Bad Animals (7 page)

A few years ago I was offered an assignment by
Canadian Geographic
to take Cynthia and Jonah, who was seven at the time, to Quebec City to write a travel article about the city's annual Winter Carnival. None of us had been before, and the idea was to view the trip through the eyes of a typical kid. I said yes because that's what you say when you're a freelance writer and someone offers you a job, especially a well-paying one for a national magazine. But the more I thought about the assignment the more I worried.

“I have to cancel,” I complained to Cynthia, a week before we were to leave. She was unsympathetic. She was looking forward to getting away. This was an ideal chance to see a new place, have some new experiences. Not to mention be put up in a fancy hotel, all expenses paid. And Jonah will love it, she concluded. On this last point, she wasn't especially convincing. She knew what I was really concerned about. Jonah was going through a rough patch at the time, having more tantrums, more out-and-out meltdowns than usual, and we were all feeling the stress. None of us was coping well.

“You have to know how tough this is going to be. How do I explain that in an article like this? This is supposed to make people want to go on vacation.” What I meant was how do I explain Jonah?
Canadian Geographic
wasn't looking for an article about autism.

“Maybe they are,” Cynthia said. This was at least two years before I wrote the CBC essay, and I could guess what she was thinking:
Here it is. Your opportunity to do what you're always saying you're going to do
—
write about Jonah.
But all I could think about was the difficulty, the impossibility of seeing this so-called vacation through his
eyes.
All I could think was:
I have no clue how he sees anything.

A week before the trip I called my editor at the magazine and blurted out that my son has autism and that might make this assignment problematic. I practically begged her to let me out of the job or at least send me by myself. I could go on the press junkets, which were already arranged and which I'd already declined. I could tag along with the other travel writers, see the sites, dream up another angle. I could stay in the famously bizarre ice hotel nearby—drink vodka out of ice cubes and sleep on a mattress of sleet, another option I had initially declined. There was plenty to write about. But the personal nature of the story was already approved, so was the family vacation theme. The magazine had assigned a photographer to follow Jonah around and take an up-close look at his experience. My editor was sympathetic and probably a little surprised at how much unsolicited information I was sharing from the other end of the phone. (She wanted a personal story but not that personal.) She told me to do my best. She also said that if I felt I needed to mention Jonah's autism in the article then, who knows, maybe it would work. She added that she would leave the decision of what to write about to me.

The article turned out fine. There was no mention of autism. Except when I look back at it now I can see all the gaps where it could have, perhaps should have, been mentioned. An out-of-the-blue reference, for instance, to Cynthia's capacity to make the best of a bad situation; my insistence on holding Jonah's hand wherever we went; Jonah's fondness for dawdling and singing random tunes over and over again. The trip itself was a disaster.
That's a bit strong, sweetheart.
Jonah didn't like the cold, for starters. None of us did. He stimmed constantly, had frequent tantrums, and complained like, well, a travel writer. He didn't like the pull-out sofa he was sleeping on or the fancy French food in the hotel restaurant. He was afraid of the Carnival mascot, a presumably friendly abominable snowman called Bonhomme. I complained about everything, too. And Bonhomme is creepy. Cynthia tried to remain upbeat but eventually stopped trying. The photographer, a seasoned professional, was also increasingly frustrated. He couldn't seem to get a single shot of us that didn't reveal the strain on our faces. We weren't having the kind of outdoor, rosy-cheeked fun we were supposed to be having. “Joie de vivre,” the Carnival's trademark, was wasted on us. We all wanted to stay by the hotel pool.

Cynthia, our family photographer, also warned the magazine's photographer about Jonah beforehand—about how she usually had to take twenty tries to get a good one. Jonah was handsome, photogenic, too, at least when the shot worked out. When it didn't, though, what you ended up photographing was something other than Jonah, something additional, like autism. In the end, the only photo of Jonah the magazine used was one of him sleeping. He was a hard kid to capture—in pictures. Or words. For my part, I focused mainly on Quebec City history and the Carnival's stoic philosophy. “When nature gives you ice, you make lots of ice sculptures,” an organizer told me.

