TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 183

Mon Mar 19 07:10:34 PDT 2007

March 18, 200000000000007-March 19, 200000000000000000000000007

Dear Crowd of Individuals,

	We ran out of milk.  This is a big deal. 
Meyshe downs his own weight in milk every day. 
We buy milk six gallons at a time, and it seems 
like we are back at the store every three or four 
days for more.  It's hard to believe how fast all 
of that milk goes.  Meyshe's older half brothers 
used to drink a lot of milk, too.  But not like 
Meyshe.  Still, we kept a separate refrigerator 
for the milk.  At my mother's house, there is a 
refrigerator upstairs in the garage where all the 
spill-over goes, and that is where we house the 
six gallons of milk.  This morning, I will have 
to take Meyshe with me and venture out to the 
Safeway to stock up on six more gallons.  We 
never drank milk when I was a kid.  It just 
wasn't our family's beverage.  At dinner we'd 
drink nothing.  No milk, no water, no wine, no 
soda.  We didn't need glasses at the table.  We 
just sat there and stuffed ourselves with solid 
food.  Good things to drink?  Chocolate milk, 
milk shakes, orange juice, apple juice.  That was 
for in between meals.  There were no fancy juices 
then.  Who had ever heard of a mango, let alone 
squeezing it for its juice?  Anyway, this 
morning, before I lose my gumption, I'd best take 
Meyshe with me so he can lift the gallon jugs of 
1% milk into the cart.  If we had a larger 
refrigerator, I'd buy eight at a time.  Imagine 
that!  Oh, and I think we're out of pickles.

                         ®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®
                        ©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©

Another Little Girl

	David had just flown off in  a big jet to 
go to a physicists' conference in Europe.  I 
forget where.  When he went off to Europe, it 
could as well have been South Africa, the North 
Pole, Japan, Detroit.  The telephone reception 
was the same no matter where the physicists held 
their conferences.  They are civilized people and 
like their conferences in centers of learning. 
They don't do Las Vegas or Tahiti.  He left early 
in the morning, and I was going to be a single 
mom for two weeks.

	The twins were ten years old.  Meyshe was 
beginning to talk in sentences, short ones, and 
with all the Rs and Ls being pronounced like Ws, 
but sentences.  Feyna was in the fifth grade at a 
private school that promoted its image as being a 
haven for kids who learned differently than 
others.  A kind school, a teachers' cooperative. 
Feyna didn't have many friends.  Those that she 
did have were fickle, being smily and nice to her 
one moment, and joining the Queen of Social 
Predators, Jovanna, in making her life miserable 
the next.  She complained that the teachers never 
interceded when kids tormented other kids.  They 
blamed the victim.

	At the parent/teacher conference in the 
beginning of the fall, the two co-teachers met 
with David and me.  They looked at each other and 
one said, "Do you want to do this?"  The other 
began.

	"The students don't like Feyna."

	"Well what can we all do to change that?"

	He said, "There's nothing you can do. 
The students have already decided."

	"It's early October.  What do you mean they've already decided?"

	"There's nothing we can do."

	I told them that I was aware that the 
kids treated her badly.  She came home in tears. 
"What can you do to protect her?"

	"We like to let the kids work these things out themselves."

	"Like, 'Lord of the Flies'?!"

	They went on to explain that Feyna gave 
off, "victim vibes," and she should enroll in a 
social skills class.  And what were they going to 
do for her?

	Nothing.

	I didn't like that school, but there was 
nowhere else to send her at that point in the 
school year.  We could try her in the public 
schools and go through the Special Education 
routine with an IEP and the advocate, lawyers, 
hearings, filing, "Out of compliance," reports, 
but I was already doing that with Meyshe and I 
really did think that if I had to do this for 
both Meyshe and Feyna, it might just kill me.  At 
least Meyshe had some form of diagnosis, but 
Feyna's disabilities were so much more 
subjective, so complicated.  She had ADD.  We 
knew that.  She would stare off into the rest of 
the universe in the middle of saying something 
and need to be yanked back.  She had anxiety from 
hell, worried about everything, real and 
imagined.  She would obsess about lightning 
coming in her window and killing her.

	"I know it's crazy.  It couldn't happen, 
but I can't stop being afraid of it.  It scares 
me, and then I shake all over and I can't sleep."

