A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (21 page)

BOOK: A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story
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All this being so, it’s not surprising that Erikson writes without irony about the prescribed treatment of a “schizophrenic” child he calls Jean. Yet even as he describes her “faulty maternal conditions,” he evidences a twinge of doubt over the diagnosis.

Some such maternal estrangement may be found in every history of infantile schizophrenia. What remains debatable is whether the maternal behavior could possibly be a ‘cause,’ for such a radical disturbance in a child’s functioning, or whether such children, for some intrinsic and perhaps constitutional reasons, have needs or need stimulations which no mother would understand without professional help….
*

Note the word “constitutional.” That’s the closest Erikson can come to considering the possibility of another cause. And note too, that he feels Jean’s mother can’t care for Jean without professional (read psychoanalytic) help. While he writes about the vital interconnection between ego and society, he sees nothing cruel or contradictory in taking six-year-old Jean away from the society of her mother and placing her in a residential psychiatric unit.
**

For the first time I can see for myself that the crucial contribution to Temple’s well-being has not been psychiatry, but home therapy, speech therapy, and a good private school.

December 1961. It’s the week before Christmas and Christmas vacation has started. During dinner the telephone rings. Temple answers it and returns to the dinner table white-faced.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“It was the headmaster of my school. He told me I was a menace to society.”

“What!”

“He said, ‘Don’t come back after Christmas vacation.’ And then he hung up.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“He didn’t let me talk. He wouldn’t listen to my side. He hung up on me.”

Just like that? Just like that! He knows Temple’s history, it’s no secret, Temple’s Viennese doctor is on his board. Why didn’t the headmaster call me? We could have talked it over. We could have decided together what would be best for Temple and best for his school. How could he descend on Temple! For God’s sake, she’s a child! No warning, no flicker of concern for the wound he’s inflicting out of his own anger.

I realize that Temple and I have both grown used to special attention at Dedham Country Day School, I realize that this is a much more grown up school, and Temple, with her temper and readiness to strike, presents a risk. But not that much risk!

I make an appointment with the Judge Baker Guidance Clinic for a conference such as we’d had with Dr. Caruthers eleven years earlier when Temple was three. I arrive to find that Dr. Caruthers is no longer there and the conference is scheduled to take place, not in a doctor’s office, but in a bare hospital conference room.

The conference room windows are embedded with chicken wire, their lowered blinds let in narrow bars of winter sun and a few remote honks from the street traffic below. The room is painted pale aqua, a shade known to hospital staffs as psychopathic green, a color meant to soothe the crazed, the desperate, and me.

I sit as indicated on a solitary folding chair facing a long table with chairs behind it facing me. Two doctors I’ve never seen before file in and sit at the long table, followed by two interns and a social worker who carries what looks to be Temple’s medical record. Where is Temple’s doctor? Why does this feel like a parole board?

I am asked to tell what happened.

“Temple has thrown a book at a student in her school. The student’s mother has exploded to the headmaster and the headmaster has expelled Temple.”

All very cool, but inside I’m still seething over the headmaster’s treatment of Temple. Was he too fearful to face his responsibility as headmaster and humanitarian, and speak to me first? No. He’s removed himself the range of fire, gone AWOL and taken it out on a child.

I know Temple hasn’t been too happy in her new school and I know how alarming her rages can be. But I also know the kind of teasing teenage girls go in for. For them it’s a game, for Temple it’s an unbearable mine field and rage is her only weapon. Stirring up her rage is what her opponents enjoy, and this time they’ve really gotten their kicks. Temple’s exploded and been expelled. Publically humiliated before the entire school. What an outrageous triumph to grant teenage girls. I fight the nagging suspicion that the headmaster wanted to have credit with Temple’s doctor, who’s on his board, for accepting Temple. Now he wants an excuse to unload her.

“Don’t come back after Christmas vacation.”

The next day, when I’d sounded off to a member of the school board, I’d been told, quite condescendingly, how difficult Temple was, how forbearing the headmaster is. “After all, considering that Temple’s autistic.” But when I tell the story to Temple’s Viennese doctor, for the first time I see him look discouraged. Where is he today? Why isn’t he here at this conference?

The white coats at the table lean into one another and whisper sibilantly. “Autisssm, adolessscence.” I can’t catch the drift, but then I’m not meant to. I, too, am a felon and the parole board isn’t going to let either of us go free. I wait for their opinions. I’ve made my bed and I can lie in it? OK, I’ll lie in it, but what about Temple? Has she got to lie in it too? A whitecoat stares at me, taps a pencil against her teeth.

“What do you suggest as a solution?” I ask.

“Oh that’s not really relevant. It’s not what we do.”

More silence, more whispers, more pencil taps.

“Could you describe Temple for us?”

Describe her? How? My chitty chatty mind goes into spasm. I could be facing the bishop. All I can think of is the church catechism, that ritual of guilty promises: “I should renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked world and the sinful lusts of the flesh.” I want to kill the row of them. I want to fling a book at the pencil lady, a heavy book with sharp corners.

“What do you propose to do about Temple?” she persists.

“Nothing at the moment.” Then, determined not to let Old Doc Bettelheim get the upper hand, determined to show the whitecoats what a lovely mother I am when you get to know me, “Christmas is next week, so we thought we’d make Christmas puddings together for family presents. We’ve bought cut glass bowls, and raisins, and citron, and brandy, and breadcrumbs. We’ve put the suet through the meat grinder….”

I can’t stop; my mouth has come unglued. “You have to put the suet through a meat grinder. You use it in place of lard. That’s what gives the pudding its Christmas taste. That, and the brandy. Then you mix it all up and put it in the crystal bowls and you steam it, and cool it, and wrap each bowl with red cellophane….” I’m running down, I’m running lame. “It makes a lovely present.”

