Charles Spencer

Kate Bowler: Who deserves our compassion and who has earned our empathy? Those are odd questions, maybe, but we all encounter moments or circumstances or people and toss up our hands and say, that is for someone else to care about. Whether it’s an issue that’s bigger than our individual self can solve. Sorry, Greenpeacers, I will keep recycling, I promise. Or maybe it’s someone that you know who just has a lot of problems that just keep happening. And bless you, I have been on that end of the equation before. Or maybe it’s a circumstance that just seems totally out of touch with any reality that you can conceive of, which makes empathy hard. I’m Kate Bowler and this is everything happens. What are the bounds of our empathy? Who deserves my compassion or care? I just want to hold that question up and any kind of itchiness that it might bring throughout today’s conversation. Because at first my guest today might feel unrelatable, except that he is tender and kind and gentle, so all of our very favorite qualities. But today I’m speaking with Lord Charles Spencer. Charles is an author and historian, which is, of course, one of my very favorite kinds of people and a broadcaster and a journalist. He is also the ninth Earl Spencer, which may sound familiar because his big sister was Princess Diana. He grew up in a world very different from one that you or I might be familiar with. A world where wealthy, notable families send their kids to prestigious boarding schools at very young ages in order that they grow into certain members of society with a serious stiff upper lip. Charles’ his latest book is called A Very Private School, a courageous and beautifully written memoir about his time in an abusive English boarding school that was shrouded in secrets, abuse and cruelty. And while his circumstances may be totally unlike something you’ve experienced, Charles speaks so candidly and tenderly about his painful childhood. This is a gorgeous conversation, but just a heads up, there are mentions of emotional childhood and physical and sexual abuse, so it might not be appropriate for all ears. Charles, I’m so honored to be sitting here with you today. Thank you so much for doing this.

Lord Charles Spencer: It’s a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Kate: We’re professionalized into such a certain kind of detachment, as historians. We’re very careful or observational. Nosy in a certain way, but sometimes not about ourselves. I imagine deciding to write a book like this caused you to maybe lean into an account of yourself or like a professional mode that wasn’t, wasn’t entirely natural.

Charles: Well, it was. It’s completely different for me. So I think it’s my eighth book in 25 years, and the others were history books. And so this was a bit of a blank sheet when I looked at it. Over the past few years, before actually before I started writing, I had been in therapy for a very long time and so much of it kept leading back to the school I went to between the age of eight and 13, it’s called Madewell Hall, and I got used to how grim it was. But then I started to jot down all my memories from there, from the really mundane to the, I suppose, shocking. And then it was just so strange because it’s a tiny school. It was when I was there as only 75 boys, all boys. And I kept bumping into more and more of these people by chance, people I hadn’t seen for decades. And they started telling me about them. And it was that that persuaded me to write it because I was so shocked by what happened to them. But of course, what happened to me was pretty bad. And it set off a pattern where I just suddenly realized I had to write it. So I didn’t plan to write it, I had to write it.

Kate: Yes, some things just kind of land on us and we sort of feel the weight of it.

Charles: I think that was it. And actually, other people said to me that somebody had to record this on paper and it should be me. And I thought, well, I will, you know, because I felt that some of the stories were so appalling. And it appealed to me as a modern historian to lay it down because, okay, it’s 50 years ago, but it’s not that long ago. And I thought, well, I’m not getting any younger and I better do it now.

Kate: I wonder if for people who are not used to boarding school culture, if you could just maybe offer a little, for your historian hat of like, why they became important and how, yeah, just the the why of why they were so culturally significant.

Charles: Yes. I think they’re all part of the British imperial story, really. I could trace my family going to boarding schools back over 300 years. And I think essentially what it was was a place to send people who could become the officer class for the empire. And I really believe that they were taking these little boys on purpose and cauterizing their emotions so that they could be transplanted anywhere in the world without being homesick, without feeling too much in terms of empathy. And then it became very, as you say, ritualized that in the family letters and diaries I found there was consciousness among the adults every generation, that it was going to be appalling for the child to be sent on this journey. But somehow the rationale was that they would get over it and it would be better for them to be broken in this way, to have their hearts broken and to become a useful tool of the establishment, really.

