S3:E5 As you wish // 10.28.21

Episode description:

Why is it that the people we love most don’t show that love in the way we need it? Love languages, family history, and why sometimes love gets lost in translation.

Show notes:

Transcript:

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about embracing the journey in a world forever changed. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

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Laura: Twenty years ago, when my husband Nate and I had been dating for just a few months, I gave him the perfect gift. I was twenty-two and broke, but I scraped together my savings and gave him one gift for each of the five senses. For sight, it was my favorite short story collection, The Shell Collector. For sound, a mix CD. For smell, Estee Lauder Pleasures cologne. For taste, a bottle of Cabernet. For touch, a shirt so soft and beautiful that I knew he’d think of my arms around him every time he wore it. I also wrote him a 20-page letter detailing the significance of each gift.

I admit, it was a little over the top. What can I say? I was in love.

On Christmas Eve, after my family had gone to bed, we sat on the couch and I stacked up Nate’s mound of presents in front of him.

“Why don’t you open yours first?” he said.

I could not wait to see what he’d gotten me. Jewelry? Maybe a long letter to match the one I’d written? Maybe a surprise date he was going to take me on?

And then, he handed me his gift, a small flat rectangle that was lighter than a magazine. I tore off the wrapping paper, held the gift up to the light, and saw . . . Curious George.

I tried to find something to say, but I was completely stumped. Was there something I wasn’t getting? Maybe a message hiding in the pages that would mean something to me?

Maybe this was just the first clue on a secret scavenger hunt. But as I flipped through the pages, there were no clues, no secret love notes . . . just a gleefully disobedient little monkey grinning back at me.

“I didn’t know yours would be so elaborate,” Nate stammered.

I tried to be gracious. I really did.

“But we’ve never even talked about Curious George,” I cried. “I never even liked these books as a kid.”

“I just thought since we both love books . . . and maybe someday we’ll read this to our kids . . . ” but it was clear that Nate was backpedaling, reaching for a reason even as he was asking himself why did he give me a used copy of Curious George for our very first Christmas together?

Today, we can laugh at this moment. We’ve had many more good Christmases to make up for that one. After reading Curious George to all three of our kids, Nate now shares my disdain for that mischievous little monkey, who never seems to learn his lesson.

But even after all of these years together, when we know each other so well, we occasionally have moments that bring us back to that first Christmas. We don’t always feel the love that’s being extended. It’s like we’re speaking a language we’re fluent in, but the other person can’t understand it. We’re saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” in all of these ways that mean so much to us, but they’re just hearing “wah wah wah wah wah,” like the teacher in the old Charlie Brown movies.

So today, we’re talking about the languages of love. About why the people we love most are sometimes the very same people who can make us feel loved the least, and what in the world we can do to make sure that our love—and theirs—doesn’t get lost in translation.
Bethany Voice Over (BVO): I love my husband, but from the very beginning, he’s had to endure me being obsessed with another. She is smart, articulate and a world traveler. She has short hair, and freckles on her copper penny complexion.

We talk on the phone almost every day. The one time in my life when we didn’t speak for an entire week, my niece drove over to my house, leaned out the driver’s side window, and called out, “Nana wanted me to come and make sure you weren’t dead!”

The woman that I am obsessed with goes by many names: Geraldine, Gerrie, Nana, Auntie, Sister . . . but to me, she is Ma. My husband says he has three generations of Gerrie. It’s true. My mom, my daughter, and I all look and act alike. Sometimes we even talk alike. Think Black versions of Patty Duke and you get the picture.

Laura: This is Bethany Hawkins, one of our Kasama Collective trainees. Many of our trainees come to us with little to no experience in audio, but Bethany isn’t just a seasoned podcaster; she owns a podcast production company called Crackers In Soup and has her own weekly podcast. The same week that Shelter in Place won an award at the International Women’s Podcasts Awards, Chatting Over Chowder won the award for Best Black Comedy at the Black Podcasting Awards.

It’s a rare week when Bethany doesn’t have our team laughing. She laughs a lot with her mom, too, but it wasn’t always that way.

BVO: Every black family has a big mama. Big Mama knows everything you need to know about being an adult. She’s the one you go to for answers, advice, recipes. Big Mama doesn’t necessarily have to be large in appearance but she is large in presence. That is my mother.

My mom is almost 80 years old. Even though she is small in stature, she’s still the “Big Mama” to not only her children, but to her grandchildren, to her siblings, to her cousins . . . to anybody who is family.

