Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

This episode contains discussion of sexual assault.

Listener discussion is advised.

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 Susan Walter, screenwriter, director, and novelist.

Susan's is a story about the legacy of secrets, the long reach of familial silence, and the healing that becomes possible if we stay true to ourselves in the fullness of time.

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in this dusty brick colonial big house, kind of built long before open floor plans were all the rage.

When I think about my childhood home, I remember a lot of greenery outside the home, and inside the home, I remember a lot of closed doors.

Well, they all had our own rooms, set our own bathrooms.

I mean even my parents had their own room.

My mom's room had this big, king sized bed and a walking closet, and my dad's room had a couch and a TV and its own closet and on sweet bap.

I don't remember many things about those rooms.

Because the doors were always closed.

You know, when we think.

About our childhood, sometimes the core memories are the scarier ones.

And I lived in this beautiful, lush, green neighborhood with these old houses from the thirties and forties.

But inside that house it felt very empty and lonely.

And it was your parents, and your older brother and yourself.

It was the four of you.

Yeah, the four of us lived on a quiet street across from an ambassador and the chef Julia Child lived around the corner.

It was a very gorgeous neighborhood, two blocks from Harvard University, and ideal it in so many ways from the outside looking in.

My father was from a working class family in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which is the area of Boston that at the time was pretty working class South Boston Southeast.

Name is Mark Wahlberg, and his father cleaned oil tankers for a living.

And my dad grew up kind of with a chip on his shoulder.

He was very ambitious.

He went to the University of Michigan, where he got a pilot's license and learned how to fly planes.

When he graduated, he got a.

Motorcycle, and he built motorcycles, and he pretended he was racing motorcycles.

He got all the geared, he rolled them around Boston like some sort of ninja.

He was just this larger than life guy.

He started his own business at a very young age.

I think he was in his early twenties, so even before my parents were married.

He was just a risk taker.

And I grew up in sort of his mystique that this was a guy who was not afraid of anything, who would ride his motorcycle really fast on store drive.

And he took a job actually flying planes that people jumped out of, So I don't know what that's technically called, but he piloted these planes with people jumping out of them and in sometimes scary conditions.

He was just afraid of nothing.

And the other thing about my dad that I actually thought at the time was a good thing was he was never satisfied.

He always wanted more and more and more.

And I kind of took that on and I thought that was a good thing.

And now I'm not so sure that it is.

It sounds like he was very charismatic.

What was he like with you when you were a kid growing up?

I mean, he was so fun you know, well, first of all, he was not around all the time.

He traveled a lot for his budding business.

So when he came into town, it was like, Hey, I got Celtics tickets.

We're going to sit on the floor of the garden.

Come on, let's go.

And we went to see the Red Sox.

Like he was like the fun dad.

I felt like he was a person who could do no wrong.

Everybody wanted to talk to him.

We went to this supermarket and the checker would give him a free pack of gum for his daughter.

We went to basket Robins.

He always got an extra scoop.

He wasn't necessarily what you would consider like a handsome guy.

He just had this charisma and people responded to it and I was under its spell.

And in your community, and like in this Cambridge community with neighbors that were famous shifts and writers and ambassadors, was your family sort of part of a community in Cambridge like that in your neighborhood or were you more of a solitary organism as a family.

Oh, that's such an interesting question.

I would say, in our neighborhood full of these very fancy people with PhDs and part of like the Harvard Gestalt, we were the.

Blue collar family.

You know, my mom was getting a degree at Harvard and on the edge to that community, and my dad was a bit of an outsider.

He had a Boston accent and he was kind of a towny, and so we moved into this neighborhood with old money.

But there are things that money can't buy.

We were not the cool kids in the neighborhood.

And I don't know if he felt that or he had a chip on his shoulder, but you know, I was sort of being groomed to try to join this high society, but I didn't really get it.

They put a violin under my chin when I was four years old.

I didn't play sports.

I played the violin so that I could integrate into this community.

And I always felt like they had dreams for my brother and me to earn our place in that neighborhood.

And I don't know that I ever did.

