How A Nice Jewish Girl Became A Badass

Not many people can lay claim to being kicked-out of pre-school like I can.  I remember the day well, sticking my hand up one of those machines that dispense milk, the ones with the plastic udders snipped at the ends.  My mother was called and told not to bring me back.  Ever.

A year later I pushed a neighbor into a thorn bush and tied him up with kite string.  According to facebook he is now the manager of a multi-million dollar hedge fund, clearly revenge for what a 7-yr old girl did to make him look like a pussy at the bus stop 40 years ago.

During my years of working in non-profits I spent a lot of time with “at-risk” individuals of all ages.  I worked on behalf of homeless women and former gang members, but I never expected that I would find myself working with incarcerated convicts.

For the first few weeks as a volunteer creative writing instructor with female inmates I had handouts, made them write and read from a book that I thought they could relate to. I was so not badass. Some were receptive, others just thought I was wasting their time.  Soon, I ditched the handouts, the readings and a pen hasn’t been used in my workshop in at least a year.  Now it’s very free-form  and those who start out staring out the window and roll their eyes, eventually become engaged in the conversation.  I have NO problem yelling at them to “STOP TALKING!” which gets the attention of the officer looking down on the class.  If they act up they know they can go to “the hole,” so generally once is enough.

I’ve recently started working with male offenders ranging from 14 to over 60.  The nature of their crimes are all different and what I instruct them in depends on what type of pre-release situation they are in.  When people ask me what I do I feel totally badass.  Usually people ask if I’m afraid or they ask my husband if he gets worried.  He’s used to it by now, and no, I’ve never been afraid.

People have become really used to the natural high or the incredible heartbreak I feel every week after spending an hour with “my ladies.”  It runs a close second to being on top of my Tempurpedic mattress as my happy place.  Now, after I finish my weekly classes with the men, I’ll call my husband and say things like, “I love my felons,” or “I love my juvenile delinquents!”  It’s that same feeling I’ve gotten from working with their female counterparts for the past two years.

People always told me that working with the men is much easier than working with the women.  The men certainly respect me a bit more, sit rapt with attention and call me “teach.”  Some are a bit more impenetrable than the women and there is one in particular that I am desperate to break through to just to see a teeny glimmer of vulnerability that I KNOW has to be in there somewhere.  The men tease me a bit and have their inside jokes that I am not privy to (the women always teach me new jargon) but I feel more attuned to the women, the playing field being more level.

The Urban Dictionary defines “badass” as “An ultra-cool motherfucker.” My 11-yr old daughter would take issue with that as she's at that age where everything I do embarrasses her.  I bet, though,  when I'm not around and someone asks what her mother is like, she would totally describe me as "an ultra-cool motherfucker," and nothing could make me more proud.

The Questions Inmates Ask

As part my workshop with female inmates I ask the women to think of one question they would ask everyone they meet.  I often set-up the exercise by saying that they could pretend that they might not ever see the person again—having time with them at a bus stop, stuck on a train, whatever, so that it is most likely that they would get honest answers out of a stranger who would simply walk back into their own anonymous life.

I have gotten many fascinating answers during the years I’ve been doing this. Some recent standouts have been, “How do you cope?”  “Are you happy?” “What one decision would you change if you had the chance?”

As often happens, they ask these questions of me, curious about this white, middle-aged woman standing in front of them for 45-minutes a week.  Usually by that point they’re quite comfortable with me sensing that I don’t sit in judgment of them and that I’m genuinely interested in everything they choose to share.  This week I was asked, “Do you believe in God?”  I hesitated before answering, and said that that was a really tricky question for me.  One woman said, “It’s a yes or no question.  Either you do or you don’t.”  Others came to my defense understanding that it might not be so black and white.

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior?” a woman wearing a plastic prison- issued rosary beads and cross necklace asked me, as if this would definitively answer the question. 

“Oh my God, hell no,” I think I may have answered, my filter apparently taking a nap.  This got a few chuckles from the ladies.  “I’m Jewish,” I added, which led to some sounds of understanding from the women.  It’s sort of a stock answer I give, because quite frankly, no, I don’t believe in God and the deflection seems to make sense to others. “It’s not that simple for me.”   I have found that a lot of women of all ages, races and ethnicities have a tremendous belief that God, whoever that is to them, will get them through their sentences and whatever comes next.  It’s hard to know if they entered prison with their beliefs or if they were formed behind bars.

I am often asked if I am or ever was an addict.  I would say that 75% of the women I see are.  I usually point to the coffee I have with me as the only thing I can say I’m “addicted” to. (They are often not too happy that I’m up there enjoying my drive-through iced latte while they haven’t had time to have their instant yet.) I always share, when the subject comes up, that my best friend is a crystal meth addict and that to the best of my ability I understand the struggle he and other addicts face.  I emphasize that I couldn’t possibly ever know what it’s like, that I live the flipside of the issue.  I have read the piece below about my best friend’s struggle which always leads to some very poignant conversation:

http://mylifeinthemiddleages.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-high-flying.html

After reading it last week, a woman raised her hand and asked me this:

“Have you ever been curious to try heroin or meth just to see what it’s like?”

I paused and thought about how to answer.  I’ve seen enough documentaries and heard first-hand accounts about how heroin, for example, is like taking your best orgasm and multiplying it by 1,000 or that pain, physical and emotional, instantly disappears.  I’ve heard that meth makes you feel like Superman for days on end.  I’ve heard that your first hit is never your last.

“I’d be curious about how something may feel that good, but no, I’ve never been tempted to try them.   Plus, I need my sleep.  I couldn’t stand being up for 4 days in a row.”  They laughed at this. 

My answer was an honest one.  They have asked me things that I will not answer but somehow this didn’t seem to cross that line.  In many ways, it levels the playing field between us.  They never seem to stand in judgment of me and wonder how I could possibly understand them, and vice versa.  I always say to people that at the core of it all they are women, just like I am, who have made different choices and undoubtedly been dealt the cruelest hands imaginable.  We all turn to things to help us cope, whether it's drugs, religion, food, shopping, whatever.  I have insurmountable credit card debt and they have track marks up and down their bodies.  They are different "blemishes," different "blights,"  but they are the results and reminders of the choices we've made.

40 Years in 4 Hours

No, no, no, this was NOT my 40th high-school reunion.  I might not admit when that one comes around.  It was my 30th, making me sound old enough.  I remember, when I was younger, hearing people wistfully mention such high numbers and I just assumed they'd be dead soon.

As I've mentioned in other posts, I was unexpectedly whisked away in the middle of my first year of high school ( for those who never knew why, see my below post):

http://mylifeinthemiddleages.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-snoopy-ended-up-in-oven.html

I spent my childhood on a nice, upper-middle-class street from kindergarten and followed the trajectory of elementary school through junior high with friends I adored. I rode my bike until it got dark when kids still did that, playing with my neighbors before parents checked with other parents that we'd be supervised.  I liked my life, I fit in, (despite always being the tallest and the biggest in elementary school).  When I was forced to move to Los Angeles at 16, I lost touch with all of my Long Island friends.

The beauty of Facebook (and to me, it has been miraculous in bringing back that part of my life) has re-introduced me to people I barely knew, those who moved in different circles.  It has also been responsible for reconnecting me with those whose houses I slept over and spoke to on the phone for hours at night.

In many ways, I felt like an interloper at the reunion, since I missed those awkward and fraught high school years with those who were there.  To me, in my day, I looked at life as there were the Jews and then there was everyone else.  (Read the below post about my 30th boarding school reunion, where I spent my last two years of high school, one among a smattering of Jews.):
http://mylifeinthemiddleages.blogspot.com/2012/05/three-reunions.html

I felt slightly disappointed not knowing the football players who looked at my face registering not a bit of recognition and moved right past me. Everyone had meshed and merged in those two years and I had missed that part.

