[00:00:00] Jen: Hi, I'm Jen. And welcome back to The Now What Pod.
[00:00:03] Tesha: Hi, I'm Tesha. Thank you so much for tuning in once again. We are here today with Nova Reeves who is going to share some of her story with us. Nova is a poet and birth mother living in California, and she also works at trader Joe's and we will just, you know, we'll put a link in the show notes to where you can find some of her poetry.
[00:00:28] Jen: thank you for joining us Nova.
[00:00:31] We'd love to hear a little bit about you,
[00:00:33] Nova: so I grew up in the Seattle area and in the Seattle area in the eighties and nineties, There was a serial killer, a very who became very famous.
[00:00:47] Basically he is the most quote unquote prolific serial killer in us history that I, as far as I know his name is the green river killer and he is his actual name is Gary Ridgeway. So I start off with this to just start off with the hard stuff. When I was between 15 and 16 years old my mother disappeared and she was found an identified and her case became a cold case, which means it's unsolved. There's no leads. It remained unsolved until I was about 30.
[00:01:29] Tesha: It's like 15 years.
[00:01:31] Nova: Yeah, it was about 12, 13 years.
[00:01:34] Tesha: Okay.
[00:01:35] Nova: And she had been a stay at home mother. I was raised with her and my father, my father was a building official of the town that we lived in outside of Seattle.
[00:01:47] So our mother was our primary caregiver. And she was severely, mentally ill and untreated. And so one day, basically she. Had, some kind of life change or break down and decided to take off. And she started doing crack cocaine. And this was from having been very, very health-conscious stay at home mom.
[00:02:16] We were raised on like tofu and brown rice and carob and there was no. Refined sugar allowed in our house and we didn't have alcohol and we didn't hardly have caffeine except for tea. So she went from that to being on the streets and doing crack cocaine. And this was in the height that the crack epidemic, she started doing drugs. And then my dad joined her when I was in seventh grade in 1987. And then she disappeared in 1990 she was identified in September of 90, I believe. And then we were informed. In January of 91 she was identified by dental records because her body had decomposed because that was the ammo of the green river killer and why he remained at large, he would dump his victims in wooded areas and they were really hard to find.
[00:03:15] His first couple victims were dumped in the green river, so hence his name. And he has 49 murders to his name. He's currently in the Walla Walla state. I think it's penitentiary. I'm not sure. In Washington state and solitary until he dies.
[00:03:32] He was given a life sentence. By king county in exchange for information. And that is how our mother's case was solved in, I believe in 2003. Because once he was told he wouldn't be given the death sentence, he said, oh, you know, I do remember some more details. And our mother's name came to light in that process.
[00:03:59] Basically the way he finally was caught his DNA testing advanced, as far as I understand, I'm not at, by any means very informed on this, but the police became able to give a suspect some gauze and they could chew on it and they could analyze the saliva for DNA.
[00:04:20] Basically it was super hard having a mentally ill mother and it was super, super difficult. She was almost a in. I don't know if she, like officially could have been diagnosed with Agra, Agra phobia is that phobia, she would leave the house to go grocery shopping only with my dad and we would camp and hike.
[00:04:50] Sometimes. I do think she took us to the library once in a while or things like that, but she didn't drive and she didn't have any friends. She never had a job outside of the house. She didn't like us having friends over in the house. The reason why I classify her mental illness as severe was that she had hallucinations sometimes.
[00:05:17] I just remember them when I was very young and then she had some kind of episode and I don't know how old I was, where we had her journals. So she described it in her journals, which is why I know about it. But she felt that one day when she was baking cookies, she felt that she had opened the oven or, and lost her vision and thought that Jesus was coming to her.
[00:05:42] And so she wasn't by any means hallucinating all the time, but she had lots of delusional thoughts. She said that vanity led to Satan. So if you looked in the mirror and you had this interaction or transaction with yourself, health and body image and everything, but it was vanity, which led to sin, which was Satan.
[00:06:10] So the mirror was Satan. She thought that inhaling exhaust when you're out, walking on the street would lead to cancer. It turned out that later in my life, I saw that at gas stations, there was actually a warning that if you're inhaling fumes, that it could cause cancer
[00:06:27] that's so far
[00:06:28] Jen: fetched doesn't sound farfetched. Yeah.
[00:06:31] Tesha: I was paranoid about that when you were maybe in busier areas.
[00:06:35] Nova: Yeah. Just walking on the street , that would lead to cancer. I'm trying to think. She just had all kinds of ideas about us as children. I'm the oldest of four.
[00:06:45] And she thought one of us was, was like the devil and I just chuckled because it's not funny at all, but I'm just glad it wasn't me. And, my understanding was that that sister reminded our mother of her mother. And my mother had a very fraught relationship with her mother.
[00:07:07] And that goes into many other details and stories. But my mother was a Hungarian immigrant who came here in the sixties when she was 12. And so she learned English by the sink or swim method in New York city. And then met my dad in college in North Carolina. So it's kind of interesting background.
