krishanna.com :: as the crow flies

I LIKE Feeling This Way

I spent the last two and a half years of my "official" adolescence as a ward of the state of California and in a large group home or "open placement". It was an "open placement" because it wasn't a lock-down down facility. The front doors were unlocked and we had rooms instead of cells. It wasn't really a home so much as place to house messed up and throwaway girls who weren't really criminal enough to require full-time residence in juvenile hall.

Some girls were there due to drug and prostitution charges. Some were there behind assault and battery or arson charges. Others were simply guilty of bad attitudes, a lack of interest in any thing an authority figure had to say and running away from crappy homes, using alcohol or drugs to anesthetize intense internal pain and rage. I pretty much fell into the latter group, having been deemed a "pre-juvenile delinquent" by the social worker who placed me there. This meant only that I hadn't been caught doing something that would require my presence before a judge. It meant that I was headed straight for juvenile hall and a life of crime, if someone or something did not intervene.

And so it was that I came to find myself at the tender age of 16 in an old renovated convalescent home with 50 or so girls who were far more knowledgeable about all things criminal than I had ever thought to be. I was more rebellious than criminal, more interested in not feeling than making money by selling drugs.

Being put into placement probably wasn't the best place for me at the time but there was no other place for me. My father was a pedophile as everyone had learned several months earlier and my mother was ill-equipped to cope with not only the situation in which she found herself but also with a wayward, angry, stubborn and do-it-my-way teenage girl who refused to listen, conform or do anything other than look for ways to escape whatever uncomfortable circumstances she found herself in, one way or another.

And while the circumstances that brought me to the group home were heartbreaking at best; and much of what I experienced while there could be characterized as cathartic in some way, what I learned from being among those girls wasn't exactly therapeutic. What DID happen to me there was I felt my first glimpse and experience with what unconditional love and acceptance were from the woman who was charged with dealing with me. I was allowed to to be who I was on any given day. I received the therapy I so desperately needed. I learned my freedoms and privileges hinged mostly on my behavior and attitudes and I got the very first inkling that I had a problem with booze and anything that altered my mind.

What follows is the story of how I found myself at my very first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I was constantly going AWOL and coming back inebriated. The usual punishment for this was 50 demerits and 72 hours restriction. Restriction meant you couldn’t go on group activities or get phone calls or weekend passes. That kind of thing. Well, on the fourth time in a week, my caseworker finally reached the end of her patience and put me on restriction until further notice. She told me if I went AWOL one more time or had my friends come to my room window and hang out, she would not only move me to a inside room but also send me to Juvenile Hall. Shit, foiled again. At least I could see my friends at school.

Undamaged

My childhood was not a "normal" one in the classic sense of the word but as I get older I often wonder if anyone's childhood was normal. Even what passes as normal really isn't. I think normal, like art is a subjective matter. I believe others had easier childhoods than I by virtue of the fact their parents were simply more balanced and sane than the ones I had.

Undamaged is born from the realization I had not so long ago that in my forties, I am finally beginning to feeling undamaged again. It came with a collage I did entitled Undamaged that included an altered photo of me at four years old.       

 

I have found myself over the last several months drawn toward the pictures of the child I was before the damage began. Before my father began his betrayal. Before I began reminding my mother of the trouble I was. Before I reminded her of my father. Before I formed my own opinions that differed from her own. Before I began seeking and creating ways of removing myself from her presence and household once my father left. The pictures of the child I was and the child I grew to be become markedly different as I grow older. It's in the eyes somewhere. Some spark or fire grew steadily dimmer until you have to look hard to see a light anywhere in those small eyes. When I look at the Undamaged photo, taken when I was still indeed undamaged, I smile because I am reminded that the flame was only hidden while it needed protection.