The Moth - The Moth Radio Hour: Not So Golden Rules

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

In this hour, stories of structures and strictures—and the struggles against them. School assignments, teenage rebellion, and the proper time to eat. This episode is hosted by Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media, producer of this show.Storytellers:Stephen Michael Carr quietly rebels against his school's reading program.Gabriela Quiroz doesn't appreciate her school's unofficial year end tradition.Caroline Connolly attempts to find a way around her lawyer parents' rules.Saad Sarwana and his fellow "nerds" try to pull off a senior prank.Beth Ann Fennelly grows up in a heavily structured household.Podcast: 868

From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jay Allison, producer of this radio show, and this is an hour about rules. When my oldest daughter was small, we were sitting at the dining table and I felt a sharp pain in my leg. I said, yow. My daughter asked what happened

and her mother said, oh, I kicked daddy under the table without meaning to. My daughter's face lit up and she asked, can I kick daddy under the table without meaning to? There are lots of ways to bend the rules. In this hour our storytellers will be questioning the guidelines, official and self-imposed,

the rules worth following, and the ones made to be broken. We'll start in childhood, work our way through the hardide-by rules of teenagehood, and end with the rules we full-grown adults follow. Our first teller, Stephen Michael Carr, found a creative way to free himself from his school's restrictive reading system. He told this at an open mic story slam in Louisville, where the moth is promotionally supported by Louisville Public Media. Here's Stephen, live at the moth is promotionally supported by Louisville Public Media. Here's Stephen, live at the moth.

So my mama read to me in the womb, by the time I was in kindergarten I could read whole words and whenever I was seven years old the movie Matilda came out. Do y'all remember Matilda? Yes. So, you know, it's about this little girl who did not fit in with her family. Honestly, I could relate. And she read so many books that she developed the power to move things with her mind. And so I spent a lot of time as a seven-year-old

staring really hard at things, trying to move things with my mind. Never accomplished that, but I did manage to pop a blood vessel in my eye from bearing down so hard, right? Now, it's a good thing that my parents instilled this love for reading in me because when I was eight years old, my parents got a divorce and I moved with my mom to Shepherdsville where I did not have any friends at all except for one person, and that was my favorite childhood author Stephen King. Now you may be thinking to yourself Stephen King is really not appropriate reading for an eight

year old and you were absolutely right but my parents were so enamored with the fact that I love to read that they basically just gave me any book that I wanted. I remember very specifically the first Stephen King novel that I ever purchased for a dollar was at the Shepherdsville flea market and it was like one of those holographic copies of The Shining paperback, right? Loved that for me. So that was the year that I went into the fourth grade at Robie Elementary and that was the year that I was also introduced to my worst enemy, the accelerated reader program. Do you all know about the accelerated reader program? Let me break it down for you. Each book in the library is assigned a reading level and points.

You read the books, you're only allowed to read the books in your reading level. You take a computer quiz on the book, not on the internet. This is pre-internet. And if you got a 90% or above, you pass the test, and you got the points. You had to get so many points per semester. And I hated it, because all the books that I, a dark, scary little child, wanted to read were not in that library, okay? Where was

all the pig's blood? Where were the demon-possessed cars? Who gave a shit about Charlotte's Web after you've read Misery? Am I right? Right? Because see, even at eight years old, I knew books, like the real world were not like those books that they were having me read about rainbows and butterflies and talking pigs and shit, right? The real world was dark and it was scary and adults were complicated and they could not be trusted, you see, because a lot of the adult people in my family were addicted to drugs. My grandmother would often have

schizophrenic episodes and at the time I didn't know what that meant. I just knew that they scared me. My mom ended up having an affair with the man who is now my stepfather and that was the reason why we lived in Shepherdsville in the first place. So I knew that the world was not like those books, right? I wanted to read books that were like the world that I lived in. And so I came up with an idea that I was going to beat the system. I was going to destroy the accelerated reader program and it took me three years. We're talking long game people, chess, not checkers. And here's how I did it. I started by taking the test and getting put in my reading level. I would then

