BACK FROM THE BRINK

They look so harmonious. Mother and daughter, laughing and chatting in a swank L.A. hotel room, celebrating their success. Augusta, 18, says she’s happy her mom lived to fulfill her dream of writing a book. Martha Tod Dudman, 49, says she’s simply happy her daughter lived.

The irony escapes neither of them: It was the daughter’s self-destructive reign of teenage terror that gave the mother something compelling to write about. And it was the mother’s never-say-die attempts to help her child that enabled Augusta to survive to read the tale.

To their surprise, the perceived isolation they endured, the feeling that they were alone on their turbulent, downhill hurtle, turned out to be untrue. Across the country, parents who read “Augusta, Gone” (Simon & Schuster) are nodding in recognition. Many are writing author Dudman to say they have been there themselves. In some cases, their children did not live to become adults. Even the most involved and educated among them seem not to know why such tragedies happen or even when they begin. That was true of Dudman, too.

One day they were the perfect little family. A divorced mom and two little children, a boy and a girl, one year apart, all snuggled together reading “Mary Poppins” in mommy’s big bed.

They were an unsinkable unit that hiked and biked and had picnics and lived on an island off Maine, one of the most beautiful and (Dudman thought) safest places on Earth. A place where people never locked doors or took keys out of cars at night. A place where everyone knew and looked out for everyone else’s kids. Dudman, divorced since the children were 2 and 3, felt that if she did nothing else almost-perfect in life, these wonderful children would be enough.

When the children were in grade school, Dudman started to work at the radio stations her parents owned. She never thought twice about it, she says. Augusta was sweet and talented, got good grades, played saxophone, loved to draw, did gymnastics and art class after school. She was a wholesome child, who turned 12 and started acting a bit different than before, as all preteens seem to. The mother noticed the changes but didn’t want to overreact.

The book is written from the mother’s point of view: simple, stark words that detail each new shock as the precious child turns into . . . what? It was impossible to know, to handle it, to even discuss it with other adults. Or to figure out when it really started.

Was it when Augusta began going to her room more frequently and closing the door? When she stopped conversing intimately with her mom, as they had done for years? Was it the first time she answered back, or smelled of smoke, or when her grades slipped the first time at school? And what was the cause of all this? The mother writes she hadn’t a clue.

“You don’t know if it’s because [you] work too much or because your daughter’s too smart for her classes or because she has maybe a learning disability you never caught or because her teacher has a learning disability and isn’t smart enough to teach your daughter. Or maybe . . . she is becoming a teenager and this is how they act?”

That was the most likely scenario, the mother thought. Puberty causes all sorts of stresses and strains. So Dudman tried everything to keep her daughter on track. But Augusta’s rebellion escalated.

She started skipping school, lying, avoiding eye contact and changing friends. By 14, Augusta was sneaking out at night, doing and dealing drugs, stealing cars, hitchhiking to Boston, disappearing for days at a time, screaming, shouting, raising a knife to her mother and telling her exactly what she she’d like to do with it. Dudman ended up roaming the streets at night, searching for her child, dragging her home.

By then Dudman was isolated from the parents of other kids with whom she used to have so much in common. Their children’s problems were missed homework, poor hygiene, what to wear to the school dance. Dudman’s daughter’s problems were too embarrassing to discuss.

It was a swift and steep descent into parental hell. She tried to cope, going to the teachers’ conferences, the therapists, increasing her daughter’s activities. Dudman had been no angel herself when she was a teenager at the elite Madeira school in Virginia, where she was once expelled for smoking pot. She’d had some wild times at Antioch College in Ohio in the early ‘70s. So she tried to cut her daughter some slack.

Her daughter didn’t need any. She was on her own binge, and nothing her mother said or did made any difference. Meanwhile, Dudman was working longer days and some weekends, trying to run the three local radio stations owned by her parents, who had suddenly retired and left her in charge. But “I was always accessible. I always knew where the children were, what each moment’s activities were,” she said in an interview the other day. Daughter Augusta nodded in agreement. Of course, by now both realize that the mother knew little of what her daughter was doing.

‘Nothing Worked. . . .She Was on a Mission’

The mother blames herself throughout the book and even now, for doing something wrong, although she’s not sure what. Augusta tells her mother: “It had nothing to do with you. It was me. Life just wasn’t living up to my expectations. It felt like there was nothing. I was bored. So what did I do? Get in trouble. Because that’s exciting. It’s fun.”

In the book, Dudman started to dread the phone calls from the school, from the sitter, from the therapists she sent her daughter to, who could not help. In the interview, she tries to explain once again that she did not just let things go, did not ignore what was happening.

“From the moment I suspected things,” she says, her voice rising stressfully, “I grounded her, I talked to her, I punished her, I yelled at her, I reasoned with her. Nothing worked. I tried to find more activities. It had no effect; she was on a mission.”

Dudman had always liked writing and kept a journal of what was happening, a kind of chronicle she could look back at later and perhaps draw some insight from.

Three years ago, at age 15, her daughter was totally out of control and the household drama was taking its toll on her son. The two siblings were close, and as Augusta disintegrated, her brother became more and more distraught. Luckily, Dudman’s family cared and could afford to write checks to help pay for the therapists and the two expensive wilderness schools to which Augusta was sent.

