Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
It’s perilous, trying to understand somebody’s life in a few sittings. You need clues: bits of cloth and paper, snatches of song, fragments of memory. Making do, I ask Amanda Williamson to bring old photos the next time we meet.
She walks into the coffee shop with her mother’s album in her arms, and we find a deserted corner where we can talk without being overheard. She pulls out a shot of herself as a baby to show me her mom’s handwriting on the back: “Amanda, 8 weeks. Angela, 22 years. 4/23/88. First picture together.” Then she slowly flips the pages.
There’s a photo of tiny Amanda standing by the little pallet on the floor where she slept. Another of her at age 3 or so, holding somebody’s beer can. Another in which she’s surrounded by empty Pepsi cans and pizza boxes. She’s nearly always in the same pink top.
A few pages later, she’s maybe 5, and she and her mother are together in a twin bed. Angela’s arm is flung up, covering her face, and there’s an ashtray on her chest. Amanda is snuggled as close to her mother’s body as she can get.
Here’s a photo of one of Angela’s boyfriends: “She didn’t love him. They were just familiar to each other.” Another: “This guy supposedly could be my dad. He’d be a good dad. He’s a coach in Arnold. I’ve never met him.”
Here’s her grandma in a bustier, a birthday present from Angela. “That’s what you get when you have a stripper for a daughter,” Amanda says dryly.
At the next page, she frowns. The photo shows her mother sprawled on a sofa, a pager clipped to her jeans, a strip of midriff bare, and Amanda sitting upright next to her, looking miserable. “We were in this biker house. There were naked pictures everywhere.”
Finally, a happy shot, children at a holiday celebration. “My cousins,” she explains. “They always had nice stuff, and they looked nice, and they were clean.”I look at the young woman sitting across from me. She, too, looks nice, and freshly scrubbed, and her hair’s fragrant. By now, I know what she’s been through. What I don’t know is how she emerged from it so whole.
Courtesy of Amanda Williamson
Learning to fight: Angela beat the boys at a karate championship at age 12.
When Amanda was 7, she and her mother lived for a while, in secret, on the top floor of a derelict old building near the corner of Chippewa and Grand. Angela worked at the strip club in the building’s dark, low-ceilinged basement. Amanda used to stand by the pinball machine, waiting for her mom to go onstage. People standing at the bar would give her chips, and she’d gobble them; sometimes all she’d eaten that day was ketchup squeezed from packets. Once her mom’s music started, though, she forgot everything but watching. When the others stripped, it was gross, nasty. Her mom was beautiful, like a real dancer.
She’d been the first woman to compete against men in martial arts, she told Amanda. There was a yellowed news clipping (see below) to prove it: “Angie Williamson, 12, won the peewee title in karate.” They’d written comic strips about her, she said. Later, she modeled—soon after Amanda was born, she’d gone to Florida and gotten “discovered.” There was a picture of Angela lying on the beach in a bikini, bright parrots perched on the curve of her hip. Amanda loved to look at it.
Courtesy of Amanda Williamson
Angela in Florida during her short-lived modeling career.
Otherwise, there wasn’t much to do. Her mom slept all day, and Amanda waited for her to wake up. There weren’t any kids to play with, because she didn’t go to school, because they didn’t have a legal address. One extra-lonely day, it hit her: They’d lived here another time, when she was 4, and she’d left her My Little Pony set. Could it still be there? Only one other guy lived in the building…
She opened the door quietly, exhaled against the hallway’s blast of cat-pee ammonia and mold, and crept down the forbidden stairs. The air was hot and bright, shimmering with adventure. She found the rooms where they’d lived and—the ponies were there! Two My Little Ponies and half of a My Little Pony house! She raced back up the stairs, made herself some ramen noodles, and played with her ponies all afternoon. That was a good day.
From the strip club building, they moved. Alabama, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska, Michigan—they lived on just about every state street, at least for a minute. Amanda could go to school now, and she worked hard and asked a bunch of questions, not even caring what the other kids thought. School was a way out; that’s what her teachers said.
