Lemn Sissay: What Happens When Home Rejects You?

0:03Hi folks, welcome to a new episode of Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. Today's guest is the poet, playwright and broadcaster Lemn Sissay. Few people have thought more deeply about the meaning of home than Lemn has. As a baby he was separated from his Ethiopian mother and placed into foster care with a white family. He grew up with the idea that he'd been abandoned and he also didn't know his real name. He was told his name was Norman. From the age of 12 he lived in a series of children's homes which he describes in pretty bleak fashion in this conversation and he remained in those children's homes until he reached adulthood.

0:43So in this chat we explore how those early experiences shaped his understanding of things like family, belonging and identity and as you can imagine they were pretty formative. We talk about why poetry gave him a sense of place when nowhere else quite could and also what it means to build a sense of home inside yourself after losing it at such a young age. Lem is a really extraordinary man and I must say I found it incredibly moving talking to him. So here it is, homing with Lem to say and I hope you enjoy it.

1:23Hi Lem. Hi Matt. Thank you so much for doing this, I really appreciate it. the theme of the podcast is the home, right? So I'm really interested in your perspective on the home, your life story through the lens of the home, because it's such a fascinating one. And some people will know it, some people won't. But I'd love to start with the question of this word home. How would you personally define it, would you say? It's as close to us as our name. And we don't speak of our name, but we use it every day. and it's the first word that we recognise. It's the first word as a gift to us. We don't take it for granted, but we live with it so much that it sort of becomes invisible, and yet it's fundamental to who we are.

2:11And I think home might be a similar thing. It's what we're literally born into. It's with us all of our lives. and we take it for granted as a person should until it comes into question. And that's often when we're leaving it. So family is held within the home and those two are supposed to be safe places. This is my home, this is my door with a lock and a key. all things that we end up taking for granted because they're so close to us there's so much part of us they're almost part of our skin you know they're almost a an extension of our physical and definitely emotional self could you just tell me about your first home in the world what was your first home in the world what was family life like can you describe the home itself Well, can I give you the honest answer?

3:16Because there is an answer that has a logic to your show, which is also incredibly not invasive, but investigative. Like, it's a beautiful thing. Thank you. It really is, because home has ruptures for all of us, and home has connections for all of us. So I'm going to begin with what really was the home that I was stolen from. And that was the womb, the actual womb of my mother. OK, my mother was in a mother and baby home. It's amazing, isn't it, how many times the word home is used to pretend to be a home. A children's home, a mother and baby home. So my mother was placed into a mother and baby home.

4:03and the idea was that I would be adopted because she didn't have a husband with her when she was pregnant and women were seen as a sort of threat to society, like they would ruin the idea of home. So those women who were put into mother and baby homes were at their most vulnerable, OK? On the bridge between childhood and adulthood, they were sort of press-ganged into signing the adoption papers so that their child would be adopted. I think adoption is the greatest thing that one human being can do for another, by the way. But a lot of these women were not in the emotional position to know the fullness of what adoption was.

4:45And in fact, the social workers led them down the garden path. This is what you must do. This is the betterment of you and your family. What you've done is bad. You are guilty. So the first housing for the baby was that. and my mother refused to sign the adoption papers. My first home was that. And I've spoken about, you know, the social workers plunging into the mother as a home and stealing the child. So here's the deal. My mother wouldn't sign the adoption papers. The social worker said, okay, I'll have her fostered, which means the child will be looked after for a certain period of time. Matt, I'm coming to what is classically my first home.

5:30I have to tell you all of this. I know that this sounds like a long narrative to what seems like a simple question, but I've had to be the investigator, the crime scene, the journalist, the evidence gatherer, the logger of the evidence to this story of why home is what it is to me now. So my mother refused to sign the adoption papers. the social worker gave me to foster parents and said you know we'll get foster parents to look after him and then when you go back to Ethiopia my mother could afford to come to this country to study you know so she had no intention of staying here and so I was given to foster parents and introduced to what you would think of and what would classically be called my first home my first home was actually a mother and baby home in in Wigan somewhere that my mother had to sweep the floors of to pay for the keep, just like they did in the Magdalene laundries.

6:26They had to do the laundry as if they had to work for the guilt. They were made to feel guilty and then eventually the social worker would come and get them to sign the adoption papers. Like I said, she didn't. So I went to foster parents. Firstly, they taught me to call them their name, mum and dad. These are the classic things that you have at home, right? You have a home, a house, where people play a role. OK, they go, OK, I'm the mum because of X, Y, Z, and I'm the dad because of X, Y, Z. And by the way, these are, you know, anybody can be the mum and dad. It's just finding the reason to be it.

