esotericfreedom.com (Chapter 1)

The following is an edited version of a piece I first published in 2007 on esotericfreedom.com 

I left school the weekend of July 4, 2005. I missed my "friends" and I felt a bit disoriented, a little sad and lonely but basically I was all right for a long time afterwards. On the whole, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It was a relief to leave. I breathed easier than I had in a long time.

At the beginning of December, I received a phone call from K and it was after that phone call that I plunged very deeply into the darkness of depression. For the first time in my life,  I really understood what it might mean to "loose one's mind" and I knew I was in serious trouble. I decided to go into therapy.

When I received the call on that December morning, my first impulse was to think that since it was so close to Christmas she was calling to ask me to come back to school and would tell me how much fun it would it would be to have me first reappear at the Christmas Class. Or perhaps they just needed more help. If I had said the "right" things, the conversation might have gone that way. Even now, Christmas is still a very difficult time of year for me and for many former students. Our lives were taken over so completely at that time of year.

K first told me that she had wanted to make sure that I had not left school because I felt forced into doing so.  I told her that no, actually, I had been wanting to leave for a long time and the situation turned out to be a blessing.

Five months had passed since I had left school. I was shocked to receive her call but something inside of me had been expecting it. I was surprised someone had not called sooner to lure me back. She asked me why I had not called her in all this time.  Didn’t I need any help?  She had been so worried about me.  I replied that I had left school and that the rule, (as it had been told to me so many times), was that when you left school you were a "pariah" and were not to be in contact with people who were still there. She was saying I should have been in touch?  Was she saying that she didn't expect me to be able to survive without their help. Well, how come if she was such a dear "friend" of mine, she had not called me in five months? If she was so concerned about me, why didn’t she call?  I was the one who left, who was the outcast without any friends or family or support. Was she calling now (after five silent months) because she was so concerned about me or because she had been told to call me by Sharon or Mr. MC? I knew the answer. She would not have called me on her own initiative. She was told to call me.  And as usual, I kept silent. I did not ask that question and I did not ask her the real questions that were on my mind. I did not tell her the real answers to her questions. I told her what she wanted to hear. I told her what she expected me to say as a good student.

She asked me how I had been and what was happening with me. I went into great detail about how well everything had been going, how happy I was, how rich and fulfilling my life had become. I was telling her things that were true but I could feel myself embellishing the truth in order to have her think the best of me. I was stretching the truth in order to gain her approval for what I was now doing. Five months later and I was still groveling at their feet. I told her about my painting class and my job.

She even asked me not to tell my husband that she had called and I did not tell him. I was still marching to their orders, doing exactly what they told me even though I was long gone from school and grateful to have left. The promise to not talk about school after you leave is designed to keep you in a place where you are still following their rules and still under their control. It is not a promise you made from yourself of your own free will but it something you are told to promise. After Christmas, my husband received a call at work with similar intent from Mr. MC. Unlike me, he told Mr. MC that he did not want to talk to him and asked him not to call again. When he told me about this call, I confessed to him about the call I had received from K earlier. I felt shattered that I had still followed a school suggestion and had not told him about the call.

What was truly shocking to me was that even though I had left and had no intention of returning, I was still under their power. Their thoughts were still in my head. I was still saying what they wanted me to say and ignoring the real voice inside me. I was still being a good student and (more or less) doing what I was told.

I felt clearly manipulated.  She told me that she stayed in school because the world is a difficult place.  She said that in school: "At least I have my friends and the ideas." Friends? This is not what friendship is about. Our "friends" were those people who stood by and watched while my husband was violently thrown out of school and said nothing and did nothing to help but instead fanned the flames of the fire.  This is not friendship. Mr. MC was his friend for over 20 years and he stood by silently and did not say one word to help him. He watched as he was brutally victimized. He stood by and did not say a word as my husband was abused and had curses thrown at him by Sharon and his other "friends". The worst part for me was that I said nothing as well - partly from shock and partly because I too was so well trained.  My world was being torn apart and I was losing my balance. I am so sorry that I did not stand up for him then.  I have apologized to him and I can only hope that he forgives me.

I asked K if she had known that my daughter was adopted and she said that she had known. It was supposed to have been a secret. No one was supposed to know the truth. I wondered who else had known and kept silent. She had probably known all along. Why didn't she tell me that she knew so I could stop lying to her?  I had longed for so many years for people I could talk to who I didn't have to lie to. Is that real friendship?

