Dear Mia,
Please know that yes, I forgive you. Yes, we support you. Yes, we have faith in you. Full trust will take a little longer, obviously, but it sounds like you understand this.
She finally forgave me. And in such a wonderful letter. I finally turned into one of those girls whose face lights up when Tyna walks in with mail, one of the haves. Tears come when I read and I don’t bother wiping them away. Sunny, who sits to my right, reaches over and rubs my back silently. I’m thankful for the silence now. I just want to sit with this feeling. I need this to stay with me, as a reminder why I can’t ever go back down the road I was on.
Since Discovery, I feel bright and airy, as if I had been spring cleaned. Life at home with Paul is lighter as well. We’re feedbacking right and left, it’s irresistible, it’s our new toy. And there’s a playfulness to it. I’m experiencing some hostility here, Claire, is this a pattern in your life? Paul, why are you choosing silence, I’m experiencing you as making me wrong.
Karin’s experiencing us both as scary and insufferable. “I think you’ve both been friggin’ brainwashed. Gimme a beer—or is that not allowed now?”
“Of course it is, dear. Here’s a Corona.” I hand her a beer and smile at her like a Moonie. “Lime wedge?”
She snatches the beer, giving me a look. “Don’t even think of starting in on me.”
“Karin, I’m experiencing you as threatened,” Paul jokes.
“Your marriage is what’s threatened! I’d kill my spouse if he said half the shit you guys are saying to each other.”
“Not if it was something you really needed to hear,” I reply.
“Some things are best left unheard,” she says.
“Have you noticed either of us getting upset by it?” I ask her.
“That’s the scary part. Paul tells you you’re controlling, read ‘bitch,’ you tell him he’s being a wuss, in so many words, and you two are laughing and hugging like you just got married. It’s like they sucked any self-respect you had right out of you. Mia’s gonna get home and want to run away all over again.”
“Karin, it’s not criticism, it’s about helping someone get out of their own way. I wish I’d have been more conscious of some of my behaviors a long time ago. I’d have made some very different choices.”
That’s probably the most important lesson I took home. I always blamed someone or something else because I didn’t want to blame myself; I thought “blame” made me a bad person. In shifting from “blame” to neutrally looking at the choices that I made, asking, how did I set this up, I feel a sense of power in my own life that has till now eluded me.
As the weeks pass and the “seminar high,” as they call it, wears off somewhat, what lingers is a profound shift in the way Paul and I experience each other and life in general. And Karin has not only stopped joking about it, she’s decided to take the seminar herself.
Because I have so much time on my hands now, I’ve signed up for a pitching workshop with a local writing guru. As he’s describing the protagonist’s mythic journey, he draws a bull’s-eye just like the one Duane did. And then he puts a Precious Child in the middle, trapped beneath that pesky onion, those masks and facades.
Hey, he went through Discovery, too! I’m so excited to find another program parent, I hurry to the stage at the break to ask him excitedly which facility his kid’s in. He looks down at me, like four feet down at me, and says with amused disdain, “This technology has been around since the seventies. Everyone from IBM to tantric sex workshops uses it.”
Uh, never mind, I mumble, my face burning. Now, Claire, I remind myself, humiliation is a choice, what are you making it mean, what are you choosing to feel?
I’m choosing to feel like he chose to be an arrogant asshole is what. Sometimes, being unenlightened feels so much better.
We see her sitting at the med counter, the new girl, Brooke. She’s skinny, sweaty, and dirty as only a junkie can be and from her glaring expression and her leg shaking rapidly, she’s already in withdrawal. Poor thing, I remember sitting there and it sucks.
We walk past her to the classroom and as we’re about to cross in, Miss Zuza says, “Mia, Samantha, und Sunny, herausfallen, bitte (fall out ofline).”
I hope I’ve been chosen to do an intake. When someone new comes, girls are always chosen to comb through their suitcase. When you’ve had the same schedule for three months, you do get excited at making a list of someone’s contraband items. While she’s taken to be deloused, I set aside her toothbrush and then make a list of things that include condoms, a Circle Jerks shirt that has been cut up and safety-pinned back together, and cigarettes, which I have a hard time not ripping open and smoking.
She comes back halfway through our intake, freshly showered. Her silky black Uma Thurman “Pulp Fiction” haircut and full lips haven’t been missed by Sunny, who feigns interest in her intake list. I’ve been dying to talk to Sunny about being gay, but I’m not sure how she’ll react. Maybe she’s not ready to come out, who knows, she could be in total denial.
“Find anything interesting?” Brooke asks foully.
She must think we’re freaks, girls in these uniforms excitedly going through her things. She has no concept of how this place works, that privacy is nonexistent here; she probably thinks we enjoy doing this, just like I did when Miss Zuza did it to me.
So much has changed since then. I’ve become so close with some girls and staffit’s hard to believe we’ve only been in each other’s lives three months. I appreciate being here now and on some days actually like it. But I suddenly want to be my old self, show this new girl this isn’t how I normally am. But isn’t it? Isn’t this the real me, who I am when the image is stripped away? So why do I suddenly feel so naked now, why am I dying to throw on my army pants and a Descendants CD?
I don’t want her to see me as a matching nerd, I want her to know that I used to be part of that world, too. Not because I want to be part of it again, I’m much happier now, but so I can connect with her in a way she’ll understand. As I used to, she’s operating in the external world, a world where everyone’s so disconnected from each other that physicality is all we have to go by, how we determine personality and character, who we think we can relate to.
