Free Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. by Christiane F., Christina Cartwright Page B

fault for buying into that mundane, tedious lifestyle.
Christiane's Mom
    I often ask myself why it took me so long to realize what was going on with Christiane. The answer's simple, but I couldn't really bring myself to admit it until I'd heard some other parents say the exact same thing. I was in denial. I couldn't bring myself to face up to reality. I just didn't want to believe that my daughter was a drug addict.
    My boyfriend, who'd been living with me since the divorce, started to suspect something was up way before I did. “What are you talking about?” I'd ask him. “She's only a child.” That was probably my biggest mistake, to believe that the kids were somehow “too young.” When Christiane began to isolate herself, when she avoided contact with family and would rather hang out with her friends on the weekends, that's when I should have paid closer attention and investigated what she was up to. I shrugged a lot of things off.
    When you have a full-time job, it's hard to pay close enough attention to your kids. You're glad when you get some quiet time to relax, and you don't really mind when they go off to do their own thing. Sure, sometimes Christiane came home too late. But she always had some excuse that I was eager to believe. I thought that her recklessness and defiant behavior were just part of a developmental phase that would eventually end.
    I didn't want to force her to do anything. I'd had enough of that kind of parenting myself already. My dad was extremely strict.
    In the Hessian 14 village, where I grew up, he was the owner of a quarry, and everyone respected him. But his theory on child rearing consisted only of saying no. If I even talked about boys, he'd hit me.
    I still remember one particular Sunday afternoon like it was yesterday. I was out for a walk with a girlfriend of mine, and trailing more than a hundred yards behind us were two young men. My dad happened to pass by us, so he immediately pulled over and slapped me across the face, right there on the street. Then he threw me into his car and took me home. And all this just because there happened to be two high school guys walking behind us. That made me furious. I was sixteen at the time, and already I was wondering how I could eventually get away.
    My mom, who was kindness personified, didn't really have a say in any of this.
    I wasn't allowed to pursue my dream of becoming a midwife. Instead, my dad insisted that I get trained in business and office work so that I could do his bookkeeping. Around this time I met Richard, my future husband. He was a year older than me and was an apprentice farmer. He was supposed to become the manager of a farm or an estate (at his dad's insistence). At first we were just friends. But the more my dad tried to destroy our friendship, the more obstinate I became. I only saw one way out: I had to get pregnant. That way I'd have to get married, and then I'd have my freedom.
    It happened when I was eighteen. Richard interrupted his apprenticeship immediately, and we moved to northern Germany, to the town where his parents lived. The marriage was a fiasco right from the start. Even during the pregnancy, I couldn't depend on him. He wound up leaving me alone over and over again, night after night. All he could think about was his Porsche and his stupid, grandiose plans for the future. No job was good enough for him. He always wanted to be someone more powerful and more impressive than he actually was, so that people would finally respect him and look up to him. He loved to talk about how important his family was in the old days, before World War II, when his grandparents owned a daily paper, a jewelry store, and a butcher shop in East Germany. And they also owned land.
    That was the vision he had for himself. He desperately wanted to be an independent businessman like his dad and grandfather. Sometimes he dreamed about starting a mail-order company; other times he wanted to open up a car dealership, and then