Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [43]
Lucy said proudly, “No one told me to do this or cares whether I like movies or not. I just did it for myself.”
I congratulated Lucy on her illumination. Even though the content of her self-discovery was small, the process was critical. Lucy had managed to discover something about herself and to respect that discovery. She had an original thought.
After this first thought, Lucy slowly built a more independent personality. She wrote about her time in the hospital. At first she wrote her polite feelings—she was grateful to the doctors and nurses, grateful to her parents for sticking so close. Later she was able to write about her fear of death, her anger at being a cancer patient, her rage at the painful treatments and her sadness about the children who didn’t make it.
Lucy worked her way back into the world of friends and school. She joined Spanish Club. She invited her old friend to spend the night with her. Sylvia worried these activities would tire Lucy. Her worrying, which had been so adaptive during the fight against leukemia, was less adaptive now that Lucy was recovering. After five sessions, Lucy reported that she and her mother had argued over a late-night phone call. I laughed in relief.
The family therapy became a posttraumatic stress debriefing. Lucy’s leukemia had affected everyone’s life. Sylvia told of coming home from the hospital after a night when Lucy had thrown up every fifteen minutes from the chemotherapy. She walked into Lucy’s empty bedroom, lay down on her canopy bed, still decorated with unicorns. She’d picked up Lucy’s My Little Pony and cried till she felt her body had no more tears.
Frank talked about how hard it was to work. He’d be ticketing speeders and thinking of Lucy in her hospital bed. “Sometimes a speeder would be rude or argumentative,” Frank said. “I’d just want to punch him in the mouth.”
Mark was mad at Lucy for getting sick. “I thought she did it to get attention. Sometimes I thought she was faking it, and other times I was sure she would die. She got lots of presents and Mom and Dad did whatever she wanted. I wanted to get sick too.”
After eight months, Lucy was ready to stop therapy. Her voice had become firmer and more animated. Her hair had grown into a sleek brown cap. She had begun an exercise program and her body had slimmed down and firmed up. Her periods had started. She’d reconnected with some old friends and made some new ones. She was losing the ultraserious personality of the sick. She had learned that she could disagree with her parents and no one dropped dead. She could say what she thought and develop into the person she wanted to become.
LEAH (18)
Leah was born into a culture with very different assumptions about families. In Vietnamese culture, families are seen as shelter from the storm. Adolescents don’t rebel, but rather are nested in extended families that they will be with forever. Also, because Leah grew up in an impoverished communist country, she missed the information explosion of the Western world.
I interviewed Leah at her high school during her junior year. She was dressed casually in a Garfield sweatshirt and jeans, but she was carefully groomed with long ice-blue nails and an elaborate hairstyle. Only her crooked, brown teeth betrayed the poverty she must have experienced in Vietnam.
Leah was born in Vietnam in 1975. She was the daughter of a Marine and a Vietnamese woman who had lost her husband to the war and was struggling to support her four children. The Marine left without knowing that Leah’s mother was pregnant, and Leah never met her father. He gave his home address to Leah’s mother and she wistfully wrote it out for me. She read the words aloud like a mantra, but added, “I would never bother him. Perhaps my father is married and would be embarrassed by me.”
Leah grew up in Vietnam, the beloved baby of the family. Her mother worked long hours to support her children. She said, “I sat by the window and cried as I waited for my mother to come home from work. When she arrived home, I followed her everywhere