E3. Hunger and Hiding

A cold November garage, a basement chair, and a girl counting footsteps—that’s where Sadie’s story begins. We walk through the fear along with the stubborn spark of imagination: a belief that somewhere else this would not be happening. The narrative moves from hiding to hunger, showing how neglect and control can live side by side—how a parent can starve you and still track your every move, turning everyday items like socks and sweaters into weapons for punishment.

A grandmother leaves food in a shed and proves that love can be small and still life-saving. We also face the most difficult truths: a father whose gentle nature could not interrupt cruelty, and the sentence that stings across decades—“it seemed like you enjoyed punishment.” We examine how family systems protect themselves with denial and how poverty and medical debt magnify stress.

If this resonates, follow the show, share this story with someone, and leave a review to help others find it.

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

• 0:03 Framing Sadie’s Story
• 0:56 The Garage And Basement Hiding
• 4:58 Fantasy As Survival: Radio Dreams
• 7:15 Fear, Attachment, And Control
• 8:46 Hunger And Stealing To Eat
• 11:03 Clothes As Weapon And Identity
• 16:41 Father’s Denial And Family Silence
• 19:08 Gratitude For Grandmother
• 19:43 Journal From The Valley House

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Sadie Green Story, a podcast that explores the lifelong effects of childhood trauma. This is a conversation between Sadie Green, who changed her name as an adult, in part to hide from a family she remains estranged from, and me, Pam Colby, her dear friend of many years. I'm a storyteller, filmmaker, and now a podcaster. Sadie, now in her 60s, looks back on that early life and tries to understand its repercussions. In addition to our conversations, Sadie will read from a manuscript of memories she documented in her 30s. Thank you for joining us. Sadie?

The Garage And Basement Hiding

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Hey there, Pam. Thanks for being here. And thank you to listeners coming back. This is our third episode. I'd like to start out today by reading a story of hiding, which I did a lot of when I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen, and still living at home. So here it goes. Susan hid in the garage, huddled in the far back corner. The garage had no door, so she could look directly across the yard, toward the back steps leading into the gray farmhouse, and see them if they came outside. It was dark in the garage on a cold November evening, but a constant state of fear kept her alert. She blew warm breath on cold hands. She folded both arms across her chest and tucked each hand under an armpit, and fantasized again how someday she'd be famous, and then they would be sorry. Tonight, she was a radio announcer, talking quiet, with a loving knowledge of the world, playing all the perfect songs. The world outside was waiting just to hear her. And Ma and Pa, sitting at home, would listen to her voice and be proud she was their daughter. Then everything would change. Sometimes she crept to the side of the house hidden from the road by a line of pine trees, and lifted the small iron door, like a flip-up window that covered the wood chute to the basement. She wiggled backwards through the square opening, legs dangling against the rough cement wall, a solid landing on the wood pile, or where she could push away enough to jump safely to the floor below. Once inside the basement, she could hide behind the musty smelling armchair, crouching down on the cement floor, with her back wedged up against the shelves of fruit jars, covered now with dust and cobwebs. More than once, she pried the tops off those old jars. Hunger, more important than her pride, but the contents were blurry colored, soft, no clear likeness to the original fresh fruit or vegetable. Those jars came with the house, and the Laznik family moved in years ago. She might huddle in the basement for hours, dreading the sound of footsteps on the stairs, or feel giddy with relief when those footsteps went back up again, expecting their purpose was to find her out, rob her of comfort, string her up somewhere, or at the very least beat her out into the cold again. If she was lucky, and if the wood pile was high enough, Sue could climb back out that same wood chute. She would if she knew Ma was coming down to do a load of clothes, for instance. Though sometimes she had no choice, no time, and then she held her breath behind her hands in the same position without moving till she feared that she might die. For weeks, the hiding place behind the basement chair went undiscovered. This was unusual. Ma was so often just one step behind her. Sometimes it was obvious that Ma was after her in particular. Other times, it felt to Sue like she was simply in Ma's way. In either case, when Ma got down to cursing Susan, there seemed to be a vengeance in it. Like, on a day in grade school when Sue saw her favorite green plaid dress for the last time. Ma said she wore that dress too often, so she cut it up in pieces with her sewing scissors, ordering Sue to stand and watch while she cut wide rapid slices through the fabric.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Oh, that's so emotionally painful. Was that an early memory?

SPEAKER_01 5:03

That was an early memory. And the whole thing with the garage and hiding in the basement was always there, really, just under my busyness. And I don't remember a lot around that dress. I don't remember other people being there. I don't remember where we were. She seemed to be s uh in my head, she's sitting down. I'm standing up.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

I love the part where you're dreaming about being a radio announcer and sort of dreaming yourself out of that place and time. Then you did go on and do some radio announcing. Is that right? Isn't that amazing?