I felt most rooted reconnecting with my elementary school friends, those who appeared in the school photos I had uncovered and brought with me.  There were three who lived on my street in houses I have memories of pretending we were the Partridge Family.  We took the school bus together, a short distance, but memorable just the same.  Seeing these boys who had turned into men, had me hugging them the hardest, staring at their faces and marveling at who they've become.  I've become particularly close with one who lived around the corner, all through Facebook and words.

There was the smallest boy in the class who actually let me put my finger into one of his dimples (well, I never asked if I could), what I remember him for.  I heard stories about lunging to kiss a boy in first grade only to have him throw me off in a panic.  I learned that a sweet boy gave me a coin from his collection and that my mother, thinking I had stolen it, called his mother and forced me to return it.  I learned that one of the nicest boys laughed at me when I stepped in dog poop and he's felt guilty about it for all these years.  I learned that I always had a nice "aura" in junior high.

I drank wine and laughed with a woman who I had totally confused with someone else, another Facebook friend who I never really knew.  We have shared written quips and laughter, found many things in common, and I breezed into her hotel room as if we were best friends.  Another connection who I barely knew has turned into masked mush over his incredible work with urban kids.  We stole away for a few minutes having discovered so much about each other through my writing and constant Facebook posts.  He's wonderful and I hope he never has to compromise his love and passion for the lives he changes.  And of course, there were a couple of my very dear friends who I would occasionally whisk past during the night and whisper to them and move on, confident just knowing that they were in the same room with me.

There were many people there who I know read my blog and many others I had no idea did.  Throughout the night I was sought out, hearing praise for my writing that was unexpected and beyond flattering.  A man made it a point to come over to me to compliment me and on the teeniest, tiniest, itty-bittiest scale,  I felt like a real writer.  As I was leaving a lovely woman who hasn't aged one second said "You better write about this," and well, here it is, my homage to my roots and the lovely people I had to leave behind.

Beauty Among Pain

A few weeks ago I watched a show about women who have babies while incarcerated.  This particular episode centered on a pilot program where inmates, based on their crimes and behavior have a chance to keep their babies with them in their cells and followed two women through their journey.  It was one of the most gut-wrenching things I have ever seen to the point where I had to avert my eyes to keep from crumbling.  As expected there was one happy ending and one devastating.

 I see a lot of pregnant women in the workshop I lead with inmates.  For most this is not their first pregnancy nor does the unborn baby have the same father as its siblings.  There is no joy in the mother's eyes, no rubbing of the belly, no astonished look when the baby moves or kicks. The prison-issued uniform is the only set of maternity clothes they will wear.  

In the tv show, the audience is set-up to anticipate the ending of one woman's story.  She has been incarerated for a violent crime and is taken to a hospital, in shackles, to deliver her baby.  She already knows that because of her crime, she will be unable to keep her baby with her in prison. She is unsure who the father is and won't know until she can see what color his skin is.  

 She delivers her baby without much fanfare, noone clapping or cheering her on except for the female prison guard who has accompanied her (she had noone else in her life who had any interest in being there).  The baby boy is placed on her chest for a minute or two, his skin color still a bit murky, and taken away to be cleaned, measured and weighed while his mother is taken to her hospital room.

She is allowed 24 hours with him.  We see her bottle-feeding him, their eyes locked together in that way that mothers and their babies do. He is then  placed into the arms of an Amish woman whose family will foster him until his mother's sentence is completed.   He is brought in for a visit a month later and she is very grateful to the family and seems resigned that they will, in fact, be the ones to raise him.  

Today in my class there was a woman whose baby is due in two weeks.  She prayed that he wouldn't be delivered in the prison infirmary but in a nearby hospital.  Her fellow inmates soothed her as best they could and a woman in the front turned to her and askd, "Is it okay if I tell her," (meaning me), "about his name?"  The pregnant woman nodded.

"She has an autistic son and he's the one who picked out the name for the baby."

One by one, the other women started to put their heads down to cry, one getting up to pass around a box of tissues.

"What's his name going to be?" one asked.

"Christian."  There were encouraging compliments on the choice.

" My son has never expressed any interest in the baby yet and said, 'This is going to be a special baby.'"   

The mother doesn't know how long her sentence will run, but the baby will be raised by her husband and undoubtedly loved by the brother who named him Christian.

Pinch Me Please

Yesterday during training for my new job, I had a brief moment where I saw my new boss's mouth moving and didn't hear the words.  Instead, I heard my own voice in my head saying, "Am I really here?" Sitting there, across the table from her,  ranks up there with one of my happiest achievements.

Instead of going over donor lists and which temperamental board member to steer clear of, we talked about substance abuse, contraband, and the nuances of juvenile offenders.  In my 20 years of human service non-profit fundraising I was dismissed from similar trainings because they weren't "job related."  If I requested to have some involvement with the activities of the clients being served by my agencies, I would hear things like, "As long as it doesn't interfere with your job."  I hated having to justify why client connection would make me better, and much happier in my job.  (There was one exception to this where my passion for working with at-risk youth changed the course of my professional focus and I will forever be grateful for that opportunity.)

I have been clear in my resolve for several years that I wanted to work directly with underserved populations and actually be paid for it.  I knew that this meant an enormous pay cut, but I was willing to figure out a way to make it work.  My applications for these types of jobs weren't taken seriously as hiring managers wouldn't take the time to see that I had the right skills and experience to qualify for the jobs I wanted.  They didn't believe me when I said that the pay cut would be fine, I would manage.  In the end, I always found myself having to take the same type of job I had always had, going through the motions, charming donors, justifying unmet goals all while collecting a fairly respectable paycheck.  After my third layoff in a row, I vowed NEVER to plan another gala, enter another donation into a database, or prepare an excel sheet for a board meeting that was always the same as every board meeting that came before it.  It wasn't until I firmly slammed that door, that another one flung itself open.

It was through an informational interview that I ended up volunteering with female inmates.  I was told to write my own workshop description, trusted by the program director to get in front of a group of women incarcerated for various types of crimes.  Within a couple of weeks I felt as if I was born to do this work.  The women, in their required evaluations of my workshop apparently felt the same.

I have now found myself wanting to immerse myself in learning more about the criminal justice system, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Through some of my blog posts about my work I have attracted some of the most respected people in the field and have been invited to be a guest blogger for a man who is internationally known for his work with juvenile offenders.  In all of my years as a fundraiser, I was never asked to present at a conference or sit on a panel of professionals.  Yes, I had the perfect personality for the schmooze required for that profession, but perhaps my lack of passion for the work was more transparent than I realized.

I told my father that I had been hired to be a Life Skills instructor at 6 residential programs with youth and adults and how the challenge before me was more exciting than any other.  We made each other laugh when he said, "I guess it's time to dust off that Ph.d you have"  (I have a B.S. in Journalism from the same university he went to).  He's been relentless in his efforts over the past 20 years to have me attend local "networking events" hosted by our school, but when he finally said it again less than a month ago, I said "Dad, I don't think the people who attend these things are working in the prison system."  He finally got it.

I will be working directly with the staff at these residential programs, without a doubt the unsung heroes of this field.  They will help me navigate through the complicated world of offenders from the ages of 14 and up with patience and humor.  I will learn how to run workshops on anger management and self-esteem using the vast amount of curriculum that exists and by crafting my own.

I so wish that this had happened earlier in my life and not at 47, but I am proud that I have landed where I wanted to be by not compromising.  I've become the poster child for telling my peers that this can REALLY happen if they want it enough, the whole "following your bliss" thing.  Yes, the risks are huge and scary, in my case financially terrifying.  Some weeks my husband and I find ourselves with $25 to last a week and our credit card debt is astounding.  Each month we have to scramble to pay our rent, but in the end, we miraculously manage.  All that being said, I've landed in my dream with both feet on the ground.  Somebody pinch me.

