Baby Steps (5 page)

And yet, the responsibility of parenting me and making sure I grew up okay with myself and my life fell almost entirely onto my mother's shoulders. Although I still saw my father and he still helped us out financially, our lifestyle could never equal what it had been before, and my mother had to sacrifice a lot for me. It would be years before she could go her own way.

Until then, my mother wanted to maintain a normal life for me after the divorce. She didn't want to uproot me and take me on some gypsy pilgrimage, like she might have done had she been alone. She understood that I needed to feel safe and secure in my childhood home, so she stayed and struggled to make ends meet, to keep us afloat in the life we'd lived before my father left. It wasn't easy for her.
She could never have made his salary, but she didn't want me to have to pay for their issues. Of course I did—what child of divorce doesn't? But it took me many years to fully acknowledge what my mother gave up, or postponed, for my sake. Now I understand: she could ditch the husband, if necessary (and it did turn out to be necessary), but she had a responsibility to me. I was her child.

Shortly after my father left, she laid it on the line for me:

“Lis, I can't outsmart you. I can't outwit you. I can't spend my days trying to figure out what you're really up to. It's all I can do to keep us going, so you have to make me a deal. If you always tell me the truth, then you will never be punished for what you tell me. But if you don't tell me the truth, there will be consequences for that. Do you understand?”

I did, and I still do. I think a lot of single moms feel like this. Parenting is hard enough in pairs, but when you have to do it on your own, there are limits to what you can realistically tackle. She knew this and right from the start, she demanded honesty. I didn't always give it, but when I didn't, there were consequences, just like she said there would be.

When I was sixteen, my mother allowed me to get a driver's license, with only two conditions.

“If you're drunk, you don't drive,” she said. “Just call me and I'll come get you. And don't ever let anyone else drive your car.”

So what did I do? I was at a party and I'd had one beer. I thought,
I'll be responsible and I won't drive.
So when my friends and I all went out to buy more beer, I let someone's older brother drive my car. He began to speed down the dark roads in Chappaqua. Then, we crashed head-on into another car.

Amazingly, nobody died, but when my mother went to see the car, she was asked whether anyone survived the accident. The next morning, she took my driver's license and cut it up and threw it away.

“You've lost the right to drive,” she said. “And you will not drive again until you can prove that I can trust you again.” This is how she always handled things. I lied to her, and I broke her rule, and the consequence was the loss of my driving privileges. She wasn't going to shame me or make me feel like a piece of shit. She was just going to exercise her power to show me that there were repercussions. Which is worse, having a head-on collision or having sex at fourteen? She wouldn't have wished either one of these things on me, but they were decisions I made, situations I got myself into, and there were repercussions in either case. Not shame, but consequences, specifically engineered by her but entirely justified. I could never say that she wasn't fair.

Our history as mother and daughter was long and fraught with turmoil. I didn't make it easy for her to be my mother after my father left. I tortured her, and I tortured him when I saw him, too. I tortured myself. But some objective part of me was always able to stand back and observe the way my mother handled me, and I admired it, even when I was the unwilling recipient of her sense of justice. She was the reason I always knew that I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to be as good at it as she was.

As the next few years passed, my mother and I both struggled, together and separately. Although on the surface we looked like we were maintaining our lifestyle, inside, things were falling apart. Our life was like a beautiful antique dresser: respectable on the outside, but with drawers full of clothes wadded up in balls. Open the drawers and you want to ask, “What's all this shit?” That was us.

She was the one who picked up the pieces after every disappointing interaction I had with my father, when I would come home in tears, but she never shielded me from her pain, emotions, or confusion. Her vulnerability was so raw and out-there for me to see that I could hardly stand it. I wanted to be able to be vulnerable in front of
her, but I didn't want her to be vulnerable in front of me. I felt a strong sense of indignation that I had to witness and endure her weakness. I remember one day when I burst into her bedroom to ask what was for dinner, she was sitting on the end of the bed, her bathrobe slipping from her shoulders, her face buried in her hands, weeping. She looked so human and frail, and I hated her for that. I was confused by her humanity. She was supposed to be the one telling
me
that it was time for dinner. Why was she sitting there like that? Why was she crying? Why did I have to see it? The picture is burned in my memory.

She never hid her tears from me, whether she cried because all the bills were late and the check from my father still hadn't arrived, or because she felt like an alien in a place she never would have chosen for herself, or out of frustration at my behavior—my anger and refusal to participate in my classes at school. Sometimes it made me so uncomfortable that I vowed never to cry in front of my own child. I hated that I sometimes had to be the one to say, “Mom, the house is a mess,” or “Mom, we need to eat dinner now,” or “Mom, I have a doctor's appointment today. You have to take me there and we have to be on time.”

Who are we supposed to be in front of each other? Are we allowed to be human in front of our daughters? In front of our mothers? Or are we supposed to pretend to be strong because the world expects it, even while we are crumbling inside? I honestly don't know the answer to that one yet.

Maybe she should have shielded me more, but she simply didn't know how. My mother was who she was. Between the two of us, there were no boundaries. My rage and her vulnerability clashed in ways that seemed more extreme than they would have if our family had remained whole, but at least I always knew she was on my side. Painful as it was to see my mother struggling rather than putting up a front of
strength and impenetrability, I understood that she didn't want any smoke and mirrors in our relationship. She wanted me to learn how to be an honest person, who not only knows how to tell the truth to others, but who can tell the truth to herself. To me, it was sometimes too much honesty, but it also worked. I have grown into a brutally honest person. Sometimes that has served me well, and sometimes there have been casualties.

But at the time, I was the casualty. At fourteen, I was so academically out of whack the public school system labeled me as “impossible to educate.”

