PSYCH WARD GIRLHOOD
They try to give me medication but when I refuse they don’t force me to take it. I don’t know the rules around this type of thing, but the fact that I’m allowed to do this makes me think that someone out there suspects I’m slightly sane.
You’ve jailed me.
There’s dishonesty even in the pretense of attempting to tell the truth.
What exactly do you want me to say?
You’ve already put a little girl in an asylum. What’s the point of my confession now?
(Alright, a state hospital.) See, even there, there’s a rhetorical difference rather than a factual one between those two terms. In each case, it refers to a government-operated facility where inmates are placed after committing a terrible offense, being deemed in need of psychiatric care. Truth is malleable.
There are those who commit wrong acts but struggle to see their own guilt and there are those who house guilt but have committed no wrong acts. What about a person who blames themselves for each and every act and in doing so misses something crucial and terrible that they’ve done as it all blends together?
I’m supposed to meet with a psychologist when I will be asked what the truth is. I can imagine the different twists and turns this conversation will take, my attempts to corral it, his attempts to dig. The conversation always oscillates between therapy and interrogation. These doctors flit from patient to patient all day alternating between these modes. Usually people are not able to do this. Doctors have different emotional capabilities than normal people, and so there is kinship, a meeting of the minds, among them and some of the crazies.
Confession describes what is inside, and I don’t think they have a right to that.
Here are the facts: My mother, dead. My brother, alive. He’s two. He won’t remember any of this. My father, you can imagine. How did she end up like this? There was no sign of an intrusion. She was poisoned which wouldn’t have killed her on its own but there was plenty else in her system.
There isn’t definitive proof of what happened. What indication could there be really? They’re searching within me for some sort of psychological scar, one way or the other, to prove it.
Most people love their mothers. (Did I? I wanted to love her. But I was unsure how to create it, how to present her with an entirely new thing. Prometheus steals fire from the gods, brings it to humans, voilá. What license do I have to create something that I haven’t yet held in my own hands?) Life would have been easier that way—practicing self reliance means labor and every failure is your own. Believe me, I would have passed up responsibility any day for some caring woman to tuck me into bed at night.
According to Freud, the son is the usurper of the father. So why not let the daughter be the usurper of the mother?
Not a confession, mind you, just a rhetorical question.
Maybe she wasn’t good for much, as it was.
No, someone like myself wouldn’t do something like this. If you are everything you say you are, why even kill her? If you’re totally independent, totally indifferent.
You won’t get any sympathy now, for the roles of victim and perpetrator have reversed and permuted.
Unless I am tried as an adult, it doesn’t matter anyways. It all gets wiped clean. My identity remains anonymous. I’ll get to move through the world as fresh and tidy and simple as if I were just born. A world I know I can master and survive.
You can’t justify my being here. It’s a unique situation, how can you know I would do it again, even if I did, and I can’t be held here for penance. They don’t do that for kids.
I’m not saying I think I get to play God. I’m saying that what’s done is done. There’s no point in drawing out the grief.
What if I woke that morning in horror and ran hopelessly around the apartment trying to find an answer or reverse time then put on a brave face and solemnly called 911. She’s already gone. Don’t worry. No need to rush. All is fine here.
Here’s a question many of the accused ask themselves.
Why fight it?
Even in an uncertain world, it is a losing game. Even for adults, it’s a tough decision.
Guilt gets you brownie points if you do end up getting convicted.
My admission deprives me of dignity. This is true whether I state innocence or guilt, but guilt is usually not questioned. Innocence says exactly what people want to think about me. That things happen to me and I’m powerless to stop, prevent, even fully understand them.
I have been lying in bed too long and I have to get up or I will have to discuss it with a nurse. The ceiling has the fluorescent lights found in every unhomely environment. I’ve been talking so loudly in my head I stopped seeing and now my vision is filled with green spots. It’s frigid in here. All of the blankets are made from a loose weave, nearly one quarter holes, so that you can actually see through them, not very insulating.
Outside, in the main area, two boys are playing ping pong while the rest of us observe time carrying on at its petty pace. One girl has turned her chair away from the circle and is talking and talking. An argument is taking place but not a heated one. She is just trying to push back on the assertively phrased opinions of the invisible voice.
A copy of Crime and Punishment sits unassumingly on the bookshelf nearby. I wonder if this is another way to wrench a confession from me.
The group regards me with a gentle form of contempt. Most are late teenagers, but a few are younger. They are frustrated because I have broken the social covenant of group therapy: to share. However, I am also the baby of the group, so harsh words are mostly withheld.
