What was "Wrong" with my Daughter?

I didn't have any idea that anything was "wrong" with my daughter until she was in nursery school. When she was three, I decided to enroll her two mornings a week at a local Waldorf School. In truth, if I look back on my decision, a Waldorf School would have been great for me but not necessarily for my daughter. I loved the school and managed to get involved in numerous projects but didn't really make any friends. I wasn't actually the Waldorf School type; wealthy, blonde, christian and preferably European. I loved the fact that the kids made their own snacks from scratch (applesauce and vegetable soup for the days she went) and then sat down to eat at a table all together with cloth napkins that the parents had carefully embroidered with their child's symbol. My daughter was a lovely waterlily. I loved the crafts and the gentle lovely way that they had with children.

After the first half of the year, I had a conference with her teacher who said that she should be seen by the special needs consultant at the school because her behavior was difficult. Difficult? She said that one teacher should not be having to spend 60% of her time with one child. I could understand that. We went from there to the consultant who recommended that she be tested by her home school district which was free. I called the school district and arranged for her evaluation.

This was the first of what was to be many evaluations of my daughter. I stayed in the room for most of the tests but was required to be quiet. When they came to a question such as "What is your favorite TV show?" she looked puzzled but didn't say anything. Another school "rule" - no TV at all, especially for children. We had a TV but it was hidden in an armoire and she had never seen it. A common question for a 21st century child but I was afraid that they would see her as ignorant for not being able to answer that simple question. The woman who did the intellectual functioning testing told me that she thought she was a lot brighter than the tests were going to show. Of course, I had not told them she was adopted. Of course, it would be normal for her to be a little delayed. They also did a few behavioral reports. For one, they went to her ballet class, where the teacher was having trouble with her because she wasn't lining up properly and doing everything she was told to.  Of course not, I thought, she is a free spirit and I was happy that she was so free rather than being a tiny performing robot. They did an evaluation in the classroom at the Waldorf School as well. None of the kids would play with her - maybe that was why we hadn't had any playdate invitations. The observation I remember the strongest was when something was broken and the kids asked who broke it. One child said that my daughter had broken it even though she was nowhere near the other kids at the time. One thing was clear - she had become the class scapegoat. She was being teased and bullied even in that rarefied environment.

My daughter spent the rest of the year going to the Waldorf School two days a week sand the early  childhood intervention program for the other three days. At the end of the year, the school recommended a special needs nursery class for her that was pretty far from our house so she needed to be bussed there. That made it easier for me but I never saw her in the classroom with her teachers and peers so I had no idea what was going on. At the end of the year, they did a little song and dance performance. I met some of the other mothers and asked them where their kids were going the following year. One mother told me that the school had recommended an autism classroom for her daughter.  She was adamant that her daughter was not autistic and she was going to put her in a regular education program.

After that year, the school recommended a "transitional" kindergarten class for her that was at yet another school and she was again bussed to school. It was supposed to prepare her to enter a regular education first grade in our home school the following year. Her teacher asked if she had ever been tested for sensory issues and I said no so they arranged for the testing and then put her on a sensory "diet" and recommended exercises for her. They also recommended a screening by a behavioral optometrist which they would pay for. She had the screening and then I paid out-of-pocket for many sessions of vision therapy which I thought were extremely interesting and useful for her as she clearly had visual issues related to eye movement and focusing skills, convergence, eye-hand coordination and visual memory which were all skills she needed for effective reading, writing, and learning later on. 

I went to one "parents evening" while she was in the transitional kindergarten class. I was shocked to arrive and find that I was one of only two parents who were there. The other mother was european and clearly well educated.  I had met her son before, he was a cute little blonde haired imp. I asked the teacher why there weren't more parents there. She explained that in special education, most of the parents did not speak english well and were not really aware of what their child's issues were. She often said that they might not own a car or be able to drive or they might not have someone to stay with her children while she was gone. I realized then that my daughter and the other boy were the only "white" kids in the class. That year also, I had a problem with the bus. My daughter arrived home one day clutching several pieces of candy in her hand. I asked where she had gotten it from and she told me that a boy on the bus had given them to her. I asked her if she had given him anything in exchange and she said that she wasn't supposed to tell. All kinds of bells went off in my head! I told her teacher and the principal but nothing seemed to be wrong.



