The Moth Radio Hour: Our Parents, Ourselves

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This is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm your host, Jay Allison.

As all of us grow up, our relationships with our parents shift.

We begin to see more clearly, or at least we think we do, who they are as people.

We become their peers or eventually their caretakers.

Sometimes, even in adulthood, we still want our parents to take care of us and their selflessness takes on a new meaning.

In this episode, the ways our perceptions of our parents change throughout our lives.

Our first story comes from Steve Glickman, who told this at one of our Open Mic Story Slams in Chicago, where we partner with public radio station WBEZ.

A note that this story contains references to sex.

Here's Steve, live at the moth.

Around a year ago, I moved back in with my parents.

The occasion was that my mom had a nervous breakdown because she was overwhelmed caring for my dad, who has dementia.

Family crisis, gay son with no kids to the rescue.

That's me.

My parents live in the suburbs about an hour from where I live in the city with my partner Mark.

I pack a bag and I move into their spare bedroom.

That first night was weird.

Lying on their futon staring at the ceiling, I wondered

how did they get so old?

And

how long can I do this for?

Like, I love my parents, but they can drive me crazy sometimes.

Living with them, I quickly see how bad my dad's dementia has become.

His short-term memory is shot.

He can't remember what day it is.

He can't remember what he had for lunch or if he had lunch.

He wanders off and gets lost.

He needs constant supervision.

He still remembers my name.

And he's great at Jeopardy,

but I can see why my mom lost it.

So I try to help out where I can.

I pay their bills, I give them their pills, I watch over my dad during the day while I'm working,

but I have a full-time job and it becomes pretty clear that I can't do nearly enough.

And I start to think that sending my dad to a memory care facility might be the best option.

One morning I'm having coffee in the kitchen and my mom walks in.

It's 11 a.m.

They always get up late.

I ask her why they don't get up any earlier.

And she says,

that's our sexy time.

Your father gets very frisky in the morning.

I say,

wow.

That's excellent.

Every morning?

She says, every morning.

Then she laughs like a teenage girl.

She's 85.

Give it up for my mom.

Yeah.

It's impressive, right?

A little envious, actually.

Mark and I don't have sex every day.

Not even close.

And we're gay men.

My dad is 90.

So in context, it's not all that surprising.

My parents have always liked their sexy time.

We were a sexually liberated family.

When I was five years old, I asked my parents, where do babies come from?

And they told me right then and there exactly how babies are made.

I said,

Wow, can I watch the next time you make a baby?

My dad said, said, No, that's a private thing between me and mommy.

I couldn't understand why they wouldn't let me watch.

But when I got a bit older, I knew they always tried to make a baby on Sunday afternoons.

They would lock the door to their bedroom,

but I could hear my mom moaning because I was right outside.

Anywho,

The next time that we go visit their doctor, my mom mentions sexy time because she's all about transparency.

And the doctor says that hypersexuality is actually a symptom of Alzheimer's.

My mom looks down at the floor.

We had been using the word dementia for years, and my mom thought dementia meant the ordinary forgetfulness that comes with old age.

But Alzheimer's was something entirely different.

My mom looks at the doctor and she says, you don't know he has Alzheimer's.

There is no test.

The doctor says, he has all the symptoms.

You're right, there is no definitive test, but he has it.

My mom shakes her head.

She can't accept it.

But Alzheimer's are not.

My parents enjoy their sexy time.

And

I realized that if I moved my dad into a memory care facility, then I would be breaking them up.

My parents have shared the same bed for 60 years.

And they fought like cats and dogs for most of those years.

But they always made up,

usually in bed.

And if I send dad away, it will kill them.

So I start looking for in-home caretakers.

I interviewed a few.

We hired one, but she didn't work out.

And

at this point, I'd been living with them for three months, and I was going a little bit crazy.

I love my parents, but I needed my life back.

Then we hired Kelsey.

On her first day, my dad tells her to leave, and then he yells at me, I don't need any help.

I'm fine.

People with Alzheimer's have no idea how much help they need.

Kelsey smiles at me and she says, it's all right.

This is normal for day one.

