“Do you think I could look at the room before I leave?” I could feel her desire to move on to the next task, but I was compelled to stay longer, to get more of a sense of the place, prepare myself for the meeting with the young women I hadn’t really been sure she’d agree to. Suddenly, it seemed what I’d hoped for so impulsively was going to actually happen.
“Sure,” she said, “It’s right across the hall.” She pulled open a heavy metal door and gestured towards the large dark room. A gurgling fish tank sat in a corner, and a bunch of scruffy chairs were scattered about on the rugless floor. A massive fireplace, remnant of a time when this had been someone’s home, dominated the shadowy space. It seemed as oddly out of place as I was.
“Take a look; I’ve got to go, the girls will be coming up soon.” Lori smiled and shook my damp hand, turned and went back to the kitchen.
I stood in there staring at the fish tank. It contained a large, solitary orange fish that swam in slow, rhythmic circles.
It had seemed too easy, getting Lori to say yes to my idea. I hadn’t had to offer any credentials, tell her I’d worked as a therapist for twenty years, was a published poet.
As I stood there staring at the fish, working with this group of girls began to seem like an unthinkable task. Suddenly I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to do this new thing that might actually shift the focus of my life out from under its leaden coat of mourning. After all, nothing else had worked. “Mother of a dead son” had become my definition, the pain that weighted my days a connection to my son I was unwilling to surrender.
I remembered Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron’s gorilla in the mirror. It was hard to look at mine. How could I face a whole roomful of tough, suspicious girls and keep myself together? They would probably see right through me, a gray-haired white woman so much older than they were, trying to get some distraction from her own pain. Maybe there was no way I was ready to do this.
I walked back to my car, stomach caved in on itself, head clanging. When I opened the door, I dropped my bag, everything spilling out onto the cracked and heaving pavement of the parking lot.
It was another really hot afternoon, that first meeting day. But the big room was surprisingly cool, with its non-matching shabby chairs and couches, a dark rug now on the floor. The fish tank still gurgled. The room was dim, almost murky. There were only two floor lamps to light the large space.
I waited alone, shivering a bit in my standard summer and fall “uniform” of that era: a white t-shirt, black capris, and black slides.
A queue of girls, accompanied by several staff, marched in and sat down on chairs lined up against the wall. Their skin was of various shades of white, black, and tan. Mostly they were dressed in very tight jeans, tank tops, and t-shirts. They looked like regular teenagers. They all had fascinating hairdos—spiked or dyed red, braided into cornrows or gelled into long corkscrew curls. Most of them wore sneakers or flip-flops, and large gold hoop earrings.
They were, to a one, beautiful.
“Hi girls, I’m Sharon Charde,” I blurted out, my voice probably too loud. “It’s really exciting to be meeting with you. I read this great book, Ophelia Speaks, full of stories about different lives written by girls like you, and thought maybe I’d come and see if some of you might want to be part of a group that could do that too.”
They were silent, blankly staring straight ahead, bored-looking. Sure that this crazy idea of mine would never work, I kept talking—what I always did when I was anxious— trying to pull their interest from its locked-up place.
“The world needs to hear your important stories. I want to try to help you tell them. What we do won’t be ‘school writing’, but writing from the heart, what is true and real in your lives, what you’re thinking, feeling, and struggling with.”
“Miss,” one of them called out, “I can’t write.”
“What?” I said. “Everyone can write, it’s okay,” thinking she’d meant she couldn’t write well.
One of the staff spoke up and said her words were true, that she was disabled and really couldn’t write.
“Support!” the girls chorused. I later found out this was a kind of all-purpose word used frequently for all sorts of reasons, but actually did feel very supportive.
“Okay. That’s okay. You can listen.” I turned to the girl who said she was unable to write and smiled. She gazed into the space just beyond me. I smiled harder, trying to meet her eyes. She didn’t look any different from the other girls. Finally, she gave me a wan grin. The small triumph made me feel a little braver.
”So let’s try to write today in the same way we’ll write in the group. So you can see if you’d be interested. There will be some rules,” I said. “Important rules.”
A staff member interrupted me to tell me they had no “rules” at Touchstone, but “expectations.”
“Okay.” I corrected myself. “Expectations.”
“Here’s the first one—you can’t write freely unless you feel safe. In order to make sure we are all safe, everyone needs to make some commitments—to confidentiality, number one. No talking about anyone else’s writing here or outside the group. Second, silence when someone is reading what she’s written. Next, no comments afterwards, no questions. No writing about anyone else in the group. If it’s too hard to read, ask someone else to read it for you, or I will. And finally, everyone needs to write, even staff members and definitely me.”
The staff members demurred on this last one. I let it go. The group hadn’t officially formed and I wanted to make my idea a reality too badly to derail the conversation. I didn’t yet know how thick the lines were supposed to be between the young women and staff.
“If you don’t like what I suggest, you can always write about something else. So let’s start.”
I knew I had to go for broke this first time. So I read a piece from Voices From The Hood, a booklet put out by a Chicopee, Massachusetts, teen writing group from “the projects” that had been started by an organization called Amherst Writers and Artists.
The story was about a girl whose drug-addicted mother killed her dog Pal because the girl hadn’t done what her mother wanted fast enough. It was a horribly painful account of violence and profound betrayal.
Staff members handed out paper and pens.
I asked the girls to relate a similar painful experience in their lives. To my surprise, most of them immediately focused on the writing. Heads down, pens working the paper, they wrote with absorption. Many volunteered to read, sharing stories just as horrible or worse.
“I would come home from school looking for my mom and find her in the garage lighting up a crack pipe,” one girl wrote.
“My mother wouldn’t believe me when I told her I’d been raped for seven years,” another read.
Still another told us, “I remember having my baby, how much it hurt.”
“Support!” the girls called out to each reader.
Another girl, Kaylee, had written that her mother was just like the one in the story I’d read. “I wish she’d never lay down with my father,” she read from a notebook. “I hate her.”
Afterwards she told me how good it had felt to have written and read the piece, but that a lot of emotion had been stirred up in her. I worried that she’d have no place to go with it, but then remembered Lori had told me in a follow-up call that these girls had weekly clinical groups and “advocates” on the staff with whom they could talk.
“Thank you for coming, miss. I want to join your group,” Kaylee asserted. “It will be good for me.” Her eyes met mine in total openness. “I cut