Reviving Ophelia (13 page)

As a teenager, Lucy was recovering from leukemia. She, like many young people who have been ill, was close to her parents in ways that were adaptive when she was fighting the disease. Now that she had recovered, the closeness was keeping her from developing her own sense of self. Doing exactly what her parents and doctors said had kept her alive. With her recovery, she needed to learn that it was okay to make decisions independent of the well-meaning advice of adults.

Lucy was chubby, with the soft, pale skin of the chronically sick. Her radiation and chemotherapies had caused her hair to fall out and just now she was growing stubby new hair. When she went to school or shopping she covered her head with a knitted purple cap, but today in my office I could see her scalp.

Lucy sat placidly between her parents as they explained her medical history. Two years ago she had been diagnosed with leukemia and had been through a series of hospitalizations. The doctors were optimistic about her long-term prognosis and felt that with good follow-up, she would recover completely.

I asked how all this medical turmoil had affected the family. Sylvia said, “We did what we needed to do to save Lucy’s life. I never left her side when she was in the hospital. Frank came every night after work.”

She looked at her husband. “Frank’s a policeman. He was passed over for promotion this year. I’m sure his captain thought he had his hands full. But there will be other years. I am sick to death of hospitals, but Lucy is alive; I’m not complaining.”

Frank spoke carefully. “Our boy had the toughest time. He stayed with my sister. Lucy came first.”

“Mark’s been a brat since I came home,” Lucy interrupted.

I asked Lucy about the hospital time. “It wasn’t so bad except when I was sick from the chemo. Mom read to me; we played games. I know the answers to all the Trivial Pursuit questions.”

It had been hard for her to return to school. Everyone was nice to Lucy, almost too nice, like she was a visitor from another planet, but she was left out of so many things. Her old friends had boyfriends and were involved in new activities. When she was in the hospital they would visit with flowers and magazines, but now that she was better, they didn’t seem to know what to do with her.

Frank said, “Lucy’s personality has changed. She’s quieter. She used to clown around. Now she is more serious. In some ways she seems older; she’s suffered more and seen other children suffer. In some ways she’s younger; she’s missed a lot.”

Lucy had missed a great deal: ninth-grade graduation, the beginning of high school, parties, dating, sports, school activities and even puberty (the leukemia had delayed her periods and physical development). She had lots of catching up to do. She’d been so vulnerable that her parents were protective. They didn’t want her to become tired, to eat junk food, to forget to take her medicines or to take any chances. Her immune system was weak and she could be in trouble with the slightest injury. Lucy, unlike most teens, didn’t grimace at her parents’ worries. She associated them with staying alive.

The first time I saw Lucy alone, she was shy and tongue-tied. She sat looking out the window, her forehead wrinkled with worry. She was good at quoting what her mother or the doctors thought she should think or do. Lucy volunteered that when she watched television she marveled at the energy of the characters. “They move around so much and sound so perky. I get tired and jealous just watching them.”

I began by asking her what she thought was fun. She drew a blank. So I suggested that by the next session perhaps she would know. Lucy agreed to sit alone for ten minutes a day and think about what she enjoyed.

Lucy came in the next time rather discouraged. She had religiously followed my instructions and the main thing she had discovered was that she had no thoughts of her own. “All I think is what I’m supposed to.”

I said that realizing this was the beginning of the process of finding her private thoughts. We talked about how Lucy was different from Sylvia, Frank and Mark. At first this was difficult, but as we talked she became interested and animated for the first time since we’d met. Her differences were small: “I like candy and Mom doesn’t. I like rock music and Mark likes country. I am short and Dad is tall.” But later they became more important. “Mom suffers without complaining, while I like to tell others. I cry when I’m upset and Mark gets mad. I like people around when I’m worried and Dad likes to be alone.” We discussed these differences without judging and Lucy seemed pleased that she could be different from her family and still be close to them.

The next week Lucy came in with a jubilant smile on her face. “I know what I like,” she said. “Last Thursday my family went to a Cub Scout meeting and I stayed home. I thought, ‘How should I spend this evening?’ I realized that what I wanted to do was watch an old movie on television.
Duck Soup
was on and I loved it.”