[00:07:31] I think one thing for me that I had to process once I started kind of coming out of the really deep darkness that was processing her murder was I first, well, I guess I had to first start to understand the murder and accept it and, and her disappearance and her loss. And then I had to start working on what was almost more difficult, but acceptance that I felt that she hadn't loved me.
[00:08:05] And so those are separate issues that are so interconnected. I think grief is complicated for everybody. And we just lost our father last June. And so I read in Elizabeth Kubler Ross book on grief, not her main treaties, but a separate book that was written later. And, you know, grief is, is so complicated for everybody, but I personally feel that it is more complicated if you did not actually have a loving relationship with the person.
[00:08:42] Jen: My own personal story, my husband was killed at work a couple of years ago. So, and I have, I have kids, so we're very much bereaved and, and living with grief on a regular. But there is a sense, I think, even of what could be, you know what I mean, like not having the chance to, and I would imagine you experience that very much,
[00:09:11] of just, you know, the loss of possibility of potentially repairing a relationship or what would it have evolved into,
[00:09:18] or just in my own experience. That's a big one that when I'm processing it. Just the possibility of, what could be and what our relationship would have grown into.
[00:09:33] Nova: Yeah. It's not the same for me. I became really jaded since she did start abandoning us when I was 13. So by the time I was 16 and 17 and had found out about her dying, I had just tried to divorce myself from her for obvious reasons, just to.
[00:09:59] Be a better adjusted person, because it's so difficult as a child to accept or to think that your parents didn't love you. It's a matter of survival in this world that we be loved and cared for by our parents and it quite our whole identity and our survival and our sense of security in the world is tied into how our parents paradise.
[00:10:27] So my dad was pretty, I would say, had a lot of problems, but he was able to be loving. And that has probably saved us all in a way, although my sisters might disagree because after her death, after her mom's death, he became very, a very different kind of parent And so as a family, the grieving was so strange because we didn't talk about her very much.
[00:11:00] And at the same time of not talking about her, her case was in the media and continues to be in the media.
[00:11:09] Jen: It's gotta be a really weird dichotomy where
[00:11:13] Tesha: everyone else is talking about it, except you.
[00:11:17] Jen: Yeah.
[00:11:18] Nova: And my good fortune is to live out of state in California, where every time over the last 30 years I've shared some of the, unless they're a true crime fan.
[00:11:29] They haven't heard him, which is kind of remarkable seeing as we're on the west coast and he's such a big deal. However, there was a Netflix special that just came out in November about him and other serial killers. And he was prominently featured. I haven't watched it, but the production company that put it together had contacted me a couple of years ago about being part of it.
[00:11:52] And then I got this random letter that said, we just want to warn you. There's going to be this Netflix special. It's called catching killers or something. And so I don't have to face a constant media presence or at the time of media barrage. But I, I lived in the Seattle area until I was 26.
[00:12:11] So, you know, I guess I did deal with it in that manner and then just moved away from it. Whereas like my sisters, if they tell somebody, everybody knows and they all grew up with this case
[00:12:28] Tesha: right.
[00:12:29] Nova: It's a huge, huge deal.
[00:12:33] Tesha: Right. And everybody would, would know who that was. So there was a serial killer in, and he started out as a serial rapist in the area that I grew up with in, and like, everybody.
[00:12:48] No, so that it's, everybody knows that case. Like there's nobody you're going to find in Toronto who doesn't know what I'm talking about right now. So that makes sense to me that if anybody ever said, oh, you know, my mother was a victim of the Scarborough rapist. We would all know what that, what that was and what that meant.
[00:13:07] And there would be no escaping it, like for your sisters, everybody kind of knows who that is, where, like you said, you are living in a different state, so maybe it was less prominent
[00:13:22] in the media.
[00:13:23] Nova: Yeah. Sometimes when I tell people they'll go home and they'll Google it and and read about it and stuff like that, or I've heard that they do that. I assume some people go home and look it up and read about it further, but I was going to segue kind of into the grieving component. And so, like, I did start to say that we just really didn't talk about, or I personally am somebody who just needs to talk about stuff all the time with everybody.
[00:13:55] And I always joke like, oh, I don't have a filter and I don't have good boundaries. I mean, if you were raised like, kind of with abuse, like your boundaries are funky. So but I basically started trying to UN earth. Who my mother was after she died, I went through, I'm assuming I can't re remember very accurately, but for X amount of years after she died, I just feel like your whole consciousness or your body is underwater.
[00:14:33] You're not able to be conscious completely of what you're feeling or what you're going through. It's too much. I do remember in college calling up a detective who was on my case and assigned to the case and unbelievably, there were only two detectives at that time on the case in the early nineties.
