The contrast between the environment at the shelter and the lifestyle of Meredith’s family was so stark I may as well have moved to the Taj Mahal. I continue to feel ceaseless gratitude to her mom for providing me with a respite from my life, a respite in every sense of the word. While this family certainly had its own share of problems, it was so wonderful to be fed nice food, given decent clothes, and to sleep in comfort and relative safety.

After a few weeks of living at the Inn, we all moved to the new house in Cape Elizabeth. It was here in their guest room that I finally had a bed of my own for the first time since I left my dad’s house in Biddeford. It was a delicious comfort not only there being a door to this room, but that I never felt I had to use it. I did my best to reshape my habits to this new family. I spent time goofing off with Meredith’s sister Sarah, playing video games. I ate what they ate at a different schedule than what I was used to. But now and then I would simply wander the long hallways of the house, or sit alone in the bathroom in amazement at how quiet life could be. Yet even this was to end.

The process of being taken into care continued with less of my attention. School started again. I was happy to be back; even though there was some difficulty in knowing I was potentially so easily located by my father. Waynflete faculty had expressed their commitment to keeping me safe, but it was still difficult to trust that the people who worked at a private prep school would really know how to do that. My new living situation was a curiosity to my peers, which could alternately make me feel uncomfortable or proudly unique. But all in all, I had a tremendous amount of support I never had felt while I was living with my dad, and I know I owed a great deal of that support to my advisor, Gary.

One fall morning, I was startled out of my bed at Meredith’s house by my caseworker, Nancy. She brought good news: the state of Maine had decided to take me into protective custody. I had made it, and the meeting that clinched the decision had taken place in Biddeford several weeks earlier. In a confining florescent-lit room I sat with Nancy, her supervisor, and a number of other people. One of them was my father. One of the most difficult things I have ever had to do was open my mouth to speak in that room. Believe it or not, to face him and rattle off the list of things I had experienced while living with him was nearly as painful as the experiences themselves. No words can describe the waves of pain and apprehension flooding through me at that meeting, or the amount of will it took me to get through it. My fists were clenched under the table, so tightly that my fingernails left great weals and bleeding wounds on my palms. But the worth of that meeting proved itself: I was safe from going home for good.

Safe—although nothing protects any kid from the world she is in. How do I describe the aftermath of the transition to my new life? Following an additional few weeks at Fair Harbor, I was moved to a group home for teenage girls in foster care. If the shelter was like prison, this was a halfway house. The atmosphere was much more stable and the staff more relaxed. Still, I bucked what I perceived to be unnecessary restrictions—against alcohol, staying out late, and the general mayhem I was accustomed to having in my life. Remember, although living with my father meant taking care of him financially, emotionally and sexually; with these adult behaviors came adult freedoms. I never had enforceable curfews or other disciplinary rules. My more rational arguments for my own independence were not ignored. After about six months of living and proving myself capable at the group home, it was agreed I would move into an apartment of my own.

As long as I continued to be outwardly responsible to work and to school, the state would pay the rent for a modest apartment and provide me with food stamps and a clothing allowance. At 167 Danforth Street, just a few blocks away from where my family lived when I was first born, my life returned to its normal state of chaos. I was happy too. My apartment belonged to me entirely and I could do whatever I liked there. My senior year of school was not demanding, and was actually almost over by the time I moved in. My job, while high pressure, did not require a great time commitment and I had plenty of opportunity to write, cook, and spend time with friends. Oddly, some of my fondest memories of that apartment involved cleaning up in the mornings after the near-continuous parties with whoever had crashed there for the night. My 18^th birthday came and went. I remained in state custody under what was known as a V-9 contract. A V-9 contract recognizes that most kids receive assistance from parents through college and extends some support until those in care either turn 21 (half of the kids in foster care in the U.S. end up homeless at 18) or leave the state. It provided me with basic essentials as long as I was in school, so I took some classes at the Portland College of Art and then at USM.

The peace I found in my hard-earned independence did not altogether assuage my restlessness. I still had to occasionally communicate with my father and my personal life was almost always in a state of shambles. I felt stifled creatively, and my writer’s instincts were telling me to get out of Maine as quickly as possible or I might never leave. That was not the life I wanted. I decided to break my V-9 contract and move to Florida to see my mother before spending some time traveling. Legally, I was now an adult, and there was not much she could do to prevent my visiting. I packed up a few of my belongings and gave the rest to friends. I said my farewells to Meredith and her family and began a new life.

Once I arrived in Florida, my mom and her boyfriend didn’t want me to stay with them for more than a few days so she helped me get an apartment nearby. I lived in Sarasota, near Siesta Key, in an old garage behind my landlady’s house that had been converted to a mother-in-law’s apartment. This very primitive apartment had one room with a bed on one side and a couch on the other. The microwave and the bathroom sink served as my kitchen. Although more cramped than cozy, it was a wonderful place. In the back yard I had more fresh grapefruit and oranges than I could eat. I was within walking distance of both my new job and one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. I swam every day and walked around barefoot the vast majority of the time, basking in the un-Maine-like weather. Dolphins played with me in the Gulf of Mexico. I made new, if not very long-term friends. And then I moved on.

