October 3, 2019 • 34 mins
At some point in our childhood we all met the moment where we had to summon the courage and strength to stand up to the difficulties of the world. But imagine being 8 years old and finding yourself in the car with your mother in the middle of the night as she hands you a map and speeds away into the unknown.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
is a secret of my own. My father has been
helping me write these pages in my dreams. My father
stands in our house. It is not burned or blackened
or infelicitous. No melted pools of television screens. Not yet.
(00:22):
My rocking horse is still there, rocking. The air is clear,
the dining room table shines. It's all in one piece,
this house the way I've always imagined it could be.
So is my father. Sometimes he says, the things I wrote,
the way I wrote them. We play out the scenes,
we have our script. Other Times he says, no, not quite,
(00:46):
it didn't happen like that. My dead father is always moving.
I follow him. I'm Danny Shapiro. And this is family secrets,
(01:07):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Have come to think of family secrets sort of like ghosts.
A family sits at the dinner table, and the ghosts
hover nearby. A family falls asleep at night, and the
ghosts linger in doorways, pace the halls. They make a
(01:30):
cup of coffee in the kitchen. These ghosts are invisible,
of course, but they're very powerful. In fact, they're all
the more powerful precisely because they're invisible. My guest today
is t Kira Madden. Tikira is a supremely gifted young
writer whose essential piercing human nous shows up on every
(01:51):
page of her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of
Fatherless Girls. When I first read Tikira's work, I knew
that I had to have her on family secrets. Tikira
grew up in a family shaped by its secrets and ghosts,
and therefore she herself was formed by all she did
not know, all her parents kept from her, from each other,
(02:14):
and from themselves. This is a story about addiction, shame,
a couple of world rocking DNA discoveries, and thrumming under
all of it, a family's love for one another. Where
does secrets go when they're stuffed away? We're about to
find out. We began, as I often do, by my
(02:35):
asking Tikira to tell me about the landscape of her childhood.
I think my childhood always felt like an adventure. I
think that's the word I would use. That I didn't
understand the dynamic of parents and child, and it was
(02:56):
more like we were all on a team together, the
three of us, me and my mother and my father.
And there were always fights. There were always conflicts outside,
conflicts inside conflicts, but we were always running away or
in a sense of adventure. My mother and I were
always you know, going in the car to find my
father at whatever bar or strip club he was in,
(03:18):
and we never knew what we would find there at
three in the morning. Um. Where I was going on
separate adventures with my father to bars, to baseball games,
two clubs, to Las Vegas. Um. But the three of
us always we had a team. Um. We had a
team and a loyalty that I think doesn't make sense
to people now, but it was. It was just implicit.
(03:41):
We were a team always. And how old were you
when you were going to bars and you know, out
at three in the morning looking for your dad or
going to Vegas as early as I can remember, yeah,
um My, my very earliest memories, it was my my
parents wedding and being there and after that just these
(04:02):
wild apartments we lived in the wild characters who would
come in and out. Um, and I very distinctly even
have memories in a stroller going through some of these
experiences and just my very earliest memories going in my
mother's car to these clubs and meeting these strippers outside
(04:22):
the car, and at some points having golf clubs and
baseball bats being swung at car windows and shattering, and
it was all very exciting to me. Well, that's so
interesting because the fact that you have memories from the stroller,
if it had been seriously traumatic for you, um most
likely would have blocked them out. It doesn't surprise me.
(04:43):
I guess that you're saying that there was something, yeah, exciting.
I think, in a way exciting. I didn't understand. My
mind wasn't then yet molded into these false binaries of good, bad, sober, drunk.
I didn't have those understandings. It didn't feel unsafe to know.
(05:03):
Everything was just kind of electric and arousing and exciting
in my early mind. I think. So, you're father was
in another family, in another relationship when you were very small. Yes,
he was married to another woman when I was born,
(05:25):
and he had two sons with that woman, which I
didn't understand, of course, until a little bit later. Was
that something that you knew as you were growing up
as a toddler? He was the shadowy figure. He was
just the smell of cigarettes and gold and cash. And
that's who my father was, this kind of gravelly voice
figure in my house. I always knew there was this
(05:49):
other family. My father. Um. He sat me and my
brother's down when we were younger. My my brothers were
at that point teenagers and I was a toddler, and
he explained to all of us that we were actually siblings.
And I hadn't realized before that point that I was
just supposedly my mother's kid. I was just a kid
(06:10):
who was around UM. So I had a sense of
them as my family or another family, but I didn't
understand what that meant. And I understood their photos in
my father's wallet, for example, and seeing similarities, but you know,
at that point, biology, genetics, um connection, those things didn't
(06:31):
quite make sense. Well, it sounds like you were left
to figure it out for yourself a bit. Absolutely. This
is something that comes up a lot in family secrets,
the sense of having been a salution as a child.
So often we were left to our own devices, trying
to put together the pieces of our families, attempting to
(06:53):
understand what didn't add up. Our families are all we
know as children, we feel secrets as an ache, a strangeness,
or even internalize them as self loathing when we don't
understand why we feel the way we do. Could you
describe your mother a little bit? Wild? Is the word
(07:15):
I would use, and I think that's the word many
people would use who have met her. Daring, wild, beautiful, electric,
just a flash of light in any room. My book
opens with a scene of her shooting a man out
our window, and that's I think very true to her
character and why I chose to open her in that way,
(07:37):
because she's fiercely protective, no boundaries, no filter, She's she's
just a force. She still is. One of the things
that really struck me in your book is the way
in which you had to educate the adults around you
in the fact that you were a child. There's a
(08:00):
moment your father has been violent with your mother, and
it's not the first time, but it's the worst time,
and she gathers you and you get into the car
and she hands you a map and she says, find
the best root out of here. And that moment struck
me for a lot of reasons, because that felt like
(08:21):
a metaphor in a way for both for your book
and for your life, which is you did find the
best root out of there. How old were you in
that in that moment? I was in the sixth grade, right,
and your mother was handing you a map and say saying, like,
you know, figure it out. Yes, I was very good
at maps at that point because of so many instances
(08:42):
of this. There have been many occasions with using maps
trying to get out of certain situations. Sure, as an
only child myself, I'm well acquainted with the preternaturally adult
feeling that many only children experience. At the same time,
there's also the feeling that the mom, dad, and kid
(09:04):
are part of a tight little trio, as opposed to
enlarger families where children banned together in solidarity against the adults.
