“Laura”: A Life in Progress
This was not yoga, it was not perfect union of body and mind that she sought-- that would come later. Still, you could say, that on that morning, Laura had devised a unique form of sun salutation. Raising her hands toward the sunlight streaming through her window, she carefully examined the sun-dappled pattern splayed across her elongated fingers. Harking back to the days when time was measured in the interplay of shadow and light, she employed sundial methodology to gauge the passage of time. In her estimation, the time was 11:00 AM, well past the customary 8:00 AM unbolting, and still no one had come to unlock her door. For Laura, this seemingly insignificant oversight exemplified prison’s us-against-them ethos. No matter. She was determined not to let “head games” wear her down.
Consigned to a cell with only a cot and metal toilet to break its brick-walled monotony, her self-styled clock was but one of many ruses with which she attempted to distract herself from incarceration’s constricting effect.
Boredom was the least of her concerns. Having once been locked up with a violent cellmate who prided herself on her ability to “rearrange” the anatomy of anyone who had the misfortune of igniting her ire, Laura was grateful that the inanimate cell mates who currently occupied her cell would neither exhibit extreme mood swings nor tax her already limited sense of well-being.
How did a nice girl from a village eight miles north east of Buffalo, New York take up residence in such forbidding quarters?
Although the complexity of human behavior defies easy answers, still there were signposts, discernable early on, that hinted to the course she would ultimately follow.
When she was three months old and her nascent experience of the world wholly mediated by maternal nurture, Laura’s mother was hospitalized for surgery that required a long convalescence. This rupture in the natural order of her emotional development proved to be a force majeure in Laura’s life. “I know that put a wedge between me and my mom,” she says. “It had a profound effect on my life.”
This sense of estrangement carried over to grade school as well where Laura felt rejected by her peers. She describes her personality as being too overbearing for the tastes of her small town classmates. “The message that I got from both my parents and my peers was to tamp it [her personality] down.” My parents continually asked me: “Why can’t you be more like so and so?”
Further dampening Laura’s irrepressible spirit, was her mother’s rigidly Catholic world view. “I grew up feeling that I was doomed,” she says. Perhaps it was her mom’s incessant exhortation that she was “a sinner and going to hell,” that prompted Laura to accelerate her inexorable journey toward that fiery destination and chart her course toward incarceration.
At a time when her cohorts tentatively tiptoed toward life outside grade school’s cocooned parameters, Laura rushed headlong into an idiosyncratic course in American geography. Her desperate dash across America did not allow for topographical diversity. Verdant hills, wind-swept beaches, reluctantly relinquished their distinctiveness, yielding to the déjà vu blandness of repeat destination – a juvenile detention center somewhere in America.
But first there were the phases.
She entered her punk rock phase while still in eighth grade. Fueled by alcohol and later pot, Laura swathed herself in black-clothed defiance. “I couldn’t figure out how to be loved and accepted so I got into punk rock,” she says. Admission to high school precipitated a bout with anorexia. “It was my attempt at gaining control over my life,” she explains. “One day I came home from school and decided not to eat a snack and before I knew it the pounds kept coming off.” Following a visit to a nutritionist, Laura recalls thinking: “I just was looking for someone to say that it was okay to eat.”
Apparently, she learned that lesson well. Freed of her fear of eating, her menu of consumables soon expanded to include non-food items. By the end of her freshman year in high school, Laura feasted on a steady diet of marijuana, mushrooms and acid – she had officially entered her hippie phase. One month shy of the close of her sophomore year, an already turned-on Laura made literal meaning of Timothy Leary’s cri de coeur :“turn on, tune in, and drop out,” and dropped out of high school.
Next she engaged her parents in a cruel game of hide –n-seek. Laura repeatedly ran away from home and her parents, with the force of law behind them, sought her return. Her first attempt at running away landed her in a juvenile detention center in Cleveland, Ohio. Encountering little kids who already qualified as hard core criminals still did not sufficiently terrorize her into submission.
