I Need Blue

Unveiling the Unspoken: When to Share Childhood Secrets

• Jennifer Lee/Darleen • Season 3 • Episode 22

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Meet Darleen, a woman with a moving and inspiring story. Her early years were tinged with the confusion of secrets that didn't quite sit right.  At the tender age of 10, she was entrusted with a dark secret - a secret that forced her to grapple with adult issues way before her time. 

Eventually, she found the courage to break her silence. 

Today, Darleen educates and advocates for seniors on her Seniorlivingguide.com podcast, serving as a resource and a beacon of hope and guidance for older people.

Check out the SeniorLivingGuide.com podcast on Apple podcasts: 
https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/seniorlivingguide-com-podcast/id1529797009

Connect with Jen:
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Website: https://ineedblue.net/


The background music is written, performed, and produced exclusively by Char Good.
https://chargood.com/home


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Jen:

Remember you are stronger than you think. Don't believe me, we're about to prove it. Welcome back. This is Jen Lee, creator and host of I Need Blue podcast. True Crime to True Life.

Jen:

Please note I Need Blue does contain sensitive topics which could be triggering. Please seek help if needed and remember you always come first. I Need Blue episodes can be found on Apple Podcasts, spotify and many listening platforms, including my website, wwwineedbluenet. From there you will find valuable resources, safety tips, my newly released book why I Survived by Jennifer Lee. I would like to thank Shar Good, the talented violinist who composed and performed this opening music. You can find information about Shar Good on my website. As always, thank you for listening. Let's begin today's episode.

Jen:

This kid's telling secrets was often an exciting and bonding experience among friends. I remember leaning into my friend's ear, shh coming out of my mouth and whispering words of such importance it could not be shared elsewhere. Maybe it was about a boy crush I had, or a dream. Sharing secrets helps create a sense of trust and inclusion. If I became the recipient of someone's secret sharing, I felt accepted as they picked me to share it with, it felt good. My guest, darlene, understands this feeling.

Jen:

Darlene and Diane were early childhood friends. They were around 10, 11 years old when Diane came to Darlene anxious to share a secret. She told Darlene she was having a secret relationship with her uncle. She made Darlene promise not to tell anyone. At such a young age, neither girl understood that this type of relationship was not okay. Darlene eventually shares this secret and we discuss what happened after and how it still haunts Darlene. I have the privilege of calling Darlene my friend. Today she hosts the senior living guide dot com podcast. She shares her love for seniors by being a valuable resource for our aging community. My friend, thank you for joining me on the I Need Blue podcast.

Darleen:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to speak with you today and hopefully my story and kind of what is something at my age which we won't discuss but I'm not a spring check-in can be a value to someone else in their life.

Jen:

And I think that it will be. Your story made me kind of go back to my childhood and never really thinking about your situation. Now, as adults, we understand that that's not okay. So, if it's okay, I would love to start this conversation with you sharing that story. Give us a little bit of background, yeah.

Darleen:

This was back in like probably early 80s, late 70s, so back in that timeframe you lived in a neighborhood. Your neighbors were all neighbors, people didn't move around a lot, everybody knew everybody, you know you. You barbecued together, you hung out, you know all the moms talked and you had sleepovers at everyone's houses and During the summer, you know, you'd say, hey, can I go swimming over at so-and-so's house? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you go out the door and you maybe had Ravioli down the street during the summer and and you came on when the you know Streetlights came on and nobody worried about anything. To be honest with you, people didn't talk about a lot of stuff back then as well, like things that we talk about now very openly, especially openly with children or young teens.

Darleen:

And you know this girl that I had known and we had done sleepovers and she spent the night at my house and I spent the night at her house and we had hung out and we were great friends. Like you know, 10, 11 years old, 9, 10, 11 she had shared with me that she was having some sort of sexual relationship with her uncle, which was her dad's brother, and she almost made it sound like it was cool and I was like, oh okay, and maybe I'm supposed to think that it's cool that it's. You know, this is a cool thing. She's a mature girl and oh okay, you know, okay, so, but I can't tell anyone. Well, I was the type of person that if you tell me not to say something, I'm, you know, I'm gonna respect that, I'm not gonna say anything. And you know, this went on for a while and it's not like something she just chatted with me about all the time. It was just something that would come up on occasion and I acknowledged it and I didn't ask for details or anything like that.