My favorite thing about my mother is her big hugs and how many times she tells us she loves us every single day. Oh wait, that last part? That was a whole lie. Love languages? We don’t need no stinking love languages.

Bethany: Because as we both know, you scarred me as a child, with no hugs because you don’t hug anyone.

Gerrie: But a lot of love, I didn't show it in a way that normal people do. I don’t like to be touched.

BVO: Growing up in my family, we rarely hugged. We rarely said “I love you.” I want to be quick to say that as a kid we had an abundance of everything. There was always plenty of good food to eat. By high school, I had been on more cruises than anyone else I knew. Whether we needed it or not, we got new shoes or clothes. My parents weren’t heartless shrews who came from a generational wealth so they threw money at us to keep us quiet. They were just the opposite. They were a black man and a black woman who were born into poverty and made declarations that this is not where they would stay.

Gerrie: If something was going on in school, you had the money to do it. It might not have been the top of the line stuff, but you always had. I didn't have that. I used to lie. “Oh, I forgot to bring it in,” or whatever, Right? But, it stays with you.

Bethany: Dad was the same way. I’d be going to college and he be like, here’s some money. Don't tell your mother

Gerrie: And he was so proud.

Bethany: Like that was his way of showing us he loved us

Gerrie: Yes Yes

Bethany: Dad not only was not touchy feely but dad didn’t talk to us. I would call the house when I was in college.

Gerrie: And he’d hang up.

Bethany: I’d be like, hi daddy. Hi. Are you okay? Yeah. Do you need any money? No. That was like the conversation.

Gerrie: Ya

Laura: Bethany never doubted that she was loved. It was obvious. But still, it bothered her that hugs and "I love you"s weren’t a frequent part of her family life. It wasn’t until she encountered the idea of love languages that she had the vocabulary to describe this disconnect.

Way back in 1992, marriage counselor Gary Chapman published a book called The Five Love Languages, which looked at love through the five ways that people tend to express and receive it: words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, acts of service, and gifts. The book was a hit, selling over 20 million copies and staying on the New York Times bestseller list for years.

I remember buying that book back in the late 90’s, and returning to it again after that fateful Christmas gift disaster. When I was young, gifts were the main way that I showed my love. Curious George will forever remind me that Nate and I don’t always speak the same language of love. For Bethany, that reminder comes from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride.

BVO: Buttercup (pre-princess status) is always ordering around Wesley, the farmboy, telling him to do this, to do that. Every time she beckons him, he just looks at her, his luscious blonde bangs hanging over his face, and says, “As you wish.” Over time, Buttercup realizes that “As you wish” isn’t just a pacifying response. Each time he says it, he’s telling her he loves her. And eventually, she realizes that she loves him back.

Laura: When Bethany learned about the five love languages, she had a similar realization about her parents: physical touch and words of affirmation didn’t come naturally for them, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t expressing their love. They showed their love in other ways but it wasn’t until she started working on this episode that Bethany got curious about why her parents showed their love in the ways they did.

BVO: I realized I didn’t know my parents' love story. So last week I sat down with my mother and finally asked her how my dad had wooed her.

Gerrie: You don’t know that story? I met him at the corner of Dave's store, in Haverhill, Massachusetts

Bethany: Yes baby look at you standing at the corner meeting men and getting married!

Gerrie: and I was with Jane Thomas. And he drove by. And Jane said, oh, I know him. She yelled, Hey Roger. she used to go out with his friend. so he was smiling at me. I must’ve said “Oh come up sometime”. It was winterish time. We had a snow storm. And all of a sudden, I get a phone call and it’s him. And he says “Hi, this is Roger. You said I can come over sometime." and I said, you can't come now. He had walked. So I says, “I’ll be out in a minute.” I said, you can’t come over. So he walked back home. I thought, oh, well.

Bethany: You met him outside just to tell him you need to go home. And he was like and that's my Lady!

Gerrie: I can't remember when he came back again, but he did. And thank God my mother liked him. My mother and father always liked him. They liked him more than I did.

Bethany: Stop it

BVO: Princess Buttercup has NOTHING on my mother! Go ahead and Google “Should I marry my significant other.” Congratulations, you are now inundated with articles such as “31 Signs You’re with the Person You Should Marry” or “Is Your Partner Marriage Material” or “Will I Marry - Astrology”. Today, we have more sources at our fingertips to guide us in relationships than we know what to do with. But when my parents met, all they had to go on was how they felt about each other and what they had in common.

When my father asked for my mother’s hand, she was ironing her clothes in her mother’s kitchen. Without any hesitation or consultations to see if their astrological signs aligned, she said yes.

