Bad Animals (14 page)

“No,” I finally said, “we don't find our son interesting.”

JONAH STARTS EACH DAY in the schoolyard alone. I try to stay focused on him until the morning bell rings, but I usually find my attention divided. I find myself observing other kids, instead—kids who should be his friends. I watch as they shout and bounce off each other. I'm like an anthropologist, making assumptions, drawing conclusions, which I hope I can then apply to my main subject, my son. How, for instance, do creatures typically survive in this environment? By forming cliques and coteries is the conclusion I've come to. Boys push and punch one another. Girls tease each other and giggle at the boys. Some boys chase some girls; some girls allow themselves to be caught. Some girls do the chasing. Others look on and gossip. The noise, incidentally, is as loud as jungle chatter, punctuated by high-pitched squeals and stunningly elaborate curses. Incidentally, Jonah said
it
the other day; he said the word “fuck,” and started laughing. It was oddly reassuring to know he'd learned the word the same way everyone does—in the schoolyard, though not only the schoolyard.

Once he's out of school for the day, it's like he was never there. He only talks about it when he's pressed and only then to volunteer the minimum amount of information. “I did math,” he will say. Or “I worked hard.” Occasionally, he will reveal that some other kid was punished for pulling a classmate's hair or saying a bad word. He finds the misconduct of others endlessly fascinating. The important, real details about Jonah's day—how
he
behaved, how
he
coped—we invariably learn from Jessica. She writes long, detailed reports about what happened in all that time that Jonah has been out of my sight and sometimes, I confess, out of my thoughts. I can usually tell how things went by Jessica's body language or tone of voice. A slight shrug and a feeble “pretty good” delivered like a plea, a plea to leave it at that, for instance, means there isn't much that's encouraging to report. An unequivocal, enthusiastic “great” means he managed to master some small thing; he raised his hand, asked a peer for help.

Occasionally, we'll hear from one of Jonah's teachers. Their casual remarks are generally upbeat as are their report cards, but then they don't have the same level of expectations for our son that we have. The fact is: they have few expectations. He is coded, as far as they are concerned: ASD, on the spectrum. The word autism isn't used much. He tries very hard, his teachers usually tell us. Compared with other kids, he is a treat to have in class, mostly well-behaved, mostly happy. Sweet is the word we keep hearing. On the days I pick him up, I like to tell myself his solitariness, his strangeness are visible only to me. If I'm standing next to another parent, I will glance over at them to see if they are paying attention to Jonah. Usually, they aren't. Mostly, I leave it at a glance. If I'm not exactly rude, I'm in the vicinity. Mostly, I'm trying to avoid eye contact; in particular, that “So which one is yours?” look I used to relish before all this, when boasting about my son was second nature.

According to the information we gather from Jessica and Jonah's teachers, Jonah is well liked. It just takes too much effort, too much attention, too much empathy for the other kids to befriend him. So far, though, they have been remarkably kind to him, even protective. Still, I routinely see other kids walk away from what looks like a conversation with Jonah, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. But if this is noticeable to me, it isn't to Jonah. He is not indifferent to friendship, but he's not motivated by the possibility of making friends either. Friends are, for him, just more people who are likely to become an unnecessary distraction, who will ask him questions he doesn't understand and demand responses he is unprepared to give. In this respect, potential friends aren't significantly different from therapists or teachers. Or us. This is not to say he doesn't like the company of other kids; he just hasn't learned yet to see the point of it, to grasp its pragmatic importance. He is immune to peer pressure, which is both admirable and worrisome. He is impervious to embarrassment.

Sometimes, I imagine Jonah as an anti-hero in an existential novel, a character capable of existing outside convention. I imagine him taking secret pride in his outsider status. Contemporary literature is replete with this type—loners and misfits, from Stephen Dedalus to Holden Caulfield to Bridget Jones. In fact, one of the reasons I became a writer was because that's how I wanted to see myself. I honestly believed that I didn't care what anyone else thought of me. It wasn't until I became the parent of a child with autism that I stopped thinking that way.