How To Get Free Booze, or, Pilots As Enablers

I hate flying.  I’d rather be anywhere else on earth than on a plane (Being in Penn Station on one of the hottest days of the year about 20 years ago comes in a close second.)  From the second a ticket is booked, whether it’s five months before, one month or two weeks, my sense of security is thrown off balance.

I recently flew to Los Angeles, a trip I’ve done at least 15 times, to visit my father who has lived there for 30 or so years.  I’ve been flying since I was an infant, visiting grandparents who lived in Florida every Christmas break until I was 13 or so.  I’ve been to the UK three times and flew quite a bit for a couple of jobs, taking me to some really great American cities.   Friends say I need to do it MORE, to get used to it.  I think they’ve gone slightly mad.

Now here’s the thing:  you never know when a good flight is going to turn bad.  You never know, as you’re coasting along quite beautifully when you’ll hit an air pocket, fly through a thunderstorm, suck a poor unsuspecting bird into the engine, be struck by lightning, have some crazy passenger storm the cockpit demanding to be taken to New Zealand (the longest possible flight there is). 

The week before I most recently flew, the news played a tape of a conversation between a pilot and an air traffic controller after the plane had lost its hydraulic system.  Their voices were calm (ish) like they always are.  Then, when the controller asked how many “souls” were on the plane, SOULS, not people, I knew that a crash and mass casualties were expected.  The captain of the Titanic was asked the EXACT SAME QUESTION and we all know what happened there.  Somehow the plane landed and everyone was fine, their souls intact.

Flying is lovely when the seatbelt sign is off.  I look out the window, at the grids and circles on the green and brown ground, but, when we start to experience even the slightest bumpiness, I wait in fear to see if that seatbelt sign is going to flash on and the inevitable scripted announcement from the pilot that says, “Well folks, it seems as if we’ve hit just a little patch of turbulence.  Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts and we’ll try to get through this as quickly as we can.  Thank you.”

At that point I just stare out the window thinking I’ll see something on a clear day that indicates how bad it will be.   Those flights are the ones that confuse me the most—there are no clouds, no discernible winds, nothing that can explain why we’re suddenly being bumped around.  If one more person tells me that it’s just like a bump in the road or recites the statistics that the chances of crashing in a plane are infinitesimal compared to how many people are killed in car crashes, I will throttle them.

I envy (Re. hate) people who LOVE to fly.  My friend Phillip (who also loves going to the dentist) laughs his way through turbulence.  I can see him squealing “whee!” when being slightly tossed around.  I think flight attendants are freaks.  I study their faces when they too are asked to sit down during a rough patch and marvel at how they can just flip through a magazine as if their lives aren’t about to end.  Who ARE these people??

I’ve developed quite a brilliant and foolproof  strategy in recent years so pay close attention:  The second I step through the gate and onto that jet way thing where you begin to smell fuel and that one-of-a-kind footstep sound, I begin to panic slightly.  I check out the part of the plane I can see and curse it for holding me hostage for 6 hours.  At that point I’ve already taken at least one ativan but it really does very little.  As I take that dreaded step over the threshold and onto the “aircraft” I pop my head into the cockpit and ask if it’s going to be a smooth flight.  Most of the time they are nice and automatically pin me as a nervous flyer.  On this most recent trip they asked me what seat I was in and I knew I had scored big (keep reading).

They never say that it’s going to be the most turbulent flight in their history of flying, but they might say, “It’s going to be a bit bumpy over the Rockies but other than that, we should be fine.”  We SHOULD be fine!   I ask the flying time, willing it to be an hour shorter than I know it will be and when the pilot on the way home told me it was going to be 5 hours and 4 minutes, I said, “But it’s going to be shorter than that, right?”  He responded by saying, “No, it’s going to be 5 hours and 4 minutes.”   Fuck.  You.

So, after I’ve talked to the pilot, I then ask the first flight attendant I see the same questions.   They smile and say that they haven’t heard otherwise from the pilot.  Throughout the flight, I will periodically check in with them to make sure they haven’t lied to me.  When I work my way back to use the bathroom and see people drooling in sleep I wonder why they have chosen to sit in the bumpiest part of the plane.  But they don’t care.  They’re SLEEPING!

So, as the drink cart made its way down the aisle on this most recent flight I started to jones for that first sip of wine.  A guy two rows in front of me started asking the flight attendant a bunch of questions about God knows what and I felt like jumping out of my seat to begin pilfering the cart.  The other attendant pushing the cart looked at my aisle number and said “The pilot told us to give her whatever she wants.”  SEE, that’s how it works!  Thank you lovely pilots.   Two bottles of wine and one more ativan had me smiling and doing crossword puzzles.

Obviously, a trip in one direction requires a trip in the other.  I throw away the used boarding pass and rue the fact that there is still one more trip to get through.  I’m so grateful on the first day that I made it through the first  flight that I generally don’t start panicking until the day before the next.  For some reason the trip home was harder, coming off the heels of a rather emotional trip.  My heart started beating the second I woke up and I took the ativan sooner than usual.  I had a glass of wine at lunch before we boarded and the aforementioned pilot didn’t take the bait.  I watched our entire flight on the screen in the seatback, as a computer image of our plane crept its way across the country.  In case you were wondering, Nebraska is a big fucking state.  I watched as the mileage countdown changed, challenging myself not to look for as long as possible.  My husband, a meteorologist and someone who considers flying the same as sitting on the couch, felt badly for me, but we made it home, safe and sound.

So, even if you’re not terrified of flying, I’m sure you can act afraid for a few minutes, put on your best award-winning performance in order to score some free booze.  What you can’t do is tell them that it was me who told you how to do this, as I may single-handedly be responsible for another airline declaring bankruptcy. 

I Was An Activist For A Day

Yesterday in a post on Open Salon I railed against a man who wrote a hateful piece about transgender people.  I was stymied by the content for a couple of days, but as the stepmother to a transgender son I felt it imperative to present a clear-headed (and accurate) rebuttal to what he had the audacity to post.  As soon as I hit "publish" the e-mails started to pour in in praise of my words.  I got two private e-mails from readers who told me that they themselves yearned to change genders but were afraid.  I got fan mail and he got hate mail.  I ignited an itty bitty cyber protest.  


Truth be told, I'm not well-versed or well-educated in enough issues to be a very convincing activist.  If I had taken part in the Occupy Movement in support of my authentic activist friends and the media chose to interview me I would have run in the other direction squealing.  I know it was against Wall Street.  Wall Street bad, everyone else good.  (Right?)  


I was in college in the early 80s when the cause was the anti-apartheid movement.  A shantytown was erected by the types of students who studied up on them and I really had no understanding of what was going on.  I would stop by to smoke a cigarette with my best friend who just needed a good reason to skip class.  I liked class.


Besides yesterday the only other time I felt my inner activist emerge was when the leader of the largest Neo-Nazi organization in America was scheduled to speak at the library in my small New England town.   As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor I felt that this was something I could really sink my teeth into.  I was practically foaming at the mouth.  His presence, along with his entourage of skinheads just a mile from my home sent me into a near frenzy.  When I joined the group of other protesters it was very clear that this smug man enjoyed watching liberals flail in anger and even though we represented a collective voice it just felt futile.  There would be no breakthrough, just like there will be no breakthrough for the man whose post I responded to yesterday.


It is inexcusable to me that my brain shuts down too quickly when I should be educating myself on things that matter, especially when they involve things that directly effect me.  I shy away from political conversation because I know I would appear as ignorant as I know I can sometimes be.  When I log on to news sites I'll very quickly skim the front page and get sidetracked by links to celebrity news. I know I'm extremely liberal but that's about the extent of it.  I know that I would speak very loudly about children's issues, gay civil rights issues and things that I know a little something about. I have become absolutely anti-capital punishment as a result of my volunteer work in a prison. I write checks to certain charities and make pledges to my friends in whatever walks or runs they're doing, but, at 47-years old I need to understand why Obama Care is fantastic for some and hated by others.  


