Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:07]

This is actually happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

[00:00:22]

I'm thrilled to announce that starting with today's episode, this is actually happening, has now officially joined the Wonder Network as a Wonder your original show. This means a lot of things for me and for this show. But the biggest change is that instead of releasing episodes and the usual bi weekly schedule, we will be bringing you new episodes every week. The way it will work is that every other week will be putting out the normal style of episodes we always have.

[00:00:43]

But the weeks in between will be featuring stories in the happening series similar to the stories we released in early September. This will allow us to explore different kinds of stories and themes, and I'll explain more in the next volume next week. For me personally, becoming a wonder original means I've been able to realize the goal. I announced earlier this summer to make this podcast my full time job as creator and producer. I want to thank everyone who has supported me in this effort, both on Patreon, on the Facebook group, and has devoted listeners.

[00:01:09]

I also want to extend a big thanks to Karen in Georgia of my favorite murder for sending your listeners my way and providing a crucial tipping point for the show. And of course, the biggest thanks to Andre for taking a chance on me and on the podcast for supporting it over the past few years and now for making it possible to move into full time production and becoming a one true original. You'll notice a few little differences here and there in the intro and outro, small changes to the branding of the show and new advertisers coming along.

[00:01:33]

But otherwise the move won't change content, tone or style, except that I'll be able to deliver more content to a wider audience with a bigger team. Thank you all again for listening. It's truly such an indescribable feeling. It was just horrible nausea and it feels kind of like the walls are closing in on you, like reality is just collapsing.

[00:02:08]

From wondering I'm with misalign you are listening to this is actually happening. Episode 164, what if a shocking accusation devastated your family? I grew up in a pretty average American household, we lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood, did all the typical things a family would do, an average middle class family, that is, and things are pretty normal. I was happy. I loved my mother, I adored her, she doted on me and I was her first born.

[00:03:00]

So of course, we have that special bond.

[00:03:04]

My father, I have less memories of him, I think he works longer hours than my mom, and when he would come home, he would spend time in the backyard in the shed. So my mom worked as a teacher. She went into special education just like her mom, my grandma did. My grandma worked with the severe learning disabilities and it was her passion.

[00:03:27]

And so my mom followed in her footsteps and she focused on teaching reading to students who had a hard time with that. Many of them had add ADHD processing disorders.

[00:03:38]

Maybe some had Down syndrome. She had a great reputation as a teacher. From what I know, she was well by her colleagues. My mom and my dad had a happy marriage for the first two years, but my mom noticed a couple of years into their marriage that my dad was starting to act strangely.

[00:03:59]

His behavior was changing a lot. He grew more secretive. He would spend a lot of time in our backyard in this giant shed that we had smoking weed and doing drugs. And she wasn't aware in the beginning of what he was doing. It was gradual, according to my mom. It got progressively worse as the years went on. By the time I was five years old and my sister was born, he was just acting erratic, doing different kinds of drugs.

[00:04:28]

He quit his job multiple times and he was abusive towards her emotionally. He would put her down. He would accuse her of things like one day my mom had bought like a little cute lamp that she loved and he just threw it on the ground and broke it and just laughed. He would lie or he would accuse my mother of lying. He would always talk about how intelligent he was or how good he was at his job when he was actually falling behind.

[00:04:59]

He was paranoid. He always thought that people were watching him or that my mother was too overbearing, you know, for asking him about where he was and he would disappear for hours at a time and wouldn't come back. And that was just how he became. But he wasn't like that in the beginning. One thing about him is he did not like my sister. He was upset that she was a girl. He wanted a son. He has always seen me as the golden child, he adored me in his twisted way, and he never he never tried to hurt me.

[00:05:36]

He just tried very hard to convince me that my mother was evil. My mother was miserable and she was afraid of him, and that's when she realized that the situation was serious and she needed to find a way out. It was a very ugly process, it took a long time to actually finally get him out of our house and then he would continue to return and beg my mother for forgiveness. He would come to my school every day and try to have lunch with me.

[00:06:08]

He would harass the babysitter who stayed with us every day. He was like a parasite. You couldn't get rid of him. When it really got bad is when the divorce was finalized, but we had court mandated visitation with him. He would just sit there and look at me and tell me all these things about my mother and how she was wrong and she was destroying the family and that he loves me and they were still married in the eyes of God and that we would be a family again, that my mother is evil and wrong, and that my grandparents, my mother's parents were also evil.

