Barefoot with a Head Full of Henna

A daughter's revolving door

One block from my childhood home, Georgetown Washington, DC (Photo by Jingxi Lau on Unsplash)

“What are we going to do about your mother?” — My grandmother is sitting on her bed — white robe attired, PBS opera blasting, a menthol Capri 120 delicately wedged between her fingers as she sips a Diet Coke, on ice, out of a plastic wine glass. It’s not a disposable plastic, but “pool plastic,” as my grandmother would call it. Thick plastic. The kind that gets scratched up, cloudy over the years—a little yellow, as if it soaked up a bit of the sun. My grandmother had set up the butler’s pantry on the second floor landing of the house as her own personal pool bar. Never having been much of a drinker, the mini fridge was loaded almost entirely with Diet Coke. The tiny, trap-door freezer portion contained a small handle of Absolut Vodka, which despite never being opened, stayed in place, in preparation for her “once in a blue moon” martinis. “What are we going to do about your mother?” It’s not the first time my grandmother has asked me this question, but it is the first time it feels like she actually expects an answer. We? I think to myself. What are we going to do about my mother? What the fuck.

I’m seventeen. Thankfully only for a couple more weeks, and I’m counting down the days. I’m on winter break from my boarding school, and eighteen feels like a sanctuary, if only I could just get there. Just a bit over a year ago, I was in the system, the “Troubled Teen Industry,” if you will. My grandmother still doesn’t know about the abuse, what those places were really like, and I know if I try to tell her she won’t believe me. She thinks it fixed me. Or at least, she thinks it made me better. I don’t know how to tell her she’s wrong.

I’d spent half my Junior year walking on eggshells, and the rest of it treading water. I was getting better grades than I had before getting sent away, I was getting into less trouble, and I’d been more dedicated in my stage performances. I was finally getting cast in leading roles in my school’s productions. Just last spring, I’d played M’Lynn in a long-winded production of Steel Magnolias. My mother had seemed proud of me. Likely, from the outside, I looked to be a shaped-up success story of teenaged mischief turned around.

Now a Senior in high school, just weeks from my eighteenth birthday, I was feeling burnt out. A constant pressure seemed to linger in the air, as if one misstep could wind me right back into a facility, and what if I didn’t make it out again? My mother had taken to bed. Not a-typical behavior for her, except she was doing it here in Washington, DC, opposed to New York City. I was used to this, it had been happening my whole life. The women in my family were bed people. I am one too. Years later, my mother will tell me “you’re a little young for that to be happening already,” in response to my ‘Great Burnout of 2018,’ the nearly year-long depressive state, which ultimately led to my ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) diagnosis. It was as if it was a matter-of-fact, a common evolution of “womanhood,” the way in which my mother would refer to this behavior. Andy Warhol described my mother as the following, in his diaries,

"Monday, November 14, 1983 

Dolly Fox came by but she didn’t bring her roommates or anything. She’s a struggling girl trying to make it, only she lives on 61st and Park Avenue and she struggles from there."    

It’s an observation, a total read, and it describes her perfectly.