Lost Child, page 10
Jessie got to her feet, the dragon puppet still on her hand. It was quite a large puppet, so she had to hold her hand at shoulder height.
‘I’m going to eat the world!’ she said for the dragon, and began to move around the room. There wasn’t much space because of all the furniture, so she climbed up on the sofa and swung the dragon above her head as best she could. ‘I’m going to eat you!’
Jessie was on the opposite side of the table to me at this point, so there was no danger of her attacking me with the dragon, but she made it swoop menacingly in my direction.
‘I’m going to eat my mum and dad! I’m going to eat my sisters! I’m going to eat Mrs Thomas and Joseph and Enir and all the kids. I’m going to eat you. I’m going to eat everyone and then I’m going to eat some fish and chips!’
‘That is one hungry dragon,’ I said.
‘I’m going to eat up Magnus and Eleanor too. And the unicorn. And all the other puppets! And then I’m going to eat the chairs and the table. Eat up this whole room! Nothing will be left! Then I’m going to breathe fire everywhere. Rowwwrrrr!’
Before I realized what was happening, Jessie was up on the table itself. She swung the dragon puppet around and around above her head. ‘I hate my mum and dad!’ she shouted. ‘I hate them so much! I’m going to burn them to pieces, just like my mum did to my toys. Just like she did to me. I’m going to kill her! I’m going to kill my dad! I’m going to set fire to the whole, whole world! That’s what I want to do! Yes! That’s what I want to do!’
Jessie began to dance on the table, swinging the dragon puppet. I was concerned because a manic quality had come into her actions, and I sensed that she was not fully within herself. It would be very easy for her to go spinning off the table.
Rising, I said, ‘Jess? It’s time to come down from there.’
She danced on, twirling around and around, the dragon held above her head. Because of its size, it took both her hands to elevate it, and this kept her spinning in a slightly more contained manner than would have happened if she could have extended her arms.
It was hard to reach her properly because of her movements and I was growing more concerned that she would hurt herself. ‘Jess?’
‘I’m going to burn the world! Rowwwrrrr! I’m the strongest dragon in the world. I’m going to burn everything to a cinder!’
I climbed up onto the table myself and took hold of her around her shoulders. ‘Jess, we need to stop now.’ She continued to spin between my hands.
I scooped her towards me, and we stood a moment, teetering, because she was not yet completely still. A little worried about the stability of the table under both our weights, I let go and slipped quickly back to the floor. Then I grabbed her around the waist and lifted her down. Jessie didn’t resist. In fact, by the time she touched the floor she fell willingly against me, her eyes closed, her expression joyful. She clutched the dragon puppet in against her chest. I held her a moment to ensure she was able to calm down.
Jessie let out a huge sigh. Then she opened her eyes and looked up at me, a smile touching all corners of her face. ‘Wow, that was fun,’ she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘Wow, that’s the most fun I think I ever had.’
Chapter Twelve
Throughout the time Jessie had been playing with the dragon puppet, the video recorder was running. I was very glad for that, because I was anxious for the other staff to give me their opinion of what was going on with Jessie.
Ben, who had asked me to conduct the assessment interview, wasn’t available that same day, but Meleri, Joseph and two other staff members sat down with me later in the afternoon to watch it.
Almost all my career I had used recording devices. In the US, the 1970s had been a time of prosperity in education, and many schools were able to acquire the newest technology. In those days that meant reel-to-reel video recorders and cameras so big and heavy they needed dedicated tripods to support them. Unfortunately, while the districts bought us all this lovely equipment, very little training was given. As a consequence, in way too many schools the equipment ended up collecting dust in AV cupboards for the simple reason that most members of staff had no idea how to operate the items. My geeky love of technology finally paid off, because after a bit of playing around I figured out how things went together and tried the video recorder out in my classroom. I loved it! Up to that point, I hadn’t realized how much I was missing in the classroom when my focus was solely on the kids, and found it inordinately helpful to review certain situations again later.
I’d felt guilty for hogging this new resource, but it seemed a shame to let it go unused, and that was what was happening. So I offered to ‘store’ the video equipment in my special needs classroom until someone else wanted it. My headmaster was more than happy about this, as the audio-visual closet was small and video equipment in those days was bulky. Thus started my long career of recording in the classroom, which I found enormously helpful. I re-experienced this on this occasion, watching the video of Jessie, because it brought home once again just how much I missed while caught up in the situation.
What was unmistakable in the video was how openly manipulative Jessie was. Everything she said, everything she did, was aimed at keeping me on the back foot, and for the most part she succeeded. I grew embarrassed as the other staff began pointing out her behaviour. Their comments implied naivety on my part, that however well intentioned I was in my efforts, I did not have a good grasp of the realities of working with a child with reactive attachment disorder. No one was the least bit nasty about it, but it stung, because I didn’t think it was true. I had successfully resisted her desire to play with the puppets at the beginning of the session, and while I had not been successful at getting her to respond appropriately to the interview questions, neither had anyone else in other settings. It was possible her personality was so disorganized that this was the best we were going to get for the time being, and it wasn’t my fault or anyone else’s that we weren’t getting anything more. I wasn’t convinced my approach was wrong.
