The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (16 page)

I tried to be optimistic about the project, but I felt as though I’d entered into an experience similar to the months I wasted in the old U.N. office in Morocco. Within a few days, the doctor returned to the States. I was left alone again. As promised, I cleaned out the office, washed the floors, cleared away cobwebs, replaced the faded posters with shiny new ones the doctor had brought, using them to cover the larger holes in the walls. Workers from the surrounding offices would come over to chat while I cleaned. They wanted to know who I was and what I’d be doing in Shinyanga. They had no idea what our organization did and had never seen anyone occupy the office I claimed was our headquarters. I could tell they didn’t know what to make of me. After several weeks, I decided I would not sit in the office any longer waiting for an opportunity to do something. Shinyanga is crawling with nonprofits doing amazing work. If the one I worked for wasn’t going to give me work to do, I’d find one that would.

Though everything did not go as planned in Tanzania in terms of my job, I did make fantastic friends in Ruth and Mercy. I also made up for lost time by visiting with several local NGOs. One of the highlights was visiting the homes of local people who take in and care for children orphaned by AIDS. I visited local people making progress in their efforts to reverse the devastating impact of deforestation caused by decades of land misuse and mismanagement. I’ll never forget the theater troop of young Tanzanians entertaining while educating their people about many public health issues and how keeping women illiterate only serves to amplify the nation’s poverty levels and negative health outcomes.

In the end I came to believe that many of the world’s ills cannot be solved solely by outsiders who believe that their wealth and degrees make them the most qualified. The most respectful, practical and efficacious approach to improving the lives of others is for wealthy nations and individuals to use their resources to empower people to help themselves. Years after leaving Tanzania, I would have the chance to put this theory into practice.

I RETURNED TO ATLANTA
in 2000 somewhat discouraged that I hadn’t accomplished the work I’d signed on to do. I wasn’t totally disheartened, however. By way of our family foundation, I was able to make a well-deserved grant to one of the local nonprofits to continue their good work in Tanzania.

While I was uncertain where my next professional step would lead me, I knew exactly where my romantic life was headed: long-term commitment. I’d spent most of my adult life running away from commitments, particularly professional and romantic ones. I usually kept jobs and boyfriends for an average of two years before moving on to something new. I thought it would be the same with Andy. But he showed more initiative than my old boyfriends, who were smart enough to see my cross-country or cross-Atlantic moves as a clear sign that the relationship was over.

Not Andy. Though we were separated for nearly nine months and by more than eighty-three hundred miles, our relationship had managed to progress, mostly because he e-mailed me daily and even made the occasional phone call while I was in Shinyanga. When I saw Andy off at the end of our stressful safari, I had no real plans to get serious with him, but I’d soon learn that the old adage about the heart and absence is not completely unfounded.

When he called one day to tell me he’d lost another job, instead of seeing it as yet another sign that I had no business getting serious with this guy, my savior complex kicked in and I saw him not as a loser but as someone who desperately needed me. My response to his firing was to ask a dear friend who worked at Turner Enterprises to help him get another job, which she was kind enough to do.

So by the time I returned to Atlanta, my boyfriend was gainfully employed. He picked me up at the airport and we returned to his basement apartment, where he proposed and I accepted. I was not in love. There were other factors that led to me accepting the proposal of marriage. I was in my thirties and living in the South, where women are usually well into their first decade of marriage with children by then. Also, I knew my parents’ relationship was strained. Jane had written to me in Tanzania to tell me that she and Ted were talking about divorce. I had called the Turners family for nearly ten years. The thought of a split made me heartsick. The thought of creating a family of my own gave me a sense of stability in the midst of uncertainty.

The prospect of my mom divorcing was also troubling because I was very close to Ted. Unlike Tom and my birth father, he was a true father to me. When he learned of my engagement to Andy, he approached me and asked if he could give me away. The thought of that relationship being threatened by divorce was more than I could think about. So I didn’t.

I was relieved upon returning to Atlanta to find my mom and Ted still together, married but clearly not the infatuated lovebirds I’d last seen. While Ted was his usual upbeat self, my mom was greatly diminished physically and emotionally. She’d lost a lot of weight from her already tiny frame. Though she continued to put up a front that screamed
“Everything’s fine!”
I could see things were not. Emotionally, she was shutting down. Her marriage was eating her alive. There were times leading up to and even after the divorce when she wanted to share with me some of the things Ted was doing that destroyed their relationship, but I refused to listen. I knew that if she shared with me anything hurtful that he had done to her, my feelings for him would change. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be privy to the darkest inner workings of my parents’ relationship and I told her so. She respected my request. Because we had shared everything in the past, I felt that by refusing to hear the details of their breakup I was somehow betraying her. But I didn’t know how else to handle it.