The following year, she was enrolled in an "integrated classroom" for first grade in our home district. The school was right down the street from us within easy walking distance. So that made five different schools by the time she reached first grade (four different schools within our town). Something seemed off to me about that. But first grade turned out to be a good year for her. Actually, her best year so far. She was in a class with a regular education teacher and a special education teacher. Both were quite good and she was taken out of class for one-on-one work with the special education teacher who I liked a lot. I was happier because she was closer and I picked her up everyday and therefore had more contact with the school, her teachers, and the other students. The special education part of the classroom consisted of eight boys and my daughter. Not so good. She didn't have any girlfriends in the special education group. One day they caught her going into the bathroom with one of the boys and he was about to pull down his pants. Not so good. I thought maybe that all the other kids went to the bathroom together and she wanted someone to go with. It happened a few more times but they caught her before it went very far.



I continued to follow the school's recommendations and she was enrolled in a substantially separate special education program for second grade. Once again, it was eight boys and my daughter. Not good.  The classroom was second and third grades combined. I went to the school one day to talk to her teacher because my daughter had come home crying one day because her teacher had told her that fairies weren't real. Her teacher had defended herself saying that she had to know the difference between fiction and non-fiction for the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). I was furious. I asked her whether the Bible was fiction or non-fiction. She had no answer. I threatened to call the ACLU because I felt that the school was imposing their "religious" views on us (were we pagans??) What school teacher has the right to tell a child that fairies don't exist? I think they do exist. Please say you do too because every time someone says that fairies don't exist, another one dies.

Towards the end of that year when she had passed her eighth birthday, she started to wet her pants in class almost every day. She didn't have the verbal skills to explain to us what was wrong and she had no prior history of doing this. The teacher took her out of the classroom every time and sent her to the nurses office. The nurse called us and we had to bring a set of dry clothing to the school before she was allowed back in the classroom.  I didn't want to send her to school every day with extra clothes as if I was expecting it to happen again. My husband joked about it: "She finally found a way to get out of that classroom." I had to agree that that was probably a good guess as why she was doing it. I didn't like the teacher anyway, she was an older woman inured to the public school special eduction system and had no imagination. We consulted a child psychologist. She started to see him once a week. He recommended that she be evaluated by an educational specialist and we did that. The education specialist said that she was a kinesthetic learner - she needed physical activity to learn well and she did better with objects she could handle herself rather than lectures or demonstrations. This is not what the public school system did. Not good. He also suggested that we have her evaluated for autism. We sought out a developmental pediatrician and she ruled out PDD. Good. I asked the educational specialist to recommend some other schools where she fought our daughter might flourish. She named two and we went to visit them. My daughter spend a day at each school and we picked one. There went my IRA. I just couldn't send her back the following year to the same classroom where something was so obviously wrong.



I loved her new school. It was small and nurturing and she had two wonderful teachers. Most of the other parents were friendly and I got involved in the school activities. She repeated second grade which was just as well because her new teachers were amazing. I tried to get our home school district to pay the fees and even hired an advocate and a lawyer but it didn't happen because her new school was not a 766 private special education school. I fought long and hard to get our town to pay for it but in the end, they wouldn't. My daughter lasted through the middle of fourth grasde in that school and then it was time for her to leave. I suspected that the other girls had started to out distance her socially and emotionally so it was time to move on. She also had trouble with math and her teacher had to take her out of the room to do remedial math with her which was fine with us but she was starting to get teased by the other kids because of it and she also felt that she was missing out on something. She wanted to leave. Everyone suggested that we put her back into the public school, let her fail and then get an out-of-district placement for her. I felt my back was to the wall so that is what we did. She spent the rest of fourth grade back again at our local public school. For fifth grade, she had the same teacher and it turned out to be one of the worst years of our lives.

Once, I asked Sharon for help about my daughter in the middle of a christmas class. She was, of course, very drunk and lying on a richly decorated chaise longue like the queen bee that she fancied herself. I briefly explained the situation and she sat up to full height and waved her hand in that dismissive way she had and said to me: "So, what's a little retarded?"
And with that brief wave of her hand obliterated my naked heart which I was holding out to her.


Boundless Joy Arising starts with the annus horribilis of fifth grade. You can find it here: http://boundlessjoyarising.blogspot.com

And through all of this, we never told anyone that she was adopted not did we mention our involvement in a cult. 