make sure that all the books that I read were at the very top of that reading level that I was allowed to read at. And then I would take those tests and of course I would pass them. And then that would bump me up to the next reading level, right? And by the time I entered the seventh grade, 12 going on 13, about to be a teenager, I got to the Bullitt-Lick middle school library and there was only one book standing between me and freedom, between me being able to read whatever the hell I wanted. It was a 13.1 reading level book and it was Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Y'all that book was so damn hard to read as a 12 year old. Let me tell you, I spent days, weeks, probably a whole month going over

this book trying... I bought the Cliff Notes from Winn-Dixie. Winn-Dixie was a thing. And I read the book, I followed along in the Cliff Notes, y'all, because I was going to beat this. Because there was nowhere else to go after Gulliver's Travels. So I studied and I studied and I studied and I finally finished the book. It took me a month, it was probably the longest I'd ever spent reading a book up until that point. And I sat down in front of the computer to take the test. I was sweating bullets, y'all. I was thinking, what if I fail?

What if I get trapped in the hellscape that is the accelerated reading program? What if I never escape? What if I disappoint my childhood hero, Stephen King? And I finally clicked that last question, and I hit send, and I waited for the computer to calculate. And eventually, it told me that I got a 93%. Oh, yes.

So I beat the system. And for the rest of my seventh grade year, and all of my eighth grade year, I got to read whatever the hell I wanted, because there was nowhere else for me to go. While I looked over at all these kids reading their Charlotte's Web and Sherlock Holmes and whatever, I got to read Stephen King. Consequently, that was the same year that I bought from my friend Kevin, who sat behind

me in language arts, his new pristine hardback copy of Stephen King's new novel from Abuick 8, and it was the first book that I ever read as a free man. And to this day, it is still my favorite Stephen King novel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Stephen Michael Carr is the founder of SMC Story Coaching where he helps nonprofit professionals in Louisville, Kentucky learn how to tell stories He also produces local storytelling shows such as come out Lou and tales from the jukebox At night he works as the co-owner of the old Louisville Brewery When you win a mall story slam as Stephen did that, you're invited to participate in a Grand Slam, in which 10 Story Slam winners battle it out with new stories for the title of Moth Grand Slam Champion.

Gabriela Quiroz told our next story at a Grand Slam in Los Angeles, where we partner with public radio station KCRW. Live from the Regent, here's Gabriella. So while for most people in this country, for most children, the last day of school is the most exciting day. For me and all the girls in my school in this remote town in the Peruvian land. This was the day we feared the most. Our culture had taught us that men were superior to women, implicitly and explicitly, and we would never dare to challenge men or even fight back if we were put in a situation where we were put down or abused.

Not even at school. There was this boy, he was a bully. And he was the oldest and the tallest in our class because he kept repeating rates. And he would harass the women. Actually, he had this little mirror that he always had with him and he would use it to look under our skirts. And he gave me a nickname, he called me skeleton. Because I was the youngest, so I was an easy mark.

But I also was the skinniest in my class, even though my mom fed me tons of potatoes. I was the last of nine siblings and my mom told me that education was going to be my only way out of poverty. So even though I had to face the bullying and walk into school for six miles every day, I was eager to learn and to go to class, except on the last day of school, when traditionally all the boys would grab the girls and take them to the water canals around the plaza and throw them into the freezing water. And this was just for fun as an end of the year celebration. And while all the boys had fun, we were terrified.

They would literally drag us by force. Our knees were scratched. Our skirts were rolled up. And they would throw us into the stream of freezing water from the mountains. And we were supposed to accept it, just like everyone else in the town had accepted it. The major would watch from the balcony in the main plaza, the police from the station in the corner. It was free fun for all and I hated it. And this is how it had been for years. The boys would walk away laughing while we the girls had to walk back home in the cold, drenched from head to toe.