	We'd taken her to specialists for 
testing, and come up with Attention Deficit, 
Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. 
She couldn't concentrate to do the least bit of 
homework without constant assistance, coaching, 
step by step help.  Often enough, I'd look at her 
homework and Feyna and I would ask ourselves, 
"What are they trying to teach us here?" just to 
help her focus on the assignment.  Often enough, 
the answer would be, "Nothing."  It was busy 
work.  It was senseless, or it contradicted 
itself.  I would tell her she didn't have to do 
it if she understood the concepts behind it, 
which she always did, and throughly.  I'd leave a 
message on the teacher's voice mail saying I'd 
instructed Feyna not to do the homework because 
it was irrelevant, or it was busy work, and she 
understood the concept, or she worked on it for 
an hour and a half and I couldn't tell her to 
work any more on it.  Do not blame Feyna for not 
doing the homework to completion.  I told her not 
to do it.  Blame me.

	Needless to say, I was not the favourite parent.

	Countless times, as I would countless 
times do it again, I tried to educate the 
teachers about what Feyna could do and what she 
couldn't.  The teachers were thick headed and 
insensitive.  "She should just try harder." 
Actually, I'd never seen anyone try so hard.  She 
put everything into it, and she couldn't plug out 
the work like the other kids.

	Feyna was always kind to her classmates. 
Maybe she was socially clueless, but she was 
never mean.  There was one girl, Annie, who 
sometimes sided with Feyna.  But she sometimes 
turned on Feyna along with the other kids and 
Feyna would get hurt.

	I understood some of Annie's problem. 
Her family was crazy.  I knew about crazy 
families, but Annie's was different than the 
neuroses I was used to.  Her father was a 
forgetful, irresponsible overgrown child.  He'd 
promise to bring Feyna home by six, not show up 
til seven thirty and tell me that he'd just 
decided on the spur of the moment to grab dinner 
for them at a fast food place.

	"Why didn't you call?  The least you 
could have done was call.  I was worried half out 
of my mind."

	He'd hang his head like a scolded school 
boy and make excuses as sound as the one about 
the shoelaces being untied.

	Annie's mother was another story.  She 
was a terror.  She was short, shaped like a pear 
and wore skin tight clothes.  She talked.  When I 
say she talked, I mean that she didn't stop.  She 
would come in the front door to pick up Annie, 
start a monologue about something, and just never 
stop.  She would repeat herself and then repeat 
herself again.  Whatever the theme was, I could 
expect to hear that word mentioned in every 
sentence.

	"We brought Annie to Berkwood Hedge 
because we heard their approach was 
developmental.  That's what's important, to teach 
developmentally.  Some of the schools we tried 
were not developmental.  We took Annie out of 
Walden because it wasn't developmental enough. 
All the books on education say that the teaching 
should be developmental.  That's better for the 
students' development."  It would go on from 
there.  There was an engine that ran Peggy's 
soliloquies.  It was in overdrive.  Her voice was 
grating and loud and never slowed down.  No one 
else could talk.  When she came over, I'd try to 
occupy whatever spot she might plop her fanny 
down on so she couldn't sit down and ensconce 
herself.  She would go on for an hour, all by 
herself, all the time smiling this weird affected 
smile that you might see in a Fellini film 
slapped on the mug of a corpulent bleach blonde 
with lipstick being siphoned up the crevasses in 
her skin toward her nose.  This grotesque grin 
gave me the creeps, as did Peggy.  She would get 
on the phone with me and start ranting about some 
other family, some other mother or father, who 
was deranged, or a liar, or just a terrible 
person.  She would go into great detail about the 
hideous transgressions of her subject.  I would 
tell her I didn't need to hear this, but she'd 
keep going.

	Feyna would report to me the strange 
things that went on over at the Butterfield 
residence.  Peggy told Annie's older sister, 
T.J., that she had big boobs, and asked her to 
show them to everyone.  Peggy got out a tube of 
lipstick and asked Feyna to apply it to her mouth.

	"Your mouth, Feyna?"

	"No.  Peggy's.  It made me feel weird."

	Indeed.  There was something sickening 
about that, vaguely sexual, outside the required 
boundaries of what you ask your middle child's 
friend to do.  I thought of telling Feyna I 
didn't want her going over there any more, but 
Annie was Feyna's only approximate friend.  I 
tried to weigh the visits heavily on Annie coming 
to our house.  Something disturbed me about the 
family.  There was a very much younger son, Adam, 
maybe five or six years old, and I felt sorry for 
him, as I did for Annie and her older sister.

	I have gotten behind and ahead of myself. 
David left for a physicists' conference in Europe 
in the morning.  That night, after I put Meyshe 
and Feyna to bed, Feyna came quietly down the 
stairs with a blanket wrapped tightly around her. 
She called out to me.

	"Mama?  I have to talk to you."

	I brought her in and she sat huddled on 
the couch next to me.  She cried.  She was afraid 
to tell me something.  Little by little, the 
pieces of a story came out of her.  Six months 
previously she'd been at Annie's house on an 
overnight.  There was another girl there 
overnight too.  They were all in their sleeping 
bags, when Annie said, "I'm bored.  Let's play a 
rape game."