Do you think that's why they chose that neighborhood.

I mean, I would imagine.

I mean, he was a Boston boy, but there were lots of choices that didn't necessarily have to be the kind of patrician Cambridge Harvard adjacent choice.

Why do you think they chose to settle there, that's a great question.

I think he chose it in large heart for my mom because my mom wanted to be close to Harvard because she was getting a PhD there.

I don't know that he was ever super connected to that neighborhood.

In a way, it might have.

Been a consolation prize for her because he was gone a lot, and he had his own community outside of Cambridge.

He had his flying buddies.

He was always jetting off to kip Cod and Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

He had his own life outside of that.

So I think my mom got to be around what she was trying to create a community of peers, and it made sense.

But in the meantime, I didn't see a lot of him.

He was gone many weekends on business, so you know, we were alone, my mother, my brother and me in that big Cambridge house sometimes weeks on end.

My mother, her family, she's one hundred percent finish.

Her family comes from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan.

She grew up strict Lutheran on a farm.

She's the oldest of five.

They're sort of a tight lipped family.

There's been drinking and drug abuse among her siblings.

Her father passed away at a.

Young age, and I think as the oldest of five, she had to take on a lot of responsibility.

She's never somebody who has been able to talk about her feelings.

The most notable feature of my mom is that she is absolutely stunning.

She looks kind of like a young Fay done Away in my early memories and in early photos of her, just high cheekbones and sea green eyes, in this cascade of blonde hair, and almost like untouchable.

And I think that was something that my dad was definitely attracted to.

Early on, she seemed ungettable.

You know, my dad was not tall, a little bit pudgy, a Jewish kid from Roxbury, and he came back to Boston with this goddess, and I don't know, I mean, the words trophy wife pop into mind.

I'm sure they had a connection beyond that.

But looking back on them now, like I often wonder how they wound up married.

They seemed like a little bit of a mismatch.

How did they meet.

My mother was terribly shy.

She didn't ever have a community of friends.

She kind of disappeared into her studies and her work.

She did some teaching as a graduate student.

But I won't say that it was her passion.

I mean she worked to get her PhD for many, many years.

I think it took twenty years, and.

She was very quiet.

We had a screened porch that we turned into an office for her, which also sat behind a closed door of most of the time, and she was always had her nose in a book.

She dutifully took me to my violin lessons.

If I had competitions and performances, she was always the one who took me.

She was always physically present, but at the same time I couldn't touch her.

And your brother during those early years, you know, you're growing up together under the same roof years.

What was your relationship like the two of you.

So, my brother and I when we were in grade school, we fought terribly.

I mean our fights were epic.

There was I can remember a fight when I made him so mad he took a knife from a kitchen drawer and chased me around the house and I had to lock myself in.

A closet so that he couldn't get to me.

There was a lot of energy between us as young siblings.

And then when he graduated from eighth grade, he decided to go to a fancy New England boarding school and I did not, so we kind of split paths there.

I went to the public school in Cambridge, Cambride, Drench and Latin.

Famously.

My classmates were Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

It was a very diverse community and there was art and there was music, and there were sports.

It was just a fully integrated inner city high school experience.

And my brother was sort of whisked her way to this boarding school where big money, big problems, right.

I know, there was a fair amount of drug use, you know.

We got busted at Cambridgrine and Latin for having cigarettes, but they were doing mescaline and LSD and all sorts of things.

That were in another league.

So I don't feel like I had a relationship with my brother in high school.

He largely disappeared and that was his.

Choice, so we kind of went our separate ways.

I came to understand later he had his reasons for wanting to steal away to boarding school, but I didn't.

Know them at the time.

So Susan and her brother, who are only sixteen months apart in age, have separate and very different high school experiences, well, he spends those years at boarding school.

Susan focuses on music, with which she has a storied and intense, you might even say pre professor relationship.

So my mother played the piano.

She comes from a family of musicians.

All four of her siblings played three out of four professionally, so music was the thing that my mom knew, and she picked the violin for me.

I have pictures of me at four years old.

Playing my Suzuki method.