I am the  parent of an 11-yr old daughter.  I always admired my father (and still do) for how he conveyed things to me in layperson's terms, not to dumb it down, but to help me to decipher what is important to know.  I want to be able to intelligently answer my daughter when she asks questions like, "Why is there so much violence in the Middle East?" and "What is the Tea Party?"  Maybe, by doing so, I would see a bit more of my inner activist, who I actually kind of like.

The Karma-Revenge Connection

I'll start by saying that I'm not talking drive-by shooting revenge.  I'm not even talking toilet papering someone's house.  I'm thinking more of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman when she is at first snubbed by a posh boutique because of her streetwalker appearance, and then, with the support of her benefactor (played by Richard Gere), sashays  into said posh boutique the next day, all fancy pants in a fabulous outfit, carrying an endless amount of shopping bags from Barney's and Marc Jacobs and a couple of hatboxes (What is it about hatboxes that signify wealth?)

I'll add that I'm not all that spiritual.  I don't want to wait until my next life to be rewarded by my good karma.  I'm too impatient and I don't really believe in next lives.  I DO believe that I've been a pretty good person in my 47-years of life and most of the time it's not for payback but for getting what I get out of helping others. I live the concept of paying it forward.  Have I  had missteps along the way, made mistakes?  Absolutely, but at this point, the scale is more heavily weighted towards the good.

I'm riding a really nice wave of good karma these days.  It's taken a while but it's finally catching up. My writing is getting recognition, I am in the beginnings of an incredible second marriage and in general, I'm just making things happen, living that self-actualization thing.  I'm on fire.

Along the way, I have had several instances of people who have successfully stopped me in my tracks.  Two of these were by incredibly self-important, narcissistic men who were responsible for me losing jobs that I adored.  I'm not being delusional or naive when I say this.  I absolutely admit my part in situations where I've been responsible for some conflict or misunderstanding but in these instances I had no way to defend my position.  They had me disposed of.

I'm not sitting around plotting or scheming but I want them in some way to know that it wasn't a smart move to dismiss me out of hand.  I've drafted e-mails never sent because I know that they would do no good.  My fantasy, and this is really pure fantasy, is that I get, at least in some minor but public way, known for my talents.  I want them to see how I've moved on from their harsh criticism and the power they exerted over my life at the time.  I want them to wish they knew me.

I know that the response to this from many people will be that I'm being petty and that I have to let go of the past.  I think all of us would admit to feeling this way about someone in their lives who has done them wrong.  I'm not expending endless amounts of energy on this, but as I find myself taking baby steps that appear to be getting me closer to my dream, I can't help but think of how they'll react once I get there.

Why Women in Prison Lose Their Dreams

One of the most gut-wrenching things I learned about a woman in the weekly workshop I teach in prison was that her mother shot her up with heroin for the FIRST time when she was 10-yrs old.  That was until today when I was told that a woman in my class was recently set on fire by her pimp.  I learned this about 2 hours ago.  There is a new hole in my heart left by the part that feels as if it was scooped away and dropped into the pit of my stomach.

Another woman shared that she set HERSELF on fire while smoking crack.  Others have been battered to a pulp.  Most have lost their children.  I've heard stories like this week after week after week and if I EVER become inured to them it will be the signal to stop.  That will never happen.

These women, at one time or another have lived their dreams that arose from their talents.  They have been on their high-school debate teams, restaurant owners, professional organizers, ice skaters and nurses.  They've been sober, parents, dance instructors and world travelers.  One or several missteps have broken some of them, crushing their spirit and the hope that they will ever be who they were meant to become.

Because of their criminal backgrounds and repeat felonies, one woman can never be the judge she wanted to be.  One will never be able to work with children, the one thing she knows she's good at.  Others will go back to the way they ran their lives before they became incarcerated, turning tricks and forging checks to make the money they need to support a daily drug habit.  They admit that in no time in their lives did they dream of giving a guy a hand job for $20.

Today, a young woman asked if I knew how to interpret dreams.  I said that I could take a shot at it and here's what she shared:

"In my dream which I have a lot, I'm at the methadone clinic and Jesus is standing right next to me.  He's there to get his fix too.  He tells me that if I don't stop using I will die and that God will never forgive me.  He says that if I do stop, there is a chance that my son will forgive me and that God will too."

To the rest of us this seemed rather obvious.  One of the women responded by saying, "Yeah, it means stop fucking using!"  Point taken.

I've asked the women to write about their dreams and the steps they might take to achieve them and to next week share them with the class.   I can't imagine what a woman who has been set on fire will say, but I just want to tell her so very badly that the world is okay and that there is room in it for people like her to succeed.  How in the world would she ever believe that that is the case?

Jews Gone Mild

I will start by saying that I'm totally projecting.  I'M the Jew who went slightly "mild," AND, "mild" rhymes nicely with "wild" of the posts from two summers ago, "Jews Gone Wild Parts I and II."  I can't have a bunch of hysterical and defensive Jews on my hand.  Not with this hangover.

In all actuality, I wasn't all THAT mild.  I did begin drinking (wine in stadium size cups) at noon.  Less than 2 hours later, I was asking around for a menthol cigarette with a slight tinge of desperation.  Like so many others, camp is the ONLY place I smoke, every two years.  I swore up and down that I wouldn't this year and well, I found myself buying my first pack of cigarettes in two years ($9.45??????  I remember when they were 75 cents.  I say this with full knowledge that I'm dating myself.)  I ordered the most non-cigarette of cigarettes, the "un"-cigarette-Virgina Slims Ultra Lights, words that have never come out of my mouth.  (A young gay man standing behind me who I hadn't noticed, whispered in my ear "Those are girly cigarettes" and I said "OOOH, GURL, SNAP" and we sashayed out of the gas station like RuPaul.  Okay the sashaying part didn't happen.  Maybe in Provincetown but certainly not in Winsted, Connecticut.)

I have said this before and I will say it again--there is NOTHING like being at a place where I spent 15 summers of my life.  Being with these people is like being at Woodstock without the acid and tents, and no one is naked, at least in public.  It's bear hugs and lip kisses and rotating one-on-one time, bringing each other up-to-speed on the things that have happened during the two years since we've all been together.  With the women, it's talking about the onset of menopause and how we pee when we sneeze and laugh.  I'm not exactly sure what the men talk about.

For reasons I don't quite understand, my dear friend Beth (I'll talk more about her later) was hawking Tootsie Pop Drops like a secret plant from the company.  They've been around since the 70s and I'm not quite sure how she didn't know this.  She developed a sales pitch and offered them to everybody.  Nothing buffered her enthusiasm more than when one of the guys said "They're like Tootsie Pops but you don't have to fuck with the stick."  Beth raised her arms and did a victory lap around the softball field (Okay, the victory lap around the softball field part didn't happen.  Maybe it would have if she hadn't consumed a 6-pack of beer by that point and the walk to the softball field wasn't more than 50 paces.)

We watched from the bleachers as middle-aged men played 1/2 court basketball.  They wheezed and sweat but didn't let-up for a second.  Like years before, one of them ended up injured and Beth and I watched in awe as our camp mate chiropractor worked with great patience and care on the what seemed like a very painful injury.  I offered up the painkillers I travel with and within seconds our resident anesthesiologist was looking it up on a drug reference app to make sure he could take it with alcohol.

The success of some of these people is accompanied by a humility I've never seen before. The publisher of one of the most successful magazines today and the owner of the most famous bakery in New York City who kicked-off our country's obsession with cupcakes are experiencing the weekend like the rest of us.  They sleep in the bunks with their friends and have beers in their hands, putting their busy lives behind them without a thought.  There are attorneys, hedge fund managers, professors, great parents and butchers and bakers and candlestick makers.  I'm collecting unemployment but people came up to me all weekend saying "I love your blog posts about prison," or "I loved your post about your best friend," and I had NO idea they even read my work.  Based on Facebook comments everyone said how happy they were for me that I had found my true love, and based on my husband's comments knew that he is a great guy.

