Freedom Is Wild - Chapter 2

A Serialized Memoir of Life and Death

The first time we laid eyes on Mary was a moment that is seared in my memory. The details have not dimmed with the passage of time. She was born one month prematurely and was just over 2 months old when we adopted her. She was tiny for a 2-month-old, just over 8 pounds. For reasons that are not relevant to the overall story, we were able to see her momentarily a few days before we actually adopted her. I remember how the social worker brought her into the room wrapped up and cozy in an oversized white blanket. The social worker left us to be alone with Mary for a few minutes during our first meeting. What my wife did next surprised me. She immediately unwrapped Mary, undressed her and inspected every finger, toe, and joint. Every square inch of her precious little body got a thorough going over until Mary's new mommy had absorbed every last detail about this little bundle of joy. Giving her back to the social worker when our first meeting was over was one of the harder things we've ever had to do.

Some of you who are reading this, particularly if you have never adopted a child, might be tempted to think that the pain of losing an adopted child is somehow mitigated by the fact that adopted children aren't "blood relations". Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps somewhere there are adoptive parents who take a perverse, arms-length view of their relationship with their adopted children. Generalizations regarding "all adoptive parents" are problematic at best. But for our part, we were "all in" from the very start. We immediately took Mary into our hearts and when she walked away nearly 18 years later, a big, writhing, jagged, bleeding chunk of our hearts went with her. There is nothing - nothing - about adoption that eases the pain of losing a child to the world. Don't kid yourselves.

As a young child, Mary was beautiful, charismatic, loving, and tenderhearted. I think it was her tender heart that most endeared her to people. She had a natural concern for the needs and well-being of others. We had some next-door neighbors at this time that Mary used to be very concerned about. An older man and his very elderly father lived there. Mary was always very concerned about their well-being and solicitous of them - especially on holidays. She took it upon herself as a young girl to bake cookies and pies and would troop over to their house to make sure they had her festive input to their holiday season.

Mary knew everyone in the neighborhood and everyone knew Mary. If Mary was playing in the front yard, cars would drive by and entire families - kids and parents all - would hang out the windows shouting "Hi" to Mary. People we didn't even know would drive by with shouted greetings to Mary.

She was gifted with and concerned about animals. It was a constant challenge to keep her from bringing every injured wild creature home that she found near our house. More than once it was only through sheer force of will that I managed to keep her from leaping from a moving car, into traffic, to rescue an injured animal.

At 7 or 8 years old she fell head-over-heels in love with horses. She pored over books on horses, played with toy horses, and begged to be taken to tack shops to look at horsey things. She bought bits and bridles and lead ropes and decorated her room with them. She stood outside of barns with a dreamy look on her face, inhaling deeply of the "horsey smells" emanating from inside.

Bit by bit (no pun intended) she wore us down and we finally let her begin taking horse riding lessons: it was like a duck taking to water. Mary was both talented and fearless on the back of a horse. No one who rides with any frequency is going to avoid being thrown and Mary was no exception. For some kids, being thrown from a horse is the beginning of the end of their romance with horses. Not Mary. Rather than being deterred, it only seemed to energize her and increase her grit.

Horses are often like those jittery, nervous, neurotic people who bite their fingernails to the quick. They have a tendency to get irrational fears implanted in their horsey brains which they then proceed to inflate to the size of one of those Macy's Thanksgiving day parade balloons. What starts out as a small anxiety becomes, over time, a panic-inducing phobia of monstrous proportions. Mary was eager, naturally, to ride these kinds of animals.

On one memorable occasion, she was riding a horse in an outdoor arena, putting him through his paces as cars drove by on the road nearby. One of the cars driving by made a small, faint, unexpected popping sound. The horse, as horses tend to do, immediately concluded that the Apocalypse was upon us, and proceeded to lose its ever-loving mind. As if to provide a fitting climax to the general mayhem that ensued, the horse finally reared up on its two hind legs. Mary, however, was no green horn on the back of horses and this particular maniacal horse was going to have to do better than that to cause her to fall off. Alas, this was not to be a "Zorro moment" where the horse rears onto two legs, drops back on all fours and takes off at a dramatic gallop. No, this irrational beast reared all the way over onto his back, bringing his full 1300 pounds down on top of my 70 pound daughter. Thirty minutes later Mary was being wheeled on a gurney, out of the corral and into an ambulance. Forty-eight hours after that she limped back into that arena on a very bruised leg, climbed onto the back of that same horse, and put him through his paces again.