[00:06:48]

And he would even go as far as to say they're going to go to hell for doing what they did. But I wanted to listen to him. He was my daddy, you know, and that means a lot to a little girl. So it was horribly confusing because I adored my mother. She was my main caregiver. You know, I lived with her full time and I would only see him every other weekend. And it caused a lot of pain.

[00:07:09]

And as my grades started slipping, I think that's when my mother realized something was very, very wrong. So my mother, I think she had been separated from my dad for maybe a year or two years and she needs her second husband. This guy sweeps her off her feet. He waves his money around. He has a background in law enforcement and that makes her feel safe. Finally, she thought that she, my sister and I could get away from my dad and be protected from him.

[00:07:45]

She got engaged to him six months after they met, they were married pretty soon after and we all moved into his home and he had a son. So I had this new stepfather and stepbrother.

[00:07:59]

The very beginning, I still had court ordered visitations with my dad. The brainwashing had continued, it was nonstop, the visits were miserable. One day I remember I was just so overwhelmed, you know, I didn't know who to believe, I felt like a shell. The last straw that finally severed the tie between my dad and me and my sister was when I had to see this counselor and during my interview with her, I told her that if I had to go see him again, that I would kill myself.

[00:08:35]

She was like, well, those, I guess, are the golden words, you won't see your dad again. And so that stopped that. My father has received multiple diagnoses over the years, the main one that I always cite is that he has narcissistic personality disorder, but he also has been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and bipolar disorder and severe paranoia. He never accepted, but he was actually damaging my sister, my sister and me, he just claimed that it was my mother and my grandparents brainwashing me into thinking he was the bad person.

[00:09:15]

I was very confused about how I felt about my mom, but our relationship healed. I mean, the only damage to it had been caused by him. You know, all I had to do was look at her and see that she adored me. She she always has. So my mom's second marriage appeared pretty perfect from the outside, especially from the beginning, she had the ideal blended family, a nice house, a husband who had his own business.

[00:09:45]

This man I actually refer to as dad and I loved him. He was good to me and my sister, he was playful. But there's a statistic that women who are abused will often get with a second abuser in their lifetime for whatever reason. And that is exactly what happened with my mom. I don't think she realized again until it was too late that she had made a mistake marrying him so fast when she didn't really know him.

[00:10:12]

My step father, like I mentioned, had his own business, but it was not a booming business at all. And then my mother, she had continued working as a teacher. She had changed schools. She was working at a middle school now, which was not exactly her element. I remember my mother's behavior starting to get a little erratic. She would have the swings. She would stay in bed late, she would cry before going to work every day.

[00:10:43]

She was miserable at her job. She did not have a good relationship with her boss at the new school, so she was drowning her marriage. Her second marriage was failing when she wanted it so badly to work on biological father was always hanging around in the background, threatening to get custody of my sister and me. She started drinking more and she was just sad. One day I just found her in my bathroom and she had like this tiny like a little razor blade, I don't even know where she found it from.

[00:11:14]

And she was just like scratching right behind her ear, like, incessantly. And I was trying to be like, I like, what's wrong? Like, why are you doing that stuff? You know, like you're bleeding. And she just kept going. So she was going through like a full fledged breakdown and my stepdad wasn't helping her at all, he was just kind of letting it happen and draining her bank account while it did. As a kid, it was very scary to watch my mother unravel.

[00:11:46]

I remember feeling like I didn't have an adult in my life who I could really rely on. I was starting to be fearful for my mother and maybe of my mother, too, and I would see her in these very bad states of mind. So I was in eighth grade at that point, I was just an awkward middle schooler. I never had a boyfriend who didn't think I was attractive or anything like that. Like most middle schoolers think, my mother one day brought some students over to her house because they were working on an extra credit project.

[00:12:24]

And my mom has always been extremely open and loving and helpful. So she invited them over and they were working on their posterboard projects and the garage. And I got to meet her students. They were my age. They were also in eighth grade. And one of them was a guy. And I thought he was kind of cute and he seemed nice and funny. And the strange thing was he seemed interested in me. He thought I was pretty.

[00:12:48]

He told my mom that. And she, of course, told me because she thought it was sweet and thought, oh, well, maybe maybe he can be my first boyfriend. He was one of my mother's students. He was technically special education, we had some learning disorders. I know for sure that he had ADHD and a very bad temper. He had aggression issues so he would work with her again to learn coping strategies. I asked my mom, like, if he could come over more often, if we could hang out.