[00:14:57] Don't understand that. But Yeah, I remember it. So that's a little bit of the evidence that I was facing, things that I was trying to unravel things. I am a poet, and so I wrote about her when I was ready. I don't remember how early I started writing about her, but I do have a Xen that I send out to anyone who's interested.
[00:15:19] And it has poems about her in it it's all composed of newspaper coverage of the murderer, interspersed with poems about her. And so, you know, first year in this darkness, and then you start to doubt, like I've been going to therapy for years and writing and. I would do open mics in my twenties, but it wasn't until, probably in my late thirties.
[00:15:52] And I'm 47. Now that I read directly about her story at an open mic. And I read at this venue called the last church in San Francisco. And it's actually an open mic about death. And so I read a piece that I had written about her. And from that. Got interviewed for the podcast. This is actually happening in the spring of 2020. And then from there people have been asking me for my ezine. But yeah, I wrote a lot of poems about her. I haven't had any published. I feel like they're too autobiographical. I'd want them published, but. You know, what it helped me to do is everyone always thinks like poetry is therapeutic, but it's more that you're creating a record.
[00:16:50] And my goal in finding out about her life was to make her somebody that I could accept and then potentially love. Because what I would tell people over the years is they'd say, I'm so sorry you lost your mom. And I would say, well it's less about having lost my mom and more about mourning the loss of love all throughout my childhood.
[00:17:21] Tesha: That's heavy.
[00:17:22] Nova: Yeah. Yeah. That is what my conclusion is, is that. I think basically it's 30 years out and I don't I do think about her, of course, and there's some PTSD and stuff, but don't think actively like, oh, I wasn't loved as a child.
[00:17:44] Jen: Right.
[00:17:45] Nova: You know, I have intimacy issues. I feel like that I've become aware of, you know, and it's been hard to let myself be loved and I've been a very independent woman.
[00:17:57] And I think that is partly a function of the lack of nurturing. My memory of my childhood is being pushed physically away from my mother and her not wanting to be touched, or even to hug her. But that could have been when I was middle of my childhood and into my early teen years because I'm sure as a child, a young child, like I saw her parenting actively my younger sisters and breastfeeding and holding them and, and doing all the necessary things.
[00:18:31] It's just that the wasn't joyful. I think she was very stressed out and she shouldn't have had kids let alone four kids or four kids.
[00:18:47] Tesha: And like the mental health was, it was undiagnosed.
[00:18:52] Nova: It was undiagnosed until some late period. I want to say some point, I don't understand this. I thought I, I have a sheet from a psychiatrist saying she had bipolar potential borderline personality disorder, which might not have even been a DSM-IV thing in the late eighties.
[00:19:18] I thought that was from 89. The timing doesn't really make sense. So all I know is that I believe like after she had abandoned us and it was just my dad and her on the streets, like he might've tried to get her to take some medication and it didn't work. So it's definitely undiagnosed.
[00:19:37] I have bipolar disorder, so part of my whole process and forgiving her and unraveling or unwrapping the grief is to understand I my own mental health issues. And yeah, when you mature as an adult and you go through years of therapy and you write and you tell other people and you do all these things.
[00:20:03] It's still my not get you into a better place, but me having years and years of. Dealing with bipolar disorder and dealing with it very successfully kind of enlightened me in my darkest periods to be like, oh my goodness, what if I had kids and postpartum and years of not sleeping fully and.
[00:20:28] So I think that very much led me to make my decision as a woman to not mother. When I was 35, I had an accidental pregnancy and I decided to place my child for adoption. That qualifies me as a birth mother, which is a woman who places her child for adoption. There is obviously open adoption.
[00:20:55] Now it's been going on since the eighties and it is different for every family, but in our adoption, I see my son every three months or so. And they did just move to a different part of the state, but up till now we shared birthdays and holidays and soccer games and ukulele practice and all kinds of stuff.
[00:21:19] But what I find interesting is how patterns repeat in families. And my grandmother abandoned my mother because of revelation and hungry. And then my mother abandoned us. And then in no way, placing my child for adoption is not abandonment, but a forum. That's deciding not to mother anymore.
[00:21:46] Tesha: Was part of that decision, like, because you felt like you didn't have that nurturing, like mother, did you feel like you wouldn't be able to then provide that
[00:22:01] Nova: that's 100% exactly it and I was concerned with having bipolar disorder. So those two components were absolutely most of the decision.
[00:22:14] Tesha: Because I imagine as a child witnessing your mother, you know, struggle with her mental health, that you don't really probably understand what's going on,
[00:22:25] Nova: right.
[00:22:26] Tesha: In a way that, you know, you were talking about getting to know her and writing the poetry and that stuff.
[00:22:34] And then being in therapy and your own mental health struggles, I have to imagine
[00:22:40] that
[00:22:41] maybe it brings a different perspective and maybe a different level of like understanding and compassion for what was actually going on with your mom.
[00:22:49] Nova: Well, yeah. I have about one breakdown a year and I am very, very regular with medication.
