Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Dad, I Want to Know About the War (with Becky Ellis) | Episode 32

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Dad, I Want to Know About the War (with Becky Ellis) | Episode 32 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:02
  Becky Ellis: And I thought, wait, wait, what did you say?
• 0:04
  Becky Ellis: Like I didn't catch that, and I ran over to the drawer, the junk drawer in the kitchen, where we keep, you know, band-aids and pens, a thousand pens and scraps of paper, and I pulled out a pad of paper and a pen and can you tell me again?
• 0:18
  Becky Ellis: And I wrote it down and then he started talking.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:31
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:35
  Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:43
  Crista Cowan: I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
• 0:46
  Crista Cowan: Every year around Veterans Day, I spend a lot of time thinking about my grandfathers.
• 0:51
  Crista Cowan: Both of my grandfathers served in World War II and they both had a very different approach to how they communicated about the things that they experienced.
• 1:00
  Crista Cowan: I think that that's not unusual.
• 1:19
  Crista Cowan: I think that that's not unusual If you have a father.
• 1:22
  Crista Cowan: Beautiful book called Little Avalanches, where she identifies herself as a timber wolf pup.
• 1:29
  Crista Cowan: Now, that's not a phrase that I was familiar with, but as she shares her story of coming to understand more about her father and his wartime experiences, not only did the meaning of that become clear, but a lot of other things became clear as well.
• 1:45
  Crista Cowan: One of the things that I'm most impressed with and you'll hear this as she talks is how, even though her father did not ever want to speak about his wartime experiences, she was always just there to listen, and when he finally did want to open up, she was ready.
• 2:04
  Crista Cowan: I hope you enjoy my conversation with author Becky Ellis.
• 2:08
  Crista Cowan: Well, becky, thank you so much for being here.
• 2:12
  Crista Cowan: I am so excited to have this conversation with you.
• 2:15
  Crista Cowan: I think it's going to be meaningful for a lot of people, so if you wouldn't mind, let's just jump right into it.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: Would you just share maybe a little bit about your memories of childhood and and how the things your father struggled with shaped your upbringing?
• 2:31
  Becky Ellis: Absolutely Well.
• 2:32
  Becky Ellis: Thank you for having me.
• 2:33
  Becky Ellis: First of all, I really appreciate being here and I love what you're doing on this podcast.
• 2:37
  Becky Ellis: So thank you.
• 2:39
  Becky Ellis: And my childhood I was raised in California in the 1970s and while other kids were learning to roller skate and listening to disco, I was learning to shoot a gun, getting my teeth drilled without novocaine, that kind of thing which sounds a little bit intense.
• 2:56
  Becky Ellis: I remember on my sixth birthday, my dad my dad was a boater.
• 3:02
  Becky Ellis: He had a wooden boat and he loved to water ski.
• 3:05
  Becky Ellis: It kind of got away from everything while we were out on the water.
• 3:08
  Becky Ellis: And my sixth birthday it was he wanted me to learn to water ski and I still wore footie pajamas and had on my baby teeth and he had a pair of trick skis that we learned on my brother and I, and I had watched my brother do it the year before, so I knew how hard learning to water ski was.
• 3:29
  Becky Ellis: And while it might sound like fun, learning anything with my dad was not fun.
• 3:34
  Becky Ellis: It was very.
• 3:37
  Becky Ellis: It was a skill you had to know and we were never allowed to quit.
• 3:41
  Becky Ellis: So I tried and tried and tried and tried and had water in every part of my body and I wanted to give up and I allowed to quit.
• 3:44
  Becky Ellis: So I tried and tried and tried and tried and had water in every part of my body and I wanted to give up and I wanted to quit.
• 3:48
  Becky Ellis: But my father basically said, if you give up, you're dead.
• 3:52
  Becky Ellis: So my childhood really was about my dad wanted us to be tough as nails.
• 3:58
  Becky Ellis: He wanted us to be prepared and it was about survival.
• 4:02
  Becky Ellis: Everything we did was about learning to survive and being capable and competent and strong and share of incidents that required that kind of exactness in the way that you had to perform.
• 4:33
  Crista Cowan: What did that mean for your relationship with your father, Like when you think of the word relationship and father in the same sentence and think about your childhood.