Jonah ends each day in the schoolyard alone. After the final bell rings I have to concentrate to find him in the outpouring of kids. When I do spot him he's usually singing to himself. Sometimes, he's spinning—gleeful but solitary. Sometimes, he's tracking his fingers through space like he's trying to break free of everything else—complicated equations, French pronunciations—he is forced to do during the long school day. There are six hours of confusing instructions five days a week to contend with. There are inane rules, indecipherable warnings, stressed-out teachers to steer clear of. I imagine him, as he exits those doors at two-seventeen every afternoon, welcoming back his authentic self.
His autistic self?

Fail better.

—SAMUEL BECKETT, FROM
WORSTWARD HO

The animals wanted to know what's a limit?

Moe the Yak and Rooney the Camel didn't know. The Worst-Monkey-Ever didn't know. No one knew. The Worst-Daddy-Ever said he knew but he wouldn't tell anyone. That would be a limit, he said.

—JONAH, AGED 11, WITH DADDY FROM
MORE BAD ANIMALS: THE SEQUEL

Our new shrink has a manuscript. It's her Ph.D. thesis, which she completed years ago, though she's reluctant to say how many years. Her subject is narrative therapy. Loosely defined, that's the practice of employing storytelling techniques to achieve therapeutic objectives. In recent years, she's talked to a couple of publishers about turning her thesis into a book. But she's not sure what her next step should be: an outline and sample chapters? An agent? She has some questions for me. Are academic publishers worth looking into? Or should she think about making her manuscript more accessible to a mainstream audience? She knows my name from the newspaper—book reviews, right? She heard me interviewed on the CBC, too—and any advice I might offer would be appreciated. But some other time is what she means, of course, not now, not during our session. She apologizes, but I tell her not to worry about it and I mean it. I know something about unfinished manuscripts. In fact, at the moment, I'm an expert on the subject.

Harriet is a friendly, tireless woman, and the one character trait sometimes infringes on the other. She has a sympathetic manner; she's also hard to set up an appointment with. Harriet has numerous children—I don't ask, but my guess is five—and is a practising Orthodox Jew, which makes her already unimaginably full week fuller, with no time to catch up on her work Friday afternoons or Saturdays. She also writes a regular column for
Exceptional Family, a
Montreal-based special-needs magazine. She has two practices, one in the city and one in the suburbs. She teaches a junior college and a university course on early development. And she recently opened a third office, which she is in the process of turning into a centre dedicated to treatment based on neuroplasticity.

For anyone interested in the field of cognitive psychology, neuroplasticity figures to be the next big thing. The brain, it turns out, still holds surprises for researchers who were, until only a couple of decades ago, inclined to think of it as a complex but mainly inflexible instrument. Now, it's beginning to look as if a damaged brain can be self-correcting in a variety of circumstances. For instance, there are more and more case studies of remarkable, inexplicable recoveries by stroke victims. The new hope is that the brain can be trained to self-correct—to form new neural connections throughout a lifetime. This is exciting, cutting-edge stuff, which has obvious implications for injuries—severe concussions, for example—as well as other diseases and disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinsons. So far the promise neuroplasticity holds when it comes to autism is the notion that early intervention, or EI, while important, is not as essential as parents of children with autism are routinely told. EI was all we heard about when Jonah was diagnosed. As a result, there has always been the gnawing worry that we were somehow too late. Everything Cynthia was reading at the time held out the same number, five, his fifth birthday, as a benchmark or, more ominously, a deadline. If we didn't see significant progress by then, we were out of luck. Good luck, that is. In fact, with the emphasis on early intervention, our bad luck had suddenly compounded: not only was Jonah one in the one hundred and fifty or so children on the spectrum, he was one of those on the spectrum diagnosed late. Jonah didn't begin his therapy until he was almost four, and the worry even then was that his brain was already fixed, hard-wired. Which raised the question: what had we been waiting for? A clue, I suppose. But were there clues? Should we have known? Should the daycare or our pediatrician have picked up on signs when he was three, even two? Would that have made a difference? Neuroplasticity doesn't make these questions moot, but it mitigates them. What's reassuring about all this new research is the possibility that the brain is not only adaptable but that it never stops adapting—even long after we turn five. This is another subject I'd be glad to discuss with Harriet.

But we're not in her office to talk about publishing contracts or the latest neurological advances. We are, supposedly, here because I am, supposedly, not happy. Well, not happy enough. This isn't a conclusion I have reached, by the way, it's a family consensus.
All for one, indeed.
How happy I am supposed to be is open for discussion.