Joseph described my allowing Jessie to play with the dragon puppet instead of doing the assessment as ‘going soft and fuzzy’, but to me it felt like an appropriate shift of emphasis as the situation evolved. We didn’t know what had happened to Jessie in her past, but she had many indicators of serious abuse or neglect. To move forward, we needed more insight into what was going on for her. I did not see how we could achieve this without allowing her a degree of space and freedom within the sessions so that she could communicate some of this to us. Yes, she was manipulative and controlling, and, yes, there were inevitably going to be times when she completely threw a session, but that didn’t mean the time was wasted. We still had a learning opportunity. And that’s what we needed most – the chance to learn more about how and why these dysfunctional coping behaviours had developed.
When I said that, Joseph replied, ‘That’s how thinking used to be, back in the day. That as professionals we needed to understand the origins of things in order to change them. You know, Freud and everything. But we’re not there any more. I wish that we were. It was a gentler time. But these days, change happens because we engineer for change. And that’s how we have to do it, because we don’t have the resources to do anything more, much as I wish we did.’
I sat, feeling officially old.
Then it got worse. As we watched the second half of the tape, where Jessie was playing with the dragon puppet, Joseph said, ‘Stop it there a moment, please.’ It was the section of the tape where Jessie was talking about her mother putting her toys out on the front lawn, pouring petrol over them and setting fire to them.
The tape froze Jessie mid-motion, the dragon held high, her head back, her red hair flying. Her mouth was open, her expression absorbed.
‘That isn’t true,’ Joseph said. ‘She’s lying there.’
‘About her toys being burned?’ I asked.
‘No. She’s right about that, but she’s lying about her mother doing it. Toys were put in a pile in the garden and petrol poured over them and set alight, but it was Jessie herself who did it. That was the first arson event.’
I didn’t reply.
Joseph appeared to take my silence as reproach, which it wasn’t meant to be. I was simply attempting to take this information in. However, he turned to Meleri for support. ‘Isn’t that how it was?’
Meleri nodded. ‘Yes, when Jessie was six. And they weren’t her toys. They were her sister Gemma’s toys. You know, the kind of cuddly toys teenagers keep on their bed. Jessie had had an argument with her, so she put the toys out into the garden and took petrol for the lawnmower from the can in the garage. She poured it over the toys and set fire to them.’
‘Ah, okay,’ I said, because there wasn’t much else to say.
‘It’s interesting that she said her mother did it,’ Meleri added. ‘From what we know of her mother, she’s extremely passive around Jessie. She’s had a hard struggle with depression, and apparently went through periods where she didn’t get out of bed at all, leaving Jessie to her own devices. It’s interesting that Jessie interprets that relationship so destructively.’
I went home feeling depressed myself. While we had differences between us, all of us were trying our hardest with very thin resources. Our area, geographically large and mostly rural, was one of the most disadvantaged parts of the country. There were too many children in care, too few foster homes, too far apart, and too little in the way of support services. Meleri was tired and overworked in the way social workers everywhere are. Ben was the only child psychologist employed by the local authority and he had almost 2,000 children on his rota. Among the local population, very few who needed treatment could afford private therapy or specially skilled doctors. A number of charities, both large and small, did what they could to take up the slack, but it wasn’t enough. Joseph was right. You had to focus on change. Understanding was a luxury.
These kinds of thoughts always brought me back to comparing the culture I’d ended up in with the culture I’d left. I went back to the US every summer because my family were still all in Montana, where I’d grown up. This annual trip had allowed me to stay in touch with many of my old teaching friends. We always went out together and ‘talked shop’, and if the time was right, I visited their classrooms.
My own memories of working in the US were rosy. Clean, new buildings, appointments with professionals that you got simply by phoning up and making them, doctors who saw you quickly and had a battery of tests at their disposal, which produced precise labels for what was wrong and, often as not, medications to make it better. Even as I was thinking these things, however, I knew they were false memories. My mind had simply edited out the bad bits. The truth was, I’d only worked in one shiny, new school. The others had all been ageing brick behemoths from the first half of the twentieth century, grand in their day, disintegrating in mine and, occasionally, completely decommissioned except for the need to put the special education programmes somewhere. We had often lived hand-to-mouth in the schools I’d worked in, waiting for the annual property tax assessment, called the mill levy, which funded our programmes, to know whether we’d still be there or not. As someone who had the fatal mix of being highly educated but working with only small numbers of children, my programmes were often among the first cut if funding wasn’t secured or if there was an administration change in Washington, and I’d find myself job hunting. In a similar vein, while my former colleagues all had access to quick appointments with an array of specialists, they were also paying a fifth of their income in insurance. Many of the families I’d worked with in the US couldn’t afford that, and thus they had no insurance at all and, consequently, no access to services. One of my former students told of having his pregnant wife turned away at the hospital door because they had no means to pay for treatment. And those tests and labels, while comforting, had led to an explosion of drugged children. Rosy as the past seemed, I realized it was not so much a case of one culture being better than another but more a matter of picking which set of bad circumstances you felt you could best cope with.
