But there is much not told, many young women not written about, many poems still in files in cabinets and my computer, as ten years is a long time. I wish you could know them all, these splendid, courageous, profound human beings. I wish you could know more of what they’ve endured as girls in “the system,” in their homes, classrooms, and neighborhoods. I wish you could know them now, women in their twenties and thirties, raising children, trying to make it in this troubled world, determined to give those children the best of themselves, struggling to make it with their partners.
I want you to know their humanity, their beauty, their gifts, without the cruel labels assigned to them by society. I want you to know how unsurprising it is that they’ve been incarcerated for doing what they did—selling and using drugs, truancy, assault, prostitution, running away—in most cases, to survive impossible situations. I want you to know how much they have to offer the world.
Perhaps this book can elucidate some of those things; I hope so.
But what I can tell you is this: those young women saved me. And my gratitude for them, each and every one, is immeasurable. This book is a small expression of that gratitude. Thank you, my dearest, dearest girls.
Sharon Charde
Lakeville, CT
January 28, 2020
“I am always doing things I can’t do.
That’s how I get to do them.”
—Pablo Picasso
I was wild, raw, still crazed with grief twelve years after my son had fallen from a wall in Rome and died alone in the night. Despite the details gleaned from the embassy and investigation, the autopsy, his teachers in the junior year abroad program, and the friend who was with him that night, his death continued to be an unsolved mystery in my mind. I thought I’d tried everything possible to heal myself—becoming a shaman, falling in love with a woman, writing poetry, traveling the world, going to therapy, living alone on an island for nine months, meditating long hours on Buddhist retreats. But my world continued crumbled and unredeemed. My husband and I grieved differently, so often found it difficult to offer the comfort we so badly needed to each other.
I was stuck in a black hole, blind and dumb, staring at what Pema Chodron, esteemed Buddhist scholar and teacher, called “the gorilla in the mirror.”
Me.
I couldn’t bear what I saw.
Someone, maybe one of my therapy clients, gave me a book, Ophelia Speaks, a collection of first-person pieces written by teen girls. I ripped through it, remembering the inner-city girls I’d taught so long ago, my adolescent clients, and how I’d loved them. The girls in the book—their pain felt like my pain, somehow. And they were writing about it, pouring out their stories as I’d been prompting the women in my writing workshops to do.
Around the same time I heard about Touchstone, a residential treatment center for young women that had opened up in a town not too far from mine. I thought, Maybe I could go there, volunteer myself, start a group, get the girls to write about their lives ? I called the place and talked with the director about my idea. We agreed to meet the following week.
• • •
I pulled into a small parking lot across from an impressive stone mansion. This must be Touchstone, I thought, startled to see such a non-institutional-looking building. Suddenly chilly in the Indian summer heat, I pushed the buzzer at the locked front door several times before someone came. A strikingly pretty and very young woman opened it, a little out of breath.
“Hi, I’m Lori,” she said, looking at me questioningly. It was almost fifteen minutes past the time I’d promised to arrive on this mid-September day in 1999.
“I got a bit lost,” I said. “So sorry to be late.”
“No problem,” she said, “Come on in, I’ve got to make lunch for the kids. We can talk while I cook.”
Lori led me past the stairs she’d just run down, through a dismal room housing a bunch of brown wooden tables and chairs—a dining room, maybe—to a big business-like kitchen full of stainless steel. She opened the oven of the enormous commercial stove to slide in several baking sheets full of frozen tater tots. Corn was heating up on the gas burner in a big pot. There was no one else in sight.
“They’re at school,” she said, hearing the question in my mind. “They’ll come up for lunch around 12:30. So we can talk until then.”
I was confused. Why was the director making lunch? Why was she so impossibly young? I didn’t know then how great the director turnover would be at Touchstone. The facility had just opened a few years ago, and was a fledgling attempt at the first all-female residential treatment center in Connecticut. Gayle Brooks, a long-time Department of Children and Families senior staff member, who’d believed in gender-sensitive treatment rather than punitive incarceration for young women in trouble with the law, had looked for a piece of Connecticut real estate that might be appropriate for a small pilot program for these girls. The North American Family Institute had purchased this fifty-seven-acre property, a former psychiatric institution for the wealthy, in the prosperous country town of Litchfield.
Lori had begun working here as a staff member right after college. She later told me three residents had locked her in a closet the first year, that no one had really known quite what they were doing, and that it had been the daily crises that had educated the young staff on how to figure out a program and structure that could contain the obstreperous girls. She’d been made director just recently, at twenty-six.
Lori and I sat at one of the wooden dining tables inset with blue Formica. The day was hot and there was no air-conditioning. I was surprised at her outfit, a light tank top and capris, having imagined a director who wore a suit or dress.
“Gee, you’re looking nice and cool in this heat,” I said.
“Oh, we’re pretty casual around here,” she said, pulling off a scrunchie and remaking her blonde ponytail.
I put out my CV and some writing retreat brochures on the table, feeling I needed to authenticate myself. She didn’t look down.
“I’ve been doing writing workshops with women for years,” I said, a little fast. “I’d really like to try working with teen girls, and I’ve always wanted to work with the incarcerated. Um, I’d volunteer, of course,” I added hastily.
“Well, what exactly do you want to do?” she asked. Here it comes, I thought. She won’t like the idea, or will say it couldn’t work here. I sat up straighter, trying to look more serious.
“Well, um, I thought I would meet with all the girls, do a sample presentation of what I’d like to do each week with them, you know, get them to write, and then see who wants to be part of a weekly writing group.”
“That sounds fine. Why don’t you come next Monday after school, around 3:00? How long do you think it will take to do one group?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Maybe an hour, hour and a half?”
“Okay, we’ll do it all in a day, then. We’ll try two groups of ten girls each. All right? I’ve got to get those tater tots out before they burn.”
“Sure, okay, fine, Lori. So I’ll come here at 3:00, then, on Monday?”
Somehow I had thought we’d talk longer, that she would have wanted to know