[00:22:57] I have a meditation practice. I do yoga. I exercise. I make sure I have tons of friends. I make sure I have. Stress management and it goes on and on. And yet, no matter what I do, I have a breakdown about once a year. I did go about four years without a breakdown until a couple of years ago. That was a long time and it was wonderful, but so I recognize that without this trust of children and marriage and all that brings, I just have breakdowns and they are debilitating.
[00:23:36] And in a breakdown, if it's very bad, I can't care for myself. I. Stay home so that I won't go spend all my money. I can't manage my money. I sometimes can't cook or be aware of time, really. So whereas I normally joggle a really healthy, balanced life. I've been working full-time for a couple of years now.
[00:24:03] When that happens, it's all out the door and it's not because of any one thing that happens. So part of my journey has been to try to understand, you know, what caused my mother to act the way she did. And I just feel like, well, isn't my mental health so different than hers? No, I have education. I have resources and tool set.
[00:24:31] She didn't choose to have slash couldn't have, if you're raising four kids, you don't have time for their. You don't have time for a lot of self care. I don't know what it's like being a mother, but I imagine you can't necessarily like exercise on his schedule and
[00:24:51] Tesha: it makes it a lot harder that's for sure.
[00:24:53] Jen: Well, and I think, especially at the time that you were a child, like nobody cared about self care for moms they barely do now, but like they really didn't then
[00:25:04] Tesha: a woman's job was to care for her children. And that's that?
[00:25:07] Jen: I'm a few years younger than you and the oldest of four and I don't ever remember seeing, I, my mom permed her hair at home because she couldn't go to the salon.
[00:25:16] Like I don't remember her ever taking care of her.
[00:25:20] Nova: No exactly. As a woman, as a mother and I hope is, is not offended. I feel like your needs come west. And at the same time, I always think about how on an airplane. They say every single time, if you're an adult and have a child with you, put your mask on first.
[00:25:42] And why is that? Because you are the Bastiaan, you are the one who is providing all the care and if you're not functioning, then how are the kids gonna function? So I did have to parent, I started parenting when I was 13 in my fashion, as I felt able to, I wasn't by any means like going to parent teacher meetings.
[00:26:07] And no, but you're the oldest. So
[00:26:10] Tesha: now. If your mother's abandoned you
[00:26:13] Jen: and your father gone the way with her, you are, you're the one that is expected to and feels probably like they have to step up.
[00:26:23] Nova: Yeah. And I've been keeping a journal. So I've, I've always been a writer and I've been keeping a journal since I was 11.
[00:26:30] And I don't like to look into my journals from my childhood, but I have in the last few years, and I was shocked to see, because I was 14. I was in ninth grade. About a year before we were put in foster care. And every single entry says that I'm exhausted. And what I'm doing is I'm getting myself to school without a school bus without a ride.
[00:26:58] And Doing chores after school doing homework, bathing my baby sister, getting her to bed. Cause we're 10 years apart and I was 14, yeah. And then just saying, oh, I'm so exhausted in every entry I'm so exhausted. And when the social workers came to pick us up, I didn't know where my sisters were.
[00:27:24] My dad would take my youngest sister along with him extensively to drug deals. And my two middle sisters just farmed themselves out to neighborhood moms. So they would always be gone after school somewhere. So we had to literally find them. And I just don't have a lot of memories from that process.
[00:27:47] But we did get placed in foster care altogether. And we all have very successful lives. I feel like and two of my sisters at a three have chosen to parent and I think they're incredible parents which is just a Testament to survival and thriving in the face of what we term to be challenges, which is quite the euphemism.
[00:28:16] And so, yeah, I, I feel that for myself, you know, my vocalizing, everything about the case about my mom left a few years ago, I, I started hearing myself talk about being in foster care. Everything starting with getting interviewed and going on the record with the Seattle times about my mom's case has led me to the place mat now.
[00:28:44] And at the same time, like I said, I still struggle with issues of intimacy. I'm in a committed relationship that I wasn't for years. And I had really bad PTSD really bad just a few months ago. And I'm guessing it's because from what I read about grieving sometimes people will go through one death.
[00:29:09] They'll kind of put it away as much as they're able to, and then a second death in their life occurs. And then all of a sudden that first step comes back. And so my dad had a really traumatic passing in June of last year of 2021. And at some point last year, between June and December, I was literally thinking about my mother and how she got killed.
[00:29:44] And you do not want to think about that, like ever
[00:29:50] Tesha: actual details of the murder. You found yourself thinking
[00:29:54] Nova: about visualizing it. So that's
[00:29:57] Tesha: not probably a place you want to go.
[00:29:59] Nova: No. And that really felt like PTSD. I've only had one therapist diagnosed me as having PTSD. And I think I was only experiencing it when I moved back to Seattle.
[00:30:12] When I was 30 and as soon as I left the area, I was mostly fine. Yeah.
