Reviving Ophelia (43 page)

“I’ve forgiven Dad and Mercene. I’m happy, so what is there to be angry about now? I am happier than they are. I try to do something for them every weekend. I take over a pie or mow their yard.”

I asked how she gets along with her father. “Dad can’t forgive me for being fat. He really wanted a beautiful daughter.”

I thought of June’s life. She has a spirit as delicate and strong as a spiderweb. She is gifted at forgiving and loving. Because she is unattractive by our cultural standards, she has been devalued by many, including her own father. But somehow she has managed to survive and even thrive through all this adversity. She reminds me of those succulent desert flowers that remain dormant for so many seasons and then bloom lavishly when there is a smattering of rain.

I said to her, “Your father has missed an opportunity to love someone who is marvelous.”

We talked about Marty. He’s a bulky man who is prematurely balding. June said, “His looks don’t matter. I know how hard he works and that he doesn’t put anyone down. He’s not a complainer.”

I suggested that daily she imagine herself successfully kissing him. “It’s hard to do what you can’t even imagine doing. Once you have the images down, the reality will be easier.” I encouraged her to keep her expectations for that first kiss low. “Bells may not ring and the sky may not light up.” I quoted Georgia O’Keeffe, totally out of context: “Nobody’s good at the beginning.”

I pointed out that the relationship was going well. Physical affection was only a small part of a relationship. She was already gifted at loving and forgiving, which were much more important qualities. I predicted that kissing would be easy once she was ready.

When I saw June again, she reported that kissing was great. She asked me if I thought she needed more therapy. “No,” I said. “I think you could teach me some lessons about strength through adversity and the importance of forgiveness.”

June is a good example of someone who, with almost no luck at all, fashioned a good life for herself. Almost all our psychological theories would predict that June would turn out badly. But as happens more frequently than we psychologists generally acknowledge, adversity built her character. What saved her was her deep awareness of her mother’s love. Even though her mother was dead, June felt her mother’s spirit was with her. That enabled her to feel valued at a time when she was rejected by everyone. June’s belief in her mother’s love gave her a sense of purpose. She was determined to live in a way that would make her mother proud.

June had the gift for appreciating what was good in her life. Once she told me, “I always get what I want.” Then she winked and said, “But I know what to want.” Her life, which might strike some people as difficult or dull, is rich and rewarding. She has friends, money, a boyfriend and the respect of her peers. She has that pride in her life that so many self-made people have. She has no bitterness or anger because she is basically happy. She’s a desert flower opening to the rain.

Caroline asked to interview me for her high school psychology class. I agreed, provided we could trade interviews. Caroline had recently moved to town from Alabama, and I was interested in talking to girls from other states. We met at my house and Caroline interviewed me first. I was struck by her poise and sensitivity. Dressed in a dark blue skirt-and-sweater outfit, she looked older than her seventeen years. She could have been a college student in a journalism class.

After my interview, we jokingly traded chairs and switched roles. I asked her about her family. Her father was a military man with a drinking problem and a womanizing problem. He’d considered Caroline ugly and lazy. He whipped her for the smallest mistakes. Once when he was calling her names in front of his buddies, one of them told him to stop. Usually, though, his friends were too drunk or too insensitive to care when he belittled his daughter. Caroline said of her father, “He would have been a good horse trainer. He had lots of ways to break a person’s spirit.”

She continued, “Fortunately, he wasn’t around all that much. When he was around, I’d grab a book and head for my room. Mom couldn’t get away from him and he destroyed her.”

I asked about the abuse. “It happened at night after he’d been out drinking. He’d stumble in, slamming doors and cursing. Mom yelled at him and he called her names. Then he hit her and she cried. Later she came to my bed for the night. I stopped it when I was twelve. I called the cops on him.”

I must have betrayed my emotions because Caroline said, “It wasn’t as bad as you think. I loved school. We moved a lot and I went to all kinds of schools—parochial, military and integrated public schools. But wherever I went, I was the best student.

“I was always the teacher’s pet. The kids liked me too. I sang, danced, played sports, was good at art. I could joke my way into any crowd. Even though my home life was hell, I had high self-esteem from all the praise I got at school.”

She said, “No one at school knew what my home life was like. I pretended my parents had rules for me, that I had birthday parties and dental appointments. When we had school plays, I explained that my parents were out of town on business. I was doing so well it was easy to fool the teachers.”

She settled back into the couch. “My sixth-grade year was one of the best years of my life. That year Dad brought a girlfriend home and Mom tried to kill herself. I had to pull the gun away from her. But amazingly, I was a happy kid. I was in a good school in Boston and I loved my teacher. She arranged for special art lessons and she let me sing lead in the school musical. I maybe should have felt worse about my family, but I didn’t. I was living my own life.”

Caroline paused, and when she continued, the happiness had vanished from her voice. “The next year my parents divorced and Mom and I moved to Alabama to live with her parents. Everything good in my life stopped happening.

“The schools were horrible. Everyone with money went to private schools, and the public schools were broke. My social studies text was pre—Vietnam War, and our science labs didn’t have microscopes. Once I had to go home and change clothes because I’d fallen in human excrement on the school yard. Another time I was cut by a broken beer bottle.

“That school sent us the message that we were nothing, we were dirt. Most of my classmates bought it. They gave up their dreams and planned to get factory jobs as soon as they could quit school.

“I was nobody in a school full of nobodies. I was an outsider, a Northerner. I actually got teased because my skin was too light and my manners were too good. After a few weeks I developed a speech impediment. I was trying to sound Southern and I slurred my speech. No one could understand me. I pretty much quit talking for a while.

“Meanwhile, my home life was miserable, Mom was a permanent invalid. My grandparents were well-meaning, but they didn’t understand.”

“What saved you?” I asked.

