Girls Like Us Read online

  The gloom of this Christmas will be replayed for several years. Me and my mother sitting quietly on the dark brown couch. She: sunk deep in depression; me: sinking right along with her. By the next year, I’ll do whatever I can to not be at home for long. I’ll try to stay at a boyfriend’s, spend the day with his loud and raucous family, craving to feel included in someone else’s home. People who know about my situation will feel sorry for me and will invite me over. I’ll feel awkward but grateful and will always do the dishes, play with the kids, try to make myself a useful and thoughtful guest. Later, my mother will meet and marry a new man. It’s probably not fun to have your teenage daughter around your new spouse and I’ll be excluded from these Christmases. I won’t want to spend them with her anyway but somehow I’ll still feel jealous. Her happy holidays seem to be spent with someone else; on her sad ones, I’m expected to be there.

  The silence of those Christmases, the sense that our family was irreparably broken, will stay with me. I grow to dread Christmas, and all that the holiday season represents. As I get older, I adopt my mother’s trick of getting so drunk throughout the day that with any luck I would be semiconscious or dead asleep for the majority of the day and night, waking up only on Boxing Day. One year, when I’m living alone in a studio in Germany, I buy enough weed, alcohol, and cigarettes to last me three days, and proceed to get as wasted as I can so that I literally have no memory of the holiday, except for the buying of said substances and the recovery period several days later.

  My mother eventually gets sober and much later I finally do, and we struggle as adults to work on our fractured relationship. Yet for many years, the holidays, Christmas, and even my birthday are just an inconvenient reminder of my family, my lack of family, a reminder of the type of family I always wanted. I come to love Thanksgiving, as it’s not a holiday that England celebrates and so there are no painful childhood memories associated with it. I can create my own Thanksgiving memories and over time I’ll figure out how to tolerate, if not embrace, Christmas without getting totally trashed. Coming to terms with my family, forgiving, and letting go take a little bit longer.

  Growing up I believed that everyone had a pain quota, i.e., you could experience only a certain amount of pain and tragedy in your life before that quota was filled. In general, this meant suffering early in life was rewarded by a relatively pain-free and peaceful existence as an adult and enjoying a trouble-free childhood and adolescence meant that you were likely to get your pain quota later in life. As I looked at girls at my school whose lives seemed so neat, so foreign, so perfect, I comforted myself with the knowledge that my approved pain limit would soon be reached and that they’d experience their drama later. It seemed only fair and logical that everyone was meted out a level of hardship; some people’s pain just came earlier in life, but I was confident that eventually it would come to an end.

  When I first moved to the Bronx, a friend told me of a woman who lived nearby who had buried all five of her children. Two of her sons had perished in freak accidents in the same elevator shaft, never properly repaired, several years apart. A daughter had been murdered by a boyfriend, another son had died in a motorcycle accident, her last daughter had died of a drug overdose. I was stunned. I understood that burying a child had to be one of the most painful experiences in life, but burying five, one after the other, each time thinking your heart couldn’t break anymore? It was so unfathomable; it seemed like an urban legend. How could one person possibly suffer that much? There was no moral to be learned, no great blessing at the end of it. She wasn’t a bad person; there was no cosmic karma, just a string of mindless tragedies that seemed to directly contradict the biblical edict that the Lord wouldn’t give you more than you could bear. My theory was shot to pieces. If there was a quota for pain and suffering, someone had forgotten to tell a grieving mother in the Bronx.

  My pain-quota theory didn’t work out too well either with the young girls I was meeting in New York. There were moments where the litany of pain, abusive adults, and just downright awful luck seemed almost unbelievable. “So, you were there when your father stabbed your mother, and then you went to live with your aunt, but she was getting high and she fell asleep smoking and the apartment caught on fire, so then you went into the system and the brother in your first foster family abused you and then you ran away and the first night you were on the street you met a man, who then later became your pimp?”

  As I heard more and more accounts like these, I learned that these weren’t fantastical tales but the norm for girls whose entire lives had been punctuated with crisis, trauma, and abuse. Statistics, presented without the faces, the stories, the tears, couldn’t even begin to measure the severity or frequency of the trauma these girls were experiencing. Girls who’d been sexually abused by every male in their family, girls who were orphaned by their parent’s murder/suicide/death from AIDS who would then be abused in the system, girls who had only known the touch of an adult to be sexual or violent, girls for whom the concept of love, family, care, bore little resemblance to most people’s definitions. Girls who had long ago exceeded whatever could be considered a reasonable quota for pain.

  While my story was similar in some respects—violence, absent father, substance-abusing mother—I realized quickly that I’d been relatively lucky. For most of my early years, I had a mother who loved me immensely, who read to me every night, cuddled me a lot, and even baked cookies on occasion. It’s just that for a period of years, the wrong men, alcohol, depression, and a few other setbacks impaired her ability to give me that love (or to bake, for that matter). However, those formative years helped lay a foundation and a memory of nurturing that would be instrumental in my own recovery process. Some of the girls I was meeting had never experienced that sense of safety or love. Ever. There were no good memories, no modeling of safe love, no time in their short lives that hadn’t been chaotic, drama-filled, or painful. For other girls those memories of family and love were fleeting: Mommy brushing their hair before she started getting high, going to the park with Daddy before he got shot. Snapshots of happy times when they were either too young to understand what was really happening or in the days before some traumatic incident caused their world to fall apart. In listening to their stories, it was so clear how much the adults around them had failed them, how the family structures had cracked under the weight of a hundred external pressures, how the people that should’ve been the safest were often the ones who caused the most pain of all.