[00:13:21]

So he would come over fairly frequently and my mom was was fine with it. She was just excited to see me have a crush on someone and see me have that first little puppy love experience. I guess. It was as serious as an eighth grade relationship can possibly be, I would see him pretty regularly every week. It's not like we had riveting conversations. He would just crack jokes and I would laugh, and that's about it.

[00:13:50]

We would hang out in my room or hang out, just messing around, going on walks. And one thing that is very sad to reflect back on, I was so young, I was only 14 at the time and he repeatedly would try to like, get me to do sexual things with him.

[00:14:07]

Like he would beg me. He would make inappropriate comments. He would grab me by my shirt and, like, pull me close to him and act like he was trying to pull my shirt off.

[00:14:18]

But we never did anything sexual. The most we ever did was make out. He would like play fight with me, but he would hit so hard that he would, like, leave bruises. It was pretty bad, but I was just so excited to have someone interested in me at that age that I just overlooked it and thought that it was OK.

[00:14:44]

My boyfriend had been making a lot of sexual comments about my mom. He would make them to me, which was extremely uncomfortable, just talking about how attractive she was. I'm sure you know that he probably said these things to the other boys at school. But my mother didn't do anything to provoke this. She was just trying to do her job. And again, I cannot stress enough how miserable she was working at that middle school. And she was miserable not because of her students, but just because of the work environment.

[00:15:15]

The colleagues and her boss, the principal, despised her for whatever reason. I don't know. All I know is that I saw my mother in tears going to work every day because she was so miserable. My father had also meddled in my mother's work so much what the school district that the school board was aware of him. He had just made such a fuss that I suppose my mother had a reputation of being the woman who had been married to a crazy man.

[00:15:54]

Today's episode of This is actually happening is brought to you by upstart, as most of us have found out, the hard way getting into debt is easy, but getting out is hard, especially if your credit score isn't great. Thankfully, now there's upstart dotcom, the revolutionary lending platform that knows you're more than just a credit score and offers smarter interest rates to help you pay off high interest credit card debt. Debt is one of the most insidious burdens of our generation, but it's a fact of life many of us rely on to achieve our goals.

[00:16:20]

Upstart goes beyond the traditional credit score. When assessing your credit worthiness, they actually reward you based on your education and job history in the form of a smarter rate. They make it fast, simple and easy to check your rate. And the best part is that once the loan is approved and accepted, most people get their funds the very next business day. So join over 400000 people who've used up start to pay off credit cards or meet their financial goals.

[00:16:43]

See why Upstart is top ranked in their category with a four point nine out of five rating on trust and hurry to upstart dotcom happening. To find out how low your upstart rate is, checking your rate takes only a few minutes. That's upstart dotcom happening. You know, my mother was in the middle of her breakdown, really, when I was dating this boy, she was just doing her best to try to keep me happy. So she facilitated the visits between him and me.

[00:17:20]

She would bring him over to spend time with me. She would drive him to come see me. Sometimes she would take us shopping with her. You know, one day we were in a clothing store just looking for a new shirt for me. And she ran into one of her colleagues, a fellow teacher at the school. And the teacher made a comment, Oh, why are you with the student? And she said, Oh, he's friends with my daughter.

[00:17:45]

They're spending time together. And the colleague said, Oh, OK, that's cool. At one point, she was taking my boyfriend home from a visit and he was having a meltdown and the seat beside her, so she pulled off into a park to try to get him to calm down because he was kicking her dashboard so hard that he was going to break it. That's when she pulled off into a park that a cop pulled up behind her and was like, what are you guys doing here?

[00:18:18]

She just explained what was going on and he said, oh, OK, be on your way, but just so you know, your tag is expired. You need to renew it. And she said, OK. And I think she may have been given a ticket for that. Something like that. Or a warning, I don't know. The next day, as soon as my stepdad heard about it, for some reason, he just really latched on to that and he flipped out.

[00:18:43]

He had already been accusing my mom of infidelity, my stepdad had had an affair during their marriage, but I guess so many people like to project these days. And so he was constantly accusing my mother of cheating on him. He is a former police officer, so he went down to the station. I don't really know what went through his head. I don't know if you saw it as an opportunity. All I know is that he went to the police station and talked to some of his friends about what happened.

[00:19:15]

And I have heard conflicting stories from my mother, from a stepdad, from my grandparents. All I know is that when he went to the police station, he raised some eyebrows as to why my mother was in the park with my boyfriend at night alone.