“When I am sixteen,” she announced to her parents’ dismay, “I’m going on tour with the (Grateful) Dead.” And she did. Riding the tour all the way out to San Francisco, Laura had, by now, graduated to more sinister drugs. As the tour swung back East, she was busted and once again landed in a detention center, this time in New Jersey.
Caught up in a seemingly endless cycle of arrests and detentions, Laura experienced America’s expanse as her own freedoms constricted.
She vividly recalls an incident from those days on the run. Having flown, handcuffed and accompanied by a guardian, from a detention center in West Virginia to one in New Jersey, she began to make her way across the airport. Suddenly, she watched in horror, as parents, noticing her handcuffs pulled their children away from her. Like a dramatization of the biblical verse in Leviticus that describes the leper’s outcast status: “Unclean, unclean… he shall dwell apart…,”their actions underscored her otherness, her pariah status.
At sixteen, after she completed a ten- month stretch in a Louisiana detention center, Laura was open to a new approach. “My big sister and twin sister would no longer talk with me; they didn’t want to have anything to do with me and that hurt me very deeply,” she says. “I knew then that I was ready to get sober, I knew that I needed to make an effort to turn my life around.” With sobriety came reflection. “When I started to sober up I realized the disgusting life I was living – it was a huge wake-up call. I now realize that getting arrested that last time was a huge blessing; it’s what saved my life. It was, she concedes, “a very tough time for everyone.”
Yet despite the upheaval, Laura mines the experience for its positive consequences. “Because of all of this, it made my family face stuff …it was very beautiful; there was a lot of healing,” she reveals.
Once completely sober, Laura set about making up for her two-year “lost weekend.”
Skipping over high school, Laura earned a GED, attended Erie Community College, gaining 24 college credits and a serious boyfriend -- who would later become the father of her daughter, Kaya.
Sobriety did not, however, guarantee mastery over life’s challenges. Though not married to her daughter’s father, she agreed to move in with him while he completed his degree in Environmental Studies. Alone in a college town, living on food stamps, and attempting to care for her infant daughter while struggling with post partum depression and feelings of parental incompetence, Laura wonders how she survived. “I sit here today,” she says “and I think how did I make it through without going crazy?”
Recognizing that her relationship with her boyfriend ultimately would not pan out, Laura moved out to “build a life of her own.” A born networker, she easily found her niche in sales. More importantly perhaps, creative energies, long stifled in drug-induced repression, now freely surfaced and competed for her attention.
“I had dreams,” she says “of getting in to the music and entertainment industry.” So, she headed off to garner a degree in Music Business Management. While she did not complete the degree it greatly added to her store of knowledge – which would soon serve her well. More than working the business end of music, Laura secretly yearned to be onstage singing. But her family had never encouraged her to do so. “As kids, we have so much potential but it is often not supported by our families,” she says. The encouragement of a life coach and a belly dance classmate prompted Laura to start a reggae band. In short order she was managing the books, booking the band’s tours and perhaps most improbable of all, fronting the band as its lead singer (this, despite a lack of formal training!)
“Another one of my loves,” she says “is photography.” “I’ve had to put it on the side for now to get my music thing going,” she elaborates.
Recently returned from a dance and cultural exploration of Senegal, Africa that Laura characterizes as a life changing experience, she was fortunate to fully indulge both her love of dance and photography.
Artfully, she records scenes from Senegal; its villages -- a conglomeration of low-slung mud huts huddled together in nondescript brownness save for slivers of decorative trim the color of robins’ eggs. On a nature preserve, in what could easily be mistaken for a sci-fi tableau, her camera captures a carpet of land crabs moving toward her in spindly-legged defiance of her encroachment upon their territory.
From another vantage point, Laura focuses her lens on a beach resplendently bejeweled in dazzling diversity, with sea shells of every imaginable shape and size. Yet, the one photo that stands out in iconic distinctiveness is that of Laura. Standing on a beach, wearing only a bathing suit and an impossibly wide smile, she extends her arms outward as if to gather the world in exuberant embrace.
After years spent killing time, evading time, and doing time, she moves with confident grace to greet redemption time.