Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to 50 First Dates. I'm your host, Jolie Moore. I now know that hindsight is 20 20. This season I'm going to share that wisdom with you. In every twice weekly episode, I'm going to highlight one of my postcards from my take note stories of narcissistic abuse project and the unvarnished truth behind them. A lifetime of gaslighting and abuse are the reasons why my 50 first dates experiment was the unmitigated disaster that it was. I think it was kind of funny, a little bit tragic, but still a mess. Join me as I take on the task of finding out if my future self can forgive that person who lived through abuse and came out of the other side still searching for a crazy, beautiful love story.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Ready?
[00:00:45] Speaker A: Strap in.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Let's go.
Hi, this is Julie Moore, and welcome to 50 First Day Dates, the podcast. This is card number 13.
Let's get to it, shall we?
The child abuse.
My mother was molested by her father. She didn't tell anyone until I was 19. For the previous 18 years, I spent.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: At least four hours a day at.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: His house because she didn't want to leave me with strangers.
So I actually wrote an essay about this called Abandoned to a Predator. It was published on my substack on June 24th of 2024.
And this, like, from time to time, this one keeps me up at night. I think one of the things that made me think about it a little bit different is there's this book called Glimmer by Kimberly Shannon that came out either earlier this year or late 2023 that I don't remember. But she was subject to extreme sexual abuse by her grandfather who had also molested her mother. And despite that, her mother obviously exposed her to her grandfather. So her mother, I guess, I mean, you know, who knows, knew what was going on. And this is one of these things that this woman has to come to grips with. She was on a bunch of different podcasts, so if you want to hear her talk about it, it's certainly out there.
So I am literally of two minds about this. And I'll tell you why. On the one hand, either my mother, like, left me in the house of a predator for 10 years. I mean, I've been there. Or more. I mean, I've. It's my grandmother's house. I mean, it was. I spent every day there after school until I was about 10, 11, a lot of weekends there where my mother was. I mean, at one point she was in graduate school, otherwise she was out. And I was either when she was out doing whatever it was she was doing. It was graduate school and living her life in New York City. I was either with her mother, who we shared a house with, who lived in a two family house in Brooklyn, or in the alternative, I was with my father's mother, my paternal grandmother. And that's its own thing.
So either she just sort of left me there, either because she didn't care, or. Or I can't actually quite put my finger on it. But this is the thing about the Kimberly Shannon woman who's the author of Glimmer, is that she had to come to terms with her mother leaving with her and abuser. And the why there's no good why, because it's such a horrible thing to have in sexual abuse to children that there's no reason to subject your children to this willingly. Obviously it happens to a lot of children and it's the trauma for a lot of people. But if you can protect, protect your child from it, in theory, you would. So either this happened or in the alternative, I've come to sort of another theory. So in the years I was reading up on narcissistic abuse by mothers of daughters, I was actually in this forum online and I was sort of telling the story, reading the story of my mother standing up this funeral and saying she had been sexually abused by my grandfather, who was the person who was dead at the funeral.
And the number of people who were like, oh, my mom did exactly the same thing was not zero. It was a lot of people. And I was just like, okay, like, literally I couldn't put my head around it. But some of the theory of these people, and these are like the children of narcissistic people. So, you know, we get it or we don't get it. Equally, their theory was that that was a way to like, draw attention on them. And a funeral is like such like a thing where the attention is really on either the deceased or their, like, spouse that it's a way to draw attention to them. And part of me thinks this also may be true because. And you know, I believe women, let me just say that up front, but my mother is her own special flavor. I.
Let me say this. The story, she, she told a very, like, compelling story about it. And at the time, like, I was so shocked by the story itself in being told in like a crowd of people at a repast at my grandmother's house in Brooklyn that I like, literally, like didn't have the headspace to sort of process more than the information itself. But subsequent to That I really thought about it. So my, my maternal grandmother was. You know, I'm going to say this, she's a storyteller, so there is literally no part of her life I don't know anything about because she would, I would ask a question and she will tell a long story. So I know all about her. Like her stories from her mother of her birth, the birth of her siblings being a sharecropper in Mississippi, their escape from that life, you know, in the car, they're moved to Lake New York. What happened after that, her, her first marriage, all that like I know in excruciating detail.
