EPISODE LINK: MOON UNIT ZAPPA
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COLLEEN: Welcome back to hot flashes and cool topics. We are excited to be talking to writer, actress, comedian, artist, podcaster, and tea merchant. I love how that’s your title, Moon Unit Zappa.
We’re going to be talking about your book, Earth to Moon, a memoir. Thank you for joining us.
MOON UNIT: Thank you for having me.
COLLEEN: We just mentioned she were both born in 1967 as you were.mSo reading your book just brought back a lot of interesting memories and references that we could completely relate to. But I wanted to start with the fact that the book has written kind of from your journals.And why did you feel like now was the right time to write this book?
MOON UNIT: Well, originally, I thought it was Gail’s story to tell. And for those of you who don’t know,I was introduced to my parents as Frank and Gale. I did not have a mother and a father. I had a Frank and a Gail. And they, Gail was the quote, adult opposite my father and having the experiences in real time, getting all the references, the satire, the context of the times, and she was devoted to him and really loved the music. For me, he was my embarrassing father. The reason why I decided to write the book now is because in 2015, when Gail died, she threw a curveball that just, it just, it just leveled me. And the book, I wrote it really to save my own life and just go back over all the, everything I knew about the word family,everything I knew about trust, everything I knew about safety, everything I knew about loyalty. I had to rethink all of it. And so it was just, it just burned the house down. And I’m, I’m, I’m rising like a fill in the blank for the from the fill in the blank. So, you know, the title, not to speak in cliches.
BRIDGETT: Right. The title, you know, you see the title. If anybody is watching a video, I’m going to hold it up. The title is Earth to Moon. So when you see the title, before you read the book, you’re thinking, isn’t that sweet? And then you read the book. And then you know what Earth to Moon means. Can you share a little bit about what that means?
MOON UNIT: So my name, Moon Unit, first of all, Moon, Frank gave Gail two options, Moon or Motorhead. And there was a guy named Motorhead in my father’s band. And so Gail thankfully selected moon. Unit is my middle name.
And it’s because I was the first born and we became a family unit. And when I was little, Gail would say that spacing out was a sign of genius. I spaced out a lot. Just figure it out for yourself. Anyway, she would say, Earth’s moon, come in over. And that would kind of bring me out of my reverie. And then later she would weaponize it and say, Earth to Moon, the world doesn’t revolve around you because it revolved around my father and her. And so this was my way of reclaiming that experience and just saying, this is the world from my perspective, the moon. So I love that cover. It helped me finish the book because It reminded me of the little prince, except it’s a little girl having a little garden on the moon, and she’s observing the earth from this vantage point.
COLLEEN: If we could start kind of close to the beginning when you’re writing the book, it’s very clear from the beginning you have somewhat of a dysfunctional, unique family. And it was, it was sad when I would read parts where you were like, oh, is that what a family is, oh, dinner is on a table like you all get together and you sit and have dinner. And how long did it take you to realize that your family was unlike most of your friend’s families?
MOON UNIT: Well, obviously, before I was in school, that’s just what I was exposed to. And even then, I had the feeling of, I don’t like this. This doesn’t feel safe. I already felt like I could wander off and nobody would notice.
And when I got to school and then I would have time at other people’s homes, then there was the ability to compare and contrast. I remember visiting somebody who had a doll house. And I just thought, you have a smaller house inside your house. Like it was a toy that was hilarious and fascinating to me. And then, and in some cases, I’d visit a friend and their houses were even weirder. And as weird as mine was, I was like, I’d prefer my weird house to the house where you are not allowed to sleep with your underpants on and you have to hang them on the, you know, the towel rack. And that was, I had, there was a one play date in particular that I, I cannot look at the work of the Toulouse -Letrek ever again because there was that art, there was like a, that coffee table book. And so the underpants with the coffee table book is like wired and fired together in my psyche.
BRIDGETT: Oh, my. Well, you know, you’ve relived a lot of very painful moments in this book. And I mean, my heart was breaking for you. But I feel like everybody has had moments like that. I just felt like, you know, you exposed them. How did you feel, how did that make you feel when you were writing this and what were your thought processes when you were, well, you put it all together in the book.
COLLEEN: Was it cathartic to do that?
