If they cannot agree on the divorce .....

[Oscar]

they can agree to torment their child:

This blog is too much to read. Awful treatment of their child. They are lucky that he made out alive after losing 17 pounds.

Perils of divorced pauline

[325troll]

they can agree to torment their child:

This blog is too much to read. Awful treatment of their child. They are lucky that he made out alive after losing 17 pounds.

Perils of divorced pauline

Oscar is this another article you wrote to increase traffic on fornits?   lol

[Ursus]

they can agree to torment their child:

This blog is too much to read. Awful treatment of their child. They are lucky that he made out alive after losing 17 pounds.

Here's the correct link to (and copy of) Part One:

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Mother and Child Reunion, Part One
Posted on September 3, 2011 by perilsofdivorcedpauline

Last week I traveled to a fly-over state, a place where men still wear cowboy hats, where non-smoking hotel rooms reek of cigarette fumes, and people have three tow-headed children by the time they're twenty-five.

I sat in a conference room with several other parents whose teenagers were spending their summers in the same wilderness camp as Luca. We were all Regular Joes, middle-aged, middle to upper-middle-class parents with startlingly similar stories. We each had a child who had spent years pushing us beyond our limits. Our kids broke curfew, got expelled from school, refused to comply with any rule, terrorized siblings, cursed us out, did drugs, sold drugs, tore up the house, argued incessantly, got arrested.

You know those parents who cluster together at cocktail parties, one-upping each other with tales of their uber-children's MVP awards, multiple AP classes, and fat acceptance letters from Ivy League colleges?

We were the sardonic, hard-knock, George Booth cartoon version of those parents, one-downing each other with troubled teen anecdotes over coffee and muffins: "My kid didn't go to school for six months straight!"; "My kid overdosed on his antidepressant!"; "My kid snuck out so much we padlocked his bedroom door and put bars on his windows!"

The instructors talked to us about how the wilderness provides therapy and natural consequences in the hope of fostering self-reliance and self-agency. Life slows down. There are no computers, cell phones, or TVs to distract yourself with. If you refuse to put up your shelter and it rains, you get wet. If you didn't pay attention when you got the lesson on building a cooking fire, you go hungry. If you hold up your group because you refuse to hike, you piss people off and maybe you get clobbered. If you run, you recede into a mountain-ridged expanse of juniper trees, dirt, and rocks. The Staff will find you sobbing in the dust. You will have to hike all the way back to your camp site, bone-tired, stomach growling, only to have your shoes confiscated so you won't run again.

Several times during the seminar, when the instructors wanted to give an example of how the Field Staff handle scenarios involving particularly resistant kids, they asked me politely if they could reference Luca. After awhile, I began to feel kind of a perverse kick: Look at me! I've spawned the most stubborn, most attention-seeking kid here!

"You're Luca's mother?" a dreadlocked, tattooed, face-pierced female Staff asked me. I started to sink in my chair until I got a hit off the calm, higher-plane aura emanating from her. "I'm so glad to meet you. I have had the honor of working with your son."

She, like the other staff members, were truly superior human beings. Spiritual beings willing to forego showers and recognizable food for a week's stretch, willing to get down in the dirt with raging, non-compliant teenagers, deflecting insults and curses via some sort of Tai Chi psychic energy.

They were a sharp contrast to us frazzled parents, who began admitting the things our wits-end existence had driven us to. The things no "good parent" would do to their kids. Some of us screamed. Some of us cursed. Some of us took every possession out of our kid's room except for his bed as a punishment. Two dads confessed they had pushed, shaken, and hit their kids.

The instructors leading the Parent Seminar nodded. They'd heard it all. They were here not to tell us how to "fix" our kids, but how to fix ourselves. The best way parents can help their kids, they said, was to get along with their co-parents. I eyed a divorced couple in the room, a formerly contentious couple who said they had resolved to be on the same page for the sake of their son. I sighed, wistful, and envious.

