“Maybe I’ll stay until after creative writing,” she said.
“So what do you all think about inviting new members into the group?” I asked the room at large.
Brisa, who almost never spoke or wrote anything, said it would be hard to let new girls in when everyone had shared themselves so deeply, and pulled her sweatshirt hood down even further over her face.
“You should only bring in one new girl at a time,” said La Toya.” Just one to replace me, and then one more when Kaylee leaves.”
Ana sucked her thumb and said she didn’t care. Nia and Kaylee said they liked the group just the way it was.
“I’ll think about it and decide, but I’d like to bring at least one new girl in. We need to give some of the others this opportunity. And all this coming and going will be happening a lot as time goes on.”
“We are the ones who should be able to decide, Sharon. It’s our group and we want to keep it this way.” There was never any problem about knowing just where Nia stood.
“I don’t know how we can do that, if people keep leaving,” I mused. The makeup of the group and feelings about it were going to be a real issue, I could see that. This collection of girls had bonded strongly in such a short time.
I did want them to make the choice, for us to be a little democratic boat in the sea of Touchstone’s prescriptive environment. I hated telling them what to do. But that particular freedom just didn’t work in our group. I had to take charge, but I resisted.
I didn’t want to be seen as an authoritarian parent figure, like everyone in my past. As a parent myself, I’d swung between wanting to be a friend to my kids and being strict with them, sometimes in the middle, never sure of the right balance.
I’d made so many mistakes. Much of my suffering over Geoff’s death was regret over those mistakes and my many flaws.
When my husband and I had traveled with him in Italy the three weeks before he died, we had not been in a great place with each other. After realizing early that traditional marital roles were boxing us in, we determined that both of us needed more space and choice than those constricted roles allowed for. Negotiating that space and choice often created more conflict and stress than there would have been if our marriage was the conventional kind. Those stresses had blossomed more fully when the kids had left home and I began my new work as a family therapist.
I had feared our rocky marital ground was hard to hide, though being with our son who had grown up so much since he’d left us was an incredible tonic for us both.
And his center had shifted away from us. “My life is with my friends now,” he’d asserted. It had been a tricky business, navigating this whole new place we were in together. He’d morphed from the short, chubby, naïve boy who’d left home into a slim, tall, and handsome young man with a life in a foreign country. An adult. He was leading us around, speaking a language we didn’t know, making decisions about where we’d stay, what we should eat. We just paid the bills, awed by his transformation.
I was hungry to know who he was now, but trying to be careful not to be too intrusive, an attempt at which I generally wasn’t very successful. I wanted to know if he had a girlfriend (he did), what his studies were like, his teachers, what he did every day, what he felt about living abroad. We noticed his wheezing, his constant use of his inhaler. The air in Italy was thick, polluted with constant exhaust fumes from the ubiquitous motor scooters. Everyone, it seemed, smoked. We’d suspected how bad it would be, but knew too that we couldn’t say no to his dream of a year in Rome.
“I’m handling it, Mom, Dad,” he’d say when we asked him about how his asthma had been since he’d left.
I should have pushed more. I should have been able to protect him. That feeling has never completely left me. I didn’t know then that most parents who have lost a child struggled with this guilt. That they felt that somehow, if only they had been better parents and people, done something different, anything at all, the child might still be alive— no matter how irrational that concept in the face of reality.
My husband tried to comfort me by repeating over and over that Geoff’s death was a random event, that bad things happened all the time with no discernible explanations. I wanted to believe him and I tried, but it was too hard, even with the Buddhist teachings I was struggling to absorb. His words didn’t alter my grief, but they eventually contributed to helping me carry it differently.
The autopsy stated that an asthma attack had probably precipitated the fall. An investigation had declared his death an accident, but without a convincing explanation. The Embassy had ruled out foul play as a cause of death, but we never did. There had been a friend with him that night who, we felt, knew something he wasn’t telling us.
There were just too many unanswered questions.
I’d decided to leave the discussion about new members off to the side for now, sure that whatever we decided on today would change or be forgotten the next week.
“Let’s get to our prompt for this afternoon, ‘Everything I know about fathers.’”
Brisa immediately started to cry. Kaylee pulled me over and whispered that Brisa’s father had died recently, and that she didn’t want to hear anyone writing bad about their fathers because she didn’t have one. I was put into another quandary; should I change for her, be protective, or go ahead and risk it, knowing that they would probably write what they wanted to anyway?
We got into a spirited discussion about possible alternative writing topics; they all wanted to write about boyfriends, sex, love, and hormones.
“Is young love possible?” Kaylee suggested. “A healthy sex life,” was Nia’s proposal.
I don’t have many of the pieces they wrote from that time because I hadn’t yet begun typing them up; that happened later on. But when we did write about fathers, Nia told us her father, or the man she’d thought was her father, a drug and alcohol addict, had died when she was six. Turns out her “real” father had disappeared and this one was just someone her mother was “doing the nasty” with. Two deaths, really.
La Toya, whose hair was dyed red this week, wouldn’t read her piece because she didn’t want to upset Brisa; Brisa read nothing, trying to nestle into the hard blue couch cushions. Kaylee wrote of her love for her father and wish to discuss deeper things with him, then veered off into her anxiety about going home and how she cried herself to sleep every night worrying about how it would be.
“I will be like a new baby being born,” she said.
Yes, Kaylee, you will, I thought.
Despite their anger at being locked up and watched all the time, the girls had felt safe here, developed close and important alliances and relationships, and would have to go back to their unsafe homes and neighborhoods, be tempted by their old habits.
Striving to join them with the truth of my own experience, I wrote about my father.
My father…is Italian and was so overprotective of my sisters and me when I was young that I could hardly do anything. I had to ask permission for every little thing. I couldn’t ride a bike because it was too dangerous and wasn’t allowed to learn to drive until I was nineteen. I wasn’t permitted to go out with a boy until I was sixteen, and then had to be driven by an adult. My parents had to meet and approve of the boy. I couldn’t wear lipstick or shave my legs until I was sixteen either, so I sneaked both before.
My father was brought up in tough areas when he was young. He lived in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC and in a dicey neighborhood in New Haven until his father was able to get a small grocery store over which they lived, on the corner of Webster and Ashmun Avenues. He told me just recently