• • •
“La Toya, your hair looks so great today!”
“Sharon, I’m Nia, not La Toya! Can’t you remember our names right?”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry, Nia and La Toya. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course,” Nia laughed and hugged me.
Only five of the group had shown up. One was on a medical pass and another was on the run. She’d gone AWOL and they hadn’t been able to find her. I’d chosen a prompt about mothers for today with both of them in mind. Oh well, I thought, that prompt will work for anyone.
We gathered wherever the staff found room for us, and the sun porch was the only place available for our meeting today. I was seeing that trying to plan anything—a meeting place, the amount of time we could spend, what girls would be available to come, even the prompts themselves—was impossible. I protested to our assigned staff, but as I would eventually learn, I just had to make do with whatever room was unengaged that day.
The sun porch was an open space off the dining room with a big table in the middle for overflow. It was also a storage space for random stuff packed in plastic tubs and a passageway to the outside, so people walked in and out all the time. It lacked privacy and it was quite cool in seasons other than summer, when the glass windows made it extremely hot. It could hardly have been less appropriate as a gathering place for our new group and the safe space I’d promised them.
“I’m so sorry, girls. We have to get a better place to meet. I’ll talk to Lori. Who wants to read first?”
“I’m not going to read, Nia is not showing respect,” Mayra said sullenly, throwing her a facial.
Nia had begun talking with Ana, the girl who’d wanted to be a Bengal tiger, about something that had happened last night. I agreed that she was not following our group expectations and reminded her of that.
“Okay, okay, calm down, miss,” she said. Nia always had something to say. She pushed even farther the wide boundaries I set in our group, clearly a young woman used to getting her own way and often erupting when she didn’t. I thought she liked our meetings, but she was often sullen and exasperating.
Mayra’s piece was a passionate imploration to her mother to love her, notice her. She was so sensitive, so smart, so perceptive. I wondered how she could ever overcome all the trauma she’d experienced.
Dear Ma,
I just want you to know I love you. You say you love me, but do you really? I feel like I’m standing alone in the darkness. I really wish that I could trust you and have that bond with you, like the way you felt when I was born.
I feel pain in my heart. I feel abandoned. I know that’s a big word, but if you were here and were proud of your baby girl, then I wouldn’t cry all night and call myself a stupid bitch for messing up. Picture how you would feel if I died. Would you cry, or would you wipe the dust off your shoulders and keep walking?
I love you so much, I love you more than myself. But you don’t understand that I’m trying to do the right things. I’ve changed, and I want you to know I’m sorry for what I did wrong, but stop blaming me and my brothers for your husband’s death. We didn’t kill him. He killed himself. Why did you let him beat on you or beat on us, why did you tell him you loved him, why did you pick him over us, why did you believe that he loved you?
Ma, there are so many things I want to tell you but I can’t, because the family will fall apart. I mean, when Jenito touched me, nobody believed me but you, but do you believe that I love you, do you know who I am, what my favorite food is? Why does my father not love me? How come he can’t spell my name right? How come you told the policeman to take me, said that they could have me, is that when you stopped loving me?
So think, if you was me and I was you how would you feel, how would it be? Can we have a bond, or are we going to fall apart?
Kaylee wrote eloquently of her hatred for her mother, but quickly moved on to her boyfriend.
“He wants me to go naked, free. I’m not ready to give him the best thing I have, but I cried when I told him no.”
Kaylee was just fourteen. A petite Caucasian, the only one in the group, she was such a pretty girl, slim and agile, with a clean, clear, expressive face, her blonde hair pulled back tightly in a scrunchie.
“Can we talk about virginity, Sharon?” she wanted to know.
“Kaylee, that is an important subject, a really big one, but we just don’t have time today. Maybe next week I’ll give a prompt and we can write about it.”
Based on what they’d shared to date, I didn’t think any of the other girls were virgins, and was wary about such a conversation and how they would react.
“Girls, I thought our next piece could be a letter to yourself as a little girl. Tell her who you are now and how she helped you to get where you are—or anything else you want to say to her. Let’s try it, okay?”
“No, no, Sharon, we don’t like that, we don’t want to go there,” Nia and Mayra said together. This was another surprise to me. It took time to understand how threatening it could be for some of them, most of them, to dip into the past. Recalling the traumas of their younger years was often unbalancing and frightening, though the girls that stayed in the group for a sustained period of time got much braver with looking back, even eager to do so. I would encourage them to try to think of our writing as a way of digesting the past, then striving to let it go.
But I could see it was too soon for this. We weren’t safe enough, established enough. The girls didn’t trust themselves, or me, yet.
Ana suggested a letter to themselves now. “Okay, sure, that sounds good,” I agreed, glad that this usually taciturn young woman had decided to suggest something. They all wrote pep-rally type pieces. Ana’s was all about the drugs that had overtaken her young life. She wanted to save it for “clinical,” she told me. “Clinical” was their lingo for therapy sessions, I was yet to learn.
Lori came in; she’d wanted us to end at 4:30 today for some reason. The girls clammed up immediately when she arrived. I saw that they’d already become protective of this space we’d carved from their programmatic days, and cohered as a group more than I’d thought.
I was falling in love with these girls. Despite their painful stories, or maybe because of them, my heart was loosening. I felt as though I was coming out of a long hibernation, opening a door to light I hadn’t seen in a very long while.
At our next session, again on the sun porch, there was an additional staff person accompanying Ana. The staff member informed me she had to be an arm’s length away from Ana at all times. I wondered why, but didn’t ask, thinking I would check with Lori later, and not wanting to embarrass Ana. She looked miserable and wrote nothing, but just shifted back and forth on her chair, her overlarge yellow parka making rustling sounds, throughout the whole session.
Everyone seemed sad, and there was a chaotic feeling in the air. They were restless, and we got off to a late start. A bunch of rotting pumpkins sat in the middle of the table. They smelled. I wondered why someone hadn’t taken them away.
“We never got to eat lunch,” Nia spoke up.
“Sharon, we have to leave early so we can go shopping,” Mayra let me know.
“Shopping? Are you going to the mall or something?”
They laughed. “No, to Torrington for groceries, Sharon!”
I could hear the “duh” in their voices. I wondered why they would embrace this boring task, but I guessed that