Starvation, Utah
Off the Rails: One Family's Journey Through Teen Addiction
Excerpts in Two Voices
The beginning...
Mom
I watch the ugly bruise form on my upper arm, while I struggle
to keep driving on the narrow rural road. Hannah remains
poised for battle in the passenger seat, her pale porcelain skin
flushed with anger, her lovely, long-fingered hands still clenched
into fists. Her pretty cherub’s lips, in a permanent pout these
days, part to scream at me, “Fuck you, you fat cunt, eat shit!”
Spittle sprays from her mouth to water the bloom of black and
blue on my arm. There’s nowhere to pull over, nowhere to run,
no way to escape this cage of a car. I’m trapped, just me and
this wild creature, and though I look for my fifteen-year-old
daughter, I can’t see her at all. Who is this child-woman, and
where did she come from? If she’s willing to hit me, what else is
she capable of? Will she steal? Will she kill? Am I the mother
of a monster?
Hannah
She gets me in the car, and I’m her fucking prisoner, and she
thinks she can torture me as much as she wants. She is driving
and lecturing me the way she always does when she has me captive.
It’s as though all my pissed off feelings roll down from my
head into my hand and form a fist, and I hit her. Stupid, right? I
almost kill us when I hit her. She swerves into the other lane on
our wanky little road out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere,
and I know the look on her face isn’t fear of an accident, it’s
fear of me, and that makes me feel good. I watch the bruise
form unevenly on her arm, like a map of the terrain we’ve just
crossed, and I know that bruise will divide us forever.
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As time went on, our situation worsened. Hannah began to exhibit high risk behaviors in ways that frightened us, and made us worry about her safety...
Mom
It sounds pathetic, but I never knew that I shouldn’t trust
Hannah. I wonder how many parents have fallen into the same
trap. She’s a good kid, has always been a good kid, surly these
days and a little mischievous, but she’s just going through regular
teen stuff, school stuff, boyfriend stuff, right? I read books
about hormones, and about brain development—the loose dendrites
in her frontal lobe. Not her fault. Just biology. A beehive
head, I call it. Hannah is not amused. She calls me an idiot. She
is right, of course. The warning flags are raised and waving.
Her hair-trigger temper, bouts of deep depression see-sawing
with manic energy, her open contempt for school, the growing
clutter in her room, mysterious burn marks on her arms, and her
constant need to be out. Red flags? Hell, her behaviors are more
like klaxon horns and flashing lights. I am blind, deaf, and dumb.
We worked hard to keep our daughter home. After therapy, the intervention of a school counselor, an independent educational consultant, a drug overdose, and a detox at what Hannah called "the looney bin" we made the terrible, heart-wrenching decision to send her to strangers, hoping that they could help her when we could not...
Hannah
Well, fuck my life! I’m in a wasteland with a bunch of messed-up
street urchins who are so bored that they want to fix me. I look
at this bunch of hobos and whores and know they have nothing
to teach me. They are dirty, they stink, and they are meaner
than hell. At least they’re mean to me. They seem to like each
other just fine. They sit near the fire in the freezing Utah desert
and chat away, like they’re at some fucking Girl Scout Jamboree,
watching me on the edge of camp with sideways glances, all
smug like I am carrying Ebola, and they have the cure.
I’m not allowed to join the group until I write my life
story, and they are making me live on the edge of camp until
I do. I close my eyes and try to imagine [my boyfriend] Dylan, but for some
reason the images that come are my mom’s face when I was
leaving, and my dogs trailing me out to the van like we were
going for a ride. I tuck my earlobes up into my cap, and decided
right then and there that I will have to go through the motions
to get out of here as fast as possible. They are trying to get
inside my head by knowing about my life, and if that’s what it’s
going to take to get out of here, then fine. I can crap out some
drama for them, let them stir it around, and get on the next
flight home.
The therapist here, Jason, comes the next day, crunching
over the scattered patches of new snow with his beat-up work
boots and camo pants, and I am all good girl, telling him I’m
ready to write my life story.
“That’s good, Hannah,” he rasps, in a look-through-you
kind of way. “You can sit in on group session today, and then
start the assignment during personal time.”
Great, I have to let the bitches take me apart, and then I
will have to take myself apart. Why? I’m fine just the way I am.
I’m fine. But the fire looks warm, and my mother’s sad face is
waiting just behind my eyelids, and so I gather up my shit and
join the group. Surprisingly, the bitches do not jump on me.
Maybe it’s a welcome gift. I listen to them, these girls who have
been abused and raped, the alcoholics, and the drug addicts. I
admit, mostly I think, “Get over yourselves, bitches.” But who
is this little girl, she couldn’t be more than thirteen years old,
why is she here? Who gave this girl heroin?
Mom
As November begins, the loneliness gathers around Hannah
like the darkness of the shortening days, and she finally writes
an abbreviated story of her life. We receive it the way we will receive
all of her communication. Letters and journal entries are collected in
mailbags from the scraggly, filthy groups of kids living in the vast,
cold, high desert, and processed by an office person at Second
Nature—2N as they call it, then shared with us online.
