August 1, 2024 • 57 mins
It’s not until well into Darren’s adulthood that he discovers the truth of his father’s secret past. And what does he do with his father’s secrets? He keeps them. But only for a while.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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 Darren Manly, doctor of Law, screenwriter and author. Darren's
(00:32):
is a story of a life shaped by secrets and
the work and grace it takes to get out from
under that which haunts us. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Well, my childhood was above all insulated and sheltered to
a degree. For the first three years of my life,
my parents and I lived in a small suburb of
East Los Angeles called Elserina. We lived in a small apartment,
and when I was about three years old, we moved
(01:07):
to a larger suburb of Los Angeles called Temple City,
and my parents bought their first home and it was
very idyllic. As I remember. My father was fifty seven
when I was born. He was a World War Two veteran,
and my mom was a forty four year old Italian immigrant,
(01:27):
very zealous, very full of life, and I sort of
lived this old fashioned childhood. I remember Frank Sinatra and
Bing Crosby playing on a small record player in our
living room. There was always I Love Lucy or South
Pacific or another musical on TV, and I just remember
(01:52):
being very happy in that environment. I think a lot
of times we idolize our parents as kids, and I
was certainly the case for me. I saw my father
as as a hero. He was a war veteran. He
always protected me, and it only became an issue for
me when I started going to school in pre school,
(02:14):
in kindergarten, in first grade, I discovered things called transformers
and barbies, and there was somebody on the radio named
Michael Texan singing amazing songs. So that culture clash when
I ventured out into the world of the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties did create a bit of a conflict
(02:34):
between my parents and I, because I wanted to belong
and there's nothing more powerful than belonging.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
When you were a child, did you also feel when
you started school, was that like the first time that
you had an awareness that your parents were probably a
generation older than a lot of the parents of other
kids your age.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yes, because up until then they were just mom and dad.
We didn't go out very much. We did take road
trips together as a family, but most of my interactions
were with my parents or with my aunts and uncles,
who were also much older than other aunts and uncles.
(03:13):
So when I went to school, that was the first
time that I realized, Hey, my parents are there's something
different about them, and that thing is their age. And
it wasn't just the cultural references, it was physical age too,
because I saw that other dads and moms were running
around on the football field with their kids or able
(03:38):
to bend down and play with them in ways that
my parents tried to and certainly did, but weren't able
to copy to a full degree.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Though Darren is raised as an only child, he has
three older half siblings, Karen, Donna, and Michael, from an
earlier marriage of his Father's not a big part of
Darren's life growing up, but he knows about them and
occasionally sees them over the years, but for the most part,
it's just Darren and his mom and dad. He enjoys
(04:11):
the privileges and attention that comes from this dynamic, but
he badly wants the company of brothers and sisters, something
both his father and mother had when they were growing up.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
My mom came from a large family. She was the
youngest of seven in an Italian immigrant family, and my
father had been the oldest of six in an Irish
immigrant family, and they were complete opposites in terms of personalities.
(04:43):
My mother was very down to earth and my father
was a dreamer. My mother was very frugal, and my
father was frugal to a degree, but he definitely didn't
share her affinity for saving money to the same degree,
so they thought. I witnessed quite a few fights over
(05:05):
small and big things, the main thing of which was
how to raise me, because my parents had different dreams
for me, and I could sense that even from a
very young age. My father stressed education upward, nobility, making
your mark on the world, and I think in large
part that was due to him having either abandoned or
(05:28):
sabotaged a lot of the potential and dreams that he
had had earlier in life. He talked about it quite
a bit. He came to Los Angeles to be the
next Perry Como or Bing Crosby. He came out here
during the Age of the Crooner, actually, as that big
band era was just fading out and being replaced by
(05:49):
rock and roll. So the timing for him was unfortunate,
and also the circumstances of his life were unfortunate. He
had children with his first wife, Bernice, almost as soon
as he came out here to Los Angeles, and he
talked about it a lot. He would say, if only
I could have done this better, or if only I
(06:09):
had had more time to devote to my writing, which
was another passion of his, or if only I had
had time to devote to passing the LAPD entrance exam.
Being a police officer was another potential avenue for him.
So he talked about these things quite a bit, and
I could sense the regret in his voice, and I
(06:31):
could sense that I felt a sense of duty, even
from a young age, that I was going to carry
the mantle for him.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And what would carrying that mantle have looked like? What
were his dreams for you?
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Playing sports, which I liked doing. He really wanted me
to play football, be the star quarterback on the football team.
He wanted me to go into the military, which I
very nearly did but for some sabotaging of my own.
And he very much just wanted me to achieve whatever
(07:09):
my own dreams were, because he didn't have a chance
to do that himself, although he did try to steer
me in these specific directions.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
And when you say that he and your mother had
different dreams for you, what would her dreams have been?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Much simpler? She wanted me to finish high school, get
a job and understand the difficulty of working, and understand
the value of a dollar, and to get married in
the Catholic Church. That was one of her big hopes
and dreams for me, so much less emphasis on pedigree
(07:43):
or achievements like that.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Darren earns a highly coveted Air Force scholarship while in
high school, which is a huge point of pride for
his father, and so it seems as he heads off
to holy Cross College that he's going to fulfill his
father's dreams for him. But his time in college quickly
ignites an acute period of rebellion. Darren cutts class parties successively,
(08:11):
and what happens as a result is that his grades
plummet and he jeopardizes his scholarship. He's driven to flound
his father's wishes for him, and so he rebels even more.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
I think what started to drive me was this was
the first time that I was ever on my own
in life, I was two thousand miles away from my parents,
and because of the way that I'd been sheltered from culture,
from making my own mistakes, from learning of a life
on my own as I was growing up, I was
(08:44):
now on my own, and I wasn't prepared for that.
Looking back on it, and because I was alone in
my dorm room without my parents' supervision, I discovered entirely
on my own that I enjoyed the freedom of making
my own decisions and not being accountable to anybody else
(09:10):
for them. And beyond that, the people in my life
not knowing the decisions I was making. My parents didn't
know that I was failing out of school, not going
to classes, and that I was losing this scholarship until
close to the very end, when you know, letters started
to get sent and legal notices and things like that,
(09:33):
I discovered all on my own that I enjoyed keeping secrets.
I enjoyed the power that that gave me, even as
it was totally wiping out the progress that I could
have should have been making. I failed out of that
first college, and my father and mother showed up there
in Indiana and they drove me home, and that was
(09:58):
one of the only times that I can ever remember
my father showing true emotion. I remember him crying when
he learned that I had failed out of that college.
So they took me home here to Los Angeles, and
I enrolled in cal State, LA to pick up where
I had left off. And for several years, and I'm
(10:21):
talking maybe six years, it was much of the same, started, stop,
fail out, start again, and I actually came within i
want to say, ten credits of graduating, and then I
just quit and I started working at a county library,
a part time job, and I sort of just fell
(10:43):
into the job and started working, and I never graduated
with a bachelor's degree.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
What would you at the time have said about getting
ten credits away and not graduating, as opposed to how
you would see it.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Now, I see it as ludicrous. Back then, I justified
it because I was starting to write and I wanted
to make a career as a writer while I was
working part time at this library, and I remembered my
father didn't graduate from college, and he himself had wanted
(11:21):
to be a writer and was writing still at this time,
and so it gave me a certain sense of comfort
or justification to say, Hey, you had a chance to
go to college, Dad, you wanted to be a writer.
Were in this together, and believe it or not, he
(11:42):
sort of bought that. After a while, he bought it
and didn't put up any more of a fight. He
had fought so hard for me to get that college degree.
But as he got older and I put up more
and more of a fight, myself is just faded away.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
During this period in Darren's life, in his early and
mid twenties, he lives at home with his parents while
working part time and trying to write. Then in twenty ten,
when he's twenty six, the doorbell rings one morning and
something life changing occurs.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
In twenty ten, I had gone to a very bitter
breakup with the first woman that I ever loved, who
became my fiancee short period of time, and during this
time we were still in touch and maybe trying to
work things out, and it was very difficult for me emotionally.
And during the summer of twenty ten, I was at
home getting ready to leave for a shift and work
(12:44):
at the library and the doorbell rang. So I answered
the door and there was a woman standing there. And
the first thing that I noticed was there was just
something unexplained belief familiar about her. I wasn't sure whether
it was the way that she looked, but there was
(13:06):
just something that I could sense was familiar. And she
looked about maybe ten years older than me. And she
asked to speak to my father by name. She said,
is Edward Manley Holme? Is this where he lives? And
I said yes, and she asked to speak with him.
