E1. Why Now?

“People loved my mother. She nearly killed me.” With that stark paradox, we open a story that refuses easy answers. Sadie Green grew up in rural Minnesota with a cleft palate that required surgeries and a mother who was celebrated by neighbors while inflicting severe, escalating abuse at home. Decades later, Sadie returns to the pages she wrote in her thirties—memories captured during a winter of solitude—to understand how fear is rooted in her body and how fear has shaped her relationships and sense of self.

We move between lived memory and documented fact: hospital notes from the University of Minnesota, five surgeries paid for by proud parents with little money, and a rare removal from the home in 1970. 

Pam and Sadie examine the nature of memory, why doubt is normal for survivors, and how evidence—medical records, witnesses, removal—can steady a story but not remove the doubt that family denial thrives on. 

If you value survivor-led storytelling and conversations that make space for complexity, press play and stay with us as the series unfolds with new episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe, share this episode, or leave a review with one takeaway that stayed with you. 

Special Thanks to our supporters, who have made this podcast possible.

• Lucy Mathews Heegaard: Audio Engineer
• Terry Gydesen: Photographer

• Polly Kellogg
• Kate Tillotson
• Dawn Charbonneau
• Jacob Wyatt
• Molly Tillotson
• Julian Bowers
• Wendy Horowitz
• Pat Farrell
• Lynette Tabert
• Laura Jensen
• People's Farm Collective
• Deborah Copperud of "Spock Talk" podcast

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Story’s Frame
• 1:31 Why Tell The Story Now
• 3:21 Reading: Imagining Birth And “The Devil’s Mark”
• 7:05 Early Care, Surgeries, And Faith
• 10:16 Poverty, Work, And Life In Rural Minnesota
• 13:00 Nurses, Bonding, And A Mother’s Early Care
• 16:16 Abuse Escalation And Resilience
• 18:18 Who Was Sadie’s Mother Publicly And Privately
• 21:20 The Father’s Role And Family Labor
• 23:20 Reading: The Strangling Memory

Transcript

Setting The Story’s Frame

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hi there. Welcome to the Sadie Green Story, a podcast that explores the lifelong effects of childhood trauma. Sadie was born with the birth defect cleft palate. Abuse from her mother escalated over time until by the age of 12 and 13, Sadie stole her food, hid in the woods from her mother's rage, and at night slept in old cars and outbuildings in rural Minnesota. She was rescued at 14. In this podcast, Sadie, now in her 60s, looks back on that early life and tries to understand its repercussions. She will read excerpts from a manuscript of memories she documented in her 30s. Mixed in with the readings will be conversations between Sadie and myself, Pam Colby. I'm a champion storyteller featured on the Moth Radio Hour, an award-winning filmmaker, and now a podcaster. Sadie and I have been dear friends for decades. We intend to explore issues of childhood resilience, betrayal, exposing family secrets, and how chronic trauma in childhood affects a lifetime. Thank you so much for joining us. Sadie's here with me right now. Sadie, why now are you telling this story?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Thank you, Pam, for your introduction. I've been running from my childhood all my life. There was so much pain and loneliness there. I've avoided that pain primarily by staying very busy. I'm a task-focused person, not a feeling-focused person, at least not feelings within my own body. When I was fourteen, I was transported to a hospital, and I never really looked back until I was thirty, when I spent a winter alone in rural Wisconsin. I started writing down memories that had always been there in flashes, but now I started to stay with them, sit with them, and fill them out. And for the next few years I tried to carve out blocks of time where I could continue to document memories from my childhood, but that writing has been on a shelf now for decades. I have several siblings who still live in the same area where I grew up. And while they had no part in my abuse and did nothing wrong, they suffered ostracism and gossip when I disappeared. But mainly I have a body full of fear. Even in my sixties now, I hold on to fear, and it's not rational. It's paralyzing to reveal secrets about a parent who had so much control and power over me. But now I have time, and I want to understand that fear and how it has permeated my life, my relationships, and my sense of self.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Sadie is gonna read for us from her book that she wrote when she was in her thirties, dealing with buried memories. And this part is particularly more fiction, is that right, Sadie?

