A Shining Affliction Read online

  5

  It is evening, my work with the children over for the day. I sit at my desk in a little circle of light, painting and listening to music far into the night, unable to sleep. I begin to paint a flaming bird, red against blue, like Ben’s bird. I paint over it in black, swiftly, as he did. This same bird has dealt me some blow, a blow to my right temple, surprisingly hard, and left me stunned so that I can’t meet myself, can’t or won’t make the necessary connections between Ben’s bird and mine. Red against blue, my mind blackens it out. A girl is dragged by her father across a parking lot to see a doctor—my mind blackens it out.

  In the street, beyond the open shutters, the tall hedge hums in the dark. The air grows chilly. Ben is out there, sleeping too, somewhere in this city. A new silence stings just under my skin. I don’t know everything I need to know. Above the hedge, a movement. I go to the window and look out on the silent houses. A little black bird is weeping, weeping and flying frantically over the street. While I grow smaller and smaller, it flies farther and farther away. The little black bird goes on weeping as it wings out over the park and the city, as if a fire burns in its eyes and it has to weep to go on seeing.

  6

  Ben comes into the playroom the next day dragging a light tan jacket behind him. “Let’s play outside today,” he suggests, and closes the door. I have no objection. Ben looks around the room and picks up two red batakas, big foam bats with rubber handles. His explanation is straightforward if obscure: “We need these.” He hands them to me.

  Outside, the trees hold the sound of a thousand seashells, and their leaves flash like sunlight on new coins, golden and green. Ben runs ahead of me into the empty play yard and scoots under the slide.

  “We are going camping and I’m the boss,” he announces.

  “Oh. You want to be able to boss me around?”

  And he does, with the injunctions and demands children face daily: “Bring me some wood. No, that’s not big enough.” “Now it’s time to eat. Eat all of it, I said.” “Now you go to bed, even if you don’t want to.”

  As I comply, Ben grows interested in other things. “Where did all these acorns come from?” he asks, picking them up by the handful. “I know that squirrel. He gave them to me.” “He did?” I inquire, leaning on one elbow in the grass. Ben suddenly stands up and does a little dance of excitement. “I know. Let’s play bear cub.”

  Puzzled, I simply request, “Show me how to play it.”

  Ben drops to the ground, and in my mind’s eye I see him sprout soft brown fur and bear ears.

  “I am the baby bear,” he tells me. “The mama bear got shot and killed. I got shot, too, and I’m bleeding. I’m lost in a big, big forest and no one can find me.”

  “And what is my part?” I ask.

  But he has already left me. Scampering a few feet across the lawn, he scurries between two large clumps of bushes and is hidden from view. I can hear him whimpering. At first I think we are playing a game. I walk around the bushes, thinking aloud:

  “The forest is big and dark. What are those noises? It sounds like someone crying.”

  I lean down and push the bushes aside, entering a small enclosure on my hands and knees. Ben is lying on his stomach, still whimpering. As I bend and pick him up, I see that his upper lip is red and his cheeks wet. We are not playing a game at all.

  I take him in my arms, hold his shuddering little body close against my shirt. “You are hurt and bleeding, bear, and I am going to fix it,” I tell him. I lift him out of the bushes and carry him around a tree. We go around several times, his small body tense. He continues to whimper. Then I lay him down on the grass and, taking an invisible needle, begin to sew the visible wound over his heart.

  “I am stitching up your gunshot wound so it can stop bleeding, bear,” I whisper. Ben looks as if he is in a trance, his eyes unmoving, glazed—but his chin quivers, as if he might begin to cry again.

  “Don’t leave me,” he whispers back.

  “No, I’m not going anywhere. The mama bear got shot, but I am here to stay.”

  He lies perfectly still, then gets up and picks up the two soft batakas by the sliding board. He comes back and lies facedown in the grass with the batakas on either side of his head. He is perfectly still a few feet in front of me in the grass. I wait, not knowing what to say.

  He stirs slightly. I sit nearer to him and call his name softly, “Ben.” Slowly, he sits up, looking dazed.

  “Go hunting and bring us some food. I’m hungry,” he says. I gather three sticks from the bushes, our “fish,” I tell him, and build a “fire” out of dried grasses and cook the fish for him. Ben watches me intently. He eats the first two fish, then hesitantly offers me the third. He sits and watches me as I eat it.

  “It is nearly time to go back, bear,” I tell him, glancing at my watch for the first time. It is, in fact, a bit over time.

  “We can play bear cub again?” he asks.

  “As often as you want,” I answer.

  Ben takes my hand and we walk back across the field toward the playground and the classroom building. The high-pitched shouts of children coming out of the building for lunch move toward us, but Ben and I walk along in silence, and their voices bounce back from our silence.

  Somewhere, a little black bird flies over the city, weeping.

  Ben does not come back to play bear cub with me for a long time. He refuses to see me at all for three weeks. In his play, he has reenacted his early abandonment, allowed me to play a part in this powerful scene, and invited me into the core of a drama he desperately sought to evade.