  It’s Christmas Eve and the GEMS drop-in center is relatively quiet. We’ve had our big party the day before and now there’s just me and a couple of staff members working and a handful of girls hanging out and chatting. Sarah wanders into my office. “Raaaachel, Raaaachel . . .” The girls always seem compelled to call my name several times even if I’m right in front of them, just to make sure I’m listening. Although Sarah’s often whiny, the way she’s dragging out the syllables of my name sounds a little more whiny than usual. “Raaaachel, can you make my Christmas wish come true?” She looks at me expectantly, all big eyes and need.

  I sigh, anticipating the request—iPod, cell phone, clothes, five dollars to get Chinese food—and mentally preparing my response, no to all of the above except for Chinese food and even then I wanted a receipt. It seemed like every day I’d leave the house with twenty dollars and come home with two and have purchased only a cup of tea and a bagel. I was constantly trying to figure out if you could somehow claim the daily random expenses of sixty teenage girls on your taxes. “Huh?” Sarah says expectantly.

  “I don’t know.” I’d learned never to agree to anything without first knowing exactly when, where, how much. “What is it, hon?”

  “Can you make me and my mom get along for Christmas?”

  Just like that. A punch to the gut. All of a sudden I feel sad, and a little guilty for assuming that her wish would involve some material item. She half smiles, showing me that she knows I can’t make this happen, but clearly wishin
g, wondering if maybe I could.

  “I’m sorry, honey.” I give her a hug. I’ve learned the hard way not to make promises about girls’ families, not to build up unrealistic expectations. It’s better to teach them how to be resilient, how to create a family from the people around them who are able to love them in a healthy way. Girls get their hearts broken more times by their families than by any guy, returning to the scene of their childhood abuse again and again, each time fresh disappointment opening up the old wounds. Constantly surprised by behavior they’ve seen all their lives.

  I talk to her about the pressure of the holidays, how it’s a really tough time but it’s important to remember it’s just one day, really, that’s all it is. Given my own history with the holidays, I feel a little full of shit. I get it. It sucks to feel that everyone in the free world is enjoying the warmth of family while you’re stuck with an alcoholic mother/an abusive father/alone in a group home/fill in the blank. The pressure to feel “normal,” to buy into the media depictions of happy families around a yuletide log are stressful for most people who didn’t grow up in Mayberry, but for girls for whom the concept of family is so distorted with abuse, neglect, and abandonment, this pressure can be lethal. The number of girls at GEMS who attempt suicide increases in the danger zone between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sarah was recently one of them. I ask her about her plans and try to point out some minor bright points.

  She interrupts me to ask, very seriously, “Why do you guys care when I’m stressed out?” Stressed out for Sarah is a euphemism for Why do you care when I want to hurt myself? Three weeks earlier, she had sent her counselor an e-mail in the middle of the night that said good-bye and that she’d realized that death was the final answer. The e-mail, not seen till the next morning, created a panic in the office as we didn’t have her current address (most likely a hotel), and entailed three days of working with the cops to try to track her down. Given the frequency with which sexually exploited girls are kidnapped, I’d learned a long time ago that it’s far harder to track down someone’s Internet service provider address or trace someone’s cell phone coordinates to an exact location than it looks onLaw & Order: Special Victims Unit. However, we’d managed to finally determine her location and ascertain that she was probably still alive. Yet everyone involved, including the two detectives who worked diligently to find her, breathed a collective sigh of relief when Sarah strolled into the office several days later, seemingly having forgotten about her brush with death and looking genuinely perplexed as to why we were all making such a fuss. I try to explain all the reasons that we care whether she lives or dies, as that’s what she’s really asking. Because she deserves caring about, because we love her, because we want her to be safe and at peace. She twirls a piece of hair in her fingers and ponders this for a minute.

  “It’s just no one ever cared before.”

  Ah, the one-two punch, a fatal combination, especially on Christmas Eve. My head hurts.

  I begin to try to address all the different things that are wrapped up in this statement, but Sarah’s already thinking about something else. “Can I get a dollar for some soda, huh? Pleaaase.” I give her two dollars, grateful for the reprieve. Finally a request that I can actually fulfill.

