Paul, Mia, and I moved to Los Angeles when she was five so I could pursue a career as a screenwriter. I worked regularly, and in genres women rarely wrote in then—action and futuristic thrillers. But my primary ambition was to be a great mom. I knew these were magic years and reveled in them. So did Mia. She thought it was Herself that magically controlled the TV. She turned it on and off and changed the channels because she had The Power. Mia would swing her arms around, zap the TV with a “Poof!” and it obeyed.
We thought she’d outgrow it, as children outgrow the tooth fairy. She didn’t, and by age six, we were afraid she’d be humiliated at some friend’s house. So the TV began to disobey her little by little. It was both heartbreaking and comical to see her keep swinging and poofing to no avail. I told her the TV grew up and had its own power now.
“Oh, no, it didn’t, Mother, TVs don’t grow up!”
There are so many ways we commit crimes against our children, even out of love. She didn’t want to grow up and leave her magic behind. I didn’t want her to, either.
She eventually realized she didn’t have The Power, but she wasn’t ready to give up magic yet. So, God got the job. But how could we be sure He was qualified?
I had no idea what to tell her. I’d never talked to her about God and she’d never seen me pray. I’d never seen me pray. My experience of the divine was entirely culinary. Potato pancakes at Hannukah, matzoh at Passover, starvation at Yom Kippur.
Absent any help from me, Mia decided to prove not just God’s existence, but his usefulness. “If there is a God, why doesn’t he do something already? I mean like now, not fifty years ago when he parted the Red Sea.” She came up with a True Test, one that would vastly improve her life.
She had a terrible fear of toilets “overflooding and drownding” her. We always had to flush it after she was a safe distance from the bathroom.
“Mother, Paul,” she announced grandly, “I’m going to the bathroom and I’m going to ask God not to overflood it and drownd me when I flush. Weeee’ll see if there’s really a God.”
We waited in the hall while the exam was administered. She went. She flushed. We could just picture her waiting for the rising tide with her hands over her eyes. She finally emerged, beaming and proud.
It’s not every child that’s able to prove that there’s a God. And she expected Him to be darned grateful she did.
It was in her play that I saw remnants of the abuse in her emotional life. A recurring theme in Mia’s psyche was of evil lurking behind good. The clown of her nightmares always pulled off his blond wig to become Nick. When she played with her horses, the kind, strong stallion would suddenly become evil and try to devour the younger horses. The mother horse was always shuttling her foals from one “secret cave” to another to protect them.
I heard Mia muttering after midnight once and went in to find her combing her stuffed animals. An evil man made an oil slick on purpose, she whispered, and left them to die, so she was cleaning their fur to save them. Her horses and stuffies had as many calamities as they had tea parties.
Her nightmares had stayed behind in Chicago, but her memories apparently hadn’t. Her second-grade teacher, Sara, a gentle, perceptive woman in her forties, called us in to show us Mia’s weekly journal.
“Sometimes I feel bad when I think of certain events,” Mia wrote, “such as when my old dad did bad things to me. But all I have to do is not think about it and then I feel better.”
She assured us she’d keep Mia’s journal confidential should she want to continue writing about “certain events.” Sara and Mia forged a deep bond that soon included Paul and I. She had a calm, spiritual presence that was often an anchor for our family.
I asked Mia if she still remembered what Nick did to her. She looked at me as if I was daft.
“Of course, I do, Mama,” she said. “I just don’t remember which birthday it happened on.” Then she wagged her finger at me and scolded, “You know, Mother, you shouldn’ta got married with that man.”
How could I reply? Tell her that if I hadn’t, she wouldn’t be here? What a terrible truth for her to one day realize. The price she paid for her existence.
“He did what?” said Judge Moran, outraged.
I had flown back to Chicago to settle a child support dispute, and my lawyer told him that Nick had remarried and had more children. I had just found out myself and was half hoping the judge wouldn’t, because I knew he’d have Child Protection investigate him again. Then, Nick would blame me and would want revenge.
Which is exactly what happened. For years, Nick hadn’t paid for any psychological care related to the abuse, as he was court ordered to do, nor his share of doctor bills, but now, to get back at me, he wanted visitation rights.
My happy life collapsed and I didn’t know how to shore it back up. He had the means to outspend me in court. Going to court in California was risky anyway. Fathers got visitation no matter what they did or what the child wanted. I could just see Mia screaming and trying to crawl under a coffee table in the name of family unity. I’d sooner disappear than leave her alone with him ever again. And I knew how.
