FEST Writing Group

FEST group: In this piece, I’m writing about Bowen theory without using the theory language–for people unfamiliar with the theory. Any comments or suggestions welcomed.

I am! I am!

“Would you like to work as a camp counselor this summer?” Dad asked me when I was 12. We had moved from Florida once he became the North Carolina state director of Easter Seals. “You could be a junior counselor.” 

“Yes, yes, I do want to,” I replied. I had helped to stuff envelopes to ask for money for Easter Seals, and I had visited sheltered workshops where adults made belts and purses out of leather. Dad’s invitation was the start of working as a camp counselor from age 12 to 16.

The first camp where I worked was built in a state park near Raleigh. It was very rough. The wooden cabins were dirty, and the lights sometimes wouldn’t turn on in them at night. The showers wouldn’t always work. There wasn’t enough money to make things nice for the campers. But the mood was boisterous. The children were full of pranks. One boy hit a car with the stump of his arm, yelling at the driver “Look what you did to me!” The female counselors made jokes about being naked in the showers, the size of their breasts, and making out with their boyfriends.  I was only 12 that first summer, while the regular counselors were 18 or 19. I took it all in as an observer. 

The days were highly structured with meal times and activities, and I was a motivated and hard worker. I was physically strong and could lift heavy campers out of wheelchairs to use the bathroom. I enjoyed pushing the wheelchairs up the long hill to the cafeteria from the cabins where we slept with several campers to one counselor. 

I was especially fond of a boy who had cerebral palsy. He was a bright, likable boy who struggled to get his words out. I think he liked me. He spoke of his sadness of not being able to live the life he wanted. He wished for instance that I could be his girlfriend, he said, and he felt that he wouldn’t be able to meet someone and have a family of his own. Between scheduled activities, we walked around the camp and played checkers in the shade in the hot, still air of the North Carolina summer. We wrote to each other after camp ended.

Another boy was disliked by other campers and by many of the counselors. Eddie was in a wheelchair, and the male counselors said he was annoying. He talked a lot, and he got on their nerves, they said. The camp held a carnival at the end of the summer. Eddie volunteered to stand on a platform holding himself up with his crutches. I saw the effort he made to stand without moving when he usually relied on his wheelchair. A sheet was draped over him, hiding his whole body with a hole in the sheet at the top for his head. People would throw soft wet sponges at him from a distance. If they hit him, they won a prize. Eddie took off his shirt. 

I thought it would be hard for him to stand for that long, and I could see him strain to hold himself up on the platform. There was nothing to grasp onto if he lost his balance.

The male counselors who disliked Eddie took the chance to throw sponges at him very hard.  They were not threatening to me, and I thought they were nice. They sometimes teased me about my hair not being curled properly, but that was about it (it was 1962). But that evening at the carnival, they urged each other on in their aggression. I can’t believe that one counselor on his own would have gotten carried away as they did as a group. 

It obviously hurt Eddie, but he was determined not to show he was hurt. He let them keep throwing the sponges at him. I think he wanted them to like him, to respect him. He ended up having bruises on his face and body from how hard they were throwing.

When I was three, I had gotten into a bind like Eddie. In Pensacola, I loved to make sand castles. One day I was making one with a rose I had taken from a neighbor’s front yard to put on top of it, making it very special. Three older boys, probably five years old, came by and began throwing dirt bombs at my back. I was wearing a little sun suit with straps. I tried to ignore them. The boys may have thought it was fun to scare me off from where they wanted to play, but I was determined not to run off and not to even show I was hurt and upset. I wanted to cry, but I kept building the sand castle and I didn’t cry out or say a word to the boys or even look at them. The more I kept being strong, the harder they hit me with the dirt bombs. I don’t remember if they finally left me alone or if I got up and left.