	My blood froze.  My heart leapt.  Feyna 
described, in between weeping and shivering, how 
Annie had molested her.  It was much more than 
show and tell.  Poor Feyna felt guilty that she 
hadn't stopped Annie from doing it.  She said 
Annie told her not to tell anyone.  And Feyna had 
kept this secret for six months, sleeping under 
it, living with it.

	From all the years of my father's abuse 
of me, I had learned something.  Now everything 
was put to the test.  I told Feyna that she'd 
done nothing wrong, that Annie had victimized 
her, that she was helpless in a house full of 
crazies.  There was no one to turn to.  And here 
was someone who claimed to be her friend telling 
her to do things that felt wrong.  It was natural 
to freeze up, not to know what to do, and do 
nothing as a result.  I told Feyna that when 
Annie touched her, attempted oral sex, toyed with 
her, her body and her conscious mind were put in 
conflict.  When you touch certain parts of 
yourself, there is a physiological reaction of 
pleasure.  But all the signs going to her mind 
told her that this was sick, wrong, distorted, 
crazy.  Being stimulated didn't mean she had 
asked for it, didn't mean she had cooperated. 
She was so right to have told me.  We sat there 
on the couch, Feyna folded into my arms, her 
blanket still wrapped tightly around her.  I 
stayed with her until she fell asleep.

	It occurred to me that, given my own 
history, I might not have my head screwed on 
tight.  The next day, I spoke with Feyna's 
therapist, Fortunee.  I told her the story as 
Feyna had divulged it to me.  I asked her if I 
were thinking straight.  She told me I'd done a 
beautiful job.  And she also told me that the 
abuses were so severe, that she was mandated to 
report the incident to the Child Protective 
Services.  This started a whole series of events 
that rolled over us and did further damage to 
Feyna who had to tell her story on camera as 
evidence, and had to be questioned in detail for 
the record.

	I called Peggy and told her what Feyna 
had told me.  She said, "It didn't happen."

	"Yes it did, Peggy.  We have to deal with 
this.  I was worried that Annie might have 
learned about all these things from someone who 
is abusing her.  I wanted to make sure she is 
protected."

	"It never happened."

	"Yes, it did."

	"This should go nowhere outside of our 
conversation," she urged.  "Let's just not talk 
about it."

	I agreed.

	Of course Peggy then mounted a campaign 
chattering to all the other parents how Feyna had 
molested Annie, and Feyna's mother was disturbed 
-  the same sorts of tirades against others that 
I'd heard her make to me.  The kids avoided 
Feyna.  The teachers did nothing.

	When the report from the Child Protective 
Services came out, they were very clear that 
Feyna was being honest and the Butterfield 
children had all been coached and rehearsed in 
what to say to the investigators.  When the 
official questioned the little brother, Adam, he 
sat on Annie's lap and when he answered something 
wrong, she squeezed him.

	The interviewer asked Adam, "What would 
you do if somebody touched you in your private 
places?"

	On record, he responded, "Well, if it was 
someone in my family, I wouldn't tell."  He got 
squeezed.

	Evidently, the Butterfield family had 
been reported before to Child Protective 
Services.  An unfavourable report had been filed 
against them.

	The trouble just continued to snow ball. 
The teachers had been bombarded by Peggy's 
lunatic harangues for several months.  They had 
waited for the report to come out before taking 
any action.  Were they going to throw Feyna out 
of the school?

	"Consider the source," I pleaded with one of the  teachers.

	"When you hear a story enough times," he 
answered, "You begin to believe it."

	After they'd read the report, Feyna's 
teachers put pressure on the Butterfields, and 
Annie was removed to another school.  Their cycle 
began again.  Complaints had been lodged against 
Annie from other schools she'd attended.

	For years afterward, Feyna could not 
sleep overnight at a friend's house.  She cried 
frequently, saying the fear would never leave. 
She would never be able to spend a night at a 
friend's house ever again.  She was crippled for 
life.  I told her that it might take a while, and 
that made a lot of sense.  She'd been badly 
abused.  But it would lift eventually, and she 
would be whole again.

	Feyna's father was removed from all this. 
I told him what had happened, but he never 
reassured Feyna, or showed her any extra care. 
He was mute.  Aloof.  Distant, as he always was. 
I missed having a full partner during a crisis, 
but he was so much better than my own father had 
been that I didn't complain.

	I had rehearsed in my mind what I might 
do if my father or some other man had trespassed 
against Feyna.  I just never expected the 
violation to come from another little girl.

                         ®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®
                        ©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©©

-- 

Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net