My mother had moved us to a dangerous place, a place where there was no protection, no safety. A place where the people around me didn’t seem to follow the normal rules of society. Left to my own devices, I had fallen into the landmines and traps all around me and been further wounded and maimed. But instead of giving up, crawling away to some corner to lick my wounds, I had risen up and pretended I wasn’t wounded. I’d joined my attackers in their goal of taking down the society that had rejected them, banished them.
Once again I had come dangerously close to going over the edge. Unlike my compulsion to molest the little boy, this time I had actually acted on my dark impulses. My only consolation was that I hadn’t crossed over into becoming a “criminal” yet. I hadn’t been arrested and put into juvenile hall. I knew I was lucky to have been saved from that fate. Had that happened, I surely wouldn’t have found my way back. I was bound and determined to not waste my second chance.
For weeks after the shoplifting incident, my mother stopped talking to me. I became invisible to her; she looked right through me, just like she had when I was a little girl and she was angry with me. And just like I had when I was younger, I started a campaign to win her back. I started staying home more and cleaning the house. I studied harder at school so I would get good grades. And I stopped hanging out with the more dangerous people in the neighborhood.
After a few weeks of the silent treatment, I begged my mother to forgive me. But she just looked at me like I was some kind of bizarre creature she had never seen before. Her look seemed to say, Who are you? Why are you standing in front of me like this? I don’t know you.
And of course, she didn’t know me. She had never really known me. Even before the cops brought me home from Grants, she’d only had her distorted perception of me, her idea that I was some kind of bad seed. Now, her belief had been confirmed and she seemed to have given up on me entirely. She talked about sending me away to a convent, her old stand-by. But even that threat didn’t seem to hold the same power it once had, for her or for me.
It seemed that she was at a loss as to what to do with me. She grew not only silent but depressed. She started drinking more and she seemed to be having a difficult time sleeping. I’d hear her crying in the middle of the night, and when I got up to go to the bathroom I’d see her sitting in the dark, smoking a cigarette.
Seeing my mother like that, seeing the anger and the power sucked out of her like that hurt me. I didn’t want her to be unhappy. It reminded me of all the times I’d heard her crying when I was little. My heart had gone out to her then and it went out to her now. It made me want to be a good girl again. It made me want to please her and make her happy. I hadn’t felt like that for a long, long time.
I was so afraid of getting into trouble if I went back to the streets that I stayed home all summer and watched TV all day—becoming more and more depressed in the process. When I’d been on the streets, I was at least active and engaged with other people, which kept my loneliness at bay. But being home all day by myself, I became overwhelmed with loneliness and boredom. I dealt with these feelings—or rather, didn’t deal with them—by turning to food. Food became my comfort, my entertainment, my escape from pain and painful memories. And it was a way to suffocate the rage inside me.
I hated the things that had happened to me and how those experiences had made me feel, and so I hated the world. My innocence had been stolen from me—twice—and that made me feel justified in stealing from the “men,” the authority figures who’d taken advantage of me. Steve and Harvey hadn’t treated me like a human being with feelings, so to me men weren’t real people with real feelings. In my mind, all stores were owned by men—in fact, everything was owned by men. So stealing from W. T. Grants was like stealing from all the men who had hurt me.
But I’d really heard that store manager when he asked me how I’d feel if someone came into my house and stole my things. I knew I would feel terrible. And I saw how upset he was. I realized he had been hurt by my actions.
Because I didn’t feel loved, or even worthy of love, I’d begun to lose my ability to have compassion or empathy for others. No one seemed to care about me or what happened to me. So I’d stopped caring about anyone else. But that store manager had helped me to realize that my actions did have consequences— not only for me but for others.
Being picked up by the police didn’t “cure” me. But it did create a major shift inside me. I became afraid of my anger. I didn’t want to get in trouble because of it anymore. But my rage and pain didn’t just go away, so I started acting it out in another way—against myself. I started stuffing food down my throat in an attempt to quiet the fury inside me. I ate so much my stomach hurt. I ate so much I almost passed out from exhaustion.
Usually we only had eggs, bread, potatoes,