But this year I've already talked to some of the girls in my class. We're trying to come up with a plan to hide. But it's almost impossible to hide because there's only one main road to go back home. But the clock's ticking and this bully boy is staring at me. He's looking at me like when Gollum looks at the ring. So I am terrified and I make up an excuse. I get out of the class and I run to the back of the school and I climb the back wall. And as soon as I land the bell rings.

And I can hear the commotion on the other side of the wall, like the girls are screaming, the boys are laughing, the nightmare has started. So I see a corn field and I run to it and I hide. And I'm waiting there, I have so much anxiety and I see this girl running by and I'm about to call her, she's a girl from my class, and I see two guys coming and grabbing her and just dragging her away. And I waited there and hiding for an hour, then two hours, and every minute I feel like I'm having a mini panic attack.

And time goes by and it starts to get dark, and now my mom has always told me never go into the corn crops at night because that's when bad things happen to women. So I decide I need to get out, I need to go back home. So I start going out to the road and I find two of my friends that are also hiding in the crops. So we are so relieved that the boys are gone because we can't hear any noise anymore, no crying, no screaming, nothing. So we decide, okay, now we're going to go out and go home. So we're walking for about three blocks. And a hand holds my shoulder.

And I turn around and it's the bully boy. He's been waiting for us. And my two friends run and they're screaming and they run away. But I've had it. Like, I literally had it. This was enough. So somehow I grabbed the boy by the arm and twisted and he trips and falls on the ground and I sit on him.

And then my, my friends, like he lets Sarah cry of course, and my friends turn around and they're like in disbelief. And we somehow drag this boy to the canal and there's people watching and they actually can't believe this either. And so we are afraid of what we're doing, but once we get to the canal, our hands are firm as we swing back and throw the boy in the canal. And then we look at each other, we look at each other and these girls that I'm seeing are not the same girls that I had seen moments ago before we were feeling defeated and scared.

And now what I see in their eyes is an air of victory, a new confidence, a fire. And the fact that us and I, the skeleton, there to be defiant, changed me. That was Gabriela Quiroz, and she won the Grand Slam that night. Gabriela is a screenwriter, director, and artist. I'm told that she grew up as the granddaughter of a witch doctor in the Peruvian Andes. She has worked for various studios like Bad Robot, Paramount, and Legendary, but most importantly, she says she has an alpaca named Oso.

she has an alpaca named Oso. In a moment, senior prom and senior pranks when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. When you move with Big Steel Box, you get a convenient and flexible solution that puts you in control. You can take your time loading and unloading because the box rents by the month, which is an affordable way to reduce your stress. If your move out and move in dates don't match up, there's no need to load in and out of

a storage facility, essentially doubling your work. You load the box at your current home and we store the box at one of our secure locations until your new home is ready. Looking for a moving solution that feels better? Visit Big Steel Box. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, and in this episode, we're talking about the rules.

Bending them, negotiating them, breaking them. In other words, we're up to the teenage years. When I was a young teen, my friend and I were playing in his barn. His dad had told us reasonably, don't be stupid and don't ever play with matches in there. Well, did I mention we were teenagers? My friend had some books of matches and we thought it would be a fun idea to strike them and throw them at each other in the barn, where at one end was a head-high pile of burlap bags holding seeds.

One of my matches landed on that pile, and within a second the end of the barn was a wall of flame. It was blinding and loud and terrifying. All the small fibers in the burlap had ignited and in an instant they flared together and then all went out together. Poof. Gone. This had been a merciful flaming message from God to me.