In a week, my parents had accepted Kelsey.

And in a month, they fell in love with her.

I moved out and I reclaimed my life and my sanity.

It's been a year now and Kelsey is a part of our family.

I'm glad I was able to keep my parents together.

They can have their sexy time whenever they want.

And you know what?

I don't need to watch.

Thank you.

That was Steve Gliffman.

Steve is a recently retired software engineer and a volunteer with Literacy Chicago, where he teaches digital literacy to adults.

To hear more of his stories, visit themoth.org.

Find a link to his site.

To see photos of Steve and his parents throughout their relationship, visit themoth.org.

My relationship to my own dad keeps changing, even though he's long dead.

Partly that's because I catch myself resembling him when a mirror sneaks up on me.

or I'm ambushed by the feeling of literally becoming him.

Not intentionally, but helplessly, even contentedly.

He was a good man, so I'm lucky, and evolving into my memory of him is okay with me.

Our next story seeks to answer the question, how do you reconcile a difficult relationship with a parent who has died?

Saloni Singh told this at a Moth Story Slam in San Francisco where we partnered with public radio station KALW.

Here's Saloney.

My dad died three years ago.

None of us saw it coming.

I hadn't spoken to him in 10 years at that time.

You see, my dad was an angry man.

You know the kind of people that, when they scream, the house seems to shake.

My mother and my brother had learned to hide in the shadows, but I made the mistake of speaking up when I was 10.

And I became the focal point of all of his rage.

Oh my God.

It was such an abuser childhood that eventually I couldn't take it.

I just cut off all contact.

I didn't get to see him before he died.

I met my brother at the funeral, and he told me that in the last few days, my dad kept insisting that he wanted to tell me something.

Me?

Dad wanted to tell me something?

Really?

After a decade of silence, suddenly he had something to say.

What did he want to say?

This question has driven me crazy for three years now until two days ago I got an email from him.

Here's what the email said.

Dear Nona,

your silence has made me very angry.

Who do you think you are?

How can you treat me like this?

But eventually the anger faded and I began to think

and I realized I've said so many things to you that have hurt you so badly.

So now I believe that someday we'll just sit down and I'll make it right, but the doctors are are telling me that I'll never see you again.

So here I am, writing this email, hoping at least my words will reach you.

Because I need to tell you that I know now that just because you have tattoos and an eyebrow piercing did not mean you were doing drugs.

That just because you decided to go to college and work instead of getting married at 21 did not mean that you were abandoning your Indian culture.

That just because your loving boyfriend sleeps over now and then does not mean you've become a prostitute.

I'm sorry.

I don't know why I said that.

I didn't mean to say it.

I shouldn't have said it.

I shouldn't have doubted you.

Remember when you were a kid?

And every time you won a medal, I would take you out for ice cream.

You would eat it with this big grin on your face, chocolate smeared everywhere?

Can we do that one more time, please?

Only this time I won't ask you for straight A's or a medal.

This time I won't celebrate a perfect scorecard.

This time I'll celebrate my perfect daughter.

Because I'm so proud of who you've become.

Go, go be whoever you want.

I won't stop you anymore.

From this moment on, I'm just cheering you on.

Love, dad.

Powerful stuff, right?

I mean, stuff like this doesn't happen in real life.

A letter from the beyond?

Like, stuff like this happens in movies, am I right?

I'm absolutely right, you gullible people.

This didn't happen.

Look at you looking for a happy ending.

My dad never wrote that email.

I wrote that email two days ago.

And now I'm not completely crazy.

I look crazy, but not completely crazy.

You see, I read a book about forgiveness and closure.

And it said that instead of waiting for your parents to say the things you want them to say to you, you should say those things to yourself.

And I was like, all right.

So I went back home, I fired up my laptop, and this email just came pouring out of me and I hit send.

And then something bizarre happened.

Because when the email came back to me and I opened it,

I could hear dad's voice.

And as I began to read the words that I had just written a few seconds ago,

it felt like he was sitting right here next to me saying those things.

He,

he was saying those things.

Finally saying those things I'd waited for so long for him to say.

And I began to cry.

