MOTHER AND DAUGHTER REUNION

Augusta, Gone 
By Martha Tod Dudman
(Simon & Schuster)

Clara Sturak
Associate editor

   I want to say how we went from being the three of us in the house eating supper at the table into the dark whirling storm of the next few years, but even now, looking back, I don’t know what happened.
                                                     -Augusta, Gone 

   Martha Tod Dudman’s story is not unique. How many parents of “troubled teens” do we know personally? How many times do we think, Why can’t she do something to help that poor kid? Or, What did that woman do to cause her child to become so messed up? Or, Why doesn’t someone throw that kid in jail? Worse, we are the mom. Or the dad. Or even the sibling of this teenager — the people in the middle of the “dark whirling storm” that Dudman undertakes to write about in her memoir.
   Dudman raised her two children on her own, working full-time managing her parents’ radio stations, coming home to cook for and read to her children. “...sometimes it seemed as if I were doing a wonderful balancing act, balancing it all on the tip of my nose,” Dudman writes, but soon, the sheer force of her daughter Augusta would throw the balance off.
   Augusta, Gone is a straightforward, sometimes harrowing account of Augusta’s decent into drug use and depression, Dudman’s deteriorating relationship with her daughter, the family’s eventual decision to send Augusta away to a program for kids in trouble, and the fallout from that decision.
   It is in no way a “how to” book for desperate parents. Dudman does not make a case for one method over another. She is not a “tough love” animatron forcefully advocating the benefits of kiddie boot camp; in fact, she voices serious doubts throughout the book about her decision to send Augusta away. 
   During a phone conversation from her home in Maine, Dudman tells me, “The only message in this book is never give up on your kids.” Which, after reading Augusta, Gone, I know is much easier said than done. In what seems both sudden and inevitable, Augusta goes from bright, funny, creative student to disappearing, drug addled, screaming, yelling, abusive, suicidal teen. Anyone who’s been through it will understand Dudman’s seeming confusion when she writes,
   “There were things that started to happen. But then you don’t know. When you daughter is eleven, when your daughter starts to act different, you don’t know if it’s because her parents are divorced. You don’t know if it’s because her mother works too much, or because your daughter’s too smart for her class, or because she has maybe a learning disability you never caught, or because her teacher has a learning disability or isn’t smart enough to teach your daughter. Or maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with school at all. Maybe she is becoming a teenager and this is how they act. Maybe they are supposed to be quiet and stay up in their rooms.”
   Dudman later writes of her home as being “under siege.” I ask her what it felt like to find that the balance of power had changed, and that Augusta was, essentially, running the show. “It was scary, and I felt very guilty,” she says. “I felt scared and angry and alone. Very alone.” If nothing else, Augusta, Gone may help parents in similar situations to feel a little less alone.
   There are some almost unbearably sad passages in Augusta, Gone. Dudman kept a journal during Augusta’s treatment, which was the source for much of the material here, and the book’s raw, honest tone can be heartbreaking. During a visit to the treatment center, Dudman and her ex-husband are treated to a screaming rant from their daughter, who punctuates it this way, “...she pulls back her sleeve and then shows us in one brief flash, before she yanks it down again, two red raised ridges on her arm where she’s cut herself. Two long vertical streaks, two angry ridged red lines on her little wrist. On her pale soft skin. I can’t speak. I can’t say anything. It feels like someone is choking me. I can’t speak.”
   Interestingly, some of the best material in Augusta, Gone happens when Dudman moves her focus from Augusta back to herself, and how she coped (or didn’t cope) with the chaos in her life. Over and over again we see her taking long, hard walks in the hills by her home. Part escape, part punishment, the walks save her from despair. We watch as she becomes alienated from her friends and business associates — people who treat her like “she has a cancer.” 
   Dudman’s boyfriend takes the brunt of her fury:
“When I call him some frantic night with my daughter, who is screaming at me from her room or cutting her wrists in Idaho...he says the same thing, always the same thing.
   ‘Oh, honey,” he tells me. ‘Oh I wish there was something I could do.’
   Then, just to make me madder: ‘I really do.’
He listens on the other end of the phone far away in his house and he says yeah, I know. I want to kill him.”
   When asked about the boyfriend who she once refers to in the book to as a “useless log,” Dudman laughs and says that they are still together, and that he is very proud of the book, and of her. “He signs things, U.L., for useless log!” she jokes, adding “I’m just not so crazed and unhappy anymore.”
   In fact, now that Augusta (whose name was changed to protect her privacy) has survived the storm of her teenage years, Dudman says, “I am happy every day. Going through anything that’s this difficult or painful, you’re face to face with the worst thing you can imagine. After [it’s over] you can lighten up a little.”
   An interesting dynamic that shows up in Augusta, Gone is Dudman’s ability to identify with the daughter that has become so alienated from her. A child of the sixties, Dudman herself was no picnic, getting kicked out of high school for smoking pot, running away, driving her mother to distraction. She tells me that in some ways the book is “an apology to my mom.” 
   Augusta runs away from her treatment center two times, causing her mother incredible fear and heartache. But also this; after Augusta’s return: “She no longer hates me when I tell her she is wonderful. She herself knows how wonderful she is. She understands that she ran away from the school twice! That she got herself home by bus all the way from Oregon with no money and no help really but the runaway switchboard.” 
   Dudman explains this improbable pride to me, “you want your kid to be cool and rebellious and smart, just not to you!” But it’s more than that. Martha Tod Dudman loves her children. She can’t help it. And, as she says, in a situation where there are no solutions and no right answers, loving your children the best you can is the only thing you can do.