Kate: Cauterized is such a perfect and intense word. I’ve only, like as a religious scholar, I’ve only seen it in missionary histories. And in that story, it was, well, there is a bigger story than you. And actually it’s Jesus and all for Christ. But the whole family had to live into a story that everyone was doing their part and it was always going to be worth it. What do you think the story everyone is telling themselves? If we’re going to, like, break it into parts. What what is the story that the parents tell themselves?

Charles: Well, it comes from different places, from what I’ve seen. It can come from a snobbish place, which is my son comes from a certain family. We as a family go to a certain school, possibly an individual school, where we’ve gone for generations, and this is who we are. It’s a branding exercise. It’s a value imparting exercise. And it’s, it seems incredibly cruel to me. Much crueler than when I started to write the book. I sort of had ideas about it. But I’m now very clear that children of both genders should not be forced to board before their teens. I think having had teenagers there, probably a lot of them would be delighted to get away from their parents in their teens. But I remember these little boys, you know, when I was there, these eight year olds, some of whom hadn’t even been told they were going to be left at the school, their parents took them on a drive and then left them and drove off. And the shock for those boys, just the white shock on their faces of being abandoned. And sadly, where I was taken and my school mates were taken was a very cruel and unpleasant place. So it was the 70s. There was no communication with home except a weekly letter home that was supervised. And the subject matter of your letter was written up on a blackboard. Bland news from the school that was safe to transmit to your parents. So, yeah, we were left at the mercy of some very bad people.

Kate: Yes. And then only one story that gets to be told.

Charles: Yes. And actually touching on the Christian thing you were saying, I mean, the school wrapped itself in a bogus Christian flag. And the headmaster, who was the worst of the abusers presented to the parents as this earnest Christian. And, you know, that was very convincing for the parents, I think.

Kate: It sounds like right before, your parents had gone through a very difficult divorce. Do you think part of your dad’s, I guess, looking back, what do you imagine his best reasons were for the choice that he made?

Charles: Well, actually, my father was very conventional, he was a very loving man, but very conventional, typical upper class gentleman, I would say. So I don’t think he really thought of alternatives because that’s what you did from his background. Except there was one moment where he realized that it was a big traumatic thing. I had never spent a night away from home by myself. But I think he knew it would be horrendous. He told me in later life that the worst thing he had to do as a father to me was leave me that first day because he knew I was agonized inside.

Kate: Yes.

Charles: So he was sensitive to it. And I know that after that, dropping me at the school, he drove to see my grandfather on his way home. And my grandfather, I found his diary. And he, my grandfather said how depressed my father was at having just left me there. So I think he was torn in two because he was doing his social obligation of sending his son down this path. But as a father, he knew it was wrong.

Kate: When you remember yourself at that age, what were your first attempts to, like, live with your new reality?

Charles: While I had always been very social, I was a very lively young child. And so I became very quiet and watchful and made quiet friendships with the other boys of my year. And they were very nice, actually. I was very lucky. The cohort I was in were very sweet kids. But it was frightening, you know. Every day was frightening because of the pulsing threat of the headmaster who was a pedophile and a sadist, and then his henchmen who were really dangerously out of control, physically abusive, and there was sexual abuse in the air. And that was all from above. But then from the sides you had, because the school had broken down essentially into a sort of anarchy, there were serious boy bullies, very terrifying. I found it very interesting, actually, because I was interviewing, the boys I knew, I was interviewing them in their late 50s or early 60s, and they all shuddered at  the names of the 2 or 3 real bullies even now. They were more at peace with the Masters because in a way, that’s an understandable threat. Dangerous adult. But the vicious bullying that came in from the sides was was quite a lot, because that’s in with you the whole time. The masters retreat to their houses or their rooms at night. But you’re living with the bullies. And in fact, every evening we had to fight each other. So at 10 til 6, it was ten minutes, it was called ragging. We had to go into the hall, take off our jacket and tie and just get stuck into somebody. Fight them, properly fight them, with a master supervising to see who did it. But it was a very strange mixture because the ideals of the school were honesty and gentlemanliness and all of that sort of thing. But you were meant to fight every evening and carry a knife, sheath, knife. Just weird macho stuff.

Kate: Your description of how big that knife was, I just like took out a measuring tape after. And I found that absolutely wild.

