#67 Jenna

Heavyweight

Jenna recounts her traumatic childhood, being separated from her mother with paranoid schizophrenia at age four, and placed in foster care w

Key takeaways

• The trauma of being separated from her mother at age four shaped Jenna's lifelong fear of abandonment.

Main topics

• Childhood trauma
• Foster care system

Notable quotes

I know how much you just want to belong, how hard you try to fit in.

Conclusion

Jenna's journey reveals the lasting impact of childhood trauma and the co

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) Pushkin. Jackie? Speaker 8 (0:15) Hi, honey. Why are you calling me from FaceTime? Speaker 1 (0:18) Well, you know, it's the first episode of the new season, season 10, and I thought it might be a fun way to mix things up a little. Speaker 8 (0:27) Sorry, I'm eating a bowl of soup. Speaker 1 (0:30) Where are you right now? Speaker 8 (0:32) I'm at a nursing home. Speaker 1 (0:35) So you're having some nursing home cafeteria soup? Speaker 8 (0:39) No, my own soup. No, no. You Speaker 1 (0:41) brought it with you? Speaker 8 (0:42) I bring it in a thermos. Yeah, it's a storm outside. I always carry a Speaker 1 (0:45) thermos of soup. Do you wear it around your neck like a St. Bernard? Speaker 8 (0:51) I'm not going to laugh because I'm in a public place. Okay, Speaker 1 (0:54) call Speaker 8 (0:54) me back. Yeah, yeah. Goodbye. Oh, Speaker 1 (0:55) pick me up some heart candy from the gift shop. From Bushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Jenna, right after the break. Speaker 4 (1:25) This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Speaker 3 (1:29) In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Speaker 2 (1:41) Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Speaker 3 (1:49) Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (2:02) My girl's rooms are here. Speaker 1 (2:04) So Speaker 2 (2:05) neat. Speaker 4 (2:05) Wives' room. She's got a cello and a ukulele. She would correct me and she would say it's an ukulele mama. Speaker 1 (2:13) If love means doing anything for your family, then Jenna's kids truly know the meaning of love. For what, if not love, is listening to hours of amateur ukulele, or ukulele? The childhood Jenna's giving her kids is quite different from the one she had. But Jenna's mom would have done anything for Jenna too. Oftentimes, though, there wasn't a lot she could do. Growing up, it was just the two of them. Jenna and her mom. Speaker 4 (2:44) And my mom was incredibly lovely. She absolutely loved me, and she also had paranoid schizophrenia. Speaker 1 (2:56) This meant periods of instability, times when Jenna and her mom lived in cars or homeless shelters. It meant cooking them both dinner when her mother was having an episode. And, importantly, it meant always being on the lookout. for Child Protective Services. Speaker 4 (3:13) Anytime I saw anyone in a nice outfit or driving a nice car, I would hide. One of my very first memories was being physically taken away from my mom by CPS workers. Speaker 1 (3:27) How old were you, do you think? Speaker 4 (3:28) I think I was like four or five. Speaker 1 (3:30) What do you remember of it? Speaker 4 (3:33) I remember the feeling of panic and terror. I remember the look on my mother's face. I remember, like, the physical pulling away. Speaker 1 (3:47) That separation lasted a few weeks. Jenna's biggest fear was being separated for good. Speaker 1 (4:00) In the second grade, that fear came true. Jenna was in school when she heard her name being called over the PA. She was told to go to the principal's office. When she got there, a social worker was waiting. The social worker told her she wouldn't be returning home. Instead, she was to be placed in long-term foster care. Jenna knew there must have been some incident with her mom, but no one would tell her what. Speaker 4 (4:26) Eight years old? Like, adults are just not interested in telling you anything. and I got into a stranger's car and drove, having no idea who I was going to meet. Speaker 1 (4:38) Do you remember if you had any belongings with you? Speaker 4 (4:41) My backpack. Speaker 1 (4:42) From school? My Speaker 4 (4:44) backpack and the clothes that I was wearing. Speaker 1 (4:46) The social worker drove further and further into rural Georgia. Speaker 4 (4:50) I remember going through my head of, well, maybe that's going to be my new house as we were, like, driving by houses, or maybe that one's going to be my house, or I hope it's nice. Speaker 1 (4:59) Finally, they came