And it's not bad or good, it's just, it's actually fascina. I have like a really good sense of what happened between like 1920 and like when she died in the 90s.
But it was. I have a lot of information. And so when I sat down to think about this, and this is actually years later, it's not something I think about or dwell on a lot because there's always so much other chaos going on in my life that like sometimes I didn't have time to sit and think. But I really thought about this a lot. And what had happened was. So my grandmother met my grandfather, I call my grandfather, he's my step grandfather, but he married my grand. He didn't marry. This is the story. So he met her when they both worked in New York City in Manhattan at this place. And he was like, I want to date you, I want to marry you. And she was like, I'll marry you, but you need to get divorced. Because he was married and had children, but the children were in Puerto Rico where his wife was his first wife. And I'm going to be honest, I've never looked this up. I mean, these people obviously exist or well, now that I'm older, I don't know. But I've from time to time have wondered about them. And my mother may know information, but it has not been shared with me. And my grandmother, actually she never shared this with me and she's been to Puerto Rico, so I'm not sure. I'd have to think about that a little bit. But what he did is that he went down to Puerto Rico to get a divorce. This is not like no fault divorce land of this era. So he was gone for a couple of years. And the years that he was gone are the years my mother claims abuse, but before that where she also claims it happened. She was not actually living with my mother. She was living with her maternal grandmother. My mother was. My grandmother was living a life, and she had a baby and dropped her off with her mother and didn't come back for four years.
We can debate the shamefulness of that or whatever, but that's what it was. And it's honestly, I think the, like, the triggering trauma of my mother's life.
So this period that my mother claims abuse, either she was with her grandmother or my grandfather was not in the continental US and so part of me thinks maybe it's not true. And she's sort of taken on this story to draw attention to herself, but I don't know. So. But I'm left with either my mother told a big lie to get attention, or in the alternative, just left me in the house of an abuser for years, unsupervised. And I spent a lot of time with grandfather. I was not abused. He was delightful to me. And this is one of the things that makes me wonder because the more I've heard about other people being abused, the average, like, pedophile abuses like 20 to 30 children, which is pretty awful when you think about it, and for him to have done so.
But leave, like me out of the equation. And there were other kids coming and going for reasons I'm not going to get into in this podcast. But there are often many children in my grandmother's house. For all of this to happen, it begs the question, actually, I guess I will think I am going to think about. I never thought about this until this exact moment. So my parents paid my grandmother to be my nanny until, I don't know, a certain age. And after that, they got divorced or they decided they weren't going to do it. But my grandmother had quit her job for this. And, you know, when you quit a job, you can't really go back. And she was in her 50s by this point, about. Oh, my gosh, she was in her 50s. And so my mother said, why don't you open a private daycare? And my grandmother did so. And I remember this. She did it for maybe 10 to 15 years. I think she retired, like, whatever, that her Social Security retirement age was probably 62, 63, not 67, like now. And so she did that for years. And my grandfather was there, and my. This was my mother's idea. And there were dozens of children in the house over years.
So now I'm going to add that to the list of things I have to think about because my mother encouraged this, knowing full well that her belief was that her stepfather was a pedophile. And you have to wonder why she would make this suggestion given her history. The whole thing is so awful in many, many ways and I try not to think about it and this new aspect has just like come to mind.
But it's one of the great mysteries of my childhood that will remain unsolved.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: I'm Julie Moore and this has been 50 First Dates, the podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast, I hope you share, rate and review it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It will help others find the crazy, beautiful love stories that I like to share. Also, please hit the subscribe button on your podcast app if you'd like to know how this project started. My memoir, 50 First Dates, is available.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Wherever books are sold. A link is always included in the.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Show Notes I'm also a romance writer. If you want to know more about my books, please visit joliemoore.com for more information.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You can also follow me on Instagram.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: TikTok and Substack Xojoliemore. The essays accompanying these postcards are available on Substack. You can also follow me on all social media at the same handle, xojoliemore.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Thanks for listening and I'll be in.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: Your ears very soon.
