Reasonable people, p.8
Reasonable People, page 8
When my friends’ children were born, I noticed, particularly with the men, a further change in attitude. Some spoke of their own rebirth, of becoming suddenly less interested in business, of rethinking their priorities (within the boundaries of still having to work, still having to support a lifestyle). Some spoke quite touchingly of watching their children’s progress, of taking pleasure in their physical and cognitive gains. I secretly resented these conversion stories, wondering at whose expense such joy, like a new sofa or refrigerator, had been delivered. Though a baby obviously differs from a consumer item, it seemed the crowning pleasure of upper-middle-class oblivion. I didn’t at all see the extent to which a valid political argument might also serve an emotionally defensive purpose.
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It was probably eight weeks into our regular visits when, having caught DJ studying me, I decided to take a gamble. I’d long registered the warning about tactile defensiveness in people with autism, but I thought that during our next cranial embrace I’d try to tickle him. I’d try to get him to laugh, insisting, on some level, that he was like any other kid. He, after all, had initiated contact; I’d simply respond with a gesture of my own. And so, before going to the park the following Monday and after being led—always by the second finger on my right hand—to the couch in the family room, I lifted up his Spiderman T-shirt and gently tickled him.
At first, he seemed shocked, even uncomfortable, but then he giggled: one tiny, sputtering, high-pitched sound. I tickled him again, and again he giggled, this time more full-throatedly. Emily, who was in the kitchen grabbing treats for the park, entered the room just as he looked up at me and smiled. “What’s going on?” she asked. I tickled him once more and then left my hand hovering above his belly. DJ reached out and placed it back on his skin. “You want more!” Emily exclaimed, smiling ever broadly in return.
“You want more!” I repeated, smiling myself.
The following week, Emily had a plan to teach DJ his first sign: “more.” She told me to tickle him and, as I’d done the previous week, to stop suddenly while holding my hand just above his stomach. Whenever he pulled it down, I was to make the sign for “more”: the fingers of one hand, including the thumb, vertically meeting the fingers of the other, including the thumb, so that the knuckles of both were clearly showing. And then I was to continue to tickle him, making sure to stop every few seconds to repeat the cycle and, in a sense, glue the sign to the concept.
When DJ still couldn’t produce the sign himself, Emily sat behind him like a deaf ventriloquist, helping to manipulate his tiny fingers. We now had him looking at us—in fact, we had him looking at nothing but us—but we couldn’t get him to look at his fingers, to practice anything approximating hand-eye coordination. We’d eventually find out, after we adopted him, that he suffered from a serious vision problem, which, having been diagnosed but left untreated, had discouraged him from depending on his eyes. (A doctor had said that because he was so “developmentally delayed,” there really wasn’t much point in giving him glasses.) Indeed, when he’d begin to do puzzles, we’d notice he did them almost entirely by touch, ignoring what the individual pieces resembled, much as a blind person might. He’d have just gotten his glasses, and still he’d be doing a puzzle with his head turned in the opposite direction, his eyes investigating the sun-flecked leaves just beyond the window.
Finally, after much repetition and nearly half an hour into the lesson, DJ made the sign for “more” himself. Emily yelled, “You did it!” while I jumped to my feet, nearly forgetting to tickle him. “Tickle him,” Emily said. And I tickled him. I tickled him furiously, alternately hesitating so as to emphasize the crystalline message of cause and effect. Again and again, he signed “more,” now giggling in advance of the desired sensation, giggling for the control he’d suddenly discovered. Pardon the exaggeration if I compare the scene to a geological event: his hands coming together like oceanic plates in an earth-shattering gesture—molten rock where once there was only spangled water. My mind raced forward to the promise of fertile green. Having mastered this sign, DJ would never look back, signing, “more,” “more,” “more” each and every visit, though in the beginning we weren’t ever entirely sure if for him “more” didn’t simply mean “tickle.” For upon arriving at our house, he’d already be giggling, already be bringing those two hands together.
It wasn’t long before DJ began to use the sign for “more,” well, more properly, though not less frequently, mobilizing it to indicate more food, more phone book, more water play, more swinging. In response to what seemed a veritable barrage of “more,” Emily would say, “He wants more of everything”—a phrase that meant, we both well knew, in its darker inflections “he has so little.” But in those first few months of playing with him, we simply took what progress presented itself, as fascinated by errors of cognition as by cognitive leaps.
I was particularly intrigued by his tendency to overgeneralize, as when he’d walk up to men in the park who were wearing jeans and stick his hands in their pockets. I, who always wore jeans on our visits, had taken to giving DJ a piece of candy, had taken to giving it to him in the park, so, to him, men in jeans in the park had candy. One man, I remember, seemed utterly flabbergasted. “What’s he doing?” he shouted. While apologizing for DJ’s rather forward behavior, I couldn’t help but delight in his unwitting disregard for social protocol and in the adult panic it usually inspired. Of course, with each renunciation of the proverbial warning about not taking candy from strangers, I’d have to contemplate his terrifying vulnerability.