I cried for hours until I fell asleep.

And

when I woke up the next morning, I decided that I'm going to choose to be the gullible idiot now.

I choose to believe that dad wrote that email.

I choose to believe that if I had just made it to the hospital, he'd he'd have made me sit me down by his bed, held my hand, called me Nona one last time,

and said exactly those things.

He would have, right?

So now I, every time I leave that letter, I cry like a little baby.

But every single time,

this strange little letter is bringing me closer to a dad I lost so long ago.

Thank you for listening.

That was Saloni Singh.

Saloni is a new member of the Seattle storytelling community.

In just over a year, she has won two moth story slams, been featured on the Story Collider podcast, performed a one-hour set at the Fire and Story Festival, and is a regular at Fresh Ground Stories.

This was the first story she ever told.

In a moment, a woman needs her mother and a daughter makes a major decision for her father.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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This is the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Jay Allison.

In this episode, we're hearing stories of parent-child relationships and how they change over the course of our lives.

Sometimes that means having difficult conversations.

Our next story was told by Samantha Higdon at a Grand Slam in Texas, where we are supported by Houston Public Media.

Live from the moth in Houston, here's Samantha.

I've always been really close with my mom,

but we don't really have deep conversations.

I'm the type of person who will corner someone in a bar and ask them about their deepest wound.

And my my mom likes to keep it a little bit lighter than that.

I remember when I was in fifth grade, the nurse came to our class to teach us about our changing bodies

and I got sent home with a bag.

All the girls got sent home with a bag that had a little travel-sized deodorant and a giant single diaper-sized tampax pad and a cardboard box because you just need the one.

And when I got home, my mom said, do we need to have a conversation?

And I said, I don't know, do we?

And she shrugged, and I shrugged, and that was our birds and the bees conversation.

And this theme of not talking about important things carried on into adulthood.

And when I was 30, I found out that my dad wasn't my biological father because my parents had used a sperm donor to conceive me.

But 23andMe told me that.

But even though we didn't talk about really important things, my mom has always been a tremendous source of support and love for me.

She is my home and my safety and my comfort, and she's really quirky.

I love that she knows the name of every real housewife in the Bravo Real Series, Real Housewife Series franchise.

And I love that the way she cleans the bathroom is by taking pinesol, that lemon lime cleaner, and just dumping into the toilet.

And that's how we clean the bathroom.

That's how we know the bathroom is clean.

And

a couple of years ago, I really needed the love and support of my mom.

I was living in Austin, and my boyfriend woke up one morning and said he was leaving.

And he moved out of our apartment, and it was very unexpected, and I was reeling.

And so I called her to ask if she would come stay with me for a while she was living in Dallas and she said she would and the three and a half hour drive usually took her about five and a half hours she took the right lane the whole way on the highway she made it and I was so relieved when she got there

I was spinning and I was asking myself all the questions that one normally asks themselves when a relationship ends.

You know, I said, Mom, do you think he met someone else?

Do you think he was planning to leave for a long time?

And in my darkest moments, do you think he left because I gained weight during COVID?

And I never knew if my mom could really relate to my spinning in this way because she had been married to my dad since she was 18 and they were married for 36 years before he died.

But she listened and I went on like this for a couple of weeks.

I cried a lot.

I asked a lot of questions until one morning she came into my room and said,

Sam, I need to tell you something.

And this was unusual.

And

she went on to say,

I thought about ending my marriage with your dad every day.

And

I didn't have a lot of choices.

in my life.

I regret not living my life more for me, and I'm so proud of you for living your life for you.

And something in me shifted that day.

I stopped thinking about their marriage as a perfect fairy tale that I might never attain.

And for the first time

in my apartment with the real housewives playing in the background,

I really saw my mother.

And I stopped thinking about people in two categories, the happy, married, people with families, and the sad, single, lonely people.

Because life is far more complicated than that.

And

there's so much beauty in that complication.

I started to hold gratitude for my life just exactly as it was and for myself exactly as I am.

Now, a 36-year-old woman who's managed to travel all over the world single, who is vice president of a tech company,

a woman who has many choices,

a woman who cleans the bathroom by pouring half of the pine soul

in the toilet bowl.