The silence is palpable. Doesn’t it dawn on the pencil lady that the week before Christmas is supposed to be a time for tidings of comfort and joy? What better thing to do with a little girl whose world has just been shattered? I want to take a shard of Christmas crystal and shove it through her cheek.

“Have you thought about a suitable school?” she asks with a lemony smile.

“Yes. I’ve been doing research for a television documentary on disturbed adolescents. (Thank God!) I’ve been to all the special high schools from Maine down through Rhode Island. Out of all the schools I’ve interviewed, I’ve picked the three I like best. Temple and I have visited them and I’ve told Temple she can choose the one she likes best. She’s old enough to have a say in her own destiny; after what’s happened she’s earned the right to it.” I name her choice. The board is not pleased.

“We can’t endorse that school. The headmaster isn’t a psychiatrist. He isn’t even a doctor.”

I’m alert now and armed. I’ve finally grown up. “He’s intelligent and warmhearted.”

“He’s a very odd man.”

“Perhaps it takes a kook to catch a kook.”

The board is not amused. Do they think that because I joke I take the matter lightly?

“His students care for him,” I counter. “They know he’s on their side. He’s going to be featured in the WGBH documentary on disturbed children.”

“He would be, he loves notoriety.”

Notoriety. What do they think Bettelheim has been doing all these years?

Aloud I say, “He thinks it’s important for the viewing public to understand the problems of troubled teenagers.”

Parole is not granted.

“What school do you recommend?” I ask.

“We have a school here. It’s part of the hospital.” Ah, now we get to the nub. This isn’t a conference, it’s a sell for their own school and I’ve been going along with it.

“We’re doctors—we’re not really in the business of recommending schools.”

Wait a minute, you’ve just recommended your own school. Aloud I ask, “Your school is here? In this crowded section of the city? Where’s the playground? The grass? Hampshire Country School is in the country. It has a working farm with horses and cows.”

“Well, yes, the city is a problem. But in our school we’ll be able to monitor Temple.”

Monitor her? How? Why would she tell you anything?

I take another leap to my maturity. Thanking the doctors, I gather up my coat, and thinking of the
Alice in Wonderland
picture of Alice rising up amid the playing cards, fight the urge to dismiss them all in Lewis Carroll’s words:

“Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

At my rising, faces close, notebooks snap shut. The dust motes dance in the sun bars and there’s a general looking at watches. The meeting has been a competition of wills and for the first time I know that I know more than these doctors. If anybody is going to “monitor” Temple, it will be me.

We parade down the metal stairs in silence. Nobody wishes well for Temple, nor do they show the faintest sign of caring.

I walk behind the whitecoats, mentally adding up what their years of psychiatric training have cost them in grinding study, burnout fatigue, endless loans, and shabby gentility. And as for you two pasty interns walking last in line, more years of it yet to come, boys. Count the years ahead of you before you’ll finally climb up into that catbird seat where, right or wrong, your psychiatric counseling will turn to gold.

I go home and talk to Temple. She, too, has reached a new sense of resolve, recognizing finally that her baby pranks, like her little girl shorts, are unworthy of her. She has not been excused as she would have been once upon a time when she was little. She’s walking away, head high and dignity intact, in full acceptance of her actions and their cost. But she’s also walking away from a mean adolescent game, for which she has neither the ammunition nor, thank God, the appetite. She’s made of better stuff than that, and in time she’ll prove it.

Christmas comes and goes. The first week in January Temple and I pack up her belongings for a new start in a new school of her own choosing, a small school in New Hampshire for teenagers with special problems. The headmaster is a kindly, older version of the burly Deer Island headmaster.

We stow her gear in the car and set off, up the narrow roads, through woods filled with laurel bushes that will be in bloom on later trips. Where one New England mill town leaves off, the next begins, each with its red brick factory hanging over the riverbank as it has for a hundred years.

Soon the towns thin out, the houses thin out. We hit farm country, turn in at a white wooden gate and drive up the dirt road to Hampshire Country School.

The school has a working farm with cows and pigs and, to Temple’s delight, horses to ride. She doesn’t know it yet, but Mr. Carlock, the science teacher, will become her beloved mentor, guiding her to a lifelong love of science.

I visit Temple’s school often and sometimes take Temple and her roommate out to dinner. Temple cautions me not to smack my lips during dinner, that her roommate can’t stand the sound of it. For the first time she’s concerning herself with somebody else’s peace of mind.

I grow fond of both Mr. Patey, the headmaster, and his wife. An older man, intuitive and perhaps a bit eccentric, Mr. Patey runs his Hampshire Country School with a loose rein and is surprised by nothing. In the evening after Temple is in her dorm for the night, I sit with the Pateys in their kitchen, talking long hours, Mr. Patey guiding me to a deeper understanding of autism.

One afternoon Temple and I watch the school farmer help one of his cows give a breech birth to her calf. Unable to deliver, the cow lies on her side, the legs of the unborn calf protruding from her, the rest wedged in her birth canal. Not about to lose either the cow or the calf, the farmer knots a hemp rope around the unborn legs, braces his foot against a barn post and hauls on the rope with all the brawn his back can support. Nothing budges, not the cow, not the calf. Again he hauls, and again—long, hard, sweaty pulls. The cow makes no sound, the barn is still save for the creak of the barn post. Then without fanfare, just as the farmer is easing up on the rope, the calf slides backwards into the world. The cow lifts her head and licks it. The calf wobbles to its feet, stands rocking for a moment, then steadies itself for life on its own.

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