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Yes, I'm imagining my mother the day I was born. Okay, let's hear it. August 1955 at Aiken County Hospital. It's a girl. She hears them tell her through the fogginess of drugs. It was an easy birth compared to what it could be. She feels the nurse's presence as a source of comfort. They're in charge now. She can rest as soon as she sees her baby. It's over. The worst is over. They'll call her Susan. Susan is a solid name. Not fancy like Michelle or odd as in Louise. Nurses are busy on the side preparing her. And she notices a difference from the other times. Why are the nurses leaving? Shouldn't she see her baby first? Maybe they do things different now. She tries to reassure herself. In their absence, she drifts in and out of drowsiness. But why have they left her all alone like this? Then shuffling footsteps outside the door and whispered voices. What's the matter? She tries to pull herself together but falls back again onto the pillow. Hard to know what's real. Just be a minute. Awfully quiet though. Why don't they let me see my baby? The door opens. Two nurses and the doctor walk in slow motion toward the bed. One nurse holds the baby in a bundle. The other, smiling weakly, announces She's a little girl. Marion reaches towards the bundle. Even the baby's face is covered. A little girl, the nurse repeats, still holding the bundle close, as if she's hesitant to part with it. Oh my baby. Marion senses a conspiracy. Is something wrong with her? Why is the blanket covering her face? Mrs. Laznik be careful with her. Look at her slowly, the doctor speaks for the first time, standing alongside the bed. Your daughter will be fine. But she looks unusual. There are operations we can do. What she has, a double cleft, is not unheard of. She barely hears the words as the bundle is set carefully within her arms. She lifts one corner of the soft receiving blanket. They stand waiting. As she removes the blanket Oh my God in heaven, what is wrong? What's the matter with her face? Her own body flinches backward. She almost drops the bundle on the bed. But her face is not together right. Then I, the baby, start to cry. Oh dear God, she continues, what have I done? The Lord in heaven knows I sin. My child, the devil's mark. My baby has the devil's mark.

Early Care, Surgeries, And Faith

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Sadie, that is really intense. What was it like for you writing that and imagining your mother seeing you for the first time?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Well, my birth defect has always been a hard part of my life. Taking up more space in my sense of my self-image than it should. I'm very aware of it. Whenever I am introduced to someone new, it's kind of like having a headlight in the middle of my face that I can't turn off. While it may have been a shock to my mother, I do think she took good care of me in the first few years. According to hospital notes, I spent most of the first year in a hospital. But I think my mother cared for me when I was young. I was her third child and eventually one of nine. All of the others were born healthy. I don't know a lot about her childhood religion, but there would be family reunions in Montana. And I remember one year her father standing with the Bible and the rest of us kneeling on the floor. And sometimes I've wondered if it was a specific occasion, because I don't remember it being a regular thing. But I do remember that he felt ominous to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

And do you think, Sadie, that your mother right away thought that the birth effect was a mark of the devil? Do you think that that came to her mind when she saw you the moment of your birth?

SPEAKER_00 8:29

She clearly believed that I had a mark of the devil, that it was the devil's hoof. And there were many, many times when she would say, I don't know what I ever did to deserve you. So she clearly believed it in the time that I remember.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

But you don't know that she believed that from the moment you were born.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

I don't. However, that thought about the devil's mark is not she's not alone in that. A reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, Pig Meyer, sent me a page from a Sandra Schofield novel that included the sentence. I used to play with a girl on that street who had a cleft palate. Her parents, who were assembly of God, believed it was the mark of God put on her for their sins, and they wouldn't have it repaired, even when a service organization offered to pay for everything.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Wow. So your mom was your primary abuser. And I'm wondering what was it about that first year that made her be kinder to you. But your hospital records kind of show that you were in the hospital most of the first year.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yes, although I've learned as an adult, again, through the hospital records, that the first five surgeries that I had, my parents paid for them. They were very poor and they were proud. And the kids kept coming, and I think it was extremely stressful.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Tell us a little bit about what your parents set up with, like where was the income coming from?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

