I had so much more to learn about this place and its operation, their proclivities, capacities. They didn’t get the poem I read today, about a woman who was being attacked. I’d wanted them to write in the persona of the woman, thinking they could relate. No, too soon for this, again. They didn’t want to, nor did they want to write about “a time I was happy.”
“We’re never happy, Sharon,” Nia told me.
Instead La Toya wrote about lovemaking with her boyfriend, in great detail, and read it to us with feeling. Kaylee responded, even though we weren’t supposed to respond. “I don’t think that’s good for a virgin’s ears to hear.” I was impressed that she had enough self-knowledge to know that for herself, though everyone tittered.
I needed to find more material they could relate to. I wanted to have a space we could meet in that was warm and comfortable, where we wouldn’t be constantly interrupted. When I got home, I called Lori to ask about this.
“We need a permanent meeting place, one that lets the girls know that Touchstone respects the group,” I told her. “And what happened with Ana?”
“Yes, I know. Let’s make it the dorm basement; we just put new carpeting down there, is that all right? Ana was expressing suicidal thoughts, so we had to put her on a ‘tight.’ She’ll be watched for twenty-four hours until we think she’s okay. You’re going to keep coming, aren’t you, Sharon?”
“Oh yes, Lori. Poor Ana. That is awful. I am so sorry.”
“Well, that’s what happens around here.”
And yes, as I was to find out in the upcoming years, it surely was. Fights, restraints, actual suicide attempts, refusals to participate in the program or go to school, throwing chairs, assaulting staff members, contraband smuggling, cops on campus. Touchstone was a tough environment, a rough place to be for both girls and staff.
But it was alive and spirited, as my existence had not been. Their energy was bringing me to life again, and I wanted more than ever for the world at large to hear their voices, know their stories, what caused them to act out in such rebellious ways.
• • •
Puzzled friends, relatives, and colleagues, asked me constantly why I wanted to do this work—what could be in it for me? And wouldn’t it take away valuable time from my own writing? And how about my therapy practice?
I struggled to answer, finally developing a response convincing enough to satisfy them. I said I’d felt I’d lived much of my own life imprisoned— in the deadened world of the forties and fifties, a world in which everything was prescribed—our clothing, our thoughts, our choices. Women had few options but serving men and children as wives and mothers in capacities that had been determined by thousands of years of social programming. Children, especially girls, were to be “seen and not heard.” And in the church that ruled my life along with my parents, women had seemed even more servile than my mother, as nuns ironing the elaborate priestly garments, dusting the altars, teaching in parochial schools headed by priests.
My husband John and I had married young, in 1964, right after college. I’d worked for a short time as a teacher, but then chose to stay home to care for our much-loved but unplanned children while my husband freely pursued his medical career. He and I had been deeply in love, total equals when we married, but as husband and wife, the new roles we’d been forced to inhabit, balance in our young relationship was quickly destroyed.
At times, it felt like a locked box with no key I could find.
The therapy that I had both received and practiced over the years seemed limiting, after my son Geoff’s death. Many of the people who came to me for help were reluctant to do the real work of change; they wanted out of their pain with as little effort as possible. I understood, I loved them, we worked hard together, but it was tough going, especially with my new perspective.
I needed work I could believe in more.
The Buddhist Vipassana mindfulness practice I had begun seven years earlier on a meditation retreat in New Mexico was pushing me to try to discover a new way of living and working. The “Four Noble Truths” of the Buddhist dharma resonated more powerfully with me than the psychological concepts I had long used as guideposts for my life.
The first noble truth informs us that suffering is an unavoidable fact of human existence, and that there are varieties of suffering—the kind that comes from outside, and the kind that we create ourselves. The second states that suffering is caused by craving, wanting things to be other than they are. The third tells us that there is a way to end suffering. And the fourth is the “how-to” —that elusive and powerful summons to let go of that suffering through the “noble eightfold path.” Mindfulness meditation was one of its most useful tools, and I’d been attempting to practice it for years since my first retreat, sitting cross-legged on my cushion for a half hour each day, watching my thoughts rise and fall and rise again.
But those thoughts had been mostly filled with anguish about my dead son, and desire to have him returned to me.
Craving. I couldn’t get away from it.
The Buddha’s noble truths were pragmatic, and held the seeds of freedom, though I was far from being able to truly live them. “Letting go”—what did that really mean? I still needed my grief, and was reluctant to be without it. I couldn’t yet grasp how accepting things as they are wholeheartedly was the key to balance and peace, though that was the continual message of the many retreats I’d been on.
And I definitely couldn’t see how accepting things as they were with Touchstone and the girls could be liberating; to me that seemed like giving up. But I was determined to persevere, knowing, at some deeper level, that this acceptance was something I had to learn.
And I’d always lived by “Think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” as President Kennedy had exhorted us all in the tumultuous sixties. I’d been a college student in Washington , DC, both when he’d been inaugurated and when he’d been assassinated, and the words ran deep for me.
But what blasted all these predictable responses out of the water was this: somehow, somewhere in my unconscious, I’d known I needed these girls as teachers. I hadn’t known how or where to find them until now. My white privilege and life experience was so limiting; I was so frozen in pain, so in need of what they had to give me. Sometimes, they seemed more like adults than I did. They knew how to risk, how to stretch themselves despite the monstrous injury done to them, as I seemed not to. They knew how to protect themselves from too much hope. Suffering didn’t shock them as it had me; they knew it was simply a fact of their lives. They got all the Buddhist stuff even though they had no knowledge of its heavy rhetoric. I could see that clearly even in the few weeks we’d been together.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” sang the Janis Joplin of my young adult days, intoxicating words that had lodged themselves within me, but that I wasn’t certain I’d been able to live. I wasn’t sure what freedom was exactly; telling the truth of my life in my poems and living with the risk of the telling was the closest I had come to a definition.
I had lost everything with Geoff’s death, so yes, I had nothing left to lose.
Was that a kind of freedom, the freedom of total emptiness?
“You are so nice to bring us all this!” Kaylee said, hugging me. “A whole pack of pens! And candy too.”
“Sharon, I’m leaving next week,” La Toya told me. I’d known she was close to discharge, but I was distressed when she told me it was really happening. Despite the newness of our relationship, I was already