7:03Dad, I was with them from the age of three months old, you know. They said that my mother didn't want me, that she'd rejected me. Oh, that's the word, isn't it? Abandoned. And you have to be away from home to be abandoned. to establish abandonment means to establish an out of home experience so my mum abandoned me which is what I was told and they named me they gave me a new name because you have a name don't you in your home that's where your name is established you're like oh you've given me you've given me a name inside my home oh this is the building blocks of security so they gave me a name Norman they said they were my mum and dad and that they saved me from Africa from poorest Africa you see poor also you know we thought of it financially but actually the underlying thing is that it was morally poor as well that that was the idea you see about that whereas this home is secure we go to church we saved you from abandonment so let me just answer your question, imagine I've said none of what I've said.

8:11I grew up in a beautiful town in Lancashire called Ashton in Makerfield. You're fostered into a family, a white family, right? Yes, they were, yeah, a white English family. They went to the church. There was Bryn Baptist Church, beautiful church in Bryn, which is a village next door to Ashton. We had a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. Our house was a semi-detached facing with sandstone garden wall, a postage stamp, a garden with a laburnum tree in it which threw shadows through the windows of our house. The house was sandstone as well and it looked out over onto the flower park. It was a little town of parks, you know, the parks took up more space than the actual houses and it was idyllic, you You know, my street Osborne Road led up to my junior school, which was called R.L.

9:05Hughes. And on my street was a corner shop called, which was run by Mr. and Mrs. Jolly. Jolly sweet shop. And I thought that everybody smiled. The world was a smiling world. Like, I woke up, I had my breakfast, I went to school. And as I walked up the street, colour, like, was waiting for me. So everything coloured in. The hedges from the houses and the jolly shop and the sky and the trees, the beach trees from the flower park, you know. Everything coloured itself in for me. And then people smiled, you know. That's a really lovely description. It was all coloured in. And was it also coloured in inside the house?

9:55Inside the house was very different, actually. I've since learned the reasons that it was very different, but there was growing concern within the house that I, me, was a malevolent force against the family who'd been sort of smuggled into the house. there was a lot of religion inside the family from the Baptist faith. I'm not against Baptists, I'm not against faith or religion. This was a couple of people who did not know about how to be parents and they sort of blamed me somehow. It must have been for a whole set of dysfunctions that were happening inside the house. Inside the house was a sort of dark place really of depression by the adults, repression by the adults and a real need for life to succeed.

10:54But I think a general feeling that whatever they did, they couldn't climb over their own darknesses. They were stuck on their own mountains, you know. And there was me smiling and loving my life and being the extrovert child that I was. The boy that they brought up since he was three months old and that they had three other children themselves. That put pressure on the family, I think, financially and they were very aware of class. They came from sort of upper working class stock, lower middle class stock. Their children would eventually become the middle, middle class people that they wanted to be.

11:37At what stage did you realise they weren't your biological parents out of interest? I think I more or less always knew biological recognition of parenthood is so overrated. You know, you recognise your parents through a love, which means that if you, Matt, murdered somebody tomorrow, the ideal is that your parents would still visit you in prison. That's the ideal. So that's what a parent is. And that's not predicated on being a biological parent. That's predicated on a decision that your parents make that will get challenged forever, gets challenged when you're a teenager, gets challenged when you have your first drugs or first alcohol or first, you know, whatever.

12:33Constantly gets challenged. And believe me, parents don't tell their children that they considered an abortion you know a parent will never say to his child well you know we didn't know whether to have you or not you weren't just a surprise you were a question they won't say that you were a question in other words the idea is that the story is built and the story is solid not it's got little to do with the biological thing. That gives you an excuse to build a story, that's all. Sorry, I'm pretty radical about the idea of family because I've been shown its nature and nobody wants a child to see the true nature of family because to do that you'd have to take it away from them and it's similar with home.

13:23To understand the true nature of home often you have to be broken from it to go, oh my god that was good that's how it should have been that obviously brings us on to the next obvious question which is the loss of that home because actually you've described you were in an area that was full of color and actually quite a joyful place when you went outside the door it was home it was your family it wasn't your biological family but it was the family that you had so when you were 12 what happened well it was decided that the devil was inside of me and that that was taking me away from the family.

