TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 62

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 17, 200006


Dear Folks at home,

	Meyshe is making noises downstairs.  He has a whole 
repertoire of groans and moans that come out of him, and some 
autistic self stimulatory gestures and motions that he does when he's 
spinning his wheels.  He calls it, "daydreaming".  The other night, 
we were out to dinner and we heard noises similar to those that 
Meyshe makes.  We looked around and the source of the noises was at 
the table next to us.  There was a boy of about 14 or so who was 
making the noises, and every once in a while, he'd get up from the 
table and flap his hands, hop up and down (something Meyshe does 
sometimes).  He was not as high functioning as Meyshe,  that is, he 
didn't communicate much with his family, and seemed almost non 
verbal, but those noises and gestures were the same.  My mother 
hadn't seen the boy yet and asked the rest of us, "What's that noise? 
Where's it coming from?"  Meyshe said, "It sounds like somebody's 
crazy."  Feyna and I looked at each other.  She said to him, "Meyshe, 
it sounds like you."  I said, "The boy at the next table is autistic 
and he's making noises very much like you do.  Do you recognize it?" 
He said, "No".  It amazed me that he didn't see himself in that boy's 
behaviour.  So, since then, when Meyshe makes noises and leaps 
around, I don't say, "Meyshe, those are big noises, no big noises, 
please."  Instead, I say, "Meyshe, are you aware that you're making 
noises?"  That way, he can be made conscious of what he does and 
learn to control it voluntarily.  For the first few times, he 
answered me, "No."  But he just ran past my door groaning, and when I 
said, "Meyshe are you aware that you're making noises?"  he said, 
"YES", and giggled.  He fascinates me, as well as I love him utterly.

	I wrote the following on the 13th of November.


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Daniel sees the light of day

	My brother was born on November 13, 1954.  I was seven years 
old.  My mother was not just, "big with child", she was enormous with 
child.  She had a baby in there that made her belly come to a big 
point, and we imagined together getting her a dress with a bulls eye 
on it to accentuate the obvious.  She was very open about her 
pregnancy.  There was no talk of Mommy having a baby in her tummy. 
No.  She had been impregnated and there was a foetus in utero.  She 
brought out the paper and pen and drew diagrams of the female and 
male reproductive systems, and took out her Grey's Anatomy book from 
medical school, and showed me the renderings of the progression that 
an embryo makes from a dot of potential you cannot even see, to a 
full full-fledged full term baby, and she told me, "Ontogeny 
recapitulates phylogeny."  I was fascinated by the drawings of the 
developing embryo, how at various stages, it looked like various 
animals, and even had a tail for a while.  I can still see those 
pictures in my mind.  Those are what I contemplated when I was 
pregnant with my twins.  Two times the activity.  Parallel motion. 
When what was going to be Daniel got big enough to move around, she'd 
let me put my hand or my cheek on her big belly and feel the kicking. 
He was a pretty strong kicker, my brother.  Still is.  His footprint 
is big.

	My mother and I were both taking cello lessons at the time, 
but she had to quit because she couldn't reach the cello any more. 
When I was pregnant, I solved that problem by tucking my legs under 
the chair thereby drawing back my rotundness.  But she stopped the 
cello, never to return again.  She did sit me up on the piano bench 
in front of her, though;  she could reach the keys.  I remember her 
eyes looking skyward as she tried to recall a piano piece she'd 
learned when she was a child taking piano lessons.  She hesitated for 
a moment, put her hands on the keys, played the first few notes, then 
stopped, removed her hands.  Looked up again.  Then she put her hands 
back on the piano and spontaneously played through the whole piece. 
I was very impressed with everything my mother did, but this filled 
me with awe.  How could she play something at 34 that she hadn't 
played since she was eleven years old?

	As the due date approached, she grew larger and larger, 
unbelievably large.  She had trouble waddling around, and said, "Oy 
veh!" a lot.  But she was generally in a good mood.  She worked for 
the family right up to the first contractions which were three weeks 
late.  Her parents, Gramma Fannie and Grampa Benny, had come out from 
San Francisco to be with us when the baby came.  One night, while 
Dana and I were playing with out grandparents, my mother and father 
appeared at the door and said that she was going to have the baby. 
They were going to the hospital.  Gramma and Grampa took good care of 
us.  Grampa was full of stories and affection.  Gramma sang songs to 
us that I still remember, songs that I sang to my own children before 
and after they were born.  One was in Yiddish; it was about a little 
goat standing under the baby's cradle.

	Unter mein kints viegeleh,
	Shteyt a klyna tsiegeleh.

	And the little goat goes to market to do trade in almonds and raisins.

	Di tsiegeleh geforen handlen
	Rosenkalish mit mandlen.

	  Labour takes a long time, and it was late at night that 
Grampa answered the phone and relayed a message to Dana.  Dana wanted 
to know what was happening, because Grampa looked worried.  He told 
her that there was something going wrong with the delivery and they 
were having to do surgery.  But he gave no details.  He said 
everything would be all right.  Dana came leaping down the stairs 
into the guest room where Gramma and I were sitting.  She got a wild 
look of excitement on her face and announced, "Complications!"  She'd 
been reading books about doctors and nurses, a medical series for 
adolescents, and she knew what complications were, but evidently the 
word wasn't real to her, because she registered no worry on her face, 
only exhilaration.  Complications.  I wanted to know what that meant 
and I begged my Grandparents who were of the school that you don't 
tell little kids anything to upset them.  It is only through 
recountings of history later in my life that I learned what the 
complications were.

	They had to induce labour, because the placenta had begun to 
separate and the foetus was showing signs of stress.  The heart beat 
was slowed.  Then everything went fine for a while, but suddenly, on 
the surface of the uterus, a major blood vessel burst, and she 
hemorrhaged severely.  They would have do surgery, at least a 
hysterectomy.  They needed permission to do anything and approached 
my father to get his signature.  He panicked in his own way and 
demanded several opinions before he would sign.  But there was no 
time for second opinions, and they had to declare him temporarily 
incompetent so they could go ahead and save her life.  She lost half 
of her blood and the veins had begun to collapse, so they couldn't 
find a place to give her a transfusion.  But they finally found a 
vein on the back of her hand.  She nearly died, and had they not 
intervened my brother would have died.  Those were complications. 
All we heard was that my mother was fine, recovering from the 
surgery, and we had a baby brother.

	My mother stayed in the hospital for over a week, gaining 
strength.  After all, when she came home, she'd have to be taking 
care of everyone again.  My father took us to the hospital to see my 
mother, but they wouldn't allow children in the ward, so we stood out 
on the sidewalk and waved to the little figure in the window, way up 
there on the umpteenth floor of the George Washington University 
Hospital.

	My mother says that it was touch and go for a while there. 
She could have died in childbirth at 34.  My father was prepared to 
give his children to my mother's parents.  An odd idea it is to hand 
your flesh and blood over to someone else because you feel ill 
equipped to deal with raising them, and are sanctioned by society to 
offer them up.  After all, no woman would do that with society's 
blessing.  It is frequently that I thank whatever gods exist for 
saving my mother.  And of course, I  thank them for my brother, who 
is 52 today.


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net