Charles: It’s insane. I don’t know how people didn’t get seriously injured. And we had those knives on us the whole time. Boys lost their tempers. They had games of throwing them at your feet and you had to jump. And that nobody got badly hurt is extraordinary.

Kate: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. I think maybe when everybody thinks about it, maybe it’s not true. But when a lot of people think about a version of their childhood self, they can picture loneliness or fear. But the kind of like high decibel terror that you, and it must have been so intense to feel it again through the stories of the people that you’re interviewing.

Charles: It was an incredibly difficult to write. I normally take three years to write a book, and this took four and a half. And that was because there were days where the computer screen would just look back at me and it was too grim to write the stuff down. Also, I’ll tell you what was very triggering was some reconnecting people I hadn’t seen for maybe four decades and listening to their stuff, and I’d be completely rattled for 48 hours after seeing them because I think although I assumed I’d come to terms with the stuff that had happened to me, hearing other people’s stuff just goes straight in with a knife back at that wound, you know?

Kate: Yeah. I mean, we can feel it with love that when we see love mirrored, it does a thing to us that we can’t even tell ourselves, but I think it’s so true with pain, too, that when you sit in front of somebody and especially who knows the truth of your own life. And then you see it undo something in them.

Charles: Yes, that’s true. And what was very sad, but also, I suppose uplifting, was nearly all of them hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. I got letters, I got a letter from somebody who had asked for a favor and I’d helped him out with something. And then he wrote, he said, now your book is coming out. I’ve been with my wife for 38 years, and I’ve just told her for the first time what happened at the school. We’ve both been crying for an hour. And it’s a lot of that. I’ve had so many letters like that. Sort of devastating, really?

Kate: What do you think it does to people when they do hear the truth?

Charles: Well, that’s an interesting one, because I’ve had so many letters from people who were at that school, but also at similar schools because it’s not unique. And I think a lot of them have said, what do I do? Should I talk to someone? And I say, well, that’s an entirely personal decision, because for some of them it may be better not to and just to keep it tight. And not unpack it because it could be too unbearable. But I do say it helped me a lot to talk about it.

Kate: Yes.

Charles: Yeah.

Kate: I was a very difficult clinical trial situation in which it took a long time to figure out that I was on the wrong side of a situation that did permanent harm. And seeing it reflected back, seeing the surprise in somebody else’s face is probably the first time where it felt like, like if truth has layers, it’s just like sunk to a deeper place.

Charles: Exactly. Like someone else’s reaction makes it more real somehow.

Kate: Yeah. Yes.

Charles: I think also, you’ve got to remember this culture is so different over here, and particularly, so British people don’t talk about emotional stuff very often. And certainly the upper classes, it’s not done to talk about emotions at all. And I found that really chilling with this book. So some of my friends have gone and told their parents about what happened. And I don’t want to generalize, but it’s just true. The mothers have been devastated and the fathers have just not been able to talk about it. And I don’t know whether that’s because they feel guilty or whether they think it’s not a subject that’s worth discussing for whatever reason. And also, I would say it was very different 50 years ago. And I think a lot of these mothers didn’t want their boys to go to these schools, but their fathers had patriarchal power and said, well, this is what we’re doing. This is my son. So the mothers are angry now that their instincts were correct and they were overruled.

Kate: Yeah. And they didn’t mean to pay that cost with their loves.

Charles: That’s right. They couldn’t believe it. And, you know, there was very cruel things that are beyond the obvious. This man I know who’s an absolutely lovely, lovely man. And his parents lived 300 miles away from the school. And he said that was on purpose because they didn’t want to see him. The only time they went to the school was his first day. And then during the three terms, you were allowed out for maybe two, maybe three weekends. They never took him out once. And one day, actually, on a day where we weren’t allowed out, the headmaster said, by the way, your parents are coming. And he was really excited. But then when the, their family Rolls-Royce appeared, it was the driver who drove him to London and sat with him to watch a movie and then dropped him back. So it’s a sort of complicit cruelty for some of the parents, really?

