In Control, Or Not: The Moth Radio Hour

Also, on the product market, you will find your next step or your first big enterprise.

“With KaE, the development of the application is also the advantages of the application.”

And that is, before you go to the question. The topic of security and compliance is really simple. It is often long-term, but it is often out. That is, there are many startups, questions, questions and answers. And if it is not, it is still not in the beginning.

Yet, start in alfanta.com. This is the Moth Radio Hour. I am your host, and Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, stories about control, wanting it, wrestling it from the powers that be, or happily surrendering it to those more capable.

Whether it is a mighty battle for absolute command, or a slight power adjustment.

“So you maybe could just, you know, get a little sway.”

The battle for control begins in childhood, with your parental overlords, and sometimes

extends into adulthood, which is the case with our first storyteller, Dane Wilbur.

You may recognize Dane's voice, either from her first Moth Main Stage story, where she attempts to take control by lifting a curse. I highly recommend that one, or maybe you'll recognize her as one of the guest hosts on our radio hour and podcast. If you know Dane, you know that she rarely follows the rules.

Dane is a rebel. In this first story, we get to meet the woman who inspired the rebellion. Dane's mother, a woman so fierce, Dane weaves a tangled web to avoid her wrath. Living her home city of Detroit, where we partnered with Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts.

Here's Dane Wilbur. My father died the sophomore year that I was in college. And this made me the sole focus of my mother, the dragon.

Now, she got that name because she wanted me to be a free spirit, but she was never

prepared when I did free spirit and stuck. And she would always respond to these moments with volcanic levels of fury that could only be described as dragon-esque. She was five, ten, and heels. She kept her talent sharpened.

She would wear $2,000 worth of power suits and accoutrement, and she would smoke under no smoking signs for kicks. She also once sent a man, a pink slip, he was in a coma, and she sent it to the hospital and had his wife sign for it. This is the woman whose eyes abhorried into the back of my head.

As I sit at my graduation with my diploma holder trembling in my hand.

“This holder and I have a secret, and we learned this secret about three months ago when”

my counselor said I was a few credits short of graduating. I was 15 credits short of graduating. Now, if you don't go to college and don't understand what that means, that's a semester. So I had somehow managed to be in school for five years and still be a semester short of graduating.

Thank you, some of y'all, some of y'all did. And it was also at that meeting that she told me that if you weren't graduating until the fall, you could walk in the spring, and that's when it started. I began to come up with a plot that would extend the time between the time I graduated and the time my mother, the dragon, found out that I had you graduated.

Which means I've got a problem while I'm sitting here in this chair. Now, I don't know how many of you have run a con, but if you're running a con, evidence is bad. Holding it is worse. And I'm holding something that's empty.

So I need a hail Mary Pass. That's when I look to the young lady next to me and I see that she has a form letter that says the reason she didn't get her diploma is because she didn't pay her last bill. I take this out of her hand, put it in my diploma holder, throw my hat up into the sky,

Now, I walk outside, and I get into the parker line.

My mother makes a bee line for me as snatches that holder off from under my arm because she can smell blood in the water. She owes it up, reads it and says, makes sense, and we go off to dinner and baby was beautiful. I now have little time on my hands, but here's one of my issues. Now, I can't go home because under her direct gaze, I'm going to crack.

So I told her, well, I'm going to work campus security for the summer, and then when I come home in the fall, I'll get a job.

“Now the key to a good line is that it's got some true things.”

I, I'm going to campus security officer, at least it was until I had an administrator

in a police officer, knock on my dorm door. Okay, now the word they use is embezzlement, but I feel like that word is too big. Okay, stay with me. At the time, I had access to the charge account for campus security at the school bookstore. But, apparently, I had run up a charge of about $700, so the admin informed me that I had two

options. You can quit your job, pay the money back, or we can fire you, you can pay the money back plus court costs, and you can go to Jacob, the officer informed me that embezzlement has

“a 15-year jail time, and I thought about it.”