I shared a hotel room with my friend Beth who is pretty sure she was bitten by bed bugs all over her arms.  Judging by the MANY burn holes in our blankets it is entirely possible.  She knows me VERY well and got my full-on rules about how she needed to conduct herself in our room as to indulge my well-known high-maintenance need for sleep.  On the first night when she was reading a library book with a very crinkly book jacket I got slightly hysterical.  On the second night when she barreled into our room at 3:30 in the morning I considered getting up and driving home.  The following morning when she woke up making sounds like an old man in a nursing home I resolved to get my own room next time.  We laughed with each other all weekend.  Her Brooklyn girl appeared for 48  hours.  There's nothing quite like the Brooklyn girl in Beth.

Sadly, we have gotten to the age where we are starting to experience the death of many people we have known from summers past.  There are those who died in their twenties and those who have died in their 70s.  We held a very touching candlelight memorial in their honor, floating lit candles, personal words written on paper plates, and floated them in the lake.  We used to do this on the last night of camp, writing memories of the summer just ending, so this time took on a very different meaning.  It moved us all as we thought silently of these significant losses.

We spent our last night at the same bar we had spent the night before, the hours ticking down until we had to re-enter our routines back home.  It's a bizarro universe we're in for 48 hours where full-on breakfasts for 5 people ends up under $40, and shots of tequila are served in little medicine cups.  Not only did I have my king-sized Tempur-Pedic beckoning me but I found myself really missing my husband, my daughter and even my lunatic dog.  With my head in his lap I showed my husband pictures and videos of the weekend on Facebook and I'm waiting for the onslaught that will appear today.  I will yell at my friends for posting bad pictures of me and force them to take them down.  I will get wistful for those lovely, smiling pictures of people whose faces haven't changed in over 30 years.  It's entirely possible that we will be doing this well into our 60s when we will still always feel like teenagers.

The Care and Feeding of Self-Esteem

During the workshop I teach in prison on Fridays there is always one woman who says something so astute or so revealing that it momentarily catches my breath.  When it happens, I will approach their social worker after class and ask if I could possibly continue my involvement with them, one-on-one.  The feeling is generally always mutual although it appears that they are stunned that anyone would have enough interest in them to want to sit down and get to know them better.

In most cases, the women have a fleeting and unpredictable stay, either awaiting sentencing, about to be released or transferred to another facility so it is difficult to follow-up.  Now I know to ask how long a woman is guaranteed to be there so as not to gain their trust only to have the relationship end just at that moment in time.

I have recently based my workshop on the concept of labels and judgement.  I start by asking the women, after they've only seen me standing in front of them for about a minute or two, how they see me.  I instruct them to throw out adjectives based on first impressions.  I tell them that they can say anything, that it won't hurt my feelings, as long as they don't call me fat.  Usually I get a chorus of "You're not fat, you're gorgeous," or something like that. Some of the answers have been incredibly funny and most of them are very flattering.  They tell me I'm pretty, have great style, they will call me hardworking and happy.

A few weeks ago, a woman who didn't appear to be paying much attention said, "I think you have low self-esteem."  I latched onto the comment and said, "Tell me what you mean."

"It seems likes you need to fish for compliments."

Wow.  She was totally onto me.  We held each other's gaze for a few seconds and she knew that she had hit the nail right on (my) head.

I have written about the self-loathing I have for my body, how when I do my daily body scan I'm pretty disgusted.  When I see my underarm jiggle I want to cry.  I've recently noticed in pictures that my elbows are getting wrinkly and my knees are looking very aged.  When I recently weighed myself for the first time in about two years, I wanted to cry.  The truth is is that like most of us, I only have about 10-15 pounds to lose to be within my "healthy range," but still the disappointment in myself overwhelmed me.  That number stuck in my head until I lost 7 pounds.  Now that number is stuck in my head.

The flipside is that I possess and project great self-confidence.  I don't need my ego fed because I believe in myself and the face I put in front of the world.  If someone doesn't like me or appreciate me I don't waste my time on them.

After class, I approached the woman and told her how astute her comment was.  She just shrugged her shoulders.  Afterwards I went immediately to find out her name and her circumstances, and how long she would be there.  I'm not allowed to know why a woman has been incarcerated but often she will volunteer the information during class.   I was told that she would be there for a while and received permission to go onto her unit and talk to her.

When the officer told her that someone wanted to see her the other women got all excited and ran to her cell and told her to come out.  She seemed surprised and happy to see me.  We held what will be the first of many conversations, uncovering the many things we have in common including our love of books and writing.  She was very flattered that I asked if I could see some of her writing the next time we met.

This time will be about her, and not about me.  I'm thinking that my interest in her might feed her self-esteem a bit, help her feel less alone in a situation where she has completely isolated herself from the other women.  Anyone who "got" me so quickly is someone I want to know a bit better.  Will I stop the exercise I do, stop the fishing for compliments?  Probably not because we do indeed need a little confidence boost now and then no matter how superficial it might be.

Is Intellect A Safety Net?

This past weekend I was part of a 2-day training on how to speak publicly about suicide. I was in a room with six people, two other trainees and three facilitators, two of whom were also part of the unique group of "suicide survivors."  All five of us have very different stories to tell, different relationships to the people we have lost but the circumstances of why we were in that room together is what we have in common.  It instantly created an intimate bond that is hard to explain.

I have written and spoken ad nauseam about my mother's suicide including several previous posts in this blog.  I've got it down to a science.  As I've said before, my mother's life has become a series of ten or so bullet points about her trajectory in my retelling.  The more I have been forced and encouraged to delve a little deeper, the more I've realized that I'm doing her a terrible disservice.

After the first day in which we shared and cried a bit for each other, we were tasked with writing a 15-minute presentation that we would share with the group the following day, for feedback and constructive criticism.  We were given 6 guidelines and told to limit what our point was, based on the audience we thought would best suit us, to about 2 or 3 main themes.  The facilitators who I had interviewed with prior knew that my story was very complex and touched on topics including Holocaust survival, double-suicides, painful dreams, mental illness throughout the generations, the differences in how siblings grieve and so on.  As the day progressed I focused on some common themes and went with those.  Later that night when I finished writing,  I read it to my husband who said it was perfect and that my thoughts hung together in a way that made sense.

The next day, we plunged right in with our presentations.  The first was given by a woman, a statuesque and stylish 50-ish year old mother who lost one of her sons.  I had already spent the first day crying over her utterly devastating loss, but hearing it all in the context of a 15-minute synopsis was almost too much to bear.  She powered through and when she was finished, we gave her, and her son, the silence they deserved.

I volunteered to go next.  I had my words typed out in a 14-pt font but tried to avoid reading them verbatim.  I covered the basic themes and focused on disclosure, secrets, and knowing too much about this very complicated situation that has now pervaded 4 generations.  There were a couple of times when people jotted something down which I would learn in the critique.  No one was sobbing and I was surprised that I hadn't struggled with certain pieces of my story.  Not until I pulled out the below picture did I get a visible reaction from my small audience:

Obviously the person in the middle is me.  I am flanked by my stunning mother around the time she came to the United States and my daughter, whose eyes are the blue of my mothers.  That's an old picture of my daughter but we are all there, in each other, 3 generations of mothers and daughters.

The first thing people did was compliment my writing.

"I feel like I was just in a bookstore hearing you read from your memoir."  For me, it doesn't get any better than that, but, I sensed that for the two lead facilitators, both FANTASTIC and experienced women in the field, I had missed the mark.