MOON UNIT: Yeah. So I, in some ways, I wish somebody would have just said, why don’t you go get into a 12 -step program and work a fourth step in any program? And before you decide to write a memoir, because you’re really doing the exact same thing. You’re just excavating your part and the other person’s part and taking a good look at everything in sort of like a non -judgmental police report kind of a way. So I constructed it. I had a really good writer friend who said, press on the bruise. And so I kind of mapped it on a linear timeline. And I chose events that were still looping in my head. I was still gnawing on those events. And I was one way before the event happened and another way after the event. And so That’s how I kind of found these little pockets, I guess, these little moments. And so cathartic, I think I’m getting to the cathartic part. It was first important to me to just name it and to name it as accurately as I could so that I love the work of Brene Brown. And she talks about when you can really name something, then as accurately as possible, then some relief comes. And so sadness is different from anguish, is different from, I don’t even know, or alone versus isolation or these kinds of ways of getting a little bit more to the core injuries.
COLLEEN: And you, it’s clear in the book that your relationship with your dad, you idolized him in so many ways. And you craved time with him because he was traveling so much and touring and a musical genius and everybody wanted to be around him. Can you share the story of, yes, we all know Valley Girl, you know, we lived through that time, but the story of how you asked your dad to write a song with you is it’s such a sweet story.
MOON UNIT: Thank you. Yeah, I, I, uh, like you said, he was touring constantly, it seemed to me. And in a touring cycle, he creativity zone. And when he did pay attention to you, it was the sun came out. And you felt like you were the most important person in the world. It was incredibly intoxicating. And so even at that young age, I was like, this man really loves being downstairs a lot. So I thought, okay, if I want to spend time with him, I’m going to have to work with this person. So I, at 13, I wrote a note, I slid it under the studio door, and it essentially said, if you, if you’d ever like to work together, I could do that, that surfer dude or valley voice that I do that you think is so funny. Contact my manager, Gail, and then I gave the home phone number. And one night, on a school night, he woke me up. He took me up on the offer. not my favorite hour to be working, but you grab it when you get it. And so I was in the studio and we just, we just played for, it probably was 15 minutes in total. But in that time, it was improvisation and just listening for the places where there was a space in the verse and just inserting some, some silly, silly monologues.
BRIDGETT: You know, during that time, like Colleen said, we were all born in 1967. We were all in high school then. And I’m from Kentucky. Colleen’s from New Jersey. I mean, in this town in Kentucky, when that came out, we thought that was the coolest thing. We’d see you on TV. We’re like, she’s the epitome of coolness. And to find out when you read your book that you had the same insecurities that so many of us have. I don’t know. I felt like when you did that, it was almost validating that you could, you know, it doesn’t matter what your background is that we have insecurities. And so when I’m reading and I’m like, oh my goodness, I thought she was the coolest and she feel she,
she had the same, you know, I don’t like my skin. I don’t like the way I look. And was that ever reinforced at home? Like, did they ever criticize that? Or was that just something you put on yourself?
MOON UNIT: That is an interesting question. And I’m going to break it up into two parts. One is I really, I was hoping that people would feel an affinity to the experiences because I feel like there’s this projection that I just kind of wanted to burst that bubble and be like, go back, don’t follow me. Fame is a hollow pursuit. It’s not what you think it is. Because you never know who’s standing next to you. You never know if they’re climbing up the ladder or climbing down or falling down.
And so when when you’re failing in your mother’s eyes, no matter what you try to do and your father’s absent, then I just, I spent a lot of time feeling not just bad at home and not just bad in the world in my school and not just bad in the greater world, but I internalized all that stuff in in my head. And I was doing bad kid math as one does. And and another example that would be when my father would cheat on Gail and he would say they didn’t mean anything to him. My kid brain did the math and said, well, if they don’t mean anything to you and you spend more time with them and less time with me, that I must mean less than the thing that doesn’t matter. I shrink myself down to this a dust moat. And now I think the buzzword is toxic femininity. And in some ways, the book is a portrait of what happens when you, when you just take that to the extreme? Moon reflecting the light of my father, the son.
COLLEEN: That’s an interesting, really interesting way to put it. And when Valley Girl became this big hit and you did not really have any clue that your dad was doing this and it was actually going to be on the radio. You heard it first time on the radio, correct?
