Reviving Ophelia (11 page)

This case and others all over the country speak to the craziness of the peer culture that teenage girls now enter. Especially with sexuality, things are tough. Adolescents are exposed, via music, television, movies and pornography, to models of sexuality that are brutal and callous. Girls are caught in the cross fire of our culture’s mixed sexual messages. Sex is considered both a sacred act between two people united by God and the best way to sell suntan lotion.

Girls who maintain their true selves resist peer pressure to be a certain way. Lori, for example, knew she wouldn’t drink or smoke just because other kids pressured her at a party. She also had her own position about sexuality and wouldn’t be pressured to be sexually active before she was ready. She wanted to be liked, but was unwilling to make the concessions necessary to be super popular. She could see clearly that to be accepted by everyone she would have to give up too much of herself.

Charlotte, on the other hand, tried very hard to win peer approval. She was sexually active with boys at her school. Her attempts to be popular with boys backfired. She made choices based not on her own true needs but on her sense of what other people, especially her boyfriend, Mel, wanted from her. Because she was so dependent on peer approval, she got into a great deal of trouble and was utterly lost to herself when I first met her.

Many of the great idealists of history, such as Anne Frank and Joan of Arc, were adolescent girls. This is a time when girls actively search for meaning and order in the universe. Often this is the time of religious crisis and of exploring universal questions such as what happens after death and the purpose of suffering. Some girls become deeply religious and will sacrifice everything for their beliefs. Others have a crisis in faith.

At thirteen I was a loyal Methodist. Then I read Mark Twain’s story “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” in which he pokes fun at heaven as a place where people sit around and play harps all day. That story catapulted me into an examination of my faith. At fifteen I read Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead
and Bertrand Russell’s
Why I Am Not a Christian
and debated with my minister and my friends about the existence of God.

One client at thirteen accepted Christ as her personal savior. She committed herself to a Christian life and evaluated her behavior daily. She believed that her most important relationship was with God, and that her most important time was the time she spent in prayer. She became the spiritual leader of her family and chided her parents when they acted in un-Christian ways. She led her younger siblings in daily Bible study.

This is a time of great idealism—many girls this age become environmentalists or advocates for the poor or sick. Another student organized recycling for her neighborhood. One friend of Sara’s spent part of her allowance on sandwiches for homeless people. She carried food to their street comers and visited about their lives while they ate. Soon she knew most of the homeless people in town by name. Still another friend monitored canned tuna to make sure it was caught in dolphin-free nets, and she protested fur sales at downtown stores.

Many girls become vegetarians. They love animals and actively work for animal rights. I think this cause is popular with girls because they so easily identify with the lack of speech and powerlessness of animals. One girl I know wore a button that said “If animals are to talk, we must be their voices.” Girls identify with gentle, defenseless creatures. And they will work with great idealism and energy to save them.

The sixties were a great time to be an adolescent girl. That was an era of optimism and idealism, and many girls say they wished they had lived in those times. It’s much harder to be idealistic and optimistic in the 1990s. Girls who stay true to themselves manage to find some way to respect the parts of themselves that are spiritual. They work for the betterment of the world. Girls who act from their false selves are often cynical about making the world a better place. They have given up hope. Only when they reconnect with the parts of themselves that are alive and true will they again have the energy to take on the culture and fight to save the planet.

 

Adolescence is an intense time of change. All kinds of development—physical, emotional, intellectual, academic, social and spiritual—are happening at once. Adolescence is the most formative time in the lives of women. Girls are making choices that will preserve their true selves or install false selves. These choices have many implications for the rest of their lives.

Of course, the above generalizations about adolescence don’t hold true for all girls. Some girls have had tough lives as children and don’t experience their elementary school years as happy. Other girls who are stable and protected seem to slide through junior high. The intensity of the problems varies, as does the timing—from age nine to around age sixteen.

Another caveat: Much of what I know about junior-high girls I learned from high school girls. Junior-high girls do not confide in me nearly as often or as articulately as do slightly older girls. I hear what happened in junior high a few years later, after “the statute of limitations has run out.” In junior high the thoughts, feelings and experiences are too jumbled to be clearly articulated. The trust level for adults is just too low. Girls are in the midst of a hurricane and there’s not much communication with the outside world.

While the world has changed a great deal in the last three decades, the developmental needs of teenage girls have changed very little. I needed, and girls today need, loving parents, decent values, useful information, friends, physical safety, freedom to move about independently, respect for their own uniqueness and encouragement to grow into productive adults.

Girls like Lori, who are the happiest, manage against great odds to stay true to themselves. But all girls feel pain and confusion. None can easily master the painful and complicated problems of this time. All are aware of the suffering of friends, of the pressure to be beautiful and of the dangers of being female. All are pressured to sacrifice their wholeness in order to be loved. Like Ophelia, all are in danger of drowning.

FAMILIES—THE ROOT SYSTEMS

Betty and Lloyd came to discuss their daughter, who was born Lakota Sioux on an Indian reservation. When Franchesca was three months old, she was placed with Catholic Social Services, who offered her to Betty and Lloyd. Betty showed me a picture of Franchesca in an infant swing. “We loved her from the moment we saw her. She had shiny hair and eyes the color of black olives.”

Lloyd said, “There was some feeling against the adoption in Betty’s family. They didn’t call it prejudice, but they worried about bad genes and wondered if Francie would fit in.”

Betty apologized for her family. “They were small-town people. It took us a while to teach them to say ‘Native American’ instead of ‘Indian,’ but once they saw Francie they loved her.”

Lloyd clasped his hands over his ample stomach and looked sober. “Everyone’s done their best really. We don’t blame them for what’s happened.”

“What’s happened exactly?”

