I chatted on facebook today with an old friend, a really old friend, a friend of the variety of playing dolls on hot summer days, of kool-aid and spying and hide and seek in the dusky evening light. She lived on our block, maybe three houses down, and she and her sister and brother were a mainstay in my sister’s and my life. When I was in 8th grade, just as my parents marriage began its final crumbling, it came out that her older sister, a year older than me, had an inappropriate relationship with a teacher and coach at the high school. Maybe I should say that the teacher had an inappropriate relationship with her, as she was, after all, a girl, in school still. There was absolutely no way that relationship could be deemed or rationalized as appropriate. I never found out the details: Life for me at that point was just about getting through, getting out of that small school, that small town with a population of 300. Imagine, the rumors. Imagine, telling the truth. The teacher was gone, quite suddenly, relocated to another state. My friend’s sister, too, was gone to me. I never spoke of it with her, I wasn’t that close to her really. I do remember the talk around town…and I do remember unabashedly KNOWING that she was telling the truth. I was not surprised when this news came out. I just knew.

Now my friend and I chat, many years gone by, many miles between us, and she asks, point blank, how that could have possibly happened, how that teacher could have placed his hands on girls backs and asses and no one stopped him, no one appeared to even slap his hands away. How vulnerable we were, we are, in the face of authority. I am struck too by how deeply hidden this story is inside myself. I have spoken of it over the years, but I have never acknowledged the power of it, in my life, in my friends lives. How UNEXAMINED this story is for me. How stories like this lie alongside other small town stories of incest, of the kids who were beaten too hard and too often, and with a belt, of the old man with no teeth who no one spoke to, of the retarded man who lived with his mother and walked with a strange gait. Stories abound. So many things hinted at, spoken around. But I still don’t know them.

We are like onions, peelings fall away, and we cry. Are there stories you have rediscovered from your past? Happenings that so make up the fabric of who you are that the threads are strong, but almost invisible. How potently this story, with its many holes, comes back to me.

How can my life swing so rapidly? One day I am fine, just fine, juggling work and parenting and emotion and recovery from my marriage and other days, things just fall apart. It feels sometimes like I am juggling and if I drop one ball, the rest are soon to follow. I’m learning though..to keep juggling while retrieving, to JUGGLE LESS BALLS at once. But still. One day I am strong as a bull, immoveable, ready to face this new world I have chosen, and others, I want to curl into a ball and sleep.  Can I just say? Parenting teenagers is really hard. You know how our own children know just how to get to us? Know if its whining that makes our skin crawl, or mocking, or know how many times to repeat a word and with such succinct timing  that we throw our hands up and yell, or give in, or smoke emerges from our skin? Well. Take that, my dear friends, with a teenager and times it 1000. Just remember that they can articulate much, much better now, they have a large and looming vocabulary that incidentally, WE encouraged by reading them so god damn many books from day one onward. They are 5′6″, six foot TWO, and they KNOW we can not pick them up when they misbehave and move them to the timeout chair. Having a teenager in the house is like living with a friendly baracuda. Hmmm. And here I stand, wondering how to out-manuver, how to teach, how to help, but still allow them their own consequences, how to love when they insist that what I give them for love is, in fact, not love at all, but control, intrusion, annoyance. Was I really like this, at 16?  I was, I was. So here it is folks, back in spades.

Patience, detachment, less identity as mom, more identity as self, water, good food, exercise, sleep. Oooohhh, Nelly.