MOON UNIT: That was the first time I heard it on the radio. That, yeah, driving to, my mother driving me to school and hearing my favorite radio DJ, the morning DJ, Jed the Fish play it on his, on his radio show. Yeah, I mean, the thing too is to is that it was a private moment with my father that even when he said it was going to go on the album, it was like, oh, cool, because he’d immortalized my invisible camel to Mershi Dween in another song. And so I was used to him just whatever. He was using, everything was a color in his paint box or toolkit, and nothing was off limits and so being woven into that fabric that that was that was normal but to have the world then respond to it and then to see my father’s reaction after he had 20 years of work and I think maybe at least 30 albums at that point and that was the the breakout song and he’s in his 40s getting an FM hit and it’s with me there I think there was just a lot to navigate.
COLLEEN: And there’s so many layers to that because here you have your mom who you call your first bully, which truly makes sense. So now there’s going to be some resentment for that too because you’re spending more time with your dad. And you have three younger siblings. And when Dweezel came into the into the world and it seemed like when your career started taking off, Gail was trying to use your career a little bit to get Dweezel work as well. That is so complicated and so many emotional things to unpack there. How did you address that? Like, how did you even begin to write that in the book?
MOON UNIT: I know. There’s a, it’s a lot to unpack. It is. And I hope I wrote it in a funny way because that was my goal. And I wrote it in such a way that I hope for the reader to experience, feel like they were experiencing it viscerally and censor. right into the, into the fold there. Yeah, so one of the examples I give in the book is when I, I, I, so the song becomes popular. Some Hollywood calls. And I get an opportunity to do an episode of the TV show Chips as hitchhiking Val.
And then that paved the way for other people to say, we’d like to audition her for other stuff too. I ended up getting a role in Amy Heckerling’s National Lampoon’s European Vacation. And when this is a speaking part, a character with a, no, I still was American girl. I didn’t have a name. Anyway, I got to go to Italy. And when we got there, Gail insisted and put it in the contract that Dweezel had to come along. and then Dweezel got to have the room to himself, even though he was 13 and I was 15, and Gail stayed in my room with me. And it was like, I’m the person who’s trying to work. And how come I’m not getting the space to have my creativity? You know how to honor someone’s creativity. We do it all the time for my father. And so I was already getting the message that no matter what happens in my world, no matter how great it is, it’s not, it’s not to be enjoyed by you.
BRIDGETT: Yeah. Yeah, you know, in the parts, too, where you talk about when she wanted you to move out of the house. And you were how old been? Were you like 16? I can’t even, you were pretty young.
MOON UNIT: Yeah. So I think I was, I might have even been younger. I don’t recall my exact age, but essentially I was still getting rides to school from Gail. And she, she made the suggestion that I get an apartment. and begin my journey of free love also. And I was a hard pass. I was looking for turtle -like bathing suits and just like, what? I didn’t want any attention on me whatsoever, not from anyone. Right. And then when you did buy a house, that whole situation, you bought a house. And then later she marches in and says, where you have to sell your house and yeah she she gave me a bill she said it cost it cost $200 ,000 to raise you and so you have to hand over your house and of course now as a parent and even then it was I was just mad how she asked it I didn’t get that I could say no I didn’t the conditioning was so strong and so embedded that I didn’t it didn’t occur to me that their financial problems were their financial problems. We were just trained to that we were, it was all for one, one for all, which is why when Gail through the curveball with her will, the, all the things that just seemed to line up suddenly all of those, yeah, all of those just what was set in motion, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. They didn’t. They did a totally different thing. And the best thing I can say about it is that had things gone the way I thought they were going to go, I probably would have been, I would have remained in the business of promoting my father instead of finding my own artistic voice. And I’m not going to give Gail the credit. I’m going to give myself the credit. I inherited her tenacity to then make a giant batch of lemonade out of the circumstances. And in some ways, I had archetypes for parents, not just parents. And so I think that, again, that’s what’s so bizarre is that some of those qualities were the very things that also let me dig myself out of this giant hole.
COLLEEN: Before we the, there’s a very complicated legal situation that you had to go through. It seemed like in each chapter, you were always trying no matter what to please your mom. It just was always, I’ll do that. No worries. I’ll do that. Did you, have you figured out by either writing this book or just time and age, why there was so much difficulty with your mom. Why she seemed to be harder on you than any of your their siblings.