Now the reason I thought about it, much to the amusement of the officer, was I was pretty

sure the dragon was never going to get her talent through those jail walls, and I might

actually be safer with the cops than I was at home. But I also know I couldn't really go to jail until my fellow inmates that I had embezzled $700 worth of piece of flavor combos. So I took option one. Now I find myself in another little problem, because as a campus security officer, I could

stay on campus for the summer for free, but I don't have that job, and I want the bookstore $700 and to stay on campus I've got to pay a grant. Can't ask the dragon.

“So this is where modified con number three comes in, okay, hold on, we got this together,”

we're going to be all right. So I called my God parents and told them that my mother had fallen on hard times, my mother had been on hard times since she was two. I said she fallen on hard times and I needed them to pay this bill because I didn't want to ask her for the money.

Okay, now we got it, we have tied up all the loose ends, everything is gravy, I've got the whole summer to figure out what I'm going to say to her. Well, while I was doing all that plotman thinking, I had forgotten to get myself enough money to eat. And that's when I started to read magazines, I started to read the newspaper, I started

watching the news, and I turned myself into one hell of a dinner guest. I've got good shoes, I've got the manners, I know how to talk to people, I'm witty and urbane. I was raised right, mostly, and people love to have me over, and I'm good at getting myself invited to things I'm not supposed to go to.

But the end of summer snuck up on me pretty quickly, and my buddy came in from New York, and I told him everything I had going on. And he said, you know, you might be some kind of evil genius. I'm hope one day you're going to use your powers for good, and that's when it all hit me.

I'm out of lies, I'm out of people, I'm out of time, I'm out of chances, I got one more card to play, and that's the truth, and it dawns on me, I got to call the dragon.

to work, and then I called home and left a message on her answer machine.

The message I left was, hi, it's Dame, I didn't graduate, and I'm actually 15 credit hours short, this school says I got to pay $1,500 by individuals on Friday, so that I can register for the fall semester. If you've got it great, but if you don't, let me know, thanks, buddy, now you've got to

“understand, I don't know how many of you have ever run a four-part con, but the key to”

doing it is to not talk to anybody, so I had an answer to the phone, or like four months,

because talking to people is how you give up what evidence.

Once I left that message for her, I shut off the ringer on my phone, turn the answer machine volume all the way down, and took a three-hour nap. When I woke up, my answering machine like was blinking at me, angrily, it took everything in me to press that button, but I played the message, and this is what it said. I will be at Sienna Heights at noon on Friday.

I expect to speak with you in person, click, that's not terrifying at all. So when I told my counselor, everything that had gone on, I came clean to her, she said, "I don't, I think it's best that you two met me and private."

“I think you should meet in the music room, and I'm going to be in my office that we're”

going to leave all the doors open. This woman had met my mother one time, but she knew what I was up against. That's how I ended up clutching a music stand, staring into the eyes of the dragon. Now I'm waiting for the speech, you know, you're a liar, you're a cheater, you have a chronic lack of ambition, you know, the speech I've been getting my whole life.

And she starts crying, and she says, "Do you know what it's like to not know where your child is? Do you know what it's like to leave message after message and not get it returned? Do you know that I contacted the Michigan State Police Department and tried to have you declared as a missing person, but they informed me that I couldn't do it because you

were 24 years old and you were an adult, and you didn't have to call your mom. Now, my mother didn't cry at her mother's funeral, so I'm touched and moved by this. However the hustler in me was thinking about how the Michigan State Police Department got my back, I am an adult, I don't have to talk to my mom.

“The Popeau is on my side, and that's what gave me the courage to tell her, "Do you know”

what it's like to be the singer and their focus of a very focused mother? Do you know what it's like to have no control over your childhood and see that it's going to spill until you're adulthood? Do you know what it's like to get a diploma? You don't really want in a degree you don't really want for somebody else?"