I can't say that I chose it.

I can tell you when I didn't have to play anymore, I immediately stopped.

So I think.

That sort of informs how much I loved it.

I mean, I love music.

There were times when I was sitting in the orchestra in high school.

I played at the orchestra at the New Conservatory where I.

Could just disappear in the music and it was euphoric.

But the day to day part of being a musician was very isolating.

It made me feel very lonely.

When your friends are on sports teams and they are going to swim meets and cheering each other on, and you're at home in your room with the door closed, practicing your atudes and scales, but it's not really a formula for feeling part of something bigger.

My mom would sit down at the piano and we would play.

Playing the violin was my threat that connected me to her.

There weren't any deep conversations.

There was no laughter, There was no sharing of jokes and how was your day.

We communicated through the music, and there was a time that that was kind of all I knew.

It was a language I mastered before I even mastered a spoken language is the language of music.

And you know, we had a ritual.

Two days a week where she would drive me to my violin lesson and we would go to Dunkin Donuts afterward and I would get fruit punch and a powder donut.

And that was the thing that I can't say that I looked forward to it, but it's something that made me feel safe.

When I was young.

It was all very cute, and the word prodigy was thrown around, although I can tell you I was no prodigy, but because it started at such a young age, you know, I mastered curriculum that much older players were playing, so there was the illusion that I was some prodigy.

So it became this thing almost like how to punch my ticket into those elite institutions that we were bordering up against.

Right, So if you're really good at something, then it distinguishes you.

And I wanted to be distinguished.

So while I didn't love the rhythm of being a musician, I didn't love the lonely afternoons at home all alone.

I did love getting my picture in the paper when I was the concert master of the State Orchestra.

And I did love the fact that I had a thing that was mine that made me special.

That's such a great answer, And you know, it strikes me as really poetic that you know, your mother and you did not have an ongoing dialogue that was based in words, and you know, warm and loving and full of laughter and revelation.

But this, for you know, violin and pianos that you played together were a kind of musical dialogue, like call and response in a way.

It's so interesting that that's where you had that exactly right.

And I think, you know, my mom didn't have words.

My mom was incredibly shy.

She never talked about her feelings.

It was not her culture, coming from.

The Upper Peninsula, the strict Lutheran suck it up be dutiful to God and country.

She didn't ever indulge in any woe is Me talk.

She didn't ask me really if I was okay.

It was always assumed that I was, or I would figure out how to be okay.

It's interesting because I never psychoanalyzed it on any level growing up, and then I became a mom, and of course I did then have to look at that in a new way.

Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.

The violin seems to be Susan's ticket.

When she's a senior in high school, she's admitted to Juilliard, and the summer before her senior year, she attends Juilliard's program at the Aspen Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado.

But Susan actually desperately does not want to go to Juilliard.

Encouraged by her guidance counselor, she applies to Harvard, just down the road.

She doesn't think she can handle Juilliard, and her parents will be okay with Harvard if she gets in, because Harvard is just as good, if not better, in her parents' eyes.

So when Susan auditions for Harvard, the stakes could not be higher.

When I was at Aspen Summer School.

I developed a trick what some of my colleagues did before auditions.

You know, we would steal our parents' blood pressure medicine.

I took something called enderol that my dad took for high blood pressure, and I stole a bottle of it, and I used to take it for master classes when I had to play in front of people.

I used to take it anytime I had to audition.

I didn't when I was performing an orchestra, I didn't need it.

But I was becoming like a legitimate drug addict.

And I had an interesting revelation, you know, before I decided I was going to sneak behind my parents back and apply to Harvard.

My high school orchestra did a concert with the cellist Yoyoma, and we had one rehearsal with him.

We played the Divorce c Cello cocero, which is absolutely stunning piece, and he came out.

We were sitting there, you know, the soloist comes out.

The orchestra is seated, and then the soloist comes out, and everybody in the audience collaps and he sits down and we start to play, and I glance up at him and he's euphoric.

The smile on his face radiated up to the.

Sky, and I remember, I'm playing this music, which is very emotional and moving.