MOON UNIT: Looking back now when we have words like neurodivergent or words with the ism attached to the end of it, I think there probably was a diagnosis there that I just didn’t see. Even though I would go to see a therapist and the therapist would say run for your life, I would say, oh no, I must be telling it wrong. it made myself look good. Let me, let me tell it again and tell you what I did, which probably caused what she did. And then I’d reconstruct it because I was always looking for how we could have harmony. It never occurred to me. Harmony was not possible. And so finally, by the time we get to the end of Gail’s life, I really had gotten to a place, a namaste place with years of yoga,
many years of therapy, all the ways that a person can heal and I just I had to accept we were just not naturally compatible and I was extremely sad about that and I thought maybe she is too yeah.
BRIDGETT: Before we go through the like Colleen said the legal about it you did you saw it a lot of different things you had a yogi um I’m not using the right word am I a yoga career a yoga journey Your guru, guru. That’s what I’m thinking of guru. Yes. I’m like, I know I’m not saying the right word. You had, you went through, you know, it sounds like you were really seeking healing in different avenues. Well, I think about it now. When you’re constantly being treated as though you’re broken, you become a seeker.
MOON UNIT: I don’t know if I would be a seeker if somebody had been like, you’re awesome. Keep going. I don’t know. I didn’t, I didn’t have that opportunity. And I’m having to build it from scratch without having the benefit of having it role modeled. I’ve patched myself together through dance and watching movies and TV and seeing examples in the world and seeing friends and their families. I’ve been just, I was a hypervigilant kid and I’m a hypervigilant adult. I’m like, what are they doing? What are they doing? And I’m also nosy. I’m super nosy. But I can see where you would be hypervigilant.
BRIDGETT: If you felt like you had to walk on eggshells all the time, then you’re going to be hypervigilant.
MOON UNIT: And I think, you know, we’re like that in life, depending on who we’re around. We are, you know, sometimes you’re relaxed and sometimes you’re hypervigilant. But if you grew up in that home, all day, you’re going to be hypervigilant. Yeah. And I think also my humor was another way that I survived, the gallows humor of my family. And that shared just, I don’t know, we just, nothing, again, nothing was, everything was available to us. Nothing was off limits in terms of being exposed to whatever the media was at the time comics magazines we had we had the z channel um before other people did with anyway
COLLEEN: I guess when it came to one thing again that i related to in the book so much was that when your father got very ill he um you kind of expect because i had a similar situation where you expect this hallmark moment where all of the things that have happened in your life are just, it’s all going to be okay, you’re going to have an I’m sorry or you’re going to have, I understand what she went through, which you thought you had with Gail. But your dad was like, no, I don’t even want to go there with it. What was it like when you realize, okay, I’m not going to have that moment?
MOON UNIT: Yeah. So the, yeah, he was diagnosed with the prostate cancer, given a year to live. And I will say one amazing thing that came out of that, I hear so often that men get their prostates checked because of my father.
And that’s another gift he gave the world that awareness, because he didn’t have the chance to have an intervention ultimately. And he was given a year to live. And in my mind, I thought, oh, finally, I know it’s awful that he’s suffering, but finally he’ll come home and we can have this, the last year together. And I was obsessed with this idea of closure. It must have been in movies and TV. I don’t know. Hallmark. Yeah, yeah. So I gave it a shot. I tried to say, hey, I’d like to say all the things I’m sorry for. And I’d like to hear If there’s something I could do, again, I’m the person thinking that I’ve done something wrong that’s created the distance. And he just said he was too sick to really look at it. And this was a shock to me that somebody could basically die before they died, that they’re basically saying, this is as far as we’re ever going to go. This is, this is it. There’s a stopping point before the permanent stopping point. And this was just, so really there were two deaths. And then grieving him, I, there was, it was two tracks of grief because on the one head, I thought, was he selfish and conscious of the things that he was doing and the impact it had on me? Or was he just built that way in a neurodivergent kind of way? Because those are two different ways to grieve it. The result is the same. My needs aren’t met. But the tracks still require those 400 Kleenex boxes for you and 400 Kleenex boxes for you.
COLLEEN: And then you have this moment with your mom when she gets sick years later. Well, first you find out that according to Gail, there was no will. Right. So you’re kind of in a tailspin with that because she’s kind of got control over his legacy and she sold his music and things like that. But then you get to the point where she’s terminally ill with lung cancer. And she does say, I’m sorry, but she never really says what she’s sorry for. And then afterwards, you find out a lot of that was a lie. Can you talk about that part?