Kate: Yes. I’m just trying to fully wrap my brain around the not talk, the work that not talking about it does. And Canadians have a very polite, quiet, but still been very affected by the therapeutic term. And Americans are, of course, like a very disclosive of culture. I mean, we invented, I think we invented reality programing, but I think it probably is, especially with the amount that people are trying to figure out the like language for mental health and cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy of all kind, I imagine people assume that everybody talks about things at some point.

Charles: Just not over here, but it’s not really part of the culture among a certain background here in a certain age group. It would be considered slightly mad actually to do that.

Kate: I suppose one of the great fears of any kind of truth telling is that you’ll be betrayed a second time.

Charles: That’s possible. But also you’ll be looked down upon by your peers as somehow weak. So, you know, why not just suck it up or tell a friend briefly about it, but don’t bore the world.

Kate: Can I ask you that too, about I remember watching a documentary about this very wealthy family in California. It was entertainment money, and they become wildly rich, but they had these children that were left basically feral. And terrible things happened to those kids and everybody in the culture, I mean, that could have seen, that could have been a witness was being paid by the parents. And so their pain went on so much longer than it, than it would have, we imagine. But there there was such controversy around the movie because people had a hard time wrapping their minds around feeling sorry for the children of the rich, and I know you’ve written about this and thought about this a great deal.

Charles: Yeah, I was worried about that when I wrote this book. I wanted it to not alienate people because it’s kids from very privileged backgrounds. I think, I believe the school I went to is the most expensive private school in England, although I can’t imagine what they spent it on. Certainly wasn’t the teaching staff. But I try and lance that boil early on. You know, this isn’t about privilege, the background is, but it’s about children and vulnerability and the ability of abusers to get to children in a setting. It was easy, you know, there was no one paying attention at all. The parents weren’t. Nobody thought of visiting us or there was no government inspections or the board of governors or trustees who ran it, we never met them, they never came in the school. So it was a closed world of the headmaster’s construction. And he was a very bad man.

Kate: One of the things you do really carefully is you’re trying to understand why it was so closed. Like, why didn’t anybody say anything? Why didn’t they know, you really think so carefully about like, why didn’t this teacher say something? What were they going through? How old were they? What might they have imagined? You spent a really long time thinking about all the corners of why it was so terrible. I wondered if that was difficult to imagine or what the role of imagining it did.

Charles: Yeah. So what I worked out was, he was very clever, you know, abuses of that level of clever people. So he, as I mentioned, he had the Christian thing going. But also he was horrible, just day to day vile, unsmiling, cold and really sadistic in his outlook. But when the parents were involved, he could turn it on, the charm. And all the parents I’ve come across, the one thing they say is that the End of Term report on their son was so amusing. And I think, you think funny people are nice, don’t you? That’s a general prejudice. He wasn’t funny. He was blowing a smokescreen around what he was doing. And then on top of that, he kept the number of staff very small which is clever. I mean, you know, 75 boys don’t need that many, but there were really few, sort of seven teachers, probably. And then on top of that, he chose people who were either in on his game, so abusive, or just not going to blow the whistle. But he closed it down incredibly effectively. I didn’t realize until the end of writing the book that apart from the first day when they dropped their children off in the school, the parents never went in the school again. They came in the grounds. They weren’t allowed inside. And he guarded that front door so no one was allowed in. No parents were allowed to drop by ever. They were allowed to drop off a birthday cake if the boy was having a birthday. But they weren’t allowed in the school. They had to hand it over in front of the school by the car. And if you did drop by, you were told to go. You know, it was it was totally closed.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. This sweetness when you describe, like your very best friend has to be the person who is allowed to hand out pieces of your birthday cake. These, like, very intimate kinds of love. These like flotilla of the only forms of acceptable love. Sounds like these relationships were very. Like, there’d be truly nothing like it.

Charles: Yeah. When you watched World War two movies and the guys are wandering around the yard of the prison, it was like that, you know? And so if you if you were friendly with someone and you had a recess of half an hour, you come up to them and say, would you like to go round with me? And that’s to wander the grounds with them and talk. And that was an intimate connection in a harsh world, you know?

Kate: Yeah.

Charles: And then I think back, there was a friend of mine who’s much older than me, and he went to the same school and he was in charge of a dormitory with younger boys, and one of the younger boys used to wet his bed a lot and he used to quietly help him to fold his sheets and put on new sheets and everything. And then years later, the younger boy got in touch and asked him to be godfather to one of his children because of that kindness, you know?