Of course, through all of this rings the questions: If Sharon had not talked us into adopting from Russia, then what? If she hadn't insisted on keeping everything secret, then what?

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself. -Harvey Fierstein

The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action (excerpt) by Audre Lorde

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, of some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.

And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone can we survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

(Originally delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980)

Vulnerability and Shame

This is the best definition of shame that I can find:

"Shame is an emotion in which the self is perceived as defective, unacceptable, or fundamentally damaged. Shame is often confused with guilt, which is a related but distinct emotion in which a specific behavior is viewed as unacceptable or wrong, rather than the entire self."

I had been doing reading on shame because of my daughter. My daughter suffers from Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). Because she was abandoned at birth and left in a Russian baby orphanage for 14 months, her earliest experiences were of loss and betrayal This is still true for her and probably always will be true for her. We have no idea of what level of neglect she was subjected to or what other traumas she might have experienced.  Because she had no reliable source of comfort, no primal identification with another human being who treated her with love, she sees herself as worthless, powerless and helpless. What happens with children with RAD is that as soon as they start to get close to someone, they do anything they can to push them away as in: "I'm not going to let you get close to me because you are only going to hurt me so I am going to hurt you before you can hurt me."

My daughter needs to feel that she is the one in control and has become  a master at pushing us away. It takes the form of tantrums that go on forever, physical abuse of my husband and myself, not properly taking care of her own hygiene, stealing, lying, and breaking things.
I have had knives pointed at my throat, I have been punched and kicked, I have had things thrown at me (I have had stitches in my head from things she has thrown at me), I have been locked in my bedroom, I have had my personal belongings torn and ripped and flung all over the house and I have holes in the walls and windows where she has punched her fist through. I have padlocks on my bedroom door and on my studio door. I have put away everything of value in my house. I do not buy sugar, candy, ice cream, cookies, cake or pasta because she will hoard it in her room. 

When our daughter first came home, we thought she was beautiful, adorable, lovely and bright. We were so very very happy. Of course, we then had the problem of trying to explain her to everyone. Immediately after she came home, my husband left for a week to go to the "retreat" in Montana and I was left alone. I was fairly petrified to be totally alone with an infant.

My husband had told his first wife that if he ever got married again, he would tell her first before the boys and he wanted to keep his word to her. At that point, he had been taking the boys every weekend. The first weekend we were home, he went to pick the boys up and bring them to his new home to meet his new wife and their new sister. He told his wife when he got there what the plan was and she said absolutely not and refused to let them go with him.
I wasn't sure that I didn't blame her. It was all of a sudden and a lot of different issues to contend with. The boys were then 8, 10 and 12. He returned home alone which necessitated emergency calls to Sharon and Mr. MC. We were told to have friends come over for support. He was told to go back and not come back home without the boys. He came back with them. Sharon had told me to buy them a ping pong table and we had put it in a screened porch off the garage (this was just the beginning of what Sharon told me to buy and how she wanted me to spend my money.) I remember sitting on the floor in a room at the back of the house with my "friend" and my daughter watching them out of the window playing ping pong on the other side of the driveway.

I think that first weekend, the youngest of the boys said something like: "I'm not going to be the youngest anymore?" and "This is going to take some getting used to." It was awkward at first but we settled in fairly quickly to being a family. The boys never had a problem about their sister and accepted her whole heartedly. We went on family trips to the beach in the summer and skiing in Canada in the winter. I have come to love the three of them as my own children.

I didn't meet my husbands ex-wife for a long time. I met her one day when we went to pick up the boys for the weekend. The previous weekend, one of them had had a headache and I asked her what was the best thing to give him for it. I think that once she understood that I was as interested in the welfare of the boys as she was, we got along fine. After all, we had a lot in common. Sharon had always told me what a horrible bitch she was but she said that about everyone who left so I didn't pay much attention to it. Today, my husbands ex-wife and I are good friends. We talk and text frequently and I have her to dinner fairly often. We don't go to her house because her boyfriend (who has never been married and doesn't have children) doesn't understand why we are all friends and doesn't really want to have anything to do with us.

My nephew was going to college in the Boston area at the time. One weekend one of my cousins from Denver came to visit so I invited my nephew and another cousin to all have dinner with us. That was my family's introduction to my daughter and word spread quickly so I didn't really have to tell anyone else. We just introduced our daughter as their new cousin and that was that. I was asked all kinds of questions about where she was born and how the delivery had gone, etc. and I just lied and lied. No, it wasn't a lie, it was clever sincerity.

