Bad Animals, page 4
Cynthia is a therapist, an art therapist to be exact, and she’s passionate about what she does. She works with children, as young as three and as old as eighteen, who end up in Montreal’s English-speaking youth protection system. She’s a problem-solver. In addition to helping clients work through their challenges by making art—drawings, paintings, sculptures—she writes out personalized treatment plans. One of her methods is to assist her clients in externalizing what is often an internal issue. For example, a child is encouraged to fight her “Temper Monster” rather than her siblings.
And, yes, Cynthia sometimes takes her work home with her, where there is no shortage of problems to be externalized. This also explains why I sometimes find myself being analyzed more or less without my consent. Evidently, step one in my personalized treatment plan has me drawing a picture of a creature, a bear or gorilla, something hairy and chunky at any rate. Step two: I give this creature a name that sums up his personality. Let’s call him the “Grumpy Monster,” for example. “Never mind that it’s too on the nose,” Cynthia reminds me. “This isn’t a literary exercise.” Step three: I vanquish this creature in simple ways. No big showdowns. For instance, I could work on waking up in the morning in a good mood instead of having that automatically hopeless look on my face at the sound of Jonah babbling in his room about yaks and zebras. I could also, Cynthia suggests, ask her how she is feeling instead of asking her, as I invariably do, what’s wrong? “You see the difference, don’t you?” Cynthia says and then answers on my behalf. “One question expresses genuine concern for how I am feeling; the other expresses your concern about how I might make you feel. So why not just say, ‘How are you this morning, my dearest darling?’” There are, evidently, many ways to slay a Grumpy Monster.
At our wedding reception, a friend joked about the upside of being married to a therapist. “Think of how much money you’ll save on shrinks,” he said. He was kidding, but he had a point. My treatment plan notwithstanding, when you first find yourself in a succession of waiting rooms, waiting for child psychiatrists and psychologists, occupational therapists and speech pathologists, the countless, escalating array of experts you never expected to consult, not for your child, when you are hearing opinions you never expected to hear, not about your child, it helps to have someone around to decipher what’s being said. You need someone to cut through the bullshit because you can bet there will be an awful lot of it.
After my parents died I found a second-hand copy of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying in a university bookstore. This was the late 1970s and I didn’t have to read the decade-old groundbreaking manifesto on loss to know what it said. Kübler-Ross and her bestselling five-stage theory were already famous by then. Like most of her readers who had experienced the death of a loved one, I applied her ideas retroactively. Like most readers, I appreciated that On Death and Dying came with a social science gravitas that trumped the clichés and platitudes I heard at my parents’ respective shivas from a mix of well-meaning but obtuse relatives and friends. Life goes on. That seemed to be the best advice anyone had to offer. Not Kübler-Ross: she offered stages and who doesn’t want stages? Five seemed like a reasonable number. Not too few, three, say, so you could dismiss the whole thing as simplistic feel-good advice. Not too many so you couldn’t, with a little effort, memorize them. And once you did, you could check them off. Denial, you bet. Anger, sure: I’m pissed, it’s true. Guilt, okay fine, not a problem, got that. Bargaining—do it all the time. Acceptance—that’s done, more or less. Check and mate.
“People love the stages,” Kübler-Ross acknowledged later, and, it’s true, she was on to something: I’d felt all those things she said I should after my mother died and then felt them again after my father died. I rushed through those stages like a geeky teenager mastering a video game. I wasn’t going to stop until I, what, won? Reached Level 5? I was good at it, too, so good I couldn’t help feeling a little concerned about the ease and efficiency with which I’d advanced from anger to acceptance.
Kübler-Ross’s stages would also become an all-purpose explanation for everything from a bad break-up to the loss of a pet. Cynthia and I heard it invoked a few years ago while sitting through yet another seminar aimed at the families of children with autism. We were a growing and suddenly sought-after demographic. We spent our weekends at conferences, lectures, potlucks, and get-togethers in the first year or two after Jonah’s diagnosis. One psychologist at a conference told her small audience of mostly mothers that it was okay to mourn when you first learned your child had autism. This was a kind of loss, after all, a loss of expectations, of hope. The five stages appeared as part of her PowerPoint presentation, the tiny pink beam from her laser wand stopping briefly at each stage.
