The following morning, I felt nauseous, anxious, bordering on panicky. I couldn’t remember why I was putting myself through this! I didn’t have a single positive memory from my time at elementary school. All I remembered was the feelings of sickening dread, being on the school bus and not wanting to go inside, afraid of not being accepted, of being bullied, of being embarrassed because I didn’t know an answer in class. By the time I climbed into my car that afternoon to go to the appointment, I had to force myself to turn on the engine and make the drive south to Lloyd Harbor Elementary School.
When I arrived, it was just before the end of the day. I was a little early, so I sat in the parking lot for a while, watching as the mothers came to pick up their children. The students all looked so young, so innocent. I thought about how I often blamed myself for what had happened to me as a child, as if it had somehow been my fault that I had been kept home all those years. I remember deliberately telling my mother many times, “I don’t want to go to school, I don’t feel well,” so she would keep me at home. But looking at the little children that day, I knew I couldn’t blame myself anymore. They were so small, so completely dependent on the adults around them. How could a child be held responsible for his or her school attendance? That was a parent’s job.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to go inside the building. Everything was so much smaller, much less intimidating than I remembered. I met with the assistant principal first. I asked him about how the school deals with attendance. He told me that if a child is as much as ten minutes late, the nurse is notified, and then a call automatically goes out to the parent. At the end of the week, the school office accounts for all absences. If the absences are longer than a few days, the school tries to meet with the family, and then a social worker and psychologist are called in before any legal action is taken. The assistant principal was matter-of-fact as he recounted the school’s procedures to me—like an accountant reciting end-of-year numbers—but when I told him that as a child I had been absent from school as much as a full year at a time, he looked genuinely shocked and disturbed. Next, I met with the principal. I told her my story, too. She confirmed what the assistant principal had told me about the school’s procedures. Then she paused.
“Are you angry about what happened to you as a child?” she asked.
I told her, yes. And I thanked her. In that moment, I felt a kind of validation and acknowledgment of what had taken place all those years ago. I was glad I’d come. Growing up, there had been so many invisible barriers and misunderstandings keeping my mother from seeking the help she needed. The visit to the school only strengthened my conviction that I had to channel my own experience into speaking out, to do whatever I could to break through silence, so that others wouldn’t need to suffer as my mother and I had.
Climbing into my car, I felt as if something had shifted. I had gone back to a place that had terrified me so much as a child, only to find that there was nothing to be scared of anymore. I was a woman in my fifties now. I had three grown children. I was happily remarried with my husband’s three children in my life as well. Driving home that day, I knew that despite the odds, I had made it.
CHAPTER 20
I kept going back, visiting all the places associated with my mother and my childhood, replacing each of the unhappy memories with new, more positive ones. By 2015, I had been to nearly everywhere on my list; Steubenville, Long Island, Philadelphia, and Manhattan included. But there was one last trip to make. I wanted to go to France, to the places I had visited with my mother and Robin when I was a young girl. And I wanted to go to Monaco, Grace’s home for almost thirty years, to see the palace and the cathedral where the wedding took place, where my mother had stood beside her friend on the most important day of Grace’s life.
When I visited France with my mother as a young girl, we never made it as far as Monaco. Monaco was a destination in a journey still unfinished.
In the years since my mother’s death I had often thought about contacting Princess Grace’s family, but I had never gotten up the courage to do so. Now I decided to write to Prince Albert—Grace’s son—to tell him about my plans to visit. The prince’s private secretary wrote back, explaining that while he would be out of the country during the dates of my stay, he had read my note. The secretary then said that she would like to arrange a private tour of the palace during my visit. I gratefully accepted. This acknowledgment of my mother and her friendship with Grace after so many years meant a huge amount to me.
In October 2016 I flew to Nice, traveling the short distance from the airport across the border to Monaco.
Until now, Monaco had always seemed as fantastical to me as an illustration from a fairy tale or one of the Technicolor scenes from Grace’s movies. Now here I was, driving through the tiny streets of Monaco-Ville and Monte Carlo, the pink-and-yellow-painted buildings nestled into the hills