[00:30:19] Tesha: Really a lot of stuff there that just was triggering that was bringing up
[00:30:24] marries and
[00:30:27] seeing places and stuff. I'm sure.
[00:30:31] Nova: Yeah. I think it's honestly the weather
[00:30:35] Tesha: and the weather. Interesting.
[00:30:36] Nova: Well, like, you know, I love my family and we're on really good terms, but the proximity to my family has always been triggering.
[00:30:45] And then the weather. Is just for me, I get depression and anxiety. I get more exacerbated symptoms. So I moved to one of the sunniest places in the United States. Yeah, it was, it works for you. It works for me. And it's really hard to be a part from my sisters now that they have small children and just, you know, it's all about WhatsApp, video chat and the kids like running around like screaming.
[00:31:15] It's like, well, I'm not really getting to know my nieces and nephews via these video chats, but it's what we have.
[00:31:24] Tesha: Yeah. You might ask as much as,
[00:31:31] Nova: yeah. I mean, kids on video chat, they're like grabbing the phone, they're running around with it. You see the ceiling, you see
[00:31:37] Jen: the floor.
[00:31:41] Tesha: Gets better as they get older,
[00:31:42] Nova: yeah. My niece is a lot better. Now that she's almost eight, but the last time we chatted a few days ago, she's just letting out a a sustained scream. And I'm like asking my sister, like, why is she screaming? Is there a reason she's like no clue. She just likes to do that. If
[00:32:00] Tesha: they just scream for no reason,
[00:32:02] Nova: one thing I did want to really get across is that it was instrumental for my healing to realize that my mother's behavior towards me and my sisters is not my fault.
[00:32:18] Tesha: Yeah.
[00:32:20] Jen: I feel like that's a really hard thing as a human, but as a child, especially.
[00:32:25] Nova: And I'm sure it's in all kinds of books on trauma. And family models, but I have stayed away from those for the most part, for whatever reason to my detriment. But yeah, just realizing, especially as I became more familiar with managing mental illness, that there's just no way it could have been different.
[00:32:52] And I'm thinking
[00:32:53] Tesha: about your mom, like she immigrated here, you said she really didn't have any friends.
[00:33:00] Nova: I mean,
[00:33:01] Tesha: she may not have had that like support system that you need. Like she didn't work outside of the home, so she wasn't really engaging with people in that way. She didn't have friends. I imagine as an immigrant, she didn't have all of her family here as well.
[00:33:20] And then she's trying to parent and dealing with mental health. Maybe she didn't even understand what was going on with her.
[00:33:29] Nova: Yeah, that's exactly right. We grew up, well, my parents were hippies and I'm gen X obviously. And so when I was a baby and I was the first born, they threw me in the back of a pickup truck and we just lived on camp sites my first year or so.
[00:33:52] And they decided when they decided where to land, it was the furthest point, literally in the United States, from all of our family on my dad's side. So my dad is from South Carolina and they decided to settle in Washington state, literally, as far as you can go far away and on my mom's side They are spread far and wide.
[00:34:19] My maternal grandfather had been in Sweden. He's passed away now. Our great auntie was in Sweden, our grandmother and my, my mom's mom was in Toronto actually. And there was no other, there are no other siblings, no other relatives, no connections. And I, I do, did find out that my mom made friends, of course, when she was in boarding school in high school, which with the sisters of the sacred heart in Albany, New York.
[00:34:58] And so I, in the early two thousands about. Before we could like do Facebook and all that. I tried to contact her classmates going off of a yearbook that I found.
[00:35:14] Tesha: Oh, wow.
[00:35:16] Nova: And I got the most amazing results. I only heard from two people. Well, I heard from several people, but only two people became instrumental in helping me understand my mother.
[00:35:27] And one was her whenever classmates who sent me my mother's letters that, so my mother had written her letters post-graduation and she sent them to me, I think only three letters. And she sent the birth announcement for my birth, this little Snoopy birth announcement. And that was huge.
[00:35:52] Cause of something that my mom wrote in one of the letters just changed my whole origin story and the second person. Was my mom's art teacher. Who is wasn't none is Mexican American and ended up living in Southern Mexico working with Mayan women. And we started a correspondence.
[00:36:20] We kept a correspondence for 10 years in 2011. I was able to go to Chiapas, Mexico and meet this woman who was my mother's teacher in the seventies and talk to her about my mother.
[00:36:37] Tesha: Wow.
[00:36:38] Jen: That's amazing.
[00:36:39] Nova: Yeah.
[00:36:40] Tesha: Yeah. That's amazing. Was she able to give you some insight into who your mother was kind of when she was younger before she had children,
[00:36:48] Nova: she totally was. She has this amazing memory absolutely amazing. She's in her seventies and she remembers my mother, like it was yesterday. And I mean, I don't even know how many students she's had in her lifetime. And she said that at this the sake, the sacred heart academy, they were Catholic, but they were super liberal.
