|
|
|
When I was fourteen, I ran away from home. I wanted to see the world, and a seventeen-year-old boy offered to show it to me. With my Artful Dodger, I thumbed up and down the east coast, panhandled for meals in Buffalo, slept in crash pads in Daytona Beach, took purple microdot acid at a rock festival near Atlanta, watched Jimi Hendrix play the Star-Spangled Banner with his teeth, and finally, a month later, returned home. I had seen the world. In the meantime, my mother had seen hell. When she opened the door, I stood before her, clasping my little blue duffel bag, and stared in fear and shock. She had aged ten years. At that moment, looking into her dulled and frightened eyes, I felt as if someone had just applied a hot branding iron to my heart. That was in the 1970s, and lots of teenagers were throwing off the shackles of their middle-class upbringing and raising high the banner of the "Youth Culture." We never dreamed we'd grow up someday and have children of our own who would snatch that banner from our hands and use it to bludgeon us into submission.
The phenomenon of teenage rebellion continues in the new millennium but with more variety and more opportunities for disastrous results than ever. For years, literature gave us the rebel's point of view, but recently a spate of books about teenaged girls and their mothers provides testament to the emotional torture this "phase" inflicts upon the parents who must try to quell it long enough for their daughters to make it to adulthood. Surviving Ophelia is a collection of anguished, despairing, and sometimes hopeful messages from mothers to other parents and their children. These first-person narratives were collected by Cheryl Dellasega, a clinician at Penn State's College of Medicine, when she first began experiencing problems with her own daughter. The story of her trials with her daughter Ellen are woven throughout the book and provide the thematic grounding for each section. Taken as a whole, these stories offer a disturbing view of current practices in teenage self-destructiveness, but they are searingly relevant to anyone who is a parent or is planning on becoming a parent. The girls described in the letters have troubles ranging from eating disorders, promiscuity, drug addiction, alcoholism, bi-polar disorder, truancy, and so forth. Like Demeter hunting for her daughter, Persephone, and bargaining with the gods for her return, the mothers in these stories abandon everything to retrieve their daughters from the lords of the underworld. They spend their life savings to get them into treatment, they chase away older men who come lurking at the door, they beg, they fight, they seek out "experts" and because of their tenacity, they often bring their daughters home. But not always. Throughout these traumatic years, mothers ask themselves over and over again: "Why?" Although some of the girls described in Surviving Ophelia come from single-parent homes where the mothers had to work long hours and could not provide the supervision their daughters needed, and a few of the girls suffered physical abuse or saw their mothers experience abuse, a significant number come from stable homes, where childrearing was done by the book. The author's own situation reflects this apparent paradox. As she says in her introduction, "My husband and I followed all the 'rules' for parenting we'd learned, providing lots of love, appropriate discipline, spiritual grounding, and security for all three children."
But in spite of this near-perfect upbringing, her daughter developed an eating disorder that came close to destroying the family and killing her. She was tossed out of residential programs, doctors and therapists threw up their hands in resignation, and she alienated her own well-meaning grandmother. All the while, her mother watched as the girl's weight continued to drop, her hair fell out, and all the dreams of a normal high school life--proms, dating, shopping, and planning for college--faded into oblivion. Dellasega writes that she had expected her family to be done with their ordeal by the time her book was finished, but in fact, Ellen is still struggling with bulimia two weeks before her seventeenth birthday and two years after Dellasega began her book. There have been positive changes, however, as mother and daughter face the challenges together. Ellen has learned that her mother's love may be the one thing that saves her, and Dellasega has discovered the safety net of other women. Dellasega's experience with failed therapies and treatment centers is not unique. One thing that does seem to help some of the other daughters in this book is enrolling in a wilderness program. In desperation, mothers put their daughters in the hands of strangers to be taken into the woods where they learn to make their own shelter, carry their own firewood, and start campfires with a piece of flint. The experience often gives the girls a sense of accomplishment otherwise missing in their lives. These mothers offer cogent advice for anyone who may be embarking on the adventure of parenting a teenager: set boundaries, don't be a doormat, talk to others, and don't lose your own life just because your child may choose to throw hers away. In spite of the bleakness of the subject matter, a lot of the missives offer hope. Many of the girls somehow manage to survive their self-destructive teen years. They are damaged, but they are alive. Their mothers are also damaged, but so much wiser. For a more in-depth examination, one can turn to Augusta, Gone, the acclaimed memoir by Martha Tod Dudman. This is the story of one woman's helplessness in the face of her daughter's violent and self-destructive rebellion. Reading this book is like watching someone undergo an operation without anesthesia. You feel such pity for the person on the table; on the other hand, youÕre equally grateful that it isn't you. And if you are the mother of a preteen girl, your mind begins searching frantically for safeguards to make sure that Martha Tod Dudman's experience is one that you'll never have to endure. Augusta comes and goes from the house as she pleases, defiantly skips school, takes drugs, smokes cigarettes, lies constantly and skillfully, screams at her mother, and hangs out with "losers in their twenties." Dudman evocatively captures a mother's guilt and pain when she writes: "You want to push away your daughter when it gets like that. Because there's too much self-reproach in seeing her stoned, lying, dirty lost. The kind of girl you never meant to have. And it seems as if she is the daughter that you most deserve." As I became caught up in Martha and Augusta's story, I was reminded of the movie Peter Pan, when Tinkerbell almost died, and we were exhorted to clap for her. If we clapped long enough and hard enough, she'd come back to life. After first one treatment program and then another fails, it seems that Augusta will surely run into one of those depraved murderers we're always reading about, who will leave her lifeless body in the woods or the desert to be found years later. It's agonizing for the reader as well as for the mother, and as Dudman tries relentlessly to save her daughter, I found myself hoping each successive "treatment" would bring back the real Augusta and crestfallen when it didn't.