  Five minutes later, Monica comes into my office to show me some poems she’s written the night before. One she’s modeled after the poem at the beginning of Antwone Fisher’s memoir, Finding Fish, understandably a popular book with the girls given the author’s history in the foster care system. Monica’s poem reads in part:

  You gave me a mother addicted to drugs

  And didn’t say, when I grow I must know how to love and be loved

  You gave me sisters that keep their separate ways

  You gave me a brother, who tries to rape me in my childhood days

  You gave me no clear vision to see my way through strife

  You gave me a father who couldn’t guide me through life

  I have to pause for a little while before I look up. Fuck, it’s Christmas Eve. I came in only to answer some e-mails. Her poem, really a plaintive prayer to God, has no response. I’ve asked the same questions of God myself, about Monica, about Sarah, about the perpetual pain in the lives of the girls we serve. I tell her it’s a great poem, fantastic, she’s a great writer. I ask her if she wants to talk about what she’s written; she shakes her head no, says she feels better having written it. I know that the holiday is weighing heavy on her, on all the girls, the fa-la-la-la-la of it all, the added reminder, if any were needed, that you don’t feel normal. A reminder that in the family lottery drawing, you drew a short straw and there are no do-overs.

  During the eighties, sociologists and clinicians identified the many ways in which gang culture replicated the family unit for children who found their support systems in the street. In the world of domestically trafficked girls, the same is true. The desire for a family is so strong and so overpowering for most children that it doesn’t take much to create that illusion. Pimps play upon this desire by creating a pseudo–family structure of girls who are your “wives-in-law” headed up by a man you call Daddy. The lessons that girls have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, about family and relationship dynamics are all fuel for the exploiters’ fire. The greater their need for attention and love, the easier it is to recruit them. The more unhealthy the patterns they’ve learned, the less a pimp needs to break them down, the less he needs to teach them. Growing up with an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent sets the stage for caretaking and codependency patterns that are helpful in making girls feel responsible for taking care of their pimp. Violence in the home trains children to believe that abuse and aggression are normal expressions of love. Abandonment and neglect can create all types of attachment disorders that can be used to keep girls from ever leaving their exploiters. For girls who’ve had nonexistent, fractured, or downright abusive relationships with their fathers or father figures, it’s an easy draw. “My daddy,” girls say with pride as they talk about the man who controls them.

  I’m sitting in the office one evening talking to Tiana, a soft-spoken, guarded fifteen-year-old with long black hair and a slow smile. She’s been referred to GEMS by her cousin, Maria, who’s also been exploited. Maria is on the other side of it now, slowly healing and trying to find some normalcy. Tiana’s still very much in the mix of things, currently living with her pimp, so I was surprised that she had come in to attend a couple of groups. I already know a lot about her family history from Maria and it’s horrific. The level of violence that she’s been exposed to and experienced would equal that of a child in a war zone. Witnessing her mother’s murder at the age of six was just the beginning for Tiana. She was then sent to live with her aunt, Maria’s mother, and like Maria she has fared badly. Her aunt’s “care” is visible through curling iron burns and permanent scars from extension cords. It’s not surprising either one of these cousins ran away.

  “Maria’s trippin. She worry too much. I’m good, I’m straight.” Tiana’s working overtime to convince me that she doesn’t need any help. “My daddy takes good care of us.” She gestures to her Baby Phat jacket and jeans as proof.

  “How many girls are there?” I ask.

  “There’s five of us; all the other girls are older. I’m the baby.”

  “What’s your daddy’s name, hon?” I’m curious if I know anyone else who lives there.

  She hesitates, thinking she probably shouldn’t tell me, but unable to contain herself she proudly says, “Dollars.”

  I know him, or at least know of him. Dollars is the ex-pimp of Melissa, the first girl I’d worked with, the girl he beat unconscious on a regular basis. It’s been about eight years since I last saw Melissa and yet he’s still out there, preying on another vulnerable little girl. I figure he must be in his mid- to late forties by now. He’d recruited Melissa when she was fourteen; Tiana he’d gotten at fifteen.

  “He can be a pretty violent guy, sweetie.” This is an understatement.


  “I know,” she says, launching into a long and complicated story that ends with another girl being dragged out of the house naked and being run over several times by his moving SUV. “She’s OK now, though.” Probably seeing the concern on my face she says, “She shouldn’t have been talking back.” She looks to me to agree with this.

  “Are you worried that something like that might happen to you?”

  She shrugs. “Kind of.”

  “So have you thought about other options?” In fairness, she knows and I know that her options are limited and that there are no family members to take her. Like Maria, she’d have to go to a group home.

  “But I like it there. We have a house and everything. And a dog. And we get to sit and eat dinner together every night. Like a family. It’s nice. That’s the best part.”

  It’s hard to explain to Tiana that her feelings about this aren’t indicative of what a great guy her “daddy” is but rather an indictment against how awful all the adults in her life have been. Imagine, I tell Tiana, that you’ve never seen a cow, never even seen a picture of one or had one described to you, and someone tells you that a horse is a cow. Of course you’ll believe them. If you haven’t had proper love and care, then a substitute will feel like the real thing, because you’ve got nothing to compare it to. For Tiana, whose entire fifteen years on the earth have been filled with physical violence, neglect, and horrific abuse, this analogy doesn’t really make sense. Her “daddy” is the first person who’s shown her any type of kindness, who’s modeled what a “real” family looks like—even though after dinner he takes her and the other girls out and sells them on the street. Still, however distorted a facsimile of a loving family, it is as close as she’s come, and I can see her swell with pride even as she says the word family out loud.