Kate: Yes. They say that there is a strange thing when just in terms of like cultures around memory is we get a chance to do it again. But we only do it again is usually because someone’s breaking into our quiet world. And then the first time a new generation says why, you have to decide how much of the story.

Charles: It’s true. I found with my kids they can’t read the book, actually, because it’s too, too much. I had, I got one son who’s 30, and he started to read it and he just had terrible nightmares. He went to a weekly boarding school from the age of 16 to 18. So he thought he knew a bit about these places, but he got a bit of a shock. And he woke up one morning having hit his girlfriend in the face, you know, because he just lashed out in the night, you know. So it’s tough. But you kind of, I mean, I really spent time trying to make the language as easy to digest as possible because the story’s ugly and I wanted the prose not to be. So I really worked on that so that a reader can read it and get through the the content without feeling it’s like wading through treacle, you know.

Kate: To try to make the truth bearable for people as part of the exhaustion, I’m sure.

Charles: Yes.

Kate: I’m sorry that I have to explain this again in a different way to make this horrible thing easy for you.

Charles: Yes, that’s it.

Kate: You know, when you get to read a book, you get to talk to somebody. One of the incredible privileges is being able to see their their beautiful brain at work. The way that you thought through the thoughts of how old you were at that time, I found so moving. We forget our little self ,like we really do, like we forget what would have comforted us or what would have terrified us.

Charles: Yeah, it’s interesting. My father was addicted to his camera, which is a wonderful problem to have. And I look at all the photographs made before I went there and I was so happy and exuberant, you know, really a lively child. And then you look at what happens during those five years and it’s just a close down, it’s protective. You know, it’s not stupid. You don’t want to be sticking out too much and in a landscape like that. But it changes you forever.

Kate: That language of cauterized or, you also wrote like Amputated, I think people who’ve had a very abrupt and violent before and after in their life will really understand your language for that.

Charles: Well, there’s no coming back. They’re both finite, aren’t they? Once you’ve been cauterized or amputated, that’s it on those levels. People said to me while I was writing it, they knew I was writing something along this line, you know, they said, it must be so cathartic. And I was thinking, really not, you know, really not. It was reliving it and I got really sick and I was having migraines and all sorts of nightmares and all of that. But then actually, when I finished it, when I’d finished, I read the audio version, and that somehow put it to bad because I remember thinking, because I’ve worked on it so long and so hard, I remember thinking, look, this isn’t in any way perfect, but it’s what I wanted to say. And so that was a moment where I could step back and think, okay, you know, that’s okay.

Kate: Writing and saying it out loud are such different experiences. I think it’s really beautiful that the saying it helped. I found that the whole time I just had this sort of horrible headache that I could never get rid of it. I could feel the, that writing it felt I was getting to a thing I couldn’t have said. I was and I wasn’t, I knew I wasn’t done writing until I mean, you don’t suck the poison out of it, but at least you fully, I found I could tell when it landed. And then at that moment, there was a, I wouldn’t say catharsis, but there’s like a feeling like you’ve gotten, you’ve arrived at a place and there’s a mining or something.

Charles: I understand that. I think that’s true. See, when I wrote it, I didn’t know the purpose. I didn’t know what the end result would be. And the end result has been opening a conversation because this is such a closed topic and it’s so interesting to see. I mean, every day there’s a reference to this book in a sort of conversation of this country because people have been sitting on this. I even had a letter from a widow of a man who had been at the same school as me in 1936, and it had only opened in 1933. And she said that he wouldn’t talk, he had one year there before his parents took him away, and it was so awful that he could never talk about it to her. Now she knew what it meant because she had read the book. And other people saying, now I understand my father. I didn’t go to school like that, but now I understand why he couldn’t connect and all of that sort of thing. So I hope it’s answered some questions for other people that are beyond the obvious, really.

Kate: It also sounds like it’s created more language around intimacy and where intimacy was lacking and then where intimacy had to be formed with such a scarcity of love.

Charles: It was very dangerous to avoid an intimacy. It was so dangerous. And I was sexually abused by a woman who offered intimacy in a caring female way. We were all craving our mothers or some form of soft femininity. So she was, I didn’t know she was a pedophile, but she groomed me by being incredibly nice and gentle and sweet. And of course, you’re going to fall for that if there’s none of that around, you know?

