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the big metal basin in the kitchen, a group of boys began throwing kitchen knives at me, laughing as I tried to dodge them. The teachers never intervened when the students tortured each other. They thought it was good for us to work things out for ourselves, but after the knife incident, I finally called my mother and told her everything: how we were treated like criminals, locked into our dorms, spied on, and abused. My mother drove down to the school that night. We weren’t allowed to leave the campus, ever, but she told them she was taking me home for the weekend, and that they were never, ever to allow me to be abused by anyone, and that they were never allowed to tell me that my parents didn’t love me, and that they would treat me with respect.
    But I wasn’t off the hook. We both knew I had to finish, and finish strong, but that weekend, she made me a deal.
    â€œLis, if you finish out the year and you do well, I promise you that you can go to a private school anywhere else you want to go. A nice school that you’ll love.”
    That was motivation enough for me. She took me back at the end of the weekend, and things were a little better after that. I felt like she was watching them just as they were watching me.
    I hung in there. I kept my chin up and I followed the rules and I did what they told me to do. My new mission was to show everybody that I wasn’t “bad,” that I wasn’t “incorrigible.” My mother stood behind me the whole time, encouraging me to make it through.
    At the end of the year, my grades were good enough to transfer to a wonderful Episcopal boarding school in Tennessee called St. Andrew’s–Suwannee, which I loved, with “normal” kids and “normal” teachers who didn’t tell you that your parents didn’t love you in order to keep you there. At that school, I met my lifelong friend Leslie, who has taught me a thing or two about love in this lifetime. I met a nice boy and fell in love with him. I enjoyed my classes. I lived near my Aunt Laurie, my mother’s sister, and having family nearby comforted me. I graduated, and I finally realized I was going to be okay.
    Once I had achieved a degree of normalcy in my life, and I was out on my own, my mother changed. She’d done her job. She’d gotten me through the worst part. She’d sacrificed her dream to keep things as normal as possible for me, but now that I was out on my own, it was time for her to do what she needed to do.
    I went home every holiday and occasionally on the weekends, and I watched with some alarm as my mother began to transform before my eyes. I’ll never forget the day she tore up her Social Security card into tiny pieces and threw it into the air. It fluttered down around us like the ashes of our past life, like everything in my childhood,everything I’d believed in, had been burned away and scattered into the wind.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I asked, in horror. Wasn’t she going to need that for . . . something?
    â€œI’m through with this life,” she said. The look on her face at that moment made me think of a phoenix. It was a look of rebirth, of pure joy. That’s when she told me that she was selling the house and moving to the country.
    â€œWhat?” I said in disbelief. “You’re going to what?”
    I looked down at the floor, which was covered in tiny pieces of paper that weren’t supposed to be in pieces. “Maybe I’ll find a farm somewhere, a piece of peace in the countryside,” she said dreamily.
    â€œWhat the hell are you talking about?” I said. “You can’t sell this house. This is my childhood house!”
    â€œYou haven’t lived here in two years,” she said.
    â€œWhat kind of farm?” I said. I began to have visions of rolling fields and pastures for horses. Then I thought of that movie Out of Africa. “I had a farm in Africa, at the