Darleen:

And I was, you know, somewhat shocked by it per se, I think, because I grew up in a very Sheltered home. I mean, my both my parents were very religious and we weren't allowed to watch a lot of television that was considered controversial or we didn't stay up late, you know, we went to church on Sundays, wednesday nights, that's that type of stuff, and my parents were very Sheltering of me. I wasn't exposed to a lot of things that other kids may have been exposed to, but I didn't really want to make a big deal out of it because I wanted to fit in with her as well I'm, and I know her for so long, so it wasn't something I was completely uncomfortable with. But as we got a little bit older and I was probably like 12 or 13 I'm just trying to, you know, go back in my memory bank because this was late 70s, early 80s. So, you know, your memory starts to fade a little bit as you get older.

Darleen:

I remember just Sitting like in the living room with my mom and then another friend that was friends with this girl's mother and them talking about like some issues that maybe that they were having with my friend Diane. I remember Listening to this and this is when we were coming to kind of come into the age of opera. I mean, she really did open up a lot of conversations we have in this country and moved it forward, so she should definitely be accredited for that. I remember telling my mom hey, this is what's going on. And my mom was like, oh my gosh, darling, you really should have told me about that sooner. She wasn't upset or anything. She just got whatever details, which was not a lot she didn't share, like this is what he's doing. I don't recall, I don't know if it was. I think it was more touching. But I really honestly I don't recall all the details. I've kind of blocked that, I think. But she and the other mom Went and told Diane's mother and they had that conversation. How that conversation went I don't know because I never had any feedback that came back on me. I never had my friends say why did you tell? That never happened. Or the mom said you know what did you do? None of that ever occurred, so none of it ever came back On me. So I think my mom and her friend probably handled it Very well.

Darleen:

I don't know how it unfolded in that household. I do know that right after all of this that household started to fall apart. They lived in that neighborhood for years, they owned their home but then a divorce occurred, the home sold and Everybody in the neighborhood kind of knew what had occurred that she was abused by her uncle and the father was kicked out, all these different things. So it started a chain reaction and I remember feeling bad about that. I never told anyone. I never told any of our other friends because we had a little girlfriend group, but I didn't say anything. I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed for her and it was still a secret and I had already had told my mother, I think I ended up sharing that high school or post high school with some of those very, very close friends that I'm still friends with today. It always weighed heavily on me that I I kept it for so long, I didn't see anything for so long and I should have said something.

Darleen:

And then the after effect was so severe and I remember Diane's mom stayed in touch with some of the other mothers in the neighborhood and they were still friends after she got divorced and moved and you know the gossip that continues to happen.

Darleen:

You know they said that you know Diane Was stripping before she was even of legal age. So I started hearing that and that made me feel terrible and it broke my heart and I just All these things just stayed in the back of my mind that you know I was no longer in contact with Diane anymore because once they moved and I was disconnected, at that point we'd grown separate ways. It wasn't intentional, but she was living a lifestyle that I was not interested in. It was a lifestyle that I didn't do, and she moved and back then you didn't have cell phones, you didn't have social media, so it's super easy to grow apart, and then she was having so much turmoil in her life and I probably, to be honest with you, probably had a lot of guilt, and With that guilt I didn't want to associate, because I knew what I had kind of done, or and maybe she didn't want to talk to me too, who knows, so you were carrying a lot of blame.

Darleen:

Oh, 100%. My whole adult life have thought about her. I've asked about her with other people that maybe kind of were connected, that maybe knew her from the neighborhood kids that grew up in that neighborhood, just in passing, and they said, oh, she's had some kids with different fathers and I don't think she ever got married. I could be completely wrong on that. So her life she was never able to regroup. It's always stayed in the back of my mind. You know, I hope she's okay. I don't know what's going to happen with her, All these different things.