Thank you.

That was Samantha Higdon.

She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she owns a coffee shop and bar called Saturn Road.

Their best-selling menu item is Bev's Margarita, named after her mom, Beverly.

Beverly's photo also hangs in Samantha's shop.

Samantha misses her very much because in March of 2024, Beverly passed away unexpectedly.

Samantha told us when she wants to feel close to her mom, she watches the real housewives.

Our next story also takes place in the height of COVID.

Dion Stroder told this at a Story Slam in Denver, where we partner with public radio station KUNC.

The theme of the night, fittingly, was adulting.

Here's Dion.

So it was December 26, 2020, the day after the world's first COVID Christmas.

It had been a pretty peaceful Christmas after having kind of a weird, socially distanced, individually wrapped Thanksgiving a few weeks before.

My then boyfriend, now husband, and I were relaxing at our house and kind of enjoying just having a Christmas alone.

And the phone rang, my cell phone rang, and I missed the call, but I decided to kind of see who it was because it was the middle of the day after a holiday.

And when I listened to the voicemail, I realized that it was the hospital calling.

It was Denver Health calling.

And the woman on the line said, This is a nurse.

We're at Denver Health, and we're part of the team that's caring for your dad, who was brought in this morning.

And my immediate reaction wasn't panic, because this wasn't the first time that I had had a call like this.

Unfortunately, my dad was dying, and he had been dying for several years, not from cancer or not from, you know, some chronic, you know, immediate disease, but from liver failure and alcoholism and from the effects of having lived on the streets for a couple of years in downtown Denver.

And so I'd had calls like this before about my dad.

I'd had calls that he'd been hit by a car one time on Colfax and I had to go and see about it.

And another time he had a seizure and I had to go see about that.

And another time he went missing on the streets and my sister and I drove around in the snow looking for him and didn't find him that time.

And so when I got this call, something about it was a little different because the way that she worded it, this is the team caring for your dad, and we need to talk to you.

And I called back, and she explained that sometime in the middle of the night, Christmas night, my dad had had a significant brain injury.

And she called it a brain injury, which was confusing to me, but what it actually was, was a stroke.

And she said, You're the oldest of his children.

His girlfriend is here, and she tells us that you're the decision-maker.

You need to come down and make some decisions, and we've got to talk about next steps.

And I said, okay.

And I kind of quickly said, okay, I'll put me down.

I'll do that.

And I wasn't even sure what I was agreeing to.

She said, we're going to have a conference at the hospital and bring the family and come talk.

And, you know, we've got some decisions to make.

And so I rallied my sisters and we went down to the hospital and had to make it through the weird.

COVID strangeness of going into the hospital two at a time because we couldn't have multiple people there and wearing masks and all that stuff that was going on at the time.

And they explained to us that my dad was basically in a coma, but they weren't really treating him.

His brain was injured.

He wasn't going to wake up and he was intubated, but that was all they were doing because that was what was keeping him alive.

And we had some end-of-life decisions to make.

And I kept saying, okay,

we'll talk about it.

We'll make a choice.

But inside, I was thinking, how can I be the one to make this choice?

I don't know that I've ever talked to my dad about this situation.

You know, my dad, my whole life, was kind of two sides of a coin.

He was gregarious and funny, funny, and he was a musician, and he was into science, and we had political debates, and he also struggled my entire life with addiction.

He spent time where years where we didn't see each other, and we talked about a lot of things, but we hadn't talked about this.

And so, I was trying to think of, well, what would he really want in this situation?

And this feels like his choice, not mine.

You know, I immediately thought, I'm the kid here.

I can't make this choice.

You know, this is really, really not my decision.

But I was the one signing the paperwork, and I had to decide something.

And all I could think about was the conversation I had with my dad exactly a week before.

His birthday was December 19th, and we had talked, you know, we talked about a lot of things.

My dad was coherent, which he wasn't always when we spoke, and he had a lot to say about the election that had just happened, and he was telling me his thoughts on whether or not there would be a peaceful transfer of power.