I think if you are a smart kid, you tend to go out to the edge and look over to see how far you will fall if you jump off. Just because you're curious. Or because you're angry enough to really do it. Any parent with a smart and curious kid is going to have her hands full. For me, working that edge was about refusing to do homework, refusing to participate in class, and refusing to be part of the system.

They called it “going on strike,” and it took the public school system two years to determine that I did not have a learning disability, that I did not have ADHD, that I was not mentally ill, but that I was simply angry, messed up, and incorrigible. I was the kid who ended up at that lone desk out in the hall. I was in the “learning disabled” classes with all the other kids who couldn't seem to make it in the system or refused to try. I'd had my brain tested and retested, my IQ tested, my stress level tested by how tightly I gripped a pencil during a test. I'd taken handwriting tests and psychological tests and stared at shapes and geometrical patterns, and I'd spent countless hours with the school counselor. When they at last offically pronounced me extremely smart but extremely angry and hurt, they said I needed to be in a place where I could get the attention I was lacking. They said I was acting out from an emotional place, and they were not equipped to handle that. They said I was out. The
last two weeks of middle school, I was not allowed to go back on school grounds.

My mother did everything she could to give me the tools to deal with our family trauma and my own anger. I'd been in therapy since I was eight years old, even before the divorce, to help me deal with the verbal violence I witnessed regularly from my parents and the gradual disintegration of our family unit. I'd spent years attending an ashram in upstate New York with my mother—it was my summer camp—wearing saris and participating in rituals and attending self-help programs, first for kids and eventually, for teens. But the simple fact was that her efforts to “fix” me weren't working, according to the system. I was failing every single class. I wasn't making it. I was
choosing
not to make it. That was the final determination.

I remember the moment when I asked my shrink if I could read the court-ordered analysis that the public school required in order to boot me out. He should never have let me read it, but I did. It contained everything, every gory detail of my past and my parents' breakup, including details I didn't even know or remember. It was a
War of the Roses
story, full of volatility and emotional violence, and it had my mother written all over it: unchecked expression spewed across the pages, my mother imposing her experience on me yet again, making it mine instead of allowing me to have my own. And the details—details that painted a picture far more difficult than I'd imagined. Details of private things that government officials and school officials had now read: exhaustive accounts of my parents' fights, my embarrassing reactions to their fights and their therapy, and some things I barely believed could be true. I could feel the tension building inside of me as I read, until finally I threw the papers onto the floor, climbed up on the couch, and screamed at the top of my lungs:

“You liar! I hate you! I hate you all!”

Then I collapsed on the floor and wept. It wasn't my best moment. My heart had been broken into a million pieces. It was quite a display, I'm sure, but my emotions were true and I couldn't argue with their final verdict: I didn't fit in. I was too damaged. I was too “complicated.” They could not educate me. I needed more than they could give. A judge had ordered it: I was done.

When I recovered and my mother came to take me home, we had a serious discussion. She didn't judge me. She didn't shame me. In fact, she understood completely, and she probably felt responsible. But I was still years from graduation, so I had two options. I could drop out, take my GED, and we could travel the world together. “The world would be your classroom,” she told me. “But I need to be honest with you. For the rest of your life, you'll always know you didn't finish high school, and people will judge you because of that. You'll always be like an outsider looking in. You'll always know you gave up.”

Or, she told me, I could go to private school.

The problem with private school was that, based on my academic record, the only schools likely to accept me were schools for juvenile delinquents. There were options. We browsed them and visited several. There was the posh $16,000-a-year school for rich kids who didn't feel like fitting in, but we both knew we could never afford that kind of tuition. There was the state-funded school, but it looked more like a prison than a school, and the description scared us both. We finally settled on a school in upstate New York that seemed like the perfect compromise; some court-ordered kids were there, but others at the school just didn't fit in for one reason or another. It was affordable, but not scary, or so we thought. Best of all, I would escape my life thus far and get out into the world, where I could become my own person. I would leave home, and I would never move back. I was fourteen years old.

I thought I was ready. All the friends I hung out with were going away to boarding school, too. In our minds, we all thought we were going away on a great adventure, and I couldn't wait to get away from both my parents. I was tired of people trying to fix me. I wanted to be out on my own. I wanted to try fixing myself.

Boarding school was much more terrifying than I ever could have imagined. It felt like more of a prison than a school, and some of the things that happened there were extreme, even looking back from an adult perspective. The dorms were always locked during the day, so we couldn't get in, and locked during the night, so we couldn't get out. There were cameras in our rooms, so we had no privacy. Worse, we were punished with hard physical labor, like in that movie
Holes,
where the boys have to dig all day, in fear for their lives. None of the adults running the school trusted us. It didn't matter whether we told the truth or lied. They always assumed we were lying.

The headmistress was an intimidating woman who made us call her “Mom C.” Every morning, we had to write in a journal, in the format of a letter to her: “Dear Mom, this is what I could improve in myself.” We also had to participate in what they called “thank-yous.” We all sat in a circle and we each had to thank somebody for something. If you didn't have someone to thank, you would pay for it later.

The kids never felt safe, and hard labor was the punishment for any misstep. Once, when I was caught smoking a cigarette, my punishment was to clean out a barn that hadn't been used in thirty years. The stalls were filled with four-foot-tall piles of rock-hard manure. I remember standing in that barn, feeling desperate and alone, not having any idea how to do the work required of me. It took me weeks of physical labor to dig it out. This was my “lesson.” I convinced some of the boys to help me at night, because I knew I could never finish it alone, but if they had been caught, we would have all been punished even more severely.