The videotape viewing had upset me more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. I felt annoyed at being duped by a nine-year-old and humiliated at having had it pointed out in a group of fellow professionals. I felt others on the team saw my work as low status because I was a volunteer, and thus not as valid as that of the paid staff. And I felt they saw my approach as ‘soft and fluffy’ when I believed myself pragmatic and evidence-based. As a consequence, I went into the next session with Jessie intent on taking control.
Jessie arrived in a cheerful mood. She had just had her hair cut. It wasn’t a very different style to what she’d been wearing all along, but she liked the way it moved when she shook her head, so upon entering the room she came around to my side of the table for me to admire it.
Then she said, ‘I want to show Magnus and Eleanor,’ and she reached down to open the black bin bag beside my chair.
I didn’t say anything. I thought I would let her get started however she wanted, and then I’d address the whole control issue head on.
Jessie took the puppets out one by one and laid them on the table. She was standing beside me, so the bears, Magnus and Eleanor, were laid out directly in front of me. Then came Puppy. She snuggled Puppy close, kissed the puppet’s head and set him up in the middle of the table to oversee things. Then came the unicorn, the monster, the dragon she had played with the previous session, the toucan, the lamb, the hare and the purple ostrich.
‘There. That’s all of them.’ She regarded them a long moment, then she leaned over the table and shook her head. ‘See, you lot? I got my hair cut. See?’
I continued not to speak, curious how long it would take her to notice.
Jessie straightened up. ‘They are just puppets, you know. They can’t actually see anything. They don’t know I got my hair cut.’
She picked up one of the bear puppets. It wasn’t possible to tell which was Magnus and which was Eleanor until they were brought to life, because the puppets looked more or less identical. Jessie put her hand into it and turned it to face her. She moved the mouth up and down but didn’t say anything. Then she looked over the top of the bear’s head to meet my eyes.
‘What’s wrong with you today?’ she asked.
‘I need to talk to you about something.’
‘I could tell that. I could tell you were huffed, because you didn’t say anything nice about my hair.’
‘I’m not angry, but we do have some serious talking to do.’
‘I want to play with the puppets first.’ She snapped the bear’s mouth together two or three more times and then turned it towards me. ‘Magnus says, “You’ve got a huffy look on your face and it makes you not pretty. Pretty faces smile.” Don’t they, Magnus? Pretty faces make us want to talk to them.’
‘I need to talk to you,’ I said, ‘and you have a choice of three things. You may keep Magnus on your hand while we talk. You may put Magnus away and use the paper and pens while we talk. Or we can just talk. Those are the choices.’
Jessie regarded me but did not move. Leaning across the table, I began to put the other puppets back into the black bin bag.
This alarmed Jessie. With the bear puppet still on her hand, she reached out for Puppy. ‘No!’
‘Today we’re not playing with puppets. You may keep Magnus, if you wish, but the rest will be put away.’
‘No! Don’t put Puppy away! Let him stay out.’
‘Today we’re not playing with puppets.’
‘No!’
‘I hear you. You would like to have the puppets out, but today we are not playing with puppets.’
‘Just Puppy. Just leave Puppy out. Please?’
‘Today we are not playing with puppets. You may keep Magnus, if you want, but the rest are going to be put away.’
‘I’ll trade Magnus for Puppy. Okay? You can have Magnus. I’ll put him away, but let me have Puppy instead.’
‘Today we’re not playing with puppets.’
‘Please? Just this one thing? Please? Let me have Puppy instead of Magnus. Then I’ll do anything you say. You’ll see. Please? Please?’
I didn’t respond.
‘But Puppy gets so lonely. So lonely. And scared. He’s scared in the black bag. He got shut away when he was little. Shut in the cupboard, and it was so dark, and now he’s scared. So scared. He needs a cuddle.’
This was such a typical exchange with Jessie, this ever-present bargaining to bring things back around to where she wanted them. It was hard to ignore because she was so good at sussing out what would play upon my sympathies. Had she been an ordinary child, this small request would have been reasonable, kind, even. With Jessie, however, it was sadly all part of the game.
Calmly, I said no again. ‘You may play with Puppy another time. Today he goes with the other puppets. You may choose to keep Magnus with you or put him in the bag too, but the rest of the puppets need to be put away.’ I held the bag open.
‘No. You can’t have him. You can’t have Puppy.’ Jessie dived under the table, pulling the dog puppet from the bag.
I remained seated and did not look under the table to where she was hidden.
‘I’m going to keep Puppy. I’m going to stay under here and keep Puppy safe.’
I didn’t respond.
‘No!’ she shouted.
Moments passed. I sat quietly, not looking under the table, not speaking.
‘No! No, no, no! I won’t do it! NO!’
Angrily Jessie rattled the chairs. She kicked out the one next to mine. There wasn’t enough room for it to fall over, so she only managed to knock it back against the sofa. She kicked out two on the opposite side. She screamed.
I didn’t respond.
This carried on for the better part of ten minutes, Jessie howling fiercely from under the table, kicking the chairs, bumping the table. Despite the noise she was making, I could tell she wasn’t crying. This was anger and frustration.