They wanted to know where was the feeling, the "me" in the story?  And then, the mother who had lost her son, completely without judgement, said this:

"I think you use your intellect as a safety net."

Whoa.  Wow.  Holy shit.

I am under NO illusion that I'm any sort of "intellect."  Yes, I have a fairly decent vocabulary and I'm a pretty good wordsmith, but intellect?  I tend to forget the content of every book and every New Yorker article I've ever read.  I get the facts wrong in the re-telling.  Am I a deep thinker, searching for the meaning of life?  Do I sit in a wood paneled library, smoking a pipe, digging deeply into the language of Socrates or Stephen Hawking?  Hell no.

When I got home, I looked up the definition of intellect.  Here's the first in the list:

The power or faculty of the mind by which one knows or understands, as distinguished from that by which one feels and that by which one wills.

I feel deeply about almost everything in my life.  I wear my heart on my sleeve, am demonstrative with almost everyone I know, I cry at every perceived confrontation, and live my life with great passion.  For this one subject however, probably the defining topic of my life, I feel it in my head and not in my heart.  There are pieces of it that happen in my dreams that are devastating and I find that those are the toughest to write about and share, but other than that, it's the outline, the Cliff's Notes version of my mother's life that I can recite on demand.

There is absolutely no right or wrong in how we grieve.  I envy those who can feel the impact immediately and those who see signs that their loved ones are always present.  Perhaps one of the most important things I learned (and there were MANY) is that we need to honor the LIVES of the people we have lost, and not just focus on the nature of their deaths.  The one man in the group who I found to be extraordinarily soothing and, due to his own personal loss, is now a bereavement specialist, assures me that I'm not somehow broken, that I will get to the core of this eventually, in my own time.

Three Reunions

That's me on my first day of boarding school, a highly unusual place for a Jewish girl from Long Island to have ended up.  It was 1980 and I was 16, clearly with absolutely no interest in impressing anyone with the way I dressed.  None of my former classmates can remember what that number means but clearly I look very happy to be holding it.  And see that mole above my nose?  In my college yearbook picture the photographer found it so distracting that it was airbrushed out.  I guess that was a not-so-subtle hint that it was kind of ugly.  It has since been removed.

This coming weekend is my 30th reunion at the magnificent Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts.  I've written about the circuitous route that plunked me there in my size 16, purple Gloria Vanderbilt corduroys and floor-length purple down coat, landing in a world where people looked like this:

Our school didn't have wicker with pillows and it didn't look like a plantation, but it is still one of the most beautiful places I have ever spent two years.

Clusters of us have been there for other reunions, the last being our 25th, and every single time, every five years of catch-up, have left me beaming and in awe of what these people have become.  "Boys" in khakis with ducks on them have grown into bankers, realtors and hedge fund managers.  "Girls" in pink chinos are women with equally impressive careers living in fabulous homes, wearing, well, not wearing pink chinos.  The men who are holding down corporate jobs still get together to see concerts of the splintered Grateful Dead, and the women, those of us who didn't really know each other all that well while there, have developed adult relationships through visits, phone calls and facebook.

15 years ago I remember ducking behind a dorm to smoke pot out of a Coke can.  This year, without any pot smoking (for me anyway), I'll be singing Crosby, Stills and Nash Songs with a former classmate who gets more handsome by the second.  A year ago he was in town and while driving in his large and impressive SUV, we put on our old favorites and still sang in flawless harmony that gave me goosebumps.  My daughter and husband will hear me sing with someone for the first time and he's already told me how nervous he is.  If I look good that night, perhaps I'll use my phone to videotape it.

Those of us who have them will be bringing our spouses and children and I have this fantasy that my daughter will fall in love with the son of the first boy I every truly loved (he loved me back, "as a friend.")  I've already told her about him and how he's a little younger, but she said, "Well, he's not THAT much younger," and was totally open to the concept.  She's 10 and I think he's 8.  The kids will have an awesome time together, staying up extra late for a party on Friday night and then roaming around the school the next day, seeing the teeny rooms we shared with roommates we loved (well, I loved mine and I'm devastated that she can't be there this year).  I'll show my husband the town we used to go to, what has become very fancy-pants and as I say, used to consist of  a laundromat, Planned Parenthood and a Rite-Aid.  Now, there are sushi restaurants and boutiques that get mention in the New York Times.  Outsiders have discovered "God's Country."

In 3 weeks I'll be going to the 4th "Jews Gone Wild" weekend at the site of my old summer camp.  If you haven't had the pleasure, read this:  http://mylifeinthemiddleages.blogspot.com/2010/06/jews-gone-wild-phase-1.html 

In September, there's a third, yet ANOTHER 30th high school reunion of where I spent the first year and half of high school.  That's a different story for another time, but in so many ways, that is bound to be the most remarkable of them all.

Dine With The Kennedys or Drink With The Drunks

Walking into my weekly prison workshop I never know what might potentially trigger certain reactions in the inmates or what will lead to off-course conversations (always the best ones.)  From my almost 2-years of doing this, I know going in that in the course of 45-minutes, I will walk away with at least one moment that will impact me greatly--something that will stay with me for days, months and others undoubtedly for the rest of my life.

(For example, a few weeks ago a woman shared that her mother shot her up for the FIRST time when she was ten.  How the FUCK does one respond to this???  It was a large group that day and we were all stunned into total silence.  I have a 10-year-old daughter.  I was sick to my stomach and I literally have to shake myself out of the thought when it comes to me.  And yes, this woman, a very bitter one I might add, is an addict.)

In my last class we talked about labels--how we label ourselves and how others label us.  I've done this many times before and my ultimate goal is to have the women focus on their strengths and not the negative labels we put on ourselves or that others project onto us.  I go around the class and ask whoever is willing to share these negative labels, the ones affixed by others.  There are many common ones, "junkie," "bad mother," "bitch," "whore," but in this past class, one woman said "I'm a batterer.  I'm here for beating up my husband."

"Wow.  I've never met a woman who beats up her husband before," a young woman said.  I'm sure we were all thinking the same thing.

When you are sentenced for a crime with such clearly defined labels--felon, murderer, drug smuggler, pedophile--it makes it easy for our criminal justice system to define people, to put them in these little file folders and slide the drawer shut.  The women I work with are not there for such heinous crimes and I don't think run the risk of devolving into the categories above.  Many of them however, are repeat offenders, finding themselves back at the beginning like a game piece.

I asked the woman how she thought others saw her on the "outside," on the other side of the bars.  At that she began to sob, deep and gut-wrenching sobs.  The woman sitting next to her reached out and rubbed her back and the most I was allowed to do was get her some tissues.  We all gave her the space to cry, to release just a pittance of the pain she was feeling.

"You just hit the nail right on the head," she said.  I wasn't exactly sure what it was in particular that had touched her so deeply and I asked.

"I have a friend who always tells me I'm the kind of person who can dine with the Kennedys or drink with the drunks.  I'm everything to everybody.  When I have my makeup and nice clothes on, I am that person, and that's how people see me.  But when I look like this, people judge me as a bum, an addict, a bitch."

I asked her what her dream was, who she wanted to say she was.

"I want to own my own restaurant."

"Okay, so, why don't you figure out the path where you go from 'I'm a batterer' to 'I'm an ex-batterer,' to 'I'm a restaurant owner.'"

She considered the way that sounded and smiled.  I shared my own recent label-change, and how great it feels to actually become who you dream of becoming even if just the saying it makes it feel closer to eventually becoming real.  I think I've realized, at this advancing age, that we really do have the power to redirect our paths, even if there are many labels to be modified along the way.  Maybe I helped to nudge that woman along her way, or maybe she will forever see herself as a batterer, but I know it made her feel something good, even for just a minute or two, that she might just hold onto.

Re-Branding Ourselves

Every time I change jobs (which has been quite a lot) I joke with my friend Mark that I'm going to change my entire look.  None of my new co-workers would know that I've never worn a headscarf, false eyelashes and a fake tan.  His first question is always "Who do you want to be?"

