Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

by Claire Fontaine

  “Claire, you experience everything in your life in your brain, thinking you can control it all. You’ve been disconnected from your heart for so long, you are dead inside! You haven’t felt joy in so many years, you can’t even remember what it feels like.”

  My hands fly to my face. He’s circling me like a vulture.

  “You been burying your heart beneath your intellect, beneath your stories and drama for years! When did you first decide it was okay to kill yourself, Claire?” he says in my face. “Your heart is dying and the pain is exhausting you, exhausting you! I can see it in your face! You know it, don’t you?”

  I’m crying into my hands and can barely stand. I don’t want to hear this. He’s right, I don’t know what joy feels like, I’m always waiting for a shoe to drop. Even when Mia was tiny, my joy was surrounded by the shit that was my marriage. I had a few great years with her and Paul, before Nick threatened visitation.

  A few years in a lifetime! My heart has existed to feel pain and fear for Mia for so long, I don’t know what else my heart is for, and he’s shoving my face in it. I hate Duane for this. I’m sobbing so hard, I double over and he leans down and whispers in my ear:

  “And you’re scared to death that you’re never going to come alive.”

  I move out of the room feeling transparent. I’m vaguely aware of stares of pity or mortification, of someone squeezing my arm gently.

  “Claire, are you okay, honey?” Paul whispers. I nod and move off. I’m not ready to be with anyone. I find a solitary chaise by the pool and pull out the dinner I packed, two hard-boiled eggs, olives, walnuts, V8. What was I thinking? All I want is candy. I want three electrodes and a spinning star.

  I feel like I’ve been roto-rootered, only the crap came out the other end of the system. This is too much consciousness-getting at once. I feel like I’ve swallowed ten self-help books in one sitting and someone needs to burp me. Since I’m not about to raise my hand and get reamed in there again, I’ll just ream myself right here, poolside beneath the rising moon.

  Why do I have to be napalmed before I’m aware of how I’m really feeling about most things? Why do I have to think about how I feel? Which is a perverse statement—how can you “think” about how you “feel”? Isn’t that like eating an apple to know what the color blue sounds like?

  I think about the first significant decision of my adult life, my first marriage. I thought then that maturity meant using your head to guide you, not your heart. But, how much safer I’d have been had I’d listened to my heart about Nick, not my bookbrain construct of what I thought would be a perfect mate.

  My brain has been my sword and shield against pain, and where else is pain felt but in the heart? To slay one is to slay them both. Why did I stop trusting my own heart? When did I disconnect?

  I remember getting hurt again and again growing up because we moved so often for my father’s work. I’d no sooner make new friends than they’d be gone. I’d grow to love my teachers, only to have to say good-bye to them. But this feels too easy, it sounds like first-date personal history chatter.

  A memory leaps up in front of me, an image: the back of my mother’s apron. I am running behind my mother. I can’t be more than three or four. I’m trying to grab the hem of her blue-flowered apron and I’m crying, “Do you still love me, Mommy, don’t you love me anymore?”

  “No, I don’t love you when you do something like that!”

  I don’t remember what “that” was, but it could have been anything, putting a Chiquita banana sticker on a new dining room chair, moving something on her dresser from exactly where she put it. I felt such utter fear of her not loving me, I feel a crushing sensation in my chest even now just thinking of it.

  Why wouldn’t I feel wrong-bad-stupid, not lovable? Why wouldn’t it drive me now to have to be always right-good-smart, so I’m loved and accepted? Deep down, I never feel that I belong or am enough just the way I am. I always feel I have to work at it, to dazzle as much as I can with brains, talent, humor, if all else fails, with gourmet cooking.

  But, when you act like that, it shows. You’re trying too hard. One thing nearly everyone has radar for is a fake—and nobody likes a fake. So, I have created exactly what I feared. I’ve been proving myself right about being unlovable my whole life.

  Bing! Ms. Fontaine, you’ve hit pay dirt, won the SLB Jackpot! Pulled back the red curtain and exposed the Wizardess at the control panel, feverishly manning the levers.

