Lent
I can’t believe this, but the Greek Orthodox Church has a website. I wonder what the church fathers and mothers would think about the images of saints showing up on a computer screen. Not only that, but a person can sign up to have daily scripture readings and stories of the saints delivered directly to her e-mail inbox.
So, because I couldn’t think of a better idea for a way to honor Lent, I signed up for those readings and promised myself that I’d read them every morning. I decided I would also go back to an old morning discipline I abandoned some three years ago of writing three stream-of-consciousness pages every morning. I would read through the e-mail once, and then just start writing, not worrying about whether what I was getting down had anything to do with the readings for that day.
And, within a week, it became painfully clear why I’d given up those morning pages around the same time my partner and I broke up. As they are intended to do, they break down all the barriers a person is holding up, not only between herself and others, but between her public self and her center. Morning pages, as I had so easily forgotten, force us to face realities of our own lives in brutal bursts of clarity.
And yet, despite the excruciating realizations the pages seem to be bringing to the surface every day—-I’m not as happy here as I pretend to be; I’m losing control way more often than I should; S’s behaviors aren’t only her fault and the fault of her abusers; etc…I’ve stuck with it, even though it has been hard.
In the midst of it all, S had the worst meltdown of her life, a rage so deep and violent and horrific that it kept us home for four days, sitting together on the couch and talking, weeping, screaming.
We were on our way home from her therapist’s, in a city two hours away, when it started. She wanted to sew on the ribbons to her new pointe shoes—-never mind that it was 9 p.m., we wouldn’t get home until 11, we had four days until her first lesson. For once, I stayed completely calm, repeating over and over again the reasons we couldn’t do it now: I'm driving, it's dark, it will be late when we get home.
But no, she wanted to do it now, right now, and she was willing to do anything to make it happen—including pulling my hair and hitting me hard over and over again on the head.
I pulled over, in tears. But still, my voice remained calm. "We could have died," I said, "Do you realize that? We could have so easily died."
"Well, maybe that would be better," she said, and then she burst into tears.
“This is not OK. Every time you talk about pointe shoes you go a little crazy. You’re failing English because you’ve chosen pointe shoes as your research paper topic. You can’t do anything except watch stupid videos when you’re supposed to be researching. And now you want to die because you can't sew on the ribbons tonight? You HAVE to tell me what this is about.”
And then, she began to wail and hit and scream and spit. I held her as hard as I could. I kept saying, I love you, but you have to calm down.
"You don’t love me," she screamed. "You should have adopted a baby. A baby would have been easier."
Finally, two hours later, we hit on three truths: she had taken ballet for one month during her childhood, and coincidentally, one of her abusers had moved into the house that same month. I had known about a connection between ballet and her abuse, but for the first time, it came into sharp focus: how this man had wanted not to abuse her, as her other abusers had, but to love her, to marry her.
She was eight years old. He was, at least, in his 40s.
And then, another truth, perhaps an even deeper one: she didn’t have anything to live for. She had created the obsession with pointe because it was something to focus on, something to look forward to. What else could she do? As I’d noted, she wasn’t doing well in school. She knew she wasn’t good at pointe. Maybe she had been OK at riding horse—-not great, but OK—-but then Honey died and she didn’t deserve that kind of happiness again, obviously. And her animals—if it weren’t for my reminders, she wouldn’t even remember to feed them. They’d probably be dead. And Papou had died, and it was her fault, clearly, because he got sick right around the time the adoption was finalized, and obviously she didn’t deserve a grandfather who loved her, either.
And then, truth number three: also, pointe was something that made her feel like she was a normal 10-year-old girl, like maybe, just maybe, she could pretend she’d never been taken by force in a police car from her bio home, that she’d never gotten older than 10.
"But you don't want to be 10 again," I said. "When you were ten, you still weren't safe."
“If M (her brother) hadn’t told, if he hadn’t saved our lives, I would probably have gotten pregnant the next year, you know,” she said. “I turned 11 and got my period." She said it calmly, and for a minute, I thought the meltdown was over. But then she was weeping, screaming again. "I don’t want those girls to have to turn 11. I don’t want those bitches and whores to turn 11! They’re bitches and whores and they don’t know how easy they have it!” she screamed.
“It’s OK,” I said to her. “They’re safe.”
“Nobody will call them gutter sluts like my brother’s girlfriends used to call me. They would watch, sometimes, you know, when I was getting was raped.”