Though they were discussing divorce, we continued to socialize as a family in public. Sometimes I’d watch my mom and Ted sitting together, looking shiny and powerful in their dress-up clothes and celebrity personas, and I knew. I knew but I refused to accept that our days as a family were numbered.

I began to occupy myself with my new life with Andy. My friends and family never understood my attraction to Andy. They didn’t believe that being a decent person was enough to sustain a lifelong relationship. Though I knew we had very little in common, I was attracted to Andy because I felt physically safe around him. He was a big guy who if need be would defend me. He was also an amazing father to his child and I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t be wonderful with our own child. Growing up without a father, and feeling vulnerable most of my life, I found these qualities in Andy extremely attractive. So when my mom offered to buy us a home, I accepted and Andy and I spent all of our free time searching for just the right place. And not surprisingly, Andy and I held very different opinions about what constituted the perfect house.

While Andy wanted something big and showy, I wanted something small and simple. I had my heart set on a renovated bungalow in one of Atlanta’s older, diverse neighborhoods, which he called “the hood.” Andy wanted a big home in as fancy a neighborhood as possible. In the end, we compromised on something big in the hood: a large, contemporary home on an acre in sketchy East Atlanta, which the folks in my mom’s office quickly dubbed the Manse on Bouldercrest. I resented having to compromise at all.

After the purchase, my mom stepped in with an interior designer to help furnish and renovate. In the end, it was a beautiful home that I absolutely hated because it symbolized the beginning of the loss of me. After moving into the home, I found myself slowly morphing into what I thought Andy wanted me to be. On the weekends I was always up for a hike or a bike ride, but Andy was happier with a bowl of chips and the football game. So I stopped hiking and riding and joined him on the couch.

It annoyed him when I read while he watched TV, so I put my books aside. I started to drift away from the things I enjoyed and toward the things that interested him—particularly his number one obsession: television. The television went on from the moment we got home until we went to bed at night.

For Andy, when it came to television, the bigger the better. Soon after we moved in, he purchased a huge television that had to be hoisted over the balcony in order to get it to his man cave located on the second floor. There was no such thing as too many channels, either. He was willing to pay for hundreds despite the fact that his taste fell toward ESPN and Jerry Springer. Oh, the hours of my life I have lost watching Jerry Springer! Over the course of our relationship, I gained about thirty pounds and lost an equal number of points off my IQ score.

Once settled into the house I directed my energies toward finding a job. I knew I wanted to remain in social services, and when I came across an opening for a program counselor working for the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency in Atlanta, I could not have created a better position for myself. With my traveling days behind me, I thought working with refugees would feed my need to be with people of other cultures while utilizing my experience working in social service. I was ecstatic to get a position as the volunteer and resources coordinator, which tasked me with connecting newly arriving refugees with volunteers and essential items such as donated clothing, furnishings and other household items. I got to meet and assess the needs of nearly every refugee who passed through our office.

While my work with homeless women was intense, my new position was a lot more emotionally challenging. It’s hard not to feel a personal connection to the extreme suffering of another. My clients came to me at their most vulnerable and confused, still healing from the physical and emotional scars left from experiences the average American could only imagine: human trafficking, war, genocide and persecution based on ethnicity, religion and gender. Though they came from diverse regions of the world, spoke different languages and believed different things, they all shared the title of “survivor,” and it was my job to make sure they got the best shot possible to remake something of themselves.

They made my job remarkably easy. Having experienced what it’s like to truly have nothing, they received the support from us as bounty and fully exploited it. Though it was mostly their hard work and determination that led to them prospering in the States, I couldn’t help but take pride in learning that a client of mine got employee of the month or successfully completed a GED or was admitted to college. For the first time I was completely fulfilled professionally.