It's a gorgeous concerto, and I'm looking at this man who was so full of joy, when all I feel is rocks in my stomach.

I would always feel nauseated when I played in front of people, and that's the reason that I didn't become a musician.

It's kind of a perverse thing to say, and my apologies to Yoyoma, but he's the one who made me not want to be a violinist because I didn't have that kind of joy.

And that's what you should have if you're going to devote your life to a thing, anything, If it doesn't fill you.

With joy, you're on the wrong path.

And so I carry that with me.

Whenever I started to have doubts, like is do I really want to quit the violin, I remember that moment of watching him.

And I didn't have that joy.

So thank you, Yoyoma.

Yes.

So, when I was at Harvard, I did an internship at WBZTV and I wanted to be a newscaster, and I started out as an intern and I let it be known that I wanted to be on air, but they made me do all the kind of grunt work.

But finally, what producer said, you know, you've been here for two and a half years, what do you want to do?

And I said I wanted to be on air, and they.

Gave me an audition, and that same thing that happened when I played the violin.

I got very tense.

I felt sick.

I was not able to do that in front of people.

It was not meant to be.

I was not equipped.

So I was still working at the news station and a colleague of mine said he was applying to this assistant director's training program and it was in Hollywood and they trained you how to run movie sets.

And I thought that sounded super fun.

And also my father had told me, in no uncertain terms, once you graduate Harvard, you're out.

We're taking your key.

You need to have a career all figured out, and I had just realized that I was never going to have a.

Career on TV.

So I applied to this program that I knew very little about, with the attitude if it picks me, then I'm going to be good at it.

And it did pick.

Me, so I moved to Hollywood at the tender age of twenty one to work in movie sets, something I knew nothing about.

But it was a training program and it was a fit for where I was.

It was management, it was behind the scenes.

I had no spotlights shining on me, but I got to be around creative people and be part of making something bigger, writ a movie or a TV show.

So literally a week.

After I graduated from Harvard, I was on a plane and I moved to LA And it's a paid training program, so I had a career boom.

So when I first started my job, we're on set five days a week, and then Saturdays you're taking classes.

I really didn't have time to be homesick or think about my parents.

But I do remember Christmas was coming and I'd been working for six months, and I just assumed I was going to go home and I went to the production office.

I was working on a show called Get a Life, some strange irony, and that because I'm calling my parents from the production office is before we all had cell phones.

And I said, you know, I think I should get a plane ticket.

Will you buy one for me?

Or do you need me to buy it?

Myself and when should I come?

And my mom said, oh, we're not going to be here for Christmas, to your father's taking me to the Bahamas.

And I remember I was twenty two years old.

It was my first year away from.

Home, and I was just assumed I was going to go home.

And then I found myself sort of with Christmas bearing down on me, with nowhere to go.

I hung up the phone and I started crying.

And I'm in the production office.

It was very embarrassing to be crying in front of my colleagues.

And one of the girls who worked on the show, she was about my age, saw me and came over to me and asked me what was wrong.

And she invited me to come to her house for Christmas.

And she lived in Reno, Nevada, and she basically kidnapped me for Christmas.

And I got to see a place i'd never been before.

I danced with cowboys, I had a very traditional Christmas in.

A snowy place.

It was absolutely wonderful.

And I'm not going to be hyperbolic and say she saved my life, but honestly, I don't know where I would have gone in that moment without her.

And you know, sometimes the universe takes care of you, and the universe took care of me through Wendy in that moment.

My father was always a person who would tell me, you know, you're a big girl.

You can take care of yourself.

And if I didn't get something the first time, he would say, well, go back and try again.

And I have the feeling it's my instinct, and I could be wrong, but I think my dad.

Just decided we're going to do this thing, and we earned it.

And they kids are on their own, their adults now, and I don't know how my mother felt about it.

I want to believe that.

It was difficult for her, but I also have to understand, you know, my dad was a guy who was jet setting all over the place and he invited her, and I'm going to tell you it wasn't always she who was invited, and I don't think she could have said no.

Years past twenty five of them by February of twenty sixteen.

