It's appropriate that I'm writing about a book titled Come Back this morning as I've been away from the site too long. With some bill-paying assignments out of the way, I look forward to devoting more time to Elephant, starting with our excerpts from Claire and Mia Fontaine's extraordinary tale of the repercussions of a father's rape of his toddler.
There's much more to the book than the sordid tale of the abuse of Mia by her biological father, Nick, which is featured here only because I think the chapters open the door to talking about the unsettling topic of sexual abuse as a root cause of substance abuse. I have two double-sided pages of annotations about other events and issues where Claire or Mia hit home: denial, cutting, manipulation, the reactions of friends and neighbors, wacko shrinks, miracle-working shrinks, "dead eyed vagrants [who] were somebody's children," the feel-good phase of drug taking, facing one's fears, parents afraid of their own kids, adrenaline queens, being emotionally present and, not least, how a boot-camp, behavior-modification program actually operates.
Claire and Mia will be in New York for an appearance on Good Morning America next Tuesday morning. Deirdre and I hope to meet them in Manhattan for dinner on Sunday. It's dependent on the weather. Duncan's high school baseball team, which is 28 - 0 and ranked No. 1 in the B division in New York State, is traveling to Binghampton for the state championship tournament on Saturday and we're headed up there this afternoon . Showers are forecast for Saturday. We hope the games will not be postponed. Besides catching up with other work, I've been watching all of Hasting High School's ball games. Returning from an away game that ate up about five hours Monday when I was on a deadline, I was reminded of whole weeks that would be consumed a few years ago dealing with the repercussions of a loved one's mental illness or drug abuse. I feel very blessed that I'm cheering for a base hit and not tracking down a runaway child or distraught spouse.
There are a few paragraphs toward the end of the Fontaine's book where Claire writes about teen culture. Its more expansive than most of Claire's writing in Come Back; she says that she did not want the book to "come across as scolding or reactionary." I think Claire raises some important questions for our society in the following passage, which is touched off by a Mia's visit home after spending many months in two austere rehabs.
Don't designers get that "heroin chic" should be a contradiction in terms? That the drug-eyed post-coital teens in those "hip" seventies basement ads are irresistible to teens who live and die by how much they look and act like models. Doesn't [Simpsons creator] Matt Groening find it disingenuous to denounce censorship a few years after apologizing to parents once he had his own kids? Why don't we want to acknowledge that the biggest parent of all is the culture.
Our generation has no problem with censorship when it suits them. We censor a man if he wants to comment on a coworker's chest size. We deny him his right of free speech because we acknowledge the damage it does. But we won't limit the "free speech" that surrounds our kids even though it damages them. Are we really too stupid, or too profit-minded, to see the connection between what they grow up seeing, hearing, and imitating and the fact that they can't build schools like Spring Creek fast enough?
I used to dread feeling like I didn't belong. Before this happened, I would keep my opinions to myself at meetings or dinner parties for fear of being seen as uncool. What's uncool to me now is the greed and arrogance of those who want to create, or defend, teen culture and deny its effects, who think that they've come so very far from the era of children being seen as chattel.
Children are still chattel to them—they're just chattel with a disposable income. Not to mention perky breasts and bee-stung lips.
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