My travels took me from Florida to Memphis, Tennessee by the flip of a coin (tails would have led to Atlanta). In Tennessee I got my drivers’ license, bought a car, and drove from Memphis to New Orleans. Then from Louisiana across Texas by way of Beaumont, Austin, and El Paso. I drove across New Mexico, stopping only briefly to marvel at the Southwestern sunrise before continuing on to Arizona. There I visited my friend Chris who was at that time living with his new girlfriend and infant daughter in Phoenix. I left and moved on to Colorado: Cortez, Grand Junction, Telluride, and Boulder. My car threw a rod in a parking lot in Denver and I hopped a train back East. The adventures I had on my journey were far too numerous to recount here, but they were sometimes fun, sometimes scary, sometimes melancholic. Then finally, in April 1994, a year and a half after setting out, I returned to Maine.

I stayed with friends at first, then picked up the habit of visiting my cousins in New Hampshire, who played in an alt-rock band while attending college at UNH. For a number of reasons, including the fact that he also was heavily involved in my cousins’ lives and music, I felt obligated to try to work out some sort of relationship with my father. Now it seems foolish, but it was hard to let go of wanting to have a dad, even if it was at my own expense. My father was eager to be on good terms again, but not surprisingly, I was uncomfortable whenever he was around. When I was with other friends, though, I had what felt like a golden time.

I owned virtually nothing, paid no rent, and had no one to be responsible to or for. I hitchhiked up to Portland to work now and then, so I would have cash to play. I spent time hiking and camping and partying with friends. I was well muscled and as tan as my freckled skin would allow. There were times when I felt so free the sky itself seemed to open up to me. This period was wonderful, but very brief. Cracks developed in the social circle I was in, and I spent far less time in New Hampshire. Mostly I stayed with my old friend Dice in Portland at his apartment that was on the opposite end of High Street from where we had all lived together with my dad.

And, incredibly, I spent time in the house in Biddeford, occasionally salvaging a record or book from the house I once fled from. He had sold most of what Dice and I left behind by that time, but we never spoke of this. One night, I was at my father’s house with another friend of mine, Kurt (now dead of an apparent suicide), when something very strange happened. We had just been sitting around drinking a beer or two, listening to music. I got up to go to the bathroom as normally as always. Suddenly and entirely unexpectedly, I completely lost my composure. Although I wasn’t drunk by any means, something about spending time in that house with my father got to me again. I waddled out from the bathroom with my pants and underwear around my ankles and sat in the middle of the living room floor in front of my stunned father and stunned friend. Neither of them moved an inch as I, held tight by the flashback I was having, reenacted an incident of abuse from my childhood. I spoke like a little girl, I cried and rocked myself on the floor.

This was no memory, I was there, this was happening to me right then and yet was not. I could feel my adult self at the very fleeting edge of my perception, but that self could do nothing but watch along with my father and Kurt. I literally lost all control of my body for about ten minutes. Then I came back to myself, slowly and still with only limited faculties. I turned to my father, looked him straight in the eyes and began chanting, softly at first, then louder and louder:

“You owe me an apology. You owe me an apology. You owe me a fucking apology. YOU OWE ME A FUCKING APOLOGY!”

On my father’s face was a look of fear I have never before or since seen on any human and amid my shame and grief I relish that moment with profound joy. At the time, I was only vaguely aware of what I was saying, and once I had sufficiently shaken myself out of the flashback, I immediately dashed to the bathroom to put my pants back on. My dad wandered off to another part of the house, and Kurt helped me out to his car and took me back to Dice’s apartment in Portland. Both Kurt and Dice were concerned for me, and I only dimly remember Kurt explaining what happened as best he could before I crawled into my sleeping bag on Dice’s floor and passed out, exhausted from the experience. The next day I woke knowing only that I would never agree to have anything to do with my father again.

This disassociation was hard-won, if politely stated: “It causes me pain to spend time with you, and I cannot do that any more.” My father had, for nearly all of my life, asserted his ownership over my body, my mind, and all of my accomplishments. As an infant, as an adolescent, even as a 20-year-old woman, my autonomy meant nothing to him. He was at first confused by my rejection, then he became more and more enraged. He began to stalk me at work, parking across the street where he knew I could see him without being able to do anything about it. He made threatening phone calls. Sometimes he would just wait, silently, before hanging up. Other times he would say that he would hire someone to injure me. “If I didn’t take him back,” I joked with my unamused friends.

Meanwhile, the emotional difficulty I was experiencing picked up steam. I had flashbacks and migraines all the time. I couldn’t sleep. At the beginning of the summer I was already slightly underweight; by the end of August I had lost so much weight everyone I knew was asking if I was sick. I started having a hard time making it through a day of work. One afternoon, at my wits’ end, I picked up the phone and called Penthea, one of the social workers I spent a great deal of time with when I was in foster care. Although I don’t remember the specifics of what I said to her, I did know I was in crisis and needed help. I think I asked her to recommend a therapist, which she did, and for advice about what I should do. One of the first actions she suggested, and offered to help me with, was to get a restraining order against my father. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this was possible, although it should have; I knew what restraining orders were for. Yet it was still so easy for my dad to make me feel powerless and devoid of options.

