A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (24 page)

For now I’d like to pick up on what happened to Temple after Franklin Pierce. For those who’ve not read Temple’s book, here in her own words is the gist of her next steps:

“I wanted to do my master’s thesis [Arizona State University] in animal science on the behavior of cattle in feedlots in different types of cattle chutes…. My master’s thesis brought together all of my ideas about and fixations on the way things work.”
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After some demurral on the part of the Arizona State University faculty—in 1974 animal behavior research was a rarity—Temple’s project was finally honored. “After all,” Temple writes, “if I hadn’t used the squeeze chute on myself I might not have wondered how it affected cattle.”

Temple’s squeeze machine is something she first built at Hampshire Country School, developed further at Franklin Pierce, wrote about in her dissertation, and to this day climbs into for relaxation. In essence, it’s a chute used for holding cattle in a gently squeezing position in order to calm them for inoculation and branding. While still a teenager at Ann Brecheen’s ranch, Temple had crawled into one and discovered that it’s gentle pressure gave her the tender hugging she’d always wanted but couldn’t bear to accept because any hugging, including her mother’s, made her profoundly anxious. Here, suddenly, miraculously, was a mechanical hug she could administer to herself by herself and for herself. Nothing would do but to build her own cattle chute, and ever since, the squeeze machine has been both her source of good feeling and a lifelong fixation. While working for her M.A., Temple began writing for the
Arizona Farmer Ranchman,
which led her to designing cattle chutes for Corral Industries. From Arizona she went on to the University of Illinois for a doctorate in animal science.

Today, Temple is internationally known for her animal slaughtering systems. She counts McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and KFC among her customers. Now that she’s an Associate Professor of Animal Behavior at Colorado State University, well-recognized for her research on the breeding and handling of livestock, she’s also in a position to advise these companies—she advises 90% of the U.S. meat packing industry—on the humane treatment of the creatures they’re about to slaughter. No small feat!

But more important, Temple is world famous for her triumph over autism. Oliver Sacks has written about her, calling her “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the description Temple gave him of herself when they first met. Today she says she still feels as if she existed on an alien planet where she must, like a good anthropologist, figure out through conscious observation and logic why we, its inhabitants, behave the way we do. Though autism still robs Temple of the spontaneous interplay most of us come equipped with from birth, by watching us closely and figuring out the why’s and how’s of our behavior, she’s achieved an amazing facsimile of it. Not a cure for her autism, but her own self-developed understanding of our social interaction. Over the years she’s become so adept at it that sometimes it’s hard for people to know whether her reactions spring from a consciously imposed pattern or an innate response.

In 1999, Temple, now in her fifties and an autism celebrity, asked me to join her on the autism lecture circuit.

“Mother, families with autistic children want to hear you. They want to know what magic you did to help me.”

“There was no magic,” said I modestly, my vanity purring like a satisfied tabby. “I just did the best I could.” At that My Own Personal Past, forever a sloppy young puppy, sighed and rolled over, the metal tag on its collar giving out a reproachful chink.

“No, I’m not going to let you out. I’m snug and warm now, Temple doesn’t need my help anymore, in fact she’s way ahead of me.” The Past tried to go back to sleep as commanded, but could only flop about and whimper. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, it pushed its baby muzzle into my lap.

“All right, I’ll let you out, but I won’t let you off the leash.” With that I told Temple I’d go with her to an autism conference and try my luck at giving a lecture. Once the door opened, The Past sprang out dragging me with it, and almost immediately we were joined by The Present, an elderly, rump-sprung retriever, who began at once to sniff and nudge at both of us. The puppy, being a puppy, wanted to romp, the retriever, being a retriever, wanted to retrieve, and I, desperate for control, wanted to hang onto the leash.

“Stop it, both of you!” I yelled, but it was too late. The Past and The Present were scampering hither and yon, the leash was a joke, and before I knew it, I was lecturing to Autism Societies in over half the United States, as well as Canada, Bermuda, Ireland, Hong Kong and the U.K.

Lecturing soon nudged open a door I thought I’d shut tight forty years earlier. After Temple graduated from Franklin Pierce I never explored autism again, but when parents started asking me questions, heartbreaking questions, I found I had no up-to-date answers. Then, too, there’d been a huge medical turn-around since Temple was a child, and the old interpretation of autism as a psychosocial disorder had gone the way of the dodo. Now recognized as a neurological disorder, the diagnosis of autism had broadened to include everything from nerdy Ph.D.’s, mystified by social chitchat, to those so severely afflicted they couldn’t talk at all.

In addition, something new had entered the picture: how the extreme traits of autism play out in “shadow” form in preceding members of the family. Would this mean I’d have to learn how the combination of Grandin/Purves genetic traits may have created Temple’s autism? What about how they played out in our own lives?

Medical facts would prove readily accessible, but not so the past. Insight into the past didn’t arrive in any logical sequence, nor in blinding flashes and Joycean epiphanies. At first, the picture was faint, but like a negative floating in its emulsion, the past slowly emerged. Even then it wasn’t something I could perceive deliberatively, but rather something I’d have to allow to accumulate in its shadowy bath. There was something ghostly about the process.