  Ben makes himself into a baby bear who lost his mother and is mortally wounded, but not dead. But he doesn’t simply play in my presence; he invites me into an impromptu and enigmatic drama. While we are playing, this particular drama fills the universe. We play together as the mind plays with dreams—uncovering fragments of knowledge, making them over symbolically, making memory as real as can be borne.

  Ben slips into the world of make-believe as many young children do, so graciously and completely that he does not even bother to tell me my part—or perhaps he wants me to figure it out for myself. How he moves into fantasy play becomes a window into what he has suffered. How I enter his play reveals what I have taken in of his suffering. I see him sprout bear ears and soft brown fur as he crouches in the grass. But it is not until I look for him and find him, with real tears on his cheeks, that I know this is real. And because the world of make-believe has become real, all sorts of further transformations are possible for us. Actions become abbreviated and ritualized, and we understand them. My carrying Ben around the tree is a symbolic journey out of the forest. Ben accepts my invisible needle and mime of sewing the wound over his heart. As I transform the play that Ben begins, he in turn is affected by what I do, because my actions and words are truthful responses within the drama we are playing.

  But this drama is so distressingly real that Ben backs off from continuing to see me, as if sizing up his risks. I say “as if” because I do not really know why Ben refused to see me for three weeks. The boundaries between pretend and real have been completely blurred for him. He appears to be in a trance during his intense absorption with his feelings. I sense that he is frightened and might need to retreat.

  7

  When I come to get him in his classroom for the next session, Ben gives me a wary glance.

  “No, I don’t want to come,” he says. I kneel down by his desk to talk this over. He slides out of his desk and backs away, saying, “I don’t want to come.” When he sees that I am not going to come any closer, he stands and watches me.

  “Ben, you don’t have to come,” I tell him gently, as if speaking to a frightened animal. “You are afraid right now, and you don’t have to come with me.”

  His pupils are dilated; he never takes his eyes from my face.

  “I’m still going to keep your time for you, and ask when you want to come back to see me, OK?”

  He nods
, a slight movement. He returns to his desk only when I move into the doorway.

  During the following weeks Ben watches me warily on the playground or in the cafeteria. Walking with another child, I feel his gaze follow me. But he does not respond to my questions about coming to see me, nor does he return my greetings. He continues his self-abusive behavior, and continues to set up power struggles with adults. Walking by his classroom, I often hear his screams as someone restrains him. Again and again I doubt my decision to respect his distance. What five-year-old emotionally disturbed child can make a sound judgment about whether or not he should see a therapist?

  I speak with my supervisors about my decision not to push him, and they agree that this is the best course of action. Still, I worry. Sometimes I imagine physically dragging him down the hall to my office. With another child I might have done that, as a sign of my investment and caring. But it seems to me that with Ben this would accomplish nothing. It seems to me that he has stumbled into something very painful in his play and needs a retreat. I do not need to show him that I, as an adult, can force him to do something. This he knows already. This has been his experience many times. I want to show him the respect and trust I really feel for him, while remaining fully available if he wants me.

  During this period of waiting I decide to find out all I can about Ben. My supervisor at Glenwood, Mary Louise, suggests that I talk with Ben’s parents. His mother welcomes this opportunity and comes to talk with me the following week.

  We meet in the playroom, over Styrofoam cups of coffee with little clumps of dried creamer floating around on the surface. Kate Brinker wears a purple dress with dangling purple-and-gold earrings, and she carries a purse that looks like a stage prop—black patent leather, large. Her hair, dyed strawberry blond, curls around a full face. Her lips are outlined in red. I know she is older than I—how much I am not sure—and feel suddenly inexperienced. But Kate’s eyes are kind, distinctly kind. She rescues me from my shyness by beginning to speak about Ben and her life with him.

  She has an older child, Jacob, as well as Ben, she tells me. Though Ben was recently adopted, it is a difficult commitment she and her husband have made to him. They feel overwhelmed by his behavior. At home Ben hits, kicks, rocks, bangs his head, and continually provokes battles of control. He plays by himself, not with neighborhood children. He sleeps in a “bubble bed” at night, rocking and banging in the privacy of his room. Kate explains that a bubble bed is a convex sheet of plastic that fits over a large crib. Without this protection Ben would wreak havoc on the house and on himself at night. He sounds a lot more disturbed than I realized.

  “What was Ben like when you first knew him—as a baby?” I ask.

  “Well, he was eighteen months then. They told us he had been neglected.”

  I remember his records: severe neglect. “What did you know about that?” I ask her.

  “Not much. He was just a baby and he needed us, we thought. But when we got him home, that was something else. He just hated to be held or cuddled.” Kate pauses, remembering. “Whenever we picked him up, he would cry and squirm, and if we didn’t let him go, he’d start to scream. It was pretty awful.”

  “It must have been. Do you remember how you felt then?”