“Kübler-Ross was wrong, you know,” I told Cynthia at home later, after I’d done some Googling. “I saw it on Wikipedia or somewhere. Anyway she admitted her doubts in a book she wrote when she was dying. It turns out her evidence was strictly anecdotal. You shrinks, I’m telling you.”
“Kübler-Ross was a brilliant therapist,” Cynthia said. “Obviously, her theory doesn’t make sense in your case, sweetheart, but that doesn’t mean she was wrong. It just means you’ve gotten stuck in a lower stage.”
“Like a monkey?”
“What I mean is you’ve never accepted your mother’s death, not really. You always say you got over it too fast, but it was thirty years ago and, ask yourself, are you over it yet? No. You’re angry, sad, guilty. There’s a part of you that doesn’t believe it happened. Some part of you is still way back at those first stages—denial and anger.”
“I wasn’t asking to be analyzed.”
“Of course, you were.”
Grief can’t be arranged in stages: at least not when it comes to autism. What is intended to be most comforting about Kübler-Ross’s blueprint for overcoming loss—the predictability, the linearity, the end in sight—is not available to the parent of a child with autism. Yes, you experience anger and denial and bargaining and the rest of it, even acceptance, I suppose, but you experience it daily and in no particular order. With autism, forget stages, think revolving door: everything comes and goes. Think rollercoaster: you’re up, you’re down. In On Grief and Grieving, Kübler-Ross’s long-anticipated 2004 sequel to On Death and Dying, she writes: “I now know that the purpose of my life is more than these stages. I have been married, had kids, then grand-kids, written books, and traveled. I have loved and lost, and I am so much more than five stages. And so are you.”
JONAH WAS BORN nine days late. As Cynthia’s due date came and went, there was time to think about the usual things, the important things—how our lives were going to change, what kind of parents we were going to be. But we were fixated, instead, on what Jonah was going to look like. We lay in bed that last week staring up at the light fixture on the ceiling above us. It was round and translucent and had a rather large, lumpy protuberance in the middle. With the room in shadow, it resembled an extremely goofy-looking person. We called it Ziggy—a nickname for zygote.
We had reason to worry. Just the thought of my nose and my wife’s nose amalgamated in the middle of our poor, unsuspecting baby’s face was enough to give us recurring and matching nightmares. There was also my height or lack of it to consider; and Cynthia’s bad eyesight, her questionable taste in sweaters. We’d lie in bed, spinning out tales about how our beloved four-eyed pipsqueak would somehow manage to overcome his parents’ nebbishy genes. How he would somehow not suffer through childhood and adolescence the way we had. How he’d make do with my self-deprecating sense of humour and Cynthia’s implacable backbone. But all our musings ended the same way: with little Ziggy unable to find a date for the junior prom, with him being picked last for basketball. We couldn’t have been more of a cliché.
A while back, Cynthia and I had a single session with a family therapist, a couples counsellor really—”Call me Jeff,” he said, shaking my hand—who told us that the key to happiness was managing expectations. The problem was simple, according to Jeff: the more distance you allow between what you want and what you can reasonably expect, the unhappier you are bound to be. German philosophers had a word for this: Weltschmerz. Jeff was a nice fellow, about my age, the kind of guy I might have gone to school with or played softball with. But I was looking for a breakthrough—In one session, sweetheart?—not the kind of information I’d already read in a few thousand novels and poems, from Emily Dickinson to Philip Roth. Life is disappointment; expect less. That’s it. “Can’t they tell you something you don’t know?” I asked Cynthia in the car on the way home.