Kate: Yes. Charles, was that last understanding of sexual abuse, did that come later as a realization or did you always kind of hold that? Had you told people about that before?

Charles: I hadn’t told people about it. I knew the two other boys had been abused badly. So I think we sort of talked about it at the time, but we didn’t understand it. And, you know, the clever thing with sexual abuse is of 11 and 12 year old boys, you know, we were played so well. We were, I think we thought we were in some form of romantic connection like we had seen hints of in the movies or something. But of course, the reason why pedophilia is clearly evil is because the child can’t deal with it on any level.

Kate: Yes. Yeah. They can’t know themselves, so how can they-

Charles: They can’t stand any of it. Really? I’m sorry. I couldn’t understand any of it.

Kate: Yeah. Did you say you were, like, early 40s when all this was coming to light?

Charles: Yeah, I think I was about 42. Yeah.

Kate: So in trying to just kind of put together which forms of love in your life have worked and which felt, in a Augustinian language, they say malformed, like when something is, you want it to grow and it just grows in the wrong direction.

Charles: I think what happens if you go through an environment like I did during such formative years, you know, age 13, part of you is destroyed forever and that you have to accept and you can put back the bits that you can. But as I mentioned earlier, if it’s cauterized or amputated, it’s gone. And I think you have to accept that. So I’ve always found romantic relationships very difficult because there’s something that’s going to scare you or that’s going to feel so strange that you have to run from it. And that’s happened a lot to my contemporaries, too. An enormous number of divorces. And I’ve been spared addiction, but a lot of addiction. A lot of real problems. Yeah, it seems to be coping with that void that you’re left with and the feelings that surround that and the feelings that you fail and somehow you can’t be the complete person emotionally.

Kate: That’s such a perfect and horrible description. That’s exactly right.

Charles: Yes.

Kate: It sounds like being a dad has been this, I mean, you look at them and you know what they deserve. That’s a weird it’s a weird and wonderful-

Charles: You know, I think with parenthood, very broad brush approach to looking at parenthood. You either repeat what your parents did or you go 180 degrees the other way. So I didn’t make any of my children go to boarding school, I made that very clear. My two sons decided to go in their teens, but as I say, to weekly boarding in a completely different environment. Yeah, one of them found it easy. One didn’t. And I tried to take him out, but he was determined to sort of keep going. Yeah, with parenting, I’m very, you’re very careful with children, you know? Got to be very careful with who they’re mixing with. And I do, I’ve always bored my children by asking them when they’re at school is everyone nice to you? Are there any teachers that make you feel uneasy and all of that because you need to do a checklist occasionally.

Kate: Yes.

Charles: And I’ve always said, you know, if anyone tells you you can’t tell your parent something, then you have to tell me.

Kate: Yes. My son has a one layer face test and that’s the only way I can check. It’s like I’m checking myself, too. Like you’re still okay, right?

Charles: Yes.

Kate: Yes. It’s a beautiful thing when we see the wholeness of others.

Charles: Yes.

Kate: And I imagine it gives back pieces where we say, I know what full compassion looks like. I know it because I can, because I feel it for them.

Charles: I tell you that there have been moments where I thought, thank goodness, that they’re doing something so different. So my three eldest daughters, they’re all in their 30s now. I remember taking them away from England because I didn’t want them to go through anything like my schooling. And they went to their first day at primary school where we were in South Africa and they came back clutching these pieces of paper at the end of the first day, and there were these sort of lines on it. And I went, what’s that? And they said that the teacher told them to draw themselves. And then they were told, that’s you, that’s your body, and nobody can touch it without your permission. And the contrast between that and a school where boys were whipped and bleeding and beaten up and, you know, the physical abuse every day was so extreme. It was very moving, actually.

Kate: Yes. When we see someone else be given something that we wish we could just give ourselves.

Charles: Yes.

Kate: It sounds like one of the great themes of your love is that, that you should have felt it all along.