[00:19:33]

Her principal had also caught wind of what was going on between her, the student slash my boyfriend and me. So I had gone to school like normal and I was in choir and my friend came up to me and she said, Are you OK? And I said, Yeah, why? And she said, Well, I heard about your mom. And I said, what do you mean? And my friend said, well, I heard about the arrest.

[00:20:06]

And I said, what? Later in the day, we had a computer lab and I Googled my mom and the first thing that came up was her arrest in our local newspaper teacher arrested on sexual assault charges. When I found out that my mom had been arrested, it's truly such an indescribable feeling. It was just horrible nausea and it feels kind of like the walls are closing in on you, like reality is just collapsing. And I also felt like I had every single eye on me.

[00:20:43]

I was like, everyone knows what's going on. The next day it was in the newspaper and the newspaper, of course, had been delivered to the school and whatnot, and my principal called me out of line and told me that he was watching out for me and that everything was going to be OK. The day my mom was arrested, my stepdad did not come get me from school. I don't quite know where he was. He just abandoned me and my sister.

[00:21:15]

My grandparents came and picked us up from school and they explained to us that my mom was in the county jail, that she had been accused of rape, but that they were doing everything they could to take care of her.

[00:21:30]

I remember going back to our house and getting my things and taking the two puppies that we had at the time, we just took them and going back to my grandparents home, which became my home. They were very lost and I was confused. I didn't know what what was going on and I don't even remember talking to my stepdad during that time. He just vanished, evaporated into thin air as soon as my mom was arrested. So my mother ended up with four charges, she has a charge of aggravated child molestation, which is twenty five years to serve, no chance of parole.

[00:22:10]

She has child molestation, which is 20 certain statutory rape, which is 20 years straight, and then also sexual assault, which is 30 years served. Twenty five with parole eligibility. The thinking, nauseous feeling just stayed with me probably for weeks.

[00:22:32]

The process of like finding out that my mother had been arrested, her being in the county jail, the news reporting on her to the time, I think it was probably a few weeks later that we got her out on bond. I was thrilled for her to come back so things could seem normal again, so I could forget that image that I had in my mind of her mug shot because it was everywhere and the poor thing and her mug shot, she just looks so confused because she didn't know what was going on.

[00:23:07]

I remember the night that my mom got out on bail, they had to sneak her out of the jail. She was wearing like plain clothes and a cap to hide her hair. And she just she seemed kind of like a zombie, that strange state where she didn't seem to know what was going on. She was just in a state of shock, I feel like. Seventy five percent of the time, especially during those first few weeks after everything went down.

[00:23:36]

She was still very much broken, but she was still there for me. She tried her best when she tried to explain things to me and my sister so that we would understand. But she was also horrified by her own charges that it made it hard for her to talk about them with us.

[00:23:55]

She tried her best to hide it. My mom has always tried to hide her pain from me and my sister, but there were times when I saw her breakdown, I saw her cry.

[00:24:05]

I have a very strong memory of her just laying in the guest bedroom on the bed, just sobbing. You know, she was like a little kid.

[00:24:15]

This was just unlike any pain that I ever could have imagined to be accused of a crime, to lose your job, to move back in with your parents who are also frightened and don't know what to do. It felt like a nightmare. Her life was collapsing. She just was lost. At the age of 14, that was the first bit of awareness that I ever got, that my mom is a person, you know, she's not just my mom, but she has feelings and she's an individual who is suffering more than she ever had.

[00:24:54]

I think my family as a whole is very naive. I think that we're good, hardworking people. My grandparents especially have always lived very normal, middle class, happy lives, never getting into trouble or anything like that. And then with my mother being accused of rape of one of her students and losing her job and her second marriage collapsing, they just didn't know what to do. They were just appalled. And of course, during this time, my stepfather was nowhere to be found.

[00:25:25]

He was doing God knows what, probably just happy to get rid of my mom, since I think she had become a bit of a drag, since she had tried to convince him to continue supporting a family that he didn't want to support. So the news had a field day with my mom, you know, this was a big case for an otherwise pretty boring town. The news tends to sensationalize stories like my mother's a teacher, seduces a student.

[00:25:53]

They love to talk about those. And I remember like the news trying to interview us, they filmed themselves walking up to our front door. The good thing is that my identity was kept secret because I was a minor and so I was safe. But I remember hearing whispering from other students. Oh, did you hear about that student who got raped at the other middle school? Every time I heard a little comment like that, it felt like a knife in my chest.