So I remember my mother was not home, though my
(13:28):
father was, so I got him and he came to
the door and closed the door and stepped out onto
the front lawn of our house and spoke to this
woman for one must have been forty five minutes. And
I stood there at the window watching them, because this
(13:48):
was a very strange experience. We didn't just get visitors
out of the blue like this. I remember they were
standing close, but not too close together. I could see
a lot of hand gesturing on my father part, almost
like he was trying to wrap the conversation up. And
I do remember that while the conversation didn't get heated,
(14:12):
I still could see the look on this woman's face
going from a look of pain to exasperation to nodding
her head as if she was trying to understand something.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Were you just watching with that sense that something important
is going on and I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
I was watching with curiosity because I could put a
couple of things together. One was this was very out
of the ordinary. And number two, there was a period
of my father's life between his first marriage and the
day that he met my mom that he never talked about.
(14:55):
And I liked to call that period of time the
dark agents, and I would ask him, as a teenager
and as a young adult, Hey, what was your life
like during that time? Did you have girlfriends? Did you
make a lot of mistakes? Did you drink? Did you smoke?
My father was the most perfect person you could imagine.
(15:15):
He didn't drink or smoke or indulge in any vices.
He never even used a crussword as long as I
could remember, at least not the four letter variety. And
so I was putting this together in my head, wondering
could this woman somehow be connected to the dark ages
of his life? And it was just a nascent thought
(15:38):
in my head at the time, but I was thinking it.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
So then your father comes back inside, and what happens.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
And he acts completely normal. He goes to the refrigerator,
gets a drink from his gatorade bottle, just like he
was coming in from getting the mail or something. He
was totally trying to downplay it. I asked him, Hey, Dad,
who was that at the door? And he said it
(16:08):
was a family friend, something to that effect, or he
had done some work for her mother years ago, and
this woman just wanted to catch up with him and
tell him about how her mother was doing. And I
started to poke and prod him a little bit. I said, hey, Dad,
like kind of in jest, are you having an affair
(16:28):
with this woman or what's going on? And he refused
to budge. He just brushed it under the rug, said, hey,
aren't you late for work? We can discuss this later.
And for that moment, that was the end of it.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And how long did that moment last?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
For a while, I brushed it under the rug for
a few weeks, But it was always nagging at me
in the back of my head because I saw no
reason for my father to be a vase about it.
It wasn't beyond the pale for him to help families
in need or to be concerned about people he had
once lived in Hollywood at different neighborhoods in Los Angeles
(17:13):
over the years, so I wasn't out of the question,
and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,
but it did gnaw at me until a few weeks
later I discovered a voicemail on his cell phone. He
loved to leave his iPhone three G out in plain
view all over the house, and I saw that there
(17:36):
was a voicemail and it was from a caller with
just initials saved as the name. So I thought that
was strange, and I played the voicemail and it was
from this woman. I recognized her voice, and as I
remember it, the woman whose name was Maria. She was
(17:56):
asking my dad when or if they meet, and that
was when I knew that my father was her father
because she used the word dad, So I had no
choice but to confirm my father at that point.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Was that shocking to you or was that something that
was in the list of possibilities. I mean, you know,
you thought, maybe sort of half kidding, but you know
that maybe he was having an affair. Did it ever
occur to you in a conscious way that maybe this
was actually his daughter?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Until that moment, it definitely occurred to me. So I
wasn't wholly shocked. I was just partly shocked because that
was one of the scenarios that I had run through
in my head, since there was that period of time
that he never spoke about. And this woman her age,
(18:56):
the vaguely familiar facial features she had, and the circumstances
surrounding her coming to the door, and for her discretion
in that moment coming to the door, I'll always be grateful.
She was probably going through her own shock and discomfort
(19:16):
in confronting her biological father for the very first time
in her life, but she was still cognizant of the
fact that here's another innocent party to me, And so
I'll always be grateful for that, that discretion that she showed.
But I certainly felt shocked, but not completely shocked.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
And also, you know, when you say your father would
leave his phone, you know sort of you know, out
in full view all the time, which of course is
what people do when they don't have anything to hide.
Had you ever listened to a voicemail on his phone before,
or was this a moment where you were kind of
starting to be in sluice mode, which is why you thought, oh,
(19:56):
I'm going to actually listen to this.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Both listened to many voicemails on his phone before, primarily
for the purpose of helping him with technological issues. It's
just how it is. An elderly person and a new
piece of technology. I was the tech guru in the house,
helping him set up the phone listen to voicemails for
(20:20):
him if he couldn't hear them correctly. So I guess
the distinction is I'd usually listened to voicemails while he
was present and had his direction. This time was in
sleuth mode and stealth mode, completely out of his presence.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
We'll be right back. When Darren first confronts his dad
(21:05):
with the knowledge he now possesses, his dad downplays it
and denies it, but since Darren has actual evidence of
the truth, his father begins to admit it, saying, Okay,
Maria may or may not be my daughter.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
But the one thing above all is he said, you
can't tell your mother. And the reason he gave her
that was growing up, my mother had always been fearful
of health problems concerning herself. Many of her relatives had
died of cancer, and so she was a bit of
(21:43):
a hypochondriac, and he said, if you tell your mother,
who knows what will happen to her. The shock of
this will affect her. Help if the it have repercussions
that we don't know about. So you need to keep
this a secret. And I started to press him more
over the next couple of weeks. And as I pressed
(22:04):
him more, and as I went into stealth mode and
sleuth mode a little bit more too, I realized that
he had been emailing with Maria. And again I looked
at some of those emails, and I discovered that not
only was Maria his daughter, but she had two sisters
(22:29):
who were also my father's. He had had these three
girls spaced five years apart, from roughly nineteen sixty five
to nineteen seventy five, with a Mexican immigrant living in
Los Angeles. And once I found out those details, I
(22:49):
started to feel angry with my dad and I told him,
you need to tell Mom, You need to tell Donna
and Karen, your other children. You need to come clean
about this. Too big of a secret to keep it in,
not only for me, but for you. This must be
weighing on you must have been for years so it
(23:10):
started to get a little more heated at that point,
and my father started to get a little bit more
desperate in his pleas to keep the secret.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
It's so interesting that his initial in the moment response
for the reason not to tell your mother was so effective.
I mean, what could be more effective than saying, you know,
this could kill her, you know, some version of it,
And that was something that was already embedded into your
(23:44):
family system in some way, this idea that you know
that she was a bit of a hypochondriac, or that
maybe her health might be a little bit fragile, or
that certainly she felt that her health might be a
little bit fragile. So that was kind of inspired of him.
But then what developed from there in terms of you know,
as you say, his desperation.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Growing, it manifested itself pretty much in the same way
as that initial overture to not tell my mom because
of her health. And the only word that I can
think of is manipulatives, because during this time in my life,
I was working that part time job, was failing out
(24:25):
of school, and really had no direction in my life,
especially financially, and during this period I was very reckless
with my own money and my own decisions. There were
many times at night when I would come home drunk
from a party, or a credit card statement would come
(24:46):
to the house and it was for a shocking amount
of money. And it was to my father that I
usually went to confide in for these things, because I
felt closer to him as a child then even into
young adulthood, and they're developed this strange and really messed
(25:09):
up quid pro quo arrangement where it was unspoken, but
he would say, if you keep my secrets, I'll keep yours.
I'll keep helping you to pay for these debts of yours.
I will keep supporting your dreams even though you're not
providing evidence that you're actually making progress. I will not
(25:32):
tell your mom, who's asleep a few rooms away you
know that you came home drunk again, or that you
got into trouble or something. And that's how it manifested
itself once he realized that I had backed him into
a corner.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Was there anyone in your life that you did share
this with at that time?
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I had a good friend that I shared it with
in strict content dentiality, and I eventually did share it
with the woman that became my wife, but that wasn't
until later on. But at this time there was just
one friend that I confided in about it, and the
(26:16):
advice was generally to come clean, to unburden myself of
it before it got too entrenched and you know, became
too much of a liability for me.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
The language around secrets is one of heaviness. We talk
about the burdens we carry, the carrying, the weight on
our hearts, the weight on our shoulders. And Darren is
simultaneously reeling from the burden of a secret having been
kept from him, while at the same time he's being
asked to carry that secret, which he does for over
(26:58):
a decade between the time Maria first rings the doorbell
and his father's death.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
Once the shock of the secret that had been kept
from me started to wear off, I became angry at
my father for putting me in this untenable situation. It
was very difficult because I felt a sense of loyalty
to my mom, I felt a sense of loyalty to
my other half siblings. But a funny thing happened is
(27:30):
that I realized that my father's secrets. Then this revelation
put him in a whole new category for me, a
completely different light, and that lie was He's not perfect.
