The Crux of the Matter

I remember one day walking down the street with my daughter and she started asking me questions about where and when she was born. She must have been about five or six. She asked me what it had felt like for me to have her in my tummy. It wasn't the beginning of the end. It was the last straw. I couldn't do it. I could lie to everyone in my life but I drew the line with my daughter. I was done.

This came at a point in my life when I had started to wake up at 4 AM every morning totally terrified. I was starting to crack. There was no going on the way it had been.

It was time for the annual "retreat" in Montana. As a younger student, I had longed to be the "inner circle" that did the special things (I didn't really know what they were) and had special privileges as well as spending a week or 2 in Montana every summer. I had been invited to Montana once years before and then disinvited so I knew about it. The rest that I knew about it was from the older children who came to CR and talked about everything (after awhile they must have realized this because children under 8 were no longer able to go to CR or Montana). It was one of the manipulations that kept you in the cult - you wanted to get into the "in crowd" with the "special assholes" (as they were called).

When I finally did get into the inner circle, I realized what a farce it all was. These people were no different from me. They were no more evolved, no smarter, no more saintly, no closer to heaven than I was. I didn't do anything special to get there either. Neither did they. It was totally arbitrary in some cases and in other cases it had to do with how tightly Sharon wanted to control you. I had always thought that when you got into the inner circle then the true mysteries of school would be revealed to you. What I found out was that there were no true mysteries to school. Being in the inner circle just meant that you had more things to do, more responsibility and paid more money. I finally got there and I had no interest whatsoever in being there.

The first summer I went to Montana, my daughter was very young. The first night, I was trying to put her to bed (not easy) and Sharon knocked on our door. She insisted that I come out on the porch with her to talk when I all I wanted to do was get my cranky daughter to sleep. She took me outside (you didn't refuse if Sharon asked you to do something) and waved her hand vaguely towards the mountains and said "This is what you have been working for all of these years." That's all she wanted to say. Well, yes, the view was beautiful but I could have just gone on a vacation and enjoyed a beautiful view instead of being subjected to Sharon's "work camp" because that's what it was. Endless hours of hard physical work, endless hours of cooking and childcare, no sleep, lots of alcohol. It wasn't a great week. I hadn't worked all those years for the view. I had worked for something else - for my own evolution, to find out the secrets of the universe, to come into grace, to make a more spiritual life for myself, to become the woman that I longed to be - not to see a view (no matter how nice it was.)

Shortly after my daughter started asking questions about her birth, we went for our annual pilgrimage to Montana. When I stepped on the plane, I realized that I could no longer go on the way I had and something had to change. One day while I was out there, talking with Sharon, I said that I really needed to be able to tell my daughter the truth. She said she would think about it. The next day she asked to see me and when I went up to her house, she told me that she had thought about it and I could tell my daughter the truth when she was 18. I said that wouldn't work for me. She said she would think about it. The next day, the same thing but she said I would be able to tell my daughter the truth when she was 8. That wasn't going to work either. She knew I was upset and started asking all kinds of questions about my husband. Things were rocky with him but that was mostly because my whole psyche was rocky and I couldn't hang on to anything at all anymore.

Well, things did change. I have a number of theories about why they changed but it might be a combination of all of them. I worked in the kitchen a lot and frequently Sharon had talks with students at the dining room table and I could hear everything from the kitchen. That summer, she told several couples to get divorced and of course, that's exactly what they did. She wanted me to divorce my husband as well.

My husband had had a stroke a number of years before and I think in some ways, Sharon was afraid to push him physically in Montana in case he had another stroke. She didn't want anyone dying on her property. My husband used that to sleep late and blow off a lot of rules. Everyone did childcare in Montana and my husband had been working with the kids (5 girls) on presenting a little play of a fairy tale. The second to last night that we were there, Sharon started talking at dinner about how my husband wasn't doing a good job with the play and that his work was really shoddy. This happened frequently with Sharon. She would "go off" on a student: berate, belittle, criticize, castigate and generally drag them over the coals. Then everyone would do the same thing. The student being trashed would beg for mercy and make all kinds of promises to avoid the greatest of sins: being thrown out of school. It happened frequently and it was always horrific. Several times, I had just left the room while it was happening. This time it was happening to my husband.

Sharon called him a "cunt". My husband didn't say a word in his defense and that infuriated her all the more. Everyone in the room, teachers and students alike, took their turns verbally flagellating him. It went on for hours. His friends of over twenty years all turned against him because that was the rule of the game. I said nothing. One woman actually stood up and started punching him in the stomach with her fists. She wanted him to react and he wouldn't. Very slowly, two of the female teachers, J and K,  came to stand behind me, one on either side, putting their hands comfortingly on my shoulders to show their solidarity. In the end, he was told to leave and never come back. They told him to sleep on the couch in the kitchen that night so as not to bother me.

Ok, we were out in the middle of nowhere in Montana. Not even walking distance to a town. Where was he going to go? The next morning he was still there. He worked on childcare that morning. After an hour or so, Sharon had someone relieve him on childcare because she said that he wasn't responsible enough to be on childcare and he would poison the children. His own daughter? I was trying to find him and running all over. I asked the person who had relieved him on childcare where he had gone and the guy just shrugged and said he didn't know. This was a friend of twenty some years. I asked if he had talked to him and he said no and shrugged again. I found my husband later hiding out behind our cabin.  I snuck out some food from lunch to bring back to him. He went to dinner that night and the whole thing happened all over again. There was a final meeting for the week. I wanted to go and tell them what I thought about the whole thing but my husband convinced me not to and I realize he was correct. I wouldn't have gotten out alive (psychologically). I also know that you can't win an argument with a sociopath. Later, my husband referred to it as psychological rape. It was.

