Following Ezra (3 page)

We knew we wanted more children—maybe three or four more—and by the time we moved the next July to New York—where Shawn would complete her rabbinic studies and I landed a job writing for a weekly magazine—Shawn was into her second trimester.

Before long, we met in Manhattan’s east seventies for a late-morning appointment with an ultrasound technician.

“You need to tell me if you want to
know
—or not,” the young woman said as she squeezed bluish goop onto Shawn’s belly and pushed some buttons on the sonogram machine.

We had talked about whether we wanted to learn the gender. We did, each of us for a different reason, and neither of us because we wanted to know whether the nursery should be painted blue or pink. For Shawn it was about control: Pregnancy was so wrought with uncertainty that she wanted the comfort of knowing something for sure. For me it was the journalist’s instinct: If there was vital information available, I wanted to have it.

As the woman traced Shawn’s belly with the sonogram’s wand, we looked at the small monitor, trying to make sense of the blurry shapes appearing on the tiny screen. “There’s the spine . . . the kidneys. You can see the little heart beating,” she said. To me it looked more like bad video from one of the Apollo missions.

“Everything looks good and healthy,” she said. “What’s your older child—boy or girl?”

“A boy,” we said in unison.

“Looks like he’s going to have a brother.”

Shawn and I smiled at each other, half surprised, half amused. Two boys.

And then something happened I couldn’t explain. I decided on our son’s name. In that moment, I simply knew. As long as Shawn and I had been together, I had been the indecisive partner, the one who labored over even the simplest choices—restaurants, birthday gifts, which movie to rent—and then second-guessed myself; her style was to make snap decisions (usually wisely) and never look back. We had chosen Ami’s name, for instance, after collaborating on a list of criteria and then consulting a stack of books. (His full name, Amiel, was a combination of the Hebrew words for “my people” and God.) But as soon as the technician wiped the goop off Shawn’s belly and left us, I told my wife our fetus’s name.

“I think he’s going to be Ezra,” I told her. Hebrew for “help
.
” It was not a name we had discussed. But I knew that was it.

Shawn mulled it over. “You
think
?”

“I think,” I said.

“Anything unusual about your delivery?” Ruth asks.

In fact, it was traumatic. Ami had been born by cesarean section, and this time the doctor assured Shawn there was a good chance for what they called a VBAC, a vaginal birth after cesarean. But on that cold and rainy January afternoon, as I listened in on the neighboring birthing rooms, it seemed that a dozen or so moms had arrived, panted, screamed, delivered, and bonded with newborns while we sat waiting for Ezra to emerge. Then Dr. Morrone spotted blood in Shawn’s catheter and decided to wheel her down the hall for a cesarean. It was all seeming familiar, an echo of Ami’s birth, until—just minutes into the procedure—I saw the doctor shake her head and abruptly say six sobering words: “This baby’s not coming out yet.”

Suddenly panicked, I tried to secure an explanation, but had to wait while the doctors and nurses quietly conferred and I attempted to catch a glimpse of the fetal monitor to try to ascertain what was amiss. I imagined the possibilities, trying to block out the worst scenarios. It was stunning how quickly our joyous morning had morphed into anxious moments of dread, breathtaking how fine the line was between celebration and crisis. Finally, Dr. Morrone turned to clue me in. Stepping away from Shawn and the other gowned medics for a moment, she lowered her voice and gave me an explanation: The scar tissue from Shawn’s first C-section had caused her bladder to adhere to her uterus. That meant that instead of delivering the baby immediately and stitching Shawn back together in minutes, the surgeons needed to perform a long, difficult dissection.

“This could take some time,” she told me.

“How long?” I asked.

“We’ll do it as quickly as we can, but we need to be careful.”

I stood in a corner of the room while the doctors worked on Shawn, who was wide-awake, under only local anesthesia. About an hour into the procedure, Ezra emerged with a thick head of jet-black hair and a healthy cry. Shawn held him briefly on her chest, but quickly the doctors—clearly concerned—handed the baby to me while they worked on my wife.

For the first half hour of his life, I held Ezra, who was tightly swaddled and silent, while I paced in the corner of the operating room in my scrubs, quietly singing to my newborn the only song that came to mind: “
Yerushalayim Shel Zahav
” (“Jerusalem of Gold”), a Hebrew song about the holy city where we had lived when the pregnancy began. All the while, I worried about my wife, who lay, arms extended on platforms—a young rabbinical student laid out like Jesus on the cross. A nurse put the baby in a bassinet and gently but firmly asked me to leave the operating room and accompany my son to the nursery. I asked how long the surgery would take. She shrugged, a puzzled look on her face.

Filled with a mix of joy over our new baby and deep concern for my wife, I spent the afternoon walking the hallways of Mount Sinai Hospital, shuttling between the nursery and the operating room, where I awaited word of Shawn’s condition. Outside was a pounding rainstorm. At one point, I saw a man in a sopping trench coat rush from the elevator to the operating room. It turned out he was the urologist Dr. Morrone had called in to inspect Shawn’s bladder and make sure it was undamaged before they stitched her back together.

Finally, after more than four hours of surgery, an orderly wheeled Shawn—spent and exhausted—from the OR to the recovery room. Down the hall, Ezra lay in the nursery, easily distinguished by a Sid Vicious hairdo—spiky, jet-black hair that seemed to announce that our newborn wasn’t going to be like any of those other kids.

 

 

Ruth continues throwing us questions: When did Ezra first eat solid foods? When did he cut his first tooth? How old was he when he said his first words? With Ami we had noted and celebrated each landmark achievement, but with the bustle of two children and our busy lives, those milestones in Ezra’s development are growing hazier in both of our minds. I wonder: Have we done something wrong?

