Harmony (6 page)

Scott snakes the line of us down to the edge of the water, and then we step into the lake, one by one, all joined together. The water's chillier than I'm expecting, and the bottom feels different on my feet from the sand at an ocean beach; instead of being firm, it's kind of soft and muddy. But Scott keeps singing, as he leads us further in, as we step down a sudden drop that brings the grown-ups into the water up to their waists and the littlest kids up to their chests. He's still singing when he stops and looks around and nods, then he gets us into a circle and jerks downward with his hands, causing a chain reaction that drags each of us under the surface of the water and then back up again. And as we all pop our heads back out, wet and sort of shocked, it's like we all make a decision, together in a split second, to keep singing, right where we left off.

I'm shivering a little, but I'm smiling and almost laughing, happy for no reason at all. I squeeze the hands of the two people on either side of me, and I know before it happens that they'll continue the pattern. I know without any question that those squeezes will make their way around the circle, to my mom and my dad and Tilly and everyone else, and come right back to me.

You are cruel to your children every day, whether you mean to be or not. You are cruel by treating them better than anyone else ever will. You are cruel by giving in to their demands sometimes, but not others. You are cruel by making them the center of your lives.

Children, especially those children who are a little bit out of step, need firm, clear boundaries. They need limits and consequences. They need to learn to meet the world on the world's terms.

The world around us has become toxic so gradually that we barely even notice. We think, “I watched a lot of TV as a child, and it didn't harm me.” But children's programming was on for a few hours in the mornings and a few hours in the afternoons; in between, you either went to play outside, or you were subjected to endless soap operas and game shows. Seeing a movie meant going to a movie theater—a specific outing, a rare treat—not buying a DVD and watching it as many times as you liked. We all have stories of finding a
Playboy
, or something a bit raunchier, in our parents' closets or in a trash pile somewhere, but it wasn't possible for any child in
any house to find a hundred varieties of pornography, just by pressing a few buttons.

We breathe tainted air, and we eat tainted food. Is it any wonder that your children are having trouble?

Who knows how much we've damaged these children already, without being aware that we're doing anything wrong? Not so long ago, doctors used to recommend that pregnant women take up smoking to curb anxiety. Who's to say that in thirty years, people won't be shaking their heads over the foolishness of prenatal ultrasounds and plastic sippy cups?

Your kids are sensitive; that's one of the things that sets them apart. It may be that most American kids are ingesting artificial colors that are illegal in Europe, and sleeping on mattresses treated with flame retardants. And not all of them show ill effects, at least not as far as we can tell. But your kids' systems can't handle it, and the results are devastating.

Difficulty regulating emotions, repetitive behaviors, tics and OCD-like symptoms, inability to process social cues: these are warnings. They are indications that something needs to change. These kids are coal-mine canaries, and we can't even see how hard they're struggling to stay upright on their perches.

That's where I come in. My question for you is: are you going to let me help?

Some days you're an idiot, and some days you're a fucking idiot. It's the winter of 2008, and you've developed a habit of berating yourself while you drive. You wait until you're alone in the car, the girls dropped safely at school: no one here but you and your wretched brain. It's not hard to find material; you've got thirty-nine years' worth of evidence to draw from, and it's all up for scrutiny. You said something stupid (maybe last week, maybe in the third grade). You failed to say something smart (to your first boyfriend or to a random woman in line at Safeway). You missed an opportunity. You raised your voice. You made the wrong choice. You behaved in a way that was morally ambiguous. You were rude to a stranger. You were cruel to someone you love.

“Idiot” is not quite right—it's not that you think of yourself as stupid, exactly—but it's a good enough placeholder. “Bitch” could be satisfying, if it weren't sunk so deep in cultural muck, buried under alternating layers of misogyny and saucy reclamation. (“You say I'm a bitch like it's a bad thing!” You've seen it in catalogs: you can have it embroidered on pillows. Perfect for Mother's Day.)

Were you ever a good person? Some part of you knows that you were, maybe even are. But the bad stuff is so much more prominent. When you were a kid, you never once stuck up for someone who was being teased; instead, you'd watch, relieved, glad that no one was examining you with such focus. You screamed at your parents, too many times to count. You let a longtime friendship lapse, out of awkwardness. You spanked Tilly once, in fury: four hard swats across her bottom.