One time in second grade, when everybody was torturing her because she was poor, her mom came up to school to do something about it. One of the mean boys called her mom a bitch. Angela picked him up in his desk and slammed it down.
After that, the other kids tortured Amanda even more, so she never told her mother again. Later, she’d name the lesson: Negative attracts negative.
To make her mom feel better, she drew pictures—prancing unicorns, and the details of people’s faces. She watched her mother’s face all the time: the electric blue eyes, the high cheekbones. Whatever emotion her mom felt, she felt it too, half a second later.
The way her mother showed her love was by wrestling with her, punching her. Then she’d laugh at how much Amanda loved it. “You’re so weird!” Angela teased. But it was the emotions that hurt. Punches felt reassuring—real and warm and connected, like affection.
Sometimes, without warning, Angela would say, “You’re not living with me anymore” and take Amanda to her grandma’s, and she’d wait there for weeks. She was always waiting for her mom—to come home, to come back, to wake up from being high on crack cocaine or come out of a crazy rage. Seroquel and diazepam were the names on her pill bottles, and Seroquel was the scariest, because the doctor had given her the highest dosage, and she’d get high and then take seven of the pills to try to come down.
The good year was when they lived on Adkins, not far from the big Bevo windmill. Her mother was with a nice guy that year, and his mom used to pick Amanda up from school and take her to buy clothes. It felt like a little glimpse of normal.
When Amanda was 10, her mother had a baby. Amanda got to name him, so she chose Marcus, a warrior’s name.
The doctor at the hospital said her mom had “schizophrenia,” which, to Amanda, was just a word, something to call the demons. When they came, her mom’s cool, laidback voice would go deeper, louder, angrier. Demanding. You wanted to be on your toes if you heard that voice. Her pupils got really black, and her blue eyes looked dark green, like grass in deep shade.
The crazy times could go on for hours. Then, all of a sudden, she’d come back, and she wouldn’t know what happened. Amanda could never talk to her about it, because that would trigger her, and the demon might come back.
Instead, she learned a quiet tact and took care of both of them. One winter night, she scrubbed her shirt and jeans with shampoo in the bathroom sink, because she didn’t want to get tortured at school for smelling bad. The next morning, the jeans were frozen and, under the slick of ice, still soaking wet. Her brain raced—no dryer, nothing else to wear, she couldn’t miss school…
She ironed them dry.
At Carr Lane Visual and Performing Arts Middle School, she found a refuge. There were other kids like her, creative and eager. (The flip side of the earlier lesson: Like attracts like). Doing theater taught her to never be embarrassed. So what if she had to roll up toilet paper because tampons cost too much? Other people had problems, too. With a sigh of relief, she settled into belonging.
But the system was watching them; Marcus had been born with cocaine in his bloodstream. Angela left him with a relative, pulled Amanda out of school, and took her across the river to Cahokia, Illinois, so the state couldn’t take her away.
Heartsick at leaving Carr Lane VPA, Amanda flunked her classes in Cahokia. Then they moved to Dupo, where at least there was a marching band. She decided to make the best of it and learn to play the drums. Remembering what she’d learned in theater, she relaxed and started being herself.
Her first friend was a boy who’d been so badly beaten, he had a speech impediment. Nobody would hang around long enough for him to get words out. “Let’s dance,” Amanda urged him, and they sang and danced and acted goofy, and his words began to flow.
She made more friends, and her drumming improved. At one of the band recitals, her mom actually showed up—which would have been great, except she came with this guy who looked like Quasimodo on crack, not that that mattered, looks or anything like that. It was just the fact that they came high.
Her mom was high a lot in Dupo, and she kept getting into fights. One night she was so strung out, screaming and waving a machete, that their neighbor Patty called the police. Angela tried to tell the arresting officer that the crack pipe in her pocket belonged to Patty—who was pregnant, and not about to be framed. “I’m no crackhead,” she said to Amanda. “Tell them the truth.”
Amanda did. And from the back of the police car, kicking and screaming (they must’ve Tased her 10 times), her mother yelled at her, “This is your fault!”