Perhaps that's part of the reason why Tikira writes so
lovingly about both her parents and almost romantically about her
beginnings with them. It still feels true to me, and
(09:24):
I think people often say, you know, parents, we do
the best we can, or they did the best we could.
I think about that a lot, and I think the
easier answer would be to always say, yes, my parents
did the best they could. But I'm not sure if
that's that was always the case, and I'm not sure
it even matters, because maybe sometimes you know, my father
(09:47):
didn't do the best he could, but that's okay. Like,
there's a life of being a father and the life
of being a person in the world. And I think
through reflection and after his death, I start it to
understand those two versions and multiplicities of so many versions
of who a person can be. That the lens of
(10:08):
just a father is in some ways an unfair lens,
and the lens of just mother, like that scope is
too small. I had to think about how they ended
up the way they were um to my to my
limited knowledge, of course, and acknowledge the failure that I
can't break away from that limited scope of my own
singular experiences. As you've said, Danny, and some of your work,
(10:33):
there's a moment where you describe hearing the words addict,
you know, or crackhead or whatever the language was being used.
Someone was describing your parents in those ways, and you
had never put language to that at all. Yes, Yes,
is that something you would think of as having been
(10:56):
secret in your childhood or was that it didn't seem
to me that ways seemed like they were pretty out
there with their addictions, that that wasn't something they were
hiding from you or from the world. Speaking to children
of addicts, I see and I hear that a lot,
that there's there's just no vocabulary. As a child, in
(11:20):
the absence of a vocabulary, Takira makes up a new
language with phrases that render her parents addiction in terms
she can understand. When her parents are high, she calls
them sleepy boy and sleepy girl. It wasn't until I
started seeing, you know, commercials about drugs and Whitney Houston
(11:41):
on the news, being caught and seeing those familiar objects,
and then hearing the words from other people from media
that I started putting together what was actually going on.
Finding and knowing the language and labeling it is something
that's so powerful. I'm thinking of a previous episode of
(12:04):
Family Secrets where my guest Debbie Millman, who was being
abused by her stepfather, cuts out a clipping from an
Ann Lander's column in which someone writes to a Landers
about being abused, and for the first time she thinks,
a I'm not the only person in the entire world
that's happened to and be this is a thing, there's
(12:25):
a there's a name for it exists. That episode really
resonated with me, and she kept it under her pillowcase
or under a mattress, and I kept a book by
Drew Barrymore under my pillowcase, and I remember hearing that
on that episode and um sharing that experience that I
There was this ghost written eighties book called Little Girl Lost,
(12:47):
which was Drew Barrymore's early memoir. And it wasn't until
I read that book that was the first it just
throttled me. That was the first sense of someone else
has parent like this. In some way, these behaviors are mirrored.
It's not just me in the world, because before you
understand addiction of course as a kid, or abuse of
(13:10):
any kind, you think that this is only happening to me.
This couldn't possibly be happening to anyone else in the world.
And until I read Drew Barrymore, of all of all books,
of all stories, this kind of gossipy Hollywood book, did
I realize, Oh wow, her her father is trying to
drink gasoline. My father tries to drink gasoline. It's not
(13:30):
just me, me and Drew Barrymore. It still wasn't plural,
but it was me and Drew Barrymore had the secret
from the rest of the world. We're going to take
a quick break her parents. Addiction isn't the only secret
Tiakia learns to keep. When she's in middle school, Tika
begins an online relationship with a senior boy in her
(13:52):
high school who eventually asks her to meet him at
the local shopping mall. Love was violence, Love was desperate um,
love was forced, and it was forceful. And so you know,
at that time, I was I was a middle school girl.
I was talking to a senior from my high school
(14:14):
on the internet. I hadn't met him in real life,
and he wanted me to meet him at a shopping mall.
And he showed up with another senior in the car,
and the sexual assault. Sexual assault occurred at the shopping mall.
And I didn't have I didn't have any sort of
vocabulary for what that meant. M I truly did feel
(14:36):
that it was love, because he had used that word
with me as well. I think I might love you.
I'm always trying to write into questions of you know,
how could things have gone differently had I told my father,
perhaps we could have had such a different relationship. Perhaps
we could have um just broken the secrecy in some way.
(14:59):
Why do you think you didn't, I think because of
my own confusion of what it was. Because I always
wanted clarity, I always wanted wisdom. I wanted to be
able to explain something, and this, that occurrence was something
I could never explain. When I left them all that
(15:22):
day and my parents picked me up, they took me
to a restaurant, and at the restaurant, I went to
the bathroom, and I still remember the stall I was
in at the exact restaurant, and I fell to the
floor and I was just curled up in a ball, weeping,
And in my mind I felt what had just happened
was something great and womanly and beautiful, and it was
(15:44):
love and this was sex, and but my body knew
the difference. And that's something I think about to this day,
that the body knows even before we do sometimes. But
I also think I just didn't want to it into
trouble for getting in cars with boys, of course, but
(16:04):
I wish I wish I did. In some ways, I
also know it would hurt him a great deal of
someone who was very protective over me. But as you
as you've described in your work, how a family and
a room can crackle with secrecy, I think is the
word you use, and that's definitely something I felt my
whole life, this crackling secrecy. I described my story in
(16:29):
this book almost as a Russian doll, but the whole
thing Russian dolled on me. Every single doll I opened,
there was another one waiting, and that's not something I expected.
