Earlier this week, I received an e-mail from a woman named Maria, who was a boarder about four years before I was. (To protect her privacy, I am not including her last name. In her note, she gave me permission to reprint it.) Since I started this blog, I have been searching online for women who had boarded at this school and contacted her through a social media site.

As with any person who’s endured trauma and abandonment as a kid, I wanted to hear others’ stories, less out of a need for confirmation, more out of a need to connect with others and to give our experience a voice. I had buried those years for so long. I write for a living, and finally feel driven to tell this story.

As I read her e-mail, I had such a strong visceral reaction. I felt shaky and thought I would get sick. Her words brought back the terror and pain. For the rest of the day, I grieved for her as a little girl, the other little girls and, of course, myself. Her e-mail felt that powerful and so familiar, even the part about Ed Sullivan and the collie:

Another Voice @ Girls Sent Away