They’ve all bared their own souls. Their issues with their parents, drug problems, self harm, suicide, bullying, assault. I’ve refused to tell anyone how I ended up here.
Because of HIPAA, therapists rely on confession. Nothing is shared with the group that you don’t share yourself.
They’re angry because I’ve shown them that there was always a way out. They weren’t forced to share any of what they did, which is probably what they told themselves because it made the nakedness easier to cope with. They’re angry because they’re curious about how a harmless-looking wide-eyed nine year old ended up in here. Since I don’t have a physical advantage on anyone, I hold on to this seed of power, nurture it.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most of them don’t need to be here. (This also raises the question of why I am here as I likely don’t need to be.) Each of them has made a single mistake. Experiments in pleasure or pain. Maybe a little blood. Perhaps went crazy and started speaking in tongues. But by the third day, if not sooner, most are better. Chatting, normal affect, planning for the future. And yet they remain. Why? Because nobody wants them, and there is nowhere for them to go. The label of having been here cuts them off from normal society, makes them undesirable.
I don’t know why nobody gives them a chance. Why they get the furrowed brow and serious tone from the workers that I don’t when they just seem like lost children to me. In need of a home and a hot meal and a kindly relative.
I’ve wondered about my brother but I’m also sure he’s somewhere in a stranger’s soft blankets and won’t remember any of this.
“Very mature,” everyone keeps saying about me. I don’t know what this means.
Girls take on responsibility for everything and maybe I don’t want to. I want to be untethered.
The body is always part of the crime—not their body, yours—and if you are a girl or a woman the body is also evidence, also confession. It is often in these times that the body betrays you. Witch trials: sinking or floating, burning or not burning. And virginity tests: bumps, periods, and the state of the hymen. Of course, overwhelmingly unreliable.
People think the transition from girl to woman lies in the ability to conceal. Why do people see passivity and transparency in children? The creature is as opaque and unresponsive as a brick wall. Everything goes into it and very little comes out.
Would it have been different if I was a little boy? No, maybe not, but it might have felt different.
My mother was animated by all sorts of spirits. But it's not as if she was known for being a bad parent. We were a reclusive little trio. Not much other family to speak of. Not many friends. Still, there was nothing overtly abnormal or shameful. Between the two of us, my little brother was well cared for. The problem was unfeeling days, never stopping.
Strange thing to experience such gray days because our sunny suburb had few. Drawn days, so robotic there was no feeling, almost unreal, as if I’d cut my body in half, top to bottom, and the slightly larger side was shoving the small one and all its emotions far away. The self attacks the self and the outside remains still. Left brain, right brain. Hemispherectomy.
Moreover, what if there was no violent or even mortal struggle? What if there was nothing between us?
What if I came and found her sleeping and touched her body and it was cold. And I went to check on my brother who was in his crib, his little enclosure, and he was fast asleep and trapped away from any painful sights. And I went and laid down next to the cold mystery and I laid her arm over me and stayed there as the morning enveloped us.
I waited for something to settle within me as the blood would be around the bottom of her restful body. And then I called.
Nothing could ever be more than what it was. Nothing could ever be better than what it had been. Out of chances.
Maybe an older version of myself will come back and look at these records when the present is only a memory. When the slate is wiped clean, and feel love, compassion, having by then learned how to do so, sympathetic, given the circumstances. Then she will close the cursed folder, breathe out, gather her belongings, lock the door, and head out to take care of the important business of living in the real world.
Myself is my own mother, my own reason for hoping.
Two boys younger than me are playing in the garden below that I can see through the window. It’s on the first floor, pretty central to the main adult wards. One is drinking milk but a chasing game begins and the milk spills. This is the place where kids wait and burn off the jitters while visiting their sick parents and grandparents. What would admission, an unearthing of innocence lead to? Becoming a fine upstanding citizen? I don’t think it would be enough to prove I’m not crazy. I want my freedom, meaning to get out of here.
Innocence would only make me look crazier. Why choose to remain sheltered in this gentle chaotic place? Why, how, did you manage to implicate yourself in those first few moments when your words and attitudes could have easily and permanently freed you?
Antisocial behavior, even the hint of it, is a way to permanently cut yourself off from society, in a world where so little else is permanent.
How presumptuous it is to choose to cut yourself off from those you don’t yet know.
But, finally, I get to decide what the truth is.
REFERENCE:
In the first sentence of the 27th paragraph, "petty pace" and the idea comes from William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 16-20.
Shakespeare, W. (1606; adapted 1616). The Tragedy of Macbeth. In S. Wells & G. Taylor (Eds.), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd ed., pp. 991). Clarendon Press.
Hannah Hernandez, 18, USA ✯