On July 27, 1975, I was eight days from my 25th birthday and two days late from my due date to deliver my first born. Ellen was a perfect baby and a complete joy to raise, at least until the age of 13.

I was fortunate to be a stay-at-home mom for the first eight years of her life. She was the first beloved granddaughter of the Bernard Clan, but generated little interest from the Curl Clan, not a surprise considering that none of them liked themselves, let alone a new addition.

At the time, Ellen was the greatest gift and achievement of my life, and I’m still enormously proud of her and her accomplishments. That said, I would not wish her teenage years on another mother, including her. Nothing prepared me for her antics and behavior from the age of 13, and sometimes even now.

Her perception of her troubled life is very different from mine. When her dad and I separated, she was sad but enjoyed the discovery of a new neighborhood and the many friends she made while enjoying the lasting friendships from the old neighborhood. She contends that her depression, anger, and acting out began with the divorce, when in fact it began with the remarriage of her father. Regardless of our different opinions, I believe that Ellen has written a compelling memoir with very real insights into the dangers of high school bullying and the consequences of bad decision-making.

Ellen remains the life of every party, a personality that people from all walks of life will gravitate to while being a loving mother, wife, daughter, sister, and friend. She’s always had strong opinions and convictions in her beliefs. She still possesses the voice of a songbird and may yet become famous, if not for singing then certainly for her humorous writing style and ability to entertain the masses.

Kitty Bernard, Ellen’s Mom

PREFACE

Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth. —Viola Davis, Finding Me

This book is a love letter to my family, friends, and hometown. As a nonpracticing, agnostic, Jew-“ish” person on a lifelong quest to end racism and anti-Semitism, I was fortunate to grow up in Reston, Virginia, a town that was literally created as a place of inclusion for all. When my kindergarten teacher played the album Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas and Friends, it fell directly in line with my view of Reston: where the “shining seas” were the man-made lakes, the “river running free” was the creek behind our house, and the “green country” was the 1,350 acres of open space that Reston’s founder and namesake, Robert E. “Bob” Simon, had set aside for its residents.

As Virginia’s first open, integrated, and planned community, Reston was a safe harbor, and I truly believed in the peaceful, egalitarian lessons taught at my elementary school. But inevitably, life’s harsh realities could not be shielded from me, and when they hit, they hit hard. My childhood went from idyllic to completely chaotic, seemingly overnight.

A picture documents my first sustainable memory: I’m three years old and holding up blue homemade Play-Doh-covered hands, sitting in a yellow highchair that matched the ’70s iconic harvest gold appliances, dishware, and wallpaper of our kitchen in New Jersey. I can distinctly recall my point of view, opposite the camera, with my mom directing me to “Say cheese!” and then setting the camera down on the counter to stir her cauldron of blue sorcery.

If I didn’t have physical evidence of this moment’s existence, I would have never remembered it. When we recollect a particular incident from the past, our neural net mutates and the adjustment impacts the next recollection of the moment. Meaning, the next time you remember the event, you might not recall the original memory but instead what you remembered the previous time. Even the word itself, “re-membering,” indicates a need to reassemble or reconstruct; to put things back together after being separated. This book is a collection of my memories. Some have been cemented by retelling the stories or pictures, and some have been contaminated, but they’re all building blocks for the person I am today.

I was a curious, precocious, funny, and determined kid. The most difficult thing in my childhood was bedtime, because I had a serious and rare form of insomnia called . . . never sleep. My parents tried every trick in the book, but I would fight sleep tooth and nail. As a teenager, I spent my days and nights fighting everyone.

My parents’ divorce was a traumatic turning point in my younglife. I went from being a child who respected authority and followed the rules to someone who was in constant trouble for misbehaving, getting poor grades, drinking, using drugs, and for physical altercations.My parents were unusually forgiving and compassionate.Despite their exceptional capacity for forgiveness, offering me all the grace they could muster, I remained the epitome of trouble.