And even my mother, when confronted with these family secrets,
she described them as boxes. In the same way that
I think about opening them. She described as the boxes
(16:51):
all being closed. She closed them up, she kept them elsewhere.
She was so great and still is at compartmentalizing, and
I think that's really common. And I was really struck
by the end of your book how you describe how
other people it's like they didn't consider the consequences. And
for us, that's all we're thinking about is consequence and
(17:12):
results and what happens. And for some people just doesn't
cross their mind because they're so good at compartmentalizing what
they've done, their actions, their memories, the things that live
in their own bodies. Remember earlier when I mentioned that
DNA is part of this story. Well, I'd say it's
(17:33):
more than part of this story. When Tikira is twenty
seven years old, she's given a d n A test
as a Christmas gift, just as happens in millions of
families each year. And this is the key to those
tightly sealed boxes, the beginning of the end of the
secrets that had thrumbed in the deepest interior of the
Madden family. And it was only because my father passed
(17:58):
away and I was interested in kind of building this
family tree um. I was just kind of spooked by
that death of Oh. I want to gather as much
information as I can while I still have the opportunity
to do so. So I was interested in this. When
my mother knew about the test when she saw the
box and I said I would do it, there was
no reaction, not even a flinch, not there was no
(18:21):
fear in her face about it. It was a curious
thing to her. Why would you want to do that?
What could you want to know? That's how deep that
box was, That's how tightly it was closed. So I
took the test um. Like your story, it didn't feel
urgent in any way. I had this kind of running
(18:42):
joke in my head, because I'm always building story in
my head of like what if I find out my
father is not my father because he's just died, wouldn't
that be a twist? And so I was almost preparing
myself for this to be a big secret, like what
if I find out because I look nothing like my father,
I look Chinese and and like my mother. Um, my
(19:02):
father was you know, blue eyes, blonde hair. So that
was the running joke. What if I found out after
he died, after all this grief, through this grief, if
I found out there wasn't a connection the way people
had joked about my whole life. And I opened the
results and I don't find that. I find that I'm
exactly what I've been told. I am. The map glows
(19:26):
and all the places I would expect it to glow, Jewish, Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish,
Eastern European, jew Um, nothing's unexpected. And I said, Okay,
my mother's my mother, my father's my father. That was fun.
And it took a while to even find that other
page on ancestry that shows you the connections, that shows
(19:47):
you the people who have also taken the test, And
I see this icon of a woman who in a
very tiny maybe half an inch icon has dark hair,
and when I when I opened her picture, the picture
doesn't grow, but I can see that she's also Hawaiian
and Chinese, so I know it's from my mother's side,
(20:09):
which shocks me, as is so often the case when
people receive unexpected results from a DNA test. Tikira first
wonders about the test accuracy. She figures that this mystery
person might be a third or fourth cousin, or maybe
no relation at all, but she does reach out to
her and when this maybe cousin, maybe not cousin connects,
(20:31):
her area code is nine five four, the same area
code as tikiras from South Florida, and I thought, how
could I have a cousin who lives where I grew up?
That doesn't make sense to me. And that's when the
whole thing started to That was my big tip off.
I guess, how could that be the same area code
(20:52):
in the whole world. That's not a third or fourth cousin, Like,
something's going on here. So Tikira calls the number and
the two women begin to speak. At first, Tikira thinks
that maybe this woman is an aunt. After all, she's
throughteen years older than Tikira. But that isn't what's going
on at all. This woman with whom Tikira shares a
(21:13):
significant amount of d n A, is not an aunt.
She's not a cousin. She's ti Kira's half sister. I
was saying, I think we are related. I think you
could be my aunt. Um, this is what my grandfather
was like he passed away. And she's saying, please listen,
please help me. I have clues. I have I have
(21:35):
major clues. All I know is that I was born
on seven eleven, July eleven, and that's my mother's lucky number.
And I knew as soon as she said seven eleven,
which is how my mom says. It's still it's still
her her pass code on her phone, her alarm code,
it's everything. I sort of stopped in my tracks, and
(21:57):
she said, I also think her first name is and
she says my mother's first name, and the whole world
is sort of stopped. It really felt true and accurate
in that moment. Everything froze um, but I couldn't make
sense of this in any way. It still felt like
(22:20):
a mistake, until, of course I spoke to my mother.
Your mother put it in a box, you know, very
very buried, tightly sealed box. And yet at the same time,
your sister's half sister's birthdate was her code and her
(22:44):
lucky number. Yes, that's fascinating because these boxes are really interesting, right,
because she probably did not walk around with that kind
of consciousness about that. It's just simply seven eleven. It's
my lucky number. That's what makes me feel. That's just
part of my idea entity. Sure, but in fact she
was walking around with that being her child's yes, birth date,
(23:06):
two lucky numbers. Tikira's mother doesn't just have one lucky number,
seven eleven. She has a second one connected to another secret,
another ghost. We're going to take a quick break. So
(23:29):
Tikira now knows that her mother had given birth to
a child thirteen years before she was born. That put
her mother as a fifteen year old girl who had
given up a baby for adoption. What was your mother's
reaction like when you um when you did go to
her and say I've discovered this, It was the most
bizarre moment. She was completely throttled back in time and
(23:55):
in that moment when I when I mentioned it is
as delicately as I could. All I had to do
was say her birthday, that I took the test, I
got the results. There was someone with the birthday seven eleven.
And she was so throttled in that moment that she
believed my father was still alive. And that was her
(24:16):
first concern was your father doesn't know. Your father doesn't know.