The writing, when we finally see it, is a scrawl, and I
picture Hannah, hunched over in the cold, layers of stained
clothing like I see on the website pictures making writing awkward,
maybe one glove off as she balances a notebook and a
blunt pencil stub. The content itself is in as much disarray as
the writer, out of order, confused, and rambling. The paper
shows the grime and smears of rough living, and I can almost
smell the campfire smoke wafting up from the pages I print
out. I gather the pages up and walk softly down the stairs to
her room, wanting to be alone with Hannah for a few minutes
before sharing her writing with Paul. Curling up on her bed,
still unmade and gritty, I push sketchbooks, dirty clothes, an
empty cup, and a spool of thick wire out of the way with my
foot and read her version of the family life that Paul and I have
built around our children. I read her bitter complaints about
her treatment at the private schools she attended, the deaths
of her grandmothers, the tension with her little sister, and her
over-identification with the troubled children at school. I am
puzzled. Where, I ask, are all the good times we had as a family?
There is not a word about the fun, the travel, her activities, or
her friendships.
Hannah writes that our love for her is tied to her accomplishments.
Do we really make her feel that way? Hannah complains about how
strict we are as parents. Is she comparing us to the parents of the wild
band of roving, underachieving teens who make up the downtown Santa Cruz
scene? Her story shuns us, our life, our values, our love. I am confused—and
yes, angry—to be painted in such a negative way to people
who know us not at all, until I realize that this is her story, and
she has a right to tell it her way. I suddenly remember a scene
that took place in our kitchen the year before as she prepared
to go out.
“Hannah,” I had said, flipping through the pages of
a cookbook at the kitchen table, “you might want to grab a
sweater.”
“You know how I hear that, Mom?” she replied, her lip
slightly curled in the permanent sneer she seemed to wear
during our conversations, “I hear you saying that I’m too stupid
to know how to dress.” No, Hannah’s truth is her own, and I
will have to accept it.
Once Hannah’s life story is on paper, whether I think it
complete or not, Jason asks her to reflect on the journey that
has landed her in the program. For some reason, she takes this
assignment on willingly, and as rough as I know the output is
bound to be, I am buoyed by the fact that she is finally cooperating.
The smudgy looking letter comes later that week, and I
find myself in the middle of eight incoherent, scary, puzzling
pages alternatively taking responsibility, blaming others, and
musing about the impact her actions may have had on us.
The disjointed letter, full of scribbled out paragraphs,
misspelled words, and frightening doodles, written by a young
woman who has always loved language and writes beautiful,
compelling poetry, is not recognizable as hers. Curling up in
my now familiar spot on her disheveled bed, I search for chunks
of letter that seem coherent. Hannah seems to be grappling
with the choices she has made:
“I had to hide what and where I had done for no reason
good enough to really hide it. I asked myself, what had I done?
And why did I do that? . . . I believe I am a liar, to myself and you, a selfish
person, and that I don’t recognize the consequences of my
actions. I know that blaming it on you must have made you feel
like a failure, and that the whole event made you feel inadequate
as a protector. Let me tell you, though, that you shouldn’t have
to feel that way, and that it is awful and inhumane I ever made
you feel that way.“
When I start crying there on my daughter’s bed, it might
be from the pain of reliving the night she is describing, or it
might be my relief that Hannah is finally taking at least some
responsibility for her actions.
My relief is mixed with the fear that Hannah will never be
the same again—my bright and talented daughter replaced by
this drug-addled shell—a confused child with a broken pencil.
If I had thought of it, I might have cried too about the
fact that Hannah may be manipulating me once again. I read
the letters two more times through my tears, jot down some
questions in a little brown notebook I’ve purchased, and put the
letters in a drawer, asking Paul to print his own copy.
Soon after this first letter comes Hannah’s first journal
entry. Jason tries to prepare us for it in our weekly meeting.
“It can be rough,” he says. “I mean, you know your kid
is taking part in some dangerous behaviors, but this is the
confirmation.”
Jason is right. It is rough. Paul holds my hand as we sit on
our bed and read the detailed list of her behaviors, a testament
to bad judgment in Hannah’s own hand, her scribbles acting
as confirmation of the lingering effects of the damage she has
visited upon herself. We read silently, together, Paul holding
the pages with one steady hand and me worrying at a frayed
place in the blanket as though trying to dig my way out of
this situation.
The long list of drugs is vague; did she even know what
she was taking? In some places she describes the drug by the
way it looked, or what it felt like, not knowing what to call it.
In contrast, her self-harm is described in vivid detail, the cutting,
the burning, the tattoos, where she was, how she did it,
what she used, how she felt. It is a methodical inventory of her
misdeeds, a recipe for hastening death. Hannah has obtained a
variety of drugs from friends, friends of friends, strangers, and
our own medicine cabinet. She has smoked weed and cigarettes,
and drunk alcohol. She has used a variety of amphetamines, hallucinogens,
and narcotics. She has huffed paint and glue and
gasoline. Her drug and alcohol use took place in parks, alleys,
friends’ houses, and sometimes here at our home. She has used
drugs loosely and freely, not knowing or not caring that they
would intensify the effects of the lithium she took to control her
mood swings.
She has burned herself and allowed herself to be burned
with cigarettes and lighters. And she has cut and cut and cut
herself in an effort to relieve her pain when self-medicating
did not help her. She has tattooed her self-worth on her stomach:
one cent.
I don’t know how long we sit there, Paul and I.
It probably isn’t as long as I think it to be. I do know that we
don’t talk, and we don’t move except for his grip on my hand,
which tightens just before he releases it and slips off the bed.
“I’m going to feed the dogs,” he says, his strained voice
betraying the incongruity of doing something so mundane
after reading Hannah’s confession. He walks out of the room,
leaving me with the damaged blanket and my guilt.
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