So many offenses, and so many car trips. It's a ritual, your own private sacrament; you're zealous enough that you've become your own church. You take yourself to confession; you whisper your own private gospel: the Idiot's Prayer. Penance, penance, penance, but that's where it stops. This is a church that has no use for forgiveness.

Luckily, it's time-limited: you're done the moment you pull up in front of your house, the moment you step out of the car. Go in peace; pause button pressed. Because you know you're on your way to fill up your mind with something else.

When you sit down with your computer, you feel both anticipatory pleasure and anticipatory guilt. Your role as a stay-at-home mom has changed in recent years, now that the girls are in school, and it's less obvious what you're supposed to spend your days doing. But it almost certainly isn't this. Come on, though; ease up already. Give yourself a break. We're done with this, remember? Save it for the car.

You open your laptop, and there is your city. You've built it up from nothing, a stretch of worthless brown dirt, a primitive population still working on their farming skills. Now it contains a city hall, sixteen restaurants, and a sports arena. You're saving up to build a world-class art museum.

This is the latest in a series of video games you've played over the last several months. Before this, you ran a cartoon diner, selling burgers and milk shakes to customers in a number of different historic
settings. If you took too long with their orders, they'd fume and storm out. You sold chili dogs to Napoleon and apple pie to Shakespeare. Cleopatra had a particular fondness for your french fries.

Now you're building a city that you call Dizzantium. You grow crops, run factories, design parks, all to keep your tiny inhabitants happy. They're an adorable but fickle bunch, these masses you command. If your “civic balances” get low, they stalk through the town in gangs, causing riots and defacing your monuments with graffiti. Fights break out in the streets. But if you give them what they want—a new grocery store, a naval victory over a rival city-state—they throw tiny parades in your honor.

You see what you're doing, channeling your social and emotional needs into this predictable artificial environment. An hour before Tilly's third birthday party, Josh found you sitting in the middle of a messy playroom, organizing the furniture in a dollhouse. It may not be terribly fruitful to rearrange deck chairs on the
Titanic
, but that doesn't mean it isn't satisfying.

You keep your phone next to you while you play. Because one of the things you're not thinking about while you're strategizing battles and civic upkeep is the fact that Tilly is coming very close to being too much for her school to handle.

Matching up Tilly with a school that works for her has never been an easy task, although it took a while before you really understood that you needed to start worrying. The two years she spent at her second preschool—she'd had to leave the first because of a potty-training deadline that the two of you couldn't seem to meet—were happy ones, for the most part. She didn't connect with many of the kids, but she was still young enough that you didn't think it was necessarily a problem. (The going theory, even among the parents of some of her classmates, was that she was simply too smart to find other three-year-olds interesting.) And the teachers seemed to like her, which made every difference.

It was already clear, though, that your local public elementary school—a good one, one of the reasons you bought the house you did—wasn't going to be the best place for her. She was quiet and dreamy, often locked inside her own head. Spinning out elaborate fantasies when you wanted her to listen to directions, pacing the room when you wanted her to sit still. But she could also be alarmingly rigid, tantrums bursting out of nowhere if (for example) you added the cheese powder to the macaroni before you poured the milk, when last time you did it the other way round.

You and Josh did your research, and you figured out what you could afford, and you applied to a private school whose website said all the right things about nurturing. And you sent your child into a situation she was not the least bit prepared to handle.

She started in September, and by Thanksgiving, she was in the middle of what might be, without too much exaggeration, called a breakdown. Here is what a breakdown looks like in a five-year-old: She has nightmares. She wets her pants. She kicks and she bites. She does every single thing she's ever been asked not to do.

The school tried to help, during the early part of the trouble, before things got too intense. They called you in for conferences with the teachers and the school counselor. They gave you books to read; they suggested, of all things, that you buy her a trampoline.