   The Mirror wondered what it must have been like for “Augusta” to have her life written about by her own mother. We wondered what she would say, if given the opportunity to put her thoughts on paper. So, we asked her. The following is the story of Georgia Howland, a.k.a Augusta.

   My Story

   Georgia Howland
   Special to the Mirror

   There are all sorts of forms of teen literature; magazines, TV shows, self-help books for the struggling parents. These pieces, however, only pick at the crust of what it truly is to be a young adult, answering questions like, “Oh my God, what am I going to wear to the prom?!?” and “I think my crush might smoke a little pot, should I keep on crushing?!?”
   For your perfect suburban teenoid the answers supplied are, perhaps, perfect. For your average everyday teenage Joe, however, there is much left unanswered. It is extremely frustrating when, wherever you look, the teenage years are glossed over with neon letters, scented pages and catchy tunes.
   I myself had far more in depth questions, which I felt the media, parents and teachers were more than happy to leave unanswered. I wanted to know why I was so deeply sad so very often. I wondered how I could possibly be the wonderful, successful person I was supposed to be when school obviously wasn’t doing the trick. I was curious as to what was the point of continuing in this seemingly endless lose-lose cycle where to get ahead is to become posthumous. 
   Drugs seemed to answer my questions pretty well. So I asked and asked and asked again. Boy, did I get some interesting answers. What I didn’t realize, however, was that I was already completely immersed in an endless losing cycle, exactly what I had been running from in the first place.
   During my trip down to rock bottom, I began to realize that certain answers that I had been craving were right in front of my nose all along. I realized that sometimes one needs to take a couple of steps back and look at what he or she is becoming. I did that, and found that I was most definitely not who I had thought I was, or even who I wanted to be. I found that the changes that needed to be made could only be made if I made them myself. I stopped blaming all the outside obstacles and focused on myself. I am a strong person, as strong as any other random teen who decides it’s time to stand up and stop wallowing in the murky depths of despair.
   There are wonderful things everywhere. Parents who love you no matter what horrible things you’ve done. Ice cream by Ben and Jerry’s that is not just put there to make you fat. Roads just waiting to be driven. Boys/girls standing by ready to be kissed. True love about to be found. And that one certain inexplicable, irreplaceable feeling that comes from the satisfaction of waking up and realizing that you are who you are and that’s exactly who you want to be.
   I found on my journey that selfishness is one of the roots of all the overwhelming sadness. I didn’t look around and appreciate all that I had been given, only stared at all the things that I thought I needed and didn’t think I had.
   My mother has added her own voice to the plethora of teen literature. Only this time it is written from an angle that views all sides. It is my story, and I am glad that someone had the perseverance to see me through it and one day tell it just like it is. Maybe reading the story will spark something inside you, parent or teen. Maybe not. But regardless, it is the story of how things were, and how they could end up. Keep your head up, America, there are answers all around you and in you, and maybe, just maybe, you can figure it out all on your own.
   Where am I now? Right now I am living and supporting myself in California. Soon I will head back to Maine to save some money so I can move to the Caribbean for some life experience.
   My dream? To open a gallery for struggling artists in Hillcrest, San Diego and be on the cover of Rolling Stone. You’ll see me after this book, I guarantee.