We were supposed to stay a week but we drove home on our fourth day. We barely spoke on the three-hour return trip. The only reference I made in the article to how miserable we were comes out as a joke, though it is, in retrospect, a veiled reference to what life with autism is like day after day. “The family vacation,” I wrote, “is the triumph of hope over experience.”

JONAH IS BALKING AT doing his homework, specifically reading
Let's Talk About Complaining,
a book he chose, admittedly at my urging, for Read and Respond—that's what his daily homework assignment is called. He's a little more than a month into the fifth grade so it's important he gets off to a good start and receives lots of positive reinforcement. We have to make sure he is taking on tasks that challenge him but that don't overwhelm or frustrate him. If it were up to Jonah he'd select a book with as little text as possible. He loves the brevity, not to mention the theme of Maurice Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are.
In ten pages, Sendak sums up the childhood dilemma of having a parent who is always missing the point. Jonah is also drawn to Robert Munsch's sweet but subversive take on childhood and David Shannon's
No, David
books, which contain a multitude of misbehaviours. In
David Goes to School,
the sequel to
No, David,
the title character is berated by teachers and classmates on every page save the last. He's late. He won't sit down. He chews gum. He doesn't pay attention or wait his turn. And he does it all with a kind of mischievous glee that Jonah relates to. David
is
the worst-kid-ever. Even so, if Jonah were to choose a literary alter ego, I'm guessing it would be David. Another plus: there are seldom more than two words per page, usually just: “No, David!”

Let's Talk About Complaining
is a compromise. It has enough text to require some time and concentration from Jonah but not enough to scare him off. For Read and Respond, all Jonah is required to do is jot down the author's name (Joy Berry), the number of pages (twenty-nine), read those pages, with my help, if necessary, and then write a few lines, also with my help, explaining what the book is about. (“I like
Let's Talk About Complaining
because ...”) As it happens, this isn't very different from my job most days. Sum up in a few lines—fewer and fewer now as book review sections dwindle and disappear—a new novel or memoir I just finished. Read, respond.

But if I feel an undue urgency about this time I'm spending beside Jonah at his desk in his therapy room, it's because I want him to have this part of his homework completed before Cynthia returns from work. She will have to do the harder subjects with him—math, French, social studies—subjects that will place the kind of demands on my son that might set him off into a paroxysm of self-doubt. Her part of his homework can take most of the evening to complete or, more precisely, not quite complete.

Read and Respond is how I can help. Even so, I have, as usual, managed to convince myself there's no way it is ever going to get done. Jonah is reading
Let's Talk About Complaining
slowly and in varying modulations of tone: loud then quiet, clear then muddled. He is, in short, screwing with me. We stop and start again. Sometimes he interrupts to tell me a knock-knock joke. Sometimes he wanders away from the desk to swing on his exercise bar. I let him go for a while but always have to call him back.
Follow through, sweetheart.
I find myself wishing for Cynthia to return, not just so she can take over but so she knows what I've been going through. The frustration is not just with Jonah's unwillingness to cooperate but with his inability to comprehend such simple books. He should not be so undone by them and I should not be so undone by his being undone.

A few months ago, Cynthia came across a stack of
Let's Talk About
books in a neighbourhood garage sale. Neither of us had heard of them before, but they cost practically nothing and the subject matter—teasing, feeling sad, expressing anger—seemed like a good fit for Jonah. According to author and publisher Joy Berry's website, her books are meant to cover every “raw emotion as well as emotionally-charged situation” a child will encounter. They are, in fact, self-help literature for kids. Berry's mission, as it also says on her website, is “to make available to children 1 to 13 years of age programs and material that can teach them the information and Living Skills they need in order to live their lives intelligently and responsibly.” The conclusion Berry, originally an elementary school teacher, reached some thirty years ago was that the traditional message-laden narrative—fiction, she means—intended to help children understand their increasingly complicated emotions just wasn't doing the job. Her idea was to guide children in a straightforward, step-by-step format through this maze of feelings rather than mix them up with fairy-tale morals to untangle. Children don't need narrative, according to Berry, they need facts. This idea clicked. With the LTA series and other series like
Teach Me About, Help Me Be Good, Good Answers to Tough Questions,
Berry has more than two hundred and forty titles to her credit and has sold some eighty-five million copies.