  You grab the hem of her robe and whip her around and oh, she’s just a little thing, our Claire, and oh, no, look, she’s started to cry. All the levers have stopped and she feels so sad. Her devastated little heart.

  I was always afraid my mother didn’t love me. Because she never told me she did. Not as a child and only once as an adult, after I told her I loved her, on a phone call a few years ago. Like a dating couple where one of you waits for the other to say it first. She waited forty years.

  When I get back to the room at the end of the night, I don’t feel like talking. Which means the room is practically silent. I look at Paul’s homework before we go to bed and see that the feedback he got most was that he’s detached, withdrawn, avoids risk. How transparent we are in spite of ourselves.

  After lunch on the second day, a father who looks like the Marlboro man says he’s upset at how little guilt his son feels about what he’s done. We all nod in agreement.

  “What he’s done, huh?” Duane comments lightly.

  “Yeah. If he doesn’t feel guilty about what he’s done to the family, what’s to stop him from coming home and doing the same stuff?”

  Duane glances up, ruminating on this. He draws a breath to speak, stops himself, puts his hands in his pockets and looks down, nodding his head. The room’s getting nervous because we have no idea what to expect.

  Duane starts out pleasantly. “You know, when I do this seminar with your kids, we’re not in a nice, air-conditioned room like this. We’re in a room that gets hot very quickly, and you know how teenage boys sweat,” he chuckles. “That room gets hot and it starts to smell.” His voice starts rising. “It stinks from sweat because your kids are working so hard. Because they’re dealing with all the pain and the guilt and the shame they feel for hurting you!”

  He starts pacing across the front row, booming and jabbing the air. “I get punched, I get kicked, they spit on me. Your kids are carrying around so much guilt, it would make you sick to see it, sick! They’ve been numbing it with drugs, with sex, with alcohol, with violence. They cry out in agony, they cry out!” he bellows. “And you know who they cry out for? They cry out for YOU, every one of them! They cry out for Mommy and Daddy! They cry so hard, they vomit. I watch your children vomit!”

  Chins duck and little cries burst out from mothers and fathers whose arms want to hold their sons and daughters, their babies.

  “And you know what they’re biggest fear is?” he’s yelling now. “That you won’t forgive them! All your children want is YOU, do you get it? Not your anger and blame, not your judgment or your self-righteousness. They don’t want perfection, either, they want you, the real you!”

  A wave of shame leaves us rattled and silent. He stands for a moment before saying quietly, “Now are you ready to get to work? To dig deep and see what you were unconscious of prior to this event in your family? To ask what you were in denial of? To ask yourself, ‘Where did I go blind?’”

  He looks into one face after another. Yesterday, people recoiled. Not today. Not those who stayed.

  “You know, one of the questions I like to ask is this: ‘What are you pretending not to know?’ He pauses, then repeats, “What are you pretending not to know? Because, you see, ladies and gentlemen, you always know. When someone says to me ‘I don’t know,’ I say: Unless, of course,” he leans down to the woman in front of me, “you do know.”

  This woman’s been smug since she got here, but I can see a film of sweat break out between her shoulder blades. He’s had her number fro
m day one.

  Before we leave for break, I ask Wendy for a few moments. She stands close and looks directly into my eyes. I half regret this already.

  “I didn’t expect so much…stuff…to come up, I’m not sure how to take it back to real life. It’s overwhelming.”

  “‘Overwhelmed’ is a choice, Claire. How would it look if you chose excitement instead, like you found yourself at a banquet of new possibilities, new ways of being?”

  “Are you this, uh, blunt, outside the seminars? Don’t people start avoiding you?”

  “I always ask first if someone’s open to feedback. If they’re upset by what they hear, they’re punishing me for being honest. It rarely happens, though, because they know it’s coming from a place of love.”

  “What, you love everyone in the seminar?” I blurt.

  “I couldn’t do this if I didn’t,” she says simply.