The thing is, before Jonah was born, we’d done exactly what Jeff was suggesting; we’d managed expectations. In fact, we were experts; we were Weltschmerz-free. Or so we thought as we braced ourselves for an extraordinarily funny-looking kid. Then Jonah was born and he was beautiful. I know every parent feels this way and that every parent can’t, objectively speaking, be right. There have to be mousy, unpleasant, irritating kids. Where do mousy, unpleasant, irritating adults come from? But we were being objective. (What I’d realize later is that physical attractiveness is made note of in most of the autism memoirs I’ve read. It is, Clara Clairborne Park writes in The Siege, “one of the inexplicable items” in the disorder, a way, she speculates, of making a family’s burden lighter.) For weeks, maybe months after Jonah was born, Cynthia and I would look him up and down, then assess each other, and shake our heads. It wasn’t just that he didn’t look anything like either of us, he didn’t look anything like the other newborn infants he shared the hospital nursery with, most of whom resembled aliens. Jonah had a full round face and an undented head. He was bigger than the other babies. He cried less. He seemed, when it came to baby behaviour, self-possessed, confident. I dubbed him the Mayor of Babytown.
The day Cynthia went into the hospital to have labour induced, I read a newspaper story about the movie-star couple Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke and how they were about to have a baby, too. Our private joke, after Jonah was born, was that the infants, theirs and ours, had been switched at birth and that somewhere, in Hollywood or Martha’s Vineyard, our real kid had a nanny and a pony and a swimming pool and was living a privileged, decadent life. He was destined for a career as a child actor, a series of rehabs, and a lifelong flirtation with Scientology. John Travolta would be his godfather. Quentin Tarantino his crazy uncle. We imagined, too, that Uma and Ethan loved him dearly even though they couldn’t figure out how they, of all couples, had ended up with such a dweeb.
Jonah went from being a beautiful baby to an irresistible toddler to a handsome little boy. Put him on a motorcycle, in a leather jacket, I said the day he turned one, and there you have it: a young Steve McQueen—all right, extremely young. As he got older he only got better looking. It was almost embarrassing. There was no way to account for his exquisite cheekbones, his strong chin, his light brown hair, and his perfectly unobtrusive nose. The pale blue eyes were hardest to explain. So much so, Cynthia kept threatening to punch the next person who made some dumb comment about where exactly he’d gotten “those baby-blues” from.
In a few months, on Christmas Eve, Jonah will turn eleven. He is not tall for his age, though he will probably end up taller than both his parents. Cynthia and I still find ourselves staring at him and wondering how he ended up looking like he does. We’re not the only ones. Jonah has an affinity for his own reflection, so much so we had to cover the two full-length sliding mirrors in our hall with contact paper and then put up a more discreetly located mirror in his bedroom. The Consultant advised us to designate it “the silly mirror,” and Cynthia made a sign saying as much. This was where he would go, where he still goes sometimes, to make funny faces at himself or say funny words. It was initially intended to be an acceptable outlet, a substitute for the inappropriate bouts of face-making and staring at himself he was prone to—in department stores or the homes of relatives and friends. This has worked up to a point. Now, I’ll catch him posing in the mirror, putting his hands in his pockets, cocking his eyebrow, and shooting himself a sweet, kooky grin. Show time, I think he’s thinking. He can’t seem to take his eyes off himself and won’t until I push him on to the next thing. “Jonesy,” I’ll have to say, “enough cuteness.” But why? In that instant, as he faces the mirror, I watch him and wonder what’s going on in his head. I wonder how he can look at himself for so long and so uncritically. It’s a strange gift, but a gift nevertheless. To not see a gap between who you are and who you hoped to be. Facing “the silly mirror,” my son still looks extraordinarily self-possessed. As if he hasn’t a worry in the world. Meanwhile, Cynthia and I cling to our shallowness, hoping Jonah will remain attractive, hoping too that his attractiveness will be his ace in the hole, one thing he will never have to worry about. “The world is unfair,” Park writes in The Siege “and in a pretty child the world will overlook a great deal.”
