Transcript | Ep. 122: Unlearning Shame with Ashley C. Ford

Ashley: Most people are walking around with a massive bag of shame that does not belong to them. It's not theirs. And they won't put it down because somebody they love handed it to them. And I want them to know you can put that shit down.

[Theme music]

Cristen: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike. I’m Cristen.

Caroline: I’m Caroline. When we chatted with writer Ashley C. Ford a few weeks ago, her memoir — Somebody’s Daughter — had just become a New York Times bestseller AND popped up in the instagram feed of one Oprah Winfrey.

Cristen: What was it like seeing Oprah holding your book?

Ashley: It was like. When you are really stressed out and overwhelmed in a place that is like really bright, but it's nighttime, and so every time the light encounters you, it's light, harsh and glaring or like neon. And then suddenly you find yourself on the - in the middle of a back road driving and there's no one around you and the sky is full of stars. And your whole body relaxes, and you feel like maybe I took the right way home this time.

Cristen: That's the most beautiful description of Oprah validation.

Ashley: That's how it feels! Every time it feels a little bit better, to be honest, it's wild.

Cristen: Oprah published Ashley's memoir on her imprint. She said she saw a lot of her own story in Ashley's — a young, Black girl who endures trauma and learns to overcome it.

Caroline: At its core, Somebody's Daughter is a story about family — and chaos. When Ashley was still an infant, her father was convicted of rape and sent to prison for nearly 30 years. In her memoir, Ashley details the turmoil he left behind: Money was tight. Home life was unstable. And a current of shame ran through it all.

Cristen: So today, we’re talking with Ashley about unlearning that shame, reconciling her complicated family relationships and coming into her own.

[Stinger]

Caroline: So, Ashley we read your book, we loved it, we cried, there was - there was a lot of like you really got me with some of the unexpected crying. I don't think of myself as a book crier, but I would like turn a page and be like, “Oh, God!” So basic question to start out: Why did you want to write this book?

Ashley: Because I needed this book, The Me of before, the child me, the teenage me, the young-adult me, she needed this book and she couldn't find it. She was a voracious reader. She is a voracious reader. So the fact that I couldn't find a story about a girl who had a dad in prison and who was dealing with some of the things I was dealing with in relation to that was never and is not indicative of the lack of the existence of that story beyond me. This country incarcerates more people than anywhere else in the world. The kids of the incarcerated are everywhere. The left-behind spouses of the incarcerated are everywhere. Communities that have been decimated by the incarceration system. That's a lot of people. That's millions and millions of people. And the fact that I couldn't find that story haunted me and made me feel alone for a really long time.

Cristen: Buckle up for a staggering statistic, y'all. One in 12 American children have had at least one parent incarcerated. That's according to a 2018 paper from The Sentencing Project.

Caroline: Ashley’s parents were young and newly married when the bottom fell out. Her dad was just shy of 21 when he was arrested and put in jail. Her mom was 22 and pregnant with Ashley’s little brother.

Ashley: They were trying to just like get on their feet. My mom felt like she was setting up herself for, like, a very classic, normal Midwestern life, where she would be a mom and he would be a dad and they would have a few kids. And like that was her dream. That was literally my mom's dream was to be a mom. It was all she ever wanted.

Cristen: But she hadn’t bargained on being a single mother, with two young children and one income.

Ashley: You know, my mom still carries a ton of shame about her life back then, about the circumstances of her life. My mom carries shame about the fact that she's never really been able to financially recover from that time. My mom worked for the government for almost 25 years. She still needs my help. She did all the stuff that people say you're supposed to do, and it just kept falling apart on her. And my dad being gone, you know, based on his decisions, it's like jail ain’t exactly no picnic. But when you have an incarcerated parent, when you have one member of a family incarcerated like that, it's like the whole family is incarcerated, especially when it's a parent.

Caroline: The financial toll of incarceration is bewildering. Court fines and legal fees ALONE cost thousands of dollars. And women like Ashley's mom make up the vast majority of family members who end up paying them.

Cristen: By the time Ashley was 13, her parents had divorced, and her Mom had two more kids. Their grandmother lived with them sometimes, and her mom’s emotionally abusive boyfriend was around a lot, too.

Caroline: There was a LOT going on, but there was also a lot of love in the house. Ashley’s mom could be warm, silly, the life of the party. But she could also be vicious. Ashley learned to fear her mom’s dark side — almost like she was another person when she was in a rage.