I started going to class in Boston when we returned from Russia with our daughter. It was carefully orchestrated by Mr. MC. We were to come to class with our daughter at a specific time on a specific night. When we got there, our daughter and I were introduced to everyone. I only knew two people in the room (the "friend" that Sharon had given me and her husband.) A number of people came up to me after class and congratulated me and said how happy they were to meet me. Most of the people didn't really acknowledge me. My husband had told me which women he had dated and one of them sat there and stared menacingly at me for weeks and then she left school. There were a number of young mothers  and pregnant women in the class who sometimes came to me for advice. I lied to them as well.

I was a stay-at-home Mom for awhile. I felt isolated and lonely because I really knew no one and I couldn't tell anyone the truth anyway. People said that I would make friends once my daunter was in school. It felt strange to me to start new relationships with a whole package of lies. I went to a new mother play group and they were all women in their early thirties who had given up good jobs to become stay-at-home Moms. They all had brand new houses where everything in them was new as if they were starting brand new lives (which I guess they were) with no history whatsoever. I had an old house filled with antiques and things I picked up off the street. We had nothing in common.

Frequently we did things with my "friend" and her daughter as the girls were about the same age and got along very well. She was the only one that knew my daughter was adopted (although later I found out that a lot of people knew but that's another story). I was frequently disturbed that my daughter seemed to prefer my friend to me. Was I not a good mother?  Was I doing something wrong? She also seemed to prefer my sister-in-law to me as well. She would allow them to cuddle her and spoil her. With me she often hit me and had frequent tantrums. She screamed when I put her in her car seat and immediately unbuckled herself. She screamed at the music on the radio and wanted me to change it every few minutes. 

I will probably say this again but I will say it now: most women in my situation would have joined an adoptive mothers group not a new mother's group. I was so invested in keeping all of the secrets that I never even read anything about adoption, never went to an adoption support group and I didn't complete our post-adoption assessments. I didn't apply for her to be readopted in Massachusetts because I had no idea that I was supposed to. I didn't think of myself as an adoptive mother, I tried to think of myself as a new mother. I eventually did make a few friends and it was hard to keep up the pretense with them. Lying is always a difficult road and it is exhausting as well. I was starting to forget who I told which lie...

In one of my classes (I am studying for a change of profession) recently, someone did a project on vulnerability and introduced me to two TED Talks by Brene Brown that are absolutely amazing to me. I cried through both of them. I wrote this poem last spring after I saw these videos when I realized the central focus of shame in both my daughters life and in my own life (by those "people", I mean the cult):

My life is a spinning top

Whirling haphazardly out of control

And balanced on two points:

Those “people”

And my daughter.

My trauma

Her trauma

Her shame

My shame

Round and round it’s all the same.

I want to end

This crazy dervish dance.

Sit in the sun.

Smell the sea.

Plant flowers.

Live simply.
Simply love.

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame

Shame is also part of the reason that I and my friends stayed in school as long as we did. Sharon capitalized on our own feelings of being in some ways defective, unacceptable or damaged. I think everyone feels that to some degree but not to the extent my daughter feels it where it always eclipses everything else. Sharon took our faults and used them against us and also used them to keep us in school. The Gurdjieff tradition says that everyone has a "chief weakness" and of course no one knew what their weakness was but Sharon did. We waited with baited breath for Sharon to tell us our weakness. At a certain point, she might tell a student what that weakness was and use it against them. I remember one story of a new student who asked if he could have a receipt for his tuition for tax purposes. Of course that was out of the question, so Mr. MC told him that his main problem was that he was stingy. A simple request got turned into an hour long harangue about his faults as in "How DARE you ask a question like that!"

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself. -Harvey Fierstein

Honesty and Acceptance

I have a confession to make about an addiction that I have. I am addicted to a blog entitled Channeling Erik (http://www.channelingerik.com). The subtitle is "Conversations with my Son in the Afterlife". This bog is written by a woman whose 20-year old son took his own life. She began to channel him with help from others and now posts daily. I have found their conversations to be quite amazing and useful. First of all, it has helped me let go of any fear of death (I do fear physical pain). The topics they talk about are fascinating. From the far reaches of the outer universe to subatomic particles and everything in-between...