One was in Idaho, the other in Colorado. Much of the book deals with this different kind of terror, of sending your child someplace that you hope will be safe and helpful--but which you know may be neither. Augusta hated both places. In one of them, a boy who had become her friend committed suicide. She ran away from the second school, hitchhiked to San Francisco, lived on the streets and eventually contacted a teen runaway hotline, which provided her with a bus ticket home.

That was a turning point in their lives. Suddenly, Augusta’s wild ways had disappeared. She appreciated her mother; she wanted to finish high school. Stunned and delighted, her mother found a small, live-in school for troubled teens in Maine, where Augusta worked hard and received a high school diploma in six months.

Dudman’s journal became a book, which took two months to complete. It is a straightforward, factual tale in which her daughter and son’s first names have been changed. She handed the manuscript to a writer friend, who sent it to her agent, who found a publisher. Augusta says she is proud of the book, which has gotten good reviews, and proud of her mother and of herself.

Planning Now for College

Augusta has lived in San Diego for the last year, working as a waitress. She says she plans to go to college. Her mother still lives in Maine. The two linked up for the West Coast part of her mother’s book promotion tour. They have the aura of shipwreck survivors with still-fresh wounds. But the daughter is giddy in her recovery, clearly in full bloom; the mother looks care-worn and still shellshocked.

There are no solutions offered in the mother’s book, and even now, Dudman says, she cannot find any.

But sitting there together in the hotel room, her daughter is willing to answer a reporter’s questions:

You must surely know what happened, and when it began?

“It started at 12,” the girl says. “It started with cigarettes and pills, whatever I could get, often from older sisters or brothers of my friends. I’d sneak a pill or a smoke before gymnastics, and then right after. I went on to other things from there. When we were 12, we used to take cars and go driving around. Did you know that, Mom?”

The mother smiles.

Where did the drugs and pills come from on that pristine, isolated island?

“A lot of the older generation must be bored, too,” Augusta says. “They get the drugs in Boston and bring them in. Some drugs come in on the fishing boats, I think. It’s always there. You can get anything you want at any time.”

Dudman agrees, adding that in the last year, the island has had a “terrible heroin problem” and perhaps a quarter of what would have been Augusta’s public high school class dropped out before graduating.

Would it have helped Augusta if her mom had not worked, if she had been home to oversee the girl’s after-school activities?

Augusta’s not sure. But she is careful not to blame her mother for even a tiny part of her problem: “If she had stayed home, I might have been frustrated ‘cause she was there. And your friends get to be latchkey kids and home alone, and that’s cool and exciting. And if I didn’t get my freedom, I might have been even worse.”

Yes, but what about all the after-school activities her mother arranged for her?

Augusta: “There’s stuff to do, but it’s not very fun. And I didn’t want to do it. Maybe if I had had cool, fun stuff like they have in the city, it might have been different. I used to be a musician, but the drugs overtook the music.”

Dudman says she has berated herself for living in a rural place, although her son has found his way there, going to school and working part time as a lobsterman. Her daughter is a talented artist and musician, she says, and maybe she would have done better in a more sophisticated city. This will come as news to parents in big cities who berate themselves for not living in a more wholesome, more rural environment.

What caused Augusta to change her ways, clean up her act, to appreciate her mother? What would she tell other kids who are on the same self-destructive track?

Hardship Brings Change

Augusta says she changed while she was on San Francisco’s streets, cold and hungry and alone. She finally had the freedom from authority she had always wanted. She had time to think, to freeze and to starve, to see that she did not want to live the way she was living.

“I’d tell other kids: Just take a step back and look at yourself. Is this what you want to be? Is this who you want to be? Do you want to be some loser who spends their whole life getting high with kids half their age, never having a real job, never really falling in love, never getting to go to your high school senior prom? That’s something I was really upset about. It doesn’t seem that important now, but I never did get to go. I’d tell other kids to straighten up, so that when they look back, they can be happy with who they were and what they’ve become. I’d tell them yes, your mother really does love you. No matter what you might think, yes, she does. Take a step back, and don’t be so selfish.”

Dudman smiles proudly. She has a great relationship with her daughter now, she says. She called to tell Augusta she had written the book about their troubles and to ask her daughter’s permission to publish it. If Augusta had said no, she would not have done it. But Augusta said, “You go ahead and do it, Mommy. I’m so proud of you. And I want it told, so maybe it will help others.”

Of course, Augusta also wanted to read it; her mother wouldn’t let her until it was bound.

“I mailed it to her and then called to warn her that it would be pretty tough reading in places. There’s a lot of anger in it, and there are parts that are very sad. I told her, ‘Just remember it gets better. If you get to the end, you will see how much I love you.’

“She called me back after she read it and said she really liked it but said, ‘I kept waiting for the part where you didn’t love me.’ ”

Of course, there was no such part. Despite the mother’s rantings in the book, her acknowledgment that her daughter seemed at times too disturbed to live with anymore, there was never a loss of love.

What Dudman says she would tell other parents with kids like Augusta is this: “Don’t give up on them. Don’t ever give up. Keep trying everything you can think of to do for them, and don’t ever stop.” She’s still not sure what made the difference in Augusta’s life, she says. “When she came home, she was a new girl. I think it was probably a combination of all the things we tried to do for her, and all the things she did for herself.”