Parents most likely will wonder who's at fault when Augusta, a fairly normal and happy child, turns into a treacherous dope-swilling monster at the onset of puberty. This, of course, echoes the question that every mother of a child like Augusta asks herself: What did I do wrong? They can find a million mistakes. And yet they did nothing all that different from other parents. Fortunately, Augusta, with her mother's continued support, saves herself. Like many of the girls described in Surviving Ophelia, she seems to have figured out how to earn her freedom without committing suicide, and her mother has come to terms with her daughter as an autonomous adult. Does the boomer generation have more of these problem children than generations past? Is our own past coming back to haunt us? Can it be that those old chestnuts--churches and synagogues, small schools and nosy neighbors--are actually useful deterrents to emotional breakdown? Sometimes the most direct route to the truth is through fiction. Amy and Isabelle is a novel about a mother/adolescent daughter war. In this exquisitely written story, sixteen-year-old Amy has her first sexual liaison with her math teacher while her mother Isabelle works in the town mill's office. Unfortunately for Amy, she is discovered by her mother's boss, prone and nearly naked in Teacher's car. (You can just imagine Sting singing his ode to student-teacher affairs in the background.) When Isabelle finds out, she goes berserk and whacks off Amy's beautiful blond hair. This time the reader's compassion is directed toward Amy, whose sexual awakening is revealed to be merely a sordid escapade with an older man who has used her heartlessly rather than the great passion she'd imagined. She learns a valuable lesson, and in the process, Isabelle also discovers what it means to be a woman. In order to understand how her own fears and shame have affected her daughter, Isabelle must face the secrets she has kept, even from herself, for too long. Amy, like so many daughters, acts out the suppressed desires of her mother before finally separating enough so that she can begin to live her own life. The two of them must become enemies before they can be friends again. At the end of Surviving Ophelia, Dellasega includes some entries from daughters who have come out of the other side of the tunnel. One of them writes: "My mother and I are very close today. She is my best friend. In many ways, I needed to claim my addictions and my recovery for myself in order to grow into my own womanhood." Not all kids need to grow up so quickly, but quite often the bright ones yearn to shrug off the mantle of childhood. Some of them are content to go to school and fulfill our mythical idea of what a teenager should be. For those who aren't, what are the choices? There ought to be more acceptable options for them, ways for them to experience the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood in a safe environment. We'll probably always have people who get derailed in adolescence. It seems to be unavoidable, but we as a culture can look to our own failings: a media saturated with sexual exploitation and materialism, the isolation and alienation in our so-called communities, the fact that the only ritual into adulthood is to give hormonally poisoned young people a car so we don't have to be bothered with driving them around. Narcissism is acceptable, but true self-love is unheard of. My favorite character in Amy and Isabelle is Amy's friend Stacy, who tells her, "All mothers are fucking lunatics." I burst out laughing, knowing that it was true for me, true for my mother and true for all the nice PTA mothers in my suburban neighborhood. We are all lunatics in some sense. And our daughters, who are so close to us, so deeply connected, have to be even greater lunatics if they are to break free from our immense shadows. All teenaged girls struggle with this to some degree. They are children, and they are women, and it's a confusing time for all concerned. Recently I taught creative writing at an arts camp for teenagers. My class consisted of several girls. They were intelligent, talented, and well-brought-up, and they performed the assignments dutifully, even with a certain amount of enthusiasm. But they all appeared to be suffering from a debilitating disease manifested in different symptoms: acute shyness, homesickness, rebelliousness, and severe heartbreak. Their poems about betrayal by boyfriends, loneliness, and lusting for the bad boys revealed their quotidian dramas. The camp was an enlightening experience for me, the mother of an eleven-year-old girl--a reminder of the forthcoming emotional joyride we would both be taking, courtesy of an influx of hormones. My daughter, in her innocence, has no idea what's ahead of her, but like the mothers described in these books, I'm already enlisted in the parental army. Whether it's a tumultuous time or relatively tranquil--you do what you have to do, and you learn what you need to learn.
About
the author:
PAT MACENULTY has a doctorate in English from Florida State University. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in a number of magazines, most recently in The Sun. The recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Arts Council, she provides workshops in "Recovering Lives Through Creative Arts" to teachers, mental health professionals, chaplains, and others and facilitates arts programs for at-risk youth and incarcerated men and women. She is also the writer and host for a children's radio show called "Stories in the Air" which is scheduled to be broadcast nationally in the Spring of 2002. Her novel, Friend of the Devil, is forthcoming from Serpent's Tail Press.
At times I worried about learning too much about the misfortunes of other mothers. I didn't want that information in my consciousness. On the other hand, their stories have given me much to ponder and reflect upon, and reading them actually alleviated some guilt about my own teenage years. Knowing that so many of the girls not only survived but came out of their tribulations as strong, independent women was gratifying and reflected my own experience. As for my own child, I simply cherish every moment I have with her.
|