14:02So the family put me into children's homes, but they didn't say they were putting me in the children's homes. They said that I wanted to go into the children's homes. So my mother said to me very distinctly, you don't love us, do you? And then I said, yes. And then she said, no, I want you to go away and think about that and come back to us and tell us. So I studied the Bible because I was asked to do that as well. and I came back the next day and I said I mustn't love you but I'll ask God for forgiveness because that was what I thought they wanted me to get to and my foster mother said because you don't love us you don't want to be with us and the next day my social worker was there in the car and he took me away and they said they'd never visit me and they never did and my mother wouldn't hug me etc and I left at 12 years of age believing that it was my fault and then I went into children's homes and I just need to say this to you, where everybody in the town around the children's homes thought it was our fault as well.

14:57And the staff as well in the children's home, they thought it was our fault as well. So I went into the care system believing that it must be my fault, even though I don't know what I've done. And the primary lesson that I learned from my parents, and it's what every parent mitigates against, teaches their child against this, is that if you are loved, you will lose everything, everything that matters to you. The nature of you being loved means that you will cause yourself to lose everything. That's the first lesson they said. And they said they'd never visit me and never did. And I had to learn that it wasn't my fault and that would take me a lifetime.

15:39So the thing is, is that from that point onwards, it was as if I was, or I was in, a glass-bottomed boat, looking through the glass-bottomed of the boat at what family is for everybody else, the school kids at school, and what home is to them. from that point onwards I was a visitor always a visitor to somebody's home you know from that point onwards my home was strip lights and being served cups of tea from big metal teapots that are like half the size of me seemingly you know that biscuits would come from big bags of biscuits that were held in larders and that hot chocolate came from big round hot chocolate things that you were given at supper that strip lights would be normal.

16:35I hate strip lights to this day. You know, the rumble that you can hear from the kitchen is the potato peeler, you know, the giant, everything started to become industrial. The smell of bleach in the morning and bleach at night. And in the first children's home, the big industrial washing machines downstairs and And cleaners, invisible cleaners, who sort of saw the dysfunction of it all. But their job was just to clean. They weren't the social workers. They were there longer than the social workers were. And staff that changed every four hours. That said they loved children, but never said they loved you.

17:13They said they loved children in third person, but never said they loved you. All of this strange change from the intimacy of the home gave me insight into what the other kids who had homes didn't realise that they had. But saying that, it was a home. A children's home is a home. big 18th century 17th century buildings with great histories from a different era of trade in Lancashire well that's such an amazing description thank you for that the sounds and the smells I can imagine are really still with you I can imagine that it's because it's because being in a home being at home it's a multi-sensory thing right yes oh my gosh I remember there were no kids there when I was there initially and I went up in stairs into this house it was built in the late 1700s and it's a massive it was a massive mansion and then hearing the noise of young people at the dining table in the dining rooms this is where we got introduced to things like dining rooms you know larders and all these sort of abstracts with these familial names, these sort of like strange institutional copies of something that we all wanted.

18:41You know, this is a staff who'll pretend to be a parent and they'll disappear in three months time. This is your dining hall. This is the bell that rings to get you all in from all around the gardens and the houses. And this is the ideal that other kids will say, I wish I was in a children's home. not knowing that the physical representation of home is only a reminder of what it's not it's not a home it has no sense of permanence it is not yours it belongs to invisible people who've got budgets and you're part of that budget and you're being marked off and on that budget and you might be moved because of that budget you know you get this sense of invisible owners that's the other kind of it's them up there is what the staff say you know.

19:29So out of interest Len what did you have with you when you left your family home age 12 and you arrived in children's homes what possessions did you have? It's one of the things that I ask people who've been in care it's like what did what have you got that you had since you were a child and often it's nothing I have nothing that I had when I was a child so when I left my foster parents they wouldn't allow me to take anything so it was uh like a financial transaction they they were like oh no he's you can't take anything and the children's homes of course now I realize it they probably didn't want me to take anything because they would have to can you imagine a house full of children all who bring the their stuff so so I didn't actually take anything from from my home what does that do to your sense of finding an identity through objects and belongings because we all do that we rely on these props don't we to help us understand ourselves help us understand our past and I can't imagine what that must be like not having anything so how does that how do you reflect on that I had everything taken away from me and the idea was that I would be erased from the idea of family okay so I knew I realized when I went into my care into care that my parents didn't give me anything and that my parents would be telling a different story to their children my brothers and sisters and to their family and the story they must be telling them is that I did something wrong and I chose to leave them and leave their God and it's just not true and it never was and I had that feeling.