Today she did a bog entitled "How honest are you". Which is right on point. (Excerpts below)

Sometimes it’s so hard to look inside and ask yourself, “Am I really being honest with myself?” I know I have that problem. Sometimes it’s because I’m afraid I won’t like what I find out about myself. Sometimes it’s about whether I’m being honest with others. Sometimes it’s about trying to get out of doing what needs to be done, and oh, so much more. But if we look at ourselves with our eyes and heart wide open. It frees you. It allows you to live life with your heart rather than your logical mind. It’s enables you to embrace that vulnerability that Erik discusses so often (ad nauseam at times.) 
Erik: Yes, and it takes courage, too, but it becomes easier with practice, and then you see that you feel better and less like shit. Being emotionally dishonest with ourselves is based in part on our expectations to be perfect. That’s completely unreasonable. That’s all bullshit. Mistakes are the seeds for our evolution. Don’t be afraid to see yourself through clear glasses. You’re perfect just the way you are.

Here’s another thing about emotional honesty in general. You have to be emotionally honest with yourself to know that you’re going to be okay and to know how to be emotionally honest with others. Being emotionally honest with ourselves and with others is intertwined. 

We don’t have anything in our culture that teaches us how to be emotionally honest with ourselves. We’re not taught how to analyze our choices openly and honestly. We’re not taught to be vulnerable with ourselves. Instead, we’re taught to avoid facing those parts that we don’t like about ourselves by sticking our head in the sand like some ... ostrich. Most of our schools don’t teach kids how to communicate with themselves or with others, but we don’t have to wait until we’re adults ... to be able to find what we define as our truest self. We don’t have to get to the point where we need some life coach or therapist to sift through the ... versions of ourselves that we’ve collected while we’ve had those blinders on. Look at our physical health. We’re taught to go to the doctor only when we’re broken when really we should be going to them when we’re healthy. It is possible to learn how to remain emotionally honest with yourself before you develop emotionally dishonesty. Again, this takes inner awareness and asking hard questions like, “Am I making excuses for myself?” “Am I rationalizing things?” “Am I blaming someone else for the shit that’s all mine?” .... You reflect inwardly to understand your feelings and your intent, and that takes a conscious effort.

Me: You know, when I’m emotionally honest with myself and with others, I get this enormous sense of relief.
Erik: Hell, yeah because you’re accepting. Think of acceptance as a key to a prison. Once you accept who you are and what you’re feeling and what your circumstances are, which is also rooted in feelings, you open the door and let it out. Your emotions are free.

Clever Sincerity and Cognitive Dissonance

"As I have said already, one of the first demands is sincerity. But there are different kinds of sincerity. There is clever sincerity and there is stupid sincerity, just as there is clever insincerity and stupid insincerity. Both stupid sincerity and stupid insincerity are equally mechanical. But if a man wishes to learn to be cleverly sincere, he must be sincere first of all with his teacher and with people who are senior to him in the work. This will be 'clever sincerity.'" 

"You do not understand what it means to be sincere," said G. "You are so used to lying both to yourselves and to others that you can find neither words nor thoughts when you wish to speak the truth. To tell the complete truth about oneself is very difficult. But before telling it one must know it. And you do not even know what the truth about yourselves consists of."                                   -Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

We were taught in "school" that one must always tell the truth.

What does it mean to tell the truth when the truth is something that you might be punished for? What does it mean to tell the truth when you are asked to go against your conscience? What does it mean to tell the truth when you are a lemming in a pack of lemmings about to jump off a cliff? What does it mean to tell the truth when you have been told what to say? 

We were taught in "school" that we must think for ourselves.

This is what actually happens. There is always a class after a Christmas class or a special presentation that is called an "impressions" class where everyone is supposed to stand up and say what their deepest feelings and impressions of the event were. There was a time when there were a series of public "lectures" given to try to lure people into "school". Groups of people worked for months preparing these lectures and they were always edited by Mr. MC to the point where they all sounded exactly the same, which they all were: an advertisement for school. It was supposed to be a special honor to be asked to be the actual presenter.