My father was a farmer. He was a World War II vet. He uh was a Marine in the Pacific. He did not take advantage of the GI Bill. And he also worked for a neighbor who moved houses. He also worked in a factory. He was a hard worker. Both my parents were very hard workers. The first home we lived in, we hauled water in and out of the house. We had an outhouse for a bathroom. There was no plumbing inside. And it was a small house with two small rooms off the main room. My parents had one of those rooms. A brother had another, and my sister and I slept on a porch. It was a three-season porch. So in the winter the outside door was closed, of course, and the inside door was open.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Where were you at in the United States?

SPEAKER_00 11:14

We lived near Millachs Lake, near Millachs Indian Reservation, in middle of Minnesota.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Which is in pretty cold territory. Yeah, yes, yes. And so here your family was not well off, paying for your surgeries, and you were in the hospital the whole first year.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

I'm surprised to hear that actually, but that is what it says in the notes. And I imagine that while my surgeries were at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, my hear was often in the small town hospital in Aiken. And I imagine all these nurses and staff coming in every day and hauling me around. And if I was there that long, they certainly got to know me, and I'm comforted by that.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Anybody who knows you knows you have great capacity for love, and there's something good, some bonding that happened.

Nurses, Bonding, And A Mother’s Early Care

SPEAKER_00 12:17

Yeah. And I think my mother was good to me. I had to be fed in a certain way. Of the hospital records, there was a surgery when I was two and a half, there were two when I was an infant, and then there were two around the age of four. And in those records, she reports when I sat up, when I first started walking, when I wasty trained, that I ate well, that I was hard to understand. She's cited as being a reliable reporter. You know, I really think that in those first few years she was good to me. I've spent some of my adult life working in the battered women's shelter, and it is true that abuse does escalate over time if there is no intervention. And I think that my mother had a lot of stress, maybe a lot of rage. It just got worse over time. Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

And so what we want to be um looking at in this podcast is well, Sadie's story, which is an amazing story, but also your process of recovery and resilience and getting through some really, really dark times. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more, an overview of what your mother was like and who she was in the world.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

She was really a hard worker, very self-sufficient. We had an old ringer washer in the basement. She gardened. She was the first one up in the morning, the last to go to bed. She'd be on her hands and knees at midnight scrubbing floors. She'd, you know, make homemade noodles, baked bread. And then she also was out in the barn during lambing season. She was throwing bales up on the wagon during hay season. She just was always busy.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

So she was a worker. Sounds like a little bit of a drudge, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Well, except people, you know, people love my mother. She was generous. She would give eggs and milk to widows, you know, in the very rural neighborhood. She was involved in 4-H. I remember I have this picture of her standing in front of the stove and some friend, a neighbor probably, standing right behind her, and they're just laughing and laughing. I mean, people love my mother.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Wow. Just this weird dichotomy as this story goes on and people hear more about it. She was wickedly abusive. And I think that's just something that the world doesn't always recognize is the various faces.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah. People are way more than their abuse.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

So what about your dad? What w what was his role in all of this?

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Well, she was the dominant parent. He was gone a lot. You know, we had uh beef cows and sheep and ducks and geese and chickens, and i i there was a lot of work, you know, a lot of planting and fields and getting hay into the barn and milking cows twice a day.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

But you don't feel like what happened to you would have happened if it was just him as the parent.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

No, I think he would have liked me under different circumstances. I do.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Wow. Okay, well, for people who don't know the story, let's keep going with it and continue reading from what you wrote when you were a young woman and just starting to process these memories.