• 4:41
  Crista Cowan: What did that look like or feel like?
• 4:43
  Becky Ellis: I wanted to love my father and I wanted my father to love me and I respected him.
• 4:49
  Becky Ellis: He was a surgeon, he was a good doctor and he was also an alcoholic, so he was unpredictable and I I think I feared him and I revered him at the same time.
• 5:02
  Becky Ellis: He was the kind of person who if he would protect us, his family, against anybody, but nobody was protecting us against him and that was really challenging.
• 5:17
  Becky Ellis: So I think feared and revered are kind of the feeling I have, but also this yearning for deep love yeah, that was ever present.
• 5:26
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, did you see that in him with anyone else, or was he pretty much a consistent personality in how he related to others as well?
• 5:37
  Becky Ellis: With my siblings and I he was the same.
• 5:40
  Becky Ellis: He treated us each a little bit differently boys from girls, but not that much.
• 5:45
  Becky Ellis: He wanted his daughters to be really strong and tough.
• 5:48
  Becky Ellis: And he wasn't like that with other people.
• 5:51
  Becky Ellis: He was like that with some other people, I think people that he loved he was like that with, and I think other people he was very guarded against and could come off as being a little bit cold.
• 6:07
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 6:08
  Becky Ellis: If that makes sense.
• 6:09
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, and my father married four times and had eight children.
• 6:13
  Becky Ellis: So we were this kind of kind of blended but fractured family at the same time.
• 6:18
  Becky Ellis: I don't know his first wife or first three kids, I didn't know at all, but the rest of us, especially siblings, were all pretty bonded, kind of that survival.
• 6:30
  Becky Ellis: We were in this together.
• 6:32
  Becky Ellis: We're all experiencing the same thing.
• 6:34
  Becky Ellis: So there was that dynamic going on and also this dynamic of my father replaced women, like most men replace cars, and I knew that he had abandoned his first children.
• 6:47
  Becky Ellis: So always present in my heart was he could abandon me too, and while there were some days when I really wanted him to do that, I really didn't want him to do that, sure.
• 6:59
  Becky Ellis: So there was this really complex dynamic of I want my father to love me and I needed I was an adaptive child which I turned into an adaptive person basically, as I think the psychology behind yeah, so you were raised with this knowledge of this previous family.
• 7:21
  Crista Cowan: Were you also raised with the knowledge of any of his involvement in the war or anything, anything that would have given you pause, even as you grew to think, oh, this might be why he's the way he is.
• 7:35
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, my father had a one document from the war that he kept over his desk that might be the only thing that survived every move he ever made which was his Silver Star kind of award certificate.
• 7:51
  Becky Ellis: So I knew he had been in the war and sometimes when I was little and he was drunk, he would kind of start firing off a really scary story and then he'd abruptly stop, sort of.
• 8:03
  Becky Ellis: It was sort of like machine gun fire is how my sister actually describes it is how he would try to deliver some stories when we were little.
• 8:12
  Becky Ellis: But talking about the war was off limits.
• 8:15
  Becky Ellis: No one was allowed to ask him about that Silver Star document.
• 8:19
  Becky Ellis: No one was allowed to talk about the war.
• 8:21
  Becky Ellis: So we knew he had been in the war and I think I always, always felt this deep wound that he carried.
• 8:28
  Becky Ellis: And sometimes he talked about Nazis and like we would have to hide from the Nazis and I knew there weren't Nazis around but and I so I knew there was a lot of residue and leftover stuff from the war and when I was young I didn't know it was PTSD, but I learned that as I grew.
• 8:50
  Crista Cowan: Sure, yeah, I don't even know that there was a label for that when we were young, right Like they didn't label it that.
• 8:57
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, there was not a label for that.
• 8:59
  Crista Cowan: So at what point in your own kind of emotional and relationship development in your life Did you decide that this silence about this experience needed to be confronted?
• 9:11
  Becky Ellis: When I was in college I did a study abroad and during that time I visited Germany, which my father knew I was.
• 9:20
  Becky Ellis: I was studying abroad in England, in London, and I told him, oh, I'm going to go on a European little trip, backpacking thing afterwards.
• 9:27
  Becky Ellis: And he said Don't go to Germany, like it was the place to avoid.