Susan is married and has two young daughters.

She's been developing her career as a screenwriter and has reached a big milestone.

She's just sold a script that will be made into a movie.

It will be her directorial debut.

But just as all this is happening, just as she finally feels she's done, her father proud, he dies.

He was just set in this impossible standard, and I felt like I might have finally earned my place in his wall of pride, and that would be something.

You know, Dad, I'm doing a movie with Sharon Stone.

And he died before it happened.

She died six months before we went into production on that movie.

And I remember when he passed away, thinking, he never saw me do something great.

It's so interesting, Susan, because he saw you be viewed as a violin prodigy and certainly performing and really esteemed places.

And he saw you go to Harvard.

But the feeling that you had was, he hasn't seen me do anything well.

My memories of being a young child were always that I was not quite good enough.

If I got an as what happened to those other five points?

And I wasn't the valedictorian of my class and why not?

And you can do better than that.

And what's so strange is I always assumed he held himself to that standard on every front.

I thought that he was invincible and this perfect person and so I tried to be good enough for him.

You know, I had an eating disorder for most of my teen years because my dad carried a little extra weight, and I thought, well, the thing that would really make him love me is if I was skinny, and so I would go off the deep end with the diets.

I would go days and days and days without eating.

I passed out from not eating many times, and all to be that thing that would light him up.

I have a core memory of being in my house eating ice cream out of the tub and him walking in and pinching my underarm right like a fat caliber and him saying like, do you think ice.

Cream is really the right move for you right now?

Imagine how good you could be if you didn't have that little extra fat on your arm, and thinking like, you.

Know what, he's right, and maybe I can do that, And I did.

I got down to I was five four and eighty eight pounds and I maintained that for about a year and a half until a doctor said, you know you're killing yourself, right, And I said, I don't think that's what he wants.

But it was all about how to impress him.

So when he died, did he die suddenly.

He did.

He was at home and he did a thing in the morning on the weekends where he would go swimming in his pool.

He lived in a condominium complex, and he was kind of like, I don't.

Know the pied piper of the condo complex.

He knew all the neighbors.

My parents moved out to southern California after I did, sometime after, not because of me.

I think they were just tired of Boston winters, and so they were living in this condo complex near the beach in Plia Vista, and he loved living there.

He loved all his neighbors.

He made sure to befriend everyone, and.

People really responded to him.

So he had one of those mornings where he was sort of holding court his condominium complex and he went for a swim.

He turned on the ballgame, he sat down on the couch, fell asleep, and he never woke up.

My brother was living in San Francisco and I was here in La so I drove to my mom.

I got the call from the neighbor, who is also a doctor, and the neighbor said to me, Hey, I have to deliver some very sad news.

Your father's passed.

Away and I was home with my kids and a brand new babysitter.

This babysitter was her first day and I was just about to pay her to go home when the phone rang and I just.

Collapsed in heaving sobs.

And my young daughters, I think they were seven and eleven, they were terrified, and I pulled them to me and I held them and I just cried, and I told them, you know, Papa's dead.

Papa's dead, and this babysitter.

I just remember looking up at the babysitter and being like, I'm so sorry, I need you to stay.

And I drove to my mom and I think we were both in shock.

There was a sort of telling moment when they come to take the body away, to take them to the funeral home.

He didn't you don't go to a hospital.

This I didn't know this I learned on the spot, which is, you know, when they're already deceased, there's no reason to go to a hospital.

You just take them to the place where they're gonna, you know, their final resting place.

And they come and they put them on the gurney and they said to my mom and me, you know, do you want to say goodbye, and my mom just turned her head around and started walking away, and.

I was embarrassed.

I didn't know what to say to my father in that moment with people standing there, you know, they're very respectful.

They sort of clasped their hands and bow their heads, and they wanted to give me a moment.

And I just remember watching my mom walk away and being so stunned, like you're walking away.

Maybe it was just too much.

A few months after her father's death, Susan takes charge of cleaning out his closet donates his clothes to goodwill.

Her brother, at their mother's request, has taken over sortings through their father's office.