He's made mistakes. Not only has he made mistakes, he's
made really big mistakes. He's had children that he entirely
(27:53):
walked away from to pursue a new life with my mom,
and then he had me, who he gave everything to.
That's a big mistake and it must have really weighed
on him for so many years. So armed with that knowledge,
my anger morphed into a sense of relief, and it
(28:14):
was a sense of relief saying, hey, you know, you're
not perfect. And I started to notice patterns and commonalities
between me and my dad. It put things into perspective.
For instance, unfortunately there's no way around it. I had
cheated on romantic partners, and some times that cheating had
(28:37):
been successful in the sense that I wasn't caught, and
other times it came dangerously close to getting caught. And
I realized that I loved the secret part of that.
I loved the control that it gave me. Same thing
with the money, spending money on lavish things and dinner
(29:00):
and trips that I had no business spending money on.
It wasn't really the end product that I was after.
It was the knowledge that I could go to a
store of my own will and secretly buy something and
then maybe even secretly sell it on Craigslist to make
up the difference later on, while nobody else around me
(29:20):
knew what was going on. So here's my father with
huge mistakes and me with small mistakes that are gradually
adding up to a pattern of much bigger mistakes. And
this brought us closer. It actually made me bond with
my father, and it made me not only keep his
(29:43):
secret for those eleven years, it made me seek out
his counsel and get closer to him in a way
that I never would have if Maria had never come
to our door.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
So in seeking his counsel, you were, at that point
than sharing with him the ways in which you now
realized were like him, or at least were enacting something
that was like him. How was his counsel.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
It was varied in quality. The biggest takeaway that I
got from the things he said to me and what
I observed, were that he had this uncanny, strange ability
to compartmentalize his life, these different eras of his life.
For instance, until Maria came to our door, I very
(30:37):
rarely saw anything perturb him emotionally. He was very placid,
very stoic, and I always tried to emulate that. And
when I would cheat on a partner and that blow
up would happen and I was in the midst of
(31:01):
fighting with my partner and the shame that comes with
getting caught and the uncertainty of what's going to happen next,
he would always tell me, you just have to keep
your head down. This will path, this will go away.
Time will heal this. And same for my financial mistakes.
(31:24):
He always counseled me, of course, stop spending money, stop
relying on external things to validate yourself. He gave me
great advice in that regard. But he always had this
ability to block out his mistakes from the path and
just keep trudging forward. And that's something that, of course
(31:44):
I tried to do, but it's easier said than done,
and I found that I did not have the stomach
for that. I couldn't just block out my mistakes and
treat them like they'd never happened.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
When you and he would talk about these things, would
he so speak with you about his feelings about his
mistakes or was it more like he was in a
role of counseling you, and you both shared this knowledge
of what some of those mistakes of his had.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Been mostly counseling, but he did open up. At first,
he would say it's too much to get into, or
it's too big of a story to talk about, and
he would artfully divert the story back or the conversation
back to a time in life that he was more
comfortable talking about, like World War two or sometime when
(32:34):
I was a child. But then gradually he did start
to open up about the mistakes that he had made
with Maria and her siblings, and regrets that he had
about not being there for them, and most of all,
as I continued to kind of sleuth and glance at
(32:55):
some of these emails that he would exchange on a
weekly basis with Maria, his regret and his emotion really
came out directly to her. In those email I could
tell how much he regretted having left them, and I
(33:15):
could also sense that a certain burden had been lifted
off of him, although not entirely because he couldn't come
clean to the rest of his family.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Was this a correspondence only with Maria or with her
two sisters as well.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
He attempted to speak with her two sisters, but it
was primarily through Maria, because her two sisters felt more
of the brunt of his abandonment, because they were older
and I believe they remembered him, whereas Maria didn't really
have much of a memory of it, and so they
didn't really approve of her talking to him. And they
(33:52):
didn't really speak with my father very much at all.
And that goes for both before and after his death
in speaking with the rest of our family.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
So is your sense of that that just the wounds
were just too a bridge too far in terms of
being able to kind of have a relationship, very.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Much so, although to her credit, Maria seemed to very
much want a relationship, both by seeking him out and
by communicating with him so often by phone and email
and meeting up in person secretively, of course, but she
very much did want a relationship, and I could sense
(34:32):
the emotion was there on her side too.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
And how about you in terms of, you know, having
been raised an only child, and you know you had
these very distant, much much older half siblings, but you know,
really really experiencing your life as an only child, there's
suddenly these half sisters who are a little bit closer
in age to you, who had been this total secret.
(34:54):
Was there any longing on your part for a relationship
with them or with.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
There? Was? There was curiosity there. But while my father
was alive and my mother and other half siblings didn't
know about her, I was offered opportunities to meet with
her by my father. He said, you should get to
know Maria. You should you should call her, you should
(35:22):
go have lunch with her, things like that. But I
never felt it was my place. I wanted to, but
I felt like an intruder into this dynamic between my
dad and her, and into her life as well, in
a way, because it felt like the whole thing had
just been not forced on us, but just dropped into
(35:44):
my lap.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
I would imagine too, that it would have felt like
a betrayal of your mother, given that you were already
having to keep this a secret from.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Your mother, very much so, and also because this big
secret amplified what I discovered in light of this secret
were smaller secrets that my father had always kept from
my mother. That manipulative nature, which sounds like a strong
(36:16):
word and I hate using it, but it's really the
only word I can think of. It had always been there.
My mother would tell me that when my father and
her first married, my father, prior to the marriage had
represented that his financial situation was different from what it
actually was, and she found out once they got married
that he actually had less money than she had planned
(36:40):
to have. After getting married, I noticed that my father
would purchase things without my mom's knowledge and tell me
to not tell her about it because if she found
out about it, she would just end up taking it
back to the store. And then there were the ever
present warnings about her health, which looking back on it,
(37:02):
were legitimate but very overblown. So I started to discover
this pattern of secret keeping them my dad had, and
that made me feel like I would be even more
disloyal to my mom by communicating with Maria and her
not knowing about it.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
But Darren isn't the only one who's been in the dark.
His much older half siblings know nothing about this either.
Maria and her sisters are every bit as much siblings
of them as they are of Darren, and so Darren
is put in the uncomfortable position during those years of
not only carrying his father's secrets, but also being in
(37:48):
sort of cahoots with him, engaged in a dizzying bargain.
But there's a silver lining to be found here too.
The truth of his father's secret life is offering an
explanation to Darren for some of his own behaviors, parts
of himself that he hadn't previously understood. It brings to
(38:08):
mind what Carl Jung famously wrote about secrecy. Until we
make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and
we will call it fate.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
And perhaps the biggest secret of all, and the thing
that I couldn't understand until all of this started to unfold,
was that publicly I was, as many people are, I
was a very different person than I was privately, And
part of that stemmed from the fact that my father
(38:41):
had this perfect image and this old fashioned image of
being upstanding and kind of a community leader and always
looking out for people. And I'm really trying to emulate
that so much from young adulthood into being an adult
in my twenties and early thirties. So for all anybody knew,
(39:02):
outside of my own foibles and problems, I really had
it together. I was doing well. I looked like I
was doing well. I spoke as eloquently as I could
in the light of all these things that were happening
to me. And so when Maria came and I discovered
(39:22):
my dad's secret, it really let me understand that trauma
can be passed down through generations in a very subtle,
strange way, almost without you knowing about it. And now
I had this barometer or this compass that was showing me,
here's why you are the way you are, and here's
(39:44):
why you need to find a middle ground between your
public image and your private one, or just completely own
your private image, and maybe a lot of your problems
will go away. Because what I've discovered and this holds
true and my father, is that having children with a
woman out of wedlock is not a problem. Leaving them
(40:07):
was certainly a problem. If my father was a playboy,
or he had predilections to search out certain things, or
he liked he had a large sex drive, nobody vaulted
him for that. It was that he and I held
themselves out to be something that they weren't, and then
(40:28):
they betrayed that trust with the outside world because inside
they were harboring all these secrets and they were completely different.