21:16Yeah, so that's 12 years of age in the children's home, nothing from my foster parents. I thought my name was Norman Greenwood, so at least I had my name, Norman Greenwood. Do you know what? To this day, it's the weirdest thing. I'm okay. I get my therapy. I've really looked after myself. Somehow I've come through this, you know, without trying to look at everything and see it for what it is rather than for what it pretends to be. I spent all my life with people saying, oh, family's not that good. You know, God, you're lucky not having a family, you know, you know, without realising that family is a set of disputed memories between one group of people over a lifetime.

21:57You have a lifetime to resolve your stuff with your family. And the point is, the reason that you don't resolve your stuff in your family is because that's one of the privileges of family. One of the privileges of family is that you don't have to forgive. You can hold that gripe forever. You can build a house on that gripe. You can get married on that hatred and that anger. Why would you forgive? So you have a lifetime for that, you know, surrounded by people who did not know what they had. And also, I can't blame them for that, Matt. You don't want your child to fully understand how important home is, because to do that, they would have to have it taken away from them so it's quite a compelling case that I'm building I could be wrong but this is the beauty of our cases that we have you know this is why I love your podcast everybody has a different case is a different case study and their everybody's view on home is legitimate well all I can say is your your case file has a lot of paperwork in it um and it and I really appreciate you sharing all this it is so fascinating and I think it's genuinely helpful I think it's really helpful that we all share our stories in this way because we can learn from each other and I think one of the things you said there is that your you thought your name was Norman Greenwood yes I did yeah yeah Norman Mark Greenwood actually yeah Norman Mark Greenwood is is who you were brought up to believe that you are and actually yes well what's what's in a name I mean right so so I suppose at what point did you discover your birth name oh I honestly if only I could just go back and hug that kid and just say this is not your fault man you know you didn't do this okay they're doing this and and you know you need you shouldn't you don't have to take anything on this because cut to a few years and I'm locked in a children's home and I can't get out and I've got severe anxiety and then I'm imprisoned by that same system oh cut to a few years later and I take them to court for everything they've done for me and I win but that's another story but let's go right back to being 12 and then I was in a series of different children's homes and then I get to 16, 15, 16 and my social worker who's a good man by the way there's a lot of good people who work in this system who can't do anything about it so you know expect me to be angry as a child with you but that's only natural you know and he said this is your birth certificate and he showed me my birth certificate and my birth certificate had my name on it, Lem Sese, the name that had always been my name.

24:44It's just they hadn't showed it to me. And it had my mother's name on it, Yamasha Sese. And he said, he said, somebody did love you. Now, I need to stop here for a second, just to say to you, they had to legally show me my birth certificate because I was becoming 18. And at 18 years of age, you leave the care system in the 1980s, you leave the care system and that's it. You're an adult. You're now in adult services. it's cruelty personified so I'd been I was going to be leaving care at 18 so they had they felt like they had to tell me because they had to give a birth certificate to a responsible adult who was looking after me and there was none there was no parents so it had to come to me so they said this is your name let me just say and he said the social worker said somebody did love you and he gave me letters from 1968 first six months of my life of my mother pleading for me back pleading for me back to a social worker whose name was Norman.

25:44He'd named me after himself. That was his first thing he said to the foster parents. You can have him, but you've got to name him Norman. They wanted to call me Mark after Mark in the Bible, after the book of Mark. And their last name was Greenwood. So I thought my name was Norman Mark Greenwood. So my mother was writing to the social worker, Norman Goldthorpe, to ask for me, when could she get me back? And could she have the address of my foster parents. My social worker wrote back to her to say, no, you can't have their address. But he called me Lem when he was speaking to her. In other words, he'd called me Norman, giving me to the foster parents, saying I could have them for life.

26:23But he called me Lem when he denied me to my mother. I'm just saying that that letter is proof of the duplicitousness and of the lie. This moment of my mother requesting for me back, of the social worker saying that she couldn't have me without telling her my name, this was the moment, the first moment that I thought on some level deep inside of me, even though I couldn't articulate it because I was simply searching for my mum, I thought something's wrong with this, there's something wrong. It seems logical now, of course it's wrong Lem, but I did not know, I didn't have anybody I had nobody there's nobody I knew at that age at 16 or 18 that I'd known for longer than a year because I'd been in different children's homes with different kids moving in and out and different staff nobody held the full story in mind but at some point I decided that the only truth that I'd been told was that truth from my mother and that was my name and so I took my name at 17 I'd lived from 12 to 17 in four different children's homes Woodfields, Gregory Avenue, Oakland's and Woodend Four different places in five years Each with different staff and different children in them So what I'm saying is that my name was linked And the reason I took my birth name is I was like Shit, none of you people really give a shit I'm going to leave here at 18 and none of you fuckers are going to call me because I'm a job to you.