I had forgotten about a cockamamie clause in our custody agreement that required me to notify Prince 7 days in advance of any meeting I scheduled at Luca's school or residential placement. When Prince found out I was flying out for the Parent Visit, he fired off e-mails to Luca's therapist and me stating that I was "breaking the law!" and "in violation of the court order!" This, after Prince had sat in this very room, listening to the same directives about getting along with co-parents, married or divorced. Clearly, there was no page big enough for the two of us.

So I would have to focus on the only thing I could control, the thing the instructors asked us to write about in a "Collusion Letter" that we sent to our children a few weeks earlier. In this letter, we came clean to our kids about the things we do to invite them to behave badly. We have inconsistent boundaries. We rescue. We ignore. We act like martyrs. We lecture them endlessly about their faults. All of these things I have done to varying degrees, and I told Luca so in my Collusion Letter.

At the end of the Seminar, we got strict instructions on what to do and not to do during the next day's visit to our kids' camp site. Don't bring gifts. Do create space for your kid to open up in the family therapy session. Don't let your kid bully you into taking him home early. Do let him be your guide, as he is now a wilderness expert. Whatever you do, don't give him your car keys!

And most important: if your kid argues with you, don't argue back. Walk away. The instructor told a story about a mother who flew all the way from Ireland only to have her stone-cold kid refuse to talk to her. When she left, the kid bawled harder than any kid the instructor had ever seen.

Suddenly, I was crying. I looked up and saw the couple across from me, sobbing. They were the ones who said they were afraid their kid would die if he kept traveling down the same path.

"Sam might die," acknowledged the instructor. "This is his journey. You can't save him."

He likened the wilderness camp experience to a walkabout, the 2000-mile long trek aboriginal teenage boys embarked on hundreds of years ago, to mark their rite of passage into manhood.

"Imagine, the tribal elders come take your kid, telling you it's his time to go. He's got to walk 200o miles through the outback. Maybe he comes back, maybe he doesn't. You, as the parent, have no control over whether your kid lives or dies. You watch your kid walk away and wonder if that's the last time you're going to see him."

A silence came over the room, a silence that united parents who had flown from Florida, Texas, California and Mexico, to meet up with their kids on their modern-day walkabout. We all knew what it was like to hand over our children to tribal elders–in the form of wilderness program staff–who escorted them onto a journey they had to take without us. We all knew what it was like to feel we were booted out of our parenting jobs, to have our parent-child relationship severed too soon. We had spent years trying and failing to reign in our children. They were lost boys and girls, propelled away from us by unseen, unknowable forces into a realm of chaos we couldn't reach.

None of us had been able to save our children. So we handed them over to strangers who had some success in turning around treatment-resistant kids. But there were no guarantees.

The next day I slathered myself with sunscreen and pulled on cargo pants and a white t-shirt. I hopped in a rented 4-wheel drive and followed Jim, Luca's therapist, through 150 miles of sun-scorched earth.


The View from the Walkabout

We parked along a thicket of sage and juniper. The arid morning air burned my lungs. I scanned the seemingly endless vista of rocks and brambles. I fought back tears. Nothing had happened, yet suddenly, I felt as significant as the specks of dust at my feet.

“Do you think Luca wants to see me?” I asked, more like a child than a mother.

"I don't know," Jim shrugged. "When I told him you were coming yesterday, he bawled like a baby. But anything could happen. Remember–if he starts to argue with you, walk away."

Jim forged ahead into the thicket as a 20-something bearded Staff emerged, holding a 2×4 attached to a long rope.

“This is a bullroar,” said Knox, the laid-back, affable Staff who had been sent to lead me to Luca. Knox explained that Luca had written a list of his self-betrayals–the ways he sabotages himself–on his bullroar, then carved them off one by one to symbolize his transformation.

“You wave it over your head like this.”

He catapulted the bullroar, swinging it over his head in broad loops. The 2×4 sliced through the air like a propeller, finally producing a low roaring hum.