• 9:31
  Becky Ellis: Stay away from blah, blah, blah.
• 9:33
  Becky Ellis: I won't go into all the horrible things he would say about Germans and he so, of course I went to Germany.
• 9:40
  Becky Ellis: Right, I was 20 years old and I'm going to do what I want to do.
• 9:44
  Becky Ellis: And he raised me in his likeness.
• 9:46
  Becky Ellis: So I rebelled and I went to Germany.
• 9:47
  Becky Ellis: And when I was in Germany I met an SS officer who suggested that my girlfriends and I go to Dachau.
• 9:57
  Becky Ellis: And we went to Dachau and it was a life changing experience, probably for anyone that visits.
• 10:03
  Becky Ellis: And I thought to myself for the first time.
• 10:07
  Becky Ellis: I thought, oh, maybe this is why dad won't talk about the war.
• 10:11
  Becky Ellis: It makes me almost start crying because it was such an emotional, it's such an emotional experience.
• 10:16
  Becky Ellis: And I thought, oh, when I come back now I know what to talk to him about.
• 10:21
  Becky Ellis: Because I felt like, if this is what he saw and this is what he experienced.
• 10:24
  Becky Ellis: No wonder he doesn't what to talk to him about.
• 10:24
  Becky Ellis: Because I felt like, if this is what he saw and this is what he experienced, no wonder he doesn't want to talk about it.
• 10:29
  Becky Ellis: And when I went, got back home, I thought, okay, now is my chance, I'm going to talk to him about this.
• 10:34
  Becky Ellis: And absolutely not, he would not talk about it.
• 10:38
  Becky Ellis: I thought I told you to stay away from that place, becky, that that's the end of that.
• 10:43
  Becky Ellis: Like we're not going to, are you going to ruin this beautiful day?
• 10:45
  Becky Ellis: Was a common comment when anyone wanted to talk about something from the past.
• 10:51
  Becky Ellis: My father would never talk about the past, not five years ago, not five minutes ago.
• 10:55
  Becky Ellis: We were always moving forward, always forward, always forward.
• 10:59
  Becky Ellis: Won't talk about a past wife or his first children, nothing, always.
• 11:03
  Becky Ellis: That's.
• 11:05
  Becky Ellis: That's not the way you survive in battle.
• 11:06
  Becky Ellis: You don't look back, you keep moving forward and that's the way we lived.
• 11:10
  Becky Ellis: So I didn't bring it up again.
• 11:14
  Becky Ellis: And there were moments when I wanted to, but I didn't, because I carried this profound kind of sadness for what like an understanding of what he might have been through, and I learned that his division did liberate a concentration camp they liberated Nordhausen and it was a horrible experience for anyone that was there.
• 11:36
  Becky Ellis: And when he was 89, he visited me in my home in Portland and I had three daughters at that time and was married.
• 11:47
  Becky Ellis: And he said to me do we have any issues to clear up?
• 11:51
  Becky Ellis: And I thought what is he talking about?
• 11:54
  Becky Ellis: What happened today Because he's not talking about yesterday or any time before that, that's for sure what happened in the last three seconds that we need to talk about?
• 12:03
  Becky Ellis: But I realized he's talking about the past.
• 12:06
  Becky Ellis: He's asking me he's 89.
• 12:08
  Becky Ellis: And I just looked at him for who he was.
• 12:12
  Becky Ellis: You know he was an 89-year-old man and I thought this is my chance, this is my chance to ask him about the war.
• 12:18
  Becky Ellis: And I said, dad, I want to know about the war.
• 12:22
  Crista Cowan: And that was your introduction to your.
• 12:23
  Crista Cowan: That was your introduction to the conversation, was that sentence?
• 12:27
  Becky Ellis: That sentence.
• 12:27
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, dad, I want to know about the war, and so that's.
• 12:31
  Crista Cowan: that's how it all started, and did he immediately open up, or was he taken aback by that question?
• 12:38
  Crista Cowan: What was his reaction?
• 12:40
  Becky Ellis: He was definitely taken aback.
• 12:42
  Becky Ellis: What he said to me was my feet were frozen for 172 days.
• 12:47
  Becky Ellis: There's nothing more to it.