I’d heard of an “Underground” that secreted away women and children when courts wouldn’t protect them. The only other option I saw was doing what Dr. Elizabeth Morgan did in her well-publicized case. She had her parents spirit her child to New Zealand, and she went to jail for it.
I was prepared to do either if I had to. I felt so emotionally overwhelmed that I called a social service agency for counseling. A therapist named Fran called back and I poured out the whole saga in between sobs. As we were making an appointment, I asked her full name. Fran Blair, she said, then spelled it out for me: B-l-e-y-e-r. That’s an unusual spelling, I said, are you related to a Peter Bleyer, from Philadelphia?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, he’s my husband, she said, why do you ask?
I’d come all the way across the country to escape from Nick and the one psychologist in the entire state of California I happen to call is the wife of a P family friend. Who had been at my wedding. I don’t know who was shocked more, she or I.
Paul came home to find me staring at the phone, practically catatonic.
If I had any doubt Nick would learn where we lived, I didn’t anymore. It took me exactly one day to find the Underground. I met a well-dressed young woman at a café and explained my situation. She listened quietly, then led me to her car without a word.
She drove to an apartment in a seedy part of town, locked the door behind us, and then told me this was the first stop in going underground. I looked around and thought, here I am again, at the nexus of Nick, desperation and dirty orange shag carpet. The worn sheets on the bed matched the one strung across the window. We stepped over toys and sat on the sagging plaid Herculon sofa to talk about the mechanics of “disappearing.”
We could take nothing of our old life, not even a stuffed animal. There’d be new histories, new hair colors, a new profession. Every day would be a lie. Paul would be watched.
I wish I could tell you that you’ll get used to it, she said, but you won’t. And if you ever do, that’s when you’ll get caught, because you’ll get careless, it’ll be good-bye Mia, hello prison. Once she was eighteen, Mia could resurface, but I never could, I’d face charges. I would go to my grave looking over my shoulder. Underground was an apt name, I was feeling cadaverous already.
We would wait here until she got everything set up for us. There was a doorless closet against one wall full of Goodwill cast-offs. She pointed to them and said I could pick out new wardrobes for Mia and me once we got settled in.
I scanned for the least drecky choices. Triple-pleated, puce trousers; a flowered sweatshirt; and a slick, thin blue belt that looked like a Tupperware cake dish handle.
Or I could hold the pants up with that Navajo beaded belt and use the Tupperware belt to hang myself. God help me, it was vanity that made my decision.
Forget it, I told Paul, Mia will have to lie every day knowing that if she screws up, Mommy goes to jail. And it’ll flat out kill me to become Jane Smith, tight-lipped blond bookkeeper for Frank’s Fuel-n-Feed.
I found another lawyer in Chicago who established that nothing would happen without the Sex Offender therapy Moran ordered. Nick finally withdrew his motion.
But the damage to Mia was done. Because I made the single worst choice I’d ever made in raising her. From the start, I felt it was best to hide all this from her until I had no choice. My hope was that it wouldn’t come to that. But, for some reason, a sister-in-law kept harping on me to tell Mia, saying, “You must always be honest with your kids.” I was of the opinion that your kids didn’t need to know some things. But I was so exhausted and fearful, and she so insistent, I gave in.
I took Mia outdoors, by her favorite fountain, and somehow managed to force the words from my mouth, “Your old dad wants to see you again.” She grabbed me and started to cry. She shrunk into a ball in my lap and I knew immediately that I’d done something I’d regret for the rest of my life. It didn’t matter that I told her that I was going to fight hard to stop him; her safe world was shattered. I was furious at my sister-in-law and myself. I could see in Mia’s face that her little life was snapped in two. Her first Before and After.
Mia was never the same. Sometimes, she’d stare off into space and a fleeting melancholy would pass across her features. She began to pick at her fingernails and jiggle her knee, or she’d get these shudders up her spine, like someone cracked the whip from her tailbone to her neck. Her nightmares returned, either with Nick chasing her in that wig or snatching her off the playground or scaring her with snakes (Freud got that one right).
One night as we walked to her favorite restaurant for dinner, she galloped in front of an alley without looking, just as a car was pulling out. The car’s brakes squealed and Mia froze inches from the bumper. It was the second time in a few days she’d done it. We scooped her up and scolded her about looking both ways. By the time we ordered dinner, she seemed fine. Then her mouth and shoulders suddenly sagged. I asked what was wrong.
