Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [106]
Roberta said that they were an ordinary family who liked church, Big Red football and community socials. Their first two daughters were easy to raise. “We mainly stayed out of their way. Other kids flocked around them. They never needed rules or curfews. We actually told Christina not to study so hard.
“Kelli is so different,” she said. “We’ve been at a loss what to do with her. She likes different food, movies, music and people. She’s attracted to strangeness. All the things that worked with the others seem to be wrong for her.”
“The older girls were self-motivated while Kelli doesn’t care about success,” Kevin said. “She’s hard to punish because she doesn’t want money, television or new clothes. Once we tried to ground her from her boyfriend and she threatened to kill herself. She would have too.”
“We’re sure she’s having sex,” Roberta added. “Brendan and she are inseparable. He’s a nice enough boy, but we know they do drugs together. Her sisters never drank or took drugs.”
“It sounds like the older girls are a hard act to follow,” I said.
Kelli was desperately seeking her own niche, different from her sisters. Since they had the glorious and successful niches, Kelli was left with the black-sheep niche.
“One of the problems with your earlier success is that it makes it hard to do things differently. It was easy to parent Christina and Carolyn. But for Kelli, you may need a consultant.”
“Kelli thinks we love her sisters more than her, but it’s not true,” Roberta said. “We’re just mainstream people and Kelli is harder for us to understand.”
The next week I met with Kelli, who was tall and thin with long brown hair. She could have been a beauty queen if she tried, but clearly she wasn’t trying. She wore an orange shirt, torn jeans and combat boots with thick olive socks. She was polite but distant. I had the feeling she was enduring this session, so I talked about the sixties for a while.
Kelli said, “I wish I’d been alive back then. I have nothing in common with the kids of today.”
“What do you like to do?”
“Hang out with Brendan. We feel the same way about things. He likes me just the way I am.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “Did my mom tell you we were having sex?”
I nodded.
“It’s no big deal,” Kelli said. “We love each other and I’m on the pill.”
I asked her what a “big deal” was from her point of view.
She tossed back her hair and said, “My parents. They just aren’t like me. They like to play bridge and do crossword puzzles. They watch John Wayne movies and listen to Conway Twitty albums. I feel like the hospital made a mistake and sent me to the wrong home. My sisters were perfect for my parents. They are middle-class success stories. I’m not going to be.”
I asked how she felt as she talked. “It hurts. They try to love me as much as my sisters, but they can’t. My parents love it when we achieve—that’s what makes us worth something. They don’t know what to love about me.”
“What do you want?”
“Enlightenment—what the Buddhists call ‘Nirvana.’ ”
I said, “That’s pretty ambitious.”
“Brendan and I read about Buddhism. When we have the money we’re going to the Naropa Institute in Boulder.”
We spent the rest of the session talking about Buddhism. Kelli knew a surprising amount for a fifteen-year-old. She was animated on this subject, and at the end of our time she seemed reluctant to go.
The next session Kelli wore those same boots, jeans and socks, but this time with a rose-colored T-shirt. She brought me some drawings she’d made of the Buddha, the tree of his enlightenment and the elephant god. She said, “I hate alcohol and cigarettes. They destroy consciousness.”
“How about other drugs?”
“We take mushrooms now and then and acid.” She paused. “Some of the best moments of my life were on acid.”
She liked the way LSD changes reality—the way music sounds different, colors are more vivid and