He's been loosely involved in the business and naturally steps in to handle these matters.

This makes sense to Susan at the time.

Her brother will know what's important, what to keep, what to look for.

She never thinks twice about it.

Then, after a meal one day with her kids and brother, he casually mentioned something in passing, something he assumes she already knows, but she doesn't.

We're walking from my car and I have my daughter Sophie with me, and my brother just casually brings up the letters from the girlfriend that he doesn't know what to do with.

And I was like, wait, who's a girlfriend.

He's like, well, Dad's girlfriend.

And I was like, what are you talking about.

He said, well, yeah, you know, I found about twenty letters from this woman and I tried to find her.

But I don't know, Maybe it's not a good idea.

And I was so flabbergasted on two fronts.

One that he's so casually bringing it up, but also in front of my daughter.

My brother does not have kids, and you know, I wanted to give my daughters the gift of happy memories of a grandfather who was worthy of their love.

Right, maybe my mom wanted that for me to because she never told me even though she knew, And so in that moment.

Many things were taken from me.

First, what was taken from me was this memory of my father as this perfect person, which maybe should have been taken from me long ago, but it was zapped from me in that moment.

Also, it was taken away from my daughter because she had a good relationship with her grandfather by the time he was in his sixties and seventies, all the fraught overachieving, you know, where was he all those weekends none of that was part of her life.

She just had experience of a fun, loving guy who liked a barbecue and took her in the swimming pool.

And I liked that she had that, but she doesn't have it anymore after this conversation.

So yeah, that was kind of a stunning moment, and I didn't really want to get into it with him in front of her, but we did talk about it later, and I came to learn that.

He just assumed that I knew because everybody else knew.

I mean, he knew, my mother knew, my mother's family knew, but somehow I didn't know.

And what did you find out?

I mean, there was one woman for a very long time.

He had one relationship over many years with another woman, and everybody knew about that and knew her identity.

I don't know how many people knew her identity.

I do know that she wrote to him many times over many years.

My brother said nine years, but it could have been more because maybe they only started writing letters after they were involved for a time.

I know that there were times that acquaintances of my mother, women I learned from my brother, told my mother they called her on the telephone to say like, hey, you know, I saw your husband out at this bar looking kind of.

Intimate with another woman.

And you know, my brother had told me that these women had called my mom, And I guess my mom confided in my brother because he knew this and I didn't.

But I mean, I think it was well known in their circle of friends that he was stepping out.

Susan has always tried to do the right thing.

As a mother of daughters.

She lives by example, checks the boxes, follows the rules, striving to make her father proud.

So when the truth surfaces, not just a hidden detail, but a secret it seems everyone else had known, but her, it lands heavily.

It isn't just the revelation, it's the unique and pressing weight of being the last to know.

My first impulse was to be angry at my mother and my brother for keeping this from me.

But then it occurred to me that, you know, in a way, it was a kindness, right, I mean, there was no reason for them to upset the happy memories that I was carrying of this person.

But at the same time, I got an eating disorder from my father.

I was never happy, I was never satisfied, I never felt good about myself.

I still you to this day, am painfully insecure.

I have a lot of self doubt.

I still have disordered eating and all because I thought I had to be something perfect for this perfect person, and then to find out that he wasn't perfect.

Strangely, it doesn't make any of those things go away.

It doesn't make any of the self loathing go away.

It's in there now, like that was his gift to me.

I use the word gift.

I mean, on the one hand, it.

Has pushed me to do things that most people might not try to do.

Right.

I made a movie, I've written books.

Now, I've done things that are outside my comfort zone because somewhere my inner child is trying to impress him, I think.

But at the other hand, was I ever happy?

You know, we're raising kids, right, and there's always this balance of you want them to do big, scary things, and you want them on some level to keep pushing right to not be satisfied, but really, ultimately you want them to be happy.

And I don't know if those two things can coexist.

I was around a lot of very successful people, both in the music world and then at Harvard, and the most successful people are not usually the happiest people because there's always more and they've always held themselves to a really high standard.

And do you ever really reach that high standard?