Growing up is about growing away, about finding an identity distinct from your family. But few teens have a strong enough sense of self to stand alone. It’s why friends are so important; together you form a collective identity from which you gather strength and a sense of belonging. And your clothes, music, and friends announce that identity.
Weeks after the seminar, I’m still mulling the “Where did I go blind” question while shopping at Ross Dress for Less. Without a second income now, we’re doing Everything for Less. Mulling, however is free.
Probably the first time I remember going blind, I mull as I check the size of a sports bra to send Mia, was when I ignored Nick’s drug use, before we even got married, then in countless ways after we did.
Just as troubling was going into such denial about Mia’s old psychologist Ella’s warning that I “forgot” it altogether. And I’ve only recently recalled that my mother warned me when Mia was still in grade school that something like this would happen. What he did hurt her deeply, something like that doesn’t just go away, she told me.
What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn’t permanently damaged her, that I’d truly saved her. Because if I did, if there was no lasting residue of him, it meant that the denial that kept me in the marriage long enough for him to hurt her didn’t help create the situation she’s in now.
The person who I worked hardest to keep safe seems to have been me.
I’ve finally decided to share in group about my old dad. Glenn came to support me, but I’m still nervous. Seminar was one thing, everyone was bawling in a darkened room. But here, in a bright, silent room, it’s much less comfortable.
“I don’t really remember much of it. I used to, but all I remember now is vague details and the nightmares. It’s weird how something I barely remember runs me so much.”
“What came up for you in seminar?” Glenn wants to cut to the chase.
I’m silent for a minute. I’m not sure where to start, how to word it.
“I didn’t realize how hurt I was by him. I was aware of the anger, and of feeling different, but I never acknowledged being hurt, too.”
“Why is that? What would acknowledging the pain mean?”
I knew coming in Glenn wouldn’t let me slide by, but that’s not making this any easier.
“I don’t like being out of control, being weak. I hate that it hurts me, that twelve years later someone I don’t even know makes me feel like shit. It bothers me that he never went to counseling. He could have had visitation with me, a relationship with me if he went to sex offender therapy, but he didn’t. He just went on and had another family.”
I stop for a second. I feel dumb saying that. Who would want to be wanted by a pedophile?
“And I feel really fucked up for wanting him to want me, I mean he’s sick, so what does that make me for missing him?”
Glenn leans forward in her chair toward me, but she addresses all of us. “We all want to be wanted by our parents, no matter how shitty they were as parents. It’s human nature. There’s anger toward them, sure, but beneath that is always hurt, why did he do this to me? It doesn’t make you weird or perverted for wanting your father’s love. Do you hear me, Mia? There’s nothing wrong with you.”
She holds my gaze and says it again.
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
I feel my chin start trembling and Glenn’s face starts wavering as my eyes water. She keeps whispering, “There’s nothing wrong with you,” as I bury my head in her chest and start to cry.
When I look up, my family’s surrounding me saying how proud they are of me and how much they love me. I feel a mixture of love and gratitude toward them and Glenn and relief at hearing her words, though it may take me awhile to fully believe them.
During a lunch meeting with a friend, I notice for the first time since Mia left five months ago that I have just gone a whole meal without thinking of her.
My days have finally begun to take on their own rhythm, one not dictated by Mia’s needs and wants. For the first time, I’m not obsessing about her progress or her future.
I would have been thrilled if Morava had merely returned her to who she used to be. But she’s transforming in a way I never imagined possible. She’s made huge leaps in understanding herself, in learning to communicate honestly and effectively. Most important, she’s grown to love herself, the quality a teenager most needs to stay safe.
After lunch, I pick up a few ingredients for a small dinner party I’m giving on the weekend. I’m digging in my purse for my keys on the way to my car when I look up and see a pretty teenage girl and her slender, dark-haired mother come around the corner. The mother has her arm around her daughter and they’re laughing.
The noise of the street drops off and tears spring into my eyes unexpectedly. I quickly duck my head and I look back into my purse as they pass me.
I don’t just miss her, I miss us.
We’ve crossed out to go to lunch but the boys aren’t finished eating yet, so we face the wall and wait in silence. As I wait, it occurs to me that I’m no longer bothered by the quiet. I actually enjoy it at times. It makes me realize how excessively we talk. We talk to fill the silence because it’s easier than being with ourselves.
We’re stripped to the bare essentials here, physically and emotionally. We eat, use the bathroom, sleep, exercise, and attend school, but all on silence. Talking becomes important only when it’s a need, not a want, when someone needs to get something off their chest or say something important. I feel more in tune with my real needs versus wants now, both mental and physical.
I feel much healthier now, too. The drugs are out of my system, I’ve gained some weight, I don’t get light-headed like I used to. It sounds dumb, but feeling good feels good.
Morava now has fifty kids, and most of the parents have gotten to know each other by email. There’s a resilience and sense of humor common to the Morava parents. I guess you’d have to be a combination of tough and not a little crazy to send your kid to a brand-new program in a former Soviet faux chalet near the Slovak border to face the wall when the opposite sex passes and remain silent for most of the day.
I’m looking forward to meeting some of them and some of the girls that are now part of Mia’s journey. The opportunity will come sooner than I expect.