Free Live Through This by Debra Gwartney

stretch a daughter so tight between them that she has no recourse but to unscrew a medicine bottle cap and dump the contents into her belly. Though I did notice that from the moment I walked in, when the woman at the reception desk glanced over my file, lifted her gaze slowly, arched her eyebrows in disapproval, and tapped her pen smartly against the page, I had felt nothing but scorn from the center's staff. A hidden-away part of me welcomed their disappointment—the part that desired the castigation and punishment a bad mother deserves. The bigger part of me, though, wanted to blame what had happened entirely on Tom.
    Over the week I was there, I spent much of my time adding up the ways he was at fault, while he and Ellen spent much of their time adding up the ways I was at fault. We were each allowed two hours a day to visit Amanda, no more. Other chunks of the day, I filled counselors and nurses and doctors in on Tom's neglect and irresponsibility, portraying myself as the real parent to Amanda and her sisters. I'd bought a house, and, in need of repair though it was, it gave my daughters a stable place to live. I had a job and health insurance. I'd found daycare, took them to music lessons,
bought many gallons of milk a week, cooked every meal at home, served dinner at the table and not in front of the TV, met with their teachers, drove them to friends' houses. I laid it all out to the professional counselors: didn't this prove I'd done the job of mother?
    Not once did I suggest to the teams of doctors and nurses and therapists trying to put Amanda back together that I was willing to deal with my ex-husband in taking care of our daughter. Nor did I address the ways I could have helped her love her dad without inflicting stabs of guilt. In fact, by the Friday morning of my stay—I would fly home on Sunday—I'd told anyone at the clinic who would listen how right I was and how wrong he was in regard to our children.
This
child, Amanda, the one he'd talked into moving to Tucson, who'd become miserable and lonely enough to want to kill herself. Hadn't I said it to Tom a hundred times? The girls couldn't be parted from one another, nor could they be parted from me.
    During that week in Tucson, I'd calculated Tom's visiting schedule down to the minute so I could avoid having to see even the faint hint of his shadow down the hallway. Or his wife's. And they did what they could to avoid me. Linda, Amanda's main counselor, had already told me that because of my "inability to communicate" with Tom, and his inability to communicate with me, she and the others would decide where Amanda would live after the month-long treatment. That suited me. I had no doubt that they'd send her home to Oregon. I'd already told Stephanie that Amanda would soon be with us, at our house, going to the right school, belonging to the right family.
    My last Friday morning there, I went past the nurses' station and down a narrow hallway painted with aqua-greens and blues of a seascape most of these kids would probably never see in real life—dancing dolphins, smiling lobsters, breaching orca whales—and spotted Amanda in the unit's common area. A pungent mix of sweaty feet and Lysol drifted from the doorway of the institutional space posing as a living room, with a few soft chairs and worn sofas and untouched jigsaw puzzles on round tables. I stood
there and took her in. Amanda was curled at the end of one of the couches wearing the clothes she'd been issued by the clinic: white cotton pants with no belt or drawstring, long-sleeved T-shirt, flat slippers, no socks. Her hair was in a tight ponytail, and with fluid gestures of her hands, she spoke with a like-dressed girl on the other end of the couch.
    They both fell silent when I came in, which made me sad. They'd seemed like such normal teenagers before they were aware of me. The other girl hurried away, leaving Amanda and me alone. I sank into a battered cushion next to her and put a