People will do anything to avoid saying, “I f—ked up,” Amanda thought. It’s always somebody else’s fault.
She tucked away the observation and spent the night figuring out how to get enough money to bail her mom out. She was just 15, too young to cash her mother’s disability check, so she gave it to an elderly neighbor in exchange for cash.
The drama was beginning to wear thin, but Amanda still didn’t want to be anywhere but with her mother. She lived for the calm days. She’d call home to check her mother’s voice, see what she was in for. Good or bad, it was a penny toss. If her mom sounded like herself, affectionate and mellow, they’d curl up together and watch Highlander, and for a few hours the world would be perfect.
Her mother’s voice was clear and warm and happy the day Amanda’s new friend April suggested coming over to do homework together. She could spend the night, right? “OK, sure!” Amanda said, with an unaccustomed little tingle of anticipation.
They were giggling and groaning their way through the last bit of homework when Angela announced that she was going over to the bar for a quick drink.
“Just stay home,” Amanda begged.
“I won’t be gone long,” Angela said breezily.
A few hours later, the girls were listening to music. A woman’s screams drowned the chords. “April, stay here!” Amanda ordered, sick with dread. She opened the door and saw her mom on the ground, trying to crawl up the trailer steps, bloody from head to toe and yelling, “They beat me up with two-by-fours! I gotta get my shotgun!”
“Mom! Oh my God! I have a friend here! Oh my God. Mom, calm down. What happened? Should we call the police?”
“I’m gonna f—king kill them!” Angela blazed, hoisting herself over the metal threshold.
Amanda ran back to check on April, who was still in Amanda’s room, eyes wide. “I know, it sounds scary from back here,” Amanda told her, “but it’s going to be OK.” She ran to the front of the trailer and got her mom up onto the couch. Then two women from the bar came over to check on Angela—who proceeded to hold them hostage with her shotgun.
“I am so sorry,” Amanda whispered to them. “Just let me get her calmed down, and as soon as I say leave, leave.”
She got the women out and raced to her room to give April some headphones so she didn’t have to hear any more. April put the headphones on and burst into sobs. She thinks it’s the last day of her life, Amanda realized. “You don’t ever have to come over here ever, ever again,” she promised. “We’ll be at school soon, and everything will be OK. Please, just don’t tell anybody it’s like this.”
The next morning, Angela’s father came over and took her to the hospital, where a doctor announced that if a horse had consumed that much alcohol, the horse would be dead.
April never did tell anyone. “She knew it wasn’t my fault,” Amanda says now, “but she never really talked to me after that.” She shrugs. “I didn’t blame her. It was realistic to me.”
As she grew older, Amanda became adroit at revealing only as much as she thought that a friend could take. But when she dared bring her friend Samantha on a camping trip, her mother’s worst demon came out.
Angela had named all her demons, and this one was Angelica: green-eyed, with a devilish mean voice. She’d kill you without a thought to the consequences.
Desperate to keep Samantha from seeing the worst, Amanda stayed inside the cabin with her. Out by the campfire, her mom was flat-out drunk and busy punching her boyfriend’s buddy in the nose. When she slapped his glasses off him, there was nothing to do but rescue her.
Amanda brought her bikini-clad mother inside. “I’m going to do a flip,” Angela announced, and she climbed up to the loft, grabbed the base of the railing, flipped over, and landed on her feet, then fell and burst out laughing. “O-kay,” Amanda thought. “At least the anger’s turned into something goofy.”
Turning to Samantha, she said, “I’m so sorry.” Samantha shot her a grin: “Are you kidding? My dad’s an alcoholic. I go through this stuff all the time.”
From that day on, they were so close, you couldn’t see light between them.
Early on, Amanda was told she had a learning disability—probably because she’d missed whole months of school and changed schools so often, and she was always struggling to catch up. Later she was labeled bipolar, because she couldn’t explain to anybody why she was so sad, for fear they’d take her away from her mother and put her in the system. She’d already lost her brother. And she was pretty sure she was the only thing keeping her mother alive.