Somewhere I know I've seen Jennifer Lopez with a Pucci silk headscarf and huge gold hoops.  THAT'S who I want to be--the epicenter of "boho-gypsy chic." She's got a perfect radiant dewiness to her cheekbones that I've attempted to replicate about a million times.  Forget the abs and ass (for now)--I just want to look like her from the neck up, because, well, she wears a cross and that wouldn't go over very well with my father.

Not only would I never be able to figure out how to put on a headscarf let alone glue on false eyelashes, I wouldn't have the patience required for spraying or rubbing self-tanner in just the right way. The most I've managed is tying gauzy patterned scarves around my neck, so self-conscious that I haven't done it right in that way that says I didn't have to even try, that I end up taking them off halfway through the day.  On some days I've managed to achieve part of my desired look, but fall short in one detail or another making me look more like a wannabe than a natural.  I envy those people who just pick things out of overflowing accessory drawers and jewelry boxes, slap on some lipstick, all in under a minute and just become "them."  I want to be one of "them."

Recently, I've re-branded myself in an entirely different way.  I've decided that "who I want to be" is a writer while holding down a "day job" working directly with at-risk populations.  I've decided that who I DON'T want to be is a fundraiser accountable to an often ungrateful board or boss.  Just because I was good at it for a while, possess the skill set that made me successful at it, I wanted to become "unstuck" from the 18-yr career pigeonhole that I found myself.  At 47, I was really scared about making this definitive choice, mostly for financial reasons but more for the rejection that I thought I would experience by hiring managers who skimmed my resume and couldn't see the  logic in how my overall professional experience would transfer into work as a counselor or advisor to former gang members, women in prison and everyone in-between.  I put it out there, sold myself in great cover letters, and I have gotten three interviews for jobs that I see as my ultimate dream.  I've successfully re-branded myself in the course of about 3 months.  How cool is that?

My husband and I have recently starting watching a show called "Lockup" which gives a pretty thorough look into our nation's prisons.  Because of my ongoing volunteer work with female inmates, it has become added insight into our country's really warped justice system.  The shows that are particularly heartbreaking are those that focus on juvenile detention centers.  These are kids who are absolutely on the cusp of going in either direction.  You can just see in their eyes the ones who have completely given up and will undoubtedly spend their lives behind bars.  You can almost see an immediate time-lapse in their faces, project the image of what they will age into and how they will look 20, 30, 50 years from now.

The other night there was a young man who was about to turn 18, the age when you get booted over to the adult prison system.  He had made a couple of stupid choices but was absolutely determined to make it, never see the inside of a cell again.  He was expecting his second child (that's an entirely different subject) and wanted to be part of his kid's lives.  He had been in a gang, what I have learned in my work is an alternate family that you NEVER betray.  Kind of like the Mafia where if you snitch, you either up dead or in the Witness Protection Program.

In an act of what I think is total bravery, he had his gang tattoos professionally removed.  He no longer wanted to be identified with that world, no matter what the consequences.  At his hearing, his probation officer and court-appointed attorney held this up as his absolute commitment to changing his life and it's what convinced the judge to release him.  He re-branded himself.

I really don't want to be anyone but who I am at the core.  I like myself and have a tremendous amount of self-confidence.  That being said, when a woman in my prison group described me as a "hippie" and another said I was "funky" I knew, at least for that day, that I had done an awesome job of the re-brand.  In that same class when they asked what I did for a living, on a day when my first piece was picked-up by one of the most reputable on-line magazines, I stuttered and stammered as I answered, "I'm a writer."

My High Flying Bird

My best friend is a junkie. Crystal meth has tossed his brain into unrelenting chaos. It has jumbled his lobes and pathways into amorphous masses in need of a fix. It has made him think that a young mother and her child recently sitting next to him on a plane were secret agents and that a pig stuffed animal was a recording device. He sees people in his bushes and leads the four or so people he insists are following him on high-speed chases through suburban neighborhoods. He gets angry with all of us for not believing him.

My best friend is a junkie. I winced the first time he referred to himself as such, but once he actually started shooting crystal meth instead of just smoking it, he said the label was the honest one. He got some strange thrill out of using the term, adding this to his other descriptors: “homo,” “alcoholic,” “unlovable.” His endless number of friends knows his flair for the dramatic, the relish he takes in all of these terms, so adding “junkie” to the list just feeds into the self-loathing that he thinks is being deflected by such sweeping terms. Trust me, he knows how transparent this is.

After two rather glamorous rehab stints for alcoholism many years ago and about 10 or so years of sobriety, he doesn’t think he has anything left to learn from rehab. In reality, he doesn’t think he has anything to learn from anybody. He plays us all by pretending to listen to us, agreeing and commenting in all the right places, manipulates us into thinking that he really HAS done that last hit. Several of his best friends have dropped out along the way, exhausted by him and his energy suck, and others, like me, have been deluded into thinking that this time will be different. Have. Past tense.

The handful of friends and family still willing to listen and spin their wheels have just come off yet another week of the madness that ensues when he’s gone missing. The cast of characters is different this time, the friend pool having shrunk and different core members of his family getting involved. It’s new phone numbers to put into my phone, new e-mails, and new phone lists jotted down on a random piece of paper. It’s hours of recap, bringing each other up-to-speed, venting. It’s putting spouses and partners on hold for days at a time putting them through the same scene they’ve witnessed many times before. When my amazing husband and I had a bit of an argument, I realized that this was now seeping into my marriage.

The last conversation I had with him he was on his way to a sober living program, all bright and sunny and optimistic. He was meeting a friend who would take him there for his 2:00 check-in time. Unlike the last program he blew out of, I wouldn’t have to wait a week to speak to him. He could come and go as he pleased (I learned that this place was in the middle of the worst drug-using part of town so I had my doubts about why he should even bother) so he could talk to me that night to find out what it was like. When I learned the next day that he called his friend saying first that he had a flat tire, and then that the axle fell off his car, that he later called her back and said he was an asshole and a liar, and that he never actually made it to rehab, I knew, that yet again, we had all been played.

None of us heard from him for three days. I said to everyone that he wasn’t such an asshole as to not call at least ONE of us to let us know he was alive. His brother started calling the coroner, morgue, prisons and filed a missing persons report. He provided his license plate number and the necessary information to ping his cell phone and see where and when he last used his debit card. A friend of his went over to his apartment to check to make sure that he wasn’t lying dead on the floor. For the second time, I started thinking about the eulogy I would give, how I would edit “A Day in the Life” to make sure that that last iconic chord was loud enough to have the impact that he hopes it will. I thought of the call distribution list that I would dole out to the many strands of friends he has.

When he finally surfaced, he told his cousin that he couldn’t believe that we were all so worried and that he thought we would all just assume that he had made it to rehab. He somehow had “lost” his car in one of the worst neighborhoods in LA with everything in it including his cell phone and wallet, slept on the street for a night and walked 15 miles to get home. He said he just wanted one last high and he would go to rehab the next morning. This set me off into my first rage. This made me resolute in my statement that “I’m done. I’m out.” And I meant it. I swore I wouldn’t call even though I feel like there are so many things he needs to hear, my anger being one. So, I didn’t. I didn’t until his cousin asked me, as a favor, to call him with some phone numbers that were in his lost phone.

I had to think about it for a while. I didn’t have any numbers that would do him any good. His closest friends had already refused him rides to find his car and later refused to drive him to rehab. He could get on a bus if he needed to. I finally steeled myself, armed with the vitriol I planned on unleashing the second he picked up the phone. His machine picked up on the first ring so I sort of stammered my way through my discomfort and anger. The last thing I said was “I have absolutely nothing to say to you.” I hung up and instantly felt guilty.