28:05You say you love children and then I'm gone. You can't give me what you say you want to give me. And I believe that you do want to give it to me. But the problem with the institution you are working in is that you believe that what you're doing is OK. The most institutionalised people in the care system are not the kids. It's the staff. And I was going to stop that institutionalisation happening to me. And that's why I took my name, Matt. I was like, this has to be my home. I have to start here. My home has to be my name. And I lost friends, Matt. People thought I'd gone crazy. You're Norman. Lancashire people, you know, good stock, you know.

28:49Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? Literally, you know. Gosh. One of the things we talk about a lot on homing is this sense of homelessness within your own body somehow, which I think you're always going to feel to some extent if you're in a scenario like yours. Tell me about what was happening kind of bodily through that phase for you. OK, my first day at school, I was called the N-word when I was with my foster mother. Oh God, walking up the pathway. I was spat at. when I went into the children's homes, I used to come home and have to wipe the spit off my coat. I was beaten, chased by skinheads.

29:30I suddenly became aware that other people, and I had no idea about this, were aware of my skin colour and that I was an N-word and that I was the only one. I mean, okay, let me just talk about the micro, what people now call microaggressions. As I walk across the road, cars drive faster to hit me. People spit outside of pubs. People shout from cars. This is when I was a kid in the 80s. From an area, people twitched their curtains and called the police. You know, like these things happened to me. And I was like, what have I done? And I just got to a point, Matt, where I couldn't go outside. I was so aware of the colour of my skin and the race panic that happened into people when I walked into their shops when I asked them for directions?

30:22Would people move in their bag close to me? And then I would go to the children's home and people would say, you've got a chip on your shoulder. You know, who do you think you are? It's not about you. And blah, blah, blah. Why do you think everything's about colour? So I was like, oh shit, if I come home, they're telling me that I'm making it up. And if I go outside, I get beaten on and spat at. And then they say that colour doesn't matter and then they say they don't see colour and I was like but but I don't want to see colour but all I can see is people's reactions to it and it was like wearing mirrored glasses where people just saw their idea of me their reflection of me but I saw them and it scared me Matt it scared me I suddenly felt really afraid because I was like is everybody pretending here because stuff is happening to me it was such a shock and I didn't have anybody at home who would be like be proud of who you are let me show you some people who look like you who are incredible firstly us your family we're incredible and then here's you know Michael Jordan here's blah blah blah here's this mathematician here's this cellist here's this architect here's this doctor here's this to me all I was told is that all black people were evil and all black people were muggers and sheets and music.

31:43They could play music and they could run fast. And I suddenly realised none of this is true, but I don't know what is true. It just shocked me. I became so aware of myself that I couldn't get outside, you know. I'm not that kind of guy. I'm the kid who thought the world was smiling and didn't realise that it was me smiling at the world, smiling back at me. That's what it was when I was a kid. It was me. I didn't know that. I thought the world smiled. As you were talking, this word belonging obviously keeps coming into my head because I think we all want to feel like we belong in some way. And I just wondered about your sense of belonging because you grew up in Greater Manchester.

32:32you're living in East London your mother who you tracked down to Ethiopia I believe is that right? No no she was she she left Ethiopia after the revolution in 74 she I tracked her down in West Africa she was working for the United Nations in the Gambia and then she ended up living in New York. Okay so in terms of a sort of sense of belonging that's quite a multifaceted thing so if I was to ask you where do you belong what would you say I'm not actually sure to be honest I really am not at Matt you know I said at the beginning of this that I'm not sure and I don't have a problem with that that's really important for you to know because I you know I've spent my life traveling the world as a writer you know so as a poet I've been all over the world like tons of countries my family you know my mum lived in New York she passed away last year my dad was a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines.