Two separate times, she went with her mom to rehab at the Queen of Peace Center. She tried to help by doing everything they told her mom to do, like exercise and eat right and keep to a routine.
In sixth grade, she had to go alone to a residential program for girls. She was the only virgin. It was dark and smelled like a dungeon, and when the counselors asked about her life, she didn’t tell them anything, because she was afraid they’d take her away from her mom. Instead, she had a tantrum and called one of the ladies names. She was afraid she’d never see her mom again, and she thought they were the reason why.
It took a lot of what she called “rationalizing” to get through those weeks. She didn’t mean justifying; she meant thinking things through, paying attention, finding deeper meanings. It was the beginning of The Observation.
There were positive people, and there were people who lived in chaos. Amanda made it a project to scrutinize both kinds, trying to see how they did things differently. Soon she was able to pick out, with a sharpshooter’s accuracy, the people she could trust to help her.
Her mom’s best friend, Jennifer Manor, was one of her saviors, because Jennifer would put Angela on speaker for, like, 24 hours. “Uh-huh… Yeah… I hear it, Ange.” If you didn’t feed into what Angela believed, things’d get worse—you’d be a traitor—and Jennifer caught on to that right away. Sometimes, when things were really bad, she’d call and say, “Hey, Ange? I need some help. Can I take Amanda off your hands for a while?” Angela would agree, then call when they were halfway back to Jennifer’s house and yell, “Come home right now, or your stuff’s outside.”
After a few rounds of this, Amanda just phoned the man she called her father figure, a security guard from the strip club who’d continued to watch out for her. “Can you make sure my stuff’s not outside?” she asked. “Mom’s going crazy.”
It took a minute to understand reality in Angela’s world, because some things were true but a lot wasn’t. She’d say that her father sold their souls, and that she was cursed. That, Amanda believed.
We’re all born pure. That’s what they said at every church she went to—and she’d been to a whole lot of churches, because they always had food, and she was a hungry kid. She ate, and she listened. Slowly, she was putting together a theory, a narrative that would explain her mother’s wild swings. Anytime you sinned, it was like opening a door to evil spirits. The sin tainted you a little bit, but you could learn from that guilt and shut the door. Except that once those doors opened, some people thought they couldn’t be shut, and one sin opened another door and another and another, and the demons came in and took over somebody’s whole mind and body.
She’d watched it happen.
Courtesy of Amanda Williamson
Two months into life, Amanda in her mother’s arms.
Early in the fall of 2006, Angela went through her third drug treatment program. She’d just had another baby, a girl, and lost custody. “It was god’s will for my baby to be gone for a moment,” she wrote in a red spiral notebook. “So I can work on me being good.”
Later, Amanda would read her notes:
“How drugs have took away from
children.”
“My daughter Amanda. She is the oldest child I have she is very nervous sometimes. She feels she has to take care of everything because I fall short of my life.”
“She will take care of me if necessary. Even clean house, remind me of bills.”
“I resent you dad for not loving me the right way… I resent you dad for raping me when I was twelve years old.”
“Friday phone call. Ask for cigs, money and a jacket…See if Amanda and David are coming to see me if not have Danny bring Amanda. Write down what time I was released from court. Instant coffee. Baby powder.”
“I would think I wasn’t doing to [sic] much wrong but I was so wrong.”
“Insane. Repeat same thing over and over getting same results. Turn life over to: good. Orderly. Direction.”
There were lists of good parenting traits, and tiny, sad confessions: “My son Marcus is real confused. He didn’t even know I was his mother at first.”
There was even a letter she’d written to Marcus and never sent:
“Hi son. There are some things I would like to talk to you about. I am going to be in life more…I am working on this now son, no more putting this off. I am here for you heart body and soul. Things have changed for the better. I am taking care of myself so I can be their [sic] for Amanda, you, and [her new baby girl]. We have a lot to look forward to.”
Her “Recovery Plan” sheet is indented; she was pressing hard. “I am ready to be happy,” she wrote at the bottom. Only 41, she had plenty of time to make up for what she’d lost.