[00:37:14] So they had a nun on duty 24 7. So that if you had trouble in the middle of the night, you could go and talk to somebody. So she remembers having long conversations with my mother who was there as a full-time boarder. She wasn't being parented at all. She says, oh, your mother was very European, very beautiful and classy and smart.
[00:37:44] And so just really good things that she remembered. And she didn't say, well, you know, she was starving yourself and throwing up and had weight body issues. You didn't tell me any of that. Which I, I did grow up watching my mom be anorexic and bulimic per her mental health and substance abuse issues.
[00:38:06] It was a really, really good thing. Yeah. It started a whole path where I had been going to that part of Mexico and volunteering for 10 years. So sporadically, I don't have 10 years of volunteer work under my belt, but yeah, travel's good. Yeah.
[00:38:24] Tesha: That's amazing that she remembers because it's not necessarily easy to like, remember every student you had, but your mom obviously had
[00:38:32] Jen: made some sort of an impact.
[00:38:34] Tesha: Yeah. Made some sort of an impact on her that she could remember. And it's nice that she offered to share that with you.
[00:38:43] Nova: Yeah. And the only other person. So I have two people alive who knew my mother, which is my maternal grandmother and my great aunt. My maternal grandmother is a writer also and has written several memoirs and.
[00:39:01] She's funny, I'll ask her questions and she'll just snap at me and say, it's in my book. And I'm like, okay, but your books are in Hungarian. So
[00:39:14] Jen: you're my grandmother. So you should tell me
[00:39:16] Nova: and that's become Gary. And, and one of her books did translate into English and then her other two were, oh my gosh.
[00:39:24] I don't remember if she has three or four books.
[00:39:26] I want to say she has three and only the first one was translated because they're all self published. And my great aunt on the other hand really loved my mother. My mother was named after her and. Every time we've been able to connect. She has sent me photos of my mother, which none of us had in her family, like of my mother's childhood and tells me memories of her and fills in some of the blanks, but she lives in Stockholm.
[00:39:58] And I only seen her like three times in my life. So,
[00:40:04] Tesha: but it really sounds like you've kind of gone through this process of trying to piece together really who your mother was
[00:40:13] Nova: very much off of very scant evidence.
[00:40:17] Tesha: And I do think that I think you touched upon it earlier, but I do think that so much of our own identities are, are connected to who our parents are.
[00:40:29] And when that information is missing or cut short. Then it kind of becomes important to figure out where we came from.
[00:40:40] Nova: It does so much. And I think the, the backstory, in my mother's life and her mental illness was that she was born in 1953. I believe it's the year Stalin died and in 1956, hungry was invaded by Russia.
[00:41:03] And so my mother was only three when this revolution came about and her mother felt that she couldn't flee on foot with a three-year-old. And so she left her behind. And then my grandfather, my mom's dad felt that he couldn't parent. So he gave my mom. To his parents, those grandparents felt that they couldn't parent.
[00:41:33] So they gave her to the other set of grandparents. Those grandparents felt they couldn't parent. So she ended up with a woman who took in kids and did people's laundry because other countries don't have organized foster care like the United States does. And so my great aunt describes coming to see my mother and my mom not being clothed from the waist down and being dirty and sitting in a courtyard at this laundry, a woman's house.
[00:42:07] And then when she was 12, my mother was sent for, to the United States by my grandmother. And so my grandmother didn't parent. She never parented, never ever, but she did have custody of my mom from birth to age three, and then from 12 to age 18,
[00:42:32] Tesha: but she was in a boarding school.
[00:42:33] Nova: She put her in full-time boarding school and didn't really even visit her on the weekends that I know of. My grandmother was a fashion designer in New York city. And so that was for whatever reason, she felt that it was better.
[00:42:48] She felt that my mother shouldn't be in the school system in New York city public schools. And that this was. Simply a good opportunity for her. And we can't, you know, my grandmother came from a rather air Socratic, Hungarian family. So you know, she wanted education for my mother. Right? Yeah.
[00:43:13] Tesha: And so she provided that, but you know, definitely
[00:43:16] can see this sort of generational trauma as you're describing these stories and, and this idea that maybe her mother provided some of those necessities and not a lot else in terms of the nurturing.
[00:43:33] And then your mother has children and is, you know, she said, like you said, she breastfed the kids and, and cuddled them when they were little and then not a lot of the nurturing and. I think it can be hard to know how to do that if you haven't had it.
[00:43:50] Jen: and just the idea that at three, she was passed off.
[00:43:53] How many times that's
[00:43:56] Tesha: yeah.
[00:43:57] Jen: There's no version of that. Not having an impact.
[00:44:00] Tesha: And then how do you let people in and develop intimacy and learn how to be nurturing. Right. And like you were saying even about yourself, that it can be hard to have those intimate relationships.