We debated about this a lot, and we talked about COVID, and he was kind of afraid of COVID.

And he told me that the one thing he was afraid of was getting COVID and being on a ventilator and being intubated.

And so I thought, well, he did tell me that.

So I know something about what he wants.

And so I think that, you know, this decision, I'm going to try and do what it is that he would want me to do.

And so, you know, as a family, we talked about what to do.

And we did make the decision.

Let's take him off the ventilator.

We don't want to want to leave him like that.

And so they brought us all into the room.

And it was still kind of COVID strange.

We had a video monitor for some of the family that was out of state so that they could look in and see what was happening.

And we all had masks on, and it was just a really surreal moment.

And we started to play music.

My dad was a musician.

He had played in a soul and funk band in the 70s and 80s, and he really loved Earth, Wind, and Fire.

And so we decided to play some songs because we didn't know if he could hear us, but we wanted to play music.

And when Earth, Wind, and Fire song Fantasy came on, there's a line in the song that says, we'll live together until the 12th of Never.

And all of a sudden, it was like time slowed down.

And I realized we've made this decision and we're going to do it.

And I was blinking, and every blink, I was thinking about different things that had happened in my dad's life and mine.

I blink, and I think about him walking me down the aisle at my wedding.

And then I blink, and I think about seeing my dad panhandling one time on the street, and I didn't realize it was him.

And I blink, and I think about that same marriage that I had ending, and my dad just showing up at the courthouse when I was filing divorce papers unexpectedly and doing that with me.

And I blink, and I picture the room that we're in, and I can see my dad's hair growing back from the surgery that he'd had.

And even though his brain wasn't working, his body was still working, and his hair was growing back.

And blink, and blink, and blink, and thinking about my dad's life.

He passed away on December 30th, just one day shy of the end of 2020.

It was very peaceful, and for the next couple of weeks, I was kind of in a fog.

I couldn't even really comprehend what had happened.

Exactly a week after he died, January 6th, there were some things happening in Washington, D.C., and I thought of calling my dad, and of course, I couldn't.

And even now, this morning, I passed someone on the street, a homeless man who looked so much like my dad that it made me stop.

And I blinked, and he was gone again.

Thank you.

That was Dion Stroeder.

Dion is a county manager by day and a writer and storyteller by night.

She was born and raised in Denver and raised two kids while leading local governments.

Dion tells us her dad was a complicated man, brilliant in many ways, but also with lifelong struggles.

She wants to remind everyone that when you see a person on the streets, they are someone's child, someone's brother, or someone's dad.

She wrote, it has been four years since my dad passed away, and I still have so many unresolved feelings about his final days, but for the most part, I'm at peace with it, and I believe we made the best decision we could to honor him and the life he lived.

When we return, a dad who drops everything for his daughter, and a mom who reveals herself to her kids.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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Hey, it's Jill Schlesinger, CBS News business analyst, certified financial planner, and host of the podcast Money Watch with Jill Schlesinger.

It's a show where we answer your questions about your money, from investing to retirement and completing your taxes.

I'll be your financial coach and help take the stress out of managing your money.

Plus, we might even have a little fun along the way.

Follow and listen to Money Watch with Jill Schlesinger on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour.

I'm Jay Allison.

Sometimes our relationship to our parents changes because they change.

It happened to my mother.

Late in life, she totally switched her political allegiance.

She became a righteous defender of the rights of others and willing to put their political welfare ahead of her own.

If you'd asked me as a kid if that would have happened, no way.

But it did.

It gets harder to change over time, but it can happen.

Alternately, as in our next story, sometimes we change and see our parents in a new light.

Embarrassing moments soften, unconventional upbringings become cherished, and we feel the full weight and love of their sacrifices.

This story comes from Deborah Nagan-Lee at a Story Slam in Boston, which was supported by public radio station WBUR and PRX.

Live from WBUR City Space, here's Deborah.

About the same height.

Yeah.

So my dad called me

and he was kind of quiet and he said, just want to let you know that your aunt broke her hip today.

And my response was, oh, crap.

That sucks.

I was so angry.