  Kate pulls in her lips, stops breathing. “Hopeless, pretty hopeless. I knew something was very wrong with Ben, but we wanted to do right by him. The social worker told us he’d spent a lot of time in a little room alone in that first foster home. It would take time for Ben to catch up to where he should be. I didn’t know what she meant by that. I mean, I didn’t know child psychology or anything like that. But we knew something was really wrong. So we took him to doctors. Lots of them.” She laughs, a short laugh.

  “Finally, when he was just four, he was diagnosed as autistic. Then we took him to the Harrisburg Center for Autistic Children.”

  “What was that like?” I wonder, putting aside my cup of cold coffee.

  “It was a good place, good people there. Those therapists really helped Ben—and us too. They would have him playing alone and then run a soft blanket over his arms and legs. He got to like it. Then, they’d have us stroke him, light, like the blanket. Sometimes he liked that, but sometimes not.”

  For the first time, tears gleam in her eyes. “Even now, you know, it’s hard not to be able to comfort him or really hold him. And he kicks my husband and hits his brother. If I try to hold him, to stop him, he bites. He’s made my hand bleed.”

  Kate breaks the spell, laughing. “Then they told us he’s not autistic, after all. We’ve been to so many doctors I can’t tell you all of them—psychiatrists and psychologists. Ben and I see a psychiatrist every week. A few years ago I hardly knew what a psychiatrist was, and now every week I’m seeing one. And Ben has been hospitalized too, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I’ve read all his records, his medical records too. There is a lot of information there, but a lot is missing. You know more about Ben, you have spent more time with him than anyone. There’s so much I need to know from you to help him.”

  She laughs again, “You treat me like ...” and stops. “You’re so young!” She blushes. “I don’t mean to insult you or anything, but you don’t sound like the others.”

  I laugh this time. “I’m twenty-seven.”

  “You don’t look twenty-seven,” she counters, “but you do sound like you know what you’re doing.” We laugh together—as if this is the funniest thing in the world—because so much depends on it.

  “What do you need to know?” she asks, serious now.

  “When Ben was away from you, when he was hospitalized, what was he like?”

  Ben’s mother looks down at her hands. “The last time was a real nightmare. I’m not exaggerating. They took him off his Ritalin and Mellaril, and he just went berserk. He scratched his skin raw, he screamed. I begged them to put him back on. He covered his head with bruises from rocking and banging it on the bars of the hospital crib, even with a helmet on him.”

  “And then? When he came home, what was it like for you?”

  “Back to square one—he wouldn’t let me touch him, pick him up, and worse, he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. So, I couldn’t go anywhere. My husband, Charles, felt just overwhelmed, angry, God —we were so tired.”

  I try to imagine living with Ben. Not one hour here, one hour there, but living with him—twenty-four hours a day. I can’t really grasp it.

  I look at his mother with more than a little awe. I tell her about playing with Ben, the details of our play, and his refusal to see me now. Kate can hardly believe that he, her Ben, has played with me. Then she grins at me, a wide grin showing her teeth.

  “You are going to help him,” she says. It is a pronouncement I cannot not refuse—I see that right away, but I am not so confident myself. As we leave the playroom, she asks if I would speak with the psychiatrist she and Ben have been seeing now for two years. I readily agree and write down the address and phone number.

  The psychiatrist is not encouraging. She thinks that Ben is too disturbed to benefit much from play therapy, but that the medications help—somewhat. What is most essential, she says, is supporting and educating Ben’s family. Ben’s family, I learn, regularly meets with a social worker at Glenwood. And they use a system of “respite care” —an occasional weekend off from struggling with Ben.

  I begin to know other people in Ben’s world: the staff at Glenwood, his classroom teacher, and the consulting psychiatrist at Glenwood. Between staff meetings and my regular contacts with Mary Louise on Friday mornings, I am able to find out quite a lot about Ben’s day-to-day behavior. What I learn isn’t encouraging. Ben hits and kicks the other children in his classroom. He has a very short attention span and reacts with rage in response to the smallest frustration. He has to be restrained several times each day for attempting to hurt himself or the other children. His work in both reading and math is at grade level, however, an amazing accomplishment.

  Mary Loui
se encourages me about my work with Ben and is also very frank about how disturbed his behavior appears. It is a tense, hard period of waiting.

  What is clearest to me is that Ben successfully wards off human contact. And attachment. I remember him lying in the grass, the pain of his early abandonment as tangible as the sun and wind on his back. His pain that day had a mysterious quality too. I would wait for him to show me how to approach it.

  One day, as I am sitting on the hall bench, talking to another child, Ben walks directly up to me.

  “Do you see me today?” he asks.

  “No, but I will see you next week, on Monday.”

  He runs down the hall and comes back. Extending four fingers, he says, “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Four days?”

  “That’s right. In four days I will see you.”

  He waves goodbye and runs off again.

  8

  Driving to Glenwood the following Monday morning, I watch clouds darken and rain splash on the windshield. I roll down the car window to breathe in the metallic smell of rain on city streets, and wonder if Ben will or will not come to the playroom.