TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 108

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 2, 2000000007


Dear You,

	Meyshe goes back to school today.  This means I had to get up 
extra early and make his lunch.  He could probably make it himself, 
but I don't want him chopping around with knives early in the morning 
before his medication takes effect.  Don't you think that wise?  Here 
is where what is safe conflicts with what he needs to learn to be 
independent some day.  I have to remind myself that all these things 
happen eventually, and that he progresses.  It wasn't long ago that I 
would have had to hire a sitter to stay with him if I were going down 
to the store for a loaf of bread.  Now, I can leave Meyshe for a few 
hours at a time, and he's fine.  I never dreamed this would happen, 
but it has.  So there will be a time when he's safe with knives 
before his meds have taken effect, and he'll learn to make his own 
lunch, his own dinner even.  He'll be turning on the stove, the 
burners, wielding cleavers, boiling water, and I won't even have to 
be there to supervise.  Exquisite patience is needed to raise any 
child, not just an autistic one.  And the rewards of patience are 
exquisite.


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Catholic tastes

	Susie Marshall lived next door to us in Silver Spring, 
Maryland.  She didn't go to the public school up the street; she went 
to a Catholic school.  When we played together, it was after school 
or on weekends.  And usually we were in our back yard.  We had a 
swing set.  We'd sing made up songs substituting my sister's name for 
the bad guy and ours for the good.  Dana didn't let me play with my 
friends uninterrupted.  All of my friends were afraid of her.  She'd 
tease, or hit or take toys away.  I have never figured out where all 
her aggression came from.  From what my mother tells me, I think she 
was born that way.  We do have undeniable personalities from the 
moment we emerge and open our eyes.  All babies are different. 
Evidently, Dana cried and shrieked constantly and by the time she 
came home from the hospital, she had an inflamed throat from all the 
screaming and her knees were scabby from kicking the sheets.  God 
only knows what she thought of me, the interloper, getting in between 
her and our mother when she'd had her all to herself for two years. 
I can't have been a welcome addition.  I see a lot of our family 
dynamic revolving around bids for my mother's attentions.  Her 
attentions were so pure and healing, so desired.  All of us vied for 
it.  My father was just the biggest baby.  The competition was fierce.

	Dana chased Susie and me and wouldn't let us use the toys 
we'd chosen.  She'd just march in and say, "I'm going to play with 
these," and we'd stand back because she resorted to hitting and 
throwing things.  I wasn't on my sister's mind all the time, though. 
She had her own playmates and amusements.

	Susie told me about Jesus Christ who was supposed to be, "our 
saviour".  But I didn't know what, "our saviour," meant, and Susie 
wasn't much help explaining.  She said he died for our sins, and I 
couldn't think of what we'd done wrong.  I was only a little girl. 
There wasn't much of consequence that I'd done so far.  And why did 
someone have to die for our sins?  Why did anyone else even have to 
suffer for our sins, if there were sins.  There was no equivalent of 
sin in Judaism.  It was all a big mystery to me.

	Susie and I played doctor together.  I think we were about 
four or five years old.  We got under my bedspread and took turns 
taking each other's temperatures with a pencil, eraser side first. 
If I close my eyes, I can see Susie's cute bare butt with her perfect 
little hole in the middle, and I can see that rectal pencil going in. 
I didn't put it in far, not even to the end of the eraser.


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Jack, Bubbles, and Shad

	Dweller and I had friends, Jack and Pam.  Pam was called, 
"Bubbles," by Jack.  I don't know the story behind that.  Pam dressed 
like a witch and had an explosion of black, wiry, curly hair.  Jack 
was a wild man.  He dealt grass and acid, and had been in many a 
dangerous scrape with the cops.  Once, he had to roll up his window 
and eat the slips of paper on which he'd written his contacts' 
information.  Right in plain view of the policeman who'd stopped him 
for some minor infraction.  The police took him in to the station, 
and when it was time to fingerprint him, the guy taking the 
fingerprints recognized Jack from somewhere.  They were old buddies. 
So the guy borrowed a bunch of other fingers for the fingerprints. 
Jack loved telling these stories.  I think Jack was always stoned.

	When Jack and Pam threw a party you could smell the grass 
from down the street.  I went to one party there.  It was pretty 
wild.  People were stoned on one thing or another.  It was a small 
apartment, the upper floor of a smallish house.  They had a son, 
Shad, who was just six years old.  Shad's bed was a cubbyhole in the 
wall between the door to the bathroom and the door to their bedroom. 
During the party, they just took time out to put him to bed: gave him 
a bath, got him in his jammies, read a story to him and tucked him in 
to his cubbyhole.  Then they returned to their guests and the rest of 
the party.  I've often wondered where Shad is now, and if he's a 
Republican.


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Meyshe's big adventure

	We took Meyshe and Feyna to Oakland's Children's Fairyland. 
Fairyland is a cobbled together amusement park for toddlers and very 
young children, all on nursery rhyme, fairy tale, or children's 
literary themes.  Everything is built of chicken wire and concrete. 
In front of each offering (they're not really rides.  You have to 
walk through them) is a little speaker with a tape recording in it. 
You can make it work by inserting your magic key into the slot.  You 
buy your magic keys at the Fairyland entrance for five hot clams. 
You can bring it back on your future visits.  When you turn the key, 
a voice comes out of the speaker and tells you all about Little Jack 
Horner, or Little Miss Muffet, Alice in Wonderland, or The Little 
Engine That Could.

	There's an Alice in Wonderland underground tunnel with funny 
mirrors in it.  There's a long gentle slide built into a dragon. 
Feyna and Meyshe loved Fairyland.  They didn't see any of the 
cheesiness that we adults saw.  They were eighteen months old when we 
took them this one time.  We were at some picnic tables getting their 
snack ready, talking about how lucky we were that neither of them had 
ever gotten hurt badly enough to have to rush to the doctor, when we 
heard Meyshe's high pitched complaint.  He'd been running, one of his 
favourite things to do, and he sideswiped the edge of a picnic table. 
I picked him up.  There was a cut over his eye.  It didn't look bad 
until his crying opened up the wound, the blood came pouring out, and 
I saw right away he'd need stitches.

	We called the pediatrician to warn them we'd be coming in. 
We called home to tell Alex and Ben what was up.  We packed our 
things and drove to Dr. Rhea's office.  Dr. Rhea got out a plastic 
board with an indentation in it the shape and size of a toddler.  It 
had Velcro straps to keep a child from moving.  I thought, "Iron 
Lady".  We had to put Meyshe on the board and strap him in.  He 
didn't like that, but he seemed fascinated by what Dr. Rhea was 
doing.  Dr. Rhea numbed Meyshe's eyelid and got out his needle and 
thread.  He had me hold Meyshe's head still while he sewed five 
perfect stitches into his eyelid to close the wound.

	I was thinking that Meyshe would remember this traumatic 
experience, being velcroed to a board and having his eyelid sewn up. 
And who was torturing him?  His mother was holding his head still.  I 
was the villain he looked to to save him, and there I was holding him 
down.  You can still see a scar above his left eye.  He's never 
mentioned an internal scar.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net