Gerrie: I met him in January and we got married in August.

BVO: She was 18. My dad was 20. The ‘60s were a wild time!!

My mother was the second oldest of 8 children.

Gerrie: Those were all boys. My status in that house was cooking, cleaning. They didn't have to do that stuff. So I was a caretaker.

BVO: My father was one of 12! Back then, there was no Netflix so I guess my grandparents had to keep themselves busy somehow.

Gerrie: Our upbringings were very similar because we didn't get to eat right. We didn't have things we should've had. That’s why your father left school because he was tired of being made fun of. They had all those kids, father didn't work. I don't think the mother ever worked. His father would always go out with a white shirt on, dressed up and everything, never went to work. I think they spent an awful lot of time on like welfare. I mean, we had a small house, it was terrible, but they had a small house also, but it had an outhouse in the back. Their mother died very young. She had cancer and the sad part of that was things were going good for them because the kids were able to do some work and Uncle Wilbur bought them a house. In fact, she died there.

Bethany: Daddy's parents never said, I love you,

Gerrie: Right

Bethany: or like hugged them and stuff. And your mother didn't treat you that way

Gerrie: that's where I get it from

Bethany: I never knew any of my grandparents.

Gerrie: Right, Right

Bethany: They had already passed by the time I was born. With you being born in the forties and your mother having you when she was like 18, she had to have been born in like 1920-something. Did you ever know your grandmother?

Gerrie: My mother's mother died at a young age. She had three kids. Their father, your great grandfather, had left the south and this was before his wife died, but he moved up to New Hampshire and had died. They had no place to go. When my mother was like 15, 16, she was pregnant with uncle Johnny. They took Uncle Johnny away from my mother because she was a child. It was horrible. She and Aunt Doris were put into, this is how you became Catholic, they put them in a home with the nuns. Uncle Richie, he lied with his age and went into the service.

Bethany: She didn't get a lot of hugs in the orphanage. When she was a 15, 16 unwed black girl having a baby.

Gerrie: I never knew that I had a brother until I met him, I want to say he was 16.

Bethany: When you met uncle Johnny, did you hug him?

Gerrie: No, I didn’t.

BVO: Compared to what my parents went through. I can see how lucky I was. My parents didn't show love using all of the five love languages, but the ones they did use, they use really well. I started thinking of how love is expressed, especially in the black community. I started thinking about my grandparents who died before I was born. If my parents' love languages were a reaction to their upbringing. What were my parents' parents reacting to? If my great-grandparents were raising my grandparents, when slavery was still illegal, Was there a historical correlation between slavery and the lack of physical touch and affirming words, not just in my family, but in the black community?

Laura: Bethany’s theory wasn’t mere speculation. The United States has a long and painful history of separating children from their parents. DeNeen L. Brown outlined that history in her 2018 Washington Post story, ‘Barbaric’: America’s cruel history of separating children from their parents.

That history included slavery, when it wasn’t unusual for slave owners to sell children and their parents to different owners, but it also extended to Indigenous children, who as recently as the 1970s were still being forcibly separated from their families to attend boarding schools where they were stripped of their language and culture.

BVO: A few years ago, the Smithsonian featured an exhibit called “The Weeping Time,” which documented the history of enslaved children who were separated from their enslaved parents. It included accounts like this one, from a former slave named Henry Bibb: “the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart-rending shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and the bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other.” To be emotionally connected and invested in your children and then to have them ripped away is a profound, generational emotional trauma rooted deep within black families.

Laura: Learning this history of separation—a history that her great-grandparents had lived through—got Bethany thinking about her mom, who had been raised by the children who came out of that generation. Even though Bethany always knew she was loved, sometimes the way that love was expressed felt a little detached.

BVO: We learn how to be in this world first and foremost by watching our parents. If you are detached, what happens to your children emotionally….and then to their children….and then to their children. The idea that black women would have to emotionally detach to protect themselves for self preservation is not farfetched.

Laura: That history of children being separated from their parents wasn’t the only one in Bethany’s family history. Her parents experienced other separations, too. During the Vietnam War, Bethany’s dad was drafted into the army.

Gerrie: He got the thing, the letter. He got drafted. He was 24 or 25. and he says, I'm not going to go. They won’t take me. His first mistake, because they took him. He left, you know, your grandmother crying and me crying and all that stuff and he went. That afternoon, police came to my door and said, "We're looking for Roger Sylvester." I think I cried. Your father was so nervous that he went and got on the train and he wasn’t supposed to.