It said, don't be stupid and don't play with matches. And I've done pretty well with that rule ever since. Our next story is from Caroline Connolly, who told this at a Boston Story Slam where we partnered with public radio station WBUR and PRX. With a classic example of high school rebellion, here's Caroline. As the daughter of two former prosecutors, I became accustomed at a very early age to losing in arguments. This was not because I was unskilled at the art of debate, but because in my house, my parents were the judge, the jury, and literally two literally two lawyers So quite frankly the system was just corrupt

And I can say this with confidence because my parents convinced me and my sisters to follow every strict rule of our house by posing Potentially traumatic consequences to us for example when I was 10 years old I left our backyard gate open and our Bichon frise cocoa escaped My mother, furious, stormed inside our house and announced to me and my sisters, Coco is dead. Just kidding, she said like an hour later. But that could happen if you don't follow our rules. Now however flawed this logic may seem, it pretty much presided over my entire life right

up until my junior prom after party in high school. When my parents' worldview was shaped by like a Law & Order SVU episode, mine was formed by romantic comedies and teen dramas. And so when I was told I cannot attend my junior prom after party because premarital sex and pregnancy were likely outcomes according to my parents, I was devastated. This was a rite of passage that I felt every teenager deserved to experience and I was determined to experience it myself and so I crafted a plan to commit high treason in my household and sneak out. Now I grew up in one of those old federal houses

here in Massachusetts with creaky floorboards and where doorknobs just like fall off at random. And so it was like a Victorian trap if you were a teenager trying to escape. But on the night of my prom I took every precaution. So I unlocked our big old front door that no one ever used and left it slightly ajar so I could get out without making any sound and I instructed my boyfriend to

wait for me a hundred yards down our street in his car with a change of clothing for me like we were two teenagers committing a grand heist. When I got home from the dance that night I was efficient I said good night to my parents I went straight up to my room and I waited for them to fall asleep. I sat on the floor for what felt like hours plucking bobby pins from an updo until all I could hear was the hum of our air conditioner in their window. Then I made my exit. I crept down three flights of stairs,

holding my breath the entire way, until I reached that front door, and I was so relieved to see it was still open. And I silently slid out, and it really wasn't until my feet hit the sidewalk that I could finally exhale because I had made it. Well I had envisioned my after-prom party would look something like a John Hughes movie where I was like beloved and super popular by the end. This was more like six sweaty

teenagers drinking natty light beer someone smuggled in wondering who was gonna make out with whom by the end of the night. It was super gross but also like kind of perfect and when I woke up wed between my two best girlfriends the next morning with my boyfriend sleeping by himself in a corner I felt super proud of this rebellious teenage act I had just committed and then I looked at my cell phone I realized I had five missed calls from my mother and it was 6 a.m. so she knew I was not home and I knew I had been caught and as I sat there envisioning all of the punishments I knew she was going to dole out I honestly kind of

wished I had been pregnant because I thought like maybe she wouldn't kill me then and I was contemplating what a summer would feel like grounded at my house when I had another thought. And that was maybe I wasn't caught yet. Maybe I could still pull this thing off. So I woke up my boyfriend and we jumped in his car and I ordered him to drive to our local Kmart, which was about to open. And I asked him to go inside and buy running sneakers, running shorts, and a t-shirt.

And he looked totally perplexed as I threw all of this on in the back seat of his car and then doused myself in water. Because my plan was to just pretend that I had been out for a 6 AM jog after prom. It is worth noting that this guy never asked me to another prom again in high school. But he dropped me off 100 yards down from our house on our street and I proceeded to run up it and I walked through the door panting as a runner would and my mother was standing

right there waiting for me and glaring at me and she said so calmly and coldly, I'll never forget it, like a serial killer, and where have you been? That still makes me sick. And I was like, I was running, obviously. And I could see by the look on her face she was not buying the story, but then I could also see she was taking in

all of the physical evidence in front of her that supported what I was saying. Because I was wearing sneakers, I was wearing shorts, and I did look exhausted from something. And so she peppered me with questions. When did you leave? Where did you go? How far did you run? What was your pace? And I somehow flawlessly answered all of them and she was stunned because she had no other recourse than to accept this ridiculous explanation. And she did.