So I learned a lot about how unburdened you can
get just by owning who you are and letting that
unconscious part of you take over. A little bit.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(41:15):
Nearly halfway through this decade long period of carrying his
father's secret, in twenty fourteen, another important event transpires in
Darren's life. He meets Eva, the woman who is now
his wife.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
I was Eva's supervisor at the library, so we were
not supposed to be dating under any circumstances. But we
fell for each other and kept that secret that we
were dating from our coworkers and certainly from our bosses,
until I left the library in twenty fifteen to pursue
(41:56):
writing full time. And Eva was in a lot of
ways my opposite too. I had this sometimes unquenchable ambition
to become a published writer, to make my mark on
the world. I still had that impulsive streak where I
would make decisions, primarily financial, but also just spur of
(42:21):
the moment, plans that completely contradicted the way she did things.
She was very practical and above all brutally honest and
took people at face value. So I had a streak
of sarcasm within me that had to be modified or
(42:42):
extinguished a little bit of what I was talking to her,
because she would take me at face value, and that
was interesting for me, but also terrifying in a way
because she didn't really know about my past. I hid
that from her. In her mind, I was this old fashioned,
(43:03):
upstanding young gentleman who grew up with older parents that
had a completely different vibe from the modern world, and
she liked that. She was a huge Island Lucy fan.
That was one of the things we bonded over initially.
So meeting her and seeing how clear she was with
her expectations was very scary for me.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
I mean, it's interesting, like just the I think you
just used the expression like she took you a face value, right,
I mean, it was just so perfect, like what you
see is what you get. At what point did you
make the leap of letting her in more and letting
her know you better.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Well, I do remember telling her about my father's secrets
not that long into our relationships, so she had a
little bit of context for him, But for me, it
wasn't until two thousand and sixteen. In twenty seventeen, when
(44:06):
my writing wasn't really panning out, and she was encouraging
me to return to work of some kind because she
was making some money I wasn't, and she just wanted
me to feel fulfilled and like I was moving forward
in my life. And during that period of time, my
(44:27):
credit card debt really ballooned out of a feeling of
depression and sort of aimlessness and fadness. And I was
living at home with mom and dad, and I was
alone during the day again, able to keep secrets, not
really accountable to my partner or really even to the
(44:51):
outside world at this point. And during this period of time,
not only did I spend just an exorbitant amount of
money I don't even want to talk about, but I
was unfaithful to her twice, and the first time she
forgave me. The second time it was much more serious,
and she forgave me again, but with conditions that were
(45:14):
much harder to meet, so she started to hold me accountable.
And it was during this period of time when again
I was confiding in my father and he was urging
me to try to be stomic and see the bright
side of things and come for me as best he could.
It was during this period of time when I realized
(45:36):
I can honor my dad and love him for all
of the blood and sweat he's given me, and I
can keep his secret. But I don't have to be
like him. I can choose to be different from him
and put the exercises in to become more honest myself.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
It's interesting that you, early in your relationship with Eva
you did share with her your dad's secrets, because it
sounds like she's only the second person who you unburdened
yourself to right so in a way, it's almost like
some part of you from early on recognized this is
something I want to do differently, even though you couldn't
(46:15):
do it differently right away.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
Yes, because I mean I was tired of messing thing up,
although I would go on to do the same. And
I didn't see it as a way of really letting
her in. I saw it as a faithe way of
being honest with her because it did end pertain to me,
It pertained to my dad, and it was a way
(46:39):
of letting her in without really letting her in. And
it was a step on my part, but nonetheless not
really anywhere near as as far as I could have
taken it.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Years pass and Darren decides to study law. In California,
you can go to law school without a bachelor's degree.
It's Eva who encourages him to pursue this path, while
also encouraging him to continue working on his writing. After
about a year of law school, in the fall of
twenty twenty one, Darren experiences the two great inevitabilities of life,
(47:17):
birth and death. His first child is born in September,
and in November, his dad's health begins to rapidly decline.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
So I was adjusting to being a dad for the
first time myself, and trying to suppore my wife and
you know, just learning how to change diapers and everything,
and my dad started to get confused about where he
was and what was going on. I took him into
the hospital for heart failure, and he came out a
(47:51):
week later and took his medicine for two days, and
then he said, Darren, I want to die. And IM
plus it in that was he wanted to leave money
for each of these hidden siblings that my mother and
(48:12):
half siblings still didn't know about. He wanted to leave
money from Maria and her sisters. So I immediately started
to think, you know, how am I going to do this?
There's no way. So as he started to slip further
away in Hotae care over the course of about two days,
I saw voicemails on his phone and emails from Maria
(48:32):
asking what's going on, Dad, I haven't heard from you
in a little bit of is everything okay? And how
old is he? At this point he was ninety four,
And so I decided, just before we gave my dad
medicine that may make it impossible for him to speak again.
I called Maria myself and I said, you know, this
(48:56):
is Darren. Dad is going to die today or tomorrow.
And she broke down crying on the phone. She said,
I had a feeling, but I wasn't sure, you know.
Thank you for letting me know. At that point, I
called Donna and Karen individually and I told them, Hey,
(49:16):
I need to tell you something. Dad had not only
one or two, but he had three children that he
never told you about. And then, worst of all, I
had to tell my mom face to face, and she
was shocked because she was dealing with the death of
her husband and the birth of this completely new understanding
(49:41):
about him. And I remember it was almost immediately before
my father slipped away into sleep and never woke up
that I remember telling him nothing in particular, but I
just said, Dad, it's okay. I took care of things,
and he looked at me like he understood. And besides
promising him that I would graduate from law school, which
(50:03):
thankfully I ended up doing, that was the last thing
I ever said to him that he heard was it's okay, Dad,
you can go now the burden is gone. My half
siblings were shocked. They hadn't seen my father from a
different perspective growing up than I did, obviously, because, unbeknownst
(50:25):
to me, but known to them, my father's first marriage
had ended because he cheated on his first wife, Bernice,
with the woman who would eventually end up becoming a
second and his third wife. They married, got divorced, and
then married again, and even during the course of this
(50:49):
second and third marriage, there were other affairs than my
father had that my half siblings were privy to, because
he would show up with these different women at family
parties or big events. But they never told me about
this until Dad died, and until I told them that
(51:11):
he had been hiding this huge secret from them their
whole life. So they were shocked, but not completely shocked.
I was then shocked in turn to find out that
he had told me different reasons for the first divorce.
He had justified it and made it sound like it
(51:31):
really wasn't his fault. But my half sister, Donna in particular,
then went into sleuth mode because she's a genealogist and
loves searching family trees, and so she started to research
Maria's family tree. She reached out to Maria and to
her two sisters and trying to establish a relationship so
(51:57):
that we could all be together.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
And your mom.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
My mom just kept saying, I can't believe that he
would keep this from me. And the crazy thing that
I learned that she told me directly was before she
married my dad, she had been approached by a woman
at the cathedral where she and my dad had met,
(52:23):
telling him that she didn't really know my dad yet
and that there were other children out there. And to
this day, I don't know whether that was Maria's Bob
or someone else that he had had a relationship with,
but it speaks to my mom's state of mind and
her loyalty that she even went through with the marriage
(52:46):
after that, and also my dad's ability to talk his
way out of that, because she did confront him and
he managed to downplay it as he often did.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
In these few years since his father's death. Darren and
Eva become the parents of two a girl and then
a boy. They are determined to get their partnership right,
not to fall into the traps or mistakes of the past,
and so they develop a strategy something they call honesty exercises,
a beautiful, soulful way to learn from history rather than
(53:27):
repeat it.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
It's something that was definitely born out of my relationship
with her that period of time after I cheated on
her in twenty seventeen. There was a period of time
of about a year where I was just doing whatever
I could to get back in her good graces, and
(53:52):
it ended with a marriage proposal about a year after
we had started this odyssey. And what I've just did
is that the sting of unfaithfulness might go away or
ebb a little bit, but it actually never goes away completely.
(54:13):
And so there's been times during our marriage where things
that I'll say it would do might give rise to
doubt on her part, even that I haven't really done
anything wrong. But it's that to me then to put
her at ease. And I think that I've gotten defensive
(54:33):
about that, but I also think that it really is
on me to exercise my honesty in the best way
that I can to put her at ease in light
of what happened between us, and it doesn't just extend
to her. I think exercising your honesty muscle, it's just
(54:56):
a daily thing because even now, in ways big and
small that urge to keep things to myself, whether it's
out of shame for thinking maybe I did something wrong
or maybe I don't know how to do something, so
let me not ask for help. That's strong even to
this day. So it takes quite a bit of internal
(55:18):
dialogue every day for me to just remember where I
came from, how far I've come, and how I can
keep going down this path just by trying my best
to be honest in the smallest of ways.