And then she was calm again, back in a world into which she could fold herself—the world that silenced her. That world, I realized, is comfortable for her--scary, yes, but less scary, maybe, than the unknown.
When she was calm enough, finally, we drove home. On the way, she said, “I need more help than I’m getting right now,” and I knew she was right.
“I’m going to change my paper topic,” she said, as we drove around the curvy road that encircles a lake about a half hour away. “And take a break from pointe.”
But when we got home, she went directly to the computer, turned on some point videos.
“It’s past midnight,” I said calmly. “You have to turn off the computer. It’s time to go to bed.”
And she attacked me, kicking me repeatedly in the knee until I could barely walk on it.
I thought maybe I would have to hospitalize her. Instead, we made it until the next day, and saw our family therapist. There, we made a plan: we would stay home for four days and try to get as much of it out as possible, and if she attacked me again, I would call the therapist on her cell phone, and S would be hospitalized.
I didn't want to hospitalize her, but I didn't see any other option. Hospitalization, I knew, would disrupt our bond. It would remind her of worse times, like when one of her foster mothers committed her, and she never saw her again. And so, I had to try.
At home, on the couch, she told me everything, finally, in all the detail she could remember: gang rapes to celebrate important family milestones, the fights between her brothers and their friends over who would get to rape her. Her little brothers, how she tried so hard to protect them, failing again and again. Her mother was there, too, in all of it, participating, not just watching, a detail I never knew.
There is more, but I can’t type it all. It’s too much to have to remember the telling of these stories. I simply can’t imagine living them.
I knew, theoretically, that she had been abused more severely than even the average foster kid. But to know and to feel are two different things. To read the records and to hold your daughter down while she cries and screams her way through the stories are two different things.
But we got through it. Our college student friends showed up to walk the dog, do our grocery shopping. We didn’t leave the house for four days.
And then, when it was over, for awhile, at least, we had a celebration of my father’s life, a 40-day memosino in the Greek style, except without the liturgy. I made the traditional kolyva and a soup he’d taught me to make the last time I visited. People showed up, brought food, including friends I’d tried to reach who hadn’t called me back during that time. (Still, only one person my age has actually talked with me about what happened—people are afraid of what they don’t understand).
I had canceled this celebration, and then re-invited a smaller group, because S wanted to see people. I thought this was a good sign.
Through it all, I kept up my Lenten discipline, kept reading, kept writing. And one saint’s story, which I read sometime during or shortly after those days of hell, stood out to me. This saint, Gerasimos, had tamed a lion, who attended to him during his monastic life in the caves. There were many stories of this lion, but the one I love most is the story of the stolen donkey. Gerasimos had a donkey that was the lion’s best friend. The donkey served a practical purpose, carrying Gerasimos' water from a nearby well.
One day, the donkey was stolen when he was away at the well with the lion. The lion had fallen asleep, and some thieves took the donkey with them. When the lion returned, Gerasimos believed he had eaten the donkey and punished him by making him fetch water and do other chores for him--chores that were no problem for a donkey, but difficult for a lion. The lion willingly complied.
Weeks later, at the well, the lion saw some people passing with the donkey, and recognized him. For the first time in his life, he roared, scaring the thieves and recovering the donkey. Gerasimos freed the lion to show his gratitude, but the lion returned each week to bow before the saint’s cave. When the saint died, he went to his grave, roared loudly, and died himself.
Ever since reading it, my mind cannot stop thinking about this story--I am even dreaming it. Perhaps that is because it is a story of deep and unconditional love—from the lion to the human, that is. Even when the human is unable to return that love, the lion remains faithful.
And if the donkey represents the vehicle we need to get our needs met--then the story is also about losing, and then rediscovering, that vehicle. All of our lives, although the vehicle is right before us, we lose it, rediscover it, and lose it again. We punish each other when we can't figure out how to meet our own needs, and then we are sorry.
This is the story of me and Lisa, I wrote one morning in the midst of a rant about my friends--who weren't there, and then didn't respond to a follow-up request to be there the next time. But suddenly that didn't matter anymore--the story had become clear to me. That's why I keep coming back to it, why I can't let it go.
Upon realizing what this story meant, I did some crazy things. I stopped being bitter about being dropped from party invite lists and planned or spontaneous social gatherings, about how all the favors I offered my friends over the years have not come back to me now, when I need them most—and I thought, I need to figure out how to get my needs met.
