Will's Choice

by Gail Griffith

  We gathered once more in the log cabin schoolhouse late morning on the second day of the parent seminar. The region had yet to experience its first snowfall, but the temperature had dipped into the twenties overnight and the room was chilly and damp. I clutched a steamy cup of weak coffee and made small talk with the other parents, and steeled myself for the day’s potential detonations.

  We took our seats, and Bob, Melissa, Jack, and I arrayed ourselves in a row, designed to convey a united front. Dennis and Greg filed in and outlined the day’s agenda. The eight boys would be joining us for this morning’s session. Rather than being “talked about” for the remainder of the morning, they had been offered an opportunity to participate and they voted to join in. Each boy would be asked to address an unresolved issue between himself and his parents—an unspoken grievance or an apology for an incident over which he now felt remorse. Or, he could talk about his relationships to his parents, collectively or individually (“Describe a strength you admire in your father’s character” or “What do you miss most about your family?” or “How do you expect to get along with your mother in the future?”)

  The boys ambled into the cabin. Heads down, expressions guarded or embarrassed, their eyes darted around the circle and at the wood floor, scouring the room like minesweepers hoping not to trigger an explosive charge. They sat on the floor at the base of our chairs, legs sprawling or crossed, some casually relaxing a back against a mother’s leg, some purposefully resisting any bodily contact with father or mother. The boldest, or perhaps the child the most practiced in therapeutic give-and-take (or perhaps the boy with the least to lose), spoke up first.

  Some people are good at self-examination and reflection; others are not. In any therapeutic setting, the force of this exercise unfortunately lands heavily on individuals who are unable or unwilling to analyze their actions in the context of how their behavior affects others and admit failings, large or small. I never cease to be amazed by parents who do so poorly at understanding and communicating with their children. A much older father spoke of wanting to instill in his boy an appreciation for great literature and could not understand why his son needed him to be more than a mentor or pedant. His son was gasping for warmth. Another couple evinced such a poisonous rapport between them that you worried how their son could ever return to the family without being caught in the middle and torn apart by his parents. There were tears, bitterness, and anger; it spilled out around the room. Round One went to the kids who had learned to frame their actions and emotions in ways that demonstrated a real desire to break the mold and get out from under those patterns of behavior that had landed them at Montana Academy in the first place—with or without the support of a sympathetic or understanding family.

  I marvel that so many of us make it to adulthood. Likewise, I am stunned by the depth of insight and empathy some parents come to naturally. Where do these gifts come from? Are they learned behaviors or are they innate? It stands to reason that you learn to parent from your parents, but what I observed were families (such as ours) forced to confront challenges our parents never imagined: the rampant spread of illegal drugs; easy access to birth control, the sexual revolution, and a global spike in sexually transmitted diseases; the transformative shifts in technology, communications, and the economy, pitting families and centuries-old traditions against rapid modernization. The New World Order begins at home. We see as much disruption within the microcosm of the family as we observe on a global scale.

  As we circled the classroom, our attention leapfrogged from one family, one boy, to another. We had been at it for two hours and Will was the last kid to present, simply by virtue of where he sat in the circle. No doubt he had time to ruminate on an appropriate answer to “Will, how do you characterize your parents’ best attributes and what impact have they had on you?” Four parents, all eyes and ears on him; this was no mean feat. Will opted for brevity. Turning to face each one of us in turn, he brilliantly elucidated characterizations of his family, pinning a single one-word adjective to each of us:

  “Dad, you’re ‘insight,’ Melissa’s ‘enthusiasm,’ Jack is ‘humor,’ and Mom, you’re ‘openness.’”

  His pronouncement was a stunner. It was exactly right. We loved him so unabashedly; it seemed that all of our efforts were paying off. He managed in a single word to recognize and acknowledge our individual strengths—and what these attributes gave him back. The moment had required not just insight, but diplomacy and humor. He packed it all into four words.

  “Wow, Will. That was a home run!” Dennis congratulated him. The rest of us exhaled; I reveled in the moment’s pure feeling and Dennis brought the session to a close.

  Letter from me to Will, from Washington, D.C.:

  November 19, 2001

  Woo, you turkey dude,

  I spoke to Malinek today. He says he thinks you’re much improved. I sure hope so.

  And now we’re about to hit the HOLLODAYS. I love the first one: the Eating Holiday. No gifts, just more food than is right for a starving third world country. Then the Blessed Snow Holiday. The one where the Fairy Queen dusts everyone for fingerprints and we make cookies shaped like little fish. Can’t wait for you to get home. John comes home tomorrow; I’m going to let him sleep in your room. Jane comes on Wednesday. It will be good to have the children underfoot for a test run before December, just to see how the grownups react.

  I am hoping to hear from you tonight that you’ve made it to Star Clan. That’s what you are to me. My star. (Even if you are a turkey.)

  I love you,

  Mom

  Star Clan Assignment

  Who am I? This question is to be answered both in a written format as well as presented figuratively through some means of creative expression—art work, collage, sculpture, poetry etc. etc. Although presented as the first question, this question should be answered last after reviewing the following questions. Please try to present your written summary in approximately one paragraph that accurately captures the central themes of your uniqueness.