  This just blows me away. Because I believe her. Only love could make someone fearless enough to say the things she did. Our children are probably the only people we are that honest with. The worse their behavior, the more brutally honest. What she and Duane are doing is no different. Except that we’ve been carrying around our garbage thirty years longer than our kids have. No wonder they need pickaxes.

  The last night of the Duanathon begins like a 1970s episode of Mr. Rogers. He starts with a lecture about our “Magical Child,” the amazing boy or girl we used to be. Before we buried it behind layers of Fixed Beliefs that led to layers of Fixed Emotions that led to layers of Fixed Behaviors and voilà! that’s how you cooked yourself up into the great big onion you are now.

  If they’re trying to avoid the word “inner” child because it sounds too therapeutic, sounding like you came out of a box of Lucky Charms isn’t an improvement. But if last night taught me anything, it’s that Duane Smotherman knows something about being human that I don’t.

  The lights dim and we’re asked to get comfortable on the floor. I have to leave my glasses on the back table during this process so they don’t get whacked off my face by the flailing arm of someone who doesn’t regress quite all the way to the magical part of their childhood. I’m legally blind without corrective lenses, which will regress me to a preverbal state without any help from Duane.

  I lay back and close my eyes as Duane talks us softly through a visualization. A half-hour later I’m in the most glorious forest imaginable, feeling like happy juice has been injected straight into a vein. My brain has stopped fizzing for the very first time in, I don’t know, my life maybe.

  I feel more clear, aware, and open than I ever have. No, this isn’t feeling or thinking. It’s simply being. I feel whole, as if my heart, mind, and soul have found their way back to each other.

  I’m walking down a path toward a shimmering golden light. And there she is, walking out of the light toward me. A little froggy-eyed girl with big hair, in her favorite yellow dress. And she’s not wrong and she’s not bad. She’s lovable beyond imagining. She’s beautiful. She looks up at me and holds her arms up. I pick her up and she looks into my eyes and asks, “Where have you been all this time?”

  We walk hand in hand out of the forest into Agnews meadow, a storybook meadow near Yosemite. There’s another little girl there calling to us and waving as she gallops toward us.

  It’s little stick-legged, wide-eyed, laughing Mia. She takes my hand, only my hand is suddenly very small. I realize I’m not looking down at my little self, I am that little girl and I’m holding Mia’s hand.

  We lift our arms and fly away, together.

  18.

  Dear Mia,

  Please know that yes, I forgive you. Yes, we support you. Yes, we have faith in you. Full trust will take a little longer, obviously, but it sounds like you understand this.

  She finally forgave me. And in such a wonderful letter. I finally turned into one of those girls whose face lights up when Tyna walks in with mail, one of the haves. Tears come when I read and I don’t bother wiping them away. Sunny, who sits to my right, reaches over and rubs my back silently. I’m thankful for the silence now. I just want to sit with this feeling. I need this to stay with me, as a reminder why I can’t ever go back down the road I was on.

  Since Discovery, I feel bright and airy, as if I had been spring cleaned. Life at home with Paul is lighter as well. We’re feedbacking right and left, it’s irresistible, it’s our new toy. And there’s a playfulness to it. I’m experiencing some hostility here, Claire, is this a pattern in your life? Paul, why are you choosing silence, I’m experiencing you as making me wrong.

  Karin’s experiencing us both as scary and insufferable. “I think you’ve both been friggin’ brainwashed. Gimme a beer—or is that not allowed now?”

  “Of course it is, dear. Here’s a Corona.” I hand her a beer and smile at her like a Moonie. “Lime wedge?”

  She snatches the beer, giving me a look. “Don’t even think of starting in on me.”

  “Karin, I’m experiencing you as threatened,” Paul jokes.

  “Your marriage is what’s threatened! I’d kill my spouse if he said half the shit you guys are saying to each other.”

  “Not if it was something you really needed to hear,” I reply.

  “Some things are best left unheard,” she says.

  “Have you noticed either of us getting upset by it?” I ask her.