Speaker 2 (55:56):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's A Core
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
(56:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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 Darren Manly, doctor of Law, screenwriter and author. Darren's
(00:32):
is a story of a life shaped by secrets and
the work and grace it takes to get out from
under that which haunts us. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Well, my childhood was above all insulated and sheltered to
a degree. For the first three years of my life,
my parents and I lived in a small suburb of
East Los Angeles called Elserina. We lived in a small apartment,
and when I was about three years old, we moved
(01:07):
to a larger suburb of Los Angeles called Temple City,
and my parents bought their first home and it was
very idyllic. As I remember. My father was fifty seven
when I was born. He was a World War Two veteran,
and my mom was a forty four year old Italian immigrant,
(01:27):
very zealous, very full of life, and I sort of
lived this old fashioned childhood. I remember Frank Sinatra and
Bing Crosby playing on a small record player in our
living room. There was always I Love Lucy or South
Pacific or another musical on TV, and I just remember
(01:52):
being very happy in that environment. I think a lot
of times we idolize our parents as kids, and I
was certainly the case for me. I saw my father
as as a hero. He was a war veteran. He
always protected me, and it only became an issue for
me when I started going to school in pre school,
(02:14):
in kindergarten, in first grade, I discovered things called transformers
and barbies, and there was somebody on the radio named
Michael Texan singing amazing songs. So that culture clash when
I ventured out into the world of the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties did create a bit of a conflict
(02:34):
between my parents and I, because I wanted to belong
and there's nothing more powerful than belonging.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
When you were a child, did you also feel when
you started school, was that like the first time that
you had an awareness that your parents were probably a
generation older than a lot of the parents of other
kids your age.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yes, because up until then they were just mom and dad.
We didn't go out very much. We did take road
trips together as a family, but most of my interactions
were with my parents or with my aunts and uncles,
who were also much older than other aunts and uncles.
(03:13):
So when I went to school, that was the first
time that I realized, Hey, my parents are there's something
different about them, and that thing is their age. And
it wasn't just the cultural references, it was physical age too,
because I saw that other dads and moms were running
around on the football field with their kids or able
(03:38):
to bend down and play with them in ways that
my parents tried to and certainly did, but weren't able
to copy to a full degree.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Though Darren is raised as an only child, he has
three older half siblings, Karen, Donna, and Michael, from an
earlier marriage of his Father's not a big part of
Darren's life growing up, but he knows about them and
occasionally sees them over the years, but for the most part,
it's just Darren and his mom and dad. He enjoys
(04:11):
the privileges and attention that comes from this dynamic, but
he badly wants the company of brothers and sisters, something
both his father and mother had when they were growing up.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
My mom came from a large family. She was the
youngest of seven in an Italian immigrant family, and my
father had been the oldest of six in an Irish
immigrant family, and they were complete opposites in terms of personalities.
(04:43):
My mother was very down to earth and my father
was a dreamer. My mother was very frugal, and my
father was frugal to a degree, but he definitely didn't
share her affinity for saving money to the same degree,
so they thought. I witnessed quite a few fights over
(05:05):
small and big things, the main thing of which was
how to raise me, because my parents had different dreams
for me, and I could sense that even from a
very young age. My father stressed education upward, nobility, making
your mark on the world, and I think in large
part that was due to him having either abandoned or
(05:28):
sabotaged a lot of the potential and dreams that he
had had earlier in life. He talked about it quite
a bit. He came to Los Angeles to be the
next Perry Como or Bing Crosby. He came out here
during the Age of the Crooner, actually, as that big
band era was just fading out and being replaced by
(05:49):
rock and roll. So the timing for him was unfortunate,
and also the circumstances of his life were unfortunate. He
had children with his first wife, Bernice, almost as soon
as he came out here to Los Angeles, and he
talked about it a lot. He would say, if only
I could have done this better, or if only I
(06:09):
had had more time to devote to my writing, which
was another passion of his, or if only I had
had time to devote to passing the LAPD entrance exam.
Being a police officer was another potential avenue for him.
So he talked about these things quite a bit, and
I could sense the regret in his voice, and I
(06:31):
could sense that I felt a sense of duty, even
from a young age, that I was going to carry
the mantle for him.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And what would carrying that mantle have looked like? What
were his dreams for you?
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Playing sports, which I liked doing. He really wanted me
to play football, be the star quarterback on the football team.
He wanted me to go into the military, which I
very nearly did but for some sabotaging of my own.
And he very much just wanted me to achieve whatever
(07:09):
my own dreams were, because he didn't have a chance
to do that himself, although he did try to steer
me in these specific directions.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
And when you say that he and your mother had
different dreams for you, what would her dreams have been?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Much simpler? She wanted me to finish high school, get
a job and understand the difficulty of working, and understand
the value of a dollar, and to get married in
the Catholic Church. That was one of her big hopes
and dreams for me, so much less emphasis on pedigree
(07:43):
or achievements like that.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Darren earns a highly coveted Air Force scholarship while in
high school, which is a huge point of pride for
his father, and so it seems as he heads off
to holy Cross College that he's going to fulfill his
father's dreams for him. But his time in college quickly
ignites an acute period of rebellion. Darren cutts class parties successively,
(08:11):
and what happens as a result is that his grades
plummet and he jeopardizes his scholarship. He's driven to flound
his father's wishes for him, and so he rebels even more.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
I think what started to drive me was this was
the first time that I was ever on my own
in life, I was two thousand miles away from my parents,
and because of the way that I'd been sheltered from culture,
from making my own mistakes, from learning of a life
on my own as I was growing up, I was
(08:44):
now on my own, and I wasn't prepared for that.
Looking back on it, and because I was alone in
my dorm room without my parents' supervision, I discovered entirely
on my own that I enjoyed the freedom of making
my own decisions and not being accountable to anybody else
(09:10):
for them. And beyond that, the people in my life
not knowing the decisions I was making. My parents didn't
know that I was failing out of school, not going
to classes, and that I was losing this scholarship until
close to the very end, when you know, letters started
to get sent and legal notices and things like that,
(09:33):
I discovered all on my own that I enjoyed keeping secrets.
I enjoyed the power that that gave me, even as
it was totally wiping out the progress that I could
have should have been making. I failed out of that
first college, and my father and mother showed up there
in Indiana and they drove me home, and that was
(09:58):
one of the only times that I can ever remember
my father showing true emotion. I remember him crying when
he learned that I had failed out of that college.
So they took me home here to Los Angeles, and
I enrolled in cal State, LA to pick up where
I had left off. And for several years, and I'm
(10:21):
talking maybe six years, it was much of the same, started, stop,
fail out, start again, and I actually came within i
want to say, ten credits of graduating, and then I
just quit and I started working at a county library,
a part time job, and I sort of just fell
(10:43):
into the job and started working, and I never graduated
with a bachelor's degree.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
What would you at the time have said about getting
ten credits away and not graduating, as opposed to how
you would see it.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Now, I see it as ludicrous. Back then, I justified
it because I was starting to write and I wanted
to make a career as a writer while I was
working part time at this library, and I remembered my
father didn't graduate from college, and he himself had wanted
(11:21):
to be a writer and was writing still at this time,
and so it gave me a certain sense of comfort
or justification to say, Hey, you had a chance to
go to college, Dad, you wanted to be a writer.
Were in this together, and believe it or not, he
(11:42):
sort of bought that. After a while, he bought it
and didn't put up any more of a fight. He
had fought so hard for me to get that college degree.
But as he got older and I put up more
and more of a fight, myself is just faded away.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
During this period in Darren's life, in his early and
mid twenties, he lives at home with his parents while
working part time and trying to write. Then in twenty ten,
when he's twenty six, the doorbell rings one morning and
something life changing occurs.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
In twenty ten, I had gone to a very bitter
breakup with the first woman that I ever loved, who
became my fiancee short period of time, and during this
time we were still in touch and maybe trying to
work things out, and it was very difficult for me emotionally.
And during the summer of twenty ten, I was at
home getting ready to leave for a shift and work
(12:44):
at the library and the doorbell rang. So I answered
the door and there was a woman standing there. And
the first thing that I noticed was there was just
something unexplained belief familiar about her. I wasn't sure whether
it was the way that she looked, but there was
(13:06):
just something that I could sense was familiar. And she
looked about maybe ten years older than me. And she
asked to speak to my father by name. She said,
is Edward Manley Holme? Is this where he lives? And
I said yes, and she asked to speak with him.