Bethany: He accidentally went AWOL.

Gerrie: They found him.

Bethany: Well, I mean, black men in the army, we don't fare so well.

BVO: When my father was found from his unintentionally going AWOL, he was stationed in the south. My mother would travel regularly from the northeast to the south to visit him. Friendly reminder, this was the 60s!

Gerrie: I remember I got on a bus. I said to the bus driver, "Now, I sit in the back?" And he said to me, "Sweetheart. You could sit any place you want on this bus. But I still was nervous. I mean, there were black people, but there's a lot of white people too."

BVO: Eventually my father was honorably discharged from the Army and began working as a construction worker. My mother quickly moved up the ranks at Verizon telephone company. For the first time, they had enough money to pay their bills and take care of themselves. They did all of the things they couldn’t do when they were younger: eating what they wanted, vacationing and purchasing a house.

Bethany: I know the dad was like, we work hard. And I'm going to have whatever I want to have and I'm going to vacation and do whatever I want to do. But did you guys have that conversation of "When we have children, our experience is not going to be their experience"?

Gerrie: I don't know if we actually said that. From the time we got married, we always were doing something. Even before we had kids. We always went somewhere. even if it was only to the Cape.

I go grocery shopping and I come back and he say, well, did you get my, like cookies and all that. And I'd say, oh, I didn't get them today well, you know, I never had these as kids, so I don't care. I'm going to have this and he did.

Somebody would think, well, what's the big deal about the cookies, but it was because he never had them.

Bethany: It was all about Ritz crackers and saltine crackers.

Gerrie: And the fact that he always had clothes because he never had clothes. He's always say, "I don't care, I didn't have this when I was a kid." Before we had the kids,

Bethany: Before we had kids, you mean me?

Gerrie: I mean ya, you and your sister, right? I would say well, maybe we shouldn't go, you know? We gonna save money for this and he say, well, I don't care. I didn't do this all my life.

That's why he always wanted to go somewhere and thank God he did. Because when people say to me, what's that picture there? Oh, that's when we went ba bup ba ba. And you know, you need to be able to say that because people don't look at black people and think they can go somewhere. Right. I said, oh yeah. He says, "We went every year for years," and they look at you and say, "Wow!"

He was always adamant that when he became whatever age he was retiring, and he did.

Laura: Bethany had always enjoyed those cruises and clothes and multiple choices of crackers in the cupboard. But now she saw them in a new light, not just a small comforts, but as evidence of just how much she was loved.

But here's the thing about generational patterns: they don't stop affecting us just because we can see them. That pattern of separation followed Bethany into adulthood at a time when she least expected it

BVO: In the August of me entering my senior year of college, my father was unable to move the right side of his body thinking he had had a stroke. My mother brought him to the hospital only for us to learn he had a brain tumor. Further tests proved it was secondary, his primary: lung cancer. Within a few months from courses of different radiations and treatments, he became blind.

Bethany: What I realize now that I guess I didn't realize then, Dad literally lived long enough to see me graduate from college.

Gerrie: Yeah he did.

Bethany: In our immediate family, I was the only one who graduated from college.

Gerrie: That's right. That's right. You know, that was a big thing, you know?

Anybody could have seen that he was sick. You know, he was adamant that he was going, and I didn't say nothing to him. Okay. No, you go.

Bethany: In the pictures he was in good spirits.

Gerrie: Ya

Bethany: You would never know that like in four weeks, he would have passed.

Gerrie: I know - that fast.

Bethany: LIke in the pictures, even though he couldn’t see, he was still smiling. He was still talking to Tesha

Gerrie: Yes because there was a lot of people there that day. He pushed himself forward so that he could do it. Yeah. You know, he wasn't all bad. Maybe crazy, but he wasn't all bad.

You all didn't get a lot of love, so to speak. But you had anything that you needed, anything that you wanted.

Bethany: I appreciate all that you've done for us. I don't think that you see your parents as people. When you're a kid and you're growing up

Gerrie: No, you don’t because you're always asking for something. And you're just thinking of all they're mean to me because I can't go out today and you know, all that stuff.

Bethany: Having my own family now

Gerrie: Makes a difference

Bethany: You and daddy. We're not trying to be our friends.

Gerrie: No!

Bethany: You were like, look, I parboiled this chicken, put it in the oven at such and such a time. Make some sides. I want the house clean. Like there was no friendship

Gerrie: Nope. But you need boundaries and stuff.

Bethany: We had so much structure

Gerrie: and you know what, we had a lot of love in that house.

Bethany: I appreciate all that you’ve done for us.