And then she asked me a question for the first time in 24 years. She said, "What do you

want to do next?" And I said, "I want to finish." And we walked over to the business office and she wrote a check and we walked outside and that's when the sun hit her. And she pulled up to her full height and you could hear the leathery edges of her wings snapping in the wind and she unclenched her talons and put one right up against my jugular. And she said,

education." And I thanked her and she drove off. But I didn't need her peptop. I already knew

“what I wanted to do. And I walked off that campus with the highest GPA of my entire educational”

career of three-point-oh. And my own set of leather wings. Thank you. That was Dane Wilbur. I called Dane to talk about her mother and her mother's legacy. And here's some of that conversation. So in the store, you painter, she's pretty fierce. But she has a tender side, though, too. She does. And the reason I paid her is fierce. And my mother passed away in 2007 and she was home. So I was with her when she passed. And some of the last coherent

things that she said to me was that I would tell people that she was a bad mother. And I said to her, "You weren't bad mother." And if I speak about you to people, what I was safe to them is you were formidable. I was not an easy child to raise. I was interested in everything and nothing all it wants. And I was a comedian and I was a charmer and easily able to get in and out of things. What I thought I'd give was I'd driven my mother to distraction. In

these later years, I've talked to her sister. She said, "Your mother never taught to me or anybody

else that I know of as if you were a burden." And when I heard that I started crying because my perception of how I had been as a child was not my mother's perception at all. And as I've gotten older that's been of a real comfort. Dame Wilburn talking about her mother, Mrs. Alberta Wilburn. Dame has a set of dragon wings that would make her mother proud. I've seen them flapping with my own eyes. He also was thinking about sending you the tent to a have on my right arm. It's the first set to

I ever got. And I hid his from her for like a year before she finally saw it one day. And she said, "What's that?" And it's a dragon. And I said, "Well, I was going to get a heart that said, "Mom in it." But they were all out of red. So I just got a portrait of you. Stop! That's perfect!" To see a picture of the dragon tattoo she got in honor of her mother, visit the moth.org. In a moment a story about losing control on the road and also in a second grade classroom.

When the moth radio hour continues. The moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

We always recommend Shopify. It took us from an idea to a real business. We got set up.

“I think, in less than a day, with very little effort, we could just focus on the supply chain”

to the product development. Shopify gives us the ability to customize without the complexity. We can change something without introducing fragility or having to pay a developer. Where thirsty total and we leveled up our business with Shopify. Start your free trial at Shopify.com/AU. This is the moth radio hour. I'm Jennifer Hixon. We're sharing stories about trying to exercise

power over others and sometimes over ourselves. This next one is from Todd Kelly. He told it at a Portland Grandslam where we partnered with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Here's Todd.

“It's very important for me that you understand that I am not a violent person.”

I'm very even killed. I never lose my temper. In fact, at one point, when I was 25 years old, my

girlfriend of a year broke up with me because she said I was too even tempered and even killed. She said that I so was afraid to ever get angry that her words were, I was like a woman and to quote her, she could find a better, more masculine man on the open market.

we had sort of drifted off with her friends and I'd become a strange from my own.

“And I started about six months prior working for her sister who now that we weren't together,”

let me know that she didn't like me and was waiting for a reason to fire me. Which I was making too easy because I was really terrible at my job. And I kept showing up late and I knew if I should up late one more time. This is about a month after we've broken up and I'm going to get fired and so I set my alarm and I am on my way to work from my crappy life to my crappy job driving my crappy Mazda,

which is like 20 years old and it's the kind of car where it makes these noise that frightens so you turn the stereo up so you're not afraid to drive it. And I just, I don't know, I can't move past anything in my life and I'm thinking about how I have nothing to look forward to when I see something come directly at me on the freeway from the window and it is a black car hurtling toward me and I swore of over and actually go off

of the highway onto the parking strip. And the car is in fact I immediately notice it's not out of control. It's just cutting me off. It's this incredibly expensive black gorgeous BMW and the person clear how could he have not known that he just ran me off the road doesn't think anything of it just shoots on along through traffic and I had this moment of clarity where I decided everything in my life would be better. If I passed him and cut him off and this is rush hour traffic

and it's in Portland and everybody's going about 35 or 40 miles an hour except the guy who I'm chasing who's going about 60 and it sounds more dangerous than it probably is. He's a phenomenal driver and this car in handles beautifully and it's almost as if all the other cars recognize that this is a period car and they have to get out of the way and it's like watching a dolphin go through water and I would have no chance of following it because now I'm going in his wake

and he's going back and forth and it suddenly hits me I suddenly know he knows that I'm following

