She flips back her ebony hair and yawns, looking forlornly at her mother. She is obviously weary. Her sad eyes glance at yet another tuft of hair dance across the floor.
She hasn't been here her whole life - they had adopted her in 2009 when she was being put back into the system (again). It had been her last chance, at some level she had known that. She was getting older, and even she understood that it was more difficult to get adopted as you aged. But, she was happy to be here, even if the current situation was...uncomfortable.
M. had been born into a family of seven. Her birth was solely to increase the amount of income coming in to the family - nothing more. On a sticky summer's day, it had been determined that her home was unfit - and a handful of people from the county took her away. While she was happy to be clean, warm and fed, she knew that her freedom was at the whim of strangers, and it terrified her.
Not long afterward, she had been placed in a foster home in Bangor. The older woman lived alone, and in a moment of melancholy had decided this is what she needed - some youth and vigor to keep her grounded and loved. At first, things were great. M. was clean and well fed, and the center of attention. As the days progressed, she discovered that her new guardian liked to drink and gamble. A lot. She began to come home very late, very broke and very, very stumbly. She would 'forget' to feed M. and more frequently than not, didn't have money left to buy food. Eventually, she was gone for days at a time. M. was brokenhearted. She had tried desperately to get her new mom's attention in any way she could. Nothing had worked.
On a sunny August afternoon, she had been playing alone in the back yard. A strange man came over - he was much bigger than her, and it was unnerving. She panicked when he came close and reached over to touch her hair. She had looked furtively toward the house - no mom, no escape. M. spun her head around and did the only thing she could think of - she chomped as hard as she could on his nicotine-stained fingers.
That was a lifetime ago. Her new mom had known the older woman, and had begged to be allowed to adopt M. when she was in trouble for biting the man. The old woman kept saying something about putting her down somewhere, but M. never really understood it. She did understand that the woman was really angry that she had bitten the man, and M. was sad and sorry for that. But on one cool fall morning, the older woman had packed up M. and her things in the car, and taken them to the new woman's house.
And then she left - without so much as a goodbye hug.
M. had been petrified and began to shake. She had met this woman a couple of times previously, but everything else was new and different; her world was crumbling. She climbed up into her lap and closed her eyes. The woman whispered to her and held her close until she stopped shaking.
After a few months of love and care, this new family became her own. She had a sister - bigger than her, but younger and full of energy. M. had become queen of the house, and Mom's favorite. She loved her family, and they loved her. Finally, she had a real, safe home.
That was over four years ago. And yet...
Every fall, beginning in August, she began to itch and lose her hair. A skin condition, the doctor had said, caused by nerves and the change of seasons. She has sprays and special shampoos; none of which seem to help much. Tufts of hair float across the wood floor and stick to the rug in spite of her mother vacuuming most every day. Every other day she gets a bath, and what's left of her hair washed in hypo-allergenic shampoo. She even has a special diet. Her skin is sprayed with the prescription liquid to help ease the itching. But M. can't help herself - it's constant and maddening. Even M.'s Mom gets frustrated with it sometimes. The discovery of Benadryl has meant that M. has finally been able to get some serious sleep, without the incessant and infernal itching - and that means her family can catch up on some uninterrupted sleep too.
They are just need to get her though the end of October - when the itching will subside and her nerves will calm again for another year.
"I had a difficult time with this one - it's a challenge not to interject yourself into the story, or to be carried away with the story itself..."
ReplyDeleteI can see you had trouble here. Well, how would it look if you could interject yourself? How would it look if you let the story off the leash you've put it on? Do you want to revise with answers to those two questions as guides?
Or do you want my comments before you contemplate possible revision?
I think I'm going to regroup and go with my original idea - a completely different piece.
ReplyDeleteFirst three grafs:
ReplyDelete1: an image, a visual, a moment, a vignette--always good.
2: suddenly raises a lot of questions:
* how old is she, important! but we never find out;
* "system"? We have to guess DHHS--too early in the essay to ask the reader to guess;
* "here"? All we know of here is that there's a floor
3: back story--another good idea
So I think the structure works so far, but graf 2 needs a bit of nursing.
4 & 5 deepen the backstory--good! But I really really need to know how old M is in graf 5.
ReplyDelete6 & 7 finish the backstory--good.
Grafs 8 on update us, bring us back to graf 1. But everything except the last two grafs vague out on the reader. There's nothing here to picture, to imagine; no dialogue, no anecdote. Here's where I think this piece loses itself.
As I hinted in my first comment, you're tying yourself into knots trying to avoid introducing yourself into the profile. But think about it--you give M.s' history, but who is really being profiled here? Not M.!
Mom. And where we need that profile to begin in graf 8, the writer has to avoid putting herself it, or thinks she has to, so things never come together.