MOON UNIT: So in the book, I talk about how Once Gail became ill, you know, people read the book have said, why didn’t you ever confront her? And I just, once she was ill, there was no way I was going to say anything to her because she was at her most vulnerable. And it just seemed a cruelty to then say, and another thing. It just didn’t make sense. But I had fresh compassion and fresh energy and fresh endurance because I just thought she’s got a limited time here.
She did her best. And now I know that there’s an end date to her cruelty. And so I just, I was like using all my yoga, Jedi, whatever I had stored up. And it was actually easy for me to have more love for her. And At the end of her life, she, she happened to be on all kinds of medications. And she was in this kind of delirious state. And she, she looked at me and she just said, what if you were this nice the whole time? Meaning, I think I blew it. I think I just didn’t, I didn’t see it. And this was so, this was everything to me. That there was, I had this little glimpse that there was some recognition that she actually, the projections and the whatever she felt about herself projected on me or whatever I was to her, there was a little respite from it. And then when she she asked for my forgiveness, she didn’t say I’m sorry. She asked for my forgiveness, but she didn’t tell me what she had actually done. And so I’ve said, of course, I forgive you. And then when I found out what she had done. It wasn’t just the shock of what she had done. It was also, oh my God, she’s also stolen my ability to grieve her. And again, I had to now build three tracks. Did she do it on purpose? Was she just mentally ill? And would I have done it anyway? Would I have forgiven her anyway? Had I known everything? Is that really my nature? Is that was that my what I, what I grew up in because I had, I just had to keep enlarging myself. When I wasn’t dissociating out in space, I was, had my feet on the ground and I just kept enlarging myself and saying that this, you know, essentially forgive them for they know not what they do. Because no one would do that. Like the expression when they say hurt people, hurt people, no, unwell hurt people, hurt people don’t want other people to feel hurt.
BRIDGETT: And you, you know, you say yourself, you’re an empath. And so that just amplifies. I feel like the feeling for somebody who is an empath that when somebody says that, all those feelings are just being absorbed by you. It just is something. And I do feel when somebody writes a book, somebody writes a book like this, it allows other people who have something like this just deep inside of them that they don’t feel like they can get it out or they feel like it’s something they did something’s wrong with them it helps them it makes them feel and this is such a big thing with me I say this a lot not alone and when you don’t feel alone in a situation the healing can really start it just really helps so that’s something i just
appreciate when people like you bear their souls like this in a book like this, just the help that it’s going to help all these other people.
MOON UNIT: I really hope it does that because again, the Ariel Levy’s book, an abbreviated life, Sean Wilsie’s book, oh, the glory of it all. I can’t think of, I’m spacing on some other books. Or the opposite, things that are so uplifting. All of George Saunders incredibly his absurdist views, but with this unbelievable empathy threaded in there, nobody asks to have the goodie bag that they’re handed. And for whatever reason, I have a nervous system where it’s like a creature with no outer shell. I just, I can’t, I don’t have a poker face. I would do horrible Degas. I just, I’m, I can, I don’t know, I’m just, I’m just full of feeling. And it made sense to go into the acting world and ultimately to then put it into the writing world because those are my paint colors, my emotions and giving myself permission to be, have righteous anger or to have a sense of, I don’t even know what the, what’s the maximum injustice you could feel. And then to say, I’m going to let love win. because there is something weird about me. I’m just like, love wins. I will not. The patterns end with me. And, you know, I just have this fire for no. It seems like you were all raised in the same household, but your two younger siblings seem a little different in not only the relationship with Gail, but in the way they look at.
COLLEEN: And I’m looking at this from perspective of what you said in the book, obviously. But how has that tension? Because I know in the very beginning, not the very beginning, but when your mom, after your dad died, Gail was like spending money right and left. You had asked if you could have your wedding at her house. She was like, no way, but she hosts this big party instead. And then you get called in because she’s in debt. And she wants each of you to sign off. And it was interesting that you were like, I’ll do this, but you have to do that. And Dweezel was like, I’ll do this, but you have to do that. And the other two were like, I’ll just do it. No problem. It’s almost like there was a understanding with the other two that something was going on. And you two had no clue. Am I reading that right?