So I remember my mother was not home, though my
(13:28):
father was, so I got him and he came to
the door and closed the door and stepped out onto
the front lawn of our house and spoke to this
woman for one must have been forty five minutes. And
I stood there at the window watching them, because this
(13:48):
was a very strange experience. We didn't just get visitors
out of the blue like this. I remember they were
standing close, but not too close together. I could see
a lot of hand gesturing on my father part, almost
like he was trying to wrap the conversation up. And
I do remember that while the conversation didn't get heated,
(14:12):
I still could see the look on this woman's face
going from a look of pain to exasperation to nodding
her head as if she was trying to understand something.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Were you just watching with that sense that something important
is going on and I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
I was watching with curiosity because I could put a
couple of things together. One was this was very out
of the ordinary. And number two, there was a period
of my father's life between his first marriage and the
day that he met my mom that he never talked about.
(14:55):
And I liked to call that period of time the
dark agents, and I would ask him, as a teenager
and as a young adult, Hey, what was your life
like during that time? Did you have girlfriends? Did you
make a lot of mistakes? Did you drink? Did you smoke?
My father was the most perfect person you could imagine.
(15:15):
He didn't drink or smoke or indulge in any vices.
He never even used a crussword as long as I
could remember, at least not the four letter variety. And
so I was putting this together in my head, wondering
could this woman somehow be connected to the dark ages
of his life? And it was just a nascent thought
(15:38):
in my head at the time, but I was thinking it.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
So then your father comes back inside, and what happens.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
And he acts completely normal. He goes to the refrigerator,
gets a drink from his gatorade bottle, just like he
was coming in from getting the mail or something. He
was totally trying to downplay it. I asked him, Hey, Dad,
who was that at the door? And he said it
(16:08):
was a family friend, something to that effect, or he
had done some work for her mother years ago, and
this woman just wanted to catch up with him and
tell him about how her mother was doing. And I
started to poke and prod him a little bit. I said, hey, Dad,
like kind of in jest, are you having an affair
(16:28):
with this woman or what's going on? And he refused
to budge. He just brushed it under the rug, said, hey,
aren't you late for work? We can discuss this later.
And for that moment, that was the end of it.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And how long did that moment last?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
For a while, I brushed it under the rug for
a few weeks, But it was always nagging at me
in the back of my head because I saw no
reason for my father to be a vase about it.
It wasn't beyond the pale for him to help families
in need or to be concerned about people he had
once lived in Hollywood at different neighborhoods in Los Angeles
(17:13):
over the years, so I wasn't out of the question,
and I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,
but it did gnaw at me until a few weeks
later I discovered a voicemail on his cell phone. He
loved to leave his iPhone three G out in plain
view all over the house, and I saw that there
(17:36):
was a voicemail and it was from a caller with
just initials saved as the name. So I thought that
was strange, and I played the voicemail and it was
from this woman. I recognized her voice, and as I
remember it, the woman whose name was Maria. She was
(17:56):
asking my dad when or if they meet, and that
was when I knew that my father was her father
because she used the word dad, So I had no
choice but to confirm my father at that point.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Was that shocking to you or was that something that
was in the list of possibilities. I mean, you know,
you thought, maybe sort of half kidding, but you know
that maybe he was having an affair. Did it ever
occur to you in a conscious way that maybe this
was actually his daughter?
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Until that moment, it definitely occurred to me. So I
wasn't wholly shocked. I was just partly shocked because that
was one of the scenarios that I had run through
in my head, since there was that period of time
that he never spoke about. And this woman her age,
(18:56):
the vaguely familiar facial features she had, and the circumstances
surrounding her coming to the door, and for her discretion
in that moment coming to the door, I'll always be grateful.
She was probably going through her own shock and discomfort
(19:16):
in confronting her biological father for the very first time
in her life, but she was still cognizant of the
fact that here's another innocent party to me, And so
I'll always be grateful for that, that discretion that she showed.
But I certainly felt shocked, but not completely shocked.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
And also, you know, when you say your father would
leave his phone, you know sort of you know, out
in full view all the time, which of course is
what people do when they don't have anything to hide.
Had you ever listened to a voicemail on his phone before,
or was this a moment where you were kind of
starting to be in sluice mode, which is why you thought, oh,
(19:56):
I'm going to actually listen to this.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Both listened to many voicemails on his phone before, primarily
for the purpose of helping him with technological issues. It's
just how it is. An elderly person and a new
piece of technology. I was the tech guru in the house,
helping him set up the phone listen to voicemails for
(20:20):
him if he couldn't hear them correctly. So I guess
the distinction is I'd usually listened to voicemails while he
was present and had his direction. This time was in
sleuth mode and stealth mode, completely out of his presence.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
We'll be right back. When Darren first confronts his dad
(21:05):
with the knowledge he now possesses, his dad downplays it
and denies it, but since Darren has actual evidence of
the truth, his father begins to admit it, saying, Okay,
Maria may or may not be my daughter.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
But the one thing above all is he said, you
can't tell your mother. And the reason he gave her
that was growing up, my mother had always been fearful
of health problems concerning herself. Many of her relatives had
died of cancer, and so she was a bit of
(21:43):
a hypochondriac, and he said, if you tell your mother,
who knows what will happen to her. The shock of
this will affect her. Help if the it have repercussions
that we don't know about. So you need to keep
this a secret. And I started to press him more
over the next couple of weeks. And as I pressed
(22:04):
him more, and as I went into stealth mode and
sleuth mode a little bit more too, I realized that
he had been emailing with Maria. And again I looked
at some of those emails, and I discovered that not
only was Maria his daughter, but she had two sisters
(22:29):
who were also my father's. He had had these three
girls spaced five years apart, from roughly nineteen sixty five
to nineteen seventy five, with a Mexican immigrant living in
Los Angeles. And once I found out those details, I
(22:49):
started to feel angry with my dad and I told him,
you need to tell Mom, You need to tell Donna
and Karen, your other children. You need to come clean
about this. Too big of a secret to keep it in,
not only for me, but for you. This must be
weighing on you must have been for years so it
(23:10):
started to get a little more heated at that point,
and my father started to get a little bit more
desperate in his pleas to keep the secret.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
It's so interesting that his initial in the moment response
for the reason not to tell your mother was so effective.
I mean, what could be more effective than saying, you know,
this could kill her, you know, some version of it,
And that was something that was already embedded into your
(23:44):
family system in some way, this idea that you know
that she was a bit of a hypochondriac, or that
maybe her health might be a little bit fragile, or
that certainly she felt that her health might be a
little bit fragile. So that was kind of inspired of him.
But then what developed from there in terms of you know,
as you say, his desperation.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Growing, it manifested itself pretty much in the same way
as that initial overture to not tell my mom because
of her health. And the only word that I can
think of is manipulatives, because during this time in my life,
I was working that part time job, was failing out
(24:25):
of school, and really had no direction in my life,
especially financially, and during this period I was very reckless
with my own money and my own decisions. There were
many times at night when I would come home drunk
from a party, or a credit card statement would come
(24:46):
to the house and it was for a shocking amount
of money. And it was to my father that I
usually went to confide in for these things, because I
felt closer to him as a child then even into
young adulthood, and they're developed this strange and really messed
(25:09):
up quid pro quo arrangement where it was unspoken, but
he would say, if you keep my secrets, I'll keep yours.
I'll keep helping you to pay for these debts of yours.
I will keep supporting your dreams even though you're not
providing evidence that you're actually making progress. I will not
(25:32):
tell your mom, who's asleep a few rooms away you
know that you came home drunk again, or that you
got into trouble or something. And that's how it manifested
itself once he realized that I had backed him into
a corner.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Was there anyone in your life that you did share
this with at that time?
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I had a good friend that I shared it with
in strict content dentiality, and I eventually did share it
with the woman that became my wife, but that wasn't
until later on. But at this time there was just
one friend that I confided in about it, and the
(26:16):
advice was generally to come clean, to unburden myself of
it before it got too entrenched and you know, became
too much of a liability for me.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
The language around secrets is one of heaviness. We talk
about the burdens we carry, the carrying, the weight on
our hearts, the weight on our shoulders. And Darren is
simultaneously reeling from the burden of a secret having been
kept from him, while at the same time he's being
asked to carry that secret, which he does for over
(26:58):
a decade between the time Maria first rings the doorbell
and his father's death.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
Once the shock of the secret that had been kept
from me started to wear off, I became angry at
my father for putting me in this untenable situation. It
was very difficult because I felt a sense of loyalty
to my mom, I felt a sense of loyalty to
my other half siblings. But a funny thing happened is
(27:30):
that I realized that my father's secrets. Then this revelation
put him in a whole new category for me, a
completely different light, and that lie was He's not perfect.