She pulled out her billfold and showed me a picture. “Sandra saved me, or rather we saved each other. I met her early in my eighth-grade year. She sat beside me in English. I noticed that she knew the answers to the teacher’s questions. One day I asked her if she’d like to meet for an ice cream after school.

“Right from the first we understood each other. Sandra’s dad was an alcoholic too. Her mother worked at the box factory and we had both raised ourselves.

“By the end of that first meeting we agreed to fight the system together. We promised each other we wouldn’t do drugs or get pregnant. I’d traveled with my parents and I knew there were better places to be. Sandra loved to hear me talk about those places.”

She laughed and continued. “We invented this game. I put my finger on a globe and spun it. Wherever it stopped, that’s where we were for that day. If my finger landed in Bombay, we discussed the food, the music, the streets, the weather, the smells and sounds of Bombay. We vowed we would visit all those places when we grew up.”

She put Sandra’s picture away. “We pushed each other to achieve. We knew that the one way out was education. We memorized vocabulary words. We got a list of the classics from a librarian and read those books. We went to every free lecture we could. We were determined.”

I asked her about high school. “By tenth grade, Sandra and I were straight-A students. We broke the curve in every class we took. We sang and were in the student government. We had transcripts full of activities that showed we were well rounded. Then last year we moved here.”

“How did that happen?”

“Sandra’s aunt and uncle said she could move in with them and have her senior year at a good school. She wouldn’t come without me. We share a bedroom. We’re closer than sisters. We’ve promised each other we won’t marry until we get through college. We’ve divided up all the good schools so we won’t be competing against each other for scholarships. But we’ll stay close through college. We’re family.”

 

Since Caroline was a young girl, she had been determined to be the best at whatever she did. She had remarkable survival skills. In the language of popular psychology, Caroline was a “parental child.” But as her life demonstrates, that’s not always bad. Her experience left her responsible, achievement-oriented and able to take care of herself in any situation.

Often in stories of teenage girls, the relationships between girls are ugly and destructive. Margaret’s story showed the harm girls do to each other. Caroline’s story was different. She and Sandra helped each other survive and eventually escape their stormy environments. They helped each other stay focused on their dreams and optimistic about their futures.

Both June and Caroline lacked what we call today “emotionally available parents.” June’s mother was dead and her father insensitive. Caroline’s father was absent and her mother was mentally and physically ill. This absence of parental support made it clear that, from the beginning, they had only themselves to depend on for happiness. That’s a lesson all girls must learn. Ironically, it’s harder to learn if parents take too much responsibility for their daughters’ happiness.

Both girls had a focus that carried them beyond the painful days in junior high. June wanted to behave in a way that made her mother proud, and Caroline wanted to make something of herself academically. Even in their darkest times, they were preparing in their own ways for brighter futures.

Evonne’s and Maria’s stories are quite different. Both girls come from strong families with strong women. They learned from their parents the importance of fighting back and resisting others’ efforts to define them. Evonne, like many black girls, saw strong women all around her. To Evonne, growing up female was compatible with growing up assertive and strong. Maria had grandparents who risked their lives for what they believed in. They taught her to be true to her own values no matter what the cost.

Evonne was a black student who had toured with a women’s gospel choir and starred in school and community musicals. She was an A student, she was on student council and popular with her classmates. I was curious about her social success and invited her to come to my house for an interview.

Evonne drove up in her new red sports car, a present for her sixteenth birthday. A week earlier, her parents had given her the keys at a dinner for twenty of her friends. Evonne was dressed in an olive silk blouse, black slacks and gold rings and earrings. She was beautiful, with butterscotch-colored skin, enormous black eyes and dimples. I asked her to tell me about her life.

Evonne was the only child of professional parents; her father was an attorney and her mother a physician. She’d been a loved and pampered child from day one. Every summer she spent with her maternal grandmother in Arkansas, and winter holidays she spent with her father’s parents in Virginia.

She attended a private Montessori school in Chicago until she was in third grade, then she transferred to a racially diverse public school for gifted students. Her early school years were happy ones—she was immediately recognized as a gifted performer. She danced and sang her way through school and was in a children’s choir that was on television regularly. Her parents had paid for private lessons with drama and singing coaches.

I asked about racism in Chicago. “As a kid, I only experienced one racist. This guy called me ‘nigger’ and said to stay out of his neighborhood when I rode my bike down his street. I avoided that street for a while, and finally Dad noticed. When I told him what happened, he insisted that I ride on that street. He told me I shouldn’t give racists any power over my life, even the power to decide a bike route.”

Evonne said that she liked school until fifth grade, when the girls at her school changed. She told me, “Everyone became materialistic. I could afford the right clothes but some of my friends couldn’t and they were left out of everything. I never, ever teased anyone for wearing K Mart clothes, but other girls did.”

She shook her head. “I wish I could tell you that I didn’t fall for the snob scene, but I dumped my friends and hung out with the popular kids. I was a total bore in sixth grade.”

She paused as our cat jumped on her lap. She petted Woody for a few moments before continuing. “Junior high was the pits. I went to a new school that was 95 percent whites. I felt alone. Even the nicest white students didn’t invite me to their homes. But the blacks weren’t like me either. They were poorer and from different backgrounds.

“I thought about where I fit in. I looked for black movies in the video stores and they were about drugs and gangs, which wasn’t me. I felt like an invisible black person. I didn’t want to be an Oreo, but I didn’t want to hang out with crackheads. I couldn’t find a place. Sometimes I was angry I wasn’t white and sometimes I hated whites.”

Evonne looked sober as she thought about race. She continued, “In junior high I prayed that I would wake up in a world where everyone was the same color. Simple decisions paralyzed me. Should I sit with black kids or white kids at lunch? Should I buy heavy metal or rap?”