“I just have this feeling that I don’t like being a person,” she said quietly.
I took her to see a child psychologist, Colleen, a very caring woman who spent over a year helping Mia through this time. Though Mia grew to feel safer, she remained a changed girl. She became a nervous child. There was a shadow across her heart.
She was afraid something would happen to me; her fear of being alone in bathrooms got worse. Until she was twelve, she wouldn’t shower unless I was in the bathroom or Paul was outside in the hall. “A bad guy could come in, and I can’t see through this shower door, you know!”
The fallout from Nick finally hit me as well. Not long after, I woke up crying every morning, with a sick, mushy feeling in my stomach that was inexplicable, followed by losing ten pounds in as many days. The CD from the film The Piano became the soundtrack to the depression movie I starred in, Crying in Three Positions. Standing, sitting, lying down, it was all I did. When Mia got home from school, I’d somehow pretend to be her smiling mother, make dinner, read stories, ask about school.
I learned why most people committed suicide. It’s impossible to describe what it is to have your heart literally hurt so much that only the stopping of it will end the pain. Stopping it becomes the bright and shining light at the end of the tunnel. Just the thought of it, with its secret, thrilling promise of release, is enough to lift you up to where you can perform basic functions, like brushing your teeth or eating or drawing that pricey chef’s knife across the jugular. Somewhere in the mountains where it wouldn’t leave a mess for someone else to clean up.
I finally got on an antidepressant and in six months I no longer needed them, but I knew a hole had opened up in the terrain. And that if I wasn’t careful, I could fall in.
It was little things, it always is. Things only a mother notices. A subtle withholding, waiting too long to wash her hair, a book choice, red cheeks.
When Mia was thirteen, I noticed her cheeks were often red. It was winter, it couldn’t be the sun. My cheeks aren’t red, she’d say. Paul agreed, as he nearly always did.
But they were. I had no idea where the thought came from, but out popped, “I think you’re scalding your face.” As soon as I said it, my brain agreed with my intuition.
Did I catch hell. What a mean thing to say, leave me alone, leave her alone, they said. I didn’t say anything else about it, but I had sprouted a new antenna. One that would cause increasing discord in our home as it picked up the subtlest things in her behavior.
Her heroes had always been Jane Goodall and Audrey Hepburn. Suddenly, it was Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. She read his autobiography several times. “For a school assignment,” she said. She began to let her personal grooming slide. She’d stay in the bathroom forever, but whatever she was doing didn’t involve soap and water.
It’s odd, I told Paul, something’s off. It’s typical teen behavior, Paul said, leave her alone. No, it’s not, I told him, teenage girls are fanatic about their appearance.
“You can’t keep at her like this, Claire,” he said irritably, “for heaven’s sake, she’s a great kid, she’s not doing anything wrong.”
It’s true, she wasn’t doing anything wrong, but something was wrong. I felt the same way I did when I met Nick’s family, something was wrong with the picture. I couldn’t see it but I could feel it.
Then, one day, out of the blue, Mia said to me, with cold curiosity, almost with contempt: “How could you have married him?”
I arranged for her to see Colleen again, to deal with whatever was coming up for her about Nick. Mia was old enough then that the sessions were confidential.
Mia asked to see the court papers; she wanted to read all the reports for herself. We decided she would read them in Colleen’s office, where she could ask me questions and deal with the emotions that were sure to come up.
Mia seemed appropriately angry, curious, bothered. Some things she remembered well. Some she remembered remembering. All of it she remembered feeling. She remembered how the abuse made her feel most of all. I told her it was okay to be angry with me, it was normal. She was surprised—why would I be mad at you, Mommy?
In her mind, we escaped him together, we were the crusading duo triumphing over evil. My question challenged the bond that had defined us. I realized that she couldn’t conceive of me as being fallible.
“What a pervert!” she said on the way home. “It’s not fair that he’s not in jail. I can’t believe he could do something like that to a little kid and get to go on with his life.”
“A little kid.” Maybe talking about herself in third person made it easier. At bedtime, she thanked me for being her mother, for going through “all that,” as if I had the biggest burden.
She never spoke of him again and it seemed the issue was behind her, though she did want to continue seeing Colleen. I thought they might deal with some of the things that continued to bother me about her behavior. The problem was, what had been bothering me still wasn’t bothering anyone else. Which meant the problem became me.