I pride myself on being that ONE person who would never turn my back on him, the one who wouldn’t judge, the one who would always forgive. After he wasn’t heard from for almost 24 hours, I thought that for sure I had sent him over the edge, that all hope was gone for him and that he had killed himself in the most dramatic way possible. I know better than to think I hold that much power over anyone, so dropped that thought pretty quickly. Despite that, I called him the next morning and said that he knew I wasn’t the kind of person who could abandon him, and that I would try him again later. (His long distance service was shut off so he couldn’t call me.)

It was another full day of people trying to make contact, but a bit less frantically. When his brother called me last night and told me that my best friend, the junkie, had started selling whatever he has of value, I knew there was nothing anyone could do.

My best friend is a junkie. The lyrics below are from an Elton John song that he wants played at his funeral (I think a long time ago he wanted “Levon” but that seems to have changed along the way.):

My high-flying bird has flown from out my arms
I thought myself her keeper
She thought I meant her harm
She thought I was the archer
A weather man of words
But I could never shoot down
My high-flying bird

The white walls of your dressing room are stained in scarlet red
You bled upon the cold stone like a young man
In the foreign field of death
Wouldn't it be wonderful is all I heard you say
You never closed your eyes at night and learned to love daylight
Instead you moved away

Bunnies in the Sun

I recently bought a deck of “conversation starter” cards to use as writing prompts for my recent foray into being a writing coach. They each contain a question like: “What literary character would you most want to be friends with?”, or “If you could ask your hero one question what would it be?’’ and so on and so on. In working with teens it’s a useful way to at least get them thinking about how to best express themselves and a good way for me to get to know a little bit about them before we launch into actual writing.

The other night with my family we started pulling random questions from the deck, my 16-yr-old stepson editing out the ones he thought were boring or too obvious before bothering to read them. When he got to this question, it took us a lot longer to respond to than any of the others before it:

“If you could know one fact about every person you meet, what would it be?”

_________________________________________________

This morning in my prison workshop, I asked the women this question. Like my family and me, they gave it some deep thought. I didn’t lead them in any particular direction but stressed the word “fact,” something concrete.

The first woman responded in all seriousness by saying she would want to know their shoe size. Well, I guess it is a fact but not exactly what I was looking for.

“Really? Why?” I asked.

“Well, I have really big feet and I want to know if someone has a pair of shoes that I like if I can fit into them and borrow them. I’ve been looking at your shoes this whole time."

(For the record, I was wearing fabulous brown leather clogs, wide strap with an oblong gold buckle. End-of-season sale at DSW last year, thirty bucks.)

“Maybe you have a foot fetish,” one of the other women pointed out.

“Maybe. Probably,” she conceded.

I pointed to other raised hands.

“I’d want to know where they grew up.”

“What’s their nationality”

“How old they are.”

“What’s their education?”

We agreed that the person’s answer to this question would help determine if there was any common ground between them, either putting them on equal footing or completely at the other end of the spectrum.

“Here’s how my husband and stepson answered the other night. I think my stepson said it first but my husband was very quick to agree with him:

"WHAT IS THE WORST THING YOU HAVE EVER DONE?"

I realize that this isn’t exactly a FACT, that it’s very subjective, but I thought it was a fantastic answer to the question. I said to the women that for some it might be stealing a candy bar and for others it could mean killing someone, but, I think the answer can say a lot about how someone looks at themselves, the things they hold themselves accountable for, how they look at right from wrong.

I didn’t intend for them to answer the question, threw it out there rhetorically, but they started answering anyway.

“Well, I accidently let 10 baby bunnies out into the hot sun and they all died.”

Somehow, a few of us couldn’t help but chuckle. This woman was in prison for SOMETHING and I’m assuming that it wasn’t for killing her bunnies. She didn’t take the laughter personally. “I was watching tv, and I guess I left the cage open and they escaped. I even picked up some that were still alive and tried to get them to drink but they died anyway.” Of course it was sad and horrifying to kill your pets, but she couldn’t help but giggle with us while reinforcing that really, she thinks it was the worst thing she ever did. When the next woman answered with "drug trafficking" the bunny woman said she would switch places with her in a heartbeat.

A couple of women aswered with starting smoking crack, selling drugs, hanging out with the wrong crowd and evading immigration.

In listening to the conversation my answer came to me, at a moment in my life where the question resonsates for me for all the right reasons:

“I would want to know what their dream is for themselves. If they’re 3, I want to know what they want to be when they grow up. If they’re 70 I want to know if they have lived their dream."

Here We Go Again or Why My Life Can Never Be Rewritten

“So with the time we have left, tell me about your background, the key players in your life growing up.”

Fuck. Here we go.

It's been 5 years since I stopped seeing an amazing therapist who I had seen for years. I wanted to start seeing someone again, someone new, someone who would concentrate on my here and now, the snapshot of my current life first and then perhaps go back to my childhood where the seeds are clearly planted for who we are. (Also, it was very clear when my old therapist had attended a conference that introduced new techniques and approaches to therapy, and I basically had to stop when she suggested my current me go back to talk to my younger me as if she were sitting next to me on the couch.)

I guess that I was deluded into thinking that I could somehow stave off my somewhat unusual upbringing for several sessions, kind of slipping it in after a few weeks or so—“Oh, and by the way, my mother died in a double-suicide.” I spent the first 30 minutes of my first session talking about my string of job losses and layoffs and how that made me feel like a failure that has lead to some pretty strong self-loathing. I talked about some really bad financial choices I’ve made along the way. I talked about my wonderful second marriage and how there was no way I could get through any of this without him. I talked about my very deliberate change in a career focus and how my work with female inmates and at-risk pre- and teenage girls has always brought out the best in me and how I can’t possibly do anything else at this point in my life, how any other administrative job in fundraising is just a set-up to fail and quite frankly something that I have no more zest for.

This woman is lovely, mid-60s I would guess, very gentle and astute. Her office is very comfortable and I was happy to see an abundance of pillows which I’ve always used to cover my stomach while I sit on the couch.

“Do you have siblings?” she asked, pen poised over pad.

I listed my two brothers and sister in birth order, giving a sentence or two about each of them, emphasizing as always my brother Mark who has been there for me throughout everything.

“What about your parents?”

I did the usual mother/father dog and pony show. When I got to my mother’s suicide, and threw in the “double” part, she put both hands over her heart and shook her head in sympathy. I’m not exactly sure what I said to lead her to ask a question a few minutes later that no one has asked before.

“Was she murdered?”

Whoa. I realized that maybe because we hear so much about someone killing someone and then killing themselves that this could have prompted the question. But, due to a lot of circumstances surrounding their deaths, it is entirely possible that the man she died with could have somehow forced her into something that she wasn’t intending to do. Is that murder? Would that make my “script” change? Double-suicides are dramatic enough. I don’t need to throw in the possibility of some sort of crime although there had been yellow police tape in an X across the door to our apartment. I’ve thought about going to the NYPD where a wild goose chase only about 2 years ago lead me to learn that that is where any police report would be kept, but I haven’t thought much about it since.

“I think it’s really interesting that you’ve chosen to work with teenage girls and women who are somehow suffering.” I thought about this for a second and realized that again, no one, including me had really made that connection.

“I’m not sure I ever really suffered,” I said pushing back a little bit.

“Well, at 13 you were left alone with a very sick woman while your father moved 3,000 miles away.” I didn’t really feel as if she were trying to convince me that I actually “suffered” but maybe, as almost everyone who knows my story, she was trying to give me credit for what I had been through.

We had to end at that point. I feel trapped, pigeonholed by my narrative. I’ve had a really happy life but I always seem to get pulled back to an unfathomable event that happened 26 years ago. In many ways this may seem hypocritical because I write a lot about this (and there is a lot more to come) but I want to believe that my present setbacks have nothing to do with my history, that they are somehow a character defect based on other things and not a rocky past.