TODAY
Bad girl Are today's mental health hospitals destroying children's lives? Join the discussion on "Mental Hell" in the Mothers section of Table Talk.
- - - - - - - - - -
RECENTLY
Wild Things Drama Queen An unfinished life For girls only Spice of Life Of lye soap and frilly pink dresses - - - - - - - - - -
Mamafesto | BAD GIRL | CONTINUED
Tonight's fight had started at the dining table. L. used a polysyllabic word, showing up her less erudite adversaries, and they either slammed down a dictionary (by their account) or threw it at her (by hers), suggesting she look up those big words of hers before tossing them around. She lunged, they fought, and she wound up ripping out a big chunk of one girl's hair, leaving a gaping bald spot, the quintessential mark of humiliation. (Even 10 years ago, when I worked in a group home, "I'll snatch you baldheaded" was the threat of choice when things went sour between the girls.) "It was gross," winces the counselor, with a nervous laugh that includes some concern -- enough to have made her call me -- but also a voyeuristic curiosity that demands collusion. "I don't know where she is right now," the counselor continues. "I hope she's not hoing." The word sounds silly in her prim, suburban voice, and the implication -- they're all the same -- infuriates me. When I get to work the next morning, L. is already there, asleep on the couch. She wakes up and bounces around the office, alighting on desks, soaking up all the attention in the room, thirsty for more. "I looove Nell," she announces to nobody in particular when I walk by. "She came to see me every week when I was in juvenile hall." The declaration is clearly preemptive: She has screwed up and is afraid that means I won't love her anymore. (In the rigid emotional economy of group-home life, that's generally how it goes.) We take a walk and she tells me what happened. For two weeks, at school and at home, these two girls pushed, pulled at her, found her weak spots and went for them with the unfailing instinct of the trapped. The staff finally got wind of the conflict and yesterday called a meeting in which L. and her primary tormentor were each instructed to leave the other alone. By calling each to task in front of the other, L. explains, the counselors had inflamed both girls' pride, practically guaranteeing the blowup that followed. L. regrets her AWOL, though she left not impetuously but because she felt herself backed into a corner -- the police were on their way and she wasn't prepared to go back to jail. She does want to go back to the group home, though, and says she's willing to take whatever medicine is prescribed her in order to be allowed to do so. She felt it was a good placement, relatively speaking, and that had been my impression too -- to the degree that any place that takes six to eight young women, each carrying her own load of pain and rage, and throws them together in an enclosed space can ever be called a home. L. wants my help in negotiating her return. When I call the group home supervisor, he is sympathetic but hesitant. It was, apparently, quite a large chunk of hair, and the girl to whom it belonged wants to press charges. But he knows that L. was provoked and also that she really was trying, and doesn't seem averse to taking her back. He says he'll talk to the social worker and the therapist and get back to me. In the meantime, he suggests I call her probation officer. The P.O., who has not been easy to reach in the past, returns my call immediately when I leave a message that L. is in our office. It's been less than 10 minutes since the group home supervisor promised to look into L.'s return, but this woman's voice is like a door slamming shut. "I've discharged L. from the program," she informs me. "She needs to turn herself in." "Needs to" is one of the more frightening euphemisms you hear from institutional types, used to describe actions that they themselves are determined to compel. L. may have no choice but to turn herself in, but on her lists of needs, which range from love and attention to a jacket to a high school education, going to jail is actually pretty low. But until she meets this "need," I am told quite explicitly, she can forget about the rest of them. I tell the P.O. that L. knows she must turn herself in and is willing to do so, but would like to have some sense of what her future might hold once she hands herself over. Such an expectation, I am made to understand, is ludicrous. We are talking about an offender, I am reminded -- someone who "ripped a child's hair out." (The fight, in this version, is erased, and "child" status is reserved only for the single designated victim, the other girl.) There will be no deals here, no bargaining, no "working together." I must deposit L. behind bars post haste, and let them do with her what they will. At this point I make what I will come to see as a crucial mistake: I tell her that no, I will not stuff L. into the trunk of my car and return her to jail against her will. I will try to use the relationship I've built with her to help