He handed me the bullroar.

"You're going to do just what I showed you," said Knox. "Luca is in the field, waiting with his bullroar. You'll both take turns, following the sounds, until you find each other."

I slackened the rope, hoisting it over my head and through the air. After 10 seconds, I started to gasp. My shoulders ached. The fibers of the rope dug into my fingers. I wasn't sure I could keep going. One thought ran through my head:

"I'd make a lousy aborigine."

--------------
Part II coming soon...

[Oscar]

Part II

-------+-------+-------

Mother and Child Reunion, Part Two
Posted on September 8, 2011 by perilsofdivorcedpauline

I sidestepped unruly tufts of sage, stopping several times to swing that damn bullroar over my head, wincing as the rope burned through layers of skin on my right forefinger. As I stopped, again, to listen for the hum of Luca’s bullroar, I felt my heart beat wildly.

I’d felt a similar overwhelming anticipation one morning fourteen years ago, as I labored to bring Luca into the world. I’d used the force of that anticipation to ride the freight-train-like waves I was convinced would rip my body apart. What would he look like? What would he feel like in my arms?

Luca emerged from my womb with a full head of shiny black hair. When I held him for the first time, the life I’d known reconfigured itself in an instant. It was as if all the days that preceded were leading to this moment. The loneliness I’d felt as the sole adopted member of my family, the distance I’d felt from my birth family, all of that slipped away as I stared into my infant son’s beautiful face. I birthed Luca, but he pulled me into the stream of life. This not quite seven-pound squirming bundle gave me a sense of connection that I had never known before.

I promised him that morning, silently, that I would protect him. He wouldn’t go through life as I had, with his nose pressed to the glass. My child would know what it was to belong.

Now, fourteen years later, I wandered through the wilderness, waving a bullroar through the air to call forth the stranger my son had become.

What would he look like? And if he let me hug him, what would he feel like in my arms?

“There he is,” said Knox.

Luca stepped out from a thicket into the clearing. He seemed taller than the last time I’d seen him, two months ago. His black shirt and cargo pants hung off his body. His golden brown hair had grown shaggy, half-covering his face.

Jim had appeared, seemingly from nowhere, but he and Knox drifted to the side, keeping a respectful distance.

“Hi, Mom,” Luca said.

“Hey, Luca.”

As we walked towards each other, I thought at first that he was limping. Then I realized he had slipped the hem of his cargo pants over the soles of his feet to keep sticks from digging into his skin. Later I learned that kids are put on “solo” the day before a Parent Visit to encourage reflection. Since they are away from the group, Staff takes their shoes so they won’t be tempted to run.

I could see Luca smile at me, shyly. I smiled back. I felt uncomfortably contained, almost removed.

Until I wrapped my arms around him. I could feel his bony shoulder blades under his shirt. I squeezed him closer and he relaxed into me. I breathed in sharply and started to sob–a choked, animalistic, thoroughly embarrassing noise. I buried my face in his hair, pressing my lips to his head to shut myself up.

I pulled back, wiping tears away from under my sunglasses, smiling to reassure him that I was not going to dissolve into a heap at his feet.

Knox stepped towards us and explained the schedule: Luca would take me to his shelter, where we would hang out and talk for an hour. Then we would meet Jim and Eric, the Clinical Director, for our family therapy session.



Luca led me to his shelter, a tarp draped over a hammock strung between two trees. He slept in the hammock and kept his clothes, food, and homework assignments in a thin nylon sack. We sat cross-legged in the shade of the shelter. He showed me his food supplies: tuna, freeze-dried concoctions, a cream-of-wheat-like grain meal called Germaid.

“Are you eating, Luca? You’re too thin.”

“The food’s awful. I’ve lost 17 pounds.”

“That’s too much!” I was horrified.  ”You need to eat.”