Darleen:

And during COVID I was online looking at the local news channel and just like a blurb it wasn't a big news story, it wasn't a headline or anything like that A local woman and it had her name was found in a retention pond. They said homicide and it was her and my heart sank. That's the end of her story. That was her story, her whole story. It didn't have to be that way. It didn't have to be that way. And you know, I looked up her obituary. It named her mom, her sister and, I think, several children and it just broke my heart. It didn't have to be that way. And it all started. You know, your life can go anyway. So it may have ended up going in that direction, but it all started with a sexual abuse of someone who should have protected her. How stupid is that?

Jen:

How ridiculous is that it's sad and it happens too often. Let me ask you this, because I too, I lived a sheltered life and I don't know if at age 10 or 11, I really understood what sex was. You know to understand if it was right or if it was wrong.

Darleen:

Yeah, I don't, I don't really recall I think I knew what it was, basically my mom. I remember her sitting down and having to talk with me and I remember, oh my gosh, please don't have this talk with me, please don't have this talk with me, and I was probably 10, but it was, you know, the biological talk, the birds and the bees talk, type of thing. You know, I would never want to have grown up any differently. I think we, to be very frank with you, I think we are over sexualizing our kids now. I think it's so sad that these kids are growing up so fast. They have such a small window of time to be little and to play with Barbies and to play with dolls and to be little children in the grand scheme of life. We live 75, 80 years old. Sometimes we really have five, 10 years out of that whole timeframe to be little kids and I think as adults we are really out of selfishness trying to make them little grownups and I don't understand it. I really just don't. But I don't think my mom was like overprotective where she didn't want me to understand what it was, but I think just that timeframe we I don't know that sexual abuse, I don't know, abuse was as prominent as it is now, and sometimes I think it's just because parents like my mom was home a lot more, and a lot of these moms, they were home a lot more, not that some of them didn't work, but we just didn't have the social activities.

Darleen:

We ate dinner at home every night. There was no going out to eat. If we went out to eat, it was a deal, I mean, it was something you bragged about to all your friends. So it was not, you know, but we had dinner, we had dinner at the table every single night and we talked about our days and we had conversations, you know, and we had the stranger danger conversation. But we also felt safer in our neighborhoods. And not that things didn't happen, because I do remember, even growing back then, if a child was kidnapped and I mean I grew up in Orlando, so I mean I didn't grow up in some little teeny, tiny town but if a child was kidnapped it was like huge news, huge. And now we've got kids disappearing every single day and they don't even make the news hardly anymore because it's just such a common occurrence.

Jen:

Absolutely. They're being trafficked, everything, and you're so right, even though, compared to the 70s and 80s, those things really weren't talked about, and a lot of times I grew up where kind of like whatever happened in your house stayed in your house. Yeah, now times have changed. But you're so right. When it comes to these crimes against our children, they're innocent and, like you said, they only have so many years where they can actually be a child. I think I played with Barbies until I was 12. At that point, I was doing their hair. You know, I was like I want to braid the hair and cut the hair.

Darleen:

Yeah. And all of those fun things.

Darleen:

We are at, especially now. I mean, even back then, some of these conversations should have been a little bit more prominent. If your friends tell you to keep a secret and it doesn't feel comfortable, you need to tell someone, and that can be the whole conversation. If it doesn't feel comfortable, if it feels wrong, you need to tell someone. I think that would have been even for me, a trigger for me to probably have said something earlier rather than later. In my mind. I feel like it was years, just looking back, because I'm sure I was younger before I finally said something, because I believe it was for years that I knew about this and she had said things to me just in passing and, like I said she did. It wasn't something that she went into detail about or anything like that, but she really did make it sound like it was consensual and that it was cool and that she I don't want to say was proud of it. But she either that or she was reaching out to me and I think about that as well. That is another thing that has, you know, rolled over in my mind, where it can be haunting sometimes. Was she looking to me for me to say you shouldn't be doing that or that's wrong, or let me help you.