“him and that's why he's going faster and this is why he won't like do anything and we come up”

and we get to the exit where I'm supposed to get off and get to work on time and I think no because justice has to be served. So I bear a lot and we're going and we're going through the curves and I should not go through the curves in this car because it's an odd thing about my car not all the time but sometimes when you turn the wheel it's a little wild before the thing turns so I know actually cutting other people off accidentally and again before you think hippocritical

asshole cutting off cutting off for justice they are very different things but I can't I can't

I'm not falling back but I'm not catching up to him and I keep going and we go and finally we're passing

to Walton I'm now like 15 miles past my work we get up to the 205 interchange and suddenly cars are going off there and it breaks open and I can see him he's 10 car lengths ahead of me and he hits the open space he's going 60 and then clearly he just puts his foot on the grass and he leaves it there because he goes from 60 to 90 boom and he is like a comet and it's like those cartoons where you see the car suddenly shrink in size but that's okay because I'm just a few seconds behind him

and then I hit the open space and I hit my accelerator I hold it out and I go from 60 I'm still

“going 60 because piece of shit car and I should turn around but I don't because I think I can stop now”

and then a miracle happens as I start to get towards Wilsonville there's some thing happening on the highway that's caused great congestion and he's the last car in the bass lane and I can say oh boy he's seeing me coming in his river he knows it's coming he knows

it's coming and I can feel the adrenaline I feel amazing and suddenly

he branches off and he gets off and I follow him and I think I'm going to come front him

out with me and I get out and he's really big and that flight part of me goes we're terrible at this

and I'm like no today we're going to try and I walk up to him and I go hey and he turns around and it's the moment I see his face and his expression that I know he has no idea who I am he has no idea what's happened he has no idea he's cut me off and I have no idea what to say and all I can say is you cut me off and he said oh god I'm sorry like right at your frame ramp and I'm like no like 20 miles to go and he's like looking at me and he's like

and not in an unkind way he's like are you going to cry and I was like I can feel the tears

“well enough and I I want to say my life is out of control and it's shit and I just want something”

to go right but all I can say is you cut me off and he says in like the coolest kind of way I am so sorry like I was late and I wasn't paying attention and it looks like you're having a rough time and I so sorry that I made it worse for you I am terribly sorry and I hadn't had

anybody apologize to me about anything in forever and it just felt amazing and if this were an

ABC after school special suddenly my life would have changed but it didn't of course except the in that moment it did I just felt better and I apologize and I think I'm like God in the car and I started to drive off to work knowing as soon as I was going to get there I was going to put in my two weeks notice and I was going to start asking myself seriously what do I need to do to get my life back on track thank you that was Todd Kelly Todd says that what happened

that day in his 1983 Mazda 323 was totally out of character I asked him why he thought he lost it that day and he said heck of I know maybe it was my brain's way of telling my heart it was time to grow

“up and move on and that's what he did after Todd quit the den in job he bartended for his”

bell then had a successful career in risk management and these days Todd is a journalist who also produces live shows in Portland Oregon for people whose North Star is predictability and order any deviation from the path can be a challenge our next story was told by Gabriel Woods Lamanese at a story slam in Boston where we partner with PRX and public radio station WBUR here's Gabriel okay so I'm the type of person with assigned pegs for each specific coat that I own

and very much assigned slots for each utensil in my kitchen drawers this pillow in my world goes with this pillow case only and every time my girlfriend leaves her keys and my key spot I have to just pray for patients left to my own devices all of these spice bottles and my cabinets would be label facing forward because I'm not a barbarian and and when it's down half way I take the soap dispenser in the bathroom and switch it with the one in the kitchen which is used up

more slowly so that they can deplete at the same time and be filled up simultaneously I consider