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 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 and begged to sit on her lap.”

She described her childhood as happy. The family lived in one house, and when her brothers married they brought their wives home to live. Leah never had to work and had all the toys she wanted. “My brothers and sisters protected me and competed to hold me.”

When I asked her if she fought with her mother, she said, “Why would I fight with my mother? She gave me the gift of life.”

I asked her if she ever disobeyed her mother’s rules and she said no. She explained, “She is my mother and I owe her obedience, but it’s more than that. She knows what is good for me. Her rules will help me.”

Three years ago, because of Leah’s parentage, she and her mother were able to come to America. They would miss her siblings but felt they must move. Leah explained, “Vietnam is a communist country. There is no freedom and no money. I couldn’t even go to school beyond ninth grade.”

At first she and her mother lived in a small apartment with no furniture and wore clothes from Goodwill. The Refugee Center helped Leah’s mother find work at a local cannery, and now they have an adequate income, even enough to send money back to Vietnam.

At night, after her mother goes to bed, Leah writes letters to her brothers and sisters. Holidays, especially the Vietnamese New Year, are lonely for her. Still she is happy to be here. The high school is much better than the schools in Vietnam. She has made friends with some of the Vietnamese students. “The teachers are kinder and we have computers.”

I asked her about her days here. “I wake early so I can cook breakfast for my mother. It makes me sad to see her work, so I try to help her. Then I walk to school. After school I clean house and fix dinner. In the evenings I study and help my mother learn English.”

I asked about hobbies. “I like to listen to Vietnamese music, especially sad music. I write poems about my country.”

Leah considers herself too young to date. She told me, “I would never have sex until I was married. That would bring great shame on my family.”

When she is in her twenties she plans to date only Vietnamese men who promise that her mother will always be able to live with her. She showed me a class ring and a silver bracelet. “Mother bought me this. I begged her not to, but she wanted me to look like an American teenager. I could never leave my mother. My mother has given me everything and kept nothing for herself. I am all she has now.”

She and her friends speak mostly Vietnamese or French, and American teenagers leave them alone. She has yet to see an American movie. When we discussed American teenagers, Leah hesitated, clearly concerned not to appear rude. Then she said, “I don’t like how American children leave home when they are eighteen. They abandon their parents, and they get in a lot of trouble. I don’t think that’s right.”

Leah likes the freedom and the prosperity of America. She said, “It’s easier to earn a living here. I can hardly wait to finish school and get a job so I can support my mother.”

In Leah’s culture, autonomy and independence are not virtues. Vietnamese families are expected to be harmonious and loyal. The good of the family is more important than the individual satisfaction of its members. Children are expected to live at home all their lives (sons with their parents and daughters with their husbands’ parents). No one anticipates that children will rebel or disagree with their parents, and children rarely do disagree. Authority is not questioned, which may be tolerable when authority is wise and benevolent, but can be tragic when authority is malevolent or misguided.

These beliefs in obedience and loyalty allowed Leah to have a less turbulent adolescence. She didn’t need to distance from her family or reject family beliefs in order to grow up. On the other hand, she didn’t differentiate into her own person. She was unlikely to develop in ways different from her family. If she tried, she would have been discouraged.

Jody was the oldest daughter of a conservative, fundamentalist family. They lived in an old farmhouse that had managed to survive as elegant suburban homes were built around it. The front porch was piled high with boxes of
National Geographics,
sleds, snow shovels and work boots. The small living room reminded me of my grandparents’ home in the fifties. It was cramped but cozy, with worn overstuffed furniture. Doilies perched on the television and pots of Swedish ivy hung from macramé cords. Every available space was occupied by family pictures, trophies and knickknacks.

I’d heard about Jody from her teachers and wanted to interview her. This afternoon she was home alone. Her sisters were at ball practice and her mother and brothers were at a church bazaar. Her dad was at work in the family tree-trimming and firewood business.

I’d seen a photo of Jody in the paper when she was homecoming queen, but today I wouldn’t have recognized her. She wore no makeup and her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was dressed in gray sweats and glowed with good health and wholesomeness. I knew she had a softball scholarship and I asked first about sports.