I like to go back in my mind to situations like that one that I didn’t know how to manage and to consider how it might have gone differently. I might have told the boys to stop it. I might have told them the dirt bombs were hurting me. I was a brave, proud little girl at three years old, but I could have told them to them to stop, and I think they probably would have. 

I felt bad for Eddie, especially as I saw him trying to be brave and not show that he was hurt. The carnival took place at night, held by the camp as a festival for the campers at the end of the session. The next day there were bruises, and I saw them, not just on his face, but all down his bare torso. It was terrible what they did to him, and what he let them do to him. I think they didn’t realize what they were doing, at least they didn’t know they were leaving the bruises which didn’t show up until the next day.

They probably secretly hated something about themselves that they took out on Eddie. Although Eddie was in a wheelchair, he was very strong. He pushed his wheelchair himself, and his arm muscles were well developed. He was intelligent, too. He was closer to the counselors’ age than other campers, and I think he wanted to fit in and be one of them socially. He would talk a lot in order to show how smart he was. He would bring things up about how things were done at the camp, complain, and make suggestions about how to improve. Eddie was a brave and strong boy, but he didn’t have friends. I still remember it vividly, the way he volunteered to be thrown at, how he looked with his head through the hole made in the sheet, and how he refused to ask them to stop when they were hurting him.

One of the girls in my cabin had severe spina bifida, in which from birth a part of the spine does not close properly. In the most severe form, there is a place in the spine that is open, and I remember seeing it when helping her into her bed from her wheelchair. She was very heavy, and as she lay forward, I saw that the occlusion had opened and the bandage over it had come undone. I tried my best to press the sides of the opening together, to hold the skin together over what may have been a sac of nerves and maybe part of the spinal cord revealed. I did look but I felt afraid. I pushed the sides together while I pulled her bandage over it to give her some relief. 

The camp did not have good or clean facilities, and I don’t know if she received the medical help she needed there. There was a nurse on site at the camp. I felt overwhelmed by the girl’s situation. Besides the severe spina bifida, she had terrible acne that had scarred her face. She was a pleasant person, who asked for help when she needed it, yet her disability and especially her appearance scared people away. 

When I was a young person in college I needed help that I didn’t get. Reflecting on the girl with spina bifida: resources are limited. The world is not made, is not set up, to help someone who needs help. The grownups are busy with their own lives and taking care of their own children.

After two summers at the camp in Raleigh, I worked at the newly built Southern Pines camp, which my dad as the state director had opened and integrated in 1964 for both black and white children to be in camp together. Then, though when I was 16 he had changed jobs to be the North Carolina state director of vocational rehabilitation, and no longer worked for Easter Seals, he arranged for me to work at the Orlando Easter Seals camp in Florida. 

The Southern Pines camp was new, so much nicer than the camp in the state park in Raleigh, with fine cabins and new facilities. On the last day of the last summer I was there, after the campers had left, the heavy-set, red-haired camp director, Mrs. Liddell, asked all the counselors and other staff to meet down at the lake, to stand in a circle, and to hold hands. She asked us to promise never to tell what had happened at the camp that summer. “This will be especially hard for you, Laurie,” she said, “because of your dad.” I actually had no idea what had happened at the camp, but I murmured “I promise” like everyone else because I felt I had to. 

I knew that each summer there was a worry that one of the camp counselors would become pregnant, and I wondered if something like that was it. I mentioned the episode to my dad years later when he was no longer the Easter Seals director, and he found it interesting and knew nothing about a problem that summer. Perhaps there had been a drunken party among the counselors, or something worse. The worst would be that something reckless was being covered up that would have put a camper at risk of harm. As far as I know, none of the campers’ families lodged a complaint.

I never learned about the family of any of the campers. I never met their parents. I reflect now on how important parents would have been in their lives. It would be parents who would make sure they received medical care and had an opportunity to learn to swim, to attend school, and to have a chance to make friends. And if their parents had a realistic view of life, including of their children, without fear or bias, it would have made a difference.