She had no shortage of grit.  Events would show that this was both a blessing and a curse.

And she had an almost magical way with horses. Mary could march into the stall of an outraged horse, dodging the flying hooves, and within moments she would have that horse acting like a puppy, practically wagging its tail for her attention.

But in hindsight there were indicators of something amiss. You, reader, have the advantage of seeing all of this through my eyes in hindsight. But in the moment itself, small signs spread out over 15+ years are harder to perceive. Only as these things became more pronounced and metastasized were we able to remember the early indicators.

Mary craved being the center of attention. At first, we just attributed this to the normal interest of a precocious, out-going child that needed to be tempered with some parental guidance and instruction. But over the years, our concerns about this grew because as she grew older, she became more, not less, insistent on being the focus of everyone's attention. At first, she primarily insisted on the attention of her mother and I. And she was insistent that our attention be on her even rather than on each other. We noticed, for example, that if we were talking or involved in something together, she would physically position herself between us and act in such a way as to draw our attention. You might expect this from a 3 year old but Mary was still doing this at 14. In fact, her behavior in this area was growing worse with time.

Mary had no notion of the concept of "personal space". She physically crowded people to get their attention. Once again, she started this behavior with just us, her parents. But as she reached adolescence, her craving for attention grew to the point that she would behave this way even toward people at school. She would hang onto and physically crowd her friends, both girls and boys. And we observed during middle school and early high school that her female friends began distancing themselves from her. By the time she was half-way through high school nearly all of her friends were boys.

Mary is, by any standard, physically attractive. In terms of physical beauty, she stands out in a crowd. Her physical attractiveness has elicited, as you might expect, a significant amount of attention from the young men in her life. But this attention always seemed to inflame her focus on herself rather than conjuring a genuine interest in the boys as people. It wasn't that she was disinterested in boys. She was obsessively interested in boys. But we observed that her interest was exclusively related to herself. She was very pleased with the effect she had on these boys, but substantially disinterested in them as people. Her interest in these boys amounted to a perverse infatuation with her own attractiveness, rather than in the character or attractiveness of the boys themselves. In fact, over time she became increasingly interested in boys whose character was questionable or known to be entirely lacking. Her interest in these kinds of young men has contributed significantly to her long and painful descent.

I don't want to give the reader the impression that we were just passive, scientific observers of all of this. We were concerned parents who, over time, became substantially alarmed by the transformation we were seeing in Mary's life. She had morphed from a young child who had a sincere interest and concern for others into a young adolescent who was shockingly self-centered to an obsessive degree. In our efforts to correct and guide her the conflict level in our home began to rise significantly. The same grit she had demonstrated on the back of a horse she now brought to bear in an effort to resist any of the teaching and correction we tried to offer. There was nothing clinical or dispassionate about our reaction to the changes we were seeing in Mary. With each passing month the anxiety and fear grew more acute.

Mary was the third of four children. It isn't as if we had no prior experience with raising children. We were familiar with the normal conflict that emerges between parents and adolescents as teenagers begin to desire independence and need to find ways to stretch their wings a bit. But the kind of things we were finding with Mary was unlike anything we had seen in our other children.

Starting around her sophomore year in high school it seemed as if Mary embarked on the pursuit of any kind of drama and conflict like an addict pursues a drug. She would go out of her way to provoke conflict and when we would confront her, very often strongly, she would lower her head, turn away, and you would sometimes catch the hint of a small, half smile on her face. She had come to a point where she actually took pleasure from provoking a conflict. So much pleasure, in fact, that it became increasingly hard for her not to actually laugh out loud at whomever she was in conflict with.

And she became an astonishing liar. During those years she had embarked on a full-scale double life and she became amazingly accomplished at spinning falsehoods. It got to the point where even she didn't know what the truth actually was. She trotted out so many falsehoods that it was impossible to catch her in all the lies. This is actually saying something because my wife can smell a lie from a mile away.