“this peak brilliance so you get the picture for as long as I can remember I have been a lover of”

and at times a refugee in order predictability organization these are things that help me maintain sanity and otherwise chaotic and overwhelming world and you know so make a plan have a routine everything is just safer and better that way well when I went off to college settle on a major in cognitive science partly because the research is awesome and partly so I could just be tucked away in a neat orderly little lab somewhere well my junior year of college I ended up

stumbling my way into an education course and the professor was an amazing human being I had

great classmates I was having a good time but part of the requirement for this class was going to a local classroom a couple times a week and the final project was I had to teach a lesson about states of matter using mystery group okay what is mystery group so mystery group is this mixture

it slowly but kind of solidy if you like squeeze it really suddenly or punch it or something it's

“pretty cool stuff so I decide I'm going to plan the shit out of this lesson right I'm going to do”

like warm up discussion with my students and we're going to list different liquids and solids and gases and we're going to have a worksheet for them to write down their observations and while they

explore the mystery group in a calm orderly civilized fashion this is second grade by the way

I was new all right so the night before I've everything laid out and the morning of I wake up early and I decided to start mixing the concoction and and I'm kind of you know my mind's wandering as I'm mixing one cup of cornstarch two cups of water one cup of cornstarch another two cups of water and I realize that I have no mystery group developing below me in the Tupperware instead I just have white water totally liquid so I add a bit more cornstarch and then more and then all of my

cornstarch and it's still just white water and that's when I realize that I got the ratio backwards and I have the cornstarch and doubled the water so my orderly world just crumbles in this moment the scientist in me decides the best option is to evaporate the extra water as rapidly as possible so I put it in the microwave all this does is cook it into some weird fluffy mass right so it's got all of the mystery and none of the group so that's okay it's okay I have time

so I get my car and I go to the grocery store to get some backup cornstarch and when I get back to my car the battery is dead okay by the time I get to school I'm running way late and I have

“no group I am I am officially goopless which is not a place you want to be and if you want to win over”

a classroom full of second graders so I rush to the back of the room and the head teachers run

and things and and I'm you know kind of frantically but carefully mixing the cornstarch and water and my backup Tupperware with my spoon and it's working I've got this muck in front of me right it's great and I turn around to get the work she said on my backpack and I turn back around and the spoon is gone and I look for a culprit nearby and there's no students and I realize you know I lift the Tupperware up and they're at the bottom of the group through the see through bottom is my spoon

so with a sigh I reach in and take out my spoon and I'm standing there hand dripping goop frantic frenzy to eyes you know looking around the room and you know what the kids freaking loved it right when we got the lesson rolling there were squeals of delight and kids were shouting for their friends to hey look at this and you know there was dried goop dust on hands and pens and desks and my soul and and students were arguing if it was a liquid or a solid and there was

that one kid who was saying that it was it was debating that it was a gas because if you're lucky

there's always that one kid only if you're lucky and you know I looked around the room and

realized that it was full of curiosity and and laughter and I realized that I was laughing too I had actually laughed every time something went wrong that morning with the fluffy mass with the spoon spelunking maybe I didn't laugh with the car battery but my point is that even though things went spectacularly awry and in ways I hadn't even imagined I was having a darn good time and I did not feel safe and I was not in my comfort zones and I was most assuredly

also frantic and anxious but but it was working I felt alive anyway that that graduation requirement turned into a education minor and instead of doing brain research the past five years I've been teaching all around the world and for every piece of organization and predictability that I've given up in my classrooms I've welcomed in equal parts adventure and joy and that's a ratio I've worked really hard to get right and and I got to say my students have really taught me a lot

about living a better life thank you

“that was Gabriel Wood's Lamanism as you heard Gabe is now a teacher and says I believe that”

education should be applicable empowering and joyful to see a picture of Gabriel and his highly organized workspace with a place for everything and everything in its place visit the moth.org where you can also download this story there you'll also find a picture of him joyfully showing the disorganized spice rack he shares with his girlfriend because compromise makes for harmony Gabriel has yielded control of the spice situation I'm proud of you Gabe.