Gradually, DJ’s visual thinking would become more sophisticated and discriminatory, though he’d continue to have trouble understanding spoken language, experiencing what Emily called an “auditory processing disorder,” which was a big part of his autism. And gradually, very gradually, as he’d learn more signs, he’d say a few words or, rather, approximations of words, some of them humorously creative. His first would be tied, appropriately enough, to his favorite activity. “Tickadoo! Tickadoo! Tickadoo! Tickadee!”
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Can ideological objections to family be trusted? By intimating that my political repudiation of family might have concealed a more personal repudiation, I don’t mean to propose that I’d simply displaced the latter onto the former in some crude Freudian fashion. Instead of confronting the problem of an unhappy childhood, the patient confronts the more manageable, because intellectual, problem of insidious privatization. Or, Instead of exploring the impact of his father’s decision to stop speaking to him when he was seventeen because he’d once again sided with his mother during one of his parents’ spiteful arguments, the patient drones on and on about the legacy of President Reagan’s decision to fire the striking air traffic controllers and permanently dissolve their union. However suggestive the pun in that final phrase might be, I object to the stark opposition of the psychological and the political, the reduction of one to the other.
Rather, I mean to say that the effects on me of my parents’ punishing marriage and of my own rancorous and then nonexistent relationship with my father had found shelter in my political convictions, hiding like immigrant stowaways in my mind’s darkened hull and under no circumstances allowed to appear on the official manifest. What could be more ridiculous, after all, than a wannabe socialist referencing his thoroughly bourgeois anguish? What did the personal matter? In retrospect, I can see how my father helped to fuel the development of my political sensibility, as if I were a character in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and as if a primal struggle against authoritarianism were at the undiscriminating root of all such rebellions.
It had almost been too easy to make him the embodiment of capitalist antagonism, despite the fact that I’d clearly profited from the upbringing he’d provided and would later take advantage, among countless other things, of the beautiful waterfront home he’d build in Florida. (Summers, when my parents would be up north, Emily and I would spend weekends at this home, taking the boat out onto the intercoastal, indulging in breezy luxury.) An enormously successful corporate lawyer, a self-made man, my father was haughty, insensitive, self-involved, aloof, and, most important of all, never, ever wrong. Though he was quicker on his feet in an argument than I—he’d defeated the government in several high-profile anti-trust cases—I’d nevertheless insist on doing battle with him when I was in college. I’d mobilize every theory I’d learned from Marx in my political science classes: theories about commodity fetishism and false consciousness and alienation. Our battles, which would invariably degenerate into shouting matches, couldn’t help but be vehicles for me to articulate a more personal version of that final, aforementioned concept. In other words, they couldn’t help but express a wish, at least on some level, to be closer to this man. When I think of my father, I haven’t a single memory of him being playfully physical with me, though I do remember his hearty form of discipline.
Years removed from such skirmishes, I’d imagine his smug retort to the facts and figures I presently summoned: 35.6 million Americans in poverty, with 500,000 additional children, since welfare reform, in “extreme poverty” (a woefully understated term denoting a household income of less than $6,403 per year); the loss of thousands and thousands of relatively high-paying industrial jobs, with only one-sixth of the jobs replacing them during the great technology-driven boom of the 1990s paying better than poverty-level wages; a staggering increase in the annual income, the annual bounty, of the top twenty percent—particularly the top five percent (of which my father could claim admission); two-fifths of the country without any kind of health insurance; crucial programs designed to aid the underprivileged under privileged attack; and all the while that very different, that much more vociferous, cry of “more” from Wall Street and consumerist America. Along with a host of other arguments, my father would inevitably respond to such a litany, or so I’d imagine, by dwelling on my own socioeconomic contradictions—in effect, by accusing me of insincerity. Then, he’d return to his favorite rant: “It’s all about personal responsibility!”
The point, of course, was that whatever a person’s contradictions or psychological stowage, those trends—and the people whose plight they encompassed—couldn’t be dismissed. Clearly, with less and less for so many, not everyone could afford the dubious hot cross bun of family. Not everyone could purchase its delicately scrumptious social oblivion. At a moment when liberalism and its “Great Society” were in full retreat; when social obligation had been reconceived as an impediment to the nation’s economic competitiveness, a pointless giveaway to the slothfully undeserving, and an historical failure; the effects of cultivating a private heaven (or hell) could indeed be devastating.
To me, the typical middle-class family still resembles the mythical gated community in which so many seem to want to live. I say this having long abandoned my unqualified opposition to family and the practice of ideologically pummeling my friends. I say this having abandoned any specific commitment to radical politics (Marxism included) in favor of a more modest approach to staggering inequality, an approach that only now seems radical in relation to the ascendancy of the Right. One in five children in America lives in poverty—more than thirteen million altogether. Nearly one in six people works full time and yet remains poor. Is this acceptable?
