Colleen Conrad

When I was in late junior high and early high school, one of my closest friends was wading through a series of family troubles.  Leah’s* mother’s re-marriage, a secret about years of abuse, and religious fanaticism were all contributing to a hostile environment in her home.  To make matters worse, she wasn’t allowed to spend time with other teenagers outside of her religion, unless they agreed to attend religious meetings with her.  In no uncertain terms, she was trapped.

Sometimes we forget how little control kids have over their own lives.  They don’t often get to choose where they live, what school they attend, or even the social group available to them.  Leah was a victim of her circumstances, as created by her parents.   

Ask any teenager what’s important to them, and their friends will be at the top of the list. But I remember feeling like we were a Romeo and Juliet story without the sex.  Thankfully, her mother and stepfather chose to send her to public school, which gave her an outlet and an opportunity to meet other kids her age.  I can only imagine what a relief it was for her—what a reprieve from the confines of her abusive home and narrow religion—school felt like.  She was safe there; protected, and free to say what she truly believed.  Also thankfully, I had parents who trusted me enough to let me go to meetings with her (arguably) unstable parents, believing that I was strong enough to stay true to my own beliefs.  I can only assume that they recognized how important she was to me, and perhaps even identified her need for friends outside of the boundaries of her extremist religion.

Leah’s situation devolved further when she gathered the strength to share her story of abuse with our school guidance counselor, setting in motion a chain of events that led to her stepbrother’s incarceration, and further alienation from her parents and religious community.  Mis-identifying her public school as the cause of these “problems,” her parents threatened to withdraw her from school.  Leah realized that she would lose her only healthy support system.  Her lifeline was disappearing. 

So she ran away.  I mean, what else could she do? 

We stayed in touch for some time, but eventually I left home for college, life changed, and Leah and I lost touch.  I looked for her over the years, googling her and asking around.  Finally, she found me on Facebook.  After almost fifteen years, we re-connected and got together just a few weeks ago.  In the two hours that we sat over beers and caught up, I was reminded why I adored her so much in high school.  It wasn’t only the strength and resilience that she had maintained through tremendous challenges (although that would certainly have been reason enough).  Leah is fun.  She’s non-judgmental, confident, self-possessed, and so much older than her years.  And she was like that even when we were kids.  Despite everything that happened to her and around her, she maintains a sense of self-awareness.  She doesn’t apologize for who she is, or for the decisions that she makes.  She’s funny, direct, and honest.  It doesn’t matter how much the grown-ups in her life beat her down emotionally, or how much they tried to brainwash her into thinking the same things that they did.  She shrugs it off and hold tough to who she is.  As a kid, I admired that quality, recognizing how rare it is in another teen.  As an adult, I’m awed by her. 

Sometimes I see other old friends, and I recognize that whatever brought us together when we were young doesn’t exist anymore.  Maybe we don’t have that much in common, or we’ve just naturally grown apart.  But getting together with Leah was so damn easy.  We could have talked for another three hours and not run out of things to say.  It was like we hadn’t missed a beat.  She’s made an amazing life for herself, filled with love, joy, and forgiveness.  She still struggles with her relationship with her mother, but there’s no bitterness in her heart.  I can only imagine the emotional work that she had to do in order to recover from the scars of her childhood.  But nothing has broken her.

Kids don’t have much control over their lives, but Leah accessed all of the resources at her disposal.  She found the love for herself that she needed to make some difficult choices, and to get through the choices that she couldn’t make.  She may not have had control, but she did have power.