While work was going well, I began to develop a dislike for Atlanta. I had not lived in the same town as Jane since Los Angeles, where being the child of a celebrity is not a big deal to many people. In Atlanta, however, I often felt singled out. Atlanta was relatively new to being a place where celebrities lived and mingled, and I felt it difficult to make sincere friendships because of my parents. The circles I found myself in made Atlanta feel like a very small town, and in short order I felt I had no anonymity. To many, I was just an extension of Ted and Jane. Sometimes I was in the opposite position. When I attended sporting events at CNN Center or Turner Field with the entire family, I was often singled out by black security guards to show my ID or somehow prove that I was legitimately with my family and not some hanger-on trying to get access to the good seats (white security guards usually gave me the benefit of the doubt). Sometimes—but not always!—I could avoid being singled out and interrogated if I held my mother’s hand. But woe unto me if I got distracted and found myself bringing up the rear.

Compounding this problem with the city was that many in the African-American community still held fast to a lot of ideas I found antiquated and offensive. Once I went to Piedmont Park with a young black woman I had met at an event; we got along fine and seemed to have a lot in common. I suggested we put a blanket down on the grass and relax in the sun; she looked at me stunned and said, “Let’s go over to the shady spot instead. I don’t want to leave here looking like a field slave!”

I threw myself into my work and my relationship, trying to convince myself that I’d be happy if I tamed my wandering spirit and molded myself into the perfect worker, the perfect fiancée. Though I had few examples of couples actually experiencing fulfilling careers and long-term matrimonial bliss, I couldn’t help believing that I could achieve it. So I went to work early and left late. I began to tuck away all those aspects of myself Andy found annoying or intimidating like frayed cuffs on a fancy dinner jacket. And for a while it worked. I’d managed to work and tuck myself into a zombielike state where I became accustomed to feeling nothing. No matter that I’d given away my life in exchange for weekends, ten days a year vacation time and a warm body to sleep next to at night.

But something deep inside refused to allow me to give myself away completely. I could not bring myself to agree on a wedding date. No matter how much Andy pressed, I made excuses. One of the best was telling him we could set a date when he got himself out of debt. Andy was buried in so much debt I knew it would be a while before he could get out from under it. Months went by, then a year passed since our engagement. Then another and another.

Then, like a kiss from a prince, my trance was broken by two very interesting e-mails. The first came when I began having trouble with my laptop and Andy allowed me to use his computer to check my e-mails. He failed to close his e-mail account before I got on, and an exchange between him and a female caught my attention. They talked of twisted bed sheets and sweet kisses. Reading the explicit back-and-forth of their romantic romp made me realize that it had been months since Andy and I had been intimate. An intimacy I had not missed.

I was surprised that I was not angered by proof of Andy’s infidelity. While we were far from satisfied with each other, we got along reasonably well and rarely fought. I didn’t know how to break up with someone I was not fighting with and I wasn’t the type to create drama where there was none. So I saw these steamy e-mails as a lifeline out of my dead-end relationship. I confronted Andy with the e-mails and, rather than admit to infidelity, he tried to make me the bad guy. His response was indignation at my invasion of his privacy. It was a masterful performance. But I stuck to my guns and proposed that we break off our engagement. Next came the tears. From him. While I wanted to end the entire relationship then and there, he convinced me to give the relationship more time. I knew Andy didn’t have the money to move out so I suggested he move to another bedroom while he saved money to move out, and I returned his engagement ring.

We continued to live together but I no longer felt obligated to subjugate myself to him. I began to read again. To dream again. I read a book by Bill Bryson called
A Walk in the Woods,
about hiking the Appalachian Trail. I began to fantasize about walking the trail myself. I bought camping equipment, stashing it away in my downstairs office, and went on long training hikes at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park on the weekends.

Things got more interesting at work too. Over the past few months I’d become increasingly dissatisfied. It was a familiar cycle. I’d come onto a new job excited, only to work myself into the ground and take out my anger and frustration on my fellow co-workers. I went from being one of the most hardworking and optimistic folks in the office to a total grump full of nothing but criticism for everyone and everything. Things got so bad my boss told me she was considering letting me go. But before she could, I got an e-mail that changed everything.

One day in the summer of 2001, a coworker sent me an article in
The New York Times Magazine
about a group of refugees dubbed the Lost Boys of Sudan. The Lost Boys were a group of nearly twenty thousand Sudanese children orphaned during the second Sudanese civil war, which began in 1983. By 2001, with no end to the war in sight, the U.S. government was in the process of resettling about thirty-eight hundred Lost Boys in over thirty-eight cities in the U.S. Atlanta alone was getting three hundred Lost Boys. Many would be resettled by my office.