• • •
We did three prompts that afternoon. For the next one, I’d brought in a bag of objects: an onion, a pink razor with a flower motif, a child’s toy school bus, a jar of cinnamon, a lipstick. The woman staff member on duty with us that day wrote a moving piece about the razor—the flowers and the blade, the two ways you could go in life, the loss of innocence that came with shaving your legs for the first time. The girls were fascinated, especially because staff members were not supposed to reveal personal information to the girls, that heavy black line. I knew it was a good rule, but one that needed to be broken at least partially in our group if we were all to write with honesty.
“If I Could, I Would,” was the final prompt suggestion, and they just took off. Mayra wanted to be the ocean, Ana, a bird that flew away and a Bengal tiger.
“Do you know what that is?” she asks, looking hard at me.
“Yes, I do, Ana,” I said, meeting her gaze firmly.
Brisa wrote of wanting her dead brother back and Kaylee of wanting to be with her mother, taking away the meanness in her. Kaylee seemed so young, so innocent, so adorable, that it was hard to get myself to believe she’d done anything lawless.
They all wrote of giving the homeless homes, the poor money, of wanting out of the projects. The room coursed with energy. I was elated. When I got home that night I couldn’t stop talking, telling my husband John every detail of the afternoon’s meeting.
Smiling, he wrapped his arms around me. “Those girls are lucky to have you,” he said.
But I already knew I was the lucky one.
Facials, Confrontations, Advocates
The guiding principle for daily life at Touchstone was called “the normative model.” It was a behavioral conditioning template that employed a mission statement, specific language for various misbehaviors, expectations, and penalties for “going off mission.”
The model was predicated on a level system. When the girls were admitted they were on level one, not allowed to leave the facility and with very few privileges. Level five was the top, achieved by very few; those who made it were allowed the freedom to walk around the campus with their own walkie-talkies—like the ones carried by all staff. Most of the girls see-sawed between levels two and three—three, allowed off-grounds access, two was still restricted. At weekly community meetings, staff members and the whole group of young women would vote on whether or not the person who was “going for her level” should be given the privilege she sought.
• • •
“Yo, I’m confronting you, you did a boundary violation, I saw you kissin’ her in the house bathroom last night.”
“That’s a facial, girl, no way you gettin’ away with that.”
It was humorous to hear these young women tossing the Touchstone lingo into their ordinary conversations. A boundary violation meant any physical touch. The “facial” was not a beauty treatment but a grimace, a roll of the eyes, or some look that could be understood as a challenge to fight, an insult, or some other troublesome communication. Many of the girls were so volatile and had so little impulse control that a “facial” could start a major assault.
“You off mission, girl. Get you feet off the couch. You s’posed to be in group now, get goin’.”
A “confrontation” could be made by holding up a hand in the shape of the letter “C.” A staff member would then call on the girl to make her confrontation. Everyone in the area would then singsong “the mission,” which was “making responsible choices within our community.”
To me, the behavioral model’s rote jargon made them sound like absurd parrots. I questioned whether this stilted and inauthentic language was going to be helpful to them when they reentered the outside world.
Over the next weeks, I began to realize how new the residential facility and its concept was, but wasn’t sure what to expect from staff members. I discovered all did not have college degrees and counseling experience or at least courses; I’d presumed they did. I’d assumed that their mission in life would be to care for these wounded girls with compassion and concern, and that they would all be female.
Oh, was I wrong.
There were at least as many males as females on staff, if not more, and though it seemed strange to me that men would be involved with young women in such an intimate way— for example, standing outside bathroom doors while they showered— I slowly understood that there could never be enough women to fill the required positions. I also came to know that many of the girls did not trust women, and related much better to males, which surprised me, given the destruction I learned anew every week that had been done to them by the men in their lives.
The pay was lamentable for the hard work and long hours required (maybe twelve dollars an hour at that time), the geographical location was far from cities that would have a larger pool of available hires, and there were just not a lot of people who wanted a job like this.
And these deeply scarred girls were difficult if not impossible much of the time, sometimes even physically abusive, both to each other and to staff. And I would later see that staff turnover was continual, which seemed destabilizing to me.
The staff members were called advocates and were assigned a number of girls who were called their “advocatees.” The advocates were supposed to be available as needed for frequent talks and support, but the reality was that they were usually too busy putting out the constant fires that burned high and hot in a facility like this.
And they cut me no slack, this new intruder into their formulaic days. One staff member’s eyes would blaze at me when I saw her in the hall. She would move protectively towards the girls she was herding to their next activity, and shout angrily for silence or make a confrontation if one called out, “Hi, Miss Sharon!” or “How you doin’, miss?” pushing them past me. Another named Hiram turned the other way when he saw me coming, and still another one would refuse to answer my questions if he was assigned to the group.
I didn’t yet understand why I was meeting such opposition.
I was required to have a staff person with me at all times when I was with the girls, and I prayed I would have none of the ones that seemed so opposed to me. Since the person would vary each week depending on who was working that day, I never knew whom I would get. I felt we really needed a female to preserve the group’s intimacy. Lori agreed, but the difficulties of who was available when, who’d called in sick, whether or not there was a crisis on the floor, made scheduling a particular person seemingly impossible.
The girls were not allowed to swear or use street slang in the program, but I had insisted to Lori that when they wrote with me they needed that freedom so that their poems and stories would be free from self-censorship and could flow freely. She agreed, but many of the staff frowned upon this, and actually a few of the girls would find it difficult as well.
I was pushing liberation in a place that held its inhabitants captive.
I thought about the girls all the time: in the car, in the shower, walking in the woods. I talked to my husband about them incessantly. He listened patiently, understanding how important this new work was becoming to me, though with some concern about how wholly I’d given myself to it.
I had been accustomed to my therapy clients’ painful histories, but what these girls had put forth in a few weeks trumped those stories with their raw truths.
I was falling into their lives.
The sheer amount of what these girls had suffered was eclipsing my own anguish. Our meetings were the heart of my week.