It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [65]
Now, while I don’t think I was tricked into going, I’m pretty sure I never agreed to spending two days with my mother in a nun’s room and eating the cuisine of the food bank. I know I wouldn’t have agreed to canned green beans at five meals out of six. But at fourteen, if your parents say, “You’re going to spend the weekend at church with your mother to learn how to be a normal teenager,” you go. There was no choice to be had. My mother, however, was pretty excited about the retreat; she expected to immediately get down to business and solve the problem of my unruliness now that I was wearing a bra and had an onslaught of hormones comparable to angry Mongols surging through my body.
Once she explained our problems to the priest—my un-cleanliness, my snotty attitude, and the fact that I was still not running fast enough by vans (clear indications that I was destined for a life of abnormality and certain dust)—everyone at Bad Daughter Camp was bound to bestow upon her unparalleled amounts of sympathy and, if conditions were right, pity. She knew this. She was ready for it. She expected nothing less.
An hour after we checked in and dragged our suitcases to the nun’s block, we found ourselves sitting on metal folding chairs in a half circle in “group.” While she didn’t show it, I imagine it was a bit of a surprise to my mom, who was sitting next to me, that every other girl enrolled in Bad Daughter Camp was either dabbling in heroin, a runaway who had lived in a tunnel, had stabbed someone with a mechanical pencil during a robbery at Circle K, or was forced to attend by the conditions of their release from juvenile detention, according to their “testimony” as we each took turns telling our “Harried Mother/Bad Daughter Tale of Woe.”
When our turn came, things might have ended differently had we been given warning or even a syllabus. We might have been able to huddle and been more prepared, but we were nothing short of a disaster. I don’t know about my mother, but I certainly felt the energy of the room drop and disappointment abound when she dramatically confessed that, instead of truly cleaning my room, including the baseboards, I just shoved everything in a closet or under my bed and “that wasn’t normal.” I do believe the other mothers actively rolled their eyes, and one crossed her arms in defiance. Even the mention that my mother had attended the notorious high school depicted in Welcome Back, Kotter didn’t earn us any street cred. My mother tried to bring it back by suggesting that I may have smoked on one suspicious occasion or that I purchased a Devo album with my babysitting money, but by then it was too late. Our only hope for redemption was if she had suddenly gone for the gold and inserted the word “pimp” into our sordid tale of nothing, but in the presence of a priest, the consequences were too vast, although even he looked bored. Sure, I would have been a firecracker at band camp, but at Bad Daughter Camp turned into Felony Camp, I couldn’t even catch a spark. I found myself almost wishing I had taken a shard of glass to someone’s kidney or had set fire to something flammable, even just to my Kmart monkey pajamas, so I would have fit in and had something to talk about with the other girls on break instead of “Yeah … I talk back. I’ve done it several times now.”
To add insult to injury, Felony Camp also called for us to hug after every “breakthrough,” which to other mother–daughter duos meant a concession to try methadone (although the decision about cocaine was still iffy); a compromise to take the alarm off the window if the daughter would stop crawling through it; a deal to meet with another