I joined online adoptive parents' groups, even though I don’t really believe in online communities--but they’ve actually been helpful! In the process, I learned about a parenting philosophy that at first sounded too simple and seemed to have been created mostly to earn easy money for its creator. Morning pages began in my conscious mind—don’t drink the kool aid, Argie. Don’t be an idiot—but then they got to the raw truth of the matter—this must be making sense to me for some reason. I’m not an idiot.
I paid a little more attention, and the core belief really spoke to me: all of our actions have their root in either love or fear. It is up to me to recognize that so much of S’s “difficult” behaviors, and my reactions, have their root in fear, and to actively work on changing that dynamic.
And so I had to face my fears, all of them, so often masked as anger or self-pity or jealousy: that I am not as valued as I ought to be at work and will inevitably someday be cut; that I’m incapable of being friends with people because I’m too needy or too intense or…something; that I’ll never do as much good in the world as I hope to do; that I can’t possibly become a better parent, stop yelling or reacting or freaking out when things go wrong—that my ability to stay calm in this recent crisis was an anomaly in an otherwise guilt-ridden narrative of losing control, that I’ll turn into the kind of parent my father was.
But what good does it do to face these fears? Maybe I have to make friends with the lion, somehow.
And then I realized I needed to look into all of this more carefully—so I joined an online parenting class. The basic idea that we can't fix things by taking back control—who wants to teach their kids that the way to live is by controlling others?—seems right to me. And I know I have the critical thinking skills to discard anything that doesn’t make sense along the way.
Maybe I’m losing it, but I think I just may be getting saner. Maybe online communities and online classes aren't so crazy, after all.
And then I started to dream—what if I left this place that I thought I’d never leave, this place I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to make better? What if I stopped worrying so much about what is making me angry and focused instead on what is making me afraid? What if I let myself connect with S in the way I did in those hard days, being fully present in her present, and her past, and her future—instead of focusing on only one of those at once?
And suddenly, everything in my life seemed full of possibility and mystery and wonder again, and S was this amazing child I was so lucky to have in my life, a person I wanted to learn to love more deeply, not a kid whose behaviors I wanted to control.
It seems weird to write that I am in a new place, that I feel on the verge of something big right now—but I do. And it is exciting to not be sure exactly what it is.
So, because I couldn’t think of a better idea for a way to honor Lent, I signed up for those readings and promised myself that I’d read them every morning. I decided I would also go back to an old morning discipline I abandoned some three years ago of writing three stream-of-consciousness pages every morning. I would read through the e-mail once, and then just start writing, not worrying about whether what I was getting down had anything to do with the readings for that day.
And, within a week, it became painfully clear why I’d given up those morning pages around the same time my partner and I broke up. As they are intended to do, they break down all the barriers a person is holding up, not only between herself and others, but between her public self and her center. Morning pages, as I had so easily forgotten, force us to face realities of our own lives in brutal bursts of clarity.
And yet, despite the excruciating realizations the pages seem to be bringing to the surface every day—-I’m not as happy here as I pretend to be; I’m losing control way more often than I should; S’s behaviors aren’t only her fault and the fault of her abusers; etc…I’ve stuck with it, even though it has been hard.
In the midst of it all, S had the worst meltdown of her life, a rage so deep and violent and horrific that it kept us home for four days, sitting together on the couch and talking, weeping, screaming.
We were on our way home from her therapist’s, in a city two hours away, when it started. She wanted to sew on the ribbons to her new pointe shoes—-never mind that it was 9 p.m., we wouldn’t get home until 11, we had four days until her first lesson. For once, I stayed completely calm, repeating over and over again the reasons we couldn’t do it now: I'm driving, it's dark, it will be late when we get home.
But no, she wanted to do it now, right now, and she was willing to do anything to make it happen—including pulling my hair and hitting me hard over and over again on the head.
I pulled over, in tears. But still, my voice remained calm. "We could have died," I said, "Do you realize that? We could have so easily died."
"Well, maybe that would be better," she said, and then she burst into tears.
“This is not OK. Every time you talk about pointe shoes you go a little crazy. You’re failing English because you’ve chosen pointe shoes as your research paper topic. You can’t do anything except watch stupid videos when you’re supposed to be researching. And now you want to die because you can't sew on the ribbons tonight? You HAVE to tell me what this is about.”