Charles: Yeah. It would have been nice to have someone you could go to at that school or in life who could have made it safe. But we didn’t have that sort of relationship with our parents, you know, most of us. I remember one of my friends telling me the strangest thing about his first day of being sent to this school was that he was alone with his father in the car. He was aged eight and he had never had that before. And his father was talking to him and he didn’t know what this was all about because I’d never had a conversation before.

Kate: My gosh.

Charles: And the father was telling him, you know, you’re a very pretty little boy, and there might be all the boys are going to be interested in you and you just have to say no. So the first conversation he had with his father was his father admitting he was sending him to a potentially abusive environment, and he’d better watch out.

Kate: It’s like speaking an entirely new, terrible language.

Charles: Yeah. And an eight year old doesn’t understand what that means. But he remembered it because it was just so strange.

Kate: Yes. Yeah. I imagine so strange and so foreboding. I didn’t ask about your mom, but I know part of understanding her was a big part of this.

Charles: Yeah. Look, she was great fun and terrific, really, sense of humor. I’m not sure maternity was her strong suit, but I’m not, you know, I was very gentle on my parents in the book because I’m a parent and I’ve made many mistakes. It’s not a time to criticize your parents. Also, like 98% of parents, they did their best. And that’s all you have to really hold on to, I think.

Kate: I interviewed Tara Westover one time. Did you read Educated? I think you like it. Educated is a book about survivalist Utah parents. And she has a line I think you would like where she’s trying to account these honest accounts of their parents without, sort of without any additional brutality, just like the careful, honest look. And she said, I you know, my parents did their best and her best was devastating.

Charles: Yes. That’s very good.

Kate: This was the great privilege. I can’t tell you how deeply moving I found your book and how careful and like excruciatingly lovely it was in its honesty. And you were truly yourself. And it was, it’s obvious to anyone who sees it.

Charles: Thank you, Kate.

Kate: Thanks for doing this.

Kate: Pleasure.

Kate: Hello, my dears. That was a heavy one. How are we doing? It might bring up the fact that sometimes the pain that you experienced as a child should not have happened and that it was not your fault and that you deserved better. We don’t have a culture that gives us a lot of room to be honest about what things cost us, whether it’s people or institutions that fail us. Sometimes we just wish there was some wonderful ledger that was keeping count of the cost. So if that’s you, here’s a blessing for if you had a painful childhood. Blessed are you who come with your own sorrow, allowing your pain to convey all its truth. For here is where reality is a welcome guest. Here is where grief is understood at its core. Or the dark shadow of betrayal is seen from the inside. Hear, my dear, is where the work of healing begins. Blessed are you who mourn as you meet yourself once again as a little child who needed protection but did not receive it, who deserved respect, but was not afforded it. The things that should have happened but didn’t and the things that happened but shouldn’t. The broken family systems and normalized cruelties that allowed your pain to continue far beyond what it should have. For you have come now to the God who is alive to your past, your present, and your future. And who has already moved heaven and earth to restore your dignity and return you to yourself. And P.S., take a minute to remind your past self that you are loved now, tomorrow and forever. And rest. You are loved.

Kate: All right, darlings, we would love to hear from you. Charles spoke so beautifully about how telling our stories opens something up and maybe even heals something inside of us. How has sharing your story helped you connect with others? Write me a note on social media. I’m @katecbowler. Or leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. And if you happen to be anywhere near Apple Podcasts or Spotify, if you could make sure that you’re subscribed, it’s a subscribe button. If you’re there, then you will not miss an episode. I also realized only recently that I’m not subscribed to my own podcast because I didn’t know where the subscribe button was. So no shame. No shame if you don’t know what that is. And a big thank you to everyone who makes this podcast a podcast. Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School are my theological home. Thank you for your support of all of our projects. And thank you to everyone who works on this podcast, making my life infinitely better. Jessica Ritchie. Harriet Putnam, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azanio, and Katherine Smith. You are the best thing that I never created with my own human body. And next week is a special one, I sat down with Parker Palmer. Guys, he is O.G. perfection. You’re going to absolutely love his wisdom. I kind of felt like I was supposed to be taking notes, but that is confusing because it’s a podcast. So you didn’t hear scribbling. Just my super attentive face. We talked about aging and what it means to reengage in community right now. He is so wise. Sign up at katebowler.com/newsletter so you do not miss an episode. And I’ll talk to you next week, my loves. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.