What am I going to tell him? And I said,
Dad's not here. But that's how far back she was
throttled in that moment. She was so just, And that's
not like my mom. My mom is very to her
fault in a way, always living in the present moment,
(24:37):
always very present um. But she was so somewhere else.
And I knew in that moment, wherever she was um
as she was saying these things and closing her eyes
and drinking water, that I could never reach wherever it
was she she was living in that moment, that there
(24:57):
was a part of her, so many parts of her
I will never know, and I don't think it ever
occurred to me until that moment. Secrets begets secrets begets secrets.
That is just how secrets work. Their viral contagious A
married couple who are addict and alcoholics circle and circle
(25:18):
around the unsaid, the hidden. Their lives are formed by
what they don't speak of, what they keep from one another,
And their daughter's life is formed by all that silence
and fear and shame. Does it surprise you that she
never told your dad? It did surprise me, knowing the
(25:39):
full story and having a better understanding of my mother
and my father and their secrecy. Now now it doesn't
surprise me in that moment of Corso's how could you
have not told me? How could you have not told dad?
How could that be? How is that possible? So your
(26:00):
mother has a secret from your father, Your mother and
father have secrets from you, and then your mother and
father have a secret together. Yes, but remember that ti
Kira's mom has not one, but two lucky numbers. One
of those lucky numbers represents the birth of the baby
she gave up for adoption as a teenager. What can
(26:20):
the other lucky number represent? What else could possibly be
so huge and important? Tikira meets her new half sister
and they begin to form a relationship. It's a revelation,
after a lifetime as an only child, to have this
new person in her life. Someone she describes in loving terms.
(26:41):
It feels for a while like a happy ending, a
perfect ending, and opening up and understanding finally of the
secret that had formed so much of her family's life.
But then it turns out that there's more, There's much,
much more. Just over a year later, I hear from
(27:01):
my fiance, of all people, um, that she overheard something
from other members in my family. And I said, what
did you What did you overhear? And she said, they said,
I'm so happy she found her sister, but what about
her brother? And I said, what are you talking about?
(27:25):
And she said I heard it. And I said, you,
miss you misunderstood. You didn't hear, You didn't hear correctly,
And she said, no, I heard. I heard it very clear.
And I I confronted them and I had them repeat it,
and I got more information. There is a brother. And
then I'm thinking, okay, it's my dad's turn. This has
(27:46):
got to be my dad's child. And she said he's
your full brother. And I said okay, and I'm doing
the timeline when could this have happened? And then she
says he's younger than you. And that was Um. It
was the complete opposite reaction. I felt with my sister,
(28:08):
with my sister, and immediately as soon as the shock subsided,
it just felt like this enormous gift, just the most
beautiful thing that could have happened to me, and so serendipitously,
so soon after my father passed away, that I would
lose the most important person to me and then find
(28:28):
a sister as someone who grew up alone. And when
I heard this, it felt the opposite. It felt like
I've never felt such anger and sadness and rage in
my entire life. I've always said, considering my father has
(28:49):
such rage in him, and my mother too, Let's take
a moment to walk through this more slowly. Tikira, raised
as an only child, part of the tight little tree
with her two complicated parents, actually is one of three children.
Her mother had a child as a teenager. That was
a huge revelation, but this this meant that her two parents,
(29:12):
together when she was a very young child, had another child,
a brother, who they gave up for adoption. I was
so angry, and I think processing that, I think I
was so angry that my father was gone, and I
knew I could never ask the questions, and I knew
(29:33):
I just felt like I've already gone through this. I
can't believe I'm going through this again, and I can't
believe it's more intense. It's a full sibling, it's my
father's and I can't talk to my father. I was
able to get all the answers from my mother about
my sister, but I knew this was unreachable in a
different way. And unlike ancestry, I had no connection to
(29:57):
find this brother, my full brother, the only the full
sibling I have in the world, the person who shares
more DNA with me than anyone in the world. I
had no lead of any kind, and that infuriated me,
and I felt deceived um And when I called a
family member that night and asked if it was true,
(30:18):
and she told me, and I soon realized everybody knew.
That was the hardest part, that it felt like this
conspiracy in a way to keep this from me. How
old were you and your mother was pregnant one one
and a half. And there's a moment I believe correct
me if I'm wrong, where someone tells you they sent
(30:40):
you away, right like during during that period of time
you went to Disney. Disney, I'm sorry, Disney that's what
I thought, didn't but you were like one and a
half years old. Yeah, I still haven't taken my son
to Disney, totally deprived. It's great. So then what happens
(31:04):
with your with your brother? It's still the unknown. Yeah,
it's still the unknown, and I mean, we'll see. What
I've tried to embrace in the book is the unknown
where the unfinished story is the story that we don't
(31:26):
have the perfect plot arc that we always want, and
I'm still trying to figure out what that story looks
like with my brother. Sometimes the unfinished story is the story.
Here's t Kira reading a passage from her beautiful book,
how Alma Kula is a place in the afterworld in
(31:47):
which all of one's ancestors are waiting. I always liked
this legend best, the idea of this place where all
family ties remain solid, intact, or nothing on earth ever mattered.
It is the place in which all family members are reunited,
and I like to imagine that everyone shows up a young, healthy,
so much bright life in the face, and all the
(32:09):
realms of heaven and hell. Al Amakua is the most
desired among the people of Hawaii. Once the family is reunited.
Each spirit is encouraged to visit their own idea of home.
Home can be in the depths of the sea, in
the tree tops, a spirit may choose their grandmother's lap
in her rocking chair. The sour smell of malasadas. Ancient
(32:32):
legend describes it as the place of your greatest responsibility.
