Have you walked the moon?

Into the Wilderness: Story 1, Mom

On an unusually cold and rainy day in June, we drove down our mountain in New Jersey, headed to Newark airport. My daughter Catina was with my husband and me, and she hunched in the back seat, surly and cross-armed, hoodie pulled over her eyes.  She knew where we were going.

And she was mad.

We had decided not to goon our daughter into wilderness therapy (“gooning” is basically a team of muscled and kind-hearted professionals who transport your child, without warning, in the middle of the night).  Against the advice of many, I told her where she was going at the end of the school year— a therapy program in Georgia called Blue Ridge Wilderness.  We had hired an educational consultant for recommendations, and we had chosen this program over three others.

No teenager wants to go to wilderness.  Who would willingly give up cell phones and friends, to go deep into the woods for weeks on end, pitching tents, sleeping on beds of pine and leaves, using self-dug latrines? It is a modern-day teenager’s nightmare. Catina was no exception. She wanted the familiar comfort of the hostility she had wrapped around her with the covers in her room and the secret, and sometimes addictive, shame of self-harm. It was what she knew.

And what did we know?  We knew we had to save our daughter. And that saving took decisive and dramatic action, thrusting us evermore into an unfamiliar world. Educational consultants. Wilderness therapy. Residential treatment.  These were support systems we had known nothing about. For any parent contemplating what to do with their struggling teen, you need to know: this is hard.  It is one of the hardest decisions you will make. But it is also valiant and filled with hope.

So, we drove down our mountain, flew to Atlanta, headed two-plus hours North and dropped our daughter, wide-eyed and compliant—a final effort at making us change our minds—at Blue Ridge. From there, she was taken to a room to learn what would happen.  She was searched and tested for drugs.  She was given new clothes and a pack of camping necessities. She was driven beyond trails into the shaded canopy of the Blue Ridge mountains.

And that was how we began walking the moon. 

It felt—and it floods over me as I write about it today—that we would never see her again. It felt as if we were sending her to the moon—a far, forbidden and mysterious place, without communication or contact.

Catina coined “walking the moon” in one of her letters home.  She recalled—for the safe space of wilderness dislodges forgotten memories— that when she was a toddler and I left on business trips, I would tell her, instead of days, how many moons I would be gone.  I had figured that it would be easier for a 2-year-old to count moons than the number of days.  In her child’s mind, she pictured me walking around the moon for each of those days.  And now, away from family, she too was walking the moon each day.

The phrase became our shared language, not just for being away from each other, but for the difficult gravity of healing, the inhospitable pain of remembering and the crushing weight of letting go.  We walked the moon, together, many times.  And we learned the journey was worth it. 

Because wilderness was the beginning of a new life.  It changed all of us and brought us to the moment of joy we feel today, even during our current world circumstance, an uncertain pandemic shutting us in our homes. This is the story we want to share with you. And so much more.

Together, we learned to walk in strength. To gear up for the long journey.  To weather the uncertain atmosphere of life because, just wait, the winds will kick up the lunar gasses and it will change. We don’t have magic formulas.  Or a step by step guide. But we do have mother-daughter resilience. 

Mother-daughter resilience is the concept we want to share with you.  Stay tuned.