her make the choice to come in. I will not end that relationship if she proves herself unable to come to that decision within the next half hour. That, at least, is what I try to convey. But I am so stunned by the chill I hear in the voice of this woman with so much power over people's lives that my delivery is, I suspect, whiny and desperate. Despite myself, I must be conveying what I really feel: I can't believe you would do this to her. Two days later, at her request, I bring L. back to jail. We stop at a bookstore and she picks out a stack of novels -- Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid -- which I'll have to bring in to her one at a time: You are not allowed to carry anything with you when you enter juvenile hall. At a nearby mall, she chooses a lunch of milkshakes and candy, a child's last meal. "Slow down," she keeps saying as we drive the 20 miles to juvenile hall; by the time we reach the exit, we are barely moving, and I have become aware of how much it is costing her to submit voluntarily to a system that has let her down so often. It is something she has never done before, but I've promised to do everything I can to help her find a placement. The dozen books are just a precaution, an indulgence: Neither of us imagines she will be locked up long enough to read them. As it turns out, she is kept behind bars for nearly six months, the legal limit for someone who has not been sentenced for a crime but is merely awaiting a residential placement. As far as I can tell -- and I try my best to find out -- little effort is made during most of that time to find somewhere else for her to go. I try looking for a placement, but find myself nearly paralyzed. I can't get any details from the probation department, have to grovel and plead even for permission to visit, since my role corresponds to none of the categories on the little blue visitor's pass: parent, guardian, custodian. Meanwhile, L.'s childhood, actual and legal, ticks away while she exists in a sort of sleep in her darkened room, reading W magazine by the light that comes through the crack under her door. Every so often -- when another group home administrator explains why L. is not "appropriate for the program," when the guard at the front desk arbitrarily changes the rules, when another court hearing is canceled without warning or explanation -- I get just a taste of the rage that is generated when helplessness meets irresponsible power. Your mind looks for avenues, ways out of or around the dreadful deal you're offered, and then, hitting only brick walls, quite naturally lashes out. That's why there is such random venting in juvenile institutions -- the throwing and breaking things, as well as the viciousness toward each other. Legitimate anger is blocked off, dammed, until, as inexorably as water, it finds another outlet. "With freedom comes responsibility" -- that's one of those things adults are fond of telling children. What we tend to forget is the corollary: When you take someone's freedom, you assume responsibility for her, particularly when you imprison her in the name not of her actions but of her status. That's what I am desperate to make these people understand: the tremendous weight of the responsibility they've assumed by locking up this child. They have forfeited the right to fail to return a phone call, to profess themselves "not sure" why a placement hasn't come through, to act like petty bureaucrats under no obligation to tell you why your package hasn't arrived, or worst of all to blame her for their failures. They must not fail her, unless they are prepared to admit it, and set her free to fend for herself. Like surgeons, in whose hands lives are laid, they don't have the luxury of indifference or incompetence. But they are not, of course, compensated as surgeons, and I suspect they remind themselves of that when faced with a "hard to place" child like L. Just weeks from the legal deadline that would probably mean being dispatched to a crowded temporary shelter, I find a group home that will take L., and the probation department agrees to let her go. The minute she is released, L. springs to life -- getting a job, enrolling in community college (she passed her high school equivalency test in juvenile hall), buying new clothes and dreaming of boys. Things go well for a few weeks. Then there is an argument with an administrator, L. throws something, the police are called. I am talking to her on the pay phone when they knock on the door. "Don't worry about the police," I tell her. "They can't arrest you if there's been no crime, just because somebody wants them to." "They can if you're on probation," she reminds me. This time, though, the police leave without her. The only suggestion I can offer now is that she compromise, play the game, do what is required of her to keep a roof over her head and stay out of jail. When she thinks of these relationships as real, that's when she allows herself to get angry, and her anger is too dangerous to her now. She says she knows, has been trying to do just that, but when