She made it to the end of the 30-day program, which was the best she’d ever done—she usually quit around day 20. Amanda was elated.
But it was almost as if getting clean made her mom worse.
In December, a few months after her mother finished the treatment program, Amanda and her boyfriend were driving home from the Dairy Queen on Hampton. Her cell rang.
She grabbed for it—she’d been worried about her mom since the day before, calling on and off just to hear (and assess) her voice. They were apart for the first time: Evicted after spending all her rent money, Angela had moved to North City, and Amanda had refused to go. She was 18 and, after enduring those years at Cahokia and Dupo, happily enrolled at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School. She didn’t want to leave in her senior year. She had promised her mom she’d earn enough for a security deposit on another apartment.
The caller was her uncle’s wife, which was random—she never called. “Sweetie,” she said, “sit down.”
“I’m in a car,” Amanda said automatically. Fear had already dug the outline of this news, but it dropped hard.
Her boyfriend drove her to North City, and she pushed past the police to see her mom’s body. She crumpled next to the bed where Angela lay. “I wasn’t ready,” she sobbed—still talking to her mom, because what else was she going to do?
That spring, it was hard to find a purpose, because Amanda was so used to taking care of somebody. Keep to a routine. Angela had bought Pepsi, so she bought Pepsi. She exercised. She learned how to avoid dwelling, how to pick up and go to the gym when she felt like crap instead of lying there listening to those thoughts.
When she graduated from VPA, her aunt and uncle came to the ceremony, and so did Jennifer Manor. Amanda found a job, and because nobody had ever taught her how to drive, she moved to an apartment across the street from her workplace. She became a certified massage therapist and graduated with honors from cosmetology school, having not missed a single class. She dated carefully.
“I remember looking grown early, and my aunts assuming that I was fast,” she says, “but I wasn’t. I understood ethics at a young age, because of my mom. I remember thinking, God, this is wrong. How can you just do this, take advantage of people’s emotions? Maybe because mine were so sensitive.”
Head tilted, she considers: “My mom wasn’t a whore so much as a big hustler. She acted like a man, got what she wanted when she wanted it. If you can make these things happen, I’d think, why can’t you make good things happen?”
Impatiently Amanda brushes back her hair, wavy auburn artfully streaked with pink. “I knew she wasn’t capable. But when I got a little older, I thought, Why not? Why can’t we all shut those doors? If people would just sit and think about what’s good. I mean, you’re the right temperature—you’re not too hot or too cold, which, God!—I remember just being so hot. We would jump in the cold shower with our clothes on and sleep wet. If people would focus on what’s good, it would flip that switch. But it’s hard for them to overcome the emotion. It takes rationalizing. Sit there and focus on what’s good, and you will get what’s good.”
“The stats were, I was supposed to be a stripper, a drug addict, a whore,” Amanda says ruefully.
Her mother had a hellish childhood, and it took a toll.
Amanda had a hellish childhood, and
it didn’t.
Why not?
I start reading, calling experts. Deanna Barch, chair of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University, reminds me that schizophrenia isn’t one of those single-gene diseases that run through families like wildfire. The likelihood of a child’s inheriting the entire string of genes involved in schizophrenia is only about 15 percent.
As for the drug use, mental illness and substance abuse are a common, destructive pairing, Barch points out. People try to self-medicate, not realizing that “some of the substances they abuse will actually make the symptoms worse.” Does cocaine? She sighs. “Cocaine is like the devil in a red dress. It has a big effect on the dopamine system, and there’s evidence that dopamine is involved in psychosis and schizophrenia. It will make paranoia worse, but it will also make [people] feel like their cognitive system is better, their memory sharper.” So they crave more, and the effects grow harsher.
How does a kid make sense of that? “Early on, it’s hard for kids even to understand that people have good and bad sides,” says Barch. “It’s particularly hard when the person is supposed to be your caretaker and is loving you at other times. The resilience lies is finding a way to explain that to yourself.” Early on, Amanda created a narrative for herself that explained how a loving—if not quite functional—mother could turn into a stranger consumed by bizarre fears and a fiery rage. “It was probably really helpful that she developed a way to think that the good mother was her mom and the bad person was this other personality,” Barch says.