Jonah is a competent reader and an excellent speller. His problems are with comprehension. The this-then-that aspect of narrative is often hard for him to grasp. It's hard too for Jonah to distinguish between the foreground and background in a story. The main idea sometimes escapes him as it sometimes escapes all of us. Still, we neurotypical types take this skill for granted—our ability to distinguish between what truly matters and what doesn't.

The advantage of the
Let's Talk About books
is that they are all main idea: example after example of kids behaving badly. “This should be easier for him,” Cynthia said when she showed me what she'd found. “They have helpful illustrations, minimal text, and no story to speak of. They're meant for younger children, but I think they're a good place to start. You know he's going to love reading about bossiness and jealousy and breaking promises. He's a little contrarian.”

Cynthia is right. He does love Berry's books, though not for the author's message, which is unwavering. No matter what situation she is “talking” about, the golden rule is Berry's answer to everything. If you don't want to be bullied, don't bully other people. If you don't like it when someone lies to you, don't lie to others. Break a promise, all right, let's see how it feels when someone breaks a promise to you. Jonah, despite being a sweet, gentle boy, doesn't get the golden rule. Autism and empathy seldom mix. What Jonah gets, instead, is a thrill from all the unrelenting discussion in Berry's books about bad behaviour and negative emotions. Every kid is good at being inappropriate; it goes with the territory. Jonah, however, is better. It's his trump card, and Berry's books, without intending to, play right into his hand. For Jonah, inappropriateness is always the main idea.

“Right here, bottom of the page. Jonah?” I put my forefinger on the place where we left off and coax him to read along with me, then alone. He's supposed to spend some of the time reading to himself, but I can hear him muttering Berry's heavy-handed message: “'Thinking about the bad things around you can put you into a bad mood. When you are in a bad mood you will be unhappy and most likely have a bad day.'”

“Jonah, come on, we have to finish this now. Try it again, quietly, to yourself. I can't believe we can't do this. Mommy is going to be home soon and she's going to be mad because you're not trying.”

“Daddy, can I tell you something?”

This is taking too long. I should say no. I know what he wants. He wants to tell me the same joke he's been telling me ever since we started his homework a half hour ago. He wants me to play straight man, yet again: Abbott to his Costello. I also know I am not supposed to allow myself to be distracted again.
Ignore bad behaviour, sweetheart, reinforce good behaviour.
Still, there's something about this request that sounds reasonable, disarming even, and causes a tiny flutter of happy-go-lucky obliviousness in my chest.
This time,
I can't help thinking,
maybe he's going to initiate a conversation.
Maybe, he wants to tell me a story, tell me what happened in school today or try to explain his own tangled emotions. Something I can make sense of. Something we can genuinely discuss. This also takes me back to his baby days. To my memories of a time that was pure anticipation. When I couldn't wait to see what he might say or do next, when there were so many other ways—other than autism, I mean—to interpret his words and actions.

“Knock-knock ...” he says. I've been suckered again.

“No more, Jonah. This is homework time. You know what you have to do.”

All parents fight with their kids over homework. I'm aware of this, but the fight doesn't inevitably turn into so much more, doesn't escalate out of all proportion, so instead of looking at a crabby, procrastinating child you find yourself staring down everything he might have been, everything he might not be.
The future is a thing of the past.
It should be enough to say that you are a parent and like every other parent you get tired and fed up. You worry. You lose your temper. Everyone has something to cope with and this is what you have. So, go ahead, cope.