I once had a well-known business man give me some advice. If I were to actually write this man's name, many of you would recognize it. This man once advised me that I should try to have a woman who had children on the board of directors of a company I had started. When I asked him why, he said "because they have a built-in b.s. detector." I had never heard anyone put it quite this way before, but I immediately knew what he was talking about. Mothers very often "just know" when their kids are lying. But Mary was so profuse and persistent with her lies, even when she had no incentive to lie, that it became impossible to see many of the whoppers she let loose.

At about this point, as a parent, you begin to instinctively sense that things are slipping away.

The shocking transformation of your daughter from a happy, joyful person who is interested in the lives of others, to a bitter, furtive, ferociously self-centered young woman just leaves you scrambling, trying to figure out how to reverse the slide. And this is when the "Big Lie" starts to haunt your dreams.

The "Big Lie" is the belief, often unconscious, that you have it within your power to condition her to make better choices. Lost on you, as panic for your troubled child starts setting in, is the irony of the notion that "choice" can be "conditioned". Because you love your daughter so much, you secretly cling to the idea that you have it within your ability to guarantee a happy outcome for her. After all, if good kids are the product of good parents, it would follow that her self-destructive choices are somehow within your ability correct. And without really examining this preposterous idea, you start agonizing over what you can do to "fix" the problem. As if people are mere mechanical devices governed by the laws of physics.

But the harsh reality is that we cannot choose truth on behalf of our children. We cannot choose beauty or love or meaning for them. We cannot make a commitment to Christ on their behalf. We can teach. We can plead. We can try to persuade. We can even structure the circumstances of their lives in such a way that all of their incentives point toward God. Indeed, that is our affirmative obligation if we are going to be faithful to our calling as parents. But choice is only choice when freedom is real.

If freedom is real, then parental influence is not absolute.

As a parent, you only come to the conclusion that your child actually prefers darkness very slowly. Incredulously. Unbelievingly. Painfully. Ashamedly. Reluctantly.

And finally, inevitably.

Mary's descent into a life of self-absorption has come at a horrible cost. Violence. Abuse. Life-threatening illness. Homelessness. Fear. And more. But none of these costs have persuaded her of the benefits of living a life with moral boundaries and self-control. For Mary, a life with the moral restraints that are conducive to spiritual health, or even physical health, is an unattractive life. In a moment of unusual candor, she once said "the thought of being sober the rest of my life is depressing."

There are two avenues of attack on your mind when you're in thrall to the big lie. First, you obsess over how you can control your child’s environment. After all, if you accept the assumptions of the big lie, then fixing her environment and life circumstance is how you can fix her. So we worked hard to place her in settings where healthy relationships and healthy activities were the norm. We closely monitored her friendships to make sure that questionable characters were not having an influence.

The problem with all of this, of course, was that as long as we believed that there was some intangible thing about her environment or relationships that needed fixing or monitoring, we blinded ourselves to the possibility that her problems were rooted, not in her circumstances, but in her appetites. For too long we blinded ourselves the possibility that it wasn’t that she was hanging around the wrong people, but that she herself really loved the wrong things.

Around this time we were privileged to hear noted Christian author and speaker, Chuck Swindoll preach at the church he pastors in Frisco, TX. It was late in the summer and just before a lot of kids went off to college. He spoke to the angst that Christian parents feel about sending their kids off to college. In particular he addressed parental concerns about the environment and influences that their kids will encounter. He told some very hard truths that day. One thing he said that really struck home (kind of a like a knife, as I recall) was that there is no college environment controlled enough for a kid who lacks character.

The second avenue of attack, when you believe the big lie, is that you’re haunted by the possibility that if you just say the right words, the light bulb will suddenly go off for your daughter and she will morph back into the person you knew before her dark transformation. This belief is a sort of “first cousin” to the “big lie”. It is the belief that her behavior is the result of some sort of informational deficiency - that your communication with her has been somehow deficient. Night after painful, agonizing, sleepless night, we lay in our bed pondering what magical incantation might be uttered, what information might be shared, or how we might rephrase earlier words in such a way that it would suddenly resonate with her, opening her eyes to the destructive path she was on. As if the choices she was making were somehow tied to a flaw in our choices of phrasing.

Accepting that our children are truly free to choose darkness does not come easily.

Chapter 3 is here.