Ashley: My mother had a lot of anger and sadness and I think some depression and anxiety and nowhere to put it. There was nothing really for her at the time, nor did it seem that there was something to be done about what was going on inside of her. So the dynamics were, you know, in a lot of cases it was hard. But on the daily, it wasn't like it was just like I walk in my house and there's a dark shadow and who knows what's going to happen. It was like - it was just as likely that I would come home and everybody would be playing loud music and dancing in the living room, you know, as like my mom throwing something because she was angry. So it was a mix of both, but it was such extreme ends of that dynamic is really the problem. It was like I was either with my family and thinking to myself, “How does - why does anybody have friends when you could hang out with family? This is the best thing ever.” Or I was in my house thinking, “This is the last place I should be. I have to get out of here right now. I have to go away.”

Cristen: The mother-daughter dynamic was complicated. But Ashley’s relationship with her dad? That was magical.

Caroline: Magical and a little abstract. Their relationship was pretty much confined to Ashley’s imagination. Her dad would send her these adoring letters from prison, and Ashley built up this idealized image of him in her mind — partly as a way to cope with things at home.

Ashley: I lionized him in my mind. I felt so unprotected in a certain sense. I knew that my mom would protect me from any stranger who attempted to harm me. I knew that. I did not trust my mother to protect me from people who were close to her. And I definitely did not trust my mom to protect me from herself. Because for so long, I didn't know what my dad did to end up in prison and all I had were these letters that were, y’know, about how much he loved me and my brother you know and my mom, I lionized that aspect of him and turned it into like this perfect like this perfect protective force. You know, I used to dream I used to have a recurring dream that my dad showed up to my school one day in a cowboy hat and on horseback literally to, like, take me out of there. I used to dream about that. Like, that was a recurring dream I had as a kid was that my dad was going to show up on horseback in a cowboy hat and that we were going to go live on a farm somewhere.

Cristen: Well how do you think your Dad’s letters shaped how you saw your mom and the way she showed you love?

Ashley: The thing is my mom was not a person who said, “I love you” a lot or, you know, particularly kind things, but my dad's letters were full of kind things, and you know he called me his favorite girl and the most beautiful girl in the world. And he told me how much he was proud of me. And he would tell me things like, you know, no matter what's going on in the world, you always have a dad who's proud of you. You always have a dad who loves you. You always have somebody who's in your corner. You always have somebody who's thinking about you. And those letters I was starting to really like read them and receive them and understand them, just as I realized how messed up it was that my mom didn't ever say those things to me, really, or when she did, it was like in this weird, aggressive way where she would be like, look at me. I'm proud of you. OK? So you can't ever say I didn't say I was proud of you. Or, you know, don't be out here letting boys tell you anything just because they say, I love you, OK? That don't mean anything. I love you, you know. So there. So now you've got an I love you. You don't need it from anybody else. You know, like that's the way my mom was about emotions. Like there wasn't a lot of tenderness. But the truth is, her mother was not a very tender person. So where would she have learned it from? Where would she have gotten it from to give it to me?

Cristen: We’re gonna take a quick break.

Caroline: When we come back, Ashley begins learning to relinquish her family shame.

Cristen: Stick around.

[Stinger]

Cristen: We’re back with Ashley C. Ford.

Caroline: Ashley didn’t find out why her Dad was sent to prison until she was 13. She got into a fight with her mom, and afterward Ashley’s grandmother said, “You know, you should be nicer to your mom. She’s been through a lot.” And that is when her grandmother told Ashley that her Dad was in prison for raping two women.

Ashley: It's a very vulnerable position being a young black girl who is constantly told that men are both a danger and a savior. Like I grew up with it basically being like men are going to try to do this to you. They're going to try to hurt you this way. Men were either the predator or the protector, And so in my mind, I could only think of my dad as a protector, and then to find out that to someone else, he is a predator, you know, while he's being a protector of your heart, is shattering. It's shattering.

Caroline: So you’ve talked about being raised with a lot of shame around your dad’s incarceration, and I’m curious: How long did it take for you to release that, or learn to release that?

Ashley: Probably until my like mid 20s, my deep mid 20s, like not like 24. More like 27, 28. I think what happened honestly was being in therapy, which I started at 18, and eventually realizing that what my dad did was terrible, and I could feel a lot of hurt and pain and sadness. I could feel, especially as a victim of sexual assault myself, I could feel empathy for what his victims must have gone through. And it was hard to think of my dad as a perpetrator, but I had to accept that about him. And I don't mean condone it and I don't mean be OK with it. I just had to accept that the person who sent me these letters over the course of my life who, you know, went to prison when I was 3 months old and didn't get out until I was almost 30, that that guy had been one person to me and had been a completely different person to somebody else. And that's not just to say that that's true for his victims. It's also true for my mother. He hurt so many people with what he did. And altered the course of our lives forever without any of our input. But I did not make those decisions, and I refuse to be judged by decisions I was not privy to, had no control in, and have really just only been able to react to the outcomes. There's no intention on my part in that cruelty and in that - in - in the pain and harm caused there. So to own it as if it was mine ultimately is to lie. It's to live in a delusion. And I have found that attempting to live in delusions makes people miserable. And I do not deserve to be miserable because of what my father did.