Others define it as returning to one's rightful place or
one's greatest duty. The Hawaiian word for this is kolianna
(32:59):
many Thanks to t Kira Madden, you can find out
more about her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of
Fatherless Girls at t Kira Madden dot com. Family Secrets
is an I Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a
supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie
(33:19):
Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family
secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch
with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com,
and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
(33:39):
Shapiro dot com For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
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visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
is a secret of my own. My father has been
helping me write these pages in my dreams. My father
stands in our house. It is not burned or blackened
or infelicitous. No melted pools of television screens. Not yet.
(00:22):
My rocking horse is still there, rocking. The air is clear,
the dining room table shines. It's all in one piece,
this house the way I've always imagined it could be.
So is my father. Sometimes he says, the things I wrote,
the way I wrote them. We play out the scenes,
we have our script. Other Times he says, no, not quite,
(00:46):
it didn't happen like that. My dead father is always moving.
I follow him. I'm Danny Shapiro. And this is family secrets,
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the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Have come to think of family secrets sort of like ghosts.
A family sits at the dinner table, and the ghosts
hover nearby. A family falls asleep at night, and the
ghosts linger in doorways, pace the halls. They make a
(01:30):
cup of coffee in the kitchen. These ghosts are invisible,
of course, but they're very powerful. In fact, they're all
the more powerful precisely because they're invisible. My guest today
is t Kira Madden. Tikira is a supremely gifted young
writer whose essential piercing human nous shows up on every
(01:51):
page of her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of
Fatherless Girls. When I first read Tikira's work, I knew
that I had to have her on family secrets. Tikira
grew up in a family shaped by its secrets and ghosts,
and therefore she herself was formed by all she did
not know, all her parents kept from her, from each other,
(02:14):
and from themselves. This is a story about addiction, shame,
a couple of world rocking DNA discoveries, and thrumming under
all of it, a family's love for one another. Where
does secrets go when they're stuffed away? We're about to
find out. We began, as I often do, by my
(02:35):
asking Tikira to tell me about the landscape of her childhood.
I think my childhood always felt like an adventure. I
think that's the word I would use. That I didn't
understand the dynamic of parents and child, and it was
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more like we were all on a team together, the
three of us, me and my mother and my father.
And there were always fights. There were always conflicts outside,
conflicts inside conflicts, but we were always running away or
in a sense of adventure. My mother and I were
always you know, going in the car to find my
father at whatever bar or strip club he was in,
(03:18):
and we never knew what we would find there at
three in the morning. Um. Where I was going on
separate adventures with my father to bars, to baseball games,
two clubs, to Las Vegas. Um. But the three of
us always we had a team. Um. We had a
team and a loyalty that I think doesn't make sense
to people now, but it was. It was just implicit.
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We were a team always. And how old were you
when you were going to bars and you know, out
at three in the morning looking for your dad or
going to Vegas as early as I can remember, yeah,
um My, my very earliest memories, it was my my
parents wedding and being there and after that just these
(04:02):
wild apartments we lived in the wild characters who would
come in and out. Um, and I very distinctly even
have memories in a stroller going through some of these
experiences and just my very earliest memories going in my
mother's car to these clubs and meeting these strippers outside
(04:22):
the car, and at some points having golf clubs and
baseball bats being swung at car windows and shattering, and
it was all very exciting to me. Well, that's so
interesting because the fact that you have memories from the stroller,
if it had been seriously traumatic for you, um most
likely would have blocked them out. It doesn't surprise me.
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I guess that you're saying that there was something, yeah, exciting.
I think, in a way exciting. I didn't understand. My
mind wasn't then yet molded into these false binaries of good, bad, sober, drunk.
I didn't have those understandings. It didn't feel unsafe to know.
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Everything was just kind of electric and arousing and exciting
in my early mind. I think. So, you're father was
in another family, in another relationship when you were very small. Yes,
he was married to another woman when I was born,
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and he had two sons with that woman, which I
didn't understand, of course, until a little bit later. Was
that something that you knew as you were growing up
as a toddler? He was the shadowy figure. He was
just the smell of cigarettes and gold and cash. And
that's who my father was, this kind of gravelly voice
figure in my house. I always knew there was this
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other family. My father. Um. He sat me and my
brother's down when we were younger. My my brothers were
at that point teenagers and I was a toddler, and
he explained to all of us that we were actually siblings.
And I hadn't realized before that point that I was
just supposedly my mother's kid. I was just a kid
(06:10):
who was around UM. So I had a sense of
them as my family or another family, but I didn't
understand what that meant. And I understood their photos in
my father's wallet, for example, and seeing similarities, but you know,
at that point, biology, genetics, um connection, those things didn't
(06:31):
quite make sense. Well, it sounds like you were left
to figure it out for yourself a bit. Absolutely. This
is something that comes up a lot in family secrets,
the sense of having been a salution as a child.
So often we were left to our own devices, trying
to put together the pieces of our families, attempting to
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understand what didn't add up. Our families are all we
know as children, we feel secrets as an ache, a strangeness,
or even internalize them as self loathing when we don't
understand why we feel the way we do. Could you
describe your mother a little bit? Wild? Is the word
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I would use, and I think that's the word many
people would use who have met her. Daring, wild, beautiful, electric,
just a flash of light in any room. My book
opens with a scene of her shooting a man out
our window, and that's I think very true to her
character and why I chose to open her in that way,
(07:37):
because she's fiercely protective, no boundaries, no filter, She's she's
just a force. She still is. One of the things
that really struck me in your book is the way
in which you had to educate the adults around you
in the fact that you were a child. There's a
(08:00):
moment your father has been violent with your mother, and
it's not the first time, but it's the worst time,
and she gathers you and you get into the car
and she hands you a map and she says, find
the best root out of here. And that moment struck
me for a lot of reasons, because that felt like
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a metaphor in a way for both for your book
and for your life, which is you did find the
best root out of there. How old were you in
that in that moment? I was in the sixth grade, right,
and your mother was handing you a map and say saying, like,
you know, figure it out. Yes, I was very good
at maps at that point because of so many instances
(08:42):
of this. There have been many occasions with using maps
trying to get out of certain situations. Sure, as an
only child myself, I'm well acquainted with the preternaturally adult
feeling that many only children experience. At the same time,
there's also the feeling that the mom, dad, and kid
(09:04):
are part of a tight little trio, as opposed to
enlarger families where children banned together in solidarity against the adults.