And I totally got away with it. And I will admit, all these years later, the thought of spending an entire night out and drinking Natty Light beer is so wholly unappealing to the independent adult I've now become. But what does still excite me are those moments of independence from teen years to today and the feeling I still get when I'm bold enough and creative enough to go after them. Thanks. That was Caroline Connolly. Caroline grew up in Massachusetts and has spent the last decade reporting for news stations across the country. Her work has been featured on NBC's American Greed and Access Hollywood.

She lives in Boston with her partner and their dog. Caroline also won the slam the night she told that story. Our next story is told by the self-proclaimed nerd Saad Sarwana. But even nerds sometimes bend the rules. Just with science. At a StorySlam in Phoenix, where we're supported by public radio station KJZZ, here's Sai. My guilty conscience was making my heartbeat so loud it was almost about to jump out of my chest.

I was standing in the principal's office with my friends and it was possible we were about to get expelled. And I only had one person to blame for this, my chemistry teacher, Mr. Jabbar. It all started a few weeks earlier. Me and my nerdy friends, we were discussing how the cool kids would probably pull off a high school prank in one of the last few days of school.

Someone said, we should do one too and we immediately started brainstorming. That's when I remembered something my chemistry teacher had said way back early in the semester while reminiscing about the good old days. He was saying he used to do an experiment where he mixed iodine with ammonia to make these crystals and when you step on them they pop. It was really fun experiment, but the loud noises were too distracting. So he wasn't allowed to do it anymore. So he said we should do that.

So this was pre-internet day, so we didn't know where to you know get the materials or what ratios were involved, but we did have access to this we did have access to this one book which would help you find anything or almost anything. You might have used it when you were younger. It's called the Yellow Pages. So we looked under chemicals and we found industrial chemical wholesale. That sounded right. We gave it a call, you know. No caller ID. Do you have ammonia and iodine?

Sure, how much do you want? We hung up. So this was in, you know, it was a business to business place. It was in the industrial wholesaler. You know, a couple of kids couldn't just walk in and get chemicals from them. So we found a piece of stationery from a pharmacy and we wrote on it, one bottle of ammonia, one bottle of iodine. And since I looked innocent enough at that time, I was asked to go in.

You know, my hand was shaking. I gave it to the guy. I said, my dad asked me to pick this up. He didn't even flinch. He just handed me the things. And he's like, all right. So the next day was the penultimate day of school. We came in super early.

We got some plastic glasses and plastic spoons from the cafeteria. We mixed the two mixtures in, and we could see the crystals form as we stirred the mixture. And we poured these crystals on the asphalt blacktop. And these purple crystals were almost invisible. You know, being nerdy people, we had to try it out. So we stepped on it., so we stepped on it.

Nothing. We stepped on it again. Nothing. Finally, we heard a barely audible pop from the edge of the spill. And so we thought, we might not have used enough, so we mixed the entire batch and poured it all over this area. Now, this area connected two school buildings and is swarming with students as they go in between classes.

So in preparation for this, I looked up what happens and it's a very common science experiment. And what happens is ammonia reacts with iodine to form nitrogen triodide. And in the wet form, the crystals are completely stable. It's only when they dry up is when they become unstable. There are also warnings online not to use more than a gram of iodine.

So we poured this in the black top. We went into first period, and when we were in first period, the sun came out and the crystals began to dry. Imagine the loudest thunder you've ever heard. And then double it. And you still won't even get close to how loud it was. Because once the first period bell rang, people stepped on it and bang, bang, bang. close to how loud it was. Because once the first period bell rang,

people stepped on it and bang, bang, bang. And teenagers being teenagers were deliberately stepping on this. But what had happened was by this time, there were sections, only sections had dried up and other sections were still wet. And the wet sections were getting stuck under people's shoes.

They were then becoming carriers and moving it to other parts of the school... where inside buildings, you would hear just a deafening bang. Our prank had worked. It had worked a little too well, because everyone wanted to figure out who was responsible. It was pretty easy.