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Community radio, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Community radio.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

And playing music. And you've always been somebody who loves music.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

I love music.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

When you think about yourself, that part about you daydreaming about a radio announcer. Do you feel like you're have a fond memory there?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Yeah, I'm fond of that memory, and I'm glad I had fantasies like that. I read a lot of Red Book magazines that were on the porch when I lived at home. And that was a real escape in going other places. Books reading in general took me out of what was happening and put me into different worlds.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

And so you did have this other reality that there was this whole other place out there.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Somehow I believe I knew that if I if I were somewhere else this would not be happening to me. Sometimes I've thought that that's why I am as functional as I am, but I'm not sure, but I think that I knew that even then that if I were somewhere else this would not be happening.

Fear, Attachment, And Control

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Well that's a powerful statement about your ability to see beyond your circumstances and dream your self another life. Which you did. But back in that life, what can you say about the hiding memories and your mother?

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I was hiding all the time. I was so afraid of her and her mood. There were ways that I was neglected as far as food and shelter, but there was also a way where I felt very connected to her. I felt like she knew where I was, what I was doing. It was like there was a rope connecting us almost. It isn't like she ignored me. You know, that might be another reason why I function as well as I do.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

There's that whole talk about abandonment or neglect.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

And in some ways your mother wasn't neglecting you because she was constantly There was some way that she was aware of me or in my skin all the time. In the end, I would be gone in the woods for days, hours, and then she didn't. But there was still a way that I knew I needed to come back, or you know, there was a way that I was always aware of her.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

But the interesting part is with all the kids and work she had going, she was aware of you too. It's almost like she there was something that she got out of torturing you.

Hunger And Stealing To Eat

SPEAKER_01 8:40

I I wish I knew. More and more I think it was about money. I think the fact that they paid for five surgeries and they didn't have money and they had a lot of kids, I think that was really difficult. I'll never know for sure. But that is the single most reason that I tell myself now is it was so stressful and I was consuming so many resources.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Let's talk about resources because as your story goes on and we haven't really gotten to the really hard parts around hunger yet, but this one hints at you looking at jars of food that were long spoiled. And how did your mother gradually quit feeding you?

SPEAKER_01 9:34

What was that like Yeah, again, I wish I knew. There's so much that I can't seem to get to. I don't remember a particular event, a night when she decided I'm not sleeping in the house anymore. I don't remember an incident or a particular time when I was not allowed at the table. I don't know how that happened.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

But you have the memory of gradually becoming more and more hungry.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

And I became roofless. I would steal lunch bags out of lockers once I was in seventh grade in town, outside of the one room schoolhouse. I would take food from the garden, I would go through the basement, come upstairs at night and steal food out of the kitchen. A little of this, a little of that. I knew how to take just enough so it might not be missed. I stole from the freezer, I stole from grocery stores once we were in town. My grandmother started feeding me, putting food out in a shed. I remember stealing meal tickets. You know, you just do what you or that's what I did. I did what I needed to do to eat.

Clothes As Weapon And Identity

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Let's go on to as you talk about no resources or little resources and taking up space and time and money and a big chunk of their savings they didn't even have. But then to s hear about your mom cutting up your favorite dress. Now that's just mean. That's getting to some core piece of who she was that is probably pretty painful to think about.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

I think she had a lot of rage and I became her punting big. I learned where did I hear this? That my mother was kind of the odd one out in her family. And I don't know any details, I don't know what that meant. She was called the black sheep. Might have had something, you know. I don't know. I just grab at straws, really. But I think more than anything it was the money.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

I know that clothes are something that you've always paid attention to. You always look great, put together. Sometimes you've combined a lot of more wild outfits in your younger days, I remember. But I think clothes have a special importance to you. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Yeah, I've always loved clothes. I do have an emotional attachment. I don't buy a lot of clothes. I have clothes for years and years. I realize now as an adult, I do not remember much about clothes I wore back then, normal clothes. I remember humiliating outfits. I remember the green plaid dress. And then there was this blue and white soft sweater outfit given to us by the city folks who had a cabin across the road that I wore into the courtroom. Then there was one perfectly matched outfit that was ordered from JC Penny's catalog. It was a pleated green skirt, a dark green, with a matching sweater button down and a white blouse underneath. I remember I loved that outfit. Clothes are a big part of what happened in my childhood. Clothes are really important to me now, but they were a really hard part of my childhood.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

The whole thing with your mom was that she was always torturing you with clothes. She was making up that you'd lost a piece of clothing or making you wear your father's old overalls to school, and maybe this has something to do with it too, because sometimes she would not let you wear clothes and put you in an overcoat. To me, it also seems like perhaps because you had no control. So now in in life you can take great pride in having control over my clothes.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Yeah, I do. There's a lot in the early years I don't remember, and I wish I did. I am so full of the last two or three years before I left home that were so terrible. I don't remember having a place to put my own clothes. I don't remember a lot of mornings before school. I don't know how to get at it. I just can't remember. When I was in the hospital on the psych ward, I was thrilled to have my own clothes. I had a bookshelf in the maybe it was a dresser in the room. I just remember being so proud of my clothes.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Well, let's talk about your mother and her clothes. Since she was so controlling with yours. Did she have a lot of clothes herself?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

She did not. I remember she had one dress that was kind of a dressier dress. It was blue and black striped with a belt. She was very casual. I don't remember having any sense that it mattered a great deal.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

So the whole hiding the clothes and punishing you for not having knowledge about where it is after she hit it was just a random way of driving you crazy.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

I don't know how it started, but that was certainly the primary means of punishment. There'd be a piece of clothing, a pair of shoes, or something that I supposedly had I had to find them, go find them. And I supposedly had hid them, but I knew I wouldn't find them. It wasn't something I could do.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

How often did she do that with you?