[00:44:17] Nova: Yeah. On top of being passed off when she was three, my grandmother Before she was a writer was actually a cabaret singer, like a jazz and a jazz singer.
[00:44:33] And she was working singing at night. And so it's like, who was feeding the baby? She describes having my mom in the bed and leaving her to go things work. Right. Which is, as we know a very bad thing for childhood development.
[00:45:02] Jen: We spoke with one of our guests about developmental trauma and, she definitely was in that age where that's, what was happening.
[00:45:11] That doesn't go away, you know, like it doesn't just go away without any work or support. And I think, especially in the time period we're talking about, there wasn't even any acknowledgement that that was even a thing.
[00:45:24] Nova: Yeah. I want to think. I want to thank you so much for saying like, how would my mother know how to parent?
[00:45:33] Tesha: Yeah.
[00:45:34] Nova: Because I just didn't, it's just, it's very helpful right now to talk about her life and in this way, because it's, it really is helping me understand her better. It's like, you know, my spurs can parent and they are parenting. But they were parented, I guess my youngest sister really only had.
[00:45:58] A couple of years of parenting before my mom was killed. And then my dad was, he was an addict and just not the best parent. He worked in a professional capacity and till retirement, but he was a functional addict and alcoholic. So it's really, it's like, she's parenting. How is she doing that?
[00:46:28] Jen: I do think that there's an element of it. That is eight, but not for everyone.
[00:46:35] Tesha: I think too, like, obviously my story is going to be very different from your sister's, but I also have a lot of child mama and sometimes in my life where maybe, I wasn't protected in the way that I should have been.
[00:46:49] And I think becoming a parent. Some of that is really hard to grapple with, and there's a lot of conscious effort if that makes sense. And a lot of healing, I think that I have had to do in order to be able to parent, because when you're parenting, without having done any of that healing I think that's when you're more likely to kind of repeat that stuff
[00:47:17] Nova: and you get triggered. I was an elementary school teacher. I was an elementary school teacher about 10 years ago. And I just found it super triggering to be caring for very young children. Right.
[00:47:31] Tesha: Yeah. And your sisters might have their own struggles too, right? Like, like you said, they're doing, and they're being successful parents, but that doesn't mean it's easy for them.
[00:47:40] Nova: Yeah, exactly. And I always have this theory that the less time my sister spent being parented by my mother, the better that they're more likely to be healthy. My family theory is that my baby sister was only parented by our mother until I, I honestly don't have the numbers.
[00:48:00] Exactly. Correct. But let's say
[00:48:02] for about four years until she was about four.
[00:48:07] Jen: What I just wanted to say is, regardless of how old you were and what the capacity was, is you did step in to the best of your ability to fill that gap when you had to.
[00:48:20] Tesha: Right.
[00:48:20] Jen: So , you did,
[00:48:23] and , that's not to say that you should be parenting or mothering now, but there is a part of you that is able to do that, because you did, yeah. It doesn't mean that you should for life. It doesn't mean it's very different having like baby babies and like each stage is very different. But I think you contributed to them, your sisters, I would think being able to as well, because you showed such innate, a caring as the older sister, we all are oldest sisters and I know, I feel immense protectiveness over my siblings.
[00:48:58] Nova: Oh yeah. And it continues.
[00:49:01] Tesha: Yeah.
[00:49:02] Nova: wow, thank you so much that, yeah, I it's weird. I just talked to my sister, not the baby sister about the. She's my, our second out of, so I'm the first one. She's second born. And literally I talked to her right before this podcast and she said, what? You said it's amazing.
[00:49:26] The timing she said, I never realized. And I'm just now realizing like how much parenting you did.
[00:49:33] Jen: You had to, you didn't have a choice, so you probably don't acknowledge it as such really.
[00:49:38] Nova: I just remember doing laundry and setting the table. I just don't remember doing chores. I don't. And I guess I bathed my little sister.
[00:49:48] So again, like chores that's, that's less of a chore. That's more,
[00:49:53] Jen: that's a job. That's a full job. But the thing is, is to a kid it's a chore, but if there's no adult, who's going to do it. If say you don't, then it's not just a chore. It's part of running a home.
[00:50:08] Nova: Yeah. I, I know that I somehow. Fed them. Because we obviously ate, I remember my parents dropping off bags of groceries and there being like a couple of days in between.
[00:50:22] Tesha: So they just kind of dropped the food and then go off when off our work is done. Yeah,
[00:50:29] Nova: yeah, yeah, yeah. Writing bad checks at the local grocery store. And this is like, my dad was the building official of our town.
[00:50:38] Like he worked with the mayor, like he went from that to like running on the street and spending all his money and abandoning us. And so eventually a neighbor was like, oh, I'm going to report these parents,
[00:50:58] Tesha: right. Because the neighbor knew what was going on. Do you mind telling us your mother's
[00:51:03] Nova: name?