MOON UNIT: That is actually true. And later when I had more information, I mean, later as in recently, I got some more information and when there’s secrecy and no transparency and an unreliable narrator, aka your mother, there is, that’s how power happens, that control happens and how it continues happening. It’s so, in my opinion, toxic. As far as my siblings go, the dynamic was totally different. I love Gabbar Ormate’s work on these kinds of ideas where every kid actually gets a different parent. And because they learn something and then they do it definitely with the second kid. And then they, if they have any, it was easier for Gail to relate to men because that’s how she, that’s how she lived in service of her own father and service of her husband. And so, and then Diva was the baby. So they were they had more love mixed in i mean i feel like we all got that hot cold thing love bombed and then attacked um which is why it was again a shock to me because in my head once she passed away we’d all be like we did it we crossed the finish line together and uh and that’s that’s i didn’t understand that younger siblings don’t have that shoulder to shoulder to shoulder feeling. They have, oh, another person looking over me. And then they’re, they’re escaping, they’re defining themselves opposite everything that’s come before them. And I just, I didn’t have that awareness. And so now I can see it differently than I did when I was writing the book. And again, because there’s always new information coming in that I wish I would have had at the time. And yeah, the other thing I’ll say about the legal situation that was confusing for me that I was writing about in the book that I’m, again, little by little getting even now more clarity on is that the actions were done in the name of my father. But when Gail died, my father’s will appeared. And so if you’re going to do things in the name of my father, then why would you do exactly his wishes? That it just didn’t track for me. So we’re going to do Gail’s wishes in the name of the person that we’re not doing the wishes for it just it was it just didn’t make any sense to me and and by the way what i said to gail at that time i said uh absolutely will help you out but all of us have to have the ability to have our expression i was literally still doing the the three musketeers the except there were five of us remaining and i just i really wanted all of us Libra wanted everyone have the same size place.
BRIDGETT: That’s my husband. That’s exactly how he is.
COLLEEN: And then you find out when she passes. Yeah. You find out when she passes, there was a will from your dad. She has her wishes, which leave you and Dweezel out of really your father’s legacy and that you’re 20%,
20%, 20%, 30%, 30%. That, it seems like finances and technical stuff, always get in the way of familial relationships. And it’s really hard to navigate saying, I love you. You’re my sibling. What’s happening is not right. And, you know, your sister’s like, I’ll give you my kidney, but I won’t change this. And that was such a stark distinction in your book. How did you reconcile that with yourself?
MOON UNIT: So, yeah, so essentially, Gail sliced the cake very, very differently than I had imagined. And, and it wasn’t, it wasn’t the stuff that bothered me. It was that she said, and when I pass, I wish these two well and you two, not so much, that I say, these people have great ideas. I value them. I value the time I’ve known them. It was around the value and the, in summation, a shock to me because I had made so much space for her flaws and all. And she hadn’t made that space for me flaws and all. And I didn’t even know what the flaws were. And I didn’t, and there was no chance to correct anything because there was no communication. And so there were so many things, again, to just tease out and just isolate and examine during this process. And ultimately, what I’ve come to is, if you’re going to make a will, just make it even Stevens. Even if you can’t stand somebody. And because of the best bands that stay together that you love, split the publishing. So it’s just, it’s, but that’s my value. That’s how, that’s how I, That’s how I do my life. And everybody has the dignity of the choices. I don’t have to agree with them. But it was sad to me that we didn’t learn as a family how to make room for other people and how we were pitted against each other. And I mean, it was just commonplace to talk buying someone’s back. I thought it was venting so that you could then be kind when you saw them next. It didn’t occur to me that it was backstabbing. I just thought it was a mechanism for bringing the pressure down so that you could be a more sane individual and so these kinds of patterns that I that I grew up with had acted upon myself and then ultimately changed and reworked because of the pain of being on the receiving end of it that’s it’s it certainly made me a different person right you know,
BRIDGETT: When I read your book, too, I never felt like it was a pity party. I never got that ever through your writing. It was, it was laying out, this is what happened. This is how I’m working through it. But I never got that feeling that you wanted us to feel sorry for you. And I think that’s really an incredible talent. I don’t know how you did that. I mean, it was really unique.