• 12:48
  Becky Ellis: And I said I'm sure there's more, dad.
• 12:52
  Becky Ellis: Well, that's all you need to know.
• 12:54
  Becky Ellis: I needed to know more.
• 12:56
  Becky Ellis: I was persistent.
• 12:57
  Becky Ellis: He raised me in his likeness.
• 12:59
  Becky Ellis: Of all my siblings, they say I'm probably the most like my father and back and forth.
• 13:07
  Becky Ellis: We went for probably two hours.
• 13:09
  Becky Ellis: He wasn't going to talk.
• 13:10
  Becky Ellis: I was persistent, he wasn't going to talk.
• 13:13
  Becky Ellis: And finally he said to me I was a staff sergeant, 1st Battalion Company C, 415th Regiment, 104th Infantry Division.
• 13:22
  Becky Ellis: And he said it hard and fast, like he had said it a thousand times before and it's the first time I'd ever heard it.
• 13:31
  Becky Ellis: And it was as if he was saying his name, which was a shock enough to me, and I thought wait, what did you say?
• 13:38
  Becky Ellis: Like I didn't catch that.
• 13:40
  Becky Ellis: And I ran over to the drawer, the junk drawer in the kitchen, where we keep, you know, band-aids and pens, a thousand pens and scraps of paper, and I pulled out a pad of paper and a pen and can you tell me again?
• 13:52
  Becky Ellis: And I wrote it down.
• 13:53
  Becky Ellis: And then he started talking, asking really basic, rudimentary questions like wait a minute.
• 14:07
  Becky Ellis: How are armies divided up?
• 14:07
  Becky Ellis: What does that mean, what does this mean?
• 14:08
  Becky Ellis: And I was getting kind of a basic lesson in the way military divisions are set up, I think.
• 14:15
  Crista Cowan: So do you think approaching that conversation that way, from a little bit more of a analytical perspective as opposed to an emotional perspective, helped him open up in that moment?
• 14:24
  Becky Ellis: I think so and I think also showing I was curious and I think taking that time for me to really understand what is a battalion and what is a regiment, and he told me his unit had a 300% casualty rate.
• 14:41
  Becky Ellis: And I was like, wait a second, how is that possible?
• 14:44
  Becky Ellis: Do the math?
• 14:45
  Becky Ellis: You're sitting here, you know, and his answer was my survival was insignificant.
• 14:51
  Becky Ellis: I said I still don't understand the math and so he did the math for me and it's like, oh, I get it, his, his unit was essentially replaced three full times and he and one other man were the only ones that made it as long as he did.
• 15:08
  Becky Ellis: And his infantry division 104th, which are the Timberwolves.
• 15:15
  Becky Ellis: They had 195 days on the battlefield, which is the longest consecutive battle of any other army division in World War II, and he made it 172 days before he collapsed on the battlefield.
• 15:29
  Crista Cowan: Wow, and so did all of that information come out in that one and done conversation, or is this something that opened a door?
• 15:39
  Becky Ellis: It opened a door.
• 15:40
  Becky Ellis: It took a while that he was visiting for a week and every day that week, you know, we talked for a couple hours and he said that's enough.
• 15:50
  Becky Ellis: And I said well, let's pick up again tomorrow.
• 15:52
  Becky Ellis: And he said okay, and then the next day he was not going to talk about it and I said you promised, you know you promised.
• 15:57
  Becky Ellis: And so we started talking again and once he would get into it he would start, he would start sharing, but it was really hard and the hardest thing to get to was how he felt about it.
• 16:11
  Becky Ellis: That probably took a year and it was he and I talking.
• 16:13
  Becky Ellis: Every time he talked to me after that visit he would open up a little bit more, a little bit more about the war, and we talked about once, sometimes twice a week and he eventually really opened up about it and would say I forgot to tell you this thing, or I need you to understand this, about what I told you, which was really meaningful because he really wanted me to deeply understand his experience.
• 16:39
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it sounds like it.
• 16:40
  Crista Cowan: In the in between times, even in that first week, did you find yourself going online and doing research and trying to understand more so that you could ask more intelligent questions, or did you just kind of let it happen organically?
• 16:53
  Becky Ellis: I did.