[00:51:04] Yeah. Her name was Marty college and, or Marta that she went by Marty.
[00:51:13] Tesha: Okay. She went by Marty, I think, you know, it's interesting. And I did listen to you talk on another podcast about this and, or you kind of touch upon it. It made me think this, like, it's interesting, I guess, because your mom was a victim of a serial killer that there's so much focus on the killer and like nobody's really paying attention to the victim and thinking about that the like these.
[00:51:45] Real people who had lives and families and, you know, regardless of her struggles, obviously didn't deserve to have her life and the way that it did. And I think sometimes like we hear like, oh, there was a serial killer. And, you know, she had four children who were like those poor kids, and then they never think about it again.
[00:52:10] But, you know, and you're a real person who's having to now deal with the fallout from that and carrying that for the rest of your life.
[00:52:21] Nova: When I got interviewed by the Seattle times, I said that, when I was in my twenties, that is when they were talking about the case. I said something to the effect of poor women don't have advocates for them when they're getting killed. You know they disappear or they get killed in domestic violence situations or by murder. Then I felt that those cases were not going to be investigated and given attention and usually murders go, yeah, they go cold pretty quickly.
[00:52:58] And you only hear about advocacy. If the family like like literally drops everything like with black lives matter, like the family drops everything to advocate for justice for their loved one. And
[00:53:17] Jen: there's somebody who's very well known. Like there was the tic talker in the summer, Gabby potato, this white woman who, because people knew who she was and because she was white The whole nation was like, trying to figure out like, well, I don't, I only know from what I saw from other people talking about it, but it was this big deal, but it's because she was a public figure and in some way so I it's true and it, I don't know that much has changed, unfortunately.
[00:53:48] Nova: Yeah. Because I don't know. And this just could be my ignorance, but I don't know of a single Memorial to the victims of the green river killer. I don't know where so many, so many, and I don't know of any forum wherein the victims, families have met each other or talk to each other or gone to the court case, or it's just, I, I also as part of my.
[00:54:21] Healing did a press conference in 2012 in LA as part of an anti death penalty campaign in California at which the death penalty still stands, but it it's, it's been voted on and very narrowly kept on the books in California. But when I spoke with this organization, it is called something it's M M D R it's murder victims, families for reconciliation or something like that.
[00:54:59] I'm out of Texas, but I spoke with them and that was the only time where I kind of tiptoed into the world. Other people who have family members who have been murdered. And what is that like? And talking about reconciliation? Because I never wanted, or I never needed not wanted, I never needed Gary Ridgeway to be put to death because I felt it's more suffering for him to live life in prison.
[00:55:35] And it doesn't bring back our mom. I just wanted to emphasize that it is really, really hard to acknowledge murder.
[00:55:47] Jen: It's one of those super uncomfortable things.
[00:55:50] Nova: It's just too big is my guess.
[00:55:54] Jen: And it's interesting that there hasn't been any,
[00:55:57] I mean, again, I wouldn't know because that's not my experience, but like what kind of groups and supports are there for somebody who is a survivor of somebody who has been murdered, because that is a very unique experience.
[00:56:10] That as much as we do talk a lot about how you can find commonalities and through hard times in there, and there definitely are threads,
[00:56:18] but there are certain experiences. And I, I do think yours is one of them Nova that it's, it's like there is value and being able to have access to and connect to people who are the survivors of people who've been murdered.
[00:56:36] Nova: There are organizations. I don't know how many, but I was living in Sacramento that I am, that the case was solved in second fornia. And there was an organization called Vita. Like, again, it's failing me, but victims advocacy something. And I only went to like one meeting, but I was really struck. What I remember was a, I don't want to talk about murder all the time, which is why I don't do anti-death penalty advocacy, but B I saw a wall of photographs of people who had been murdered. And as a white woman, I had thought that perhaps they be majority people of color and murder, unfortunately reaches across all races and gender and class. So that was a big realization for me and an equalizer.
[00:57:34] And I, I did want it to just as kind of capping up really emphasize to people that if you can, in your life, in everything in your life, if you can connect and realize that you are not alone in your experience, that is probably one of the most powerful things you can do to heal. And I was able to do that, not through therapy, but through my meditation practice.
[00:58:05] I came to realize like every time I met with my meditation group and we shared that I was just like everybody else. And that. Super profound because grief is isolating. Murder is isolating. Family trauma is isolating. Mental health is isolating. It's a lot to overcome, but if you can find your spirituality, your meditation practice, your form of healing could be art.
[00:58:39] It could be helping other people, which I think is probably one of the most powerful ways to heal. It could be like me advocacy writing even just journaling any kind of therapy that you can find that works for you, or, you know, that will engender healing over time. It's inevitable.
[00:59:04] Tesha: Thank you so, so much for that.
[00:59:06] Jen: Yes. Thank you. And thank you for agreeing to talk to us and making the time. This was a really, really interesting conversation.