Coming up a story about skin heads in London when the moth radio hour continues the moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media in wood's whole Massachusetts

where you end up that anything is possible run for office live off the grid hit a home or

“throw robots teach goat yoga anything this spring the moth main stage is traveling the cities around”

the country with stories of the american dream doesn't even exist anymore for who what happens when that dream is dashed or deferred and what happens when the dream is fulfilled let's come together and listen to people telling true personal stories of their very own american dreams experience the moth main stage live find a city near you at the moth.org slash main stage

you're listening to the moth radio hour i'm Jennifer Hickson in this show with sharing stories

about how people confront power our final story was told by nimisha ladva she told this at a

“moth main stage at St. Anne's Church in Brooklyn New York here's nimisha i grew up in England the”

daughter of indian immigrants the spring that i turn 11 there is violence in Brixton it's an area of London skinheads police and dark skinned people some who look like me are clashing on tv there are images of things on fire my father talks to my brother and me and says there's nothing for us to worry about we don't live near the violence we don't live near any skinheads and we should just carry on doing what we do and being who we are so one of the things we are is vegetarian hindus

and when bugs get into our house we don't kill them we take them outside so that spring

“a gigantic wasp gets into the house the stinger is visible to the naked eye”

my mother rolls up a newspaper asks god for forgiveness and then does what she has to do she hands the weapon to my father but my dad does not take it he walks up to the window where the wasp is and with his bare hands cups them around the wasp and walks outside and simply let's it free then he turns to me and my brother and says i'm your father my job is to put things where they belong including you two monkeys to be honest my brother and I do not care that we have

just been insulted because in that moment we are figuring out that our father skinny shoulders thick glasses indian accent that guy that guy might be badass so in the neighborhood where we live we are the only people of color we are such an anomaly that there's just one day i'm outside in the front garden visible to everyone when a neighbor walks by with a friend and announces passing my house here is where the colored family lives the kids at school could sometimes be cruel and when the

incidents added up my father would come to school talk to the head mistress and leave with assurances from the grownups that they would seek to make my condition better now that said i will say that i did have friends at school for example there was Deborah and i not only like Deborah i really like to little brother Michael as well and Deborah Deborah's mom was a baker and she would tell me things like things about sponge cake and fruit tarts and shortbread in three flavors

and chocolate biscuits and i'm just amazed because in my house when my mom finds an eggplant at the market she makes eggplant curry and that is supposed to be a treat for us and it's not working for us so when i get invited to Deborah's house for tea i'm really excited so i asked my parents for permission and they say yes i go to school the next day i wait and wait and wait and wait wait and wait for the

school day to oh and it finally does and it is time to go to Deborah's house and eat that stuff

stuff and she's raised these lovely children and i'm really just so excited so we start

“walking to her house and the pavements are a bit narrow so we have to take turns holding”

Michael's hand and we're talking about how many treats you can eat before we get into trouble

and is it rude to eat to at a time and we finally get to the door and i'm really excited

and that Deborah presses the doorbell and her mom opens the door and i look at her and as soon as i see her i know that something is wrong so i'll watch her eyes and i and i look to see where she is looking and she's looking at my hand holding my calls the first thing out of her mouth Michael why don't you get inside and wash your hands wash them and try steered

“then she turns the Deborah Deborah is this your friend you want to bring over for tea is this”

Felicia i'm so shocked and scared i don't have the nerve to tell her that i am not Felicia

my name is Nimisha then she says to Deborah while do you really should have known better why don't you tell her that she can't come inside and that she's not welcome each word is poison and i am stung i'm stung with shame and fear and the brand new knowledge that the touch of my hand is something that has to be washed away i wish and wish and wish that my father was here that he would come and do something about Deborah's mother for me because

i am not ready i am not ready to do anything about Deborah's mother myself Deborah doesn't say anything to me and i don't say anything to her and at school we pretend nothing happened a few weeks later my family and i are on the bus