He blinked from behind his hair. He looked vulnerable and proud at the same time. He showed me the things he had made: a wooden spoon with which he ate his meals; a backpack constructed from branches and leather; foam moccasins.

What I learned, in varying degrees of truth:

He showered once a week. Hadn’t brushed his teeth the entire time. Didn’t comb his hair. Went a week without eating once. An entire day without drinking because a mean Staff wouldn’t give him water (dubious).

The conversation shifted to the subject of what would happen after the wilderness program ended. Jim had warned me that Luca would lobby hard to go home instead of on to a therapeutic boarding school. A psychologist had come out to the field the day before to administer psych testing which would help determine the right placement for Luca.

The educational consultant Prince had hired had originally thought Luca would thrive at a boarding school in a western state, one that focussed on experiential education: organic gardening, caring for animals, forestry. But the latest thinking, according to Jim, was that Luca needed a higher level of care — an RTC, or residential treatment center.

“I’m afraid he’ll blow his way out of a boarding school,” Jim told me.

I was afraid of that too. But I was more afraid of Luca living with truly hard-core kids, kids who were violent, who set fires, and hurt animals. As defiant and mean as Luca can be, he is at his core a sensitive, vulnerable kid. I couldn’t stand the thought of him walking single file with his hands behind him back, terrorized by deeply antisocial teenagers.

Luca didn’t know about the RTC possibility, and I didn’t let on because the decision wouldn’t be made until we got the results of the testing. As Jim forecast, Luca laid out his case for why he should go home.

“Boarding school is the wrong choice for me,” he said. “I won’t do well there. I need to be home. I’ll do better at home. I’ve figured things out, Mom. I know I made a lot of mistakes, but I won’t make them again.”

I sighed. Even if I agreed with him, there was nothing I could do. Prince had all the decision-making power now and could enroll Luca anywhere he wanted without my consent.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Luca asked:

“Can you get custody back? My dad shouldn’t have all the custody. He shouldn’t be able to make all the decisions. I want you to make them. You’d make better choices for me.”

“Luca…”

“My dad lied to me! He told me, if I signed this piece of paper saying I wanted him to have all the custody, that he wouldn’t send me away. He said you were the one who wanted to send me away, not him, and that’s why you shouldn’t have custody.”

The air felt still. And quiet. I was surprised that I didn’t feel angry. Probably because I was feeling too sick to get angry.

I took off my sunglasses and stared at him. He was fighting back tears.

“My dad tricked me! I don’t trust him anymore. I can’t believe anything he says. You wouldn’t do that to me, Mom. It’s not right that you don’t have any custody now. Can’t you get it back?”

I sat there, stunned, trying to figure out what to say. Jim had warned me not to “trash-talk” Prince to Luca, which had offended me. Did he really think I was the kind of parent who would do that? But now I understood why he cautioned me.

Because what Prince had done to Luca was unthinkable. It was the worst kind of abuse of power, worse, to me, than being physically abused. It was silent, insidious, gas-lighting craziness. I had known for years that Prince was manipulating Luca, but this level of betrayal was beyond anything I had allowed myself to imagine.

“Luca, I am so sorry this happened,” I said, cherry-picking my words. “It’s awful, being lied to. It must feel terrible.”

“Why can’t you get custody back?”

“Well…it’s complicated. It would be…I just don’t think it’s possible, Luca.”

“Could you take me to boarding school? I don’t want Dad to take me. I want you to take me.”

“I’ll ask him. I’d love to take you. But it’s kind of up to him.”

Luca started rummaging through his sack.

“My dad’s not doing his work! If he doesn’t do his work, I’m not going to get better! You should see his Collusion Letter,” he said, rifling through papers in his sack. “Parents are supposed to say what they did wrong. He didn’t do that, he told me everything he did was perfect and I was the problem, it was all my fault!”

He looked up at me.

“That’s not what you did in your letter. You told me your part in it.”

“Your dad and I both made mistakes. It wasn’t just you.”