Penny and I began meeting regularly. I filed the petition for the restraining order and we went down to the courthouse together. I was so afraid he would be there, or that he would send someone to harm me. I don’t know how rational or irrational my fears were, but he didn’t show up and no one bothered us. The restraining order was granted without much effort on my part at all, the judge almost mechanically signing and stamping. While I felt victorious, I should have known that what is easy to get is usually worth very little.

My father continued to show up at my apartment, and while I now had a document to show the police, there were still often many unnerving minutes of waiting for them, followed by my dad’s predictable disappearance just as the cops showed up (did he have a scanner? I don’t know. He was paranoid enough to). On top of it all, upon the arrival of a pair of officers, one would invariably castigate me for even having a restraining order against my father. “I’m sure he’s just trying to see his daughter,” he would say, shaking his head. It wasn’t even always the same officer, but this happened nearly every time. How does one respond to this? Sometimes I told the cop that he should know better, that he probably had to arrest bad people (who might even have daughters) all the time. On my angrier days I would hiss that I had recurrent pelvic infections as a toddler (found in the state’s discovery of my medical records) and he should save his sympathy for some other father. When I was tired I wouldn’t say anything at all, knowing at least my dad wouldn’t come back as long as the squad car cast its flashing blue on the sidewalk out front.

There were other people I could depend on for support. My friends Dice and Meredith, of course. My new therapist, Pam, who never failed to help me put things into perspective. And of course, Penthea. Penthea had the idea I might be able to return to state custody (and receive some much-needed assistance) under my V-9 contract, even though such a thing had never been done before. In our opinion, there were occasionally valid reasons for a child in care to leave the state for a period of time and it made more sense to follow the V-9 contract in spirit rather than to the letter of the law. We worked together to write letters to the governor detailing the particulars of my case, and amazingly enough, the state let me back in. Not only was this a great accomplishment for me, but it also set a precedent for other kids in similar situations that allowed for greater flexibility in how the V-9 was defined. Now that I was relieved, albeit temporarily, from a few of my everyday responsibilities, I could focus on the work of repairing my psyche.

Without a doubt, I consider the process I went through a sort of rebirth, one in which I was both mother and infant. How did I do it? I cried most of the time. I mourned what was gone, from the innocence that allows other people to look upon the faces of children without feeling panicked for them, to the inability to share a story about the losing of my virginity with my peers. I cried for my mother, for all the chances she had that she never took; that I knew would eventually come to haunt her forever. I shed tears even for my father, tears both of anger and sadness that he was so fucked up and that he had destroyed a family, my family. Often suicidal, I thought I couldn’t possibly keep going, that everything was too hard and that Death would be the lover to obliterate any trace of the hurt that had been inflicted on me. A few things stayed my hand.

When I was alone at this time, I would sit in my room and listen to a Cowboy Junkies rendition of an old blues song: “Never Get Out of These Blues Alive” The singer’s voice was simultaneously husky and fragile and the lyrics of the song struck a nerve every time I heard it. It would always make me cry, and at the same time, more capable of hanging on—for another few minutes, another few hours, another few days. As if the song, reflecting the bottom, allowed me to see how much more I had in me. As if actually experiencing pain I had suppressed for so long made me feel alive, instead of just numb. As if the fight in me was brought out by the tragedy that sometimes pervaded life. As if that soft still voice inside me needed to hear the words of that song: “I’ll never, never… get out of these…blues alive,” so that it could respond, “Oh yes you will. Yes you are.”

And, as improbable as it seemed to me then, time continued to pass as well. Life can be equally as seductive as Death, particularly when springtime arrives in Maine. The aching cold of the winter subsides and the buds of leaves itch their way out of what were once dead sticks scraping against my window. I began to work in the tiny yard behind my apartment building, throwing a great physical force against the inattention of years. I raked leaves, dug up soil, planted. I would be dirty and quiet for hours as the sun sank down through the repetitive songs of city birds that unworked knots in my soul. I began to realize I wasn’t so much fixing old wounds as learning to live with the weight of the scars, seeking a new way to balance myself, finding new, less-destructive pathways.

I am 34 now. I like to think that the self I am today whispered to me then, extending a hand to help me here, and that the self I will become in another five, ten, fifteen years does the same now. Equal measures of pain and joy are stitched into my cells, holding me up when there is nothing else. Yet grief, while never entirely extinguished, doesn’t overwhelm me any longer. Feeling astoundingly lucky does. Some years ago, as a meditation, I had the image of a pomegranate tattooed on my knee to cover a scar I inflicted on myself when I was sixteen, just before this story began. The old Greek myth of Persephone reminds me that great strength can be bestowed upon those who are willing to face mortality and darkness while waiting for the return to the light.