To be so completely immersed in a world of broken and healing teens and then come home to Los Angeles, where most teen culture is generated, is a disturbing jolt. It’s impossible not to see these teens as miners’ canaries. I pass billboards, watch movies, TV, I peruse the newsstand, and it feels like we’re all fiddling like Nero while our fifth-graders wear thong underwear and learn the difference between oral, anal, and vaginal sex before afternoon recess.
Don’t designers get that “heroin chic” should be a contradiction in terms? That the drug-eyed postcoital teens in those “hip” seventies basement ads are irresistible to teens who live and die by how much they look and act like models? Doesn’t Matt Groening find it disingenuous to denounce censorship a few years after apologizing to parents once he had his own kids? Why don’t we want to acknowledge that the biggest parent of all is the culture?
Our generation has no problem with censorship when it suits them. We censor a man if he wants to comment on a coworker’s chest size. We deny him his right of free speech because we acknowledge the damage it does. But we won’t limit the “free speech” that surrounds our kids even though it damages them. Are we really too stupid, or too profit-minded, to see the connection between what they grow up seeing, hearing, and imitating and the fact that they can’t build schools like Spring Creek fast enough?
I used to dread feeling like I didn’t belong. Before this happened, I would keep my opinions to myself at meetings or dinner parties for fear of being seen as uncool. What’s uncool to me now is the greed and arrogance of those who want to create, or defend, teen culture and deny its effects, who think they’ve come so very far from the era of children being seen as chattel.
Children are still chattel to them—they’re just chattel with a disposable income. Not to mention perky breasts and bee-stung lips.
Even my little corner of the world looks different to me now. I can see how unconscious I’ve been about what I’ve surrounded Mia with in her own home. She’s right, it is severe, there’s little color, and those breasts. They may be culturally relevant and provocative, but they’re also angry. Abuse of power, greed, male violence, and misogyny are important themes for artists, but perhaps not in Mia’s home right now.
Even my refrigerator poetry magnets are a mirror for me. “I am a bitter goddess, Beneath my whispering petals, Lies a crushing tongue.” “I want languid red dreams, But my dreaming apparatus is rusty, And so, My dreams are pink.” They’re the depressed mother’s version of cheesy, angst-ridden teenage poetry.
My home reflects a state of mind I’m not in anymore. I want the feeling of our home to be one of happiness. White walls become buttercup, pale olive, sunshine yellow. I hang Mia’s pastels, childhood photos of all of us. I want Mia to return to a home as transformed as we are.
My relationship with God has evolved as well. I no longer rail or beg or sass back. I was standing on a bluff over the ocean the other day and suddenly laughed out loud as I realized what an illusion that was, what an impossibility. That would assume a relationship between a “me” and an “Other,” a separation. There is no otherness; to be separate from God is to be separate from myself, from life itself. What I’ve been looking for, I’m looking with.
Well, I’m back in the saddle, I think, looking around at the seminar room. Two days on junior staff and I’m already staffing Discovery. Cameron and Chaffin offered me back my Level 5 status after my parents left—and this time I took it. I wasted enough time. Plus, I’ll get a home visit in time for my seventeenth birthday!
It’s my first time on a staffing team and I had no idea how many hours you work preparing and getting coached. If I thought David was intimidating before, he’s twice as hard on the staff team. We’re about to do the first release process, and he’s going over our duties.
“I want the kids to come in to dim lighting and ‘Cristofori’s Dream,’ that’s CD 12, song 3.” He nods to the people in charge of lights and music. “Small group leaders, I want you already seated in their circles. It’s critical you’re on top of your duties or the mood will break. Half of what gets these kids to open up in these processes is trust. The other half is the separation of this atmosphere from their normal lives, where they avoid dealing with things. Your job as a staffer is to help create that environment.”
Sonia’s one of the kids in my group. When it’s her turn to share, she rises slowly and smiles coyly before speaking. She’s perfected the art of captivating an audience, knowing exactly when to pause and stare woefully at the ground, when to lower her voice to barely audible, bringing listeners to the edge of their seats.
But I’ve heard her stories before, and while stripping, being raped, and dealing drugs were no doubt formative experiences, I suspect those she leaves out were more so.
“What about your parents, Sonia?”
“What about them? I don’t appreciate you interrupting me when I was sharing about my fucking issues,” she snaps.
I remind myself not to react, to remember how easy it is to get defensive when someone’s trying to break through your walls.
“I’m not saying what you’re sharing isn’t important, but I’ve heard it enough times to say it myself. I also don’t think these things are that hard for you to share.”
“Yeah, rape’s a real easy topic.”
How do I explain this without sounding like a bitch?
“I’m not saying it isn’t. I just have a feeling that whatever came before it was worse.”
She stares at me for a few seconds, a cat deciding whether to play with her prey, or just pounce.
“Okay, if, as you say, I omit what’s painful, why wouldn’t I just refuse to talk?”