He was silent for a moment.

“You know, I had that testing yesterday.”

“I know.”

“I did really well on the math part. The psychologist told me he could tell I put forth my best effort.”

I smiled, hearing him parrot a phrase that was clearly not his own. I sensed that he was starting to take in what everybody was saying to him, the myriad bits of worldview-changing information that had been heaped on him the past couple months. He was starting to make space for other people’s points-of-view.

“Do you know about this boarding school, Mom?”

“I do. The educational specialist told me about it. And I’ve seen pictures on-line. It seems like a really good place.” I hesitated. “I know you don’t want to go to boarding school, Luca, but I think it would be good for you.”

Luca blinks when he gets nervous, when he’s upset, and he was blinking now. I could sense how hard he was working to calm himself down, not to argue back, to accept something he didn’t want to hear. He looked up at me.

“Will you visit me there?”

Part Three coming soon…

[Oscar]

Part III

------+------+------

Mother and Child Reunion, Part Three
Posted on September 13, 2011 by perilsofdivorcedpauline

“I’m going to visit you, wherever you are. You’re not going to get rid of me.”

I was trying to assure Luca that the terms of the custody agreement ultimately had no bearing on our relationship, which would develop and grow despite who picked his school or transported him there. In my eagerness to patch the hole in his damaged psyche, I was perhaps skating too quickly around the jagged edges, around the gaping wound created by betrayal and manipulation.

We were sitting in the shade provided by a grove of juniper trees. Jim, Luca’s therapist, and Eric, the Clinical Director, were facilitating our family therapy session. Luca was struggling to free himself–and me–from the straitjacket that is the custody agreement, the suffocating realization that Prince will be making virtually every major Luca-centered decision until he turns eighteen.

“It’s four years of my dad making all the decisions! It’s four years of my dad deciding when I can see you!”

I started to clarify what his dad could and couldn’t do and I said something lame like four years isn’t a long time in the big scheme of things, when Jim cut me off.

“Four years is a long time for Luca.”

And it is, of course. Four years is about one-third of his life. I felt like a nincompoop. After all the time I’ve spent prostrate on a therapist’s couch, I forgot that what Luca really needed from me was to let him have his feelings, as raw and uncomfortable as they might be.

The session had started with “family sculpting,” an exercise in which family members take turns moving each other into certain positions, like lumps of clay. People see how one person experiences life in the family now, and how that person wants life to be.

“You’re my dad,” Luca told Eric, pushing him a stone’s throw from the rest of us. “You stand there with your back to us, and you’re talking on the phone. My dad’s always on the phone.”

Eric held an imaginary phone to his ear. Luca took my arms and stretched them out towards him.

“And, Mom, you’re reaching out to me, like this, you’re trying to help.”

Luca stood in front of me, yet just out of reach, with a “help me” look on his face.

“What about Franny?” Jim asked. “Where’s she?”

“Franny’s by herself,” Luca said, moving Jim under a tree. “She’s crouching down, and she’s crying.”

Jim knelt in the dirt, turned away from us, his head in his hands. Luca stood in front of me again, forlorn, tentative: I want you to help me, but I don’t know how to ask.

The family sculpting exercise ended with Luca showing us how he wanted things to be. Jim was Franny and Eric was Atticus. Luca placed us in a circle and had us all hold hands, with Luca clasping “Atticus’s” hand.

I was surprised when I saw the hand-clasping. A rapprochement between Atticus and Luca desperately needed to happen, but I didn’t imagine that Luca would have any desire to be close to his stepfather.

For the first year-and-a-half of our relationship, Atticus quietly tolerated Luca’s rages. He listened to him, talked to him, tried to befriend him. He didn’t react when Luca channeled Prince and screamed at me about all my wrongdoings.