Many of us, subjected to a parent’s worst side, end up reproducing that behavior ourselves; fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Amanda never once thought she’d turn out like her mother, because she knew she could close the doors. She observed, and she thought about what she saw. She found ways to protect herself, to pull back from the chaos.
Basically, Amanda reacted to trauma with intelligence. “The genes associated with resilience,” Barch says, “include genes associated with higher IQ and better cognitive function.”
Finally, Amanda had her mother’s bubbly, outgoing personality and a stranded kid’s shamelessness in reaching out for help. With strangers, she gave as few details as possible (“You don’t want them to judge you”). People close enough to see everything—her posse of girlfriends, her mom’s best friend, her father figure—bailed her out of crises regularly, and she repaid them with a fierce love.
So is all that enough to make the difference?
Resilience is tough to unpack, says Craig Smith, director of Saint Louis University’s Medical Family Therapy Program. “There’s a spirit, an inner strength, if you will. And they have rescue supports, and they’re outgoing enough to reach out to those supports for help. “A more closed-in child would just pull into themselves and wither away.”
He asks a few questions about Amanda. “I kind of suspect there might have been some strong attachment in her very early years,” he says. “We are starting to understand the importance of that. In those formative years, the attachment allows us, paradoxically, to be more independent. People say, ‘Oh, they’re over-attached’—that’s an anxiety response, the clingy, needy child. Real attachment gives confidence. And I would suspect that there was someone early in her life that she was able to form that with.”
Her mother, I think, whenever the demons were quiet.
I repeat aloud what her friend Samantha used to say: “Even though your mom’s crazy, she loves you. I love the way she stares at you.”
Smith nods. “Kids can take unpredictability,” he says, “if they also know that they are loved.”
Courtesy of Amanda Williamson
Angela and Amanda on the couch when they stayed at the place Amanda calls “the biker house.”
Amanda drives me around in her new-old car, a Martian-green Chevy Spark named Marvin, to see a few of the places she’s lived. We cruise along the state streets and South Grand, across the river to Cahokia and Dupo, back over to Chippewa and Grand, where the strip club was torn down years ago.
Dupo, Amanda says, was the worst. “That was sophomore year. My mom beat up every neighbor that moved into the trailer next to us. One of them’s proud of it. Some people worshiped her. She was charming, beautiful, funny—very much an alpha.”
Yet she was so plagued by fear, she’d make Amanda sit in the corner of the trailer, next to the refrigerator, for most of the day. “She always thought somebody was coming in the house. I couldn’t be by any windows. I couldn’t breathe too loud, or we were going to die. If I didn’t listen to what she said, I was a traitor. And I never wanted to be a traitor to her.
“I sat there for hours. She would sit on the couch, high, moving her tongue [Amanda mimes the contorted
grimaces] and if I moved, she’d scream, ‘You are going to get us f—king killed!’ She’d grab her shotgun and talk as if people could hear her: ‘I got you on my camera. I got you on Angie’s candid camera.’ And I’d sit there thinking, There is nobody out there. I just want to lie down so bad.”
Turning down McBride Avenue, she points to mobile homes she used to visit. “Whoever was willing to let me over for dinner, I was coming over.” She nods toward a neat little brick house. “I’d walk here for help with homework.” Glancing at a trailer on the other side of the street, she says, “My mom told everybody my brother needed surgery and scrounged money for drugs. I went over to that lady’s house, and she said, ‘Is your brother OK?’ and I said, ‘Yeah?’”
Amanda told her the truth. “I can’t believe she’d do that,” the woman said.
“Oh, I can,” Amanda said with a sigh.
The trailer Angela rented is still there, its blue siding faded to gray, weeds miring the wheels. Amanda barely slows the car. “There were holes in the floor,” she says. “In the winter you were freezing. The furniture was anything we found in the trash, just raggedy trash furniture. We got our mattresses from the trash. I know, right? I don’t know how I never got scabies. It smelled like mold and shit, because she’d get afraid to let the dogs outside, and one was an English mastiff. There was a spot where they’d pee, and we’d put this carpet stuff on, so you got a wave of ammonia and potpourri when you walked in.”
