Following Ezra (4 page)

Every Wednesday, Shawn and I bring Ezra to Ruth’s office, where the four of us sit on the carpeted floor. She opens a large wooden cabinet full of toys and games, Ezra chooses a toy, and we follow his lead. Often, he doesn’t even choose a toy. He climbs up on the back of the couch. We pretend it’s a boat. He rolls in a blanket on the floor. I lie down and try to roll with him. Ruth sits a few feet away, coaching us as we play. He is most attracted to her collection of stuffed animals and puppets.

One Wednesday he selects a toy farm—a set of plastic animals nested into a shoe box–size barn. We pretend to talk, taking on the role of the duck or the farmer, and trying to elicit a reaction from Ezra, who remains aloof. Ruth demonstrates how using a high-pitched, excited voice can attract his attention and draw him in. High affect, she calls it. It takes a bit of shedding inhibitions. On occasion it works, but I find myself feeling somewhat absurd as I sit on the carpet holding a tiny cow or goose between my thumb and forefinger and making animal noises. Sometimes keeping the conversation going feels like struggling to keep a sinking boat afloat, or tapping a balloon to keep it aloft, only to watch it escape your reach and slowly fall to the ground. But I trust Ruth’s instinct that all of this play will help our son to connect in ways that don’t seem to come naturally. I take it one week at a time, not yet perceiving this as anything greater than a way to get our preschooler back on track. But it’s a struggle. When Ezra withdraws, Ruth indicates it with a short pronouncement: “He’s
gone.
” And it feels that way: like he’s departed, transported himself to some other place. He seems far away.

One afternoon, Ezra doesn’t want to play with any of the toys, and keeps looking away from us. At first I think he is staring at the wall, but then I realize he is keenly focusing on some object. On the large expanse of wall he has spotted a tiny spider, so the spider becomes the game. Shawn starts talking to the spider. I speak in the voice of the spider, then in a loud whisper tell Ezra to ask the spider where he is going.

“Where he’s going?” he says, echoing my words.

“I’m trying to find my home,” I say, then whisper to Ezra to ask if the spider has a web.

“If he has a web?” he echoes.

The three of us sit on the floor, watching together and trying to maintain the interaction as Ezra, mesmerized, keeps his eyes fixed on the spider crawling up the wall, onto the ceiling, and, finally, into a vent.

“All gone,” Ezra says.

“All gone,” we echo.

Increasingly, Ezra too seems all gone. At home, our son is falling into a solitary world of plastic animals, animated videos, and plush toys—a place Shawn has come to call “Planet Ezra.”

He does not appear to be forming any friendships in Karen’s class. The children are young enough that “parallel play” is typical, but Ezra still stands out for his lack of connection. Baffled about how to plan his third birthday party, Shawn invites the entire class and hires a young actress to entertain the kids with parachute games and balloon animals. But when the woman gathers the children in a circle in our living room and pulls out her guitar to begin singing, Ezra is . . . gone. I run upstairs and discover him alone in his bedroom, jumping up and down and talking to himself. As the sound of toddlers singing “She’ll Be Coming’Round the Mountain” wafts up the stairs, I watch my son pretending to be Tigger, whom he has watched over and over on a favorite video.

“Ezra, come on down. It’s
your
party!” I plead.

“
Hellooo! Hellooo!
” he calls, not to me, but to nobody—to himself, or perhaps to the Winnie the Pooh in his head—as he keeps bouncing, seeming not to hear me.
“Hellooo!”

It is difficult to know how to respond. This is the party we had planned for him, yet suddenly it seems entirely inappropriate for him. In fact, the whole life we had planned for him is seeming more and more inappropriate.

