by Terri Giuliano Long
Published 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9754533-9-1
Also available in Kindle and Nook formats.
*received this book in exchange for a review. This did not impact my opinion in any way.
I’m one of those crazy moms who started worrying about my oldest daughter’s boyfriends before she was even born. When my younger daughter went through a phase at two years where she would yank off her diaper and gleefully streak through the house, I hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come. Parents worry. They go through those anxiety filled nights, after watching the news, where they wonder what they would do if their child was in a car accident, or raped, or robbed. And they dread even more the opposite occurrence, that their child is the drunk driver, or the rapist, or the thief.
Because we all know, without being told, that though infancy is more physically demanding on parents-- the sleep deprived nights, the fear inducing croup coughs, the bumps and falls from learning to walk—it’s nothing compared to those terrifying moments when your teenager walks out that front door and it doesn’t matter how much you love and want to protect them, anything can happen. Anything.
Sometimes the most worrying comes from remembering the trouble we gave our own parents. The lies we told, the reckless friends we hung out with, the alcohol drenched parties we went to, the poor choices we made.
Most of it came from trying to assert our independence. Our individuality. We thought we deserved the right to rebel. Our parents put too much pressure on us. They foisted their own unfulfilled dreams onto our shoulders and we reeled under the weight. Sometimes it was because they didn’t pay us enough attention, and we looked for it where we could. Sometimes we just wanted someone to hear us out, instead of barking orders and making demands.
And now that we’re parents, we wonder where we are failing, where we are pushing, where we are alienating.
Terry Guiliano Long’s In Leah’s Wake draws a fictional portrait of the dismantling of a family that begins when the teenage Leah suddenly veers off the path, into full force rebellion. A soccer star slated for the Ivy League, she misses practice and begins dating Todd, a football player turned troublemaker. As she delves into drugs and sex, her grades take a turn for the worse, and she drops off communication with her friends. Despite their best efforts to draw Leah back into the family, parents Zoe and Will only succeed in pushing her closer to Todd and his wayward friends.
Leah’s self-destruction brings out the differences between Zoe and Will as well: Will is determined to run interference until Leah sees Todd for the creep he is, and Zoe wants to give Leah space so that she can come to her own realizations about what she’s doing. When neither approach works, each parent blames the other, and all the old resentments and weaknesses of their marriage surface.
Meanwhile, Justine, Leah’s 12 year old sister, deals with the fallout of Leah’s actions. She has to fend for herself as her father stays away from home and her mother sinks into a depression. She is rock in the family, trying to bring Leah back home, trying to take care of her mother, and trying to get her father to see that his overbearing approach is only making things worse.
Long draws a skillful portrait of a flawed family and each member of it. Zoe’s joy in conducting self-help workshops for the women in the community. Will’s drive and ambitions for his daughter, and the decline of his business. Justine’s wish for her family to be what it once was. Each character brims with life, with longing, with hope.
But what Guiliano Long does best is to nudge us to recognize ourselves in Will and Zoe. To give us that perspective to recognize the small decisions that we make that form chasms between us and our children. To remind us that we were there once, too. We were young. We wanted our independence, and sometimes that need drove us to some desperate measures, some dead end roads, and some destructive relationships.
I can’t recommend this enough for any parent, but especially for parents of young girls!