The trampoline thing seemed to come out of nowhere, even after the teachers tried to connect the dots for you, with lots of phrases like “sensory input” and “motor planning.” But it didn't take a lot to convince you.
It doesn't have to be big
, they told you.
They have these little round ones, three feet in diameter; try a toy store or a sporting goods store.
And yes, you told them, of course. Of course, you would buy her a trampoline. Of course, you would drive out to the suburban mall; of course, you would find a place for it in your house and encourage her to jump for ten minutes before school each morning. You remember how hopeful this felt:
I will buy this for my little girl. I will do this because I want to help her.

And maybe it did help, but not enough. You can say that she was expelled, or you can say that she was asked to leave. You can say, if you're in a particularly bad mood, that those assholes kicked her out. What you can't say, will never be able to say, is that you couldn't have prevented it from happening.

The thing is: she was still so little. You can hardly believe it when you look at pictures now, how little she was. There was so much about her that was big: the force of her tremendous will; the astonishing vastness of her intellect, still emerging; the outsized chaos she brought to your household. But this is all she was: a little girl. God, the picture of her on her first day of school, standing on the porch in her little purple jumper. Will you ever be able to look at that picture without wondering if that was the day you made all the wrong choices?

You walk through your city, keeping an eye out for tasks that need to be done. A rival army has burned down your armory—bad for morale. Once you finish repairing it, you should have enough points to advance to the next level, which will mean a cache of gold coins and a new set of goals to unlock. You gather materials and begin the painstaking task of reconstruction.

You remember reading once, in a college psychology class, about a process called “thought-stopping.” It's a component of mind control, used by cults to gain control over new inductees. You give people a task that occupies their minds fully, and they'll pay less attention to any nagging questions that might occur to them. Chanting works, and singing, and speaking in tongues. Backbreaking labor is always a popular choice: work until you're exhausted, then fill up your brain until it's time to sleep. If you're chanting with a group for hours every morning, you're not wondering if this is where you really want to be. If you're going purposefully blank so that you can speak in tongues, you're not asking whether you chose this life or it chose you. And the thing is, you're complicit in it. You've agreed to every step.

After Tilly's diagnosis, you got in touch with the special-education team of the local public school system and requested an evaluation. Their placement suggestion—an autism classroom inside a mainstream elementary school—has not been ideal. Most of the kids in her class are more severely disabled; some of them are nonverbal. The teachers and aides are overstretched, and none of the kids seem to be getting what they need. The environment is chaotic and not particularly stimulating, and Tilly's behavior is becoming more and more out of control.

You have the feeling, lately, that your days are made of tempered glass, the kind they use in making car windows. Safety glass, as you learned in college on a drunken December evening when one of Josh's friends held a cigarette lighter to the frosty back window of his Toyota Camry, is not actually shatterproof. It's “safe” because when it does break, it crazes itself into a thousand small, dull pieces. The glass is designed so that when it suffers an injury it can't withstand—a massive impact, most often, though it can also be something as random and momentary as an impulse in the head of a nineteen-year-old boy who's going to have a hard time explaining this to his parents—it breaks in such a way that no single piece can hurt you. You'll end up with glass in your hair and on the seats; you'll find it months later in the pockets of the coat you were wearing that evening. The pieces are harmless: blunt little jigsaw fragments, not a sharp edge in sight. But inarguably broken beyond repair.

When you wake up in the morning lately, you have a sense that the day ahead of you is shaky, but still solid. You know what you need to do: get the girls up, pack lunches, get everyone dressed and fed and into the car. Drive them to their separate schools. Every morning, you give Tilly a kiss, and you have a little talk about what's going to be expected of her, and how she might act to meet those expectations. And then you go home and wait for the phone call, hoping that today might prove to be made of sturdier stuff than yesterday was.

You play your video games and control what you can. Build your
society, a tidy little microcosm. Keep your residents well fed, keep their landmarks clean. Plant your crops and wait for time to pass.

You're trying to make things better for Tilly: you've had multiple conferences with her teacher, and you have a call in to the district special-education office, but it's been hard to connect with a real person. Now the situation is coming to a head, and you don't know what you can do to fix it. And you have no idea at all what's going to come next.

Right before the phone rings, a little box pops up on your screen. Congratulations: your citizens have acquired the ability to manufacture rubber. Welcome to the modern world.