[00:26:25]

My mother, I remember she tried her best to try to keep attention away from her, she'd always dyed her hair pretty blonde highlights. But then as soon as she had her mug shot pasted all over the news, she went back to Brown and she did not venture out in public that often, just out of fear of being recognized. I think everyone enjoyed the sensation of the story. People love gossip and people love drama. And I think that's what my mother's case was and the school district ran with it.

[00:27:01]

They made a big deal out of claiming that they were providing counseling services to the fellow students at the school where she worked and all this crazy stuff when really none of that was happening.

[00:27:15]

What I felt was confusion and just sickness, you feel like you're in a nightmare, like it's just unreal what's going on and it feels like there's no there's no escape.

[00:27:30]

My mother was at home on bail for probably roughly a year before the main trial, and to be honest, the latter half of that year was incredibly happy. I have very happy memories of coming home from school and just sitting and talking to my mom for hours, telling her about my day, my classes, we would watch shows together. We were big fans of the show, Supernatural. I suppose that's kind of the silver lining. If there is one of the situation that I was able to repair and just have true quality time with her away from stepdads or biological dads who could interfere.

[00:28:13]

My mother sort of recovered from her breakdown, of course, she still had this trial coming over her head and the grief over her failed marriage and her lost job and this accusation that she was facing.

[00:28:27]

But aside from all of that, she was not just going to sit at home. She wanted to work towards her next career, that she knew she would never work as a teacher again. So she tried to become a hairstylist. I never believed that my mother could do this ever. Even at her worst point, when I saw my mother going through the worst part of her breakdown, I never thought my mother could hurt someone in that way, especially not my boyfriend at the time.

[00:29:02]

It was sickening to know that he was the one making this accusation, but I think what's important to note about this accusation is that it was really spearheaded by my stepdad and by the boy's family and by the school district. So my mom's trial took place the summer after my freshman year of high school, and I remember it lasted about a week every day. My mother would put on her nice clothes and she and my grandparents would drive off to the courthouse and I would be left at home with my sister.

[00:29:44]

So the public believes that my mom was basically having an affair with her accuser, who was her student. At first, he maintained that nothing happened. I heard that he was just as shocked by what was going on as many of us were. During like the very first interrogations with police, he was like, nothing happened between us, that's insane. But he was questioned multiple times. I know my family has copies of the transcripts and you can read as he gets hammered by the police.

[00:30:19]

It's sad in a way. He just start saying, OK, well, yeah, that that did happen. I guess that did happen there. So he claimed that he and my mother had had sex multiple times in different locations in our house, out riding four wheelers, which was bizarre. So it was it was pretty wild what he claimed. She was painted as the teacher seductress. And even during the trial, when he was getting examined by our attorney, I was told that he had his head down the entire time.

[00:30:55]

He wouldn't look up, wouldn't look at anyone. He was barely speaking. You couldn't even hear him, really. He was just just saying yes to whatever the attorney said that, yes, it happened. He was basically being fed answers and then I guess he just ended up running with it. I know for a fact that his family got a huge settlement from the school district because, of course, they threatened to sue, or maybe they did.

[00:31:19]

So I'm not quite sure. I doubt it got that far. The school district was, of course, involved because as soon as my mother was arrested, they were they were ready to wipe her from their record and get rid of her. It's important to say that his files, like he was a special education student with a very long history of aggression and lying and other behavioral issues, his files were sealed and they were not brought into the trial.

[00:31:50]

So my mother's trial was built on hearsay. There was no evidence, even though they took all of our computers and mobile devices and went to her truck with a fine tooth comb looking for DNA evidence. The only thing that the trial was built around for were the verbal accusations from my boyfriend, who I had not spoken to since her arrest. They went through her clothes, my stepdad gave them like our entire laundry basket, like it even included the clothes that she was wearing the night when they found her in the park, took my laptop, my iPod, her laptop, her phone.

[00:32:31]

And we never even got one of those computers back searching for, like messages, I guess, or photos. They didn't find anything. None of that existed. That's the thing. The case was built on the testimony from the accuser. So my stepdad was with the trial, he testified against my mother, he spoke to her in stability regarding her breakdown, the breakdown that he witnessed and did nothing to help her with.

[00:33:01]

You know, I know that he was the one who stirred up a fuss and got people looking at what she was doing in the park that night, I don't know what else he did. All I can say is that he comes from a very influential family. He was a deputy sheriff himself for a long time. So I don't know what he did, but I do think he pulled some strings. This whole thing was just an opportunity for him to escape, like his marriage with my mother was falling apart and it was his fault.