BVO: My parents were absolutely fallible and they were also absolutely perfect.

All of these years later, my mother's still the big mama. She raised her siblings and my sister and me and my nieces and my nephews. I think it says something that her way of loving has been passed down to yet another generation. Just last week, my nephew drove four hours to vacuum her carpet. The morning we spoke, my niece had picked up my mom's prescriptions. And me? I'd still do anything for her. Funny enough, as we curtailed to her love language, she actually learned a new love language.

Bethany: So all of this legacy of acts of service has been passed on from generation to generation to generation. Because, like, truly, I am the only one out of our family that hugs people.

Gerrie: I know

Bethany: Like Erin and Devin aren't really huggy

Gerrie: No. I never was. I still am not.

Bethany: I try to hug Amaya and her body gets all stiff like you do. But it it's funny because now, Olivia and Charis, when I try to hug them they're like "Ugh!"

Gerrie: It's a kid thing. But at night, even when Olivia's here, I kiss them goodnight and everything and Amaya's like this.

Bethany: Which is ironic because I remember a young, wee lass who just wanted a kiss goodnight from her mother! And I got "Go to bed." Huh! Well I'm glad that my daughter and my niece are getting kisses from my mother.

Gerrie Ya, 'cause they giggle and stuff

Bethany: the kisses I never received

Gerrie: Hey, I’ve grown

Bethany: You have grown

Laura: I’m still learning to speak Nate’s love language, but I no longer think about love languages as a relational problem to solve. I think about them instead as a part of relationships that keeps evolving, because I’m evolving too.

I don’t give elaborate gifts anymore. Gifts doesn’t even rank in my top 3 for the ways I feel most loved. There have been many years when Nate and I decided not to give each other gifts at all because money was tight, and I was truly OK with it. It meant a lot more to me to get to spend time with him, to dream about what life could be, and figure out how to get a little bit closer to reaching that life together.

A few months ago Nate and I watched The Princess Bride with our kids. They’d never seen it, and I realized that the last time I had seen it, I was probably in middle school. It was just as great as I remembered it.

But what I noticed this time around is that while Buttercup fell in love with Wesley’s dreamy soft-spoken way of giving her everything she asked for, the love that ultimately brought them back together was far more nuanced and even—at times—difficult.

During the years when Wesley and Buttercup were apart, when Buttercup believed that he was dead, they became different people.

Fighting villains and living among pirates and wrestling, giant rats, and the fire swamp made them stronger, but it also left them with wounds.

The people Buttercup and Wesley eventually became, the people Nate and I became, the people Bethany's parents became, the person she's become, were shaped more by the hard moments than the easy ones.

BVO: I am who I am today because of my parents, and their parents, and their parents before them. I think the way we receive and show love can change. One minute you are talking about true love in an open field, the next you are spending quality time in the fire swamp. One minute you are getting a gift from a miracle worker and the next you are in the throes of a PG-rated kiss. And then there are those times when you get stuck in that one love language, and the only way you know how to show you love is by fighting off rodents of unusual sizes. After I have cooked my kids dinner and washed their clothes and done all of the same acts of service that my parents did to show that they loved me, I also chase them around and bear hug them and squish their guts, and tell them 1000 times I love them. They audibly sigh with exasperation. I fully expect that one day they’ll tell me that THEY were scarred because of how I show love. It’s a sick cycle.

But at night, after I tell my daughter that I love her and hug her again, she asks me,

Olivia: Mom, will you put me to bed and say prayers?

Bethany: The only response I can think of is, “As you wish.”

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Support Credits:

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around.

But first, we’d like to dedicate this episode to Bethany’s late father Roger Sylvester, whose love and life lives on in her story. Thank you to Gerrie and Bethany for bringing this story to Shelter in Place with all the love, care, and heart that your story deserves.

End Credits:

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Bethany Hawkins was our lead writer and producer for this episode, Zahra C. was our assistant producer, and Hannah Fowler was our assistant audio editor. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 3 Kasama Collective trainees are Bethany Hawkins, Hannah Fowler, Meridian Watters, Nathan Wizard, Nikki Schaffer, and Zahra C.

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.

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OUTTAKE:

Bethany: Well, thank you for doing this.
Gerrie: You’re very welcome.
Bethany: I hope this wasn’t too torturous,
Gerrie: No, it wasn’t. It got out things.
Bethany: Don't you think that like, love languages are interesting and how people
Gerrie: Ya Ya. So am I getting paid for this?
Bethany: Hell no. You’ll get paid in hugs and kisses