We discuss that one afternoon back at Ruth’s office, as Shawn and I once again try sitting on the floor, making vain efforts to engage our son in play. Shawn in particular is finding the experience increasingly frustrating. The harder we try to engage him, the more Ezra resists, and the more isolated he becomes. He isn’t defiant, just detached—his voice distant, his gaze diffuse. Elsewhere, Shawn is a dynamic, confident, upbeat woman, full of life and energy. She is also a master communicator, able to command a room as a teacher of rabbinical students and at the small congregation she leads, where she engages adult learners in lively, interactive spiritual discussions. She pours herself into deep conversations with her circle of women friends and with me. Yet here, for the hour we focus on Ezra, she is often discouraged and bewildered at this growing realization: She cannot communicate with her own son.

One afternoon on the maroon love seat, I hold Shawn’s hand, silently listening to my wife, exasperated, wonder tearfully how she will ever get through to Ezra.

Ruth listens and nods with understanding.

“You have to allow yourself to grieve,” she says.

I speak up: “For what?”

“You have to let yourself grieve for the child he didn’t turn out to be.”

I let that echo in my mind.

I have not spent much time with therapists. I was lucky enough to grow up in relative happiness. My parents’ marriage was strong. My family of five (like Ezra, I was the second of three sons) has always been close and nurturing. I excelled in high school and went to a good college. The toughest moments of my life were minor rites of passage: the deaths of my grandparents, and occasional girlfriend problems. I went from college to a successful career as a writer for newspapers and national magazines. At the right time I ran into Shawn, an old childhood friend, and we fell in love and into a strong, supportive marriage. None of that has prepared me for this.

That night, I’m the one who can’t sleep. Not because of Ezra. Because of Ruth. As I lie awake, I keep hearing her voice, her quiet tone, her calm delivery.

And I realize something: I am not grieving. In fact, I feel no instinct to grieve. When I thought about becoming a father, when Shawn and I dreamed together and planned together and decided to start raising a family, I carried no particular notion of who our children would become. I have seen plenty of my friends over the years damaged by their own parents’ expectations and disappointments—that a girl wasn’t a boy; that a younger child didn’t measure up to an older one; that a child didn’t want to be a doctor after all. Perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of some glitch in my own wiring, I didn’t carry any conscious notion of what my children would be like—whether they would be girls or boys, tall or short, conventional or a little bit odd.

I planned only to love them.

The next week, when we visit Ruth, I tell her that.

“I don’t feel that way,” I say. “I’m not going to grieve.”

I am sure she thinks that I am deluding myself. I know the truth. That one statement has done more good for me than all of the play therapy, than all of the listening, all of the advice. It has forced me to find and bring out something within myself. I feel full of love—for the boy who lines up the dinosaurs on the porch, for the child pretending to be Tigger in his bedroom, for the little one I carried and sang to in the first minutes of his life. My answer will never be to mourn. It will be to pour love on my son, to celebrate him, to understand, to support him, and to follow his lead.

CHAPTER TWO

One evening, I try to put Ezra to bed one hundred times in a row. And that is just the beginning.

The trouble is, I’m following instructions that were written for another kid.

Every generation of parents has its bible. Like many new mothers and fathers of the nineties, Shawn and I have learned much of what we know about raising young children from a series of books called
What to Expect.
Throughout her first pregnancy, Shawn kept a copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
on her nightstand next to the volumes of the Talmud and Torah commentaries she was studying in rabbinical school. When Ami, our firstborn, was a few weeks old, we followed
What to Expect the First Year
’s precise, step-by-step instructions for bathing an infant as if they were Julia Child’s directions for preparing the perfect soufflé. (“Have all of the following ready before undressing baby . . .” and “Slip baby gradually into the bath, talking in soothing and reassuring tones to minimize fear, and holding on securely to prevent a startle reflex. . . .”)

We once learned at the feet of the book’s mastermind, a sweet and grounded grandmother named Arlene Eisenberg who taught parenting workshops in the Manhattan neighborhood where we lived before moving to Los Angeles. Peppered with questions about potty training and vitamins, she repeated like a mantra a phrase she said applied equally to toddlers and teens: “Love and limits.” She urged that if we later recalled nothing else she said that night, we remember those words:
love and limits.