But first we have to back up a little.

So my dad was always the kind of guy who was there for me.

He still is.

He's still alive.

And he was the guy when I was at a party at 2 a.m.

And I called him and said, Dad, kids are doing something I don't really want to do.

And he was like, all right, I'll come pick you up.

I'm like, dad, it's 2 in the morning.

He said, well, what else am I doing?

Like, all right, so he would come.

And then when I had my first child, and she was colicky, and he lived two hours away, and she wouldn't stop screaming for 12 hours straight.

And I called him up, and I was like, Dad, I am going to lose my mind.

She will not stop crying.

And he said, all right, I'll come up and I'll drive her around.

Get her out of the house so you can take a nap.

And I said, Dad, it's a two-hour drive.

And he said, what else am I going to do?

So he came up and he drove her around for two hours.

And then when I was 47 years old, which wasn't that long ago, and I was at Newark airport and my family was going to Europe and my father had driven us from Connecticut to Newark and dropped us off and my whole family was scanning their passports and I realized that mine was

expired.

I called my dad who was on his way back to Connecticut and I said dad you have to come back and get me because I'm not getting on this plane today

and he said okay And I said I'm so sorry dad he's like all right I'll take care of it and he drove me the next day to get my passport 24 hours and I'm like I'm so sorry sorry dad he's like well what else am I doing

so

and then as a mother

I took that with me as a mother

and when my oldest daughter would call me from a party at two in the morning and say this isn't going right I said it's okay I'll come get you and she said mom it's two in the morning I said what else am I doing

and then when my youngest daughter went off to college in DC and after a semester was completely miserable and called me crying in tears one day and said, I can't do this.

I said, it's okay, I'll come down.

And she's, mom, that's crazy, it's eight hours away.

And I said, what else am I doing?

And I went down and ended up bringing her home.

And she transferred to another school and was a lot happier.

So

back to this phone call.

I'm finally an empty nester.

My kids are gone.

They're both reasonably happy.

And I'm really excited to be an empty nester.

And

I have a couple friends in LA who said to me, why don't you come out and spend a week in LA?

And that sounded so appealing.

And I said, don't bring your husband.

And that sounded even more appealing.

So, and one of my friends lives the LA lifestyle with the pool and everything.

And I have this whole thing going on in my imagination.

And my dad had told me a few weeks before that he was planning knee surgery.

And I said, Dad, I can't come.

I'm going to LA.

And he said, that's okay.

Your aunt can help your mother.

My mother is sick.

And I said, are you sure?

And he said, yeah, it's okay.

So I was psyched.

I had permission to do this LA trip.

So when he called and said that my aunt had broken her hip, I knew exactly what that meant.

And I hung up the phone and I said to my husband, I'm not going to LA.

I got to go to Florida.

And he said, they'll be fine.

You can go to LA.

They'll figure it out.

And I said, said, No, I can't do it.

I got to go to Florida.

So I called my dad back and I said, I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.

I'm going to come down and help you guys out while you get the knee surgery.

And he said, You don't have to do that.

You have other things going on in your life.

And I said, What else do I have to do?

And it was probably the first time in my whole life that I finally realized that he probably had other things to do too.

Deborah Nagan Lee lives in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

She loves telling and writing stories and recently had her first play produced.

She spends a lot of time on local trails, trying to keep up with her high-energy dog, George.

She says she will always drop everything to help her two daughters, unless she's snuggling on the couch with George.

Unfortunately, Deborah's dad, Douglas, passed away in 2021 from COVID, but his legacy lives on in his offspring.

By pure chance, the last thing he gave to Deborah before he died was an atlas of the United States so she could always find her way.

He didn't trust Google Maps would adequately do the job.

To see a photo of Deborah and her dad, visit themoth.org.

April Salazar told our final story in this hour at a main stage show we produced in New York City.

A caution that while the story is not graphic, it does contain some adult themes.

With that, here's April, live from the mall.

It started as a typical Saturday night.

My mom and my stepfather were out while my stepfather played a cocktail piano gig.