The next day we were leaving for home. I remember a few comments that were made. One of the teachers, K, said: "Don't worry we will find you a new husband". The audacity. I had a husband and was intending on keeping him. Another teacher, J, said: "When you get home don't let him go home with you. Tell him to stay away for a month and then get together and talk about it." I said that I couldn't do that because that was once done to me and it was unconscionable and I would not do it to someone. We were traveling back to Kalispell in several vans. We stopped at Flathead Lake to do some shopping. We were at the chiropractor’s office.  I had really wanted to go see this particular doctor and I had really wanted him to see my daughter because I thought he might have an intuition about her that might help. 

One of the teachers who was traveling with us said that she felt uncomfortable in the van with my husband. I thought it was absurd. Absurd the way I felt when they said that he was poisoning the children. Was there really anyone there who thought he would harm his own daughter? He had paid to be there just like everyone else. I had paid to be there. We were traveling together as a family – husband and wife traveling with our child.  They had no right to separate us and anyway, where was he supposed to go and how was he supposed to get there? I was angry and I looked to a friend for support (the "friend" that Sharon had given me when I first came to Boston). My dear friend. I looked at both her and her husband and asked: “Does it bother you? Do you object to him traveling with us in the car?” Her answer stopped me cold. She said “You can not ask me that question.” I was raw and haggard from several days of sleeplessness and of being on a very emotional knife’s edge. I was about to scream: Yes, I can ask you that question and in fact I did just ask you that question. I knew there was no point in saying anything further. She did not immediately stand up for me or take my side as I thought my loyal friend would do.  If that was not her first impulse then no amount of arguing would change it. I was betrayed. I knew she was immovable. They were all immovable. I just had to hold my tongue the best I could and get the hell out of Montana. 

I got in the van with my husband in search of a car rental place or a bus station but there was no public transportation to be had. He finally said he would be OK and I left him at a bar where he had a few drinks with a guy who later gave him a ride to Kalispell. We were leaving very early the next morning and staying in a motel in Kalispell and I had to wait until everyone was asleep to sneak him into my room. Everyone had said to me that day that he shouldn't even go home on the same plane with us and after I sneaked him in that night, he said he didn't want to be on the same plane with everyone else. I called to change his reservation to a later flight and it cost $100. The woman at the airline asked if I wanted it on the same credit card that I had used for the tickets and I said yes. After I hung up, I realized that I hadn't actually bought the tickets but another woman in the group bought them all together. I felt that I needed to reimburse her before I left school so I wouldn't owe them anything and I did. I realize now that I didn't owe them anything, actually, they owe me.

That was what she said: “You cannot ask me that question.” I think in some ways that sums it all up. That statement sums up those eighteen years of my life and there is no real response to it. There were always the questions that we could not ask. That we could not, should not, would not ask. And yet we asked them all the time, at least, I asked them all the time even if I asked them silently in the privacy of my own heart. I am sure that others asked the questions privately and silently. No one dared to ask the questions aloud. The few that did ask questions received scorn and humiliation but no answers.

My "friend's" daughter was my daughter's best friend. We have never seen them again. My daughter still talks about her ten years later and asks about her. For my daughter, loss is an unfathomably deep chasm. Her life has been scarred by loss after loss. This one I couldn't help but I still feel bad about it. All of the children who have "grown up" in this cult also bear severe wounds even if they weren't actually students.  They suffered most from having parents who were not emotionally or physically available to them because they were always busy doing things for the group. It was worse in New York than in Boston because Sharon is in New York. I lived in New York as an unmarried childless woman and we bore the brunt of it. Sharon urged me as soon as we had gotten home from Russia with my daughter to get an au pair. My daughter had au pairs for the first five or six years of her life because I was out working all day (a school requirement) and every night I was either in class or out recruiting new students. My daughter suffered from that. All the children suffered from that. Had I known anything about attachment and reactive attachment disorder when I first brought my daughter home, I would have been spending all of my time with her. But no, I was trying to pretend that she wasn't adopted and that she was my natural child. 

There are so many "what if's" in relationship to my daughter. If you talked about something like this in school you were always told that you "can't blame school." That was the standard response. The alternative is to blame myself, to live in a world of shame and regret. The responsibility for what has happen is shared by a number of people. I cannot hold anyone wholly responsible. I have to also remember that I was under a spell.  Some people call it brain washing. Janja Lalich, a professor and noted author of books dealing with cults and psychological manipulation, calls it "bounded choice."
Bounded choice is defined as a state in which people "make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations."

My daughter says all the time things like: “Don’t you know her cell phone number? Can you call her? Can we ever see them again?” One day she said, “I have two friends. I used to have two other friends but they are gone.”  When I think getting in touch with my "friend", I can see her standing there saying “You cannot ask me that question” and I know that we are now being shunned and will never speak to any of them again. I also don't really know the nature of the friendship. Was she reporting back to Sharon about me? Highly likely but I will never know for sure.

I remember seeing another friend weep quietly while pulling up weeds in the garden because she could not ask what had happened to a dear friend of hers who had left school. The people that did ask the real questions never got a straight answer that addressed the question. The answer we all got back instead was “you cannot ask me that question.”  So we never asked or we stopped asking after awhile. I think that after eighteen years it was the first time anyone had ever said that to me in such a straight way.  When I think about it further, it is an honest answer – usually no one put it in those words even though that was always the sub-text.  Everything was unspoken.  I am saddest for those who are still lost in that world where you cannot ask any questions and where there are no real answers.