And then, she began to wail and hit and scream and spit. I held her as hard as I could. I kept saying, I love you, but you have to calm down.
"You don’t love me," she screamed. "You should have adopted a baby. A baby would have been easier."
Finally, two hours later, we hit on three truths: she had taken ballet for one month during her childhood, and coincidentally, one of her abusers had moved into the house that same month. I had known about a connection between ballet and her abuse, but for the first time, it came into sharp focus: how this man had wanted not to abuse her, as her other abusers had, but to love her, to marry her.
She was eight years old. He was, at least, in his 40s.
And then, another truth, perhaps an even deeper one: she didn’t have anything to live for. She had created the obsession with pointe because it was something to focus on, something to look forward to. What else could she do? As I’d noted, she wasn’t doing well in school. She knew she wasn’t good at pointe. Maybe she had been OK at riding horse—-not great, but OK—-but then Honey died and she didn’t deserve that kind of happiness again, obviously. And her animals—if it weren’t for my reminders, she wouldn’t even remember to feed them. They’d probably be dead. And Papou had died, and it was her fault, clearly, because he got sick right around the time the adoption was finalized, and obviously she didn’t deserve a grandfather who loved her, either.
And then, truth number three: also, pointe was something that made her feel like she was a normal 10-year-old girl, like maybe, just maybe, she could pretend she’d never been taken by force in a police car from her bio home, that she’d never gotten older than 10.
"But you don't want to be 10 again," I said. "When you were ten, you still weren't safe."
“If M (her brother) hadn’t told, if he hadn’t saved our lives, I would probably have gotten pregnant the next year, you know,” she said. “I turned 11 and got my period." She said it calmly, and for a minute, I thought the meltdown was over. But then she was weeping, screaming again. "I don’t want those girls to have to turn 11. I don’t want those bitches and whores to turn 11! They’re bitches and whores and they don’t know how easy they have it!” she screamed.
“It’s OK,” I said to her. “They’re safe.”
“Nobody will call them gutter sluts like my brother’s girlfriends used to call me. They would watch, sometimes, you know, when I was getting was raped.”
And then she was calm again, back in a world into which she could fold herself—the world that silenced her. That world, I realized, is comfortable for her--scary, yes, but less scary, maybe, than the unknown.
When she was calm enough, finally, we drove home. On the way, she said, “I need more help than I’m getting right now,” and I knew she was right.
“I’m going to change my paper topic,” she said, as we drove around the curvy road that encircles a lake about a half hour away. “And take a break from pointe.”
But when we got home, she went directly to the computer, turned on some point videos.
“It’s past midnight,” I said calmly. “You have to turn off the computer. It’s time to go to bed.”
And she attacked me, kicking me repeatedly in the knee until I could barely walk on it.
I thought maybe I would have to hospitalize her. Instead, we made it until the next day, and saw our family therapist. There, we made a plan: we would stay home for four days and try to get as much of it out as possible, and if she attacked me again, I would call the therapist on her cell phone, and S would be hospitalized.
I didn't want to hospitalize her, but I didn't see any other option. Hospitalization, I knew, would disrupt our bond. It would remind her of worse times, like when one of her foster mothers committed her, and she never saw her again. And so, I had to try.
At home, on the couch, she told me everything, finally, in all the detail she could remember: gang rapes to celebrate important family milestones, the fights between her brothers and their friends over who would get to rape her. Her little brothers, how she tried so hard to protect them, failing again and again. Her mother was there, too, in all of it, participating, not just watching, a detail I never knew.
There is more, but I can’t type it all. It’s too much to have to remember the telling of these stories. I simply can’t imagine living them.
I knew, theoretically, that she had been abused more severely than even the average foster kid. But to know and to feel are two different things. To read the records and to hold your daughter down while she cries and screams her way through the stories are two different things.
But we got through it. Our college student friends showed up to walk the dog, do our grocery shopping. We didn’t leave the house for four days.
And then, when it was over, for awhile, at least, we had a celebration of my father’s life, a 40-day memosino in the Greek style, except without the liturgy. I made the traditional kolyva and a soup he’d taught me to make the last time I visited. People showed up, brought food, including friends I’d tried to reach who hadn’t called me back during that time. (Still, only one person my age has actually talked with me about what happened—people are afraid of what they don’t understand).
I had canceled this celebration, and then re-invited a smaller group, because S wanted to see people. I thought this was a good sign.