It was the people with the iodine stains on their hands. We were caught purple handed. So there we were in the principal's office and she was really angry at us but since we were good students she said you know you have to leave immediately. They called our parents. We went home. We were grounded. We couldn't talk to our friends. But she allowed us to come back for the last day of school.

So I didn't talk to my friends. I walked into the last day of school. And the first thing that happens, there's one of the hot girls. She comes up to me. As soon as I'm walking in, she's like, did you do that? I'm like, yeah, getting ready to apologize.

And she's like, that was so cool. I'm like, yeah, getting ready to apologize. And she's like, that was so cool. I am not kidding. I have won academic awards in school, but I was never congratulated by my peers. But after this, I had strangers come up to me and high five me. I don't even know if the cool kids pulled off a high school prank that year, because for those final days, we were the cool kids.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is if you have an opportunity to do something with no consequences, do it. You might just become a legend. Thank you. Saad Sarwana is known as the stand-up physicist. He's a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian, physicist, and a producer for the science storytelling show, Story Collider. You can catch him live on stage or explaining science, while cracking jokes on the Science Channel show, Outrageous Acts of Science. And maybe you guessed it, Saad won his slam too. Sometimes it pays to push the boundaries.

If you have your own story that you think could be a winner, or you want to hear more stories like these, you can go to our website, themoth.org and find open mic story slams near you. Just so you know, we don't only air winning stories. There are lots of stories that we listen to that we love that didn't win at a slam. So throw your name in the hat and win or lose, you might end up on the radio. We'll stop till we're legends. Here we go, here we go. It's my turn to make history. Here we go, here we go. In a moment, our final story in this hour,

revisiting family rules when we're all grown up. That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues. I fought it with the fever for the fame was all I ever wanted, was all I ever wanted Got me singing like bang bang, bang bang, bang bang This fire's a weapon bang bang, bang bang, bang bang Won't stop till we're legends The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by the public radio exchange prx.org.

You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. As kids we follow our parents' rules without question, but as adults we start to understand them in a different way. My mother is in her mid-90s and going strong. She's very proper. Things are done the way they've always been done. My mother is in her mid-90s and going strong. She's very proper. Things are done the way they've always been done.

As a kid I felt shackled by those sorts of rules and by propriety in general, but now I see them in my mother's life as highly functional. When order is failing, all around us, self-imposed disciplines can square us up. As we all get older, we may need those rules to stay centered and keep us from collapsing, like handrails in the bathtub. Our final story comes from Bethann Fennelly, who shared it at a main stage we produced in New York City. Live from the NYU Skirball Center, here's Beth Ann.

When I was growing up, if I asked my mother if she was hungry for lunch, the first thing she would do would be look at her watch and she'd look at her watch because there was a proper time to eat and that time was noon so if it was 1159 no she was not hungry not for another 60 seconds. I offer this as an example of the very structured, very rule-bound, very, very Catholic family I grew up in, in a Victorian house just north of Chicago, Victorian outside and inside as well. My father worked all day, my mother was a stay-at-home mom, ruled with an iron fist in her little Talbot sweater sets and fluffy helmet of hair set at the salon once a week.

And my sister and I were disciplined to be ladylike and pious and chaste and quiet. Frequent admonitions in my house included things like, children should be seen and not heard, and don't speak unless spoken to first. Even now, when I look back on my childhood, when I look back on my childhood memories, I'm always a passive observer. I'm never an active participant. When I look back on those stories,

I never hear the sound of my voice. There weren't a lot of models of self-actualized women fighting for change in my growing up in my mom's friend group of stay-at-home moms or the nuns at Catholic school. I remember in third grade when a priest came into our class and announced a meeting for prospective altar boys. And I went.