She began hanging out with a new student, the one who was into witchcraft and push-up bras. For once, Paul and I weren’t at odds about Mia.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about that girl,” he said.
Mia became even more slack about her hygiene and grew more sluggish and quiet. Thus began a few months of a duet that went something like this:
“Colleen, she won’t shower for days.”
Claire, her hygiene is fine.
“Colleen, she’s withdrawn, she’s dropped all her old friends, and she’s reading Johnny Rotten for the twentieth time—that’s not normal.”
Claire, you can’t control everything she does. You must let her make some of her own choices.
“Colleen, she’s lost so much weight her ribs stick out, and she’s always tired. Are you sure she’s not depressed or doing drugs or still having issues about her old dad?”
No, Claire, Mia is not depressed and her weight is fine. Mia’s not doing drugs. And she never talks about her old dad.
The stress level at home had escalated, and Mia seemed increasingly determined to provoke me. As only a child can do, she had the dynamic between Paul and me down to a science.
Paul and I had let little things between us fester for a long time. He hated conflict so much that even a simple disagreement made him squirm. He liked staying under the radar at all costs. Which is what makes submarines so deadly. He punished with such graciousness and refined manners, it was almost possible to believe him when he’d say, who, me, passive aggressive?
There’s little that’s passive about me. I’m expressive, the barometer that gets blamed for the storms. Granted, I did cause some of the storms. I practically had my own weather system that summer. I felt like I was in the middle of a tornado, barely hanging on while my life blew out of control around me.
“Paul, she’s been in that bathroom for an hour and I don’t hear the shower running. I don’t care what Colleen says about her privacy, I’m going in there.”
Don’t come in, she yelled when I knocked. My antenna shot up and I pushed on the door. Noo!! she yelled. Paul was hissing at me to leave her the hell alone. I pushed harder and found her standing there with her razor.
“Mia, what are you doing?” I asked, puzzled.
“What do you think I’m doing!”
“I have no idea,” I said honestly.
She looked angry at my ignorance. Then she started crying and said, Mommy, I’ve been cutting myself. I put my arms around her and said, what, when you shave your legs, honey? We’ll get you an electric shaver. She sunk down to the floor and I sank with her, bewildered.
No, Mommy, cutting as in self-mutilating.
Self-what??
Neither Paul nor I had ever heard of such a thing. She may as well have told us she grew a third arm. As if the looks on our faces weren’t bad enough, I blurted, “But, it’s so weird! Mia, why would you do such a thing?”
I wanted to understand the feelings that drove her to do it. But, all she heard was “you’re weird,” and it was downhill from there. Everyone started crying and she was so upset that I was upset, she ended up comforting me.
“Don’t worry, Mommy, Colleen said it’s not that unheard of.”
“Colleen knew?” Paul and I blurted in unison.
We were appalled. I thought therapists of minors had to divulge something like that. Colleen later said that Mia wanted to deal with it on her own. And the implication was that I was largely the cause.
Really? I alone had the power to make my strong-willed daughter ladder her thighs with so many slits they looked like a giant grosgrain ribbon? To make her stop showering, become obsessed with Johnny Rotten, drop her best friends to hang out with the Wicca queen, and lose ten pounds in a month? Wow, all that power in one single mother? Why bother with therapy, all Mia needed was a surge protector.
Maybe all that power sizzled my synapses, but I’m wondering, doctor, there’s no chance that this has anything to do with her being molested? I mean, maybe it’s a stretch, but all this having happened after she asked for the reports of her abuse, there’s no chance at all? Call me thickheaded, but I just have to ask.
No, Claire, this isn’t about her old dad, Colleen told me. Again.
Some part of me must have had enough dismissal, or maybe it was all my fault; maybe I was simply tired of it all. Because I didn’t do what I usually do, which is to get information, gather knowledge, so I can analyze, judge, execute, fix. I just wanted Mia to stop doing it and she did. I knew because she showed me the countless red slashes across her upper thighs and stomach as they scabbed over and faded to pink. Rosy ribbons of proof that I wasn’t in denial, that my family was healed, my child was whole.
Life returned to normal. Mia became her cheerful, funny self again. I was hired by a revered producer to adapt a book I loved. We were putting a bid on our first home and Mia was choosing the breed of dog she’d finally be able to have. At midnight on January 30, I sang all the way home from my office, under a sky full of stars. I sang down the walkway to my back door.
I was singing when I noticed that her bedroom window was open.