SPEAKER_01 15:57

I'd say often.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

And yet you don't think your dad ever caught on that it wasn't you losing things, it was her hiding them.

Father’s Denial And Family Silence

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Well, that's interesting. I assume that people knew more than they did, but I remember once visiting them as an adult, and the only time as an adult that I had any time with my father alone, he walked me out to the car and he leaned up against the car, and I was asking how it felt for me to come and visit, and somehow I I got through this list of things that had happened to me that were painful, hanging from the barn, being put under the barrel. I gave him this list of memories, and he looks at the ground, and he's kind of a shy, mild-mannered man, and he said, you know, it just seemed like you enjoyed punishment. You know, it drove me crazy. And it wasn't until later that someone said, Well, maybe, maybe he wasn't aware. They certainly were aware of the punishment.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Well, even if you were losing your shirt or sock, the kind of punishment was beyond anything that was in the normalcy reign.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

I think now that I always thought that other family members knew more than perhaps they did. Over multiple times of this game, it became accepted that she, meaning me, did this all the time. This is what I do, this is who I am, this is a habit with me. But it wasn't a habit with me, it was a habit with her.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

But let's go back to your dad, because uh here's this man that, you know, in many ways you adore even to this day. You see how what a hard worker he was, what a kind heart he had, that he would have been good to you if your mom hadn't have interfered. And yet he is saying that somehow you enjoyed this. That is just like so standard out of the victim asking for it or something.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Yeah, that was how I interpreted it, is that he was thinking I asked for it, that I liked punishment, that I did things deliberately, and that was so far from the truth. And I just can't believe that he didn't know. I mean, he had to know. He had to know something.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Yeah, and he just couldn't take your mama.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Yeah, they really liked each other. I think they really did.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

And he must have just been so internally, like his mother was freaked by how your mother treated you, and his mother, who is your grandmother, is observing this and even talking to him about it. So you know that there's somewhere in him that is so disappointed in his wife, but he can't confront her.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah, it's almost like choosing between the two of them.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Choosing between the two of you, too. He chose his wife over you for sure, but then he chose his wife over his mother as well.

Gratitude For Grandmother

SPEAKER_01 19:08

In the end, my siblings were not allowed to visit grandma after I was removed. After they went to welfare, actually, and it took months for me to be removed, and she was a nearest neighbor, and she was blind. All of a sudden, holidays and I mean I heard that he would come and visit, but the kids couldn't go in her house, couldn't talk to her. It's so painful.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

And we are gonna do a show, a tribute to grandmother.

Journal From The Valley House

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yes, thank goodness for grandma. And for you now, Pam, for sitting here with me and listening. Before we end today, I want to read from a journal that I kept alongside of the memory book back when I was 30, spending the winter in Wisconsin, where I was first starting to connect with my past. October 1985, the Valley House. Two weeks ago I didn't have any of this silence or slow passing of time. In the early mornings, I wrap the old blue robe around me, listen to the crows caw across the swamp, and watch the dawning sky turn colors. During the days I eat and sleep out of proportion to my needs, just to fill the empty space. On clear nights, the stars rain over the valley when I step outside and look up at the open sky. Tonight is a sad evening. Everything is quiet. Sitting in the rocking chair this morning, I reread the words I wrote string her up somewhere, and I cried for that girl Susan. I am separate from her. The tears are not for me. She is separate like a storybook character I know by heart. I feel the ropes on her, not me. Her body hanging upside down, blood cooling in her face, hair falling towards the barn floor. But I know it happened to a girl, just twelve years old. Heavy sadness presses on me, like an oversized hand pushing on my chest. Then a rage of pacing back and forth. My face burns. I want to hit them, knock them down, stick up for Susan. But then I see them in their 60s now, sitting at that long oak table, with no teeth left because I've never seen a dentist. Proud, hardworking farmers all their lives. Yet city folks with all their money could still look down at them. That's when my rage collapses like a row of dominoes. Who do I blame? Do I love the parent, hate the world? When I think of them and their humanity, my rage turns back on me, and I don't know how to finish. Now, by oil lamp light, I look at my luminous face in the mirror, where my hair doesn't show in the background, but my scars stand out. A dull yellow sweater, dear to me, wraps under my chin. I don't mind the look. In the daytime, when I come in from the cold, my face looks hearty and cheerful. In a culture that worships physical perfection, being disfigured can stand out enormously in your own mind. But now in this house, I see the character of my beauty. Here it is easy to feel comfortable. Of course I am alone, but this place has much of what I come from: the woods, the weather, the fires, and the cold. I change into the black wool dress. No color, but for the straw blonde hair and a thin purple t-shirt between the coarse black wool and my skin. I run through the woods where yellow and gold leaves fall onto black earth, and the straw blonde and the dress blend into the fall completely.