Page two of Terri's experiences from her time in a group home for teens.
________________________I did see the Shetland Ponies but never rode them.
We took a lot of field trips to movies, skating, the Elks Lodge for barbecues and pool parties where some of the members would sing "You Are My Sunshine" and give us gifts and cards. On the 4th of July we had watermelon at the pool, cooked out, and swam all day. We weren't supposed to think about parents who left us there temporarily or for some of us, permanently.
While I was there I developed anorexia to get my mom's attention, hoping that if I starved myself she'd let me come home, but all it did was land me in the hospital for two months and I went back to the children's home as a bully. The staff used to drag me out of bed at 2 a.m., weigh me for my anorexia, and if I'd gained a pound, haul me down to the pool to make me swim six laps. Then I was allowed to go back to bed.
They kept telling me "We're going to put you in the hospital if you keep losing weight and they'll have to stick a tube down your throat to get you to eat - a feeding tube." I didn't believe them so I kept losing weight. I didn't think I was fat, I just wanted Mom's love, but it never worked.
Kelly and I terrorized a girl Rebecca, who reminded me of myself, by chasing her on our bikes, teasing her unmercifully as I was teased, and generally making her life miserable. I was 14 and wanted to fit in. Kelly, Jackie, another resident; and I started hanging out together. I soon became the ring leader of the bullying, going from victim to victor in my adolescent mind.
I remember "The Shining" and "Friday the 13th" movies that came out during the summer of 1980 but the staff wouldn't let us go see them. Turns out a couple of the older teenagers managed to see them somehow on their own during a home visit.
We had different levels which granted us various privileges. The higher the level, the more you were allowed to do. Then there was Punishment Level which you could be bumped to any time you did something you weren't supposed to do. Needless to say, Punishment Level had no privileges.
I kept all the letters my sister Cindy wrote me. She came to visit me too although I only remember my mom visiting once or twice. Cindy was my savior, my God, my confidante.
One houseparent couple, Bernie and Sandy, had a baby daughter and later had another. They took some of the residents to their huge church once and we sat up in the balcony, trying not to fidget after a breakfast of pancakes. We rode in a white van to all our outings and the name of the home was inscribed on the side so that everywhere we went, people stared and whispered as we got out. I was embarrassed and ashamed but the other kids didn't seem to be bothered by it.
All these years and I could never write about any of this, like a dark secret hidden away underneath a bunch of memories you'd rather forget. I can still remember everything as if it were yesterday - the rolling green hills and the promise that "this was a good place, a fun place, like camp." But as the months and for some, years, ticked by we knew this camp was like no other and that is what made the difference. I remember the faces, some names, the rules, the meals, the hope of one day going home and I wrote every day, my many stories, fantasies, poems, and prose. It kept me sane in an insane time, breathing, living, hoping as I told myself I was different from "them," from all the other residents who did or did not have parents. I repeated all this to myself regularly, silently, wistfully, hopefully as I hung on to my sister's letters of hope and inspiration. While my friends were spending the summer with their parents and their friends who lived in real houses and had normal summers, I was in a children's home with numerous others who all had the same hopes and dreams of one day going home. We never asked one another "Why are you here?" because we didn't have to. We knew it was because we were "bad" or "too much trouble."
Sometimes I'd hear my roommate cry and one time I laid in silence, crying quietly with her. We turned our passions and anger inward and some of us turned them outward in the form of acting out, being creative, or simply surviving.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to all those girls and boys. Did they go to other institutions like me or did they become the good children we were all supposed to be? How many others traveled through those halls since me? How many went on to lead "productive" lives? How many kept their souls bottled up until they felt safe enough to express their grief? And how many saved their kids from such fate without having the skills to raise them on their own?
I still question authority and I still rebel, looking for that loophole that keeps me from losing myself, spirit, and sanity as I write.
And l hope, dream, and contemplate about the home that doesn't exist, that is, until I build it.