  What things do other people know about me that I have a hard time believing about myself? Why? The answer to this question may include both negative and positive traits that you have a difficult time accepting about yourself. Please use your team group to solicit feedback about yourself, both your strengths and weaknesses.

  How has the process of therapy worked for me? The purpose of this question is for you to reflect on your stay at Montana Academy and determine exactly what has motivated you to change, and why you have made the changes in your life that you have. The answer to this question may include “pivotal moments” or a turning point that motivated you to change. Also, please examine the relationships that you have formed while at Montana Academy with both staff and peers. Have these relationships influenced you in any way and why?

  What do I want for my future? What skills do I have that will help me obtain these goals? What skills do I need to help me obtain these goals? Please focus on several aspects of your life including your future career, relationships, dreams, goals, etc.

  What changes have been the most difficult for me to make while I’ve been at Montana Academy? How did you overcome these problems?

  On December 7, Will’s eighteenth birthday, my mother, Duff Griffith, was diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. The cancer had progressed too far to treat and she would live for only four more months. It was a body blow we had not expected, in a year that had rained nothing but bad news.

  I received the phone call from my father the morning of the seventh, following my mother’s exploratory surgery. I made hasty plans to fly to Austin where I met with my sister, Suzy, who flew in from California. We picked up a rental car and drove in a dense black night through torrential December rain to Georgetown, Texas, a small turn-of-the-century railroad town twenty-five miles north of Austin, where my parents had settled only weeks before.

  My parents loved to travel. In fact, it was the constant in their life together—and in my ch
ildhood. In October 2001, after returning from a nine-month odyssey, my mother announced their traveling days were over; they were going to find a pleasant town in which to settle down “for the duration.” I found it hard to believe my folks would stay put for long (they were inveterate travelers), but it made sense to be thinking about putting down roots. After all, they were in their mid-seventies. By outward appearances, they were in relatively good health, but it couldn’t hurt to be closer to family and health care options than a port of call somewhere in the Strait of Malacca.

  My parents crisscrossed the country by car to locate the ideal setting: a small town with a pleasant ambiance, not too far from a major urban center—walkable, with easy access to shopping. In November, they decided they had found just the place in Georgetown, Texas. Right after Thanksgiving, three days after they moved into a lovely, cozy house with a front porch, a tin roof, and pecan trees in the yard, my mother went to a local doctor, complaining of a cough she had not been able to shake for several months. The diagnosis was rendered almost immediately and my mother began the last and final journey of her well-lived life.

  I called Dennis Malinak at Montana Academy to alert him and then I broke the news to Will by phone a couple of days later, after his birthday. He loved his grandmother, who was stylish, eccentric, and opinionated but fiercely proud of her grandchildren. She catered to her grandkids’ whims and lavished them with attention, maintaining a list of their favorite foods and mailing them boxes of homemade cookies on random occasions. She wrote Will and her four other grandchildren letters from all over the world describing in colorful detail the indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea or whorehouses in Bangkok. Her oft-quoted one-time remark “I don’t much care for dining with cannibals” was fodder for hilarity whenever the kids reminisced about her. It had the offbeat ring of a character given to dramatic simplification, but my mother charmed the grandchildren with her wackiness and unpredictability.

  When I finally spoke by phone with Will to break the bad news, it was hard to discern his reaction. True to his poker player persona, he did not react with an outburst of emotion. He asked, “Do you think she has long to live?” and “How are you holding up, Mom?” I am sure the phone call caught him off guard, but in a year when everything in his world had been upended, this latest bit of bad news may not have registered with the impact he might have felt if his year had been going along swimmingly. I imagined he was thinking, “Oh, great…What next?”

  But Will was now eighteen. Where he was going with his own life probably weighed more heavily than the many outside events that had penetrated his isolation over the past several months. He was old enough to “vote with his feet” if he decided to opt out of therapy, old enough to cast a vote in a presidential election, old enough to serve in the military—old enough, by legal benchmarks, to make his own decisions about all aspects of his young life.

  It is an unthinking system wherein your child is depressed and suicidal and your legal dependent one day, and the very next day he is still depressed and suicidal, but he is eighteen years old and sprung from your reach. You lose all rights and ability to secure treatment for him by ordinary legal means. And I was stunned to learn recently that in some states, a child may refuse mental health intervention when he or she is as young as thirteen years old. How did efforts to protect the civil rights of our children become so twisted on this issue?

  Throughout the fall, Bob and I strategized with Montana Academy director John McKinnon and Dennis Malinak about the approach to keep Will voluntarily engaged at the academy beyond his eighteenth birthday. The school had dealt with this problem before and Dr. McKinnon assured us that most all of the kids in the program, despite their intention to “walk” on their eighteenth birthday, are held back by lack of family support or the financial wherewithal to leave. In fact, Dr. McKinnon counseled, Bob and I should make it clear to Will that if he were to leave after he turned eighteen but before he completed the program, he would be on his own; he would have to make his way out of Montana and figure out the next steps, without our financial support or encouragement. And he would not be allowed to come back home—a classic “tough love” strategy. Bob and I outlined our resolution in a conference call to Will a couple of weeks before Christmas break. Bob took the lead: “Will, your mom and I feel it’s really important for you to finish the program. Not just for the high school diploma, but because we think you’re finally getting something out of the therapy with Dennis and you could really make the most of the time you have left there.”