Darleen:

She did not come from a conservative home. She did come from a more lenient household where I do know that you know 10, 11, 12 years old, that they did have rated our movies and I do know that that was an issue with my mother, that she let her mother know I'm to that I cannot watch those types of things. Even when we were going into 12, 13 years old years old, she would like read a Harlequin book, which back then those were who, and my mom would be like we don't read those types of books. Her mom read the romance books and so she read them and I remember my mom going we're not, we're not reading those, so no can do.

Jen:

So for you, the tough thing is you live with a lot of questions.

Darleen:

I live with questions and you know I talked to my mom a lot through the years, I mean even up until my mom passed away a few years ago. I mean up until probably six months before she died. It's come up my whole life, my whole life. I talked to my mom and just pretty much just to my mom about it and she's always would tell me there's nothing for you to feel bad about, there's nothing for you to feel guilty about. You did the right thing, you were young. So she's always reinforced for me not to feel bad.

Darleen:

But that doesn't change the fact that I still have that heavy on my heart. And, all honesty, if she'd gone a different way, a different path, and she was happy in her general life and was successful and I knew all of these things, some of that may be relieved. But the fact that it didn't go that direction and then to even have that finality of what did happen to her a few years ago, it was shocking to me to see that it literally, you know you have that moment where you read something and it's just like you're like having an outer body experience. It was kind of like that just to read that, and then it was so generic it was like a couple of sentences and a generic new story, and then there was no follow up on who murdered her, who knows?

Jen:

How do you find forgiveness for yourself? Is that kind of a journey you're trying to explore, or are you just? It's here, it sits in me and that's what it is.

Darleen:

I think just working through things with my mom over the years I have the forgiveness, so I'm okay with that, but it still sits on me because I did love her as a friend. I mean that won't change. And what happened to her is heartbreaking to me. And this is the thing in life as you get older and I think that young people need to really pay attention to this is you can't go back in a time machine and change things. So making good decisions when you have the ability to make them is really important. And then also really listening to people that you're with and people that are important to you and spending time with people that are important to you and given the opportunity to change a life.

Darleen:

I think we get wrapped up in so much of what we're doing in our own lives that we don't take the time out to do some of those things. I think we need to just stop smell the roses. I mean, I got married very young. I was a military spouse, I had kids. I just got very wrapped up in my own life and while I had her like in the back of my mind this whole time, did I reach out to her. No, those things I do have guilt about, because those things I could have done something about because I was mature enough and I knew better. But I didn't. And I was really more afraid of how she would respond to me if I tried looking her up and reaching out to her. And then do I really wanna open up this bag of worms for myself? So I do live a little bit for sure with that years ago and I know this is something that's not uncommonly said at funerals, but it was actually the first time I had heard it.

Darleen:

You know, when you look at a tombstone, you have the name you have beloved, whatever, but then you have the date, the year of the birth, the year of the death, and then there's the dash, and what's really important is not the year of the birth or the year of the death, it's that dash. What does that dash stand for? Does it matter how nice of a house you had? Does it matter what car you drove? Does it matter what career you had? None of that matters. Nobody standing at your funeral is going. You know what Mr Jones had the nicest house, do you know? Mr Jones drove a BMW, the newest one. Nobody is talking about that, nobody. What are they gonna?

Jen:

say about you? What are they gonna say about that dash? Wow, I will never look at a tombstone the same way again, or an obituary or anything where they put the birth to the death and that dash is in the middle the dash. What a great visual to really make you stop and think about your life and what you want to leave behind in that dash, you know. Thank you for sharing that. I have another question for you. You're a mom and growing up. What was your relationship like with your kids and the conversations that you had?