This was becoming really common on Fridays, Saturday nights, and my brother and I really loved it because it meant that we got to stay up late and watch as much television as we wanted to.

If we were really lucky we'd get to watch Saturday Night Live.

My mom and my stepfather returned a few hours later.

My stepfather returned his electric piano to the stand in the dining room.

And she sat on the couch and made a patting gesture next to her.

She called me and my brother over, and I could tell by the look on her her face that she had something serious to say.

We sat next to her, and she looked at us and she said, I bet you've been wondering where I've been going all of these nights.

And I hadn't because duh, she was with my stepfather on these piano gigs.

My stepfather was a tenured professor.

He was a scientist, and he liked to earn extra money playing piano.

Just the Thanksgiving before, he had dragged us to the yoga center in Manhattan just in exchange for a vegetarian meal.

So I said, Not really, mom.

But she continued, well,

I've been working as a stripper at private parties.

Your stepfather's my escort.

And just so you're comfortable with what I'm doing,

I'm going to do my routine for you.

So my mom stands up and she smooths the front of her dress and she nods at my stepfather, which is a cue.

I look over at him and I see that he's crouched over a boom box and he hits play

and the sound of a screeching saxophone fills our living room.

I instantly recognize this song because just a few months before, my stepfather was obsessed with hunting it down.

It was a song from the Lenny soundtrack called Lament, and he had dragged us to Colony Records and Times Square so that we could dig through records and 45s and even sheet music because we couldn't find it on vinyl.

And now I understood why he was so obsessed with finding this one song.

My mom walked over to the 4x6 brown shag rug and she started her routine.

She started to slowly remove her clothes,

but she had no rhythm.

So as she was doing our routine, she was basically just walking back and forth between our big console television and the rocking chair in the corner.

The entire time my brother was staring at the bookshelf behind her.

Eventually she removed the dress and she was wearing nothing but her black bikini.

And I recognized it because it was my mom's bikini.

It was what she wore whenever she was in the backyard with a shovel picking up dog poop.

Only now she was stripping out of it.

My brother looked down and I thought, oh god, mom's being embarrassing again.

It wasn't that shocking.

My brother and I were used to seeing our mom naked.

She was the kind of woman who left the door open when when she used the bathroom, but she was also a nudist.

We had even been members at a family nudist camp called the Treehouse Fun Ranch.

It's where she had met my stepfather.

The treehouse was kind of like a country club.

It had swimming pools and tennis courts.

The only difference is that its members were working class and stark naked.

It was also done up in a Wild West theme for some reason.

This was all totally normal to me.

In fact, when I first visited the treehouse, I didn't notice the naked people so much as I noticed the Olympic-sized swimming pool and the western saloon.

I was really excited about that.

There just wasn't a time that I wasn't naked when I was little, and my mom never ever made me feel ashamed of that.

I think that that was in direct defiance of her strict Catholic upbringing.

She had even made me the flower girl, a nude flower girl,

at her nude wedding to my stepfather.

That one was an intimate affair.

It took place in our living room and it was broadcast on Manhattan Public Access Television.

It was all fine and good until I hit puberty and then I started to feel self-conscious.

I felt self-conscious about being nude myself and I started to feel self-conscious about having a nudist family.

My mom though, her feelings were unwavering.

She still was very, very comfortable being naked all the time.

And she also realized that with just a high school education, she could earn a lot of money by working as a stripper.

But she wanted me to have the educational opportunities that she hadn't, so she enrolled me in private school.

I was a super, super, super nerd.

So I loved private school.

I got to take Latin and philosophy and a lot of other classes that I knew I would never ever be able to take in public school.

At the same time, I was so afraid that the other kids in my school would find out about my weird family and that I would be ostracized.

So if anyone ever asked me what my mom did for a living, I would say that she was an actress and if I was really pushing it I would say that she was a dancer.

This was working really well for me and you know you're dealt with the cards that you have and as much as I wanted a normal mom I so wanted a normal mom.

I wanted the kind of mom who joined the PTA and who spent hours sewing Halloween costumes for me.

But I felt like I could live two lives.

I felt like I could cover it up at school and then just kind of like ignore things at home.