  Reasonable enough. Will listened but did not respond. Bob then let Will know that if he intended to leave Montana Academy without completing the program, he would be on his own. Bob delivered the ultimatum as gently as he could, again emphasizing how anxious we were for him to stay in the program. Again, no response from Will.

  No one knows exactly what he was thinking, but I know I was wondering if I could really pull off our threat. For the past year I had been consumed by an almost fanatic drive to put Will back together, to restore his mental health. I was tormented: Would he really walk away from Montana Academy, hike out of the remote Lost Horizon Ranch, walk the forty miles to Kalispell, in the deep cold of Montana winter? And what then? He knew he had a couple hundred dollars in savings in the bank. Would he try to access his savings and strike out on his own, like a modern-day Kerouac? I knew Will was literate enough to find this romantic model intellectually appealing. But he was just a kid, despite the arbitrary age marker; and he was a kid recovering from a serious illness. Could I really let him go down this path if he were to elect it? If he walked all the way to Kalispell, bought an airline ticket to Washington, and showed up at the front door, could I turn him away? Honestly? No way. I am thankful he never put me to the test; it was an empty threat on my part.

  Will’s journal entries demonstrate that he was as conflicted by this decision as we were. Sometime in late November, he wrote:

  I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t want to graduate. So much pent up frustration and what-not behind this one. Can’t read my books. All the adults and everyone want me to stay. But it’s like the more they say about it, and how it’s the “right choice” and all, the more I want to leave. It just pisses me off that they (or I) put myself in this position. Man, I just want to say I’m leaving and get on with shit. I don’t care about school or going to college or any of that fucking mess. I just want to be out of here and on with shit. And I think the whole reason I want to go so bad is because I want to do what I fucking want to do. I never do what I want to do. I feel like if I go through with this shit and graduate and all that shit I’m just going to be the same sorry fucker who came in here. Always doing what everyone wants me to. But, on the plus side, everybody would be all mad or disappointed or whatever. It’s not like I don’t want to finish because I just don’t care about anything—I just don’t care about this thing.

  Well, no—I do care. I care in that I really dislike this place a lot and want to go home. And I’m just so goddam pissed that I’m in here. I still hold a very strong resentment towards my parents for being here. It just irritates me a lot. And this Spanish class shit. They’re all trying to convince me to take Spanish so that my college credits are better off so I can go to a UC [University of California] school or whatever. I hate Spanish. Why don’t they fucking worry about whether or not I’ll actually graduate this place and get a high school diploma at all? Ah, I guess I’m too frustrated and fed up right now to actually try to work this shit out, But I guess I am running out of time.

  Morning—Still [feel] the same, Dammit.

  Apparently, a lot of people are asking about me or talking to their kids about me or something. That makes me just a little uncomfortable. I don’t like being the center of attention. Especially being all undecided or whatever. Fucking people here like me. I kind of wish they didn’t like me—at least people who I don’t even know. That like adds so much more pressure to this. I think I just want to tell them I’m goi
ng to leave and put an end to all this business. I need to make some lists of tapes and books and games and shit that I need (or want) to get when I get out of here. That would take my mind off shit. Take it off the serious parts of the future. Start paying attention to the little petty fun shit. I need to get myself out of here so I can get myself a Super Nintendo and Super Mario Altars. So I can play all the Mario games one after another.

  Well, at least I’m in a better mood than last night. Super Mario 3 is so much fun. I got to beat that game (get it first) when I leave. And MDK. That was such a fun ass game. I have to get that back when I get out.

  I think Megan would be really pissed if I left without graduating. Hmmm. Surprisingly that is actually more discouraging than one might think. For some reason I’m more concerned with that…than what my parents say. Probably because I already know what to expect from them. They can’t totally reject me if I fuck up. They have to accept me after a while. She could just totally reject it and I would never see her again. Sad. Oh, well. Just more shit to factor in—I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that I can recognize that staying is the smarter choice. But I can’t see through my frustration and dislike for this place long enough to actually agree with and carry out that choice and actually stay. So, I guess I’m going to leave, by default. Hmmm, this should be interesting.

  I really don’t want to tell them this shit. That’s my biggest fear through all this business. I’m so worried that it’s going to be too much to say or whatever and I’m just not going to say it. That happens a lot when it comes to things that I want. It becomes too much of a responsibility or burden or whatever and I don’t end up saying it or doing it and I just do what someone else wants to. This is looking to be a pretty rough one. It is all like that except times fifty because it’s so important. I guess the one thing that gives me some confidence is that I know that no matter what I’m turning 18 and that’s all that really matters in the final decision making. That’s like, the one card that I have that nobody can dispute. So I guess that makes it different. Makes it actually my decision.