she's successful at it she fears she's losing herself. That is what happens to a lot of young people who grow up in the system. In order to survive, they allow themselves to become "institutionalized" -- such skilled manipulators that they don't know how to form a real relationship. The thought that someone else might come to know them inspires only fear. But L., astonishingly and at great cost, has managed to hold on to who she is. She has not become institutionalized; has not learned to structure her identity in terms of, or in opposition to, the rules and definitions the system would impose upon her. She is smart, she is honest, and she keeps on trying her hardest. They've only got her for another year and a half, unless they manage to push her into some act that will allow them to criminalize her further. I find myself hoping that it's not enough time for them to ruin her. In the movie "Face/Off," Nicholas Cage, confronting an intransigent female witness, uses the worst threat of all: "I'll send you to jail, and your child will go into foster care." Any audience would get the menace behind these words; it's only the system itself that still clings to the myth of its own benevolence. It's difficult for me to "counsel" young people who live under the jurisdiction of the foster care system because the level of courage and patience required of them is beyond what I possess. And it's difficult to advocate for them because they are so completely without recognized rights to which I might appeal. "You met me once," L. screams at her P.O. over the phone. "You don't know what I need." Neither do I. But I do know that we owe her, owe all of them. We've taken their freedom, their right to self-determination, and now our obligation to them is tremendous. It is the same as a parent's, because we are claiming the rights of a parent. For the authority we claim, we owe care in equal measure. That's the tacit deal between parent and child, but we make no such promise to those toward whom we presume to act in loco parentis. "If you needed attention," a counselor tells L. in juvenile hall, "you shouldn't have gotten yourself locked up." A few years ago, my neighbor took in a troubled teenage nephew. The nephew returned home and is now serving a 10-year sentence for robberies committed just weeks after his 18th birthday. My neighbor's conclusion, after a recent visit: "There are two worlds. One is the suburban backyard world where children do as they are told and all their needs are met. It works. But people from that world are making decisions about children whose needs are not being met, and that isn't working." To say that the foster care and juvenile justice systems add insult to injury is more than a metaphor. These systems have come to despise the wounded children in their care. There's no other possible conclusion: The hatred is systemic. While it has grown fashionable to pay lip service to the importance of "self-esteem" for adolescents, there's no greater sin in the parallel universe inhabited by wards of the state than pride: thinking you might be worth something. To think well of oneself is to think oneself entitled, better than, and then one must be taken down a peg. Youth and adults grow equally willing, equally qualified, to execute this taking-down. It's not too hard to see where the hatred might come from. It hurts to love these hurt children. They are angry, and they will vent that anger on whomever is nearest. Something is wrong with them, and if you don't want it to be your fault you'd better believe it's theirs. Inside juvenile hall, I get a glimpse of the L. the system knows. She still tells the truth, but she hisses it, wields it. I know the face they see, the one that so repels them, but I only see it when she is under their roof. On the radio they're talking about rats, and I can feel my mind shut down. A study has been made of the permanent -- not long-term, not remediable, but permanent -- effects of the absence of maternal care. Rats whose mothers fail to lick and groom them sufficiently wind up anxious, easily startled, saturated with a chemical fear that never ebbs. I don't believe it.
When L. cries on my shoulder on a park bench and says, "I want to go
home," I don't say, "Where do you mean?" because I know that's why she's
crying. Until she turns 18, L. will not even have the legal right to do
what she has been forced to her whole life: take care of herself. But
somehow, she keeps growing, drawing water from deep below the desert of her
exile. With every word and action, she lets you know that it is not "too
late" for her (whatever that phrase might mean when applied to any child).
Fiercely, quixotically, she keeps fighting for that other life she has not
yet forgotten awaits her.
Nell Bernstein is an editor at Pacific News Service and writes frequently about young people. | ||
SALON | ARCHIVES | CONTACT US | TREATS | SEARCH | TABLE TALK
DAILY |
BLUE GLOW
|
BOOKS
|
COLUMNISTS |
COMICS |
FEATURE |
MEDIA CIRCUS
MOTHERS WHO THINK |
MUSIC
|
NEWSREAL
WEEKLY |
21ST |
ENTERTAINMENT |
WANDERLUST