He's made mistakes. Not only has he made mistakes, he's
made really big mistakes. He's had children that he entirely
(27:53):
walked away from to pursue a new life with my mom,
and then he had me, who he gave everything to.
That's a big mistake and it must have really weighed
on him for so many years. So armed with that knowledge,
my anger morphed into a sense of relief, and it
(28:14):
was a sense of relief saying, hey, you know, you're
not perfect. And I started to notice patterns and commonalities
between me and my dad. It put things into perspective.
For instance, unfortunately there's no way around it. I had
cheated on romantic partners, and some times that cheating had
(28:37):
been successful in the sense that I wasn't caught, and
other times it came dangerously close to getting caught. And
I realized that I loved the secret part of that.
I loved the control that it gave me. Same thing
with the money, spending money on lavish things and dinner
(29:00):
and trips that I had no business spending money on.
It wasn't really the end product that I was after.
It was the knowledge that I could go to a
store of my own will and secretly buy something and
then maybe even secretly sell it on Craigslist to make
up the difference later on, while nobody else around me
(29:20):
knew what was going on. So here's my father with
huge mistakes and me with small mistakes that are gradually
adding up to a pattern of much bigger mistakes. And
this brought us closer. It actually made me bond with
my father, and it made me not only keep his
(29:43):
secret for those eleven years, it made me seek out
his counsel and get closer to him in a way
that I never would have if Maria had never come
to our door.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
So in seeking his counsel, you were, at that point
than sharing with him the ways in which you now
realized were like him, or at least were enacting something
that was like him. How was his counsel.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
It was varied in quality. The biggest takeaway that I
got from the things he said to me and what
I observed, were that he had this uncanny, strange ability
to compartmentalize his life, these different eras of his life.
For instance, until Maria came to our door, I very
(30:37):
rarely saw anything perturb him emotionally. He was very placid,
very stoic, and I always tried to emulate that. And
when I would cheat on a partner and that blow
up would happen and I was in the midst of
(31:01):
fighting with my partner and the shame that comes with
getting caught and the uncertainty of what's going to happen next,
he would always tell me, you just have to keep
your head down. This will path, this will go away.
Time will heal this. And same for my financial mistakes.
(31:24):
He always counseled me, of course, stop spending money, stop
relying on external things to validate yourself. He gave me
great advice in that regard. But he always had this
ability to block out his mistakes from the path and
just keep trudging forward. And that's something that, of course
(31:44):
I tried to do, but it's easier said than done,
and I found that I did not have the stomach
for that. I couldn't just block out my mistakes and
treat them like they'd never happened.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
When you and he would talk about these things, would
he so speak with you about his feelings about his
mistakes or was it more like he was in a
role of counseling you, and you both shared this knowledge
of what some of those mistakes of his had.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
Been mostly counseling, but he did open up. At first,
he would say it's too much to get into, or
it's too big of a story to talk about, and
he would artfully divert the story back or the conversation
back to a time in life that he was more
comfortable talking about, like World War two or sometime when
(32:34):
I was a child. But then gradually he did start
to open up about the mistakes that he had made
with Maria and her siblings, and regrets that he had
about not being there for them, and most of all,
as I continued to kind of sleuth and glance at
(32:55):
some of these emails that he would exchange on a
weekly basis with Maria, his regret and his emotion really
came out directly to her. In those email I could
tell how much he regretted having left them, and I
(33:15):
could also sense that a certain burden had been lifted
off of him, although not entirely because he couldn't come
clean to the rest of his family.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Was this a correspondence only with Maria or with her
two sisters as well.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
He attempted to speak with her two sisters, but it
was primarily through Maria, because her two sisters felt more
of the brunt of his abandonment, because they were older
and I believe they remembered him, whereas Maria didn't really
have much of a memory of it, and so they
didn't really approve of her talking to him. And they
(33:52):
didn't really speak with my father very much at all.
And that goes for both before and after his death
in speaking with the rest of our family.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
So is your sense of that that just the wounds
were just too a bridge too far in terms of
being able to kind of have a relationship, very.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Much so, although to her credit, Maria seemed to very
much want a relationship, both by seeking him out and
by communicating with him so often by phone and email
and meeting up in person secretively, of course, but she
very much did want a relationship, and I could sense
(34:32):
the emotion was there on her side too.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
And how about you in terms of, you know, having
been raised an only child, and you know you had
these very distant, much much older half siblings, but you know,
really really experiencing your life as an only child, there's
suddenly these half sisters who are a little bit closer
in age to you, who had been this total secret.
(34:54):
Was there any longing on your part for a relationship
with them or with.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
There? Was? There was curiosity there. But while my father
was alive and my mother and other half siblings didn't
know about her, I was offered opportunities to meet with
her by my father. He said, you should get to
know Maria. You should you should call her, you should
(35:22):
go have lunch with her, things like that. But I
never felt it was my place. I wanted to, but
I felt like an intruder into this dynamic between my
dad and her, and into her life as well, in
a way, because it felt like the whole thing had
just been not forced on us, but just dropped into
(35:44):
my lap.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
I would imagine too, that it would have felt like
a betrayal of your mother, given that you were already
having to keep this a secret from.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Your mother, very much so, and also because this big
secret amplified what I discovered in light of this secret
were smaller secrets that my father had always kept from
my mother. That manipulative nature, which sounds like a strong
(36:16):
word and I hate using it, but it's really the
only word I can think of. It had always been there.
My mother would tell me that when my father and
her first married, my father, prior to the marriage had
represented that his financial situation was different from what it
actually was, and she found out once they got married
that he actually had less money than she had planned
(36:40):
to have. After getting married, I noticed that my father
would purchase things without my mom's knowledge and tell me
to not tell her about it because if she found
out about it, she would just end up taking it
back to the store. And then there were the ever
present warnings about her health, which looking back on it,
(37:02):
were legitimate but very overblown. So I started to discover
this pattern of secret keeping them my dad had, and
that made me feel like I would be even more
disloyal to my mom by communicating with Maria and her
not knowing about it.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
But Darren isn't the only one who's been in the dark.
His much older half siblings know nothing about this either.
Maria and her sisters are every bit as much siblings
of them as they are of Darren, and so Darren
is put in the uncomfortable position during those years of
not only carrying his father's secrets, but also being in
(37:48):
sort of cahoots with him, engaged in a dizzying bargain.
But there's a silver lining to be found here too.
The truth of his father's secret life is offering an
explanation to Darren for some of his own behaviors, parts
of himself that he hadn't previously understood. It brings to
(38:08):
mind what Carl Jung famously wrote about secrecy. Until we
make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives, and
we will call it fate.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
And perhaps the biggest secret of all, and the thing
that I couldn't understand until all of this started to unfold,
was that publicly I was, as many people are, I
was a very different person than I was privately, And
part of that stemmed from the fact that my father
(38:41):
had this perfect image and this old fashioned image of
being upstanding and kind of a community leader and always
looking out for people. And I'm really trying to emulate
that so much from young adulthood into being an adult
in my twenties and early thirties. So for all anybody knew,
(39:02):
outside of my own foibles and problems, I really had
it together. I was doing well. I looked like I
was doing well. I spoke as eloquently as I could
in the light of all these things that were happening
to me. And so when Maria came and I discovered
(39:22):
my dad's secret, it really let me understand that trauma
can be passed down through generations in a very subtle,
strange way, almost without you knowing about it. And now
I had this barometer or this compass that was showing me,
here's why you are the way you are, and here's
(39:44):
why you need to find a middle ground between your
public image and your private one, or just completely own
your private image, and maybe a lot of your problems
will go away. Because what I've discovered and this holds
true and my father, is that having children with a
woman out of wedlock is not a problem. Leaving them
(40:07):
was certainly a problem. If my father was a playboy,
or he had predilections to search out certain things, or
he liked he had a large sex drive, nobody vaulted
him for that. It was that he and I held
themselves out to be something that they weren't, and then
(40:28):
they betrayed that trust with the outside world because inside
they were harboring all these secrets and they were completely different.