I had spent the last six years of my life lying to my family and everyone I know about my daughter. Most importantly, I had lied to my daughter about who she was and where she came from. I had lied to her school and her teachers. I had lied to her pediatrician and all of the other doctors who were trying to help her. I had lied to my step-children. I had lied to all my friends both in school and out. I was so enmeshed in lies I had no idea what I was doing anymore. This was not creative sincerity, it was lying. I was being eaten alive by the lies. The lying took up a tremendous amount of energy. It cost me my relationships with my friends and family because they knew I was lying and did not understand why. I kept up the pretense at every expense.

My daughter is very dark skinned and tans easily. We made up a story that my husbands grandmother was from Mexico to explain her dark complexion. The school asked for a birth certificate. I made up excuse after excuse and never actually gave them one. How could we go on a trip out of the country?  Her passport would state her real place of birth and she could read - what could we do?  Mr. MC suggested that I try to get her a "black market" passport - a fake passport.  I was shocked that he suggested that I break the law to support the lie but I had no idea what else to do. I had no idea how one goes about getting a fake documents. I do not know any forgers. I looked on the internet. Fake passports are not so easy to do after 9/11 and I did not want to start adding more lies. There is a large Mexican population in our city and I actually made my husband go and ask people if they knew where he could get a passport. There was no solution. I begged Sharon to let me tell my daughter the truth.  Finally, she said I could tell her when she was 18 years old. That was not a helpful solution. I was in despair.

I wouldn't trade my daughter for the world. I love her. I know that we were meant for each other. I never really believed when we adopted her that anything could possibly be really wrong with her that a lot of love and good food and tenderness would not make up for. I had no idea that I was to become the mother of a child with special needs. I had no idea what that even meant. I don't think that any parent with a special needs child expects it or understands it. However, if I had not been so busy pretending she was my natural child, I might have read some books on adoption and what to expect.  I might have joined a mothers group where all the children were adopted and had some support for myself and my daughter. I might have joined an organization of mothers with adopted children instead of the insipid suburban mothers group I ended up joining - where all the mothers were in their 20's or 30's and had the the perfect brand new homes and the perfect husband and the perfect children.

It was obvious to me fairly early on that my daughter was different. My sister-in-law kept saying that she was an active child like her son had been and I believed her. There are no manuals for special needs children. We have gone from doctor to doctor, from evaluation to evaluation, from medication to medication, from therapist to therapist, from school to school and I still don't really have much of a clue how to help her. All I want is to be able to give her the best help that I can get for her.  Whatever I do for her will never be enough,  Everyone has a word for her, a diagnosis but they are just words and I don't know anymore what any of them mean.

Special needs, developmental delay, attention deficit, hyperactivity, sensory integration disorder, visual and perceptive processing delays, cognitive processing problems, language processing delay, difficulty focusing and paying attention, impulsiveness, poor visual discrimination, executive functioning disorder, difficulty recognizing social cues - the list goes on and on. I am not pretending or lying about her anymore. 

Mr. T  had always told us in school that things are not what they seem, but that in actuality, 

everything was really the opposite of what it appeared to be. For the 18 years that I was in "school", my life was the opposite of what it appeared to be. My life was an illusion. It was that way ever since I started school.

In reality, it is school that is not what it appears to be. It may very well be the exact opposite. I was forced to go back and question everything. 

Speaking of Mr. T, (the man who I had known for 18 years and had been so instrumental in my divorce from my first husband, the man who had told me so cruelly when I was in utter despair that "you are born alone and you die alone"), the last time I saw him was that final summer in Montana. I was standing near the bridge and I watched him get out of a car. He looked at me in a puzzled manner and turned and said to Mr. MC something like; "I know that I know that woman but I just can't place her. What is her name?" Later, when we were having drinks before dinner and I was chatting with him. I reminded him about our shared history. He said: "Ah, yes, it's coming back to me now." I was horrified. A man who I had basically trusted with my life, who had in fact changed the course of my life in several ways, didn't even remember my name or who I was!!!

No one should have the right to manipulate other peoples lives. But that he didn't even remember was so chilling and so sickening.

That in itself is a good microcosmic look at school. I don't know what the incident was that caused my ex-husband to leave school a number of years later but when I asked him about why he had left, he said to me very simply: "I realized that school did not have my best interests at heart." How simple and how true. I was so happy for him that he finally got there. Too bad that it took many of us so many years to realize that.