[00:33:32]

He spent all of her money. And I literally think that this shit show the story was his out and he used it. There was no evidence, there was no DNA evidence, it was truly just a he said she said situation. I think it gained momentum because nothing happens in my city, nothing exciting happens. And this was a big story. And, you know, if my theory is correct, which I'm pretty sure it is, that my stepdad was pulling some strings with the police department and also the school district.

[00:34:04]

You know why my mom gone. The story just grew. You know, it's sensationalism. Someone can come at me and say, but you're her daughter, of course you're going to defend her. She still could have done this horrific crime. But I point to the fact that there is no evidence. You have to look at it for what it is. You know, it was just gossip, fake gossip that got out of hand so anyone can look at it and say, yeah, this was wrong.

[00:34:34]

This was messed up. There were very few people physically there at the trial and support of my mother, there were my grandparents who went every day and some of my other family members and some of my mother's friends. But aside from that, my mom was alone. It wasn't because she was just white. My mother's always been liked by everyone has had many friends. I think it was just the magnitude of this trial and the accusation against her. People just couldn't believe it.

[00:35:06]

My mother was very hopeful. She had a lawyer who claimed to also be hopeful. The last day of her trial, she came into my bedroom, I was still asleep, and she woke me up, she gave me a kiss on my forehead and said, you know, I love you so much. I'll see you later. And then I remember her leaving and closing my door, and she did not come home. The last day of my mother's trial is ingrained in my memory forever.

[00:35:38]

It's probably my worst memory. I was at home with my sister. It was a summer day. I remember being in our living room watching TV and I remember watching the clock.

[00:35:52]

And I was on my laptop and I kept refreshing the news feed to see if they would have posted an article about her. Eventually it refreshed and I saw a teacher sentenced to life in prison for the rape of her student. I don't think I quite registered it when I first read it, it feels like the walls are crashing down. You're in a dream, you're like, is this real? And shortly after that article was posted, I remember getting a call from my mom, I asked her, I said, how long did you get?

[00:36:30]

And I remember listening to her voice that was trembling. She was about to cry and she said, Twenty five years. And I said, oh. She said, but don't worry, we're going to fight this like this isn't the end like this, isn't it? It's going to be OK. There's no telling her that I love her. So when my mom was convicted, she was convicted of aggravated child molestation, child molestation, statutory rape and sexual assault, and the charge that has given her the life sentence of twenty five years is the aggravated child molestation charge.

[00:37:09]

There is no chance of parole. My grandparents got home shortly afterwards and they were holding it together shockingly well. And they just told us that we will fight this, that the lawyer said that he will do what he can with her appeal, that it is an over. The rest of the afternoon, I don't remember anything, but I do remember that night being in my bedroom upstairs and the stairwell was right across from my door. And I remember hearing my grandma walking up the stairs sobbing.

[00:37:48]

Just the sound of her crying is ingrained in my memory. I had never heard someone sound so broken and so on pain. I think that nauseous feeling was probably worse than it had ever been that I went to bed that night after hearing my grandma cry like that with a pounding headache, like the worst headache I had ever felt in my life up to that point. They took my mom to the county jail before she was ultimately moved to her prison.

[00:38:24]

I remember talking to my mom on the phone a little bit, but our main form of communication was letters. I just tried my best to comfort her as a 15 year old at this point. She was soon transferred to the prison where she has been now for seven years. So I started visiting my mother in prison regularly when I was in the 10th grade and I have gone to that prison hundreds of times at this point to see her and sit with her on the weekends when I have visitation.

[00:39:02]

I like to think that I have been very successful despite my mother's situation and my family being a little bit broken. I went to a very good high school, the best in my city. I worked extremely hard. I got good grades, which ultimately led to an excellent scholarship for college. But my mother's absence was noticeable. I went through high school without my mom. You know, I got to look around and see my friends. You know, their mothers would take them shopping or take them out to eat.

[00:39:37]

You know, when prom or homecoming would come around, their moms would be taking them to buy their dresses. It was actually just me doing all of those things. I had my grandparents take care of me, but they they were older and it was just easier for me to just become my own person. And I adapted pretty quickly to life without a mom. She didn't get to see me play in a single one of my soccer games or swim in any of my swimming, she missed seeing me have my first real relationship.

[00:40:11]

She was just absent.