Abuse Escalation And Resilience

Who Was Sadie’s Mother Publicly And Privately

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Yes. I'll read a memory from when I was quite young, six or seven, I would guess. Sue was looking for something to wear, a certain piece of clothing, acceptable to Ma, but she couldn't find it. The dresser Sue shared with her sister June stood just inside their cramped and drafty bedroom. This was in the first house when Sue was still part of the family. Their bedroom was a side porch, really, where the outside door was kept closed, and the inside door kept open to catch as much warmth from the heater stove as possible. The dresser stood taller than Sue was at six years old. Reaching up on tiptoe with both hands inside the drawer, she cried in fear at Ma's approaching anger. She heard the floorboard squeak behind her, heard the rising voice, then felt the calloused hands around her throat that lifted both her feet up off the floor. A solid grip and crazy words, jerky, gasping, loud, accusing voice, shaking, shaking, back and forth, and then the hands let go. And Susan's body crumpled. No control, but she could hear Ma's voice call, Warren! She felt her body lifted off the floor and heard Ma's voice again. A voice so different from what it was before she fell. Pa picked up Sue's body like a rag doll, lifted her above the threshold, carried her across the room, and laid her on the table. Sue could not move, could not tell them she could hear. From a clear distance, she knew Ma was slapping both sides of her face, heard her say, What do I do? What do I do? And Pa's calmer voice, she'll be okay. It was so odd to lay there like another person watching, but not able to lift a finger or even move an eyelash. The kids all stood around. She knew she wasn't dead unless one could be awake at dying. Then her body began gasping and trembling. Pa picked her up and held her against him while they draped blankets over her shoulders. Then he wrapped his arms around her and carried her back inside the bedroom. He laid her on the upper bunk where her sister usually slept. Sue, cold inside the blankets, curled up in a ball next to the window. The others left the porch and went inside, but she lay there for a long time, watching car lights pass each other on the road below. The whizzing pairs of colored lights appeared to clearly understand their destinations, confirming just how foreign and outside her world they were. So is that one of your first memories? One of my first traumatic ones for sure.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Mm-hmm. And so basically your mother had strangled you.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Yeah, I think I just ran out of air. She had just held my throat too long. And I was off the floor. So I just think I ran out of air.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

So it clearly frightened her that she almost killed you, but sort of foreshadowing that this would happen over and over again as you aged.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Yeah, not in that exact way. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

But yes. There was punishment in the family, but you're the only one who experienced it.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Yeah, my parents were strict. I mean, there was no talking back. That was unheard of. Kids were not sassy. But my mother had this kind of secret, it felt like a a game. She had a thing above clothes. She would tell me I needed to find a certain piece of clothing, as if I had lost it, or if I had hid it somewhere. And I knew that I would not find whatever it was. It was a pretext for some kind of punishment. But it was this appearance that I was hiding my clothes, or it was just crazy. It was just crazy. So she was setting you up. She was setting me up.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

And messing with you. And you were the one she always chose to do these things with.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Yes. And it was terrifying.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

How does it feel now to pick it up again after not reading some of this stuff for 30 years and be in your 60s and pull up some of these old memories?

The Father’s Role And Family Labor

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Well, that is really a good question. It's a scary question for me. I do trust myself that what I remember actually happened. I do trust that. Was it really accurate? I do know that what happened really happened with my abuse.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Well, and one of the reasons we know that is because your medical records, you have them, you have documentation. You were taken out of the home.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

In a time and era where kids were not removed from the home.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yes. This was 1970. So child abuse was fairly new on the radar. And especially in rural white families.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

So we know we know it happened, but for other people who have memories like this and are pulling them up, you can let them know that that there's always doubt. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Yes. And we all have our point of view. You know, my sister, who has reached out to me a few times over the years, has a totally different picture. We were 16 months apart. And in my mind, she was there. She knows on some level. She really does. But, you know, I left when I was 14. I never went back. She had a relationship with my mother all of her life, probably daily. I mean, my mother worked in her flower shop. There's been this whole other narrative. My siblings and my family have heard this whole other narrative ever since I left. So their story is different. They don't want to believe that this happened.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

But we know it did. We have the records. You wrote it all down when you were in your 30s. You have many witnesses. So we're going to continue to share this story. And we invite you to continue to listen to this podcast. And thank you, Sadie, for being willing to do this.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Thank you, Pam. Thank you.