By the time Augusta was 14, she was dropping acid, stealing cars, selling drugs and running away for days at a time.
Martha Tod Dudman could only wonder why her bright, beautiful daughter had become an angry stranger.
Books on how to be a parent talked only about “little problems” such as depression, changes in eating patterns and mood swings.
“How about when she is screaming at you and threatening you with a knife, and you are crying and she is crying and it feels like the end of your life?” Dudman recalls. “Where’s the book for that?”
Here it is — Dudman’s own memoir, “Augusta, Gone.”
While it never quite answers the questions of what went wrong — and what finally went right — it’s an honest, wrenching account of every parent’s nightmare.
The Children’s Defense Fund reports that 1,234 kids run away from home each day. And some, no doubt, are like Augusta — pretty, smart and beloved, but miserable all the same.
“It was her despair that upset me most,” Dudman tells The Post. “In the midst of this terrible anger and fury at me, there was this enormous sadness and despair that drove her to suicide attempts. That was the worst.”
Where that despair came from, Dudman (who changed all the names in the book except her own) doesn’t know. As a hard-working single parent, she tried her best, she says, to give Augusta and her younger brother a perfect life in rural Maine, close to their father (Dudman’s ex) and far from the tumult of city life.
It didn’t matter. Beginning at age 11 or so, Augusta rebelled. There were cigarettes and drugs — and lies to cover them up. She would skip school and sneak out at night.
Augusta would lash out so hatefully at her mother, speaking to the teenager was as painful as “sticking your hand in a garbage disposal,” Dudman writes.
Then again, mom knew a little something about teenage rebellion. A self-described “wild child” of the ’60s, she’d been kicked out of the prestigious Madeira School for pretty much the same behavior. Soon after, though, she cleaned up her act and went to college.
But Augusta wasn’t headed for college. The therapist she visited briefly, under duress, told Dudman that Augusta had gone way beyond what anyone would call normal adolescent behavior.
“She is endangering herself,” the therapist said. “She is putting herself at risk for rape. She is putting herself at risk for AIDS, for an OD on drugs, for an arrest, for a car accident.
“You can’t fix this.”
Grasping at straws, Dudman pounced upon a “super-duper, Outward Bound thing for troubled teens” that cost $7,000 for six weeks. Dudman took the money out of her daughter’s college fund. “I thought there wasn’t going to be any college if I didn’t get some help for this child,” she says.
But the wilderness program didn’t change things. The other teens seemed to thrive while Augusta emerged with spider bites all over her face and a scar on her wrist from slicing her own flesh.
Next stop: a boarding school for difficult kids. It was at the other end of the country, in Oregon, and cost $50,000. Dudman finagled loans and a scholarship, believing it was her only chance to keep Augusta safe.
But Augusta wasn’t safe. She ran away — twice. Each time, the family, frantic, dispatched people to find her. At last, Augusta called to say she was in San Francisco — hungry, homeless and ready, at last, to come home.
“I told her there had to be rules,” Dudman says. “‘You have to work or go to school, you can’t take drugs, you have to be home by 9.'”
Amazingly, Augusta agreed. And when she returned — thanks to a program called Runaway Switchboard, which gave her a bus ticket home — she was ready to play by the rules.
What happened?
Augusta — now 18 and living in San Diego — says street life helped turn her around.
“One of the turning points was being homeless,” she tells The Post.
“I looked around and the older homeless people were intelligent and so kind. They’d give me their last penny. And I thought, ‘That could be me.’ They were living that way because they didn’t want to live by the rules.”
These days, Augusta’s drug-free and happy — sharing an apartment with a friend, working, painting — and dreaming of one day opening an art gallery.
Her mother’s book, she concedes, is “pretty accurate.”
“There are some parts in there she didn’t know about,” she says, “but she knew a lot more I thought.”
She says things started to go wrong when she was 11 or 12. Frustrated and bored in Maine, she and her friends smoked cigarettes and popped No-Doz, simply because “it’s something to do — it makes you feel you’re doing something you’re not supposed to.”
Her parents’ divorce, the fact that her mom worked and they lived in a rural area — none of that, she says now, had anything to do with what she did.
“It was all me,” she says. “I was just mad at myself . . . I was a loser, partying all the time. And Mommy was the easiest to be mad at, because she was there.”
If she has any advice for parents, she says, it’s this: “Just remember to love your kids, no matter what, but you can’t let them drag you down and pull you into their depression,” she says.
“My mother kept telling me how great I was and how much she loved me. When someone tells you that, you start believing it.”
When the going gets tough, get help
IF you’re the parent of a troubled teen, “don’t isolate yourself when the going gets rough,” says Emanuel Pariser, co-founder and co-director of the Community School, which Martha Tod Dudman credits with helping her daughter’s recovery.
Pariser says the most successful Outward Bound-like programs are those that cater to all kinds of teens, not just troubled ones, so there’s no stigma in joining.
He suggests you investigate any program by asking for references and checking them personally, and by calling the state department that licenses the program to see if there have been any problems or complaints. Above all, he says, go with your intuition.
Here are some resources for troubled teens and their parents:
*The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services in Manhattan provides skilled clinicians who can make referrals, especially for children under 18 with substance-abuse problems: (212) 582-9100.
*Covenant House runs the Nine Line, (800) 999-9999, which is linked to 30,000 social-service agencies and shelters around the country, and is available 24/7.
*The Runaway Switchboard, a free and confidential service, mediates phone calls, provides bus tickets home and much more. Contact the group at http://www.nrscrisisline.org or (800) 621-4000.
*The Community School, in Camden, Maine, is one of several alternative schools in the country. To find out more, check the National Coalition for Alternative Community schools at The Association for Experiential Education, (303) 440-8844, ext. 10.