33:26He's buried in the Simeon Mountains. I've got sisters and brothers in Virginia, Paris, Senegal. A lot of my father's family were in America, some in Ethiopia, not many. I go to Ethiopia twice a year. I don't really talk to much of the family who I've found. So where do I belong? I mean, I belong in, I don't know actually, but well, no, no, no, wait, wait a minute you know the privilege of being able to sit into your place which you've bought in Clapton in East London and going oh where do I belong says he in his you know two-bed apartment in hippest hell Clapton come on Lem give yourself a break and get off your you know start to check your privilege so the fact is is that I do belong here you know and and actually acting locally is one of the things that my late friend Benjamin Zephaniah would talk about you know he would like be what is it think globally act locally you know it's like it's really important to acknowledge that I live somewhere that I want to live I'm in my kitchen right now which is where I basically spend most of my place time in my place I love my place I'm gonna after this podcast I'm gonna cook I'm going to bake a cake and I'm going to give it to somebody some people that I really care for and yeah I'm home man I'm home right now and one of the privileges of home is being able to say oh no I don't know if I belong Your home that you're in there do you write there?

35:05Do you write your poetry there? Damn right I do, I've got a bloody deadline coming up right now and I've got to crack on with it yeah how does the environment help or hinder that process out of interest what what if you sort of constructed around you to enable that to happen every writer will have their own set of rules and then again there it's just a thing you know we create a thing so that we can do a thing i need to have this so that i can do this you know i work here on the kitchen table and actually I have an office which is where I should work but the table is just full of papers and everything else except for what I should be doing so I write here writing is portable so you're able to do it anywhere I'll be honest with you I'm not as good a writer as the writer that I would want to be and I do think that's got to do with having to fix so much of my story in my adult life but again that's the that's the rubbishy room in the house of the writer's head you know the room for excuses that's a good way that's an interesting way of putting it that's really fascinating out of interest how does the act of putting words together for you how why is that important how does that help you make sense of stuff when i was in care 12 years of age when i went into the children's home I wrote a poem and I felt a physical sense of I'm going to say home very deliberately because I was in the middle of a storm putting a flag in the mountainside and I realized that this flag in the mountainside explained where I was physically and emotionally and that gave me a sense of place and I felt that very strongly.

37:00So ever since then, writing has given me a sense of place. I don't have to be writing about a place, by the way, that's not the issue. But the idea that the imagination creates something which is very real somehow gave me a sense of place in lieu of family and in lieu of somewhere that was called home. So maybe it was filling something in that wasn't there. Yeah, yeah. I think every artist has that feeling and I think every creative does. I think, you know, architects probably... I remember meeting the architect who straightened the leaning tower of Pisa to stop it falling. And he said this beautiful thing.

37:44He said, I walk inside a building once it's been built that I've done the drawing of. He said, I walk inside it to see if it's male or female. And he said, and I will know, you know, what it is when I walk inside it. So he was identifying what this building was beyond its physical representation. I had a feeling of place beyond the physical representation of the poem on the page. So interesting, I think, that. although a poem won't cook you a poem won't cook your tea

38:25people say to me like oh it's writing like therapy and i'm like listen if writing was like therapy i would be talking to a book do you know what i mean i would be having i would be i would put the book on the other side of the table and be like so you know no writing is not like therapy writing is like writing have you had a lot of therapy i've had enough therapy to not have therapy you know if i need it i'll go and get it yeah if i need it i'll go and get it i try not to be not to fall into the some of the tropes that you can fall into in therapy i try not to fall into some of the tropes that you can find you can fall into when doing interviews I try not to fall into the tropes that you can fall into when talking about your story you know I try not to fall into the tropes that you can fall into when you're in relationships you know so I do fall into those tropes but I try not to yeah well you've brought up the word relationships there and you know I hope you don't mind me asking this but I do think it's really interesting you know as someone who really had such a difficult start in life and who was told really not to trust any relationships ultimately or the relationships could not be relied upon right as a child so how have you navigated that as an adult because it must be so hard well we do navigate all of us our way through our relationships and we do find ourselves playing out our childhood experiences within our adult life even if we deny that we're doing that we're kind of confirming it family is about the power of suggestion I think you know you get married at certain ages because other people do it that's the only reason like it's like it makes sense and you know then you think oh my god if I'm not married at that time then I must be there must be something wrong with me because no it's just everybody has their own path you know so I didn't marry I don't have children I'm not currently in a relationship I've had some you know great relationships in my life and some good women you know and um I said I wouldn't marry because I was searching for my family or because I didn't want to have like a wedding where there was no family on my side of the thing didn't want to have children because I didn't want to I didn't want to have a child until I found all of my family because I didn't want that that to be hung over and by the way family I mean mother and father and sisters and brothers you know that's you know so I'm not just like on some fantasy trip and then I then I had a thing for quite a few years that that I was somehow bad luck that that are just ridiculous.