  “That’s the scary part. Paul tells you you’re controlling, read ‘bitch,’ you tell him he’s being a wuss, in so many words, and you two are laughing and hugging like you just got married. It’s like they sucked any self-respect you had right out of you. Mia’s gonna get home and want to run away all over again.”

  “Karin, it’s not criticism, it’s about helping someone get out of their own way. I wish I’d have been more conscious of some of my behaviors a long time ago. I’d have made some very different choices.”

  That’s probably the most important lesson I took home. I always blamed someone or something else because I didn’t want to blame myself; I thought “blame” made me a bad person. In shifting from “blame” to neutrally looking at the choices that I made, asking, how did I set this up, I feel a sense of power in my own life that has till now eluded me.

  As the weeks pass and the “seminar high,” as they call it, wears off somewhat, what lingers is a profound shift in the way Paul and I experience each other and life in general. And Karin has not only stopped joking about it, she’s decided to take the seminar herself.

  Because I have so much time on my hands now, I’ve signed up for a pitching workshop with a local writing guru. As he’s describing the protagonist’s mythic journey, he draws a bull’s-eye just like the one Duane did. And then he puts a Precious Child in the middle, trapped beneath that pesky onion, those masks and facades.

  Hey, he went through Discovery, too! I’m so excited to find another program parent, I hurry to the stage at the break to ask him excitedly which facility his kid’s in. He looks down at me, like four feet down at me, and says with amused disdain, “This technology has been around since the seventies. Everyone from IBM to tantric sex workshops uses it.”

  Uh, never mind, I mumble, my face burning. Now, Claire, I remind myself, humiliation is a choice, what are you making it mean, what are you choosing to feel?

  I’m choosing to feel like he chose to be an arrogant asshole is what. Sometimes, being unenlightened feels so much better.

  We see her sitting at the med counter, the new girl, Brooke. She’s skinny, sweaty, and dirty as only a junkie can be and from her glaring expression and her leg shaking rapidly, she’s already in withdrawal. Poor thing, I remember sitting there and it sucks.

  We walk past her to the classroom and as we’re about to cross in, Miss Zuza says, “Mia, Samantha, und Sunny, herausfallen, bitte (fall out ofline).”

  I hope I’ve been chosen to do an intake. When someone new comes, girls are always chosen to comb through their suitcase. When you’ve had the same schedule for three months, you do get ex
cited at making a list of someone’s contraband items. While she’s taken to be deloused, I set aside her toothbrush and then make a list of things that include condoms, a Circle Jerks shirt that has been cut up and safety-pinned back together, and cigarettes, which I have a hard time not ripping open and smoking.

  She comes back halfway through our intake, freshly showered. Her silky black Uma Thurman “Pulp Fiction” haircut and full lips haven’t been missed by Sunny, who feigns interest in her intake list. I’ve been dying to talk to Sunny about being gay, but I’m not sure how she’ll react. Maybe she’s not ready to come out, who knows, she could be in total denial.

  “Find anything interesting?” Brooke asks foully.

  She must think we’re freaks, girls in these uniforms excitedly going through her things. She has no concept of how this place works, that privacy is nonexistent here; she probably thinks we enjoy doing this, just like I did when Miss Zuza did it to me.

  So much has changed since then. I’ve become so close with some girls and staffit’s hard to believe we’ve only been in each other’s lives three months. I appreciate being here now and on some days actually like it. But I suddenly want to be my old self, show this new girl this isn’t how I normally am. But isn’t it? Isn’t this the real me, who I am when the image is stripped away? So why do I suddenly feel so naked now, why am I dying to throw on my army pants and a Descendants CD?

  I don’t want her to see me as a matching nerd, I want her to know that I used to be part of that world, too. Not because I want to be part of it again, I’m much happier now, but so I can connect with her in a way she’ll understand. As I used to, she’s operating in the external world, a world where everyone’s so disconnected from each other that physicality is all we have to go by, how we determine personality and character, who we think we can relate to.