Lloyd and Betty explained that Franchesca had a typical childhood. Lloyd was a pharmacist who ran his own store. Betty stayed with Franchesca until first grade, then she worked part-time with Lloyd. Franchesca fell off her bike in second grade and broke her leg. She had a slight speech impediment that was corrected with speech therapy in third grade. They lived in a quiet neighborhood with lots of kids. Franchesca had birthday parties, summer vacations, Girl Scouts and pottery lessons.

Lloyd added, “In elementary school her grades were good and she was popular with her classmates. She had a sweet disposition—always smiling.”

Betty agreed. “We never treated her differently because she was adopted or Sioux. At the time, we felt that was the right thing to do. Now I wonder if we didn’t gloss over things that needed to be discussed.”

Lloyd looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

“Francie got teased at school about being a Native American. When we knew about it, we stopped it, but I wonder if we always knew. We told her that being adopted didn’t matter, that we were just like other families. But we weren’t really. She was brown and we were white.”

I thought about how adoptions were handled fourteen years ago. Social service agencies reassured parents that adopted children would be just like their own. This was more true for the parents than for the children. Parents tended to bond immediately, but children almost always felt that adoption made them different.

In particular teenagers, who are focused on identity issues, struggle with the meaning of adoption in their lives. Often they are silent about their struggles because they don’t want to be disloyal. When adoption involves mixing races, the issues become even more formidable. Racial issues are difficult for Americans to discuss. We have so few examples of good discussions about ethnic differences that even to acknowledge differences makes most of us feel guilty. So differences tend to be ignored and feelings about them become shameful, individual secrets.

Betty continued. “In seventh grade, Francie started her periods and was cranky all the time. I thought it was hormonal. Before, she’d always told us everything, but in seventh grade she hid in her room. I talked to my sister and we agreed that teenagers go through stages like this. In fact, her girls were giving her fits at the time. So we let it slide.

“Her grades dropped and that worried us.” She sighed. “We called the counselor and he said lots of kids have trouble their first year. We made her study two hours a night and her grades picked up a little. She wasn’t seeing her old friends, but we let that slide too.”

“We let too much stuff slide,” Lloyd said.

Betty continued. “This year has been horrible. Lloyd is the main disciplinarian. He’s not that strict really, only the ordinary rules—let us know where she’s going, no alcohol and passing grades—but you’d think he was beating her. She hardly speaks to him and it’s breaking his heart. She’ll talk to me a little more, but not much. She won’t go to church with us.”

Lloyd twisted in his seat. “She’s running with a rough crowd and drinking some. We’ve smelled it on her. She’s lying and sneaking around.”

Betty added, “Last week we let her go to a ball game with friends and she didn’t come home. We were worried sick. Lloyd drove around until sunrise. The next day when she came home, she wouldn’t tell us where she’d been.”

I said, “I’d like to meet Franchesca.”

Lloyd said, “She doesn’t want to come, but we’ll make her.”

“Just one time,” I said. “I let teenagers decide whether to return.” The next week Franchesca sat stiffly in my office. She was dressed in green jeans and a SIX FLAGS OVER TEXAS T-shirt. Her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her eyes were filled with tears. At first she was quiet, almost sullen. She looked over my head at the various diplomas on the walls and answered my questions by nodding.

I searched for an issue on which we could connect—school, friends, books or her parents. She barely acknowledged my questions. I asked her about adoption and noticed that her breathing changed. At that point I sat still and waited.

Franchesca raised her eyes and looked me over. She inhaled deeply and said, “I’m living with nice people, but they are not my family.”

She paused to see how I was taking this.

“Every morning when I wake up I wonder what my real mother and father are doing. Are they getting ready for work? Are they looking in the mirror and seeing faces that look like mine? What are their jobs? Do they talk about me and wonder if I am happy?”

Big tears dropped onto her shirt and I handed her the Kleenex box. She wiped her cheeks and chin and continued. “I can’t stop feeling that I’m in the wrong family. I know it would kill Mom and Dad to hear me say this, but I can’t make it go away.”

I asked Franchesca what she knew about her real mother.

“She gave me up when I was three months old. Maybe she was poor or unmarried. I’m sure she never hurt me. I feel in my heart that she loved me.”

Outside flakes of snow floated by. We watched the snow.

“How does it feel to be Native American?”

Franchesca sighed. “For a long time I pretended that it didn’t matter, but all of a sudden it’s the most important thing in the world.

“I’ve been teased since I was little about being a Native American and my tribe doesn’t even know I exist.” Franchesca talked of the years of teasing, the names—Redskin and Squaw—and the remarks about Indian drunks, welfare cheats, and Indian giving. She ended by saying, “The worst is that line—the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

I asked what Franchesca knew about Native Americans.

“I saw
The Last of the Mohicans
and
Dances With Wolves.
Before that, the movies about Native Americans made me sick. Have you ever seen
The Lone Ranger?
Do you remember his pal Tonto? Do you know that Tonto in Spanish means ‘fool’?”

She paused. “Sometimes I see Native Americans among the homeless downtown. I don’t even know if they are Sioux. My mother might be one of them.”

I asked, “Would you like to know more about your people?”

Franchesca looked out at the snow. “In a way no and in a way yes. It will make me madder and sadder, but I feel like I can’t know myself until I know.”

I wrote down the name of a Native American writer, Zitkala-Sa. “Maybe you could check out some of her books.”

“Do you think I am being disloyal?”

I thought how to answer. “Your interest in your past is as natural as that snowfall.” Franchesca rewarded me with a smile, her first that hour.

Franchesca loved the books of Zitkala-Sa, who was a Sioux of the Yankton band, born in 1896. She wrote of being ripped from her family on the reservation and being sent to Indian School. After reading about Zitkala-Sa’s experiences, Franchesca asked Betty and Lloyd to take her to visit Genoa, a now abandoned Native American school.