And I don't know that you ever can, because there's always another rung on the ladder to reach.

And if you're that person who was always climbing the ladder, how do you ever feel satisfied where you are?

Do you think your father felt that way?

My dad used to wear this t shirt around.

It was his favorite shirt.

It said, he who dies with the most toys wins.

Everything was a competition for him.

There was always something to win, there was always more money to.

Make, and I mean we even did word problems around the dinner table at night.

I mean, I think this is why I did well on my math SAT because I was not mathy.

But he used to do these word problems about trains leaving Zurich traveling at this miles per hour and figure it out.

Whoever figures it out wins wins the game.

And there were always competitions in my house.

And he was just a super competitive guy.

And he made money at his company and somebody offered to buy it and he could have been set for life, but it wasn't enough, and he wound up driving it into the ground ultimately.

But yeah, he was always just wanted more and more and more.

We'll be right back.

Secrets have hovered in the air surrounding Susan for much of her life.

The secret that her father wasn't exactly who he made himself out to be, The secret inherent in her mother's emotional absence, the secret that she didn't really want to be a concert violinist, but when she's at the Aspen Music Festival, something happens to her that then becomes a secret she forces so deep within her that it loses all shape and language, until, like all secrets, it insists on being known.

So, you know, the interesting thing about secrets, My mother held this secret for a really.

Long time, and I think.

She kind of used secrecy as a protection mechanism.

Right, if nobody knew what was happening behind all those closed doors, she didn't have to do anything.

She didn't have to confront my father's duplicity, She didn't have to fix what was broken.

It was how she stayed safe.

She was a very shy person.

She didn't like conflict, and it was a kind of head in the sand approach, right, So if I pretend it's not there, even though everybody's telling me what's happening, then I don't have to touch it.

You know.

And I have complicated feelings about my mom keeping what she knew about my dad a secret.

You know.

One might say it was a kindness, right.

She let me believe what I wanted to believe, that my dad was this amazingly perfect guy, and the truth was not pleasant.

And as mothers, we want to protect our kids from unpleasant things.

But then this thing happened to me.

So at seventeen, I was in a par apartment with grad students in their early twenties, and they just thought I was the cutest thing.

And they used to cart me around like a puppy, and they were very kind to me.

They just thought it was super amusing, and they thought they were doing me a favor.

Right.

They would sneak me into bars, and I don't know if I liked it or not.

I think I was always a little bit nervous.

But I also didn't want to be home alone.

I wasn't around my peers.

I was around these older people, and that's what they did.

So it was either be alone or go with them, and it was all fun and games.

I don't think I.

Really drank at these bars.

It was somewhere to be, but they wanted to stay out light.

So I remember there was one night at one of these bars, I just had to go home.

It was too much and I left the bar and there were two young men who were standing outside and saw me leaving, and I think I might have talked to them when I was inside the bar.

They didn't know how old I was, but I was a very skinny kid, so they probably knew I was a teenager that they offered to walk me home.

And you know, I was a person who didn't know how to say no.

I think I'm a generation of women who didn't know how to say no, who felt like we should just do what the man says and say thank you.

And my spidy sense was tingling, like these guys did not have good intentions for me.

Did not want them to walk me home.

And then we get to my apartment and they asked if they could see my apartment.

Oh, you're staying here, can we see?

And so again I didn't want them to come in, but I also hadn't learned to trust my instincts, and I was afraid to say no to them.

I didn't want to let them down.

Man, this is a theme with me, right.

Like I didn't want to say no to my dad, I didn't want to say no to these men.

So they came into my apartment and what happened next.

Honestly, it's kind of feels like a dream.

I didn't know how to say no, so you can go in the blank.

It's very difficult to talk about.

And you didn't write.

You didn't talk about it.

In the immediate aftermaths.

You stay quiet.

Oh, I told nobody.

You know, something happens when other people are inflicting violence upon you.

There's a protection mechanism where you just disassociate, right, And.

This thing was happening.

To think that other human beings would do that to a human being, to a girl, it's so vile that you just don't want to believe that it's true.