• 16:54
  Becky Ellis: I started doing research, I went to the library, I went to the bookstore.
• 16:57
  Becky Ellis: I, you know, I got a stack of books, but the thing that was missing in almost all of them was that feeling, and so I kept asking my father about that and he said, you know, he said we were dehumanized.
• 17:11
  Becky Ellis: We were trained not to feel, and it's absolutely horrible, but utterly necessary to be dehumanized.
• 17:19
  Becky Ellis: As a soldier, you cannot go into battle if you are feeling, he said, the grief would have would have killed him.
• 17:25
  Becky Ellis: So that was that's what I kept going back to, and I really wanted to understand.
• 17:30
  Becky Ellis: My father didn't want to understand other people's experience, and now that I understand his experience, I realized there's a lot of commonality among every every veterans experience is unique.
• 17:43
  Becky Ellis: Every person's story is unique, but there's a lot of commonalities of all of our stories.
• 17:49
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, for sure.
• 17:50
  Crista Cowan: As he opened up to you, did that facilitate his ability to open up to others, or did you become the singular conduit for that?
• 18:00
  Becky Ellis: It did facilitate his ability to open to others.
• 18:03
  Becky Ellis: In fact, about six months, eight months into him telling me his story, he came well, maybe it was a year and a half because he came back to Portland a couple times and one day he showed up wearing a World War Two veterans hat and I thought he had lost his mind Because never before had he shared stories.
• 18:24
  Becky Ellis: He wouldn't talk to anybody about it, and now he's broadcasting it on his forehead and someone stopped us in the airport to shake his hand, you know, and he willingly shook the guy's hand and started a conversation with him and it was transformative, I think, for him to have that.
• 18:45
  Becky Ellis: It's like a valve opened in him and he was ready to talk about it, I think.
• 18:50
  Crista Cowan: Wow, that's amazing that that you could provide both the, the, you know, like the propensity or the propel propulsion to share those stories, but that then it wasn't all on you to bear the burden of that alone.
• 19:04
  Crista Cowan: Did your siblings, I mean, did they come into this experience at all?
• 19:10
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, I think so.
• 19:10
  Becky Ellis: He talked to them about the war to a lot.
• 19:13
  Becky Ellis: I have a brother in law that was, is is a Marine and he talked to him a lot.
• 19:19
  Becky Ellis: But I think that my questions took us to a whole nother level.
• 19:24
  Becky Ellis: And I was, I was documenting and I started, like I said, with that pad of paper and it eventually morphed into.
• 19:34
  Becky Ellis: He was giving me so much information and I didn't want to miss anything that I started like being sneaky and recording on my iPhone Because I thought, oh, my 89 year old dad doesn't really know what I'm doing, but he was smart, he was sharp and eventually he caught on that I was recording and when we would really get into it, you know, when he started feeling comfortable with it, he would ask me, he would say this is important, are you recording?
• 19:58
  Becky Ellis: And I thought, oh, he found me out, so he, that's yeah.
• 20:06
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, so over the course of a year, two years, how long did this go on?
• 20:12
  Becky Ellis: He passed away when he was 96.
• 20:14
  Becky Ellis: So I got seven years with him after he started talking about it and he pretty much talked to me about it Every time I spoke to him maybe not the last couple months of his life, but otherwise he always wanted to tell me one more thing.
• 20:31
  Crista Cowan: And in the process of all of that, storytelling was there.
• 20:35
  Crista Cowan: You know of the far past.
• 20:37
  Crista Cowan: Was there ever a visiting of a more recent past and a processing of the stories of your childhood?
• 20:43
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, there was, because I started to see connections.
• 20:48
  Becky Ellis: His replacement an example of that is the way men were replaced in battle.
• 20:54
  Becky Ellis: I started thinking is this why he replaced his wife so easily?
• 20:59
  Becky Ellis: Is he not emotionally attached?
• 21:02
  Becky Ellis: Is he still somewhat dehumanized?
• 21:05
  Becky Ellis: And while I thought that my dad had a large capacity for emotion and feeling, I think he could turn it on and off.
• 21:13
  Becky Ellis: And I started making those connections and I talked to him about it, which was really hard.