JONAH TOLD HIS FIRST joke soon after he was born. Jokes are narratives in a nutshell, little bits of truth. They are uncomplicated. But even the dumbest ones, when they work, maintain their own internal logic. They are the purest form of storytelling: premise and punchline. You get it or you don’t.
Jonah was lying on his back on his changing table when he sneezed. It shook his tiny body and left him startled by this new possibility. I looked down at him and immediately cracked up. After a few moments, I was laughing hard enough to attract Cynthia’s attention.
“What is it?” she called from the other room.
“Come, quick,” I said. We were new, first-time parents. It wasn’t unusual for the other person to drop whatever they were doing—falling asleep, finishing a book, taking a shower, sitting on the toilet—and come running, invariably with a video camera.
“What?” Cynthia said, out of breath. “Is something wrong?”
“There. Look there,” I said, pointing to a tiny trace of mucus on Jonah’s forehead.
“That’s disgusting,” Cynthia said, reaching for a tissue.
“Wait, you’re missing the point. Think about it: it came out of his nose and virtually did a one-eighty. It’s a miracle of aerodynamics, at the very least. Better yet, it’s a stunt, a prank.”
“It’s a booger,” she said, wiping Jonah’s forehead and leaving the room, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. In our relatively short time together, I was responsible for her having learned to do both simultaneously.
“You don’t get it. It’s his first sight gag. He’s a natural. And,” I said, leaning down to whisper the first rule of comedy in my son’s ear, “it’s funny, Jonesy, because it’s true.”
THREE
Bad Day
Has it made you a better father?
The question is put to me by a local CBC radio producer and it catches me off-guard, though I know it’s something I should have considered by now. This is a pre-interview. It’s the job of the young woman on the phone to help me figure out what I might say in advance of my live interview the following morning. I’ve been booked on this program because I’ve written a short personal essay about Jonah and me and autism. That would be the “it” she’s referring to. In a way, I’ve been anticipating answering this question, aloud, in public, for a while. I’ve certainly had plenty of time to think about it and figure out what it presupposes. Now, here’s my chance.
“Sure,” I tell the friendly stranger on the other end of the phone, “it can be tough. But an experience like this teaches you what you’re capable of. I’ve heard people, other parents, I mean, say that they’re grateful for what they’ve come to see as an opportunity. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but life gives you lemons and, well, you know.”
Evidently, the proof of how well I’ve adjusted to this out-of-the-blue circumstance is in the fact that I have written about Jonah in the first place. No need to mention that it has taken me years or that it’s only twelve hundred words. What matters is you’ve done it, sweetheart. You’ve told part of our story anyway. After the essay first appeared in a local magazine, I also received several supportive emails from acquaintances as well as a few phone calls from other parents of kids with autism. This essay, its hard-earned existence, is an indication of how someone like me, like any one of us, copes and is able to transform private trouble into a kind of public betterment. There is the possibility, because of it, for increased awareness, attention, and empathy. This essay, which won a minor prize and will, as a result, be broadcast on the radio, is a demonstration of my resilience. Lemons = lemonade.
I answer all the producer’s questions quickly, easily. How did we find out about Jonah? His daycare complained he wasn’t showing sufficient interest in gluing. How did we react? We thought they were kidding. My wife and I joked about it. Can’t glue? What did we do wrong? How will he ever survive in a world so dependent on a human being’s ability to glue?
I also jump at the chance to talk in the pre-interview about the book I am supposedly working on, the book which this essay is supposedly excerpted from. Solace: A Father’s Chronicle of Coping, that’s the title, I volunteer. “Why Solace? Good question. I guess because I feel as if the almost seven years since his diagnosis have been a kind of journey, you know, out of despair and towards acceptance. Autism is tragically misunderstood. Most people don’t know what it is exactly or the toll it takes on families. That’s one thing I hope I can help correct—here but also in the book eventually. How much have I written? Of the book you mean? Well ...”