And the next day I just went on with my life.

I had a masterclass I had to perform in and I played and I finished out the term and I got on a plane and I went home.

Lashed you.

Forty years later, my mother and I we still have never had a conversation about it.

I have tried to have a conversation with her about it, and the response I get is, I can't talk about it.

It's too hard.

So this idea of I can't talk about it, it's too hard.

You're now a mother of two daughters, who are you, know, around the age that you were when this happened to you.

And I think one of the things comes up on this show comes up in life a lot.

When we have kids and our kids reach an age where something happened to us, it sort of activates a different kind of thought process, or like it adds a whole other layer to these questions of what should have happened that didn't happen, what it would mean to be a parent in a moment like that.

Is that something that's kind of caught up with you over the years now that you have daughters who are that age, or is that something that you already knew?

So I repressed the memory for many years.

There was no reason to talk about it.

I didn't talk about it.

I learned from my mom that secrets not talked about can stay hidden, and they can't hurt you if they're hidden.

This is what I learned.

I'm not saying that it's true.

I'm saying that this is what she modeled for me.

If you sweep it under the rug, it can't hurt you.

So that's what I did.

Whenever I, you know, think back of that memory and the trauma, I still came out.

Okay.

I got very lucky.

So I put it away.

It couldn't hurt me anymore.

And then I got married.

I had two daughters, and you know, when you become a mother, something awakens in you and it's like this tigress of protection.

And all of a sudden, as I'm looking down at my daughter's face when she's just a little baby, the memory comes back hit me like a wall of water.

I mean, it makes so much sense that, you know, when you're looking at your own child, it comes crashing back into your consciousness.

So this is when you attempt to have a real conversation with your mother.

Yeah, I remember the day that I went to talk to her.

I went by myself, I left my kids and my husband and I said, Mom, I need to come over.

I need to have a.

Conversation with you.

And I said, you know, do you remember this thing that happened?

No, response, I need to remind you of this thing that happened to me.

My husband and I have talked about it, and she did what she was capable of.

She didn't have a language, you know, we talked earlier.

Language was music.

That's how we communicated.

She spent much of her adult life, her married life, as a victim herself, and it was just too much.

She held it together, She held the family together under incredibly stressful circumstances for her, humiliating circumstances for.

Her, and then this thing happened to me.

She has never been able to speak to me, and when I brought it up, he just shuts down.

Though Susan now knows her father's secret and has confronted her own, there's collateral damage.

There are imprints that can't be undone, the things her father did, the things that were done to her.

These truths have been unearthed, but they are still in her bones, part of her.

Like we either follow in our parents' footsteps or we overcompensate.

I definitely took the ladder route in that my daughters know what happened to me.

I told them, well, you know, I told them, not just because I thought they were ready but I told them, you know, I want them to understand my triggers, right, because there are sometimes when I might act in a way, I might overreact, or I might have fear around something, And when they became emotionally mature enough to sort of handle something about that, I thought that it would help our relationship to understand, you know, like if I freak out because you want to do this, you have some context now and we can talk about it.

And I think that's helped our relationship because certainly they're more understanding.

You know, Look, we do our best as moms to be the grown up, but we have our trauma, and sometimes that trauma expresses itself in ways we're not aware of.

But these emotionally intelligent gen Z women, they get it.

And I'm so impressed with them.

And there's been times my.

Twenty year old is we be like, Mom, that's trauma talking, and I'm like, yeah, thank you for reminding me, and thank you for forgiving me for the irrational thing that I just said.

And it just makes these some you know, difficult conversations or disagreements go down a little easier.

So I'm very deliberate with them.

I'm self aware now through talking about it.

I mean, that's where we talk about.

You know, when you stuff the trauma under the rug, you don't know how it's driving your life.

But when you start talking about it, sometimes you can catch it when it's working on you.

And sometimes if my daughters are expressing a desire to do something that I think is unsafe, they understand where I'm coming from and we can have a conversation out in the open about it.

There's no trauma secretly driving the bus, and that's been really helpful.

Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Molly Zacour 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.