Until he did. The house had turned into Armageddon. Luca was exploding everyday, for hours at a time. We were all losing our marbles. Atticus’s son Kevin, then six, was scared of Luca. He regaled his mother with tales of Luca’s meltdowns and she was understandably not pleased. When Prince pulled Luca into the custody battle and Luca started telling me he and his dad were going to sue me, Atticus lost his zen.

He yelled at Luca. Stood in front of his bedroom door to keep him from tearing up the house. Tried to alpha-male him into submission. I understood Atticus’s pushed-to-the-brink frustration, but there were times when he crossed a line into what I felt were unnecessarily harsh reactions. Atticus and I argued privately about this and never resolved our differences–although I didn’t let on to Luca. It was bad enough that he saw his dad and me fighting; I wasn’t going to allow him to witness another partnership divided.

“You defend Atticus too much, Mom. He yelled at me a lot. He’d stand in my room and yell at me to shut up.”

It was toward the end of the family session. We were sitting on the ground, in the dirt, on a layer of prickly wilderness things that dug into my butt. I tried to explain the context for Atticus’s yelling, that he didn’t lose it for no reason.

“See? You defend him, Mom.”

The two therapists gave me a “yes, you defend him” look.

“Okay, I do, I defend him,” I sighed. “I got exhausted, Luca. It was a lot of years with your dad attacking me, and you angry at me. I think I wanted a buffer sometimes. I wanted someone else to deal with things.”

“You used to get headaches a lot,” said Luca. “You and my dad would have an argument on the phone and the next day you’d get a really bad headache.”

Certainly, I had consumed plenty of Advil post-divorce, but I had no idea Luca was aware of my physical state, or connected the dots to stress.

“Do you think you underfunction?” Eric asked me, only the question wasn’t really a question. “When you were married to Luca’s dad, did you need him to make the decisions?”

You know those occasions when someone accuses you of something you find especially heinous, and a blast of angry heat wends its way up from your belly to your face? A blast of heat that, if it could speak, would say how dare you! and oh my God, is this true!

Because at heart I am still that shy little adopted kid who always had a stomach ache, hanging out on the margins, asking for permission, second-guessing herself into a pretzel.

“Well,” I answered Eric. “kinda…I guess. Yes.”

If Luca ever started coming for weekend visits, as Prince and I had agreed he would, I would have to take the reins back from Atticus.

Eric and Jim balanced things out by explaining to Luca that Atticus had felt the need to protect me and insist on respect; that families fall apart when parents aren’t on the same page.

I watched Luca listen and nod. The force field of agitation that had held him hostage the past several years wasn’t there anymore. He was calmer than I’d ever seen him. And I was calmer with him than I’d been since he was a toddler.

“I feel like I was abandoned, Mom.”

“Abandoned?” I didn’t quite understand.

“I think what Luca means is that he feels like a pawn,” said Eric.

This cut to the quick. After being caught in the middle of an apocalyptic custody battle, how could he feel anything but?

“You have been a pawn, Luca. I am just so sorry. I’m sorry your dad and I haven’t been on the same page. I’m sorry about all the upheaval in your life. The last thing I wanted, ever, was for you to feel abandoned.”

Luca didn’t say anything, but blinked behind his mop of tawny hair.

[Pile of Dead Kids]

I think this is a heavily fictionalized account of real events.

[Ursus]

The ending of Part III got cut off (maybe she hadn't posted it in its entirety at the time?), so... here it is:

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Mother and Child Reunion, Part Three (Last part)
Posted on September 13, 2011 by perilsofdivorcedpauline

*      *      *

We were sitting cross-legged in another patch of dirt. Dakota laid small piles of red, gold, and brown pigment on three "sacred rocks" in front of us.

Dakota was a wiry, bearded, tattooed-up-the-neck Staff. He was also clearly an artist: he had crafted the most beautiful shoulder bag I had ever seen out of red leather, black stitching and the tip of a deer antler for a fastener. If the occasion hadn't been so solemn, I would have commissioned him for a purse.