[00:40:16]

And it was also a secret for most of my high school career, I would talk about my mom, I would mention I have my mother, I talk to her about this and that there was still sort of like a gloss or like a glaze of secrecy over it. I never told anyone really where she was because my grandparents had insisted that we keep it a secret. I think the worst part, even to this day about having a mom in prison and not having any parents really besides my grandparents is seeing other people take their parents for granted.

[00:40:53]

You know, like I have friends who complain about their mother being overbearing or criticizing them for saying that, you know, whatever. And I just think they don't know. I'm not downplaying their pain like I know moms can be a pain, but I wish I had mine even if she was nagging me about something. I tell everyone that my mom is my best friend. She and I are extremely similar. I tell her everything. She is my role model.

[00:41:24]

And truly, despite all of the agony and trauma that we've been through together, two divorces and incarceration, it's ridiculous. I still see my mom as the best mom I could possibly have. A friend of mine, she said something funny recently, she said, I don't know what your mom did, what God she angered in a past life. I said, yeah, you know, my mom has felt more pain and this in this lifetime than anyone should ever have to go through.

[00:41:53]

But she's still a good mom. She's a flawed human being. And I see that now, like I see her as a person, not just a mother figure. I think my mother's fault, which also makes her a beautiful person, is that she is so kind, she just has always viewed the world through rose colored glasses. She thinks that people are good and that if she's a good person and goes out of her way to make people happy, then she's doing the right thing.

[00:42:27]

She's doing her job. But that naive outlook on life has been her downfall always. And she's let these men and these people walk all over her. She's ignored red flags. She's just been so focused on trying to be a good person and trying to do the right thing and trying to give people the benefit of the doubt or give people more chances than they deserve, that it's what's been her downfall.

[00:42:55]

But I love her, I adore her, and it just sucks, it feels like a punishment having my mother stuck somewhere where I can't do a thing to get her out and I'm having like a really good successful life. And so far at least and she can't see anything. It's like she's not only getting punished, but I am to my entire family is getting punished for this alleged crime. Even the judge who had to sentence her was like this case was built upon hearsay, I was told that the judge said as he sentenced her, he said this needs to be appealed.

[00:43:33]

He said, please appeal this. So we've gone through three defense attorneys. I think she put in two appeals with that second lawyer. They were denied both times. We now have a third defense attorney who I think is the most impressive. I actually sat in on that appeal and watched them bring my mother in and shackles and shaking in front of the judge who was actually a female judge. So I was so excited. I was like, this is it finally like a woman will empathize with my mom and see her two young daughters sitting behind her, supporting her.

[00:44:13]

That dragged on for a year and we finally heard back and it was denied. The defense attorney was appalled because the judge had literally just like, copied and pasted some stuff and said we care about children in the state of Georgia, like I will not overturn any of these charges. I'm not going to show that I don't care about kids. Our justice system is so broken and I think many people see that now, especially, you know, given the current state of our country.

[00:44:49]

But I know that you can't rely on a lawyer or a police officer or a judge to save you because they won't you know, they have their own interests at heart. To me, I see the justice system as a game. Lawyers just want to win. They don't care if they're fighting for the truth. And as soon as you put someone away, they're gone out of sight. Out of mind. I think that I was destined to be as good hearted and naive as my mother, but I certainly am not that way, not after seeing what's happened to her and what can happen to a person if they let their guard down.

[00:45:34]

That's where I have anger and resentment and rage mainly towards my stepdad. He has continued his life. It's so infuriating and it makes me sick. He disgust me. He had two little girls, my sister and I, who adored him and who saw him as a father. But he just threw us away, know as soon as we weren't convenient to him anymore. And the only other people that I am angry at would be the prosecutors on my mother's case and the people who worked actively to destroy her life.

[00:46:10]

They ruined her and they ruined my family. They robbed me of my mother and they especially robbed my sister. She has probably suffered more than I have. She has been without her mother. So she was 10 years old and she doesn't have many memories of being with my mom. I did feel guilty for a time, I thought, why didn't I see how sick and toxic this guy was? Why did I put up with all the things he did to me?

[00:46:41]

You know, I was a child, I didn't know anything. I try to give my past self, give her some sympathy. She didn't know what was going on. She was watching her mother have a breakdown. Her stepdad was no help. What was she supposed to do as a 14 year old? I don't know how I've been so resilient throughout my life. I think a lot of it comes from having that strong foundation that my mother builds. I've prided myself and the success that I've had in school, and it has carried me very far to where I am now.

[00:47:14]

My grandparents have always been there for me. They told me repeatedly that I have to keep working hard, that I can't let what's going on get me down or destroy me. And I've had counselors to thankfully, I think I've just been very proactive in taking care of myself and doing what I need to do to not get sucked into that dark hole.

