A SUPPORT GROUP IS MY HIGHER POWER

THE object of the Jewish women's support group I belong to (even
though I'm not Jewish) is camaraderie of a particular kind: each of us
has a child, a teenager, who has fallen apart.

I'm referring here to the dark constellation of parental nightmares:
alcoholism, drug abuse, self-starvation, depression, suicide attempts.
Most of our children have been hospitalized; all but one at the time
of our first meeting were away from home in long-term treatment.

None of us saw the nightmare coming. We expected adolescence to be
difficult, but we believed that with vigilance and involvement we
could safeguard our children. We knew the rules: Eat together as a
family. Talk openly about smoking and alcohol, drugs and sex. Find out
who their friends are.

We understood that our teenagers might occasionally stumble, but they
wouldn't fall. They were raised in stable two-parent homes featuring
weekly allowances, soccer practices, job charts, piano lessons and
regular pediatric appointments. Other than my daughter, all were
raised to believe in God.

The first time I showed up at a support group, invited by the mother
of a girl my daughter had met in treatment, the women were talking
about their synagogues and rabbis and about upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs.

"So," I said, struck by what I assumed was an interesting coincidence,
"is everybody here Jewish?"

After a brief silence, one woman said, "You aren't?"

"No."

Although I had 16 years of Methodism securely behind me, my husband
once remarked that I was the least spiritual person he had ever met.
"I guess I misunderstood," I said. "I can leave."

The woman who had invited me shook her head as if emerging from a
dream and insisted I stay: "But I thought you were Jewish. Isn't your
daughter Jewish?"

She is. Years earlier, after returning from a friend's bat mitzvah, my
daughter announced, "I want to do that." She was 11 and not yet
showing signs of the illness that would barely allow her to survive to
18.

I assumed her interest was a fad. Would she really want to learn
Hebrew, attend regular religious services and make up for everything
else she'd missed during her previous decade of leisurely weekend
mornings at home?

Apparently, she would.

Having raised my children to be compassionate disbelievers, I did not
support her plan. I feared she was entering into a foreign belief
system, a foreign language, and (to me) a set of inexplicable rituals
- -- which, of course, she was.

Maybe I would have felt differently had I known that her faith would
later help her survive more than 20 months in the abyss of severe
depression. Ironically, agnostic that I was and still am, I sometimes
found myself arguing during those terrifying months that she should
cling to her belief in the divine, to any slender hint or reassurance
that, during her darkest, most dispiriting moments, she was not alone.

I wanted this reassurance for her, but wasn't sure how to find it for
myself. At first I didn't want to join the support group. I could
barely speak to close friends about my cabinet of miseries; how could
I open it up among people I didn't know?

The miseries of the other mothers turned out to look remarkably like
mine, and within 15 minutes we had become a sort of congregation,
united not primarily by belief, but by sadness and confusion and a
common shame.

Most of us had hospitalized or institutionalized our children more
than once, and all had been questioned by social workers: "Is there
violence in the home?" "Have you sexually abused her?" In other words:
what in God's name did you do to this person?

Though we riffled through our consciences and family histories for
answers, we didn't know. Most of us, obscurely suspecting we had
failed at life's most important task, told almost no one about our
children's crises, especially at first. One woman kept her teenager's
psychiatric hospitalization a secret even from his grandparents and
siblings, telling them he was studying in Europe. We avoided other
mothers, and we doubted ourselves.

Still, we had to field questions when the children were gone. Send a
child out of state for treatment and you open the door to dire
warnings about "boot camps" and the astonished disapproval of family
and friends. "You sent her away?"

Yes, we did. Because after we locked up the cough syrup and the razor
blades; after we removed her bedroom door, hid the car keys and poured
the vodka down the sink; and after we shortened our work hours and met
with her teachers and therapists and the police, there was nothing
left but a series of soul-destroying phone calls to arrange the
transfer of the troubled, beloved child into the care of strangers
1,000 miles away in the hope that she would, maybe 6 or 10 or 18
months later, be able to live at home without endangering herself or
others.

The hardest part, once she was gone, was to try to keep alive within
the child and ourselves a faith in a better future -- a belief that
this collective suffering was not without meaning and would one day
make sense and be put right.