We never forgot.

What neither Arlene nor her
What to Expect
books have explained to us is what you are supposed to do when
nothing
is what anyone expected. Ezra, like Ami before him, developed in pace with the milestones in the parenting books for the first eighteen months, but then things veered off course. The book doesn’t say what to do when your child spends long hours in a foggy trance, or when he answers every question by repeating a few words of the question, looking off into space:

The book’s index doesn’t point readers to any ready-made instructions to follow when your child shows no whiff of interest in other boys and girls. And no matter how much love we offer and how many limits we try to impose, we cannot break Ezra’s habit of routinely rummaging through the shelves of the playroom and dumping the contents of every bin, every box, every puzzle onto the floor, creating huge, chaotic mounds of LEGOs, Slinkys, wooden blocks, and game pieces.

Still, when we run into trouble, my instinct is always to seek out instructions and follow them. A relative novice at child rearing, I trust that others who have been through it can tell me how. That is the attitude I bring to the challenge of getting Ezra to sleep.

In our division of labor, bedtime has fallen into my parenting portfolio, while Shawn handles playdates, babysitters, birthday cakes, and much of the snuggling. Maybe it happened when Ami, our eldest, was a toddler. Shawn was a graduate student and I worked at the magazine by day, usually returning home in the evening at precisely the time my wife needed to focus on homework and Ami needed to get to bed. Or, more likely, I took it on because I saw it as a problem that I could solve—if only I was able to do the right research and consult the right experts.

When Ami went through the transition from crib to bed, Shawn and I sought advice from our pediatrician and consulted with friends and coworkers and relatives. On the subway to work, I studied from a stack of books with names like
Winning Bedtime Battles
and
Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems
. Eventually, we devised a hybrid system, a mix of love and limits that involved a bath, a comforting bedtime story, and a sweet lullaby—followed by a door held tightly closed from the outside (the most popular book’s suggestion) until Ami bawled himself into exhaustion. That led to many months of frustration, second-guessing, late-night cuddling, pleading, and fine-tuning, until eventually Ami simply took matters into his own hands and taught himself to go to bed.

The house we are renting in Los Angeles has three children’s bedrooms upstairs, but our sons are accustomed to sharing space from our time in a small New York apartment. For the first few months, Ami and Ezra share a room, but then Ezra, three years old, starts becoming so agitated at bedtime that his noise and movement are keeping Ami awake. So we move Ezra down the hall into his own room.

That brings a whole new chapter of sleep issues, and I am determined to avoid the months of struggle we once endured with Ami. Instead of consulting the stack of books, I adopt one snippet of common sense I come across in an earthy, no-nonsense guidebook called
The Mother’s Almanac.
Its essential wisdom: Follow a comforting bedtime routine—a story, a song, and a good-night kiss. If the child gets out of bed, simply tuck him back in, “not angrily, but a little more businesslike every time.” The key: no drama. The first night or two, it might take an hour but, offers the book, “By the end of the first week, the problem is almost always over, no matter how old the child.”

The first night in his new room, Shawn reads Ezra a book, we sing him a lullaby together, we tuck him in, we both kiss him good night, I switch off the light, and we leave, slipping into our bedroom across the hall.

Easy.

Two minutes later, I look up to see Ezra at our door, his almondshaped brown eyes looking at me behind his straight dark brown bangs. Without a word, I pick him up and walk him back, tucking him in again.

“Good night,” I say calmly.

Two minutes later, he returns. Again, I walk him back.

“Good night.”

Again, Ezra emerges. I return him, then quietly sit on the floor in the hall, thinking about the book:
The first night or two, it might take an hour. . . .

He’s back. I deposit him on his bed again: “Good night.” No drama. I repeat the process, more businesslike each time. And each time, Ezra bounces to his feet.