“Does he have any birthmarks?” Ruth asks.

Just one that we can think of: a light brown patch on his upper back.
Birthmarks
, I think.
What do birthmarks have to do with anything?

“When was the first time he cried when somebody besides the two of you held him?”

Neither of us can recall—not because of fuzzy memory, but because it has practically never happened. Ezra seemed to be such a well-adjusted baby that he had earned himself a nickname: “Easy Ez.” In his first year, he was calm, independent, and rarely needed soothing. When we moved to Los Angeles and enrolled him at the preschool, he didn’t exhibit any kind of anxiety, bounding into Karen’s classroom on the first morning and never looking back, though he didn’t know any of the children. The other moms and dads hugged their little ones good-bye, then—following the teacher’s instructions—lingered in the hallway for the first few mornings, peering through the small square window to see how their boys and girls were faring. Occasionally, Karen summoned a parent to come back in and comfort a sobbing toddler. When she waved me off with a grin—“
You
can go; he’s fine”—I felt proud of our little guy, maybe even a bit smug.

Now it seems that what appeared then to be his confidence and independence might have been a red flag. So is his preference for wrapping himself in blankets and hiding in his little brother Noam’s crib.

As I listen to the litany of questions and ponder our answers, I am starting to register how very different Ezra is.

I remember the urgent call I received one afternoon at my office from Shawn—working part-time and home in the afternoons—who was barely consolable.

“I can’t find Ezra!” she said. “I’ve looked everywhere.”

“Did you try the backyard?” I asked.

“Everywhere!”

I told her to check the crib, his favorite spot. Of course, she already had. She hung up, then called back five minutes later.

“He’s not here,” she said. “I’m going to call nine-one-one.”

Eight miles away, peering out my sixteenth-floor office window, I gazed at the condo high-rise across the street, surveyed the busy traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, and looked toward the distant Santa Monica Mountains. Feeling helpless and confused, I imagined our little boy wandering the streets, a distant gaze on his face, a stuffed animal or two under his arm. I tried to think where he might wander, how far he could roam in our leafy residential neighborhood, with its gently curving streets. I had noticed teenage drivers speeding down our street, oblivious that it was a place where families with children lived. I wondered if he would have the instinct to avoid walking off the curb and into—

Then the phone rang again. Shawn was weeping—this time because she had found him. Ezra had been hiding at the back of a shelf in a deep linen closet upstairs. He had gone to the effort of climbing up, crawling in, shutting the folding louvered door, and then sliding to the back, behind a pile of blankets and towels. Ecstatic to find him, Shawn had reached out her arms to embrace him. Ezra had crawled out, jumped down, and scooted away, as if he hadn’t seen her.

“What’s the
matter
with him?” Shawn pleaded into the phone. “I don’t understand what I did
wrong
!”

She has the same question now, as we sit on the love seat across from Ruth. The tears are less intense, but after reviewing the catalog of observations about our idiosyncratic middle child to this relative stranger, Shawn finally tells Ruth what she is thinking.

“I keep wondering,” she says, “how much of this is our fault.”

The question hangs in the air. I think of how much adoring energy we lavished on Ami for the twenty months he was our only child. We simply aren’t able to devote the same kind of focus to Ezra. I wonder whether our second son, forced to compete for attention with an older brother, has—consciously or not—responded by withdrawing.

“That, I can answer,” Ruth says. I wait. “You had nothing to do with it. This is one hundred percent wiring.”

Wiring.
That word jolts my mind, leaving me feeling at once relieved and devastated. Here is a woman who has surely raised her own family, who is an authority on children, who has never met my son, but simply from hearing our description knows that something is amiss—with his
wiring
. When Shawn was pregnant, she did everything to follow her doctor’s instructions, taking the prescribed folic acid supplements as a hedge against birth defects—as if tiny white tablets in an orange plastic vial could protect against forces unknown. What came to mind at the time, if I gave it any thought, were things like physical deformities or serious terminal illnesses, disorders with names I knew but little understood. I don’t know what
wiring
means. It isn’t our fault. Okay. But
wirin
g—that doesn’t sound like an issue we can resolve in a few appointments with Ruth. That sounds permanent. The word echoes in my mind.

Her diagnosis doesn’t get much more specific than that. Even after she spends a morning observing Ezra in the classroom and then we bring him for a visit, Ruth doesn’t give a name to whatever is causing his withdrawal. She explains that she doesn’t see value in slapping a label on such a young child while his mind is still developing. Of course, by now, all of the possible answers have swirled through my mind. In 1998, autism is a relatively rare diagnosis, and to me it conjures up images of a child silently rocking in a corner, limbs flailing helplessly. That’s not Ezra. Besides, despite what Ruth has said about wiring, she explains that what might appear to be permanent often turns out to be a stage that the child outgrows.

It might not be a disorder. It might be a phase.

Either way, she does have ideas about how to work with him.

“We’re going to play with your son,” Ruth says. “But we’re not going to choose the game. We’re going to let him decide, and we’re going to follow his lead.”

She explains the approach in its simplest form: If Ezra chooses a truck, then as he pushes the toy, one of us might put a hand out to block the truck. That will lead to an interaction. Then we’ll build on that encounter, forcing him to confront the parent doing the blocking. The goal is not to disrupt his play or to cause him frustration, but to turn his isolated play into a social interaction, and then to build on that. In time, we will draw him away from his solitary, repetitive activities and into our lives.

Or at least that’s the theory.