One lecture was given by a woman named L and at the next class, we were asked to give our "impressions" of the lecture. Someone always had to be the first to stand up and they gave the lecture a glowing review. Four or five more people spoke and all said that they had thought it was wonderful. Mr. MC then stopped the class and said: "Well, let me tell you what Sharon thought about the lecture. She thought it was awful" and he went on to elaborate extensively. Everyone who spoke about their impressions after that, echoed Mr. MC's and Sharon's condemnation of the lecture and the vilification of the poor presenter. This happened all the time. No one ever wanted to stand up first because you could never be sure what the "party line" was going to be and you always wanted to be on the right side in an argument. So much for the "truth".

Shortly after I moved to Boston, my best friend in school left along with a number of other people. This exodus came about after Sharon's son, D, who was a revered teacher and Sharon's heir apparent, left school. Sharon disowned him and vilified him. We were all shocked by the news. I was not present when he left and I am unsure of all of the details but Mr. MC was sent down to NY to lead our class one night and do "damage control".  Of course, many people stood up and talked about how they knew something was wrong with D and that he had been following the wrong path. He was generally slandered and maliciously maligned. That's how it always went.

The rule is that when anybody leaves school, they are shunned. You are not allowed to speak to or acknowledge anyone who has left the fold. You are also not allowed to acknowledge anyone you know from school if you meet them in public. When my best friend left, she called me to explain what had happened and why she had left. Then we continued to talk on the phone for months afterward which was totally verboten. The people who had left at that time got together and my friend became especially close to Sharon's son, D, and she heard all of his lifes' stories. She heard what it was like for him to grow up in the cult in California. He had been severely abused by his mother and step-father, Alex Horn. My friend told me all of these stories and I listened. She told me as much as she knew about the abusive nature of the group. She told me of Sharon's abortions, her alcoholism, her plastic surgery, her drug abuse and her manipulation of people's lives. She told me that Sharon and Alex had fled San Francisco in the 1970's after they were accused of child abuse. She told me all of these stories and I listened. I knew in my heart it was all true.

I was living in Boston. I knew no one except for the people in the cult. I was estranged from my family and estranged from the friends I had from New York. I had a small child and no job. My husband was deeply involved in the group. I knew these people were crazy but I had no recourse; no where to go and no one to turn to.

Cognitive dissonance is defined as "the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values." (Wikipedia) 

There was a point where I had to explain to my friend that I just couldn't talk to her anymore. I would love her forever but we couldn't keep talking because the inconsistency of knowing the truth and having to live as if I didn't, was driving me mad. Literally. 

I sat in class longing to stand up and tell everyone the truth. I sat in class afraid that I would stand up and tell the truth. I sat in class thinking that if they were such enlightened beings, how come they didn't know that I knew the truth? I sat in class thinking that if they were such enlightened beings, how come they didn't know that I had broken all the rules? I sat in class wondering why they didn't know that I was constantly lying about everything?

I spoke to my husband and told him that I wanted to leave and he said that he would leave if I left. It was another one of those "rules" that if one spouse left school, the other one had to leave as well (or, they could get divorced). I was afraid that if I forced my husband to leave, that it might take a year or ten years but he would eventually blame me for his having to leave school and that would definitely put an end to our marriage. I started trying to think up schemes to leave school without actually having to leave. What if we moved to Mexico? I started waking up at 4 am every morning sick to my stomach and shaking with fear. I got to the point where I knew something had to change or I might literally go mad. This point coincided with my growing unwillingness to lie to my daughter as well. When she was 6, she started to ask me what it was like when she was in my tummy. I knew I couldn't go on. It was no longer clever sincerity, it was blatant lying and it was going to kill me if I didn't stop.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.                -J. Krishnamurti

Our Daughter Comes Home

I know that all of these posts are backwards so that to start with the beginning of the story, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the posts. What I have wanted to write about is my daughter. Of all the things that happened to me while I was in the group, the story of my daughter is the one I most want to tell right now.

My new husband and I dreamed of adopting a baby from China or maybe Korea. I have two nieces from Korea – my brother and sister-in-law adopted them as infants (only 6 weeks old) and they are both beautiful, bright, lovely women today.

When Sharon heard that we were interested in adopting, she immediately took charge of the situation. She told us not to adopt from an Asian country but to adopt from Eastern Europe so the baby would have brown hair and brown eyes and we could say that she was our natural child. Pass her off as our natural child? Why and how? Sharon said that my husband’s sons would never accept our daughter if they thought she was adopted. Only if they thought she was their blood sister, would they accept her as part of the family. Our families would not accept her either. I didn’t really believe it but I felt like I had just stepped from a world where nothing was going right for me at all into a fairy tale that I desperately wanted to hold on to so I went along with the story.

