Reviving Ophelia (7 page)

Charlotte’s eyes softened when she talked about Mel. She had a mission—to save him and to make him happier than he’d ever been before. She conceded that, so far, Mel didn’t seem that happy, but she thought that in time they could get their lives together.

Mel was the only person she trusted—she hated high school boys, who “only wanted one thing.” Most of the girls at her school were “snobs.” Her friends who had babies were okay, but they were busy now with their own problems and not “there for her.” Rob and Sue argued a lot and “weren’t as sweetie-sweet as they acted in therapy.”

She particularly hated the school and her teachers. She felt her math teacher, Mr. Jenson, deliberately humiliated her. Her Spanish teacher looked at her breasts whenever he could. None of the courses had anything to do with real life. The kids who brownnosed got the good grades. The lunches were “slop.” When I asked her if there was anything she liked about school, Charlotte thought for a while. “I’d like sewing class if the teacher weren’t such a bitch.”

One day Charlotte brought up sex. “Before Mel, I needed to be drunk to have sex. Otherwise, I remembered things from the past. When I was high, it didn’t matter.”

“Have you been raped?” I asked softly.

Charlotte pushed her brown hair off her face and said in a flat voice, “I’ve had trouble you can’t imagine.”

She looked younger and more vulnerable as we sat quietly with her words. I didn’t push for more information. It would come out in future sessions. I thought about William Faulkner’s line “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

Even though Charlotte was from a small, sleepy town, she exemplifies the problems of girls in the 1990s. She had an abusive, alcoholic father. Her mother divorced when Charlotte was young, and the family was poor and overburdened for many years. As a teenager, Charlotte is in all kinds of trouble—she drinks, smokes pot and cigarettes, diets and is flunking school. She has run away from home and she has been raped. She’s distanced from her parents and is alone except for an older, chemically addicted boyfriend. Especially with men, she’s docile and other-directed. She does what she thinks she should do in order to be accepted.

Charlotte has made many choices that sacrifice her true self and support a false self. Her choices show in her face. There’s deadness to her demeanor that comes from inauthenticity, from giving away too much. Charlotte is evidence of a childhood lost. And what has replaced childhood glitters but is not gold. I hope the therapy can help her find herself. It will be reclamation work.

Last month Lori, whom I had known since her birth, started junior high at a large school known for its wealthy, competitive students. I visited her home to see how she was taking to junior high. We met in her newly redecorated bedroom. Lori was proud of her Elvis stamp poster and Elvis bedspread and curtains. She had a white desk neatly arranged with paper, pens and a dictionary, pink beanbag chairs and a large glass cage for her gerbil, Molasses, “Mo” for short.

I was struck by how fresh and cheerful she was. She was dressed in green sweats. Her short brown hair curled over silver star earrings. She bounced around her room showing me a book she liked, her swim team trophies and Mo’s tricks. Lori made me feel I was in another place and time, back in the fifties in a home with plenty of money, happily married parents, and children who were not afraid or stressed. The cynical part of me wondered, Where’s the skeleton in the closet? If I hadn’t known this family for twenty years, I would have been even more cynical about so much happiness.

Lori is highly gifted, which in our school system means her IQ is higher than 145. She qualified for a special tutor, but she felt that this would isolate her from friends. She preferred a combination of regular and accelerated classes. Lori loved junior high. She liked elementary school as well, but said that by the end she had outgrown it. Junior high was exciting, with its hallways full of kids, nine different teachers, a tableful of friends at lunch and a swimming pool in the gym.

She was busy in and out of school. She swam and danced several nights a week and sang and acted whenever she had the chance. This year she was taking voice lessons at the university. Her mom was a stay-at-home mom who could run her to all these lessons, rehearsals and swim meets. Her dad was an attorney who could pay for these activities and who showed up for her meets and performances.

Her younger sister, Lisa, also swam and danced. Lisa was gifted in piano, which gave her a unique talent. Lori was social and bubbly, Lisa quieter and more introverted. While Lisa curled up with a book or played piano in the living room, Lori talked on the phone for hours.

Lori kept most of her old friends and made many new friends at junior high. She said, “I have friends, and I’m moderately popular. To be super popular you have to look like a model and wear expensive clothes.” She described her closest friends as like herself—good students, happy and involved in activities.

Lori said she was known for being independent and funny. She said, “I know who I am, and I don’t always think like other people think.” She was also unusual in that she’s relaxed about her appearance. Unlike most of her friends, who awaken early so they will have time to get ready for school, Lori gets up ten minutes before it’s time to leave and throws on anything she can find. Unlike her friends, she eats whatever she wants and doesn’t worry about weight. She said, “Lots of my friends wish they could be like me about appearance.”

I asked about alcohol and drugs.

“I think they’re stupid. I would never consider them.”

“What if you were pressured to use them at a party?”

“I’d say, ‘You do what you want, I’ll do what I want.’ ” She laughed. “And then I’d leave the party.”

She knew some kids who drank, but none of her close friends did yet. I asked about sexual harassment. Lori scratched the top of her head. “Some of my friends have been hassled, but I haven’t yet. I know who to avoid. There’s this certain hall that I don’t walk down.”

We talked about dating, a subject Lori had carefully considered. She didn’t want to date until she was in high school and even then, not seriously. She believed that sex comes with marriage. I asked her how she felt about the music and movies that show teenagers having casual sex. Lori said, “I turn that stuff off. I don’t have time for TV anyway. With music, I don’t pay attention to the words.”