“So how can I help you?” Harriet asks.

“Well, our son has autism,” I begin and then abruptly stop. It's as if that single fact explains everything. As if, having said it, I'm done. We can all go home now. Better yet, we can go back to talking about publishing our respective long-shot manuscripts, hers and mine. Maybe even collaborate, write a book together called:
Let's Talk About Changing the Subject.
I don't know about anyone else's brain, but these days mine seems pretty inflexible.

“Jonah, that's our son, he's why we're here. That and our relationship with him, mine and Joel's,” Cynthia says, continuing on my behalf. Even though we both agreed that it would be a good idea to speak to a therapist together again—we didn't give Jeff, our last therapist, much of a chance—we both developed cold feet in the car on the way here. As I pulled into the parking lot outside Harriet's office, I wondered out loud how much notice we would have to give to cancel our session and not pay for it. Cynthia, a professional, suggested it would probably have to be more than two minutes.

“Jonah's older now. He turned eleven two months ago,” Cynthia goes on to tell Harriet. “He's started his second term in grade five. I know it's still winter, but that means there's what, less than two years until high school. He's going to be a teenager soon and we know that's going to raise other problems. So while there's always been a lot to worry about, to consider, now there seems to be so much more. And ...” Cynthia pauses and glances at me.

“It's all right,” Harriet says, “take your time.”

“And I think because of all that, because things are going to get tougher, not easier, we need to be, as his parents and, as a couple, on the same team. If we're going to help him we have to be working together, and sometimes it feels like we're not. I feel like we're pulling in different directions.”

Harriet's yellow legal pad is out on her desk, but she asks first if we mind if she takes notes. I shrug.
Somebody should.

“He thinks I overestimate Jonah,” Cynthia tells Harriet.

I stare at Harriet's poised pen. I am waiting, I suppose, for Harriet, who knows nothing about me as a father, as a person, to come up with a reason to disagree. But Harriet is just smiling benignly at me. I assume it's my turn. I assume that this is how it works. Everyone gets their chance to say something they'd rather not say. So I speak, finally

“And she thinks I underestimate him.”

I'VE BEEN TO FOUR shrinks in the last eighteen months; two on my own and two—including Harriet—as part of a couple. Cynthia has the advantage of being in the therapy business, so she knows how this process works better than I do. She understands, for instance, that there is no such thing as an advantage—therapy is not about keeping score. My advantage is that this is all relatively new to me: new and, even now, unexpectedly exciting. The real surprise for me so far is how much I have, even now, enjoyed my brief encounters with therapists. Not because I have any illusions about them helping me. There have been no breakthroughs as yet; in fact, I can't even begin to imagine what a breakthrough would look like. Besides, as more than one therapist has already implied, self-awareness may not be my biggest problem. (A fellow writer once called me “malignantly self-absorbed,” and meant it as a compliment.) No, what I like about therapy is that it is a performance, first and foremost. It is, for all its supposed probing and promised emotional upheaval, good clean fun. Go figure. For fifty minutes every week or two, you are centre stage, in a spotlight in which self-absorption and uninhibited confessions are not frowned upon but encouraged. It is a memoirist's paradise. And you only have to pay one hundred bucks or so for the privilege. This is, if you ask me, a steal.

I've also discovered I have a knack for charming shrinks. Maybe because I've spent so much of my time turning the events of my life into stories. I have a narrative sense of what to put in and what to leave out. Maybe it's just practice. In any case, “the charm issue,” as Cynthia calls it, is one reason we quit Jeff. Cynthia was convinced he liked me more than her and, therefore, couldn't be counted on to be objective. And while it's true Jeff seemed to keep taking my side—he was surprisingly tolerant of my self-pity—my point was that would change once he got to know me better. This was what we were paying him to do, after all. Cynthia wasn't so sure. She suspected the more he got to know me the more likely we were to find out about the manuscript he had tucked away in a drawer.

“You know what it is, don't you?” Cynthia said as we sat in Harriet's parking lot, deciding whether to stay or go. “You care more about being liked than being honest. Try that for a change. Say what you think, really think. It doesn't make sense to be doing this otherwise.”

“Yeah, right!”