One warm spring in my high school in Raleigh, the girls started wearing sandals to school. One of the popular, bright girls, Martha Findlater, had a deformed foot. She wore sandals like all the other girls. She may have been aware of surprise or prejudices in her classmates when they saw her foot, but if so she didn’t let it bother her. She didn’t withdraw or cut off from the complex social environment of high school. Martha later became a Civil Rights attorney in Washington, DC. I have since considered how likely it is that her parents had a realistic view of their daughter, and of life.

In Pensacola, by age five I sometimes accompanied Dad to his job as a vocational rehab counselor.  I met people in wheelchairs, like Mrs. Williams, a middle-aged black woman full of life and fun to be around.  My dad believed in the equality of people, that people were not diminished by disabilities, race, class, or how they looked.  He was born in 1925 and had grown up in Ripley Tennessee, surrounded by racism. But he had learned from his father to see things differently from many of the people who lived in Ripley. 

When Dad’s father worked as a sheriff deputy, he saw a lot of poverty, and instead of judging others he sympathized with their struggles. He knew of men running stills in the woods to make illegal whiskey, and he looked the other way. He understood that people had to find a way to make a living to survive. He helped two black prostitutes find a place to live. In the 1930s, much of the South was still ravaged from the effects of the Civil War, and both black and white people in segregated Ripley, Tennessee, were struggling. Jim Crow laws kept black people in an economic hole. Sharecropping became a way to support their families after slavery ended, and to a degree was an extension of slavery. Black women would care for the homes and children of white families, even those like my family who had little money to pay. 

Dad’s dad, who was also named Robert Austin like my dad, but was called Austin, had grown up on a subsistence family farm and probably had a second-grade education, encouraged by his mother who believed education was important. She saw that his sisters also went as far as second grade. He was the second born in a family of 8 children. He was influenced by and admired his oldest brother, Ira, who became an alcoholic with big dreams. Ira borrowed money from the family and was unable to pay it back, creating an economic hardship for the family. Austin paid for his father’s funeral because Ira had squandered his parents’ savings. Ira’s children were eventually adopted into another family, as Ira was unable to support them. Dad wanted to name me “Louise” in memory of the little girl cousin he never saw again, but mother talked him into “Laurie” after seeing a newspaper article and picture of a beauty queen with that name. Being beautiful was important to my mother, the child in her family considered a beauty but not as intelligent as her siblings.

My dad and his father and mother were deeply influenced by their own families, that bent them toward sympathy, the love for people who made mistakes, who sometimes made wrecks of their lives that they couldn’t help doing. They were more loving than responsible people. They could laugh at their mistakes, but they couldn’t necessarily correct them.

I feel happy remembering all the love that Dad poured into me, the opportunity he made for me to work as a camp counselor in North Carolina and, when I was 16, in Orlando, Florida. I’m glad for the value he instilled in me, of seeking to understand rather than to blame. He transmitted to me a broad, sympathetic view of humanity that became part of me. 

My own specific and diagnosable disability is well in the past, with no trace. The distinct gifts from my dad, quite different from what I gained from mother, came along as well with the grief he unwittingly caused me. Or is it more what we all unwittingly created, he and I along with mother, each of the three of us caught in what was an inescapable triangle with each other, because we didn’t know any better. I will never be the kind of person who comes from generations of down-to-earth, responsible people, though I have wished I could be, or that I could at least with consistent effort become like them, but that didn’t happen.

Many of the campers were missing arms or legs. They loved going down to the lake to swim. One boy had no legs and no arms, but he could swim well. He used his torso in a beautiful, efficient butterfly stroke, coming up for air and going down into the water in a regular rhythm, his short brown hair wet against his head. An outgoing girl with bronze gold hair had no legs from her thighs. She dove into the lake and swam. And I saw her use her artificial legs to run and dance.

Those I observed during my childhood and youth remind me. The children still speak to me. What do they say? “I am! I am!”