Nancy: My name is Nancy. I'm 60 years old. I'm from Grand Rapids.
Darby: Hi, my name is Darby. I am 61 years old. I am from Schoolcraft. Have you lived in Michigan your whole life?
Nancy: All but one year. Yeah. I was born in Indiana, then we moved up here.
Darby: Love Michigan. I live with my husband here. We have three grown daughters.
Nancy: I have four children. Three are adopted. One is biological. They're all adults.
Darby: What did your childhood look like?
Nancy: I actually grew up in Portage. My dad was a factory worker at the Fisher Body Plant, as they called it back then. My mom was a stay at home mom. I had two older brothers and I was super shy. Would ride my bike places that I would not let my own children go. You know, the whole adage of come home when the lights,the streetlights come on. Very true for me. Mom was like, go outside. And I'm like, what do I do? come back with the lights are on. That's not her real voice. That's just the voice I gave her.
Darby: I grew up, you remember Kilgore Road?
Nancy: Yeah.
Darby: A street off of Kilgore just on the Portage side called Old Colony Road. Raised by a single mom. My dad was a doctor. My mom was a nurse. She thought that they were going to save the world together. So, they divorced and that was the self-respecting thing to do. And she raised the three of us kids by herself. I had the same kind of freedoms that you're talking about riding my bike and playing outside.
Nancy: Where did you go to high school?
Darby: Portage Northern.
Nancy: I did too. What year did you graduate?
Darby: ‘81.
Nancy: I graduated in ‘82.
Darby: Wow.
Nancy: Oh my gosh. I'm going to have to get my yearbook and look you up (laughing).
Darby: You're to see some wild hair.
Nancy: Are you retired?
Darby: Yeah.
Nancy: What did you do for a living?
Darby: I homeschooled my kids.
Nancy: Who was someone who has been the kindest to you in your life?
Darby: My best friend, Christine. How about for you?
Nancy: I think my dad. When I was a child, he was very unemotional and very stoic. And as he got older, you got to see that emotional side of him, just the devotion that he had to my mom as she battled Alzheimer's despite the fact that she didn't know who anybody was, she knew and trusted him intuitively. And that was just a real blessing to see.
Darby: That's precious.
Nancy: Yeah. Well, I will say that my grandma's second husband molested me as a child. And I think that if it weren't for my dad, he was just there. And I just knew he was on my side. No matter what. I don't know where I would be with that whole emotional baggage if it hadn't been for him. Just his steadfastness without actually saying the words, I love you. But being there and showing me what true love was supposed to be like and not what that creep decided he wanted it to be like was really good for me.
Darby: Yeah, I can imagine. I didn't endure that. I actually had a situation recently where I was volunteering. Somebody was inappropriate with me more than once, and I just had to stop volunteering there. You know, the frequency with which that continues to happen for women in this world just really gets me.
Nancy: Yeah. Yeah, me too. The church that I just recently left, they would say that they are welcoming. But as far as I know, there weren't any gay people, trans people there, because how can you sit in a church service when they say, you know, that marriage is meant for one man and one woman? It's not welcoming. They don't affirm them. They won't even have a female pastor. I mean, they let the women sometimes help with communion, but that was about it. Previous church before that, men only, men only. The only ones allowed to pass the bread and the grape juice (laughing).
Darby: And somebody brought up to me recently, they said, if women are charged with teaching the kids Sunday school, hello.
Nancy: Well, the church's eye was that they weren't allowed to after once the kids got into junior high, high school. You know, it's just like, no, you don't. That's a man teaching time then.
Darby: It's a power structure.
Nancy: It's a control structure.
Darby: Yeah. Yeah. What role does media play in shaping politics or does it?
Nancy: I have a hard time with that question because media I view, more as saying what the people want to hear. Whereas I consider I want my news to be more unbiased and more truthful. I do think media, meaning saying what people want to say, leading them down a path does shape politics. That's obvious with all the fact checking that needs to be done. But my news, I want to know where the politicians stand on issues. And that's what I do before I vote. I go through and I look up news articles and I read those, go to their websites and check those out. And if I can, I look on their Facebook pages. I do as much investigation as I can and try to make an informed choice.
Darby: Yes.
Nancy: And also, in a way kind of trust my gut as far as reading it and going, okay, I think they're being sincere or seeing them in a clip and going, okay.
Darby: That's a great process. I really like what you said there, Nancy. People, they're watching and listening to more of what they believe. And so that becomes truth for them. And the networks give us such different takes on things. I think sometimes it's good to look for where's some middle ground? The human tendency is black and white. But with regard to people crossing the border, I think we need to do a better job of checking history. Background checks. I don't necessarily want everyone pouring into our country. There's a middle ground in that.
Darby: You're right. We have a tendency to like things to be black and white because I think when it's in that gray area, you have to really kind of wrestle with it. And that's not what people want to do. I remember many years ago when my mother-in-law was still alive and people were coming up into the country illegally. I said to her one time, what would you think if it were happening in this country and I was taking my children, your grandkids to a better place? How would you want that country to treat me and your grandchildren? That's tough to wrestle with.
Darby: Yeah, and we've had messages on this from our pastor because they were originally from Hungary. The culture shock is so much to endure. It's so much easier in one hand, to stay where you are because that's familiar. And yet if you are being persecuted to the point of you have to escape. It's so, so hard; language barrier, culture barriers, you know, start over in every single way, usually without resources and money. It's terrible. If there's fentanyl coming over, you know, that's concerning. We've had thousands of lives lost to fentanyl.
Nancy: But I feel like those types of situations are few and rare.
Darby: But you know, you can bring over a load and it can affect a lot of lives.
Nancy: Yeah, it definitely can. Yeah.
Darby: Security is important to us. So how can we do that in a way that's...you know, I'm about giving people a path to citizenship.
Nancy: Right, right. How about let's keep the families together, not separate the adults from the children. Sometimes it is because of persecution, but sometimes it's just they want a better life for their family. And they know this is a place where they feel like that can happen.
Darby: Yes. Yeah. You know, people are a mixed bag of things, but my great Uncle Dick, he was always encouraging of having lively conversations around politics, even when we were kids and we would say things and he would kind of laugh at us. He got kind of mad, but he encouraged it. And I was blessed to have that through my life and have encouraged that with our kids. And we can't do that with every family member we go and visit, but quite often we do end up getting in some kind of civil conversation when the time is right.
Nancy: I remember realizing, I think I was probably 11 or 12, that my dad was a really cool guy because he had the key to the neighbor's house. They were selling their home. And the realtor came to get the key from him. And the realtor said, hey, I'll make it quick because it's a Black family. And that offended my dad big time. And he said to the realtor, my wife is black. Now my mom was not black, but he said it because he was so offended by what the realtor said. And I remember just hearing him talk to the guy and the realtor just sort of backpedaling, but he's like, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay, okay. And my dad comes up the stairs and cursed the guy out. And I remember thinking, yeah, my dad's cool.
Nancy: Darby, I've enjoyed talking with you. It's given me a good glimpse at a different perspective. Someone who's kind of lived my life in a way, because we have so much in common, and to feel encouraged that I'm not the only one that has an old dog that's learned some new tricks, you know?
Darby: I'm amazed that we went to the same high school together. We really do have a lot of similarities, including some shyness, and I like that we both want to have a bigger voice, and that's very affirming for me because it's not just about white males.
Nancy: Yeah, everybody deserves a place at the table.
Darby: Everybody does.