Caroline: Well, how did you know - at just 18 - to go to therapy and work through this stuff?

Ashley: TV. I’d watched so much TV and so many movies where a person who was in break down or who was like, I don't - I have a lot of stuff going on inside of me and and I don't know what to do with it. I don't know where to put it. They would go to a therapist. And I remember suggesting when I was a kid that we go to a therapist like a family therapist because I saw it in an episode of Golden Girls. And my mom was like, black people don't do therapy, you know? And I used to always hate it when she says shit like that because I would I would always say, like, I'm black. If I'm interested, how can that not be a black interest? Like, I'm here. I'm right here. But, yeah, I, I knew something was not OK. OK, like, I knew something was not OK inside of me. I knew that I was in pain, in a kind of psychic pain that was always on top of me. And I couldn't get it off, and I was afraid from a very young age that if I did not deal with this thing inside of me, whatever it was, that I was going to react to people the way my mother reacted to them in anger, and I was scared to be like that.

Caroline: So in your memoir, you write about trying to manage your mom’s emotions — shrinking yourself, being invisible. But then you go off to college, and it’s the first time you’re really away from her and the rest of your family. So, how did leaving change those dynamics with your mom?

Ashley: I just wasn't used to being under that kind of restraint anymore, and so it was really tough for me to come back into my mother's home and make myself small again. I couldn't do it, I couldn't defer the way she wanted or needed me to defer. And so that changed our dynamic pretty quickly because she wasn't ready for that. I think a lot of parents who hit to control don't understand that like, once you stop being able to hit, once it's not like reasonable for you to hit this person anymore, you've lost all control because you don't have any real influence. You don't have influence on their lives. They might be scared of you, but that doesn't mean that they're not going to do something because you might find out. That means that they've been practicing for years making sure you don't find out what they did. And I just yeah, I. I I had been away and while I was away, I got to be myself and once I got to be myself, I. I realized that was the path. That's what I'm trying to do. I want to be more of me, and anything that doesn't make me more of me, I'm not interested in.

Cristen: When Ashley was 25, she got a call from her grandmother: Ashley’s mom was hospitalized with a ruptured appendix. She’d nearly died. All Ashley could think was: I’m not ready to be an orphan. … And of course, she still had her dad. But for all his love and support, he couldn’t be there for her in the way she needed. Their relationship was still from a distance.

Caroline: Once Ashley’s mom recovered, Ashley decided it was time to do the thing she’d been putting off for more than a decade: It was time to go see her father in prison — to really make room for him in her life.

Ashley: For the first time in 12 years, I got to hug my dad. And it's like, if I think really hard, I can still remember what it felt like to see him and to sort of like, you know, run-walk toward him because you can't just run across the room in jail, like in a prison. Like, you can't - you cannot do that. But doing like this run-walk toward him and realizing that, like, oh, my God, like, should I feel should this feel this good, like should this feel this safe to be hugged by my dad in the middle of a prison visiting room? You know, trying to analyze it, but it did feel good, like it felt that good and I wanted to talk with him. I wanted him to. I wanted to give him the opportunity to know me, I wanted the opportunity to know him, you know, in a real way, but it's hard because, you know, you're there for these two hours, and you're so aware that you're sitting across from this person. And it's like, I kind of know you, right? A little like a like a little little bit, I kind of know you. But mostly in my mind, you're an avatar. Like you are - you're a projection of all the things I really, really want you to be and the things I really hope you are.

Cristen: Well, as far as that - that initial visit, what would you say that you walked away from it with?

Ashley: I walked away from it feeling like he saw me. And he heard me. And I'm pretty sure he still loves me. I'm pretty sure he still thinks I'm OK. And I love him and I think he's OK. And I think I'm at a point now where I can start talking about what happened to me and I can start talking about what life is like, and I can know that that's not going to destroy me. It's not going to devastate me. And it's not going to ruin my chances for a relationship with this parent. Yeah, it gave me hope. It gave me a sense that, like, I wasn't the only one on my team. That I could be on my own side and that when I was on my own side, it didn't mean that I had to be alone.