HARRIET IS EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD—perceptive and sensible and, most important, caring. She's succeeded, in a very short time, in charming me and Cynthia, too. It helps that we know, going in, something of her back story, her personal narrative, you could call it. We learned from a friend of a colleague of hers that she is the mother of a daughter, an adult now, with special needs. All parents understand worry, how sometimes it's reasonable, sometimes not. Unreasonable worry, however, is a luxury you can no longer afford once that label, special needs, is attached to you and your family. Now when you worry it's never merely theoretical. You're not just daydreaming about some possible occurrence somewhere down the road; now there's always something immediate and coming straight at you. Worry becomes like a hobby that has gotten out of hand. It takes up more and more space in your life, in your head, especially your head; it consumes more and more energy. It leaves you exhausted, either incapable of or just not very good at doing anything else. The good news is we don't have to waste time explaining this to Harriet. She knows. She gets it.

HARRIET PUTS AWAY HER cellphone and apologizes several times for taking a call in the middle of our session. She has no excuse, she says, except she's been waiting to hear from her teenage son. He wasn't feeling well this morning. If she sometimes seems overwhelmed by her unimaginably busy life, she also seems more generous because of it. She is the type of person for whom the more there is to accomplish the more she is capable of accomplishing. She volunteers, for instance, to help us with Jonah's school, to act as an intermediary, an advocate if necessary. She has some experience in that area, both as a psychologist and a mother. This offer is unsolicited. So is her offer to put our fee on a sliding scale should we decide to continue. All of which is more reason to like her and listen to her advice; even if I'm not sure I'm going to like that advice; even if Harriet, glancing down at her legal pad, is starting to get specific.

“Now where were we? Yes, Cynthia, you were saying that you feel like the two of you are not in sync? As a couple? Is that what I'm hearing? Can you give me an example?”

“Yes, well, there's this book I asked him to read a while ago. Months ago, right?” Cynthia glances at me. I didn't realize we could complain about each other—we didn't agree to this in the parking lot. Did this mean all bets were off? What was next? Were we going to stop pretending that there was nothing wrong between us that a miracle of neuroplasticity—on my part if not Jonah's—wouldn't cure?

“Months, really?” I say. In fact, it's been longer.
The RDI Book,
by psychologist Steven Gutstein, the founder of RDI or Relationship Development Intervention, is on my night table, at the bottom of a stack of other books I haven't started. For instance, Rupert Isaacson's uplifting memoir
The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest to Heal His Son.
From what I gather from the dust jacket, Isaacson, a travel writer and something of an adventurer, takes his son Rowan, who has autism, to Mongolia to ride horses and meet with shamans. The uplift, incidentally, is right there in Isaacson's subtitle. It tells you everything you need to know. Whoever heard of a quest ending in failure?

“I hate having to nag him about this, about reading a book. I mean it's what he does anyway Isn't it?” Cynthia asks Harriet, who treats the question like it's rhetorical, and it might as well be. All three of us know Cynthia is right: she shouldn't have to nag me. I should have read the book by now. I should have read every book on my night table by now.

“The thing is this Gutstein book, it could change our lives,” Cynthia says, taking a Kleenex from the box on the corner of Harriet's desk. There are ways in which the RDI method of treating autism complements ABA, the treatment we've used from the beginning. It does this by adding the relationship variable to what is a more detached, scientific approach. In other ways, RDI and ABA are contradictory. Where ABA can provide a child with the tools he needs to control his behaviour and succeed at school and at basic tasks, as it has with Jonah, RDI focuses on interpersonal relationships. In ABA, parents are trained, but grudgingly. The parents, in our experience of ABA, are often assumed to be an irritating obstacle, at best, a kind of perpetual fly in the ointment; in RDI parents are required to be part of the solution. It's the parents and parents alone who can provide the missing connection in the autistic brain, a connection that comes naturally to neurotypical children and their parents. Of course, even if it made sense to combine the two treatments, you'd be discouraged to do so by the RDI and ABA experts, who seem to be engaged in their own power struggle. At the moment, proponents of each are as suspicious of each other as corporate rivals: like Coke and Pepsi.
You're exaggerating a little, sweetheart; maybe you could just read the book.
As a parent, you are expected to choose one or the other. When it comes to autism therapies, you are either all in or all out.