La Cuna manuscripts, a missing piece of text. La Cuna music, an extended silence in a piece of music. La Cuna linguistics, a lexical gap in a language. La Cuna law, the lack of law or of illegal source addressing a situation.

La Cuna histology, a small space containing an osteocyte in bone.

There's an uneasy sense a person gets when something is missing. That gap in the text, in music, in language, in law, in bone.

We like when the pieces fit together and we like when we have them all laid out neatly before us. And I know that puzzle is a lazy metaphor to use, but I'm going to use it many times in this episode because I love puzzles and I am not great at them.

But I know we like when pieces fit together in music, in podcasts, in puzzles, in life. And today's episode is about that gap, that chasm, that open and unfilled space. And what happens when it finally all comes together.

I'm Nora McNeary, and this is terrible. Thanks for asking. And this is Danny Shapiro.

I remember so little about my childhood, I think in part because I didn't have any witnesses to it and the two witnesses I did have to it were my parents.

And I was like a lost to myself, didn't have a real sense of my two feet on the ground. Like my I can't summon what it felt like to be me as a child. And that's been always true for me.

I can remember certain things or have certain flashes of images, but not like an inhabit what it was to be me, you know, growing up in this house in New Jersey with my two parents and a lot of quiet.

And you know, a sense that there were secrets kind of hanging in the air and that there was just so much that I knew I knew I didn't know. And I.

But you know that feeling Nora like that feeling of being lost to oneself, feeling like other kids had a sense of their families and a sense of belonging and a sense of their lives and of fitting in and of just having a right to be there, I guess I would say.

I didn't I didn't have that I did have a feeling somehow of a kind of specialness because I was in one way or another always being told that I was somehow special, but you know specialness in isolation is a very strange and painful place to be what does it even mean.

That's such a good way to put it because what does it mean to be special your only special in comparison to something, but if you don't know what you're being compared to.

What good does it do you.

I mean, I felt like a hot house flower like I would die under the wrong conditions. I was very shivered over by both of my parents and by really all of the adults around me who are related to me, you know, really on my mother side.

But that feeling that there was something very fragile about me and that I might just kind of vanish and that contributed to that sense of specialness, you know, like a very delicate, but perhaps not prepared for the elements in some way kind of little human being.

Annie was the only child of an orthodox Jewish couple. She went to a Yashiva, a Jewish day school from kindergarten to seventh grade. All around her were kids who dressed and prayed and looked alike. And there was Danny.

I was very fair, sort of pink cheeked and blue eyed and very delicate looking and a lot was made of that all the time, both by my family and by other adults around me and by teachers and by other children.

It really was commented on all the time that I didn't look like I was Jewish and that I didn't look like I belonged and that somehow the message underneath all that was you're not one of us and you're from someplace else entirely.

You know, there was just this feeling of like complete and utter being kind of alien, like an alien hot house flower creature. I think what made it even more complicated is that I knew that it was meant as a compliment.

But it somehow felt like an insult because I adored my father. I felt very much like being part of his world and being part of his family was a tethering kind of rooted thing.

I very much wanted to feel that way and I didn't feel that way about my mother. I was not connected to her such a strange thing for a daughter to feel about a mother, but we really were kind of like a total mismatch.

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