Perhaps that's part of the reason why Tikira writes so
lovingly about both her parents and almost romantically about her
beginnings with them. It still feels true to me, and
(09:24):
I think people often say, you know, parents, we do
the best we can, or they did the best we could.
I think about that a lot, and I think the
easier answer would be to always say, yes, my parents
did the best they could. But I'm not sure if
that's that was always the case, and I'm not sure
it even matters, because maybe sometimes you know, my father
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didn't do the best he could, but that's okay. Like,
there's a life of being a father and the life
of being a person in the world. And I think
through reflection and after his death, I start it to
understand those two versions and multiplicities of so many versions
of who a person can be. That the lens of
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just a father is in some ways an unfair lens,
and the lens of just mother, like that scope is
too small. I had to think about how they ended
up the way they were um to my to my
limited knowledge, of course, and acknowledge the failure that I
can't break away from that limited scope of my own
singular experiences. As you've said, Danny, and some of your work,
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there's a moment where you describe hearing the words addict,
you know, or crackhead or whatever the language was being used.
Someone was describing your parents in those ways, and you
had never put language to that at all. Yes, Yes,
is that something you would think of as having been
(10:56):
secret in your childhood or was that it didn't seem
to me that ways seemed like they were pretty out
there with their addictions, that that wasn't something they were
hiding from you or from the world. Speaking to children
of addicts, I see and I hear that a lot,
that there's there's just no vocabulary. As a child, in
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the absence of a vocabulary, Takira makes up a new
language with phrases that render her parents addiction in terms
she can understand. When her parents are high, she calls
them sleepy boy and sleepy girl. It wasn't until I
started seeing, you know, commercials about drugs and Whitney Houston
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on the news, being caught and seeing those familiar objects,
and then hearing the words from other people from media
that I started putting together what was actually going on.
Finding and knowing the language and labeling it is something
that's so powerful. I'm thinking of a previous episode of
(12:04):
Family Secrets where my guest Debbie Millman, who was being
abused by her stepfather, cuts out a clipping from an
Ann Lander's column in which someone writes to a Landers
about being abused, and for the first time she thinks,
a I'm not the only person in the entire world
that's happened to and be this is a thing, there's
(12:25):
a there's a name for it exists. That episode really
resonated with me, and she kept it under her pillowcase
or under a mattress, and I kept a book by
Drew Barrymore under my pillowcase, and I remember hearing that
on that episode and um sharing that experience that I
There was this ghost written eighties book called Little Girl Lost,
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which was Drew Barrymore's early memoir. And it wasn't until
I read that book that was the first it just
throttled me. That was the first sense of someone else
has parent like this. In some way, these behaviors are mirrored.
It's not just me in the world, because before you
understand addiction of course as a kid, or abuse of
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any kind, you think that this is only happening to me.
This couldn't possibly be happening to anyone else in the world.
And until I read Drew Barrymore, of all of all books,
of all stories, this kind of gossipy Hollywood book, did
I realize, Oh wow, her her father is trying to
drink gasoline. My father tries to drink gasoline. It's not
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just me, me and Drew Barrymore. It still wasn't plural,
but it was me and Drew Barrymore had the secret
from the rest of the world. We're going to take
a quick break her parents. Addiction isn't the only secret
Tiakia learns to keep. When she's in middle school, Tika
begins an online relationship with a senior boy in her
(13:52):
high school who eventually asks her to meet him at
the local shopping mall. Love was violence, Love was desperate um,
love was forced, and it was forceful. And so you know,
at that time, I was I was a middle school girl.
I was talking to a senior from my high school
(14:14):
on the internet. I hadn't met him in real life,
and he wanted me to meet him at a shopping mall.
And he showed up with another senior in the car,
and the sexual assault. Sexual assault occurred at the shopping mall.
And I didn't have I didn't have any sort of
vocabulary for what that meant. M I truly did feel
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that it was love, because he had used that word
with me as well. I think I might love you.
I'm always trying to write into questions of you know,
how could things have gone differently had I told my father,
perhaps we could have had such a different relationship. Perhaps
we could have um just broken the secrecy in some way.
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Why do you think you didn't, I think because of
my own confusion of what it was. Because I always
wanted clarity, I always wanted wisdom. I wanted to be
able to explain something, and this, that occurrence was something
I could never explain. When I left them all that
(15:22):
day and my parents picked me up, they took me
to a restaurant, and at the restaurant, I went to
the bathroom, and I still remember the stall I was
in at the exact restaurant, and I fell to the
floor and I was just curled up in a ball, weeping,
And in my mind I felt what had just happened
was something great and womanly and beautiful, and it was
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love and this was sex, and but my body knew
the difference. And that's something I think about to this day,
that the body knows even before we do sometimes. But
I also think I just didn't want to it into
trouble for getting in cars with boys, of course, but
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I wish I wish I did. In some ways, I
also know it would hurt him a great deal of
someone who was very protective over me. But as you
as you've described in your work, how a family and
a room can crackle with secrecy, I think is the
word you use, and that's definitely something I felt my
whole life, this crackling secrecy. I described my story in
(16:29):
this book almost as a Russian doll, but the whole
thing Russian dolled on me. Every single doll I opened,
there was another one waiting, and that's not something I expected.