So I learned a lot about how unburdened you can
get just by owning who you are and letting that
unconscious part of you take over. A little bit.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(41:15):
Nearly halfway through this decade long period of carrying his
father's secret, in twenty fourteen, another important event transpires in
Darren's life. He meets Eva, the woman who is now
his wife.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
I was Eva's supervisor at the library, so we were
not supposed to be dating under any circumstances. But we
fell for each other and kept that secret that we
were dating from our coworkers and certainly from our bosses,
until I left the library in twenty fifteen to pursue
(41:56):
writing full time. And Eva was in a lot of
ways my opposite too. I had this sometimes unquenchable ambition
to become a published writer, to make my mark on
the world. I still had that impulsive streak where I
would make decisions, primarily financial, but also just spur of
(42:21):
the moment, plans that completely contradicted the way she did things.
She was very practical and above all brutally honest and
took people at face value. So I had a streak
of sarcasm within me that had to be modified or
(42:42):
extinguished a little bit of what I was talking to her,
because she would take me at face value, and that
was interesting for me, but also terrifying in a way
because she didn't really know about my past. I hid
that from her. In her mind, I was this old fashioned,
(43:03):
upstanding young gentleman who grew up with older parents that
had a completely different vibe from the modern world, and
she liked that. She was a huge Island Lucy fan.
That was one of the things we bonded over initially.
So meeting her and seeing how clear she was with
her expectations was very scary for me.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
I mean, it's interesting, like just the I think you
just used the expression like she took you a face value, right,
I mean, it was just so perfect, like what you
see is what you get. At what point did you
make the leap of letting her in more and letting
her know you better.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Well, I do remember telling her about my father's secrets
not that long into our relationships, so she had a
little bit of context for him, But for me, it
wasn't until two thousand and sixteen. In twenty seventeen, when
(44:06):
my writing wasn't really panning out, and she was encouraging
me to return to work of some kind because she
was making some money I wasn't, and she just wanted
me to feel fulfilled and like I was moving forward
in my life. And during that period of time, my
(44:27):
credit card debt really ballooned out of a feeling of
depression and sort of aimlessness and fadness. And I was
living at home with mom and dad, and I was
alone during the day again, able to keep secrets, not
really accountable to my partner or really even to the
(44:51):
outside world at this point. And during this period of time,
not only did I spend just an exorbitant amount of
money I don't even want to talk about, but I
was unfaithful to her twice, and the first time she
forgave me. The second time it was much more serious,
and she forgave me again, but with conditions that were
(45:14):
much harder to meet, so she started to hold me accountable.
And it was during this period of time when again
I was confiding in my father and he was urging
me to try to be stomic and see the bright
side of things and come for me as best he could.
It was during this period of time when I realized
(45:36):
I can honor my dad and love him for all
of the blood and sweat he's given me, and I
can keep his secret. But I don't have to be
like him. I can choose to be different from him
and put the exercises in to become more honest myself.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
It's interesting that you, early in your relationship with Eva
you did share with her your dad's secrets, because it
sounds like she's only the second person who you unburdened
yourself to right so in a way, it's almost like
some part of you from early on recognized this is
something I want to do differently, even though you couldn't
(46:15):
do it differently right away.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
Yes, because I mean I was tired of messing thing up,
although I would go on to do the same. And
I didn't see it as a way of really letting
her in. I saw it as a faithe way of
being honest with her because it did end pertain to me,
It pertained to my dad, and it was a way
(46:39):
of letting her in without really letting her in. And
it was a step on my part, but nonetheless not
really anywhere near as as far as I could have
taken it.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Years pass and Darren decides to study law. In California,
you can go to law school without a bachelor's degree.
It's Eva who encourages him to pursue this path, while
also encouraging him to continue working on his writing. After
about a year of law school, in the fall of
twenty twenty one, Darren experiences the two great inevitabilities of life,
(47:17):
birth and death. His first child is born in September,
and in November, his dad's health begins to rapidly decline.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
So I was adjusting to being a dad for the
first time myself, and trying to suppore my wife and
you know, just learning how to change diapers and everything,
and my dad started to get confused about where he
was and what was going on. I took him into
the hospital for heart failure, and he came out a
(47:51):
week later and took his medicine for two days, and
then he said, Darren, I want to die. And IM
plus it in that was he wanted to leave money
for each of these hidden siblings that my mother and
(48:12):
half siblings still didn't know about. He wanted to leave
money from Maria and her sisters. So I immediately started
to think, you know, how am I going to do this?
There's no way. So as he started to slip further
away in Hotae care over the course of about two days,
I saw voicemails on his phone and emails from Maria
(48:32):
asking what's going on, Dad, I haven't heard from you
in a little bit of is everything okay? And how
old is he? At this point he was ninety four,
And so I decided, just before we gave my dad
medicine that may make it impossible for him to speak again.
I called Maria myself and I said, you know, this
(48:56):
is Darren. Dad is going to die today or tomorrow.
And she broke down crying on the phone. She said,
I had a feeling, but I wasn't sure, you know.
Thank you for letting me know. At that point, I
called Donna and Karen individually and I told them, Hey,
(49:16):
I need to tell you something. Dad had not only
one or two, but he had three children that he
never told you about. And then, worst of all, I
had to tell my mom face to face, and she
was shocked because she was dealing with the death of
her husband and the birth of this completely new understanding
(49:41):
about him. And I remember it was almost immediately before
my father slipped away into sleep and never woke up
that I remember telling him nothing in particular, but I
just said, Dad, it's okay. I took care of things,
and he looked at me like he understood. And besides
promising him that I would graduate from law school, which
(50:03):
thankfully I ended up doing, that was the last thing
I ever said to him that he heard was it's okay, Dad,
you can go now the burden is gone. My half
siblings were shocked. They hadn't seen my father from a
different perspective growing up than I did, obviously, because, unbeknownst
(50:25):
to me, but known to them, my father's first marriage
had ended because he cheated on his first wife, Bernice,
with the woman who would eventually end up becoming a
second and his third wife. They married, got divorced, and
then married again, and even during the course of this
(50:49):
second and third marriage, there were other affairs than my
father had that my half siblings were privy to, because
he would show up with these different women at family
parties or big events. But they never told me about
this until Dad died, and until I told them that
(51:11):
he had been hiding this huge secret from them their
whole life. So they were shocked, but not completely shocked.
I was then shocked in turn to find out that
he had told me different reasons for the first divorce.
He had justified it and made it sound like it
(51:31):
really wasn't his fault. But my half sister, Donna in particular,
then went into sleuth mode because she's a genealogist and
loves searching family trees, and so she started to research
Maria's family tree. She reached out to Maria and to
her two sisters and trying to establish a relationship so
(51:57):
that we could all be together.
Speaker 2 (52:00):
And your mom.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
My mom just kept saying, I can't believe that he
would keep this from me. And the crazy thing that
I learned that she told me directly was before she
married my dad, she had been approached by a woman
at the cathedral where she and my dad had met,
(52:23):
telling him that she didn't really know my dad yet
and that there were other children out there. And to
this day, I don't know whether that was Maria's Bob
or someone else that he had had a relationship with,
but it speaks to my mom's state of mind and
her loyalty that she even went through with the marriage
(52:46):
after that, and also my dad's ability to talk his
way out of that, because she did confront him and
he managed to downplay it as he often did.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
In these few years since his father's death. Darren and
Eva become the parents of two a girl and then
a boy. They are determined to get their partnership right,
not to fall into the traps or mistakes of the past,
and so they develop a strategy something they call honesty exercises,
a beautiful, soulful way to learn from history rather than
(53:27):
repeat it.
Speaker 3 (53:31):
It's something that was definitely born out of my relationship
with her that period of time after I cheated on
her in twenty seventeen. There was a period of time
of about a year where I was just doing whatever
I could to get back in her good graces, and
(53:52):
it ended with a marriage proposal about a year after
we had started this odyssey. And what I've just did
is that the sting of unfaithfulness might go away or
ebb a little bit, but it actually never goes away completely.
(54:13):
And so there's been times during our marriage where things
that I'll say it would do might give rise to
doubt on her part, even that I haven't really done
anything wrong. But it's that to me then to put
her at ease. And I think that I've gotten defensive
(54:33):
about that, but I also think that it really is
on me to exercise my honesty in the best way
that I can to put her at ease in light
of what happened between us, and it doesn't just extend
to her. I think exercising your honesty muscle, it's just
(54:56):
a daily thing because even now, in ways big and
small that urge to keep things to myself, whether it's
out of shame for thinking maybe I did something wrong
or maybe I don't know how to do something, so
let me not ask for help. That's strong even to
this day. So it takes quite a bit of internal
(55:18):
dialogue every day for me to just remember where I
came from, how far I've come, and how I can
keep going down this path just by trying my best
to be honest in the smallest of ways.
Speaker 2 (55:56):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's A Core
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
(56:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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