I said, “It sounds like you screen out things that upset you.”

Lori agreed. “Not everything, but things I can’t change.”

Lori lit up when we talked about dance. She was proud that her teacher had recently moved her into an advanced class. She liked-swimming too, and believed that all the exercise helped her manage stress. “I work out almost every day.”

Although she admitted that they could be embarrassing in public, she loved her parents. She felt her dad was too skinny and her mom was overly friendly. She said that just lately her mom had been getting on her nerves. She wanted more privacy than she used to. But still she loved Sunday nights when the family had Cokes, apples and popcorn, and played cards or watched a movie.

I asked about career goals. She liked dance but suspected it was not a practical career. Lori was proud of her writing and thought she’d like a career in journalism. She had already had an article published in her school’s newsletter, and she’d interviewed a reporter for a class project.

Lori showed me out, her star earrings flashing. Lisa was practicing on the new grand piano as we left. Her mother sat beside her turning the pages of a Clementi sonatina. Her dad read the newspaper nearby.

I thought about Lori as I drove home. She seemed to be holding on to her true self miraculously well. She was social, but not overly awed by popularity. She chose to be with friends rather than have a mentor, but she still made straight As. She had kept all her prepuberty interests: singing, dancing, swimming and acting. She was relaxed about her appearance and didn’t worry about her weight. Even though she was slightly embarrassed by her parents, she still loved them and enjoyed spending time with them.

Lori was independent and funny. She made conscious choices about sex, drugs and alcohol. In fact, she made conscious choices about everything. She looked within herself for guidance and answers. Lori already had sorted her experience into what she could and couldn’t control, and she knew how to screen out what was beyond her control. She had a sense of who she was and an orientation toward the future. Though she certainly might change her mind about journalism, the fact that she had a goal demonstrated that her life was not all lived in the moment.

Lori was so well rounded and mentally healthy that I pondered how to explain it. She was extraordinarily lucky. She inherited a cheerful, energetic personality. She was pretty, smart, musical and athletic. Her parents were loving and protective, but not overly protective or demanding. She lived in a relatively safe and prosperous neighborhood surrounded by stable families. And she’d managed to escape being assaulted or traumatized.

She may have more trouble in the next few years than she anticipates. The social scene will get tougher, her emotions more turbulent, and the time may come when she thinks family night is dumb. She is just moving into the time when adolescent girls really struggle. But I think she is much more likely than most girls to hold on to her true self. She has a strong inner focus and self-confidence that I think will hold. I wished I could protect her, wrap a magic cloak around her that would keep her safe. I thought of the last line of a poem that a mother wrote about her child: “I hurl you into the universe and pray.”

My horticulturist friend says that the environment is the richest and most diverse at borders, where trees meet fields, desert meets mountains or rivers cross prairies. Adolescence is a border between adulthood and childhood, and as such it has a richness and diversity unmatched by any other life stage. It’s impossible to capture the complexity and intensity of adolescent girls. I think of one client at twelve, wanting to be a fashion model or a corporate attorney—whichever made more money. And another, an Amerasian girl who escaped Vietnam, shyly explaining that she wants to go to medical school. I think of Sara pouring forth songs from
Guys and Dolls
as I drive her to school. I think of the awkward movements and downcast eyes of a girl who works in her parents’ deli or the self-assured way that a neighbor girl walks back from the mound after pitching a no-hit inning.

Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don’t really fit anywhere. There’s a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.

Adolescence is a time of intense preoccupation with the self, which is growing and changing daily. Everything feels new. I remember the impulse to hit my mother when she woke me one morning for school. Even as I felt that rage, I was appalled by my weirdness. I remember going weak-kneed when certain boys walked by me in the halls. These moments took my breath away and left me wondering who I was becoming. I was as surprised by my reactions as I would have been by a stranger’s.

Sara, at twelve, needed to be reminded to brush her teeth, but she wanted to rent R-rated movies and get a job. She flew all over the map. One minute she was arguing with us about politics and the next she was begging for a stuffed animal. She wouldn’t be seen with us in public, but was upset if we missed her school programs. She no longer let us hug or kiss her. One night during this time of constant declarations of independence, Sara woke me in the night. She had a fever and wanted me to get a cold cloth and sit by her. I was pleased by this temporary reprieve from her ban on touching.

With adolescence, many kinds of development occur—physical, emotional, intellectual, academic, social and spiritual—and they don’t always occur in tandem. Tall, physically well-developed girls can have the emotions of children. Abstract thinkers can have the social skills of first-graders. These differences in developmental levels within the same girl confound adults. Should adults relate to the fifteen-year-old or the four-year-old part of the girl?

Generally, puberty is defined as a biological process while adolescence is defined as the social and personal experience of that process. But even puberty is influenced by culture. Girls are menstruating much earlier now than during the colonial era, and even earlier than in the 1950s. There are many theories about why puberty comes earlier—changes in nutrition (girls get bigger at a younger age because they are better nourished), hormones added to beef and chicken (growth hormones that are known to affect humans may trigger early puberty) and electricity (bodies are programmed to enter puberty after exposure to a certain amount of light, which comes much earlier in a woman’s lifetime in an age of electricity). The point is that girls enter adolescence earlier than they did forty years ago. Some girls menstruate at age nine.