Sliding into Adolescence
Before I could 'hold space' with Ann, there was a rebellion.
Looking back, I can see how quietly it began—the shift in Ann, and then the shift in me.
No one slides through adolescence unscathed. The crown of my scalp had to be stitched together after an argument, but it was the wounds beneath the skin that lasted. Those stories will come. For now, let’s feel the weather of that time.
At home Ann, my mother, was slipping into a depression that hid itself inside a maze of physical symptoms—as it often does—and kept her captive to an endless search for a cure. By then she spent most of her days on the couch in the center of our home. She had once been vibrant, as Linda and my brother Michael remembered from their childhood and high-school years, but something shifted when it was my turn to come of age. Her illness had no name for us then, but it loomed over everything.
The air inside our home thickened with cigarette smoke from Ann’s chain-smoking and the quiet presence of that ghost of a disease while the world outside was rumbling with seismic signals that I found far more interesting.
It was the late sixties, and the ground was shaking for everyone. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali refused the draft, and ten thousand hippies gathered in Central Park to chant, dance and smoke pot for peace. The counterculture movement howled into the charged air of that perfect storm. These signs of the times fused with my adolescent hormones, lighting a fire that fueled my edginess.
The year Jimi Hendrix turned the national anthem into a primal wail at Woodstock, I had my own revelation about the faith I’d been raised with. We public-school kids walked to religious ed at the local Catholic school, where an elderly nun in sweeping black insisted we could never reach heaven unless we were Catholic.
“You mean,” I asked my friend Gina as we walked home barefoot over the crushed stone of a neighbor’s driveway, “that if you’re born in India, you can never see God?”
I wasn’t buying it.
“Don’t trust anyone over 30” became the new gospel, and I was happy to preach my own brand of rebellion. I wasn’t storming Washington, but I had my arsenal: a headband over my long strawberry-blonde hair, bell bottoms wide enough to sweep a floor, a micro-mini skirting decency, and a brown fringed vest from the hippie store that was filled with cloyingly sweet incense. Sewing an upside-down American flag over the holes in my jeans felt perfectly in step with the times—though it was bound to collide with my father Frank’s world. A proud WWII veteran, he did not agree.
One early evening, as I walked past his easy chair, he spotted the flag patch.
“What the hell is that?” he shouted, leaping up and chasing me. I high-stepped up the stairs while he grabbed the shoes we always left on the first steps and hurled them at me. I turned into my bedroom just as the barrage reached its peak—as Linda arrived to introduce her college friend.
“Dad, this is Janice,” she said sweetly, while Frank stood mid-assault, red-faced and furious, still holding a shoe.
Later that night, Linda and I laughed at the absurdity: Frank flinging footwear, me dodging like a cartoon character, and her friend seeing her father for the first time in full tirade. But beneath the laughter, something in me was shifting. Linda was home from college only in the summers now, and I missed her. The foundation beneath me was beginning to crumble. The earthquake outside mirrored the one about to break in me. These first small fractures opened to a path I mistook for freedom but shimmered with danger.