And of course I started to rebel just as my mom had rebelled before me.

I started to wear turtlenecks and high-waisted pants.

So I was living my double life and I think I was doing well with that until the eighth grade when my mom decided that she was going to throw a Halloween party and invite my entire classroom.

This was really bad because it it meant that they were going to be in our house and it meant that these little things that we took for granted might give us away.

Things like my mom's costume rack, which was filled with various uniforms, but also feather boas and a leather whip.

And my mom totally got this.

So before the party, she and I went through the house and we hid everything away.

We hid that costume rack and we hid all of her promotional materials,

like her pens and her mugs and her t-shirts, which were printed with her stripper name, which was Amber Graham.

We also closed the curtain on the pot plants that were growing in the window.

That's not necessarily nudist, but in my mind it's kind of connected.

And then when we were done with all of that, she let me choose a costume from her costume rack.

I got to choose between nurse and police officer and French maid.

And I was pretty happy about that.

It wasn't the same as my mom sewing a costume for me, but it was pretty close.

Once we were done with that, we decorated the house with black and orange crepe paper.

And my mom went so over the top that she asked my stepfather to bring dry ice home from his lab and she placed it in a black cauldron on our porch.

And I kind of felt like We were a normal family.

My classmates started to arrive and I was starting to feel really great because you could tell that it was going to be a successful party.

They were munching on English muffin pizzas that my mom was bringing out, just like one of those PTA moms.

And I was getting a lot of compliments on my costume, which was sexy cop, by the way.

I had the hat, I had a shield, I had way too much room in the top, but no one seemed to notice that.

And I was wearing a badge that said amber.

And just as I was starting to feel great about how the party was going, one of my classmates pointed to the top of a bookshelf and he said, what is that?

And I looked and my heart sank because I realized that we had overlooked one thing.

It was a three-tiered gold trophy with an angel on top.

naked angel, her arms outstretched.

And there was a name plate with my mom's name name printed with her title.

I knew there was no hiding it.

I said, that's my mom's.

Of course, by this point, my entire class had gathered and formed a semicircle around us.

My classmate looked at the name plate on the trophy, and he squinted at first, and then his eyes got big, and he turned to me and he said,

Your mom's Ms.

Nude International.

And the room grew quiet, and I knew it was over, and I knew that I would never, ever be able to show my face at school again.

And then finally he broke the silence, and he said,

your mom's cool.

And everyone chimed in behind him.

Yeah,

she's cool.

I didn't think my mom was cool, but it was definitely the first time that I thought that maybe she wasn't as embarrassing as I thought she was.

My stepfather told me a few years ago that he and my mom had really debated whether she should do a strip tease for me and my brother in our living room.

He thought it was a terrible idea, but my mom was really insistent.

She said that she wanted us to feel comfortable with what she was doing.

And she was right.

I never had any question about it.

I thought that my mom could show her love for me by decorating our house in crepe paper and making English muffin pizzas.

But I realized that she could show her love for me in other ways too, and she did.

Thanks to her, I got a damn good education,

and she paid for that one bachelor party at a time.

She also showed me a whole world beyond the tiny one that she had grown up in.

And she taught me that clothes are kind of meaningless.

You can strip all of that away and what you're left with is heart.

Thank you.

That was April Salazar.

She's now a mom herself and she says she regularly mortifies her own child by dancing with her clothes on in public.

She's writing a memoir about her unconventional childhood.

To see a picture of April with her family fully dressed, visit our website themoth.org.

That's it for this episode.

We hope you'll join us next time, and that's the story from the Moth.

This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced and hosted by me, Jay Allison.

Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch.

The stories were directed by Jennifer Hickson with additional Grand Slam coaching by Kate Tellers.

The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Sarah Austin Janesse, Marina Cluche, Leigh Ann Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Urenia.

Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by The Drift.

Other music in this hour from Gaucho, Bill Frizzell, Lambert, Blue Dot Sessions, and Ralph Burns.

We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Rhys-Dennis.

For more about our podcast, for information on Pitching Us, Your Own Story, and to learn more about the moth go to our website themoth.org

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