• 21:20
  Becky Ellis: But, like I said, he taught me to be persistent and, it's funny, I had no problem confronting my father and being a little bit rebellious toward him, especially as I grew older, when I wasn't afraid of him anymore.
• 21:39
  Becky Ellis: So I talked to him a lot about it.
• 21:41
  Becky Ellis: I'm like why did you make me get my teeth drilled without Novocaine?
• 21:45
  Becky Ellis: That's crazy.
• 21:46
  Becky Ellis: I would never do that to my children, you know.
• 21:49
  Becky Ellis: And he had his reasons.
• 21:52
  Crista Cowan: So, and then, how?
• 21:54
  Crista Cowan: Then, as you kind of have emotionally and mentally processed that whole experience with him, how has your perception of him changed?
• 22:10
  Becky Ellis: changed.
• 22:10
  Becky Ellis: My father got to a point in his story that was so unimaginable to me that I finally saw him as a separate person, separate from myself, for the first time, and I saw him as a wounded veteran and a lonely man, kind of a distant father, and I think that was such a gift to see him separate from myself without any of my needs or desires attached to him, because how often do we really see our parents or our partners or our children without our needs and expectations?
• 22:45
  Becky Ellis: My dad used to come to visit me and I would want to take him to grandparents day at my children's school and I would want him to wear a certain thing and act a certain way and not shame my children or embarrass me.
• 22:58
  Becky Ellis: But he was super unpredictable and I never knew how he was going to act and in that moment of seeing him, for who he was like, all of that fell away and I didn't, I didn't expect anything out of him anymore and I didn't need anything from him anymore, of course, and that was such a gift in the process of all of it, such a growth moment for me of being able to not of being able to see someone without those desires and expectations.
• 23:30
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, it was growing for me with my relationship with my children and my partner and and me as a person.
• 23:37
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that is a gift.
• 23:38
  Crista Cowan: That's a huge gift to be able to recognize somebody for who, all of who, they are, not just their connection or relationship to you.
• 23:46
  Crista Cowan: I think that's incredible that you were able to reach that place.
• 23:50
  Crista Cowan: As you were recording these stories, obviously you kind of have a documentary nature to you.
• 23:57
  Crista Cowan: Was the intention always to write about them, or were you just writing them down to capture them for yourself?
• 24:03
  Becky Ellis: You know, the intention to write about it came quickly and At first I didn't know how much I was going to get out of my dad.
• 24:12
  Becky Ellis: But I started, you know, when I started, and so I started writing those down too, and I worked in publishing my whole career and so I pretty quickly saw oh, this could make an important book, an important story.
• 24:44
  Becky Ellis: And my dad knew that I was writing a book and that's why he would say are you recording this?
• 24:50
  Becky Ellis: This is important, this needs to go in the book, this is important.
• 24:54
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and do you think you know you talked a little bit about your father's ability to turn on or off his emotions.
• 25:01
  Crista Cowan: Was that something you also inherited from him through lived experience that allowed you to do this, or did you lean all the way into those emotions as you went through the process of both spending this time with him and then recording or writing this book afterwards?
• 25:19
  Becky Ellis: It's still my lifetime work of of letting my guard down, being soft, being vulnerable, not being guarded.
• 25:26
  Becky Ellis: And you know, writing a memoir is a.
• 25:28
  Becky Ellis: It's a practice in being vulnerable.
• 25:29
  Becky Ellis: Writing a memoir is a it's a practice in being vulnerable.
• 25:32
  Becky Ellis: Putting it out in the world is a huge practice in that.
• 25:35
  Becky Ellis: So I would say I am all of those things still, but in seeing my father, I was able to also see myself, and that was also a gift.
• 25:49
  Becky Ellis: I think that's what we're after when we're looking for our family lineage.
• 25:53
  Becky Ellis: I think we're trying to figure out more.
• 25:56
  Becky Ellis: Who are we?
• 25:58
  Becky Ellis: And when I did see my father, I started seeing similarities.
• 26:01
  Becky Ellis: I thought that I had escaped my childhood.
• 26:04
  Becky Ellis: I moved away, I lived a super different life.
• 26:07
  Becky Ellis: I was raising my children in a really different way, and when my father started revealing himself to me, I started to discover how I had not escaped my childhood.
