, I don't want to sound two melancholy, but I think a little bit about that scene at the end of Lord of the Rings when Frodo was taking his leave of his friends and he says, we set out to save the shire, and the shire has been saved, but not for me. And he says, you know, they're sometimes the work you do, it's not work that's going to benefit you. It's going to benefit the people who come after you. And now I know I'm sounding Lachrymose here, but no, Actually it makes me think back to what your mother quoted to you from the Corinthians. I'm a very lucky person, and I'm grateful for all the gifts I've been given, but a lot of the gifts have been given about like curses when I was younger. It is hard for me sometimes not to look at people who didn't get the gift of difference and think it would have been easier, wouldn't it to live other life? But on the other end, then I would have been boring, And it's hard to appreciate things you don't have to fight for, including happiness, including love, including the gift of your own soul. What's that old gospel song you've got to walk that lonesome valley. You've gotta walked up by yourself. So I mean that's what we do. We walked that lonesome valley and and yeah, sure it's between from my In my case, it was, it was between the worlds of men and women. But it was also the valley of having a secret and being unknown and being known. It's the valley between having the self that you see be an absolutely amazing secret, is known only to you, caught a glimpse in the mirror fleetingly for you know, a few minutes once every few weeks, and it being just the kind of Quotitian fact of your life that you don't think about. You get up and you get downstairs and you have some coffee. My mother held on to that haunted house until her nineties. She died in the house. Actually she lived in it for forty years, and I remember, long past transition. I had this funny experience where I went back the year before she died, and then I didn't know she was going to die, but she was ninety four at the time. So I got a job teaching at a little college. They offered me a job to teach their first semester, and I thought, well, okay, and so I took my leave. I got permission from my wife and my kids to live with Mom for the false semester, and the taught school at the little college called Arth Sina's College. And I come home and I'd make mom lamb chops for dinner, and we drink at and then we'd watched Jeopardy, and it was like, after all those decades, all of the turmoil was done. It was just a mother and her daughter, you know, eating lamb chops. And remember one night, there's a ghost that you would sometimes see on the third floor of that house. There was a mirror and another sounds insane, but I wasn't the only one who thought there was a mirror. And you'd see this kind of pale figure of this kind of older woman in a long white like a nighty or something. She always be looking over your shoulder and then you turn around there be no one there. It was bad when you'd see her. We wouldn't happen a lot, you know, once a year, maybe once for a couple of years. You can see it. A friend of mine once saw her drift through the guest treatment in the middle of the night while he was asleep, but usually she was in the mirror. And I don't know what the story was of this person. Later on I hired actually like Ghostbusters to check it out, what the paranormal investigators, and they're like, well, you got something here, we don't know what it is. And I should also say I don't really believe in ghosts, because you know, I kind of think it's bullshit. But and they my mother dinner, I cleaned up dinner, I went upstairs to my high school bedroom and I went to the bathroom and then out of the corner of my eye, I saw this figure in the mirror, and I thought to myself, Holy ship, there she is again. After all these years, that ghost is still here. And then I turned around, and of course you can see where the story is going. It was just me. Now, I was the older woman in the ninety you know, and I kind of wondered, was that the ghost that I was seeing when I was a kid? Was it the ghost of the person that I eventually turned out to be. Sounds crazy, isn't it. Can you be your own guardian angel? Can you look back over the years, maybe when I was a kid and living this arcane private life. Something in me knew or hoped that there was a possible world some day in which I would be solid, you know, but I would be openaking in the world ranther than just as kind of specter. Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets pod m. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, 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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