And even my mother, when confronted with these family secrets,
she described them as boxes. In the same way that
I think about opening them. She described as the boxes
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all being closed. She closed them up, she kept them elsewhere.
She was so great and still is at compartmentalizing, and
I think that's really common. And I was really struck
by the end of your book how you describe how
other people it's like they didn't consider the consequences. And
for us, that's all we're thinking about is consequence and
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results and what happens. And for some people just doesn't
cross their mind because they're so good at compartmentalizing what
they've done, their actions, their memories, the things that live
in their own bodies. Remember earlier when I mentioned that
DNA is part of this story. Well, I'd say it's
(17:33):
more than part of this story. When Tikira is twenty
seven years old, she's given a d n A test
as a Christmas gift, just as happens in millions of
families each year. And this is the key to those
tightly sealed boxes, the beginning of the end of the
secrets that had thrumbed in the deepest interior of the
Madden family. And it was only because my father passed
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away and I was interested in kind of building this
family tree um. I was just kind of spooked by
that death of Oh. I want to gather as much
information as I can while I still have the opportunity
to do so. So I was interested in this. When
my mother knew about the test when she saw the
box and I said I would do it, there was
no reaction, not even a flinch, not there was no
(18:21):
fear in her face about it. It was a curious
thing to her. Why would you want to do that?
What could you want to know? That's how deep that
box was, That's how tightly it was closed. So I
took the test um. Like your story, it didn't feel
urgent in any way. I had this kind of running
(18:42):
joke in my head, because I'm always building story in
my head of like what if I find out my
father is not my father because he's just died, wouldn't
that be a twist? And so I was almost preparing
myself for this to be a big secret, like what
if I find out because I look nothing like my father,
I look Chinese and and like my mother. Um, my
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father was you know, blue eyes, blonde hair. So that
was the running joke. What if I found out after
he died, after all this grief, through this grief, if
I found out there wasn't a connection the way people
had joked about my whole life. And I opened the
results and I don't find that. I find that I'm
exactly what I've been told. I am. The map glows
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and all the places I would expect it to glow, Jewish, Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish,
Eastern European, jew Um, nothing's unexpected. And I said, Okay,
my mother's my mother, my father's my father. That was fun.
And it took a while to even find that other
page on ancestry that shows you the connections, that shows
(19:47):
you the people who have also taken the test, And
I see this icon of a woman who in a
very tiny maybe half an inch icon has dark hair,
and when I when I opened her picture, the picture
doesn't grow, but I can see that she's also Hawaiian
and Chinese, so I know it's from my mother's side,
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which shocks me, as is so often the case when
people receive unexpected results from a DNA test. Tikira first
wonders about the test accuracy. She figures that this mystery
person might be a third or fourth cousin, or maybe
no relation at all, but she does reach out to
her and when this maybe cousin, maybe not cousin connects,
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her area code is nine five four, the same area
code as tikiras from South Florida, and I thought, how
could I have a cousin who lives where I grew up?
That doesn't make sense to me. And that's when the
whole thing started to That was my big tip off.
I guess, how could that be the same area code
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in the whole world. That's not a third or fourth cousin, Like,
something's going on here. So Tikira calls the number and
the two women begin to speak. At first, Tikira thinks
that maybe this woman is an aunt. After all, she's
throughteen years older than Tikira. But that isn't what's going
on at all. This woman with whom Tikira shares a
(21:13):
significant amount of d n A, is not an aunt.
She's not a cousin. She's ti Kira's half sister. I
was saying, I think we are related. I think you
could be my aunt. Um, this is what my grandfather
was like he passed away. And she's saying, please listen,
please help me. I have clues. I have I have
(21:35):
major clues. All I know is that I was born
on seven eleven, July eleven, and that's my mother's lucky number.
And I knew as soon as she said seven eleven,
which is how my mom says. It's still it's still
her her pass code on her phone, her alarm code,
it's everything. I sort of stopped in my tracks, and
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she said, I also think her first name is and
she says my mother's first name, and the whole world
is sort of stopped. It really felt true and accurate
in that moment. Everything froze um, but I couldn't make
sense of this in any way. It still felt like
(22:20):
a mistake, until, of course I spoke to my mother.
Your mother put it in a box, you know, very
very buried, tightly sealed box. And yet at the same time,
your sister's half sister's birthdate was her code and her
(22:44):
lucky number. Yes, that's fascinating because these boxes are really interesting, right,
because she probably did not walk around with that kind
of consciousness about that. It's just simply seven eleven. It's
my lucky number. That's what makes me feel. That's just
part of my idea entity. Sure, but in fact she
was walking around with that being her child's yes, birth date,
(23:06):
two lucky numbers. Tikira's mother doesn't just have one lucky number,
seven eleven. She has a second one connected to another secret,
another ghost. We're going to take a quick break. So
(23:29):
Tikira now knows that her mother had given birth to
a child thirteen years before she was born. That put
her mother as a fifteen year old girl who had
given up a baby for adoption. What was your mother's
reaction like when you um when you did go to
her and say I've discovered this, It was the most
bizarre moment. She was completely throttled back in time and
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in that moment when I when I mentioned it is
as delicately as I could. All I had to do
was say her birthday, that I took the test, I
got the results. There was someone with the birthday seven eleven.
And she was so throttled in that moment that she
believed my father was still alive. And that was her
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first concern was your father doesn't know. Your father doesn't know.
What am I going to tell him? And I said,
Dad's not here. But that's how far back she was
throttled in that moment. She was so just, And that's
not like my mom. My mom is very to her
fault in a way, always living in the present moment,
(24:37):
always very present um. But she was so somewhere else.