• 26:18
  Becky Ellis: I was hiding from it.
• 26:20
  Becky Ellis: In the same way, my father was hiding from his past.
• 26:23
  Becky Ellis: I was hiding from mine.
• 26:26
  Becky Ellis: And so I started to confront my own past and bring that more into my life and started sharing my stories and my deeper self once I.
• 26:34
  Becky Ellis: Once I started to understand myself better and I started to catch myself as a parent like, oh, this is a way I'm being like my father.
• 26:43
  Becky Ellis: I was shocked actually, you know, because I didn't want to be like that at all, but I was also raising my children to be they don't quit.
• 26:53
  Becky Ellis: I never let them quit anything.
• 26:55
  Becky Ellis: And you know, it seems so simple, like it should have been so obvious to me, but it wasn't it.
• 27:02
  Becky Ellis: I really had to look at that and that was.
• 27:05
  Becky Ellis: He provided a beautiful mirror for me.
• 27:08
  Becky Ellis: And his story provided a beautiful mirror for my own, it sounds like it.
• 27:15
  Crista Cowan: Have your children noticed a difference?
• 27:17
  Crista Cowan: Or is this something that you talk with them about?
• 27:20
  Crista Cowan: Or have you just made kind of those changes internally, without any external communication around them?
• 27:27
  Becky Ellis: No, it's something, my something readers have asked me a lot is have your kids read this book?
• 27:33
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, they have, and I think what they say is we know you so much better now that we know your stories.
• 27:42
  Becky Ellis: So I think there's such a deeper understanding of who I am, why they were raised the way they were, and it has opened up this opportunity to have the deeper, messier conversations when I'm parenting and even though they're all in their 20s now, I still am trying to parent them, as is a hard habit to give up.
• 28:06
  Becky Ellis: I am able now to say I think I'm having this response because of this situation and the conversations aren't perfect.
• 28:18
  Becky Ellis: They're a little bit messy, but they're much, they're much more connective and they're much deeper.
• 28:25
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that was beautifully said.
• 28:26
  Crista Cowan: That idea of understanding each other's stories and also making the attempt to look at things from one another's perspectives, I think is one of the most deeply connecting things we can do as families, whether it's parents to children or siblings, or even as we look back through our family history.
• 28:45
  Crista Cowan: To just have that grace for one another is a really important space to give each other.
• 28:52
  Crista Cowan: So I love that you've leaned into that with your own children.
• 28:55
  Becky Ellis: Yeah, they push me to grow.
• 28:57
  Becky Ellis: I raise them like I am too, I think.
• 29:02
  Crista Cowan: So if you had to give advice to somebody, right like, there's a lot of us who are growing up with parents who I mean not a lot of us have parents who are in World War Two, but we've got parents who were in the Korean conflict or in Vietnam and a lot of them shy away from having those conversations to varying degrees, some as extreme as your father's, others who share all of the details but none of the emotion.
• 29:27
  Crista Cowan: So what advice would you give to help people navigate those conversations or initiate those conversations?
• 29:36
  Becky Ellis: That's a great question, and I read a statistic that 26% of adult children are estranged from a parent.
• 29:45
  Becky Ellis: And it makes me so sad because I think if we could all just understand each other's experience and share each other's stories, maybe we could be more deeply connected and accepting.
• 29:57
  Becky Ellis: And so I guess the advice that I would give is try to have the conversations.
• 30:05
  Becky Ellis: Keep trying if it's safe I know some situations aren't safe but if it feels safe, keep trying.
• 30:12
  Becky Ellis: And I have a friend, a good friend, who said I'm trying, but my mom, all she wants to talk about is her broken furnace.
• 30:19
  Becky Ellis: What do I do?
• 30:20
  Becky Ellis: And I think there are strategies and ways and tips, and I have on my website I have a free download for 10 tips for trying to have the deeper, more connective conversations, because those are the ones that are hard to have.
• 30:37
  Becky Ellis: We can all talk about football, scores and the weather, but we want to get beyond that.
• 30:42
  Becky Ellis: We want to get deeper than that, and those are the ones that are harder to have.
• 30:47
  Becky Ellis: And I think you know, like I told you, one of the one of the kind of tips is if you start talking to somebody about the lighter things and express that curiosity and then go deeper from there and go deeper from there.