Darleen:

So I like to think I was a good mom and I hope my kids would back me up on that. I tried to do a balance because I was more sheltered and overprotected. I didn't want that so much with my kids, so I tried to have a balance, but they were also. I think my daughter at the time thought she was overprotected. She surely accused me of that, especially in her teenage years, because I just had this complete and total fear, and I still do. I mean, she is grown, adult, married woman living in Atlanta, and I still have a fear for her safety. If I see something on the news about something that's happened in Atlanta, I am making sure she's okay. And even my son my son is not married, he lives single lives in Detroit, michigan, and if he doesn't text me back and I don't hear from him, I have the worst case scenarios going through my mind and I start freaking out, panicking and he's like mom, god bless, I was at the gym.

Darleen:

So you know I still have all of these different things in my head because I'm still protective of them, because they are the reason for my being. I mean they are my life as far as what gives me happiness and joy and everything inside of me. Their safety was always my number one concern and sometimes that impeded on what they felt was their freedom. You know, I was kind of a tough love mom. Too bad, too sad. If you don't like it, I don't really care. I didn't ask for your permission, but I also wanted to give them a lot of freedom as well. But you know, and I also wanted my house to be the destination house, so I kind of geared it towards that. I also really still, to this day, please talk to me.

Jen:

I mean, I wanted to have open conversations with my kids, you know, and earlier you talked about spending time with special people and with family, and we had lunch yesterday, you know, with some of our friends and it was very nice and what came up is the importance of our seniors. We're all going to be a senior one day. Seniors have some of the best stories you know when you think about all of the things that they have seen in their life. There's so much we can learn from them. And because of your love of seniors, you decided to start the senior living guidecom podcast. I listened to your podcast. I love your podcast. It is not just for seniors. We talked about that. The information is great and, while it might not be relevant to me at 47, like, the day will come that it will be, but also my parents are at that age, so I need to educate myself so that if my parents need help, I can be there Like I understand some of the things that they may be going through.

Darleen:

Yeah, so we did come up with the senior living guidecom podcast during COVID. It was created to be a resource for seniors and caregivers for a variety of different topics, so we did do some research. Seniors really enjoy listening to podcasts. It's something that they can do in the car. It's something that they can do if they have any visual impairment, which is not uncommon, and even if they have some hearing impairment, you can use, you know, headphones or volume control, different things like that, so it can be very easily listened to. We wanted to do something that was light, where it's not so clinical that anyone's talking over their head, but it's a resource, and we really work to provide resources within each podcast that they can take after the podcast and connect with someone outside for whatever topic or whatever issues that they may be having. So, yeah, absolutely, and it doesn't even have to be an issue.

Darleen:

Some of our podcasts are just about how to find joy in your everyday living and just like tips on that. Or, you know, we've had someone on there. Actually, we had Ron Colberson who was on one of your podcasts. You really can find joy, I mean, as you age. The unfortunate side of aging is you get your aches, you get your pains. You know you have to eat healthier than you've ever eaten. And then they want you to exercise, and then all these different things, and you're going oh, this can be just such a bummer, but you still have to laugh during it. So we, you know having that conversation with Ron as well.

Jen:

So absolutely love that conversation and what I will say in regards to exercise. If you have an episode on Zumba, it was great. Yes.

Darleen:

Yes, at Zumba Gold it's, and you can do it virtually from anywhere in the country and it's live. So I mean you interact with the instructor. That is great.

Jen:

Especially our senior population some of them that you know they may not have a lot of family or friends come so they can find community there and community is so important. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, wonderful. Thank you so much for being my guest today. No, thank you so much for having me Absolutely. And again, darlene is host of the senior living guycom podcast. Please check that out and the website is senior living guycom.

Darleen:

Senior living guycom and our podcasts can be found on the website as well and their senior resources, but it's also available anywhere you listen to podcasts such as Spotify, Apple podcasts and more.

Jen:

Absolutely, and there is in the show notes. She has all the links to the episode as well, so it's really easy to navigate. Anyway, darlene, thank you for being my friend. Thank you for all you do for our aging community and I love that you were here with me today. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. This is Jen Lee with the I Need Blue podcast. Thank you for listening. You can find all of my episodes and everything you ever needed to know about I Need Blue on my website, wwwineedbluenet. And remember you are stronger than you think, thank you.