I’ve always felt that ghosts were unfulfilled motives and actions, left hanging in the air after death. An incompletion so strong that in certain favored spots it can still disturb the air waves, waiting there to be recognized and released by a living empathy.

Our old Bronxville house had a ghost.

In long summer evenings when the blue twilight seemed to hold forever, I used to garden in the brick courtyard, filling my watering can from a faucet in the back entry where there was an ancient flight of stairs. Originally they must have led up to groom’s quarters above the space where the carriages were kept.

One evening in the dusk I came into the back entry with my watering can and was suddenly aware of a man’s presence. And of a strong smell of cigar smoke. It didn’t frighten me. Instead I had the feeling the presence was entertained I’d found it. I felt the man’s laughter.

Off and on, over a period of two or three years, I was conscious of this presence—always in the summer, always at the hour of blue dusk, always the smell of cigar smoke. I told the children, but they were never around at the right moment. It was summer and they’d be off with friends. Alone, I grew comfortable with the presence, even came to expect it.

When you live in an old house people are always coming around to see what the place looks like now. One summer afternoon my children called up the stairs, “Mom, there’s a man outside who wants to see the house.”

The man, in his seventies, said he was the minister’s son and as a boy had lived at the bottom of our hill where the church rectory was.

“We used to play up here when it was a working stable. The groom, John Damon, was a great guy; he didn’t mind us hanging around him. Automobiles had just come in, and Mr. Chambers, the owner, had bought one. John was good with the horses, but he was crazy about that motorcar. Always tinkering with it. But then something happened, I’ve never forgotten it. One summer evening, John was underneath the car fixing something when the block holding up the car slipped, and the car came down on him. He was so strong, he held the car off while we ran for help, but by the time we got back it was too late. He was dead.”

I showed the minister’s son around inside, and when we came to the back entry, he said, “John had quarters up those stairs.”

My children looked at me. “Mom, it’s your ghost.”

I think it was, and I think the minister’s son released it, because I never felt the presence again.

Somehow, John Damon needed us to know his story.

There’s something of the same ghostliness in learning about family genetics. Physical inheritance is easy: “Oh, he has your blue eyes.” But the traits of disposition, how they play out in the next generation, are far more elusive. Doctors refer to them as “shadow” traits, meaning traits not pronounced enough to disturb the ordinary surface of life. But what an oddly emotional way to define a trait that is, quite simply, not in an extreme form.

Researching the present state of autism, understanding how its genetics relate to all humanity, past and present—including Dick’s and mine—has been a humbling and somewhat ghostly experience. Autism isn’t an exotic disorder, out there somewhere on its own, the fault of mercury or inoculations, waiting to be “cured” if we throw enough money at it. Autism is an exaggeration of what lies in us all.

And studying it has been my form of exorcism.

In September 1999, Temple introduced me to Wayne Gilpin, the president of Future Horizons, an organization presenting autism conferences, nationally and internationally. Wayne persuaded me to give a lecture for Future Horizons and held out a trip to the U.K. as bait. It was too good to resist. But then came the question: what will I say to those English mothers who will have traveled so far, trundling their desperations before them? Like everything else about autism and the past, what to say emerges slowly, starting for me on a hot afternoon in Slough, England.

It’s the tag end of summer and for an English afternoon, insufferably hot. The first two speakers have already presented their lectures, and now comes a short tea break. Nervous tedium fills the airless, low-ceilinged, second floor lecture hall. The mothers drape their sodden jackets over chair backs and exchange joky, chin-up platitudes about the weather. I beg the building manager to open a window.

“This is a municipal building,” he protests. “It is air conditioned, can’t you feel it?”

No, not really. There’s one more speaker before I’m on, so I go downstairs to sit by the open front door, and figure out how I’ll start off my lecture.

“Know that you and your child will come through.” Yes, that’s how I’ll begin.

“You’ll know more, feel more—be awed, puzzled, scornful of sentimentality and less willing to accept the obvious.” True, but don’t the words sound pompous?

Maybe I should come right out with it, and talk about the screaming fits, the spitting, the pitying glances of other children’s mothers at birthday parties, and the everlasting guilt gnawing away on you. Yes, and panic.

“You and your child will roll in the undertow, sand-filled breakers slamming you forward, sucking you back, scraping your knees raw, filling your eyes, your nose, your mouth with gritty salt water.” Then what?

“You’ll survive, that’s what. You’ll find your footing and stagger up onto dry land holding on tight to your child. You’ll limp but you’ll make sense. There’ll be good days and nightmare nights, moments of great pride and days when you want to slink out of sight. But it won’t be raw knees in the undertow.”

Too self-indulgent and self-pitying. Try another.

“I’m here, that’s what matters. Survival is a statement, a conviction that the game is worth the candle. I’ve learned to love the game, learned to climb up and peer into the machinery of it, all oily and glorious and irrelevant—wheels wobbling, sand spewing into the gears, pistons squeaking up and down at cross purposes. Amazing. Somehow the whole Rube Goldberg contraption works.”

But these ladies are English. Will they get that? Maybe I should be more literary.

“All of us when we hear the news, the official diagnosis, our reaction is shock. ‘You mean my child won’t be able to handle everyday life? Ever? Is that what you’re telling me?’ No! It’s not true!”