Through it all, I kept up my Lenten discipline, kept reading, kept writing. And one saint’s story, which I read sometime during or shortly after those days of hell, stood out to me. This saint, Gerasimos, had tamed a lion, who attended to him during his monastic life in the caves. There were many stories of this lion, but the one I love most is the story of the stolen donkey. Gerasimos had a donkey that was the lion’s best friend. The donkey served a practical purpose, carrying Gerasimos' water from a nearby well.
One day, the donkey was stolen when he was away at the well with the lion. The lion had fallen asleep, and some thieves took the donkey with them. When the lion returned, Gerasimos believed he had eaten the donkey and punished him by making him fetch water and do other chores for him--chores that were no problem for a donkey, but difficult for a lion. The lion willingly complied.
Weeks later, at the well, the lion saw some people passing with the donkey, and recognized him. For the first time in his life, he roared, scaring the thieves and recovering the donkey. Gerasimos freed the lion to show his gratitude, but the lion returned each week to bow before the saint’s cave. When the saint died, he went to his grave, roared loudly, and died himself.
Ever since reading it, my mind cannot stop thinking about this story--I am even dreaming it. Perhaps that is because it is a story of deep and unconditional love—from the lion to the human, that is. Even when the human is unable to return that love, the lion remains faithful.
And if the donkey represents the vehicle we need to get our needs met--then the story is also about losing, and then rediscovering, that vehicle. All of our lives, although the vehicle is right before us, we lose it, rediscover it, and lose it again. We punish each other when we can't figure out how to meet our own needs, and then we are sorry.
This is the story of me and Lisa, I wrote one morning in the midst of a rant about my friends--who weren't there, and then didn't respond to a follow-up request to be there the next time. But suddenly that didn't matter anymore--the story had become clear to me. That's why I keep coming back to it, why I can't let it go.
Upon realizing what this story meant, I did some crazy things. I stopped being bitter about being dropped from party invite lists and planned or spontaneous social gatherings, about how all the favors I offered my friends over the years have not come back to me now, when I need them most—and I thought, I need to figure out how to get my needs met.
I joined online adoptive parents' groups, even though I don’t really believe in online communities--but they’ve actually been helpful! In the process, I learned about a parenting philosophy that at first sounded too simple and seemed to have been created mostly to earn easy money for its creator. Morning pages began in my conscious mind—don’t drink the kool aid, Argie. Don’t be an idiot—but then they got to the raw truth of the matter—this must be making sense to me for some reason. I’m not an idiot.
I paid a little more attention, and the core belief really spoke to me: all of our actions have their root in either love or fear. It is up to me to recognize that so much of S’s “difficult” behaviors, and my reactions, have their root in fear, and to actively work on changing that dynamic.
And so I had to face my fears, all of them, so often masked as anger or self-pity or jealousy: that I am not as valued as I ought to be at work and will inevitably someday be cut; that I’m incapable of being friends with people because I’m too needy or too intense or…something; that I’ll never do as much good in the world as I hope to do; that I can’t possibly become a better parent, stop yelling or reacting or freaking out when things go wrong—that my ability to stay calm in this recent crisis was an anomaly in an otherwise guilt-ridden narrative of losing control, that I’ll turn into the kind of parent my father was.
But what good does it do to face these fears? Maybe I have to make friends with the lion, somehow.
And then I realized I needed to look into all of this more carefully—so I joined an online parenting class. The basic idea that we can't fix things by taking back control—who wants to teach their kids that the way to live is by controlling others?—seems right to me. And I know I have the critical thinking skills to discard anything that doesn’t make sense along the way.
Maybe I’m losing it, but I think I just may be getting saner. Maybe online communities and online classes aren't so crazy, after all.
And then I started to dream—what if I left this place that I thought I’d never leave, this place I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to make better? What if I stopped worrying so much about what is making me angry and focused instead on what is making me afraid? What if I let myself connect with S in the way I did in those hard days, being fully present in her present, and her past, and her future—instead of focusing on only one of those at once?
And suddenly, everything in my life seemed full of possibility and mystery and wonder again, and S was this amazing child I was so lucky to have in my life, a person I wanted to learn to love more deeply, not a kid whose behaviors I wanted to control.
It seems weird to write that I am in a new place, that I feel on the verge of something big right now—but I do. And it is exciting to not be sure exactly what it is.
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