I think I wasn't partially trying to prove a point, but partially I was kind of into the whole altar boy thing. It seemed really dramatic and I liked the fashion. I liked the robes and the chains. I thought maybe it needed a belt or a little accessorizing, but I was gonna work with that. But the priest came in and saw me in the pew and he pinched my arm and walked me across the church

to the sacristy and pushed open this giant oak door to where a couple elderly women were ironing the altar boy's robes. And he said, this is where God calls you to serve. So that evening in my best penmanship, I wrote a letter tattling on him to Cardinal Joseph Bernadine and I ended, and PS, women should be priests. And years went by before I discovered that letter in my mother's scrapbook, and two things immediately struck me. One was my mother's heading in the scrapbook,

which was, our little women's liver. And the other was only then did I realize my mother never sent the letter. And even that small protest silenced. So I became determined to live another way, find another way, and two things really helped me. The first was poetry. I had always scribbled in my notebook and kept a diary, but when I got to college I had my first real classes and I got criticism and I began to try to listen to that little whisper inside me and

turn the volume up. And the second was love. Meeting my honey the first day of our graduate program for creative writing. And we live in Mississippi now and we teach there and we have a much much different way of bringing up our kids. We have a loud, messy, comfortable house and three loud, messy, confident children. Far from being told they should be seen and not heard. I think if we were really quiet right now, we might be able to hear them. And this was very perplexing and upsetting to my mother when she'd come down to Mississippi from Illinois, which was often.

She criticized our parenting style, which she found too permissive. And she criticized our lack of structure, which she found chaotic. Nevertheless, my husband and I thought maybe my mom and she criticized our lack of structure, which she found chaotic. Nevertheless, my husband and I thought maybe my mom didn't need to be living alone anymore because by this point my father had died and my sister had died and we asked her if she wanted to live with us.

And she immediately said no and I was immediately filled with relief. But we began to see signs of mental deterioration. And we said, oh, mom's getting dotty. And I think we chose that term intentionally because it made it sound less dire. Because in truth, it was becoming dire. and we had the sense that maybe my mom shouldn't be driving anymore. And the big constant in my mom's life is that she hated change, and she didn't want to change. And if she had to stop driving,

her life would completely change. One time, my kids and I were visiting her in Illinois, and she wanted to take us to the zoo and we got in her car on the highway and she just swerved into the other lane. And that car was beeping at her and she swerved back into the other lane and that car's beeping and giving her the finger. And I'm jamming for the emergency brake pedal and I look in the rearview mirror, my kids are clasping each other's hands in fear. And I told my mom to pull the car over and she did and we switched seats and I said the

sentence that I had practiced saying. I said, mom, I don't think you should be driving anymore. And she said, and I said, and I think you need to be tested for Alzheimer's. And she said, I have been tested, I don't have Alzheimer's. And I said, can I talk to your doctor? And she said, he's busy. That was January of 2020. In March, we started hearing this strange new term, coronavirus, killing the elderly people, which meant that mom couldn't visit us and we couldn't visit her. And her activities began closing down. One time she called me, she was upset that no one showed up for bridge. And I said,

mom, they didn't show up because it's not safe. You shouldn't be cruising for Bridge partners. You shouldn't be sitting at a small table passing cards. And she sniffed, unconvinced, didn't like that, but that Bridge canceled and Ladies' Lunch Bunch canceled. And St. Mary's Book Club canceled. And then St. Mary's, the mass went online and she couldn't figure out Zoom,

no matter how much time I spent with on the telephone, she couldn't figure out Zoom. And she was alone and lonely and depressed. And all of these canceled activities were more than just a dreaded change in routine. They were doors closing to the world beyond herself and to the neurons that would have been firing when she was counting bridge tricks or discussing Oprah's book pick. And I began to see the lights in her beautiful brain going out, one by one.

the lights in her beautiful brain going out one by one. One time I called her and I stopped her just in the nick of time from sending her money to an internet scammer. Another time I called her and the phone rang and it just rang and rang, but where could she possibly be? She couldn't leave her house. Well, she'd gotten locked out and I said, Mom, what did you do? And she said, well, I just walked up and down the street knocking on doors till someone called me a locksmith.