After the family session had ended, Luca whispered something in Jim's ear. Shortly after, Dakota had appeared out of the bushes and told me Luca wanted to give me a token.

Now, Luca dripped water from his water bottle onto each pile of pigment, carefully stirring the mixtures into paste with a stick. Dakota explained that we were participating in a ceremony based on an aboriginal ritual practiced hundreds of years ago by teenaged boys on their walkabout.

In keeping with aboriginal custom, kids are given wooden tokens when Staff feels they are choosing to make progress in a particular area. Staff doesn't tell kids what they need to do to receive one. The idea is that the wilderness teaches us what we need to do. When the kids begin to "see the way" without prodding from adults, they gain a sense of internal control and self-agency–and they receive a token symbolizing the area in which they have made progress.

"Sometimes kids give their parents tokens. Luca, maybe you want to tell your Mom why you're giving her this, and what it means."

Dakota pulled a wooden token out of a leather pouch and handed it to Luca. Luca then placed it in the palm of my hand.


"Giver" token

"This token means 'Giver,' Mom. I'm giving it to you because it's like you, you're a giver." He pointed to five fine lines pointing upward. "Those are hands — see the fingers? And the thing at the top is a heart.:"

I ran my fingers over the smooth wood, tracing the carved ridges. I felt the afternoon sun hot on my shoulders. A thin breeze cooled the layer of perspiration on my neck. I glanced up from the token and gazed into Luca's eyes. He smiled, shyly. That smile that breaks my heart. That smile that says I'm trying as hard as I can.

"Thank you, Luca," I said. "I absolutely love it. And I will treasure it forever."

Luca dipped a stick into the red paste and painted the image of the token onto my my cheeks and forehead.

*       *       *

When it was time to say goodbye, Luca began to cry, silently. Tears ran down his cheeks and mixed with the brown and red pigment that Dakota had used to paint the image of a winged heart. I handed him a kleenex.

Dakota had given Luca this token after Luca gave me mine. The winged heart symbolized the two roads that Luca could take: one road led to peace and the other to self-sabotage. Luca was starting to learn that the path he took was up to him.

I hugged Luca again, murmuring in his ear how proud I was of him, that I had faith in him, and if he kept going in the same direction he would turn his life around. I told him I loved him.

I tried to pull away but he pulled me back towards him. I held him in my arms for a long time, leaning his head against my shoulder the way I did when he was a baby.

Jim led me back towards my car when I heard Luca call out: "Bye, Mom!"

I turned and saw my scrawny, moppy-headed kid waving, becoming smaller as I walked away. I blew him a kiss and, in a spasm of wanting things to be normal, yelled that I'd talk to him soon. Which was a boneheaded thing to say, I realized a moment later. Because I didn't know when we would actually speak again.

Jim and I stood by my car on the dusty roadside. I told him how stunned I was that Luca confessed all the things his dad had said and done to him the past eight years. I said I hadn't been sure if Luca would ever realize what had happened.

"He's always known," Jim said. "He just couldn't express it before."

I gazed at puffs of white drifting across the turquoise sky towards the distant mountain ridges. Then I looked back at Jim.

"I've been played a lot. So I'm not sure...was he for real back there? Do you think he meant the things he said?"

"I think he was for real, yeah." Jim shrugged. "But it's tough to know. I tell parents, with these kids, see how they are in two years."

On the way to the airport, I ended up on my own walkabout. A walkabout that involved a flat tire on a dirt road in a no-cell reception area. Hours later, after I'd missed my flight, I stumbled into a gas station mini-mart, covered in grime and crusty face paint.

The gas station attendant motioned me towards the restroom without batting an eye: here's another one visiting her kid at that wilderness camp.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, scrubbing pigment off my cheeks and forehead with a wet paper towel. I didn't know what Luca would be like in two years. But I knew this: these past nine weeks in the wilderness had changed him.

And one day in the wilderness with Luca had changed me.


After the Token Ceremony


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