“I wasn’t supposed to have her. I got pregnant after her father and I had already decided to split.” Maura hesitates. “I burned her once when she was five. Dabbed my cigarette on her arm.” She looks at the group, who are staring at her, aghast, and smiles warmly.
Ms. Gibson asks how Maura is feeling about the abuse now. The slapping, the burning.
“Burning her gently,” Maura clarifies. “Let’s not make it sound worse than it was.”
Today, Maura and her doll were practicing bedtime negotiation. The preteen dolls had been given smartphones. Maura’s doll was under the covers, playing with her device, so finally Maura pulled the covers off and threatened to smack her.
“That’s all. I am a narcissist. I am a danger to my child.”
The mothers thank her for sharing. Next, they hear from Evie, a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, who has a narrow face and somber expression and delicate, child-size hands. Evie describes her childhood as happy. Her mistake was letting her daughter, Harper, walk home from the library alone. Her eight-year-old. “No, wait. She just turned nine.” She gives the mothers a sad smile.
“It’s about four blocks between our house and the library. Maybe ten minutes going at her pace. She wanted to walk by herself. Kids in our neighborhood do it all the time. People watch out for each other. If someone had a problem, they could have talked to me. They didn’t have to call the police.” Evie stares at the floor. “She got picked up when she was a block from home.”
Ms. Gibson thinks Evie isn’t showing enough remorse. In what world is an eight-year-old allowed to go anywhere unsupervised?
“Lady,” Evie says. She bites her lip. Her voice drops to a monotone. “I made a poor decision. I put her in danger.”
“Excellent, Evie. Now what brings you here today?”
“My doll said I pushed her. But I didn’t push her. She fell down. It was an accident.”
“Evie, your instructors saw you push her.”
“You can look at the footage. Don’t you have footage of everything? I’m telling you, she’s making it up.”
They argue about whether the dolls are capable of lying, whether the dolls are manipulative like real children, whether if, by making this accusation against her doll, Evie is demonstrating the insecurity of their attachment and her lack of commitment to the program. Evie says she comforted her doll. Her hug to soothe physical injury worked within seconds. Her affection numbers have been good. On evaluation day, she came in first.
Why is Ms. Gibson giving her a hard time when all her daughter did was walk and all her doll did was fall? “It’s not like I burned anyone,” she says.
The mothers inhale sharply. Maura glares at Evie. Evie glares at Ms. Gibson. There is a flurry of tense leg crossing.
Ms. Gibson says, “Remember, ladies, this is a safe space.”
One woman’s boyfriend broke her daughter’s arm. They told the hospital it was an accident. The boyfriend violated his parole, is now in jail. The mother is here for lying on his behalf and not protecting her daughter. Other mothers admit to fires. Belts. Curling irons, regular irons. One mother hit her ten-year-old son with a scale, giving him a black eye.
Frida lets the stories wash over her. The first time Harriet stayed at Gust and Susanna’s apartment overnight, Frida wanted to take a hammer to her foot, a hammer to the wall. What was she supposed to do with that feeling? Today her anger consumed her.
She stares at the mothers’ boots, noting the various ways of tying the laces, whose uniform cuffs are frayed, whose have mud on them. It is January 11. Harriet turned twenty-two months today.
When it’s her turn, she tells them about her one very bad day, her depression, Susanna, the divorce. “I pinched my doll. During naptime drills. I’ve been distracted. My ex’s girlfriend has my baby on a diet. They’re cutting carbs. I know how incredibly stupid that sounds, but it’s dangerous. Her cheeks…” Frida’s voice trembles. She wipes away tears. “She should be gaining weight, not losing it. I lost my temper today. I didn’t mean to take it out on my doll.”
The mothers in talk circle welcome her as one of their own, murmur, “Hmmm, yes, Mama.”
The woman who hit her son with a scale says, “That’s how it started for me too.”
The mother next to Frida, who burned her son with a curling iron, pats Frida’s knee. Maura, the alcoholic mother of five, smiles kindly.
“And how did pinching Emmanuelle make you feel?” Ms. Gibson asks.