“we're coming home like we always do we get to our bus stop we get off and um the only thing”

we have to do to get home is cross the street and walk about ten houses down the problem is on

this day we get off the bus and right across the street right where we have to walk there is a group of fifteen maybe fifteen young men with very closely shaved heads skin heads some of them have arm bands with swastikers on them they are like the men i've seen on tv as soon as they see us they start to shout at us we hate you go back to where you came from go back to the jungle and then to my mother who is draped in a sorry take it off

so my mother takes my hand and my brother's man hand and she walks away she walks away from the skin heads away from our house but my father stops her aprogör.amte our house is this way and he points right into the middle of the nest of skin heads and one of them looks up he makes eye contact with my father and once they see each other my father walks so fast and so sure across the street that even the skin heads make way for him then he puts his dark face right next

to the young skin head and i see what my father has just seen before it's our neighbor's son my father speaks good god Frank does your father know you are here you're with these people then he turns around and he grabs my hand and he grabs my brother's hand and my mom comes with us and we walk home right through the skin heads because my dad really is badass the next day i hear my parents talking my dad wants to go to Frank's house and talk to his

and they start to argue and then i hear my father i'm going okay i am going it is the right thing to do

“so he goes a few hours after his visit the doorbell rings i go to the stop at top of the”

stairs to see what's happening and it's Frank he's not wearing his skin head jacket just his school uniform my father opens a door it's good to see your son come on in cup of tea so they have a cup of tea and talk for a while and Frank apologizes my dad says to him you did the right thing coming here today son Frank is blushing he looks like an ordinary boy now no stinger my dad cups his hand puts it on Frank's back and simply walks him outside

“as the news keeps bringing more and more reports of violence and racist hatred my dad decides”

it's time to leave England so he moves us to America in this country i have grown up to be among other things a dark-skinned woman married to a nice

Jewish boy from Chicago i've always assumed a happy multicultural future for us

devali and Hanukkah samosas and latkers two cultures double the fun twice the love perfect this summer i stopped taking that future for granted we're at the beach in Delaware my children

“are digging a giant hole in the ground with their father it's what they do so i take a book”

it board and i head out into the ocean and i'm waiting for a wave and i'm behind a group of young people and i'm closest to a man he's probably 19 or 20 years old and i catch something that he says hey Rachel are you with you the girl says now and he says totally casual well that's good and you know what i just not down to his job is down there i look to where he's pointing i see the two girls with headscarves they are barely middle school age the next wave carries me back to shore

the same wave knocks the young man down i get out of the water and i join my family but i can hear him cursing he is in a foul mood and he is getting closer to my family i stand up i put my hands at my hips and i stand in front of my children the man is getting closer and my heart beat quickens i start to breathe shallow and fast i look back at my children they are lost in their play

but for the first time i'm worried i am worried that with their two cultures can they be hated

two ways i'm thinking of my father he is in this September he will be 75 years old he has had a brain tumour operated on twice he now walks with a walker and his hands shake a lot i look back up at the man and i wonder is my children's burden twice mine the answer comes to me in my father's voice no not today not now i look back at the man my father can no longer take the wasps out himself but i can and i am ready thank you that was Nimeeshah Madva she teaches writing

oral communication and public speaking and haverford college Nimeeshah's dad has slowed down slightly but is still 100% a badass to see a picture of young Nimeeshah and her family outside the home

we hope you'll join us next time and that's the story from the moth

“this episode of the moth radio hour was produced by me jay Allison Katherine Burns in”

Jennifer Hickson who also hosted and directed the stories in the show coproducer is vicki

Merrick associate producer Emily couch the rest of the moth's leadership team includes Sarah

“Haberman Sarah Austin Genes make bowls cake tellers Jennifer Birmingham Marina Kloochay”

Suzanne Rust Brandon Grant in good gladowski Sarah Jane Johnson and Aldi causa

moth stories are true as remembered in a firm by the story tellers our theme music is by the

“drift of the music in this hour is from Epidemic Sound podcast music production support from Davie”

Sumner we receive funding from the national endowment for the arts the moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media and woodshole massachusetts special thanks to our friends at Odyssey including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis for more about our podcast for information on pitching us your own story and everything else good or website the moth dot org