And I knew in that moment, wherever she was um
as she was saying these things and closing her eyes
and drinking water, that I could never reach wherever it
was she she was living in that moment, that there
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was a part of her, so many parts of her
I will never know, and I don't think it ever
occurred to me until that moment. Secrets begets secrets begets secrets.
That is just how secrets work. Their viral contagious A
married couple who are addict and alcoholics circle and circle
(25:18):
around the unsaid, the hidden. Their lives are formed by
what they don't speak of, what they keep from one another,
And their daughter's life is formed by all that silence
and fear and shame. Does it surprise you that she
never told your dad? It did surprise me, knowing the
(25:39):
full story and having a better understanding of my mother
and my father and their secrecy. Now now it doesn't
surprise me in that moment of Corso's how could you
have not told me? How could you have not told dad?
How could that be? How is that possible? So your
(26:00):
mother has a secret from your father, Your mother and
father have secrets from you, and then your mother and
father have a secret together. Yes, but remember that ti
Kira's mom has not one, but two lucky numbers. One
of those lucky numbers represents the birth of the baby
she gave up for adoption as a teenager. What can
(26:20):
the other lucky number represent? What else could possibly be
so huge and important? Tikira meets her new half sister
and they begin to form a relationship. It's a revelation,
after a lifetime as an only child, to have this
new person in her life. Someone she describes in loving terms.
(26:41):
It feels for a while like a happy ending, a
perfect ending, and opening up and understanding finally of the
secret that had formed so much of her family's life.
But then it turns out that there's more, There's much,
much more. Just over a year later, I hear from
(27:01):
my fiance, of all people, um, that she overheard something
from other members in my family. And I said, what
did you What did you overhear? And she said, they said,
I'm so happy she found her sister, but what about
her brother? And I said, what are you talking about?
(27:25):
And she said I heard it. And I said, you,
miss you misunderstood. You didn't hear, You didn't hear correctly,
And she said, no, I heard. I heard it very clear.
And I I confronted them and I had them repeat it,
and I got more information. There is a brother. And
then I'm thinking, okay, it's my dad's turn. This has
(27:46):
got to be my dad's child. And she said he's
your full brother. And I said okay, and I'm doing
the timeline when could this have happened? And then she
says he's younger than you. And that was Um. It
was the complete opposite reaction. I felt with my sister,
(28:08):
with my sister, and immediately as soon as the shock subsided,
it just felt like this enormous gift, just the most
beautiful thing that could have happened to me, and so serendipitously,
so soon after my father passed away, that I would
lose the most important person to me and then find
(28:28):
a sister as someone who grew up alone. And when
I heard this, it felt the opposite. It felt like
I've never felt such anger and sadness and rage in
my entire life. I've always said, considering my father has
(28:49):
such rage in him, and my mother too, Let's take
a moment to walk through this more slowly. Tikira, raised
as an only child, part of the tight little tree
with her two complicated parents, actually is one of three children.
Her mother had a child as a teenager. That was
a huge revelation, but this this meant that her two parents,
(29:12):
together when she was a very young child, had another child,
a brother, who they gave up for adoption. I was
so angry, and I think processing that, I think I
was so angry that my father was gone, and I
knew I could never ask the questions, and I knew
(29:33):
I just felt like I've already gone through this. I
can't believe I'm going through this again, and I can't
believe it's more intense. It's a full sibling, it's my
father's and I can't talk to my father. I was
able to get all the answers from my mother about
my sister, but I knew this was unreachable in a
different way. And unlike ancestry, I had no connection to
(29:57):
find this brother, my full brother, the only the full
sibling I have in the world, the person who shares
more DNA with me than anyone in the world. I
had no lead of any kind, and that infuriated me,
and I felt deceived um And when I called a
family member that night and asked if it was true,
(30:18):
and she told me, and I soon realized everybody knew.
That was the hardest part, that it felt like this
conspiracy in a way to keep this from me. How
old were you and your mother was pregnant one one
and a half. And there's a moment I believe correct
me if I'm wrong, where someone tells you they sent
(30:40):
you away, right like during during that period of time
you went to Disney. Disney, I'm sorry, Disney that's what
I thought, didn't but you were like one and a
half years old. Yeah, I still haven't taken my son
to Disney, totally deprived. It's great. So then what happens
(31:04):
with your with your brother? It's still the unknown. Yeah,
it's still the unknown, and I mean, we'll see. What
I've tried to embrace in the book is the unknown
where the unfinished story is the story that we don't
(31:26):
have the perfect plot arc that we always want, and
I'm still trying to figure out what that story looks
like with my brother. Sometimes the unfinished story is the story.
Here's t Kira reading a passage from her beautiful book,
how Alma Kula is a place in the afterworld in
(31:47):
which all of one's ancestors are waiting. I always liked
this legend best, the idea of this place where all
family ties remain solid, intact, or nothing on earth ever mattered.
It is the place in which all family members are reunited,
and I like to imagine that everyone shows up a young, healthy,
so much bright life in the face, and all the
(32:09):
realms of heaven and hell. Al Amakua is the most
desired among the people of Hawaii. Once the family is reunited.
Each spirit is encouraged to visit their own idea of home.
Home can be in the depths of the sea, in
the tree tops, a spirit may choose their grandmother's lap
in her rocking chair. The sour smell of malasadas. Ancient
(32:32):
legend describes it as the place of your greatest responsibility.
Others define it as returning to one's rightful place or
one's greatest duty. The Hawaiian word for this is kolianna
(32:59):
many Thanks to t Kira Madden, you can find out
more about her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of
Fatherless Girls at t Kira Madden dot com. Family Secrets
is an I Heart media production. Dylan Fagan is a
supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie
(33:19):
Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family
secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch
with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com,
and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
(33:39):
Shapiro dot com For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
(34:00):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.