[00:47:37]

The only way I can really cope with my mother situation is by not thinking about it too hard. I don't sit and dwell on it. I don't think about it too hard, or else I start to feel like I'm suffocating the sense of helplessness. I think the scariest thing is thinking that she's going to continue to miss my life events, my grandmother died a few years ago and my mom missed the whole thing.

[00:48:04]

You know, I'm close with my mom when my mom was very close with her mother. They had a wonderful relationship and my mother missed the entire funeral and she's just kind of rotting in prison. That's how she puts it, too. She's like, my life is just passing me by. You and your sister growing up, and I'm missing everything. Is she going to die in prison? Her health has declined rapidly since she got there and she'll make comments.

[00:48:30]

She's like, I'm afraid I'm going to die in here, you know, and I don't know what to say when she says that to me. I just say, you won't. But I can't guarantee that. I haven't seen my mom in person since March because right after my spring break in March, my campus was shut down and I was sent home and the prison shut down visitation. She actually has covid right now, so she's really suffering in there health wise, she says that it comes and goes like the symptoms.

[00:49:02]

She'll feel OK for a few hours, then feel terrible for the next. And it's been extremely hard on her to not be able to see her family. I can't put my life on pause. I've always had big dreams. I still have big dreams. I'm working towards them right now. I have to keep going. And I guess in a way, if I am successful, that at least my mother can be proud and she can know that she did something right, that she did protect me and my sister and give us a good life.

[00:49:34]

I think if I were to be a mess that I would just be letting her down and disappointing her. Making all of her efforts over the years to protect us and keep us safe and taken care of would be for nothing. I think the same thing is true. Bad things happen to good people. My mother is the prime example of that. I know how unfair life can be and there's no rhyme or reason to it. The justice system came into my life, destroyed everything, took a wrecking ball to everything, and then just left me to pick up the pieces and make sense of the chaos.

[00:50:13]

And it's just not fair. It's just not fair.

[00:50:17]

You know, going back to my friends, funny comment about what God did, my mother anger and her past love to get all of this grief and torment. She just is a very unlucky person. I get very irritated with those people who are always like, oh, but you'll learn from this, like it'll all be OK in the end. Like I do tell myself those things like, yes, everything's going to work out, it'll be OK, but not because there's some set design out there.

[00:50:48]

And my mother's supposed to go through all of this where I am to get some some deeper meaning in life. This is just this just happened to my family and it sucks. Any of that happens for a reason. No, that's not true. Everything happens for a reason. It's such bullshit like that, and that's not true. Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people all the time. That's just how it goes. I don't see the world through rose colored glasses.

[00:51:19]

I think I still like to see the good in people and I do actually look at the same time. I don't trust. I know that people can be rotten to the core. I'll always be afraid that I'm going to make the same mistakes as my mother and fall in love with an abuser. I don't want to repeat the past. There's no easy way out of this mess, but you have to build your life literally piece by piece, you can't prevent necessarily some bad things happening to you.

[00:51:56]

I mean, you can take steps to try to prevent it, but you might end up suffering some traumatic event or some sort of trauma in your life. But you just have to keep working your way around it, working towards a better future. I feel like that's the one thing that I can do. It's to make my family proud and repay them for everything they've done for me. I graduated top of my class in high school within the top 10 percent, got a scholarship to a very elite Southern College, was very successful there, wrote an honors thesis, traveled abroad, got an excellent fellowship coming out of that school.

[00:52:37]

It's what I work on now, living in a city that I adore. I'm still close enough that I can go home to see my family and see my mother whenever visitation opens up again. And I have big plans and I'm going to continue working towards them and just hope that my mother will be there by my side physically one day to see what I built. Today's episode featured Katherine Cole, you can find out more about her on Instagram at Catcalled 20, that's at COLB two zero.

[00:53:21]

From London. You're listening to this is actually happening, if you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, the Wonder App or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join hundred plus in the one three app to listen ad free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors by supporting them. You help us bring you our shows for free. I'm your host witness Aldine.

[00:53:44]

Today's episode was produced by me with special thanks to the This is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Alan Westberg. The intro music features the song Alabi by Tipper.

[00:53:54]

You can join that this is actually happening community on the discussion group on Facebook, where it actually happening on Instagram. And as always, you can support the show by going to patriae on dotcom slash happening or by visiting the shop at actually happening store dotcom.