Without warning, she rolls down Marvin’s windows and, waving like crazy, yells at the top of her lungs, “Pat-ty!”
“Man-dy!” the woman yells back, a big smile on her face.
“Love you!” Amanda yells, and then drives on.
“Falling Springs Bar,” she says, nodding to her left. “My mom hung out there a lot. She actually wanted me to drop her ashes there.”
She talked about that?
“Yeah. She prepared me for everything. She said if I didn’t get rid of her ashes completely, not keep one single drop, she’d haunt me.”
A woman in a truck honks, and Amanda honks back. “That’s Ruby.” At the end of the street, she says, “That’s Faye’s place. I lived with her for a while.”
“For somebody who moved so often,” I say, “you’ve made a lot of friends.”
She nods. “I tied with everyone. I felt like that was the universe’s way of creating family for me.”
Amanda is 28 now, newly married to a man she describes as “big and soft and sweet and country.” He just got a promotion, so she’s quit her second job. They want children. And someday she wants to live in an apartment complex with everybody she loves—her brother, her sister, her girlfriends—around her.
“If you lack, the universe will balance out,” she says. “The universe, if you let it, will balance everything.”
She gives me a quick nod of assurance, then a wide smile. There’s something Dolly Parton about her: grit and ambition; an easy, self-deprecating humor; a generosity of spirit. When she’s cutting hair, her clients pour out their troubles. “I can break down somebody’s insecurities in five minutes,” she says with a grin.
Much of what she learned so early—how to pay bills, cook ramen noodles, read people—has made being a grownup a lot easier. “I credit my mom for that,” she says. “Her priorities were a little skewed, but…” There were layers to that selfishness: schizophrenia, addiction, and a hustler’s self-preservation.
When I ask Amanda how much of what she feels about her mother is anger or resentment, she says, “None of it. Just love and gratitude.” A second later, she amends that: She is angry for her brother and sister. She was the one Angela fought to keep. They were jettisoned, cargo thrown from a sinking ship. And that wasn’t fair.
They’re with Amanda every other week now. Marcus just graduated from high school. His baby sister’s dad is “a calm, straightforward guy, so simple people don’t know how to read him. He works really hard, and he takes good care of her. I go to pick her up, and he’s making brownies. He’s like a regular Betty Crocker.”
When I tell Amanda she seems remarkably unscathed, she shrugs: “You think you are a hero sometimes. I learned young that I’m not. That takes a lot of weight off your shoulders.”
There’s one more thing she wants me to see. She pulls up her favorite music video, Sia’s “Elastic Heart,” and we huddle over her phone’s tiny screen.
Drained of color, stark and haunting, the video shows a 12-year-old girl with white-blonde hair taunting a bearded man inside a cage, spinning him by the arm, punching him, jumping on his back.
“She’s on his back a lot,” Amanda says, pausing the video. “We’re a burden to them.”
Pressing Play again, she adds, “The cage is the schizophrenia.”
The man (played by Shia LaBeouf) is trapped inside that cage; the girl, lithe and small, moves in and out of the bars. Their relationship shifts by the second: After her kicks and punches, he turns ferocious, then sorrowful and tender. She is skittish, wary, then playful, tugging at his ears, his cheeks.
“She’s trying to readjust his face,” Amanda murmurs.
Next the girl frantically tries to pull him through the iron bars so they can both be free. Instead, he slumps against the cage wall, pale and defeated.
“He’s dying,” Amanda says. “He can’t. And she’s fighting, but she can’t.”
Sia explained the video as “warring self-states”; the young dancer, Maddie Ziegler, told reporters she was playing a werewolf. But for Amanda, the meaning of this video is obvious and incontrovertible: It’s about being the daughter of a parent with schizophrenia.
You won’t see me fall apart
’Cause I’ve got an elastic heart….
I know that I can survive
I’ll walk through fire to save my life.