Cristen: We’re going to take a quick break.

Caroline: When we come back, Ashley forges an entirely new relationship with her dad.

Cristen: Don’t go away!

[Stinger]

Caroline: We’re back with writer Ashley C. Ford.

Cristen: In 2016, when Ashley was almost 30, her dad was released from prison.

Caroline: So your dad is out of prison now. And what what is your relationship with him like now and how does it compare to all of the projection from your childhood?

Ashley: It's better. It's so much better because it's a real person and like the avatars and the and the projections and the you know, the guy on the horse with the cowboy hat. When I was making those avatars and those projections, I didn't like myself very much. And so all my ideas of what would be good about my dad, a lot of them were things that were the opposite of what I didn't like about myself. But getting to know my dad, I've discovered how much we're actually alike. And reality is just better. It's better to be here with him than to try to keep him locked away in some imaginary capsule of my mind. It's better to be able to call him. It's better to be able to get angry with him and just tell him that I'm angry and that I'm mad and know that that, me being mad is not ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to make him give up on me. Ever. Like that's just amazing for me.

Cristen: Were there any sort of ripple effects of this process of getting to know your dad and working on that relationship? Were there any ripple effects to your relationship with your mom?

Ashley: Oh yeah

Cristen: Yeah

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. My mom has this deep and massive well for compassion, and she struggles to express it. I know this now because of how much she struggles to have it for herself. And I've watched my mom attempt to create some of that compassion for herself over these last couple of years, and I think some of that is in reaction to my dad being released. And I don't know that it has like much to do with my relationship with my dad. I think it's more so about my mom finally feeling, possibly, possibly finally feeling free of this reality, of him being in jail, him being in prison. Like just him being out for her now, it's something that she doesn't have to be ashamed of. It's something that she doesn't have to be worried about. And finding that relief has given her room to start reflecting on herself and her own wants and her own needs and things like that, and the more she does that, the better our relationship gets. You know, to be perfectly honest, like I never needed my mom to think about me more. I mostly needed her to think about her more. And she's doing that really well now. Plus, you know, having my dad out and seeing how she reacted to him, how she continues to react to him you know with so much kindness and compassion is a reminder that my mom is not the same person she was when she was 24 or 27 or even 33. And there is an opportunity there for us to have a new kind of relationship, but it's - it's going to take time, as all things do.

Caroline: Yeah, how has your definition of family and the way that you relate to your family changed as you have grown up and gotten older.

Ashley: I don't feel the same obligation to family as I did when I was younger, and I don't say that to mean like, you know, my family can go fuck themselves, like, I don't feel like that at all. I love my family, but I think I have a more expansive idea of what family is now. I have friends, people who I've met who are now - they're my family, and they'll be my family for the rest of my life. And I don't have the dynamic anymore with any of my family members, family-family or friend-family, whatever, where I seek approval or I seek acceptance of me in some way. I'm at a place now where it’s like I am, what you get, I'm what you get. I show up in almost every encounter, almost every almost every interaction, I show up as myself 100 percent. I don't like to do it differently. It doesn't feel good to do it differently. I just want to be me. And there are people who are going to be able to deal with that and there are people who aren't. I'm really good to let everybody be who they are because I've allowed that for myself. And when you can allow yourself to be who you are all the time, you want that for everybody else, because it's too much work to pretend. And we've done a lot of pretending in this family. We've kept a lot of secrets and hidden a lot of things that were shameful. But that shame didn't belong to us. And if I got to be the one to stand up and go, hey, guess what, we're not doing that anymore. I'm happy to be that person. I'm totally OK with that. I'm a Capricorn.

Caroline: You can find Ashley on Twitter @ismashfizzle or on Instagram @smashfizzle. Her memoir Somebody’s Daughter is out now. Head to your local bookstore and pick it up!

Cristen: You can find us on instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also support Caroline and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll get weekly ad-free bonus episodes including recent bonus eps on the five families of the sex toy industry and an astrologer predicting cryptocurrency trends. Head over to patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger

Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.

Cristen: Next week...

Doree Shafrir: Now, kind of looking back, it does feel like turning 40, which I think when you're 25 seems like 85, actually feels like the beginning of like the life I was supposed to lead and the person I was supposed to become.

Caroline: It’s our latest Ask Unladylike episode! Doree Shafrir and Kate Spencer of the podcast Forever35 join us to answer YOUR questions about being a late-bloomer. We talk dating, pregnancy pressure, aging and menopause!

Cristen: You don’t want to miss that episode! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Caroline: And remember, got a problem?

Cristen: Get Unladylike.