• 31:04
  Becky Ellis: You don't have to.
• 31:05
  Becky Ellis: You can go slow.
• 31:07
  Becky Ellis: You can start slowly and take your time.
• 31:09
  Becky Ellis: Took me six years to get all of this out of my father and it your time.
• 31:15
  Crista Cowan: Took me six years to get all of this out of my father and it takes time, yeah, and you also had to kind of remove your own experience from that conversation, because it would have been easy to go into those conversations with your own frustration or anger or emotions around all of the results of his behavior rather than getting to the core of who he was and his experience, the humility that that takes.
• 31:37
  Crista Cowan: And the word forgiveness gets thrown around a lot and I don't even know that it's that it's just remove yourself in order to have this connecting conversation and then allow that to guide your decisions about how you proceed forward.
• 31:49
  Crista Cowan: That takes a lot of courage.
• 31:51
  Crista Cowan: It takes a lot of humility to be able to step into those spaces and, like you said, it needs to be a safe space to be able to do that.
• 32:00
  Crista Cowan: So I love that.
• 32:01
  Crista Cowan: I think that's great.
• 32:02
  Crista Cowan: We'll go ahead and put the link to your website in the show notes and make sure that everybody has access to that, because I think that's important If you want to just share to that.
• 32:13
  Crista Cowan: Because I think that's important If you want to just share, share your website.
• 32:17
  Becky Ellis: We'd love to have you have direct people there.
• 32:19
  Becky Ellis: Okay, it's Becky Ellisnet, B-E-C-K-Y-E-L-L-I-Snet, and I agree with the term.
• 32:24
  Becky Ellis: Forgiveness is thrown around and people have asked me do you forgive your father and and how did you have closure with your father?
• 32:32
  Becky Ellis: And the things about that are I feel like it's an openness, more than closure or forgiveness, it's the willingness to be open and I think once we start really hearing each other's stories, our hearts break and they break wide open.
• 32:49
  Becky Ellis: And keeping them open is a challenge.
• 32:52
  Becky Ellis: You know, living in that state of vulnerability is a challenge, but I feel like that's the goal is just get your heart broken so open that it never really closes back up again, and that that's a beautiful thing and that happens.
• 33:08
  Crista Cowan: That is a really beautiful thing.
• 33:09
  Crista Cowan: How do you think the world would be different, or our communities or our families would be different, if people were more willing to step into heartbreaking, wide, open experiences with one another?
• 33:24
  Becky Ellis: That's a great question, and I think that we are all profoundly shaped by the secrets we keep and forever changed by the stories we share, and so if we were all able to do that in places where we felt safe, there's this idea that we all want to be seen and we all want to be heard, but what I've experienced is that we really all want to be felt, and there's this moment where I feel you, feeling me, and if we can be open enough to be felt instead of just seen and heard, I think it's profoundly healing and I think we would all feel so much more connected to each other and to our humanity and I think it would be a much more peaceful place to live.
• 34:12
  Crista Cowan: And I think it would be a much more peaceful place to live.
• 34:15
  Crista Cowan: Well, hopefully we can create those peaceful places everywhere we are.
• 34:18
  Crista Cowan: I thought I would make it through an entire episode without crying, but apparently not.
• 34:20
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing those beautiful words.
• 34:22
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing your soul.
• 34:23
  Crista Cowan: I'm excited for everyone to read this book and to go on this journey with you and to go on this journey with you.
• 34:33
  Crista Cowan: But what you have shared here today, I think, has been immeasurably valuable to people, and so hopefully we can provide them with a few extra resources to ferret out those stories for themselves in their own families, in their own relationships.
• 34:46
  Crista Cowan: Thank you, becky, for being here.
• 34:49
  Becky Ellis: Well, thank you, and thank you for doing the work you do, because I do think it's through storytelling that we really get to know each other, and that's what's going to change, and I love that about this podcast that you.
• 35:02
  Becky Ellis: It's not just about finding your lineage, it's about discovering those stories so we can discover more about who we are and how we've been shaped, and that's magic.
• 35:12
  Becky Ellis: It is magic, thank you Well said.
• 35:14
  Crista Cowan: Thank you so much.