Sharon told us that we should not see anyone in our families for at least a year. I said that I would be going to visit my brother and she told me to pretend that I was pregnant while I was there.

I spent the weekend with one hand on my back (oh, my aching back!) and the other hand on my stomach (my dear sweet little baby was inside me of course.) My sister-in-law made me a maternity outfit. It was a performance and I have never been a particularly good actress but they believed it. After the weekend, I spoke to Sharon on the phone and she said that she had never told me to pretend to my brother that I was pregnant. There was no arguing with her. Why would I have put on that particularly difficult charade except under her instruction?  I was totally confused and angry at having been led into a sham of a charade. She then told me to tell them that I had another miscarriage. Another performance…

I remember being at CR one weekend shortly thereafter and I told Sharon that I did not think it was possible to pretend that a child was my natural born child for her whole life. She laughed and told me it had been done many times before and that she would have one of the women who had done it, talk to me. I have no idea how many children whose parents were in “school” were adopted and never told about it. I had a long talk with L that weekend that had two daughters who had been adopted (one of them was the child of another woman I knew in the group and I don’t know where the other one came from). Both of her daughters, now in their 30’s, still have no idea that they were adopted although many of their friends seem to know the truth. We talked for a long time. I was convinced that she could do it but not convinced that I would be able to do it.

I looked around at adoption agencies and about the rules that different countries had for adoption. I had heard horror stories about Romanian orphanages. For Russia, there was no requirement that the parents had to be married for any particular length of time so we picked Russia. That started a year of paperwork, interviews, getting copies of birth certificates and marriage certificates apostilled, fingerprinting, etc. We picked a social worker and walked her through my home in NY even though we knew that we would not live there (I was already on my way to selling my NY home and buying a house in Boston as I had been told to do.) We needed health certificates as well and I went to my doctor and told him what I was planning to do. He begged me not to adopt from Russia. He told me that he had known several families that did adopt from Russia and ended up with severely handicapped children that had torn the families apart and ended in divorce in each case he knew about. I turned my back on his advice and as a matter of fact, I never spoke to him again. This was my happy ending, my dream come true, I was finally going to have my little baby girl and it was going to end happily ever after. I refused to see it any other way. I was also afraid that if I opposed anything that Sharon had suggested (instructed) that she could pull the plug on everything and my happily ever after would disappear down the drain.

I sold my house in New York and bought one in Boston. I don’t think that if I had not been in school I ever would have done that. My rational mind told me that you keep your place for a few years to make sure it all works out and if it doesn’t then you have someplace to go back to. That simply wasn’t going to be a possibility. Not only was I really actually in love with my husband (which is not always true for many of Sharon’s “arranged marriages”) but I felt that I had the added insurance that my husband was also in “school”.  I felt that the situation guaranteed a few things. Since “school” required that everyone make at least $60,000. a year, then we would be fine financially and also that we had would be helped and guided by our teachers so it was bound to work out. Selling my house in NY is one of my biggest regrets of my life considering what has happened to the NY real estate market since then. I bought a house in Boston but my husband also kept the apartment he had been living in. He was totally cash poor due to paying child support so I ended up paying for the apartment as well. He needed to keep the apartment because he took the boys every weekend and he needed someplace to take them. Sharon had told us not to tell the boys or his ex-wife anything about our daughter or me until our daughter was with us. Secrets.

I was alone in Boston. I knew no one and Sharon prohibited me from having any contact with my family or friends. I was not working. Sharon did concede to “giving” me one friend in Boston – a woman who was also an architect and had a daughter who would be roughly my daughter’s age. All through that year, I commuted between Boston and New York. I was not allowed to attend classes in Boston until our daughter came so I was permitted to attend only one class a week in NY. I was leading a double life. I found it hard to make other friends when I couldn’t talk to them honestly and tell them the truth of my life. Smoke and mirrors and secrets. Always secrets…

Finally, we took the long trip to Russia. We had to stay for about one month to comply with the government requirements for adoption. We spent a week in St. Petersburg, some time in Moscow and in Perm, on the edge of Siberia, where our daughter was born.

We returned to the United States with our daughter on May 1, 2000. It was the beginning of another major journey, one that still continues.