to a farmhouse by a pond. A tall blonde woman emerged and introduced herself as Rhonda Grizzle. Rhonda would be Jenna's new foster mom. Jenna says the first thing Rhonda did was sit her down on the screened-in porch to talk. Speaker 4 (5:15) The only thing that I remember about that conversation was that Rhonda turned to me and said, is it okay if we call you Jenny? And it was a question, but you know how parents or adults ask a kid a question, but it's not really a question? I think that I was very aware that this was not up to me. Speaker 1 (5:38) Jenny was close to Jenna, but it wasn't her name. No one had ever called her Jenny. Here she was entering a strange new home with nothing much but her name. And now she was losing that too. Speaker 1 (5:56) Jenna became a foster daughter to Rhonda and her husband, Eddie Wayne, and a foster sister to their three biological children, a toddler, a preteen girl, and a boy that was about Jenna's age. And how did you fit in with the Grizzles? Speaker 4 (6:10) Well, let's start with the appearance. I was absolutely not like them. You know, the game, like, one of these things doesn't look like the other, one of these things doesn't belong. Everyone else was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and I was this dark-haired kid with dark eyes that bore no resemblance. And so there was certainly a lot of eyebrows raised in public places, like, who is this kid? Speaker 1 (6:39) Her new brother, Cody, made it known that they'd had foster children before her. In fact, only a few months earlier, they'd fostered a girl around Jenna's age. And her name? Also Jenna. Speaker 1 (6:55) Jenna 1.0 had bullied Cody, and so he was understandably wary of this new Jenna's arrival. When Rhonda sat her down on the porch that very first day and turned her into Jenny, maybe that had been Rhonda's attempt at wiping the slate clean. Speaker 1 (7:15) Jenna cried herself to sleep most nights. She missed her mom and only got to see her during their weekly supervised visits, which often went poorly. So poorly that eventually her mom's parental rights were legally terminated. Speaker 4 (7:30) And it felt like I was grieving her as if she had died, because at that point I would not be allowed to see her again until I was an adult. Speaker 1 (7:37) With her mother's loss of custody, the Grizzles house became Jenna's new home. She grew close to her foster dad, Eddie Wayne. a high school teacher with a warm presence and a big, booming voice. Eddie Wayne taught Jenna how to fish, and Rhonda cooked her delicious meals every night. Speaker 4 (7:54) And that was very, very different from my experience. My experience was like cereal or like cheese puffs, and I was being exposed to homemade fried chicken and fried okra and green beans. Speaker 1 (8:06) Life was filled with vacations, boating, visits to the grandparents, new friends, birthdays and Christmases. board games and family dinners. In this way, two and a half years passed. For all intents and purposes, the Grizzles were now her family. So it came as no surprise when one day, while the other kids were playing by the lake, Eddie Wayne called Jenna over. Speaker 4 (8:30) I just remember this very distinctly that my foster father brought me downstairs to the basement to have this conversation, which was, we would like to adopt you. Would you like that? Would you want that? And of course I said yes. Speaker 1 (8:48) It was official. Jenna was going to be a grizzle. But that never happened. Speaker 4 (9:00) So what happens next is my mom, she had mental illness, but she was not dumb. She was a very clever person. Speaker 1 (9:09) Jenna's mom had somehow figured out where Jenna was going to school. And from there, she found out Jenna's address. Speaker 4 (9:16) How she did that, I don't know. Speaker 1 (9:18) What she does know is that in the aftermath of her mom's discovery, something changed at the grizzles. They Speaker 4 (9:25) decide that it's just simply not safe. for me to stay with them anymore. Speaker 1 (9:32) Jenna's future was being yanked away from her. She wasn't going to be adopted. Instead, she was being kicked out. And this all happened in a matter of days. Speaker 4 (9:47) The way in which I left the home was so unemotional. Like, there was never like, this is unfair. You Speaker 1 (9:55) were never able to say to them, well, wait a minute, what happened to that conversation we had? You said you were adopting me. Speaker 4 (10:01) Right. I never had that conversation with them. And the last day I was there. I