If, as the writer Marion Glastonbury puts it, autism, with its “aloneness” and lack of “knowledge derived from intersubjective reciprocity,” afflicts an individual’s ability “to link his situational center to a social circumference,” then I’m tempted to propose that a vast majority of Americans are autistic. Though it’s a definition of autism I now reject, the more I got to know DJ, the more autistic my father seemed. Suddenly, I had a way of thinking about my father’s volitional “aloneness,” his “lack of knowledge derived from intersubjective reciprocity,” his arrogant refusal “to link his situational center to a social circumference,” not only in the world at large but in his very home. Suddenly, I had a way of thinking about his more obdurate auditory and emotional processing disorder.
Once, in a poem, I joked, “When your father’s a Republican, there are simply too many reasons/ to want to sleep with your mother.” Although obviously unfair to many Republicans, I was trying to get at the way the psychological and the political might actually be connected. My father was the perfect manifestation of a dual self-absorption—a fact that allowed me to suppose that a wish for a closer relationship with this man might be part of a larger wish for social cohesion. I didn’t know it at the time but in working with DJ I was working on this project, this dream. Watching him strive to connect with others, I’d come to perceive the need not only for a public transfiguration but for a private one as well.
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Not too long after DJ learned his first sign, his mother emerged from rehab and officially requested to begin seeing him. Having quit rehab the previous July, Rhonda had returned at Emily’s urging and this time completed the thirty-day program. At the court hearing in November, Emily volunteered to supervise her visitation and to continue providing support to DJ both in and out of school. She’d attended the hearing at Rhonda’s request, and after asking Rhonda if she approved of Emily’s proposal, the judge gave his assent.
In order that she might visit with DJ in a setting more relaxed than a conference room at the Department of Children and Families, Emily suggested that they gather at a park near Rhonda’s rented trailer. Upon completing rehab, Rhonda had begged Emily for help in getting her children back, and Emily had agreed to give her money for a place to live: enough for a security deposit and the first few months’ rent. She’d agonized over this decision, knowing that some sort of professional line was being crossed, but she felt compelled to give Rhonda a chance—and, of course, she’d hoped to save DJ from an entire childhood spent in foster care or, worse, an institution. I’d been in favor of the idea, and so with encouragement from me, she’d overridden her own serious reservations and given Rhonda the money.
The point had been somehow to keep the family together, to encourage Rhonda to meet her responsibilities. Emily felt for this single mother whose husband had abandoned her. She believed that the woman deserved support, that with it she could get sober and learn to be a more effective parent. Increasingly, Emily’s job had consisted of exactly this sort of reunification or restabilization project. The combination of disability and poverty left families on the brink of collapse. She’d seen too many irrevocably destroyed and wanted to do more to try to save them.
We both knew about Rhonda’s past (addiction, unemployment, homelessness) and chose, I think, to overlook it, or at least to undervalue it as some sort of prognosticator. I was still captive to the idea of helping people, understanding very little about the difficulty of actually doing so—beyond what I’d seen at the soup kitchen. Emily, in contrast, was seeking to fend off a nagging fear that she couldn’t really make a difference in her job. In a strange way, her desperate need to make a difference paradoxically allowed her to believe in hope all the more, though her experience had taught her otherwise. This need and her fondness for DJ catapulted her over the walls of professional judgment. Revisiting the events leading up to, and following, DJ’s removal from Rhonda’s care, I have to pause at how fearless we were. A narrative of these events, ridiculously abridged, appears below.
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In August of 1995, Rhonda, a thirty-eight-year-old white woman and single mother of two, had attended an outpatient consultation at the mental health unit where Emily worked. The unit was a five-day-a-week residential program for children with psychiatric disorders. At the time, Emily had been employed as an instructional trainer, later moving to one of Florida’s newly formed Centers for Autism and Related Disabilities—in part because she found institutional care and the exclusion it symbolized so objectionable. Rhonda had requested that DJ be placed on the unit’s waiting list, complaining that she simply couldn’t parent her son full-time, at least not until they both received adequate instruction. While DJ remained on the waiting list, Emily provided direct services in numerous ways: observing DJ in his preschool classroom, offering ongoing support and recommendations to his teacher, attending DJ’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) (which resulted in a new placement at the center school for kids with disabilities—something Emily opposed), and giving parenting and educational advice by phone.
In January, the Department of Children and Families received an anonymous report alleging that Rhonda had threatened to harm herself and DJ. The ensuing investigation revealed that she had made these statements in order to secure a unit placement more quickly. Because Rhonda really was in bad shape (unemployed, drunk a good deal of the time, depressed if not utterly distraught), Emily worked behind the scenes to bump DJ to the front of the waiting list, and at the beginning of February he was admitted onto the unit. Having to parent DJ only two days a week improved Rhonda’s mood, but it had the opposite effect of what Emily had intended, for Rhonda promptly asked for a meeting with Developmental Services in which she requested a permanent placement for DJ in a group home. She liked the current arrangement too much and sought to better it. She would legally remain his mother, she said, and would visit, but she wouldn’t care for him. When she was informed that such placements are rarely—if ever—granted to children under the age of eighteen, she asked if DJ might stay indefinitely at the unit. Again, the answer was no.