It was eight degrees in Chicago that day. So one day, well, every day, my husband and I kept having that same conversation, what should we do about my mom? And the phone rang, and it was my mother of the stiff upper lip, my mother who had never admitted to having a problem of any kind. And she said, Beth Ann, you need to come home. I think I'm falling apart.

So the next day, I flew home to O'Hare and I got a car service to my mom's house and when she opened the door somehow I was still surprised to find her so changed and I took her in my arms and she was small, she felt small. And her little Talbot sweater set was stained and the house was messy. And she said, what time is it, Bethann? And I said, oh, mom, it's just past six. And she said, past six? Well then, it's past time for dinner. And she led me into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door and this wave of odor

hit me and I could see all these little rotting nuggets of food. And I said, Mom, it's okay. You don't have to feed me. I'll borrow your car. I'll go get us some food. You just stay here. Just rest. And she was following me out to the garage. She was kind of protesting, but I just kept going and I pushed open the door to the garage. And that's when I found that her car was smashed up like a tin can. She had gotten in an accident and had hidden it from me. And I turned to her over my shoulder and she was cringing, you know, like the teenager I had been getting busted for coming in past curfew.

And I had heard of that moment when the parent becomes the child. And right then it seemed like the transference was complete. And her life did change very quickly after that. I got a hold of her doctor, who said he'd been trying to get a hold of me, but she had been telling him I was too busy. and he agreed she shouldn't live alone. So that next day I had her car towed away for parts and a for sale sign stabbed in the lawn of that big Victorian house. And my husband and I moved her to an assisted living, not a mile from our house. And what I think about now, what I wonder at, is why I didn't step in sooner. Why I had to let my mom get in an accident before I took the keys away. I think it can be so hard to shoulder aside the rules we

inhabit in our childhood. And that voice I was so proud of developing, that precious voice I had nurtured, was nowhere to be found when I needed it. And I'd always faulted my mom for her inability to change, but really at that moment it was me who was unable to change because I didn't take action and protect her and I failed her. Well, she likes the assisted living. It's a very structured schedule. She likes when I visit her and read her poetry and hold her hand.

And she likes to come to our house for lunch and dinner. She seems to tolerate the noise and chaos better than she used to. Maybe because her vision and hearing aren't as good as they used to be. Or maybe she's changed a bit. And maybe I have too. Because I've noticed when she comes, I always try to serve her lunch at noon or dinner at six because it makes her happy and Because that is the proper time to eat after all

Thank you Bethann Fennelly the poet laureate of Mississippi from Bethann Fennelly, the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021, is the author of six books, most recently Heating and Cooling, 52 Micro Memoirs. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi with her husband and three children. We asked Bethann if we could read a couple of her poems about her own experiences with parenthood. This is Night Game. The parents of my generation are dying. The last line of defense. We're floodlit now pals. We're casting shadows. The shapes of our bodies distinct on this earth.

Who will catch the pass? The ball that's sewn from skin? And this is one about Bethann's relationship with her own daughter. It's called Say Cheese. I've documented everything. each tooth, your first haircut, your first bath in the sink. Later, when you claim neglect, I've proof of my side for your husband or your shrink. Those poems were from Beth Ann's book, Tender Hooks. To learn more about her poetry and to see photos of Beth Ann and her mother, 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 by me, Jay Allison, your host, and Meg Bowles. Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The stories were directed by Katherine Burns, with additional Grand Slam coaching by Chloe Salmon. The rest of the MOLTS leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Giness, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Cluchet, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Casa. Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.

Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Leo Kotke, Accordion, Magic in Threes, Avino, The Score, and Ariel Besson and Nelson Varra. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching as your own story, and everything else go to our website, themoth.org.