MOON UNIT: Because I wrote the draft that was the fire and brimstone, I curse you into time and time is infinite draft. You know, I let myself have that draft and that space and the blaming and the victimizing and I did that draft and I knew that wasn’t where I wanted to go with it because that’s again,not how I wanted. I mean, I love these people. I have shared history with them And I wanted to, I just in my, in my, in my idealistic mind, I thought, well, if they, if they understand what my experience was, then they’ll understand why I was so upset about it. And then I just in the process, like, only I need to know that. That’s why I’m, I’m that upset. And one, and one thing that’s that really made me laugh was the, I mean, I’m, I’m, I think I’m a nod ball. And one of the things that I thought was really funny about me and my nature is that I had a friend who said, you should talk to my therapist. She can help you. And when I talk to the therapist, she said, I can help you. I can reparent you. I can basically be a surrogate mother. It’s going to take about three years just to get you some footing. And I said, oh, hell no, I’m going to get three different therapists and try to get this thing done in a year. And I think this is how ladies do it.And so that’s what I did. And now I feel like I’m still kind of metabolizing the giant leap.
COLLEEN: And it’s also interesting in the book that, you know, you get married, you have a child. Were you afraid to get married or were you afraid to have children? Did you kind of get nervous about it?
MOON UNIT: okay, am I going to have a life to be collaborative because I didn’t learn that. I was still living like Richard Dreyfus and the, what’s the alien movie called? Thank you, Menopause. Close encounters. And he’s literally just like building a giant mound in the living room. I just thought that’s how sharing went. And you just go, I’m feeling all the feelings. And now you fix it because I already spent a lifetime fixing it for everybody else. I thought it was a pass it on fix it.
It was a mess. And so in terms of marriage, I did not do marriage well. But in terms of having a kid, I definitely, I just wanted to see what a human looked like when they have love and good ingredients in the pot. I’m tearing up thinking about it. I read so many parenting books. And I really love the work of Marshall Rosenberg, if anybody’s a new parent or a current parent and they want to adjust something, Dan Siegel’s work on how the brain, what to actually expect a brain to do. He talks about you’re not even fully cooked until you’re 26 and all the milestones that you can hope for and that how many times you have to learn something before you get it. I mean, I still don’t drink water. I know I’m supposed to. I do not drink water. I’m a grown -ass lady, not drinking water. I know a thing and don’t do a thing. It’s cuckoo.
BRIDGETT: Yeah, but you drink tea, right? I sure do. I’m like, water’s in tea.
MOON UNIT: You’re right. That’s how I get away with it.
BRIDGETT: Yeah. No, it is amazing what we read and what we want to do with our children. And I mean, gosh, I’ll look back and I’m like, oh, my gosh, the mistakes that I’ve made. What could I do to do that differently? But just to have that my children are grown now and just to have that relationship with them is probably one of the most rewarding things. And I really, I feel badly for your mother that she didn’t see through to have that with you.
MOON UNIT: Well, I’m at the phase in parenting where my kid is coming forward and saying, I didn’t like how you did this, this, this, this thing. And I was like, this is so horrible slash amazing because I was not met that it didn’t go well when I tried to have that conversation. And to be able to give it, hear the feedback and be like, you’re absolutely right. I super suck at that. I super did that. And let me try to do better. That is such a gift that I have, have that conversation. I hope it continues. It’s, you know, you want the people that you love to, to, um, feel safe and, and, and, um, and yeah, it is, it is all so difficult. Is this, this is, and nobody knows how to do it. We can stand on our hind legs, but some of this stuff has to be learned. It really does. And, and if you, and that’s the other thing, too, A lot of the stuff I’m doing with my own kid now is I’m learning in real time. And so when I think about Gail and the mistake she made, she hit places where she was stunted at some point. She couldn’t give, she couldn’t hold the space, as they say, for me and the places where she wasn’t doing that for herself. And I think about it now because what, you know, what else you’re going to do with it?
COLLEEN: Right. You have to put it in where it feels comfortable for you. And we all do the best with our conscious understanding at the time. We can look back 10 years ago. I cannot believe I did this or said no to that. But you do the best you can at the time you’re there. Do you think your siblings will read this book or do you hope they do?
MOON UNIT: Ahmet was halfway through it last week and loving it. And I was, I’m so happy. And I said, if you can get through the end, then we have a chance.
COLLEEN: Well, thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate it. The book is called Earth to Moon, a memoir, Moon Unit Zap. It’s a great, we guys. We recommend it. And there will be a link for it in our show notes. So thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate it. And good luck.
MOON UNIT: Thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate your time.