girls, I’m Sharon Charde,” I blurted out, my voice probably too loud. “It’s really exciting to be meeting with you. I read this great book, Ophelia Speaks, full of stories about different lives written by girls like you, and thought maybe I’d come and see if some of you might want to be part of a group that could do that too.”
They were silent, blankly staring straight ahead, bored-looking. Sure that this crazy idea of mine would never work, I kept talking—what I always did when I was anxious— trying to pull their interest from its locked-up place.
“The world needs to hear your important stories. I want to try to help you tell them. What we do won’t be ‘school writing’, but writing from the heart, what is true and real in your lives, what you’re thinking, feeling, and struggling with.”
“Miss,” one of them called out, “I can’t write.”
“What?” I said. “Everyone can write, it’s okay,” thinking she’d meant she couldn’t write well.
One of the staff spoke up and said her words were true, that she was disabled and really couldn’t write.
“Support!” the girls chorused. I later found out this was a kind of all-purpose word used frequently for all sorts of reasons, but actually did feel very supportive.
“Okay. That’s okay. You can listen.” I turned to the girl who said she was unable to write and smiled. She gazed into the space just beyond me. I smiled harder, trying to meet her eyes. She didn’t look any different from the other girls. Finally, she gave me a wan grin. The small triumph made me feel a little braver.
”So let’s try to write today in the same way we’ll write in the group. So you can see if you’d be interested. There will be some rules,” I said. “Important rules.”
A staff member interrupted me to tell me they had no “rules” at Touchstone, but “expectations.”
“Okay.” I corrected myself. “Expectations.”
“Here’s the first one—you can’t write freely unless you feel safe. In order to make sure we are all safe, everyone needs to make some commitments—to confidentiality, number one. No talking about anyone else’s writing here or outside the group. Second, silence when someone is reading what she’s written. Next, no comments afterwards, no questions. No writing about anyone else in the group. If it’s too hard to read, ask someone else to read it for you, or I will. And finally, everyone needs to write, even staff members and definitely me.”
The staff members demurred on this last one. I let it go. The group hadn’t officially formed and I wanted to make my idea a reality too badly to derail the conversation. I didn’t yet know how thick the lines were supposed to be between the young women and staff.
“If you don’t like what I suggest, you can always write about something else. So let’s start.”
I knew I had to go for broke this first time. So I read a piece from Voices From The Hood, a booklet put out by a Chicopee, Massachusetts, teen writing group from “the projects” that had been started by an organization called Amherst Writers and Artists.
The story was about a girl whose drug-addicted mother killed her dog Pal because the girl hadn’t done what her mother wanted fast enough. It was a horribly painful account of violence and profound betrayal.
Staff members handed out paper and pens.
I asked the girls to relate a similar painful experience in their lives. To my surprise, most of them immediately focused on the writing. Heads down, pens working the paper, they wrote with absorption. Many volunteered to read, sharing stories just as horrible or worse.
“I would come home from school looking for my mom and find her in the garage lighting up a crack pipe,” one girl wrote.
“My mother wouldn’t believe me when I told her I’d been raped for seven years,” another read.
Still another told us, “I remember having my baby, how much it hurt.”
“Support!” the girls called out to each reader.
Another girl, Kaylee, had written that her mother was just like the one in the story I’d read. “I wish she’d never lay down with my father,” she read from a notebook. “I hate her.”
Afterwards she told me how good it had felt to have written and read the piece, but that a lot of emotion had been stirred up in her. I worried that she’d have no place to go with it, but then remembered Lori had told me in a follow-up call that these girls had weekly clinical groups and “advocates” on the staff with whom they could talk.
“Thank you for coming, miss. I want to join your group,” Kaylee asserted. “It will be good for me.” Her eyes met mine in total openness. “I cut off my bracelets, that’s how I got here.”
“Bracelets?” I was puzzled.
“You know, when you’re in jail at home you have to wear them.”
No, I didn’t know, but found out later from Lori that they were ankle cuffs that monitored the girls in home jail and beeped loudly when they left the prescribed space. Kaylee had worn them because she had broken her curfew too many times.
The dark room felt alive now, coursing with words and feelings and hands waving for recognition. I was reminded of my first teaching job, of the ineptness I’d felt in the unfamiliar land of a cavernous inner-city school. But I also remembered the surges of delight and connection I’d experienced in those classrooms stuffed full of restless adolescents in blue jumpers and white blouses.
Now, everything in me yearned to stay with these hurting, tough girls— to give them whatever I could. I hoped the staff and director would want me to come back. I hoped some more girls would want to join the group.
I’d been there almost three hours. It was 5:45 when I left, and all the way home I felt filled to my edges with a warmth and recognition in a way I hadn’t in so very long.
And it wasn’t only my experiences with my previous students that the young women at Touchstone called forth. It was my adolescent self, though that would take a long time to grasp. I’d always been a disciplined person; I’d spent my adolescence in what had felt like a kind of jail, a convent school in West Hartford, Connecticut. The strict limits of my Catholic life had been so confining that outside exploration had seemed impossible. Clothed and shod each day in a baggy navy dress and blue-and-white saddle shoes, I’d studied religion and French, English and Latin, getting top grades. I’d been editor of the school paper, had had a leading role in the senior play, sung in the glee club, been a Foreign Policy representative and debate club president, written essays that won Scholastic writing awards. I’d gone to a Catholic girls’ camp every summer where I’d been captain of my team, received awards for leadership, camp spirit, and mountaineering.
That’s who I thought I was.
But these girls showed me the stranger within me, the locked-up one who’d longed to spring free of the confines and limitations of my upbringing. I’d never done anything more forbidden than smoking in the woods behind my cabin at camp or wearing lipstick before I was sixteen. I’d wanted to, but had been too afraid of sin and punishment, the disapproval of my parents and teachers, of what breaking out would mean to my regimented life. So they were a fascination, “the other,” these at-risk girls labeled