This wasn't a faith that came naturally to me. I don't remember
exactly when or how I lost my belief in God. As a child I attended
Sunday school and church, was confirmed and took first communion at
age 12, volunteered in the church nursery and was a member of the
Methodist youth group.

But in my teens I felt pained and angry about going to church, and I
began to experience my own tentative faith as a sort of betrayal.

During services, from my favorite perch in the balcony, I had a
marvelous view of the two symmetrical rows of stained-glass windows,
the vaulted ceiling and the black wood pews, the beautiful pendant
glass lamps, the minister's white cassock and the enormous bronze
pipes of the organ swelling with music. The entire glorious pageant
felt like a siren song calling me to accept what was impossible,
urging me to confess an essential desire that would forever be
unfulfilled.

I sensed even then a fundamental human longing within me, and I felt
that longing was being toyed with, manipulated. Observing the glorious
pageant week after week, I began to feel like a starving person being
given a picture of a plate of food.

Perhaps my daughter's attraction to Judaism came from a need to
satisfy a similar hunger. But during the planning for her bat mitzvah,
several problems arose. Prayers had to be offered during the service,
and I was told that, given my status as non-Jew, those could not come
from me.

The rabbi turned to my husband, a third-generation secular Jew whose
parents and grandparents were atheists, and whose brother and sister
were raising their children to enjoy hunting for Easter eggs in spring.

He wouldn't be offering the prayers, either.

My daughter was told to enlist some students in her Hebrew class, who
acquitted themselves very well.

I don't remember what they said; most of the prayers were in Hebrew.
But if I had prayed for my daughter myself -- if I were a person who
prayed -- I'd have asked that whatever she chose to believe in would
last and sustain her, and that, no matter the identity of her God, she
believe in herself.

BRINGING children into the world and raising them is an act of
optimism relying on obstinate hope for the future despite grim
prognostications: melting ice floes, unbreathable air, poverty and a
panoply of violence and unreason. New parents are often stunned by
their abruptly altered view of the world as a dangerous place.

Most of us, taking measure of that world, make a series of promises to
our children when they're very young: I will protect you. I will help
you to make sense of your experience. You will not be alone.

As our children grow up and away from us, inheriting the world's
complications, we discover how poignant and futile those promises are.
We begin to suspect that our love for our children, although
essential, is also inadequate, because no matter how fervently we love
them, we can't keep them from harm.

My daughter graduated from treatment as well as high school and is in
college, where she continues -- successfully, for the most part -- to
battle her demons. Occasionally we talk about her difficult times.
More often we talk about her studies; she is majoring in religion.

Sometimes, because it seems to distress her that I am not a believer,
I soften the edges of my skepticism. During an e-mail conversation I
tell her that I have found meaning in aesthetics, that I believe in
words and that literature and writing have helped me feel more alive.

For a minute the screen is blank; then she sends a message claiming
that belief in words isn't really belief, and soon we're debating the
differences in religion, faith and spirituality. We define our terms
and stake out our differences, and while composing my response I
think, I love this person as much as the human heart can stand.

Although I still don't believe in God, I have come to believe in
support groups. When I joined the Jewish women's group, I worried that
our monthly lunches might involve tears, handholding and episodes of
recrimination and regret. They do in fact involve all of those. And I
have found that the company of people who share the particular content
and form of my unhappiness is a balm I cannot do without.

Fortunately, our meetings aren't only about commiseration. They are
also -- Christian metaphor here -- about rebirth. One woman in our
group has decided to reinvent herself professionally. Another gives
PowerPoint presentations to highlight the topic of Jewish families in
crisis. All would probably describe themselves as shellshocked but
stronger

In banding together to tell the truth about our own and our children's
suffering, we have found resilience; and we have kept the terrible
vacant loneliness at bay. Our belief in ourselves as parents has been
compromised, but that's probably all right. Most of us aren't looking
for certainty anymore so much as a complicated acknowledgment of what
is.

All but one of our children -- may he rest in peace -- are still
alive. Our hope for the others: That they outlive us. That they find
something to hold on to, and hold on hard.