She’s playing. The fact that she’s speaking almost flirtatiously tells me she’s acknowledging I hit a chord. Now that I’ve won a few points, she’s testing me to see how well I know her, which, unfortunately for her, is better than she’s about to like.
“Attention,” I answer. “You equate it with power and control, you’ve said yourself that’s why you liked stripping. Good work on changing the subject, by the way.”
“Thanks,” she smiles at me.
“You’re so aggravating, Sonia!” I suddenly exclaim. “You’re so used to wrapping people around your little finger, you don’t even know when someone’s trying to help you. I’m not asking you this shit to amuse myself—I’m asking because the reason you’re so manipulative is to keep people at arm’s length so they won’t see how miserable you really are. You act stronger than you feel, and I know because I’ve been you.”
Her amused expression changes to one of wariness. I need to watch my tone.
“Look,” I say, more calmly. “We all have our secrets, it’s okay to keep some. But, like I said, I know nothing else about you. Tell us about your life, I mean, were you a good student, did you have a happy childhood, anything?”
“Off and on, my childhood was happy, I guess.”
“You don’t sound very convincing,” I say gingerly. I’m afraid to push her too much or she’ll clam up, but I also want to get past the bullshit.
“We moved around a lot, but my parents were happily married. I got along with my siblings.”
“Who were you closest to?”
“Probably my sister, my mom, too, though.”
“What about your dad?”
“What about him?”
She’s getting defensive again. I hit another chord. She senses my train of thought and changes her demeanor, flashing a quick smile.
“My dad’s almost sixty, so I never related to him much, but we get along fine.”
Something’s not adding up, nobody from such a “happy” background does what she did. And I get a weird feeling when she mentions her dad.
“Did your dad abuse you?” I ask softly.
I don’t know what makes me ask this, maybe it’s seeing something of myself in her, her refusal to create intimacy, her need for control. It would explain her running away, the stripping and heroin, she might have been trying to blot her father out.
“Physically, no,” she answers. The look in her eyes is a mixture of dread and desire, of wanting to expose him while still fearing it.
“Sexually?”
With that one word something in her dies. Her eyes go vacant, her face blank. Her mouth opens a couple of times, but nothing comes out. After a minute, she nods ever so slightly before dropping her head. It comes out in whispers.
“When I turned thirteen. It went on until I ran away when I was almost fifteen. You know the rest.”
As she says this last part, she looks up from the floor at me. I’ve never seen anything so vulnerable in all my life.
“I’ve never said that out loud before.”
On impulse, I take her hand and squeeze it.
“Me, too, by my dad.”
There’s a lot more I want to tell her, things that she’s probably going to face in the future, patterns I noticed that stem from the abuse, but for now, I’m just glad she acknowledged it happened and that I have the chance to connect with her.
I hear David telling the kids to stack their chairs on the side of the room and find a space on the floor.
“I can’t say anything else, but what you’re about to do might help,” I whisper to her, as I move toward the staff table.
It’s time for the towel process. Barf bags are stationed in each corner of the room and we’ve all memorized the location of the first aid kit. Slight rug burn from an overly enthusiastic hitter is generally the worst that happens. The kids will have their eyes closed, so it’s our job to make sure no one’s about to bushwhack someone else.
David begins and I listen to the familiar dialogue, the imagining your father’s face, calling up the unpleasant memories. When it comes time for them to begin hitting, I brace myself. He starts the count and with three, it’s like waking sleeping dragons. It’s darkened so all you can see is their silhouettes, like a machine, arms rising and falling, rising and falling. The sheer energy is breathtaking, it’s pure emotion, unfiltered.
Whish! A towel whizzes by my face. “FUCK YOU!!” a girl to my right screams over and over, hitting the floor with such gusto I stand behind her to be sure she doesn’t hit the boy to her left. It goes on for at least fifteen minutes. When it’s time for them to rest before beginning to imagine their mom, David whispers to us to go out and soothe the kids however they feel comfortable, rocking them, putting a hand on their back.
I go to Sonia first. She’s not crying anymore, just breathing heavily, her hair clinging to the sides of her face, wet from sweat and tears. I kneel beside her and lift her head into my lap, stroking her hair and cradling her lightly. She opens her eyes for a second and stares up at me, smiling softly before shutting them again.
I kiss the top of her head before moving on to the next person, who happens to be Sean. I can make out Jason farther down and I see Zeke’s blond curls in the distance. My wall-punching, snow-slinging boys are curled up in the fetal position, rocking themselves and sniffling. And in comforting them and giving them someone to rock with as Sasha did to me, I feel something I haven’t felt before.
The last time I felt an emotion so intensely was in this same process, the freeing of a little red demon my father left and I secretly nurtured. But this is entirely different. It’s not anger or pain I feel, but love. It surprises me to find I have love, not just insight, inside me in such abundance.
And in letting myself love them, I see for the first time the gift I gave to my mom. And why she fought so hard to keep me.