scratched in arms and legs. Elly, whose eyes six months before could not see pictures, whose hands had been too weak to press down a crayon, had drawn, not a triangle or an E, but a human being.
She drew another the next day, this time supplying the circular head herself. She drew it in the sandpile with a stick; she scratched it out at once. I would wait many months before Elly drew again. But I could remember this.
8. In the Family
This, then, was Elly, from babyhood until she was four. This is what she did and what we did with her. I have put down almost everything. So empty are the days of an autistic child that it is possible in a hundred or so pages to set out nearly the full content of the most concentrated and fertile years of a normal child’s experience. In the midst of our noisy, active household here was this cipher, this little island of detached simplicity, living its life, and we with our lives to live around it.
I knew the question so well: ‘But isn’t it hard on the other children?’ It is hard on the other children. In the first bad years it was very hard indeed. ‘Why doesn’t Elly talk?’ ‘I was younger than that when I talked, wasn’t I?’ ‘Is Elly going to be retarded?’ It is hard for children to sense that something is wrong and have no inkling of what it is, not even the security of a name to give it. Why didn’t Elly talk? We could not give them answers we did not have ourselves.
It was hard to be looked through by the pretty baby they were so ready to play with and love. It was hard for a little boy six and little girls nine and ten to put all their minds to choosing a Christmas present for their two-year- old sister’s first real Christmas and know that in all probability she wouldn’t look at it or them. It was hard to learn to be aggressive and yet not too aggressive, to know when to tickle and when to stop. Sara, whose baby Elly had been from birth, had a kind of self- confidence stemming from this special relationship. She was also the eldest, a poised, omnicompetent child. It was easier for her to take the initiative than for the less assertive Rebecca, or for Matthew, who was not so far out of babyhood himself. Sara could get Elly to look at her. She was a good tickler, a good picker-upper. The younger children found it harder to press in where they were not wanted. So Elly noticed Sara more than she noticed them. But she did not notice any of them much. To take the initiative and be rebuffed is terribly painful. In differing degrees all shared that pain.
But children get used to being ignored — they have plenty of other things on their minds besides whether their baby sister is interested in them. If Elly gave nothing, she demanded nothing. She did not occupy a very important position in their lives. It seemed to us that for the time being this was as it should be. If she ignored them, they could ignore her too. Our task at this point was to see that the few ways in which she impinged on them should be, if not actually pleasant, at least neutral. Later they would have to learn to accept the inconvenience and embarrassment that any abnormal child brings. Acceptance would grow of itself as Elly and they grew together. But we could act now to minimize inconvenience and embarrassment.
We had decided — or, rather, we had never questioned — that Elly was to live with us, to benefit, we hoped, from surroundings of warmth and love. From that choice, certain things must follow.
If love was to be her therapy, it must be possible to find her lovable. At first we might be able to do no more than ensure that she not be hatable. That would be a beginning; for the children’s sakes, our sakes, and her own, we must do what we could to make sure of that. No one can be expected to love a child whatever it does, least of all its brothers and sisters.
If Elly was to live with us, we could not allow her to be destructive, dirty, or repellent in her personal habits. The children’s possessions, and ours, must be safe. We must be able to take her to restaurants and public places. The family had enough to bear from Elly without having in addition to be ashamed of her behaviour or appearance.
It was our good luck that Elly was pretty. Or perhaps it was more than luck; physical attractiveness, like good health, is one of the inexplicable items in the syndrome of infantile autism, and this makes the family’s burden lighter. The world is unfair, and in a pretty child people will overlook a great deal. We kept Elly’s yellow hair washed and brushed (against considerable opposition), her nose and mouth wiped, her fingers unsticky. We saw to it that her clothes were attractive. When she spilled food down the front (less often, as I have said, than normal children) we sponged or changed her dress. There was no danger of conveying an exaggerated fastidiousness to Elly. She was fastidious already. Perhaps it would have been more ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ if she had been relaxed enough to like being dirty, but she did not. It might be a sign of her pathology, but since it made things easier we might as well be glad of it.
Behaviour, however, was harder to control. Yet some sort of control was a necessity.
It is not easy to discipline an abnormal child. The difficulty lies not so much in the child itself as in one’s own reluctance to be harsh with the handicapped. It is not easy to punish a child who does not hear what you say for a transgression whose nature you have no reason to believe she can understand. You cannot say that Sara will be sad if Elly tears her book (Elly was six before she began to understand what ‘sad’ meant). You cannot even say that if Elly tears books Mama will have to take the books away. You cannot say that if Elly pours her bathwater on the floor it will soak down and leak through the ceiling below. You cannot say anything, because the child understands only action, and not much of that. She understands only what touches her presently, physically. She sets no store by things, so you cannot discipline her by deprivation or by reward. What remains is the traditional method of discipline — the use of force.
I need not explain to modern readers that for our generation of parents force was not the method of choice. To impose one’s will on a normal child by force is distasteful enough (though at times, as our generation of parents at length found out, quick force is less damaging to all concerned than indulgence or elaborate moral suasion). To use force on an abnormal child seems too brutal to contemplate. I do not know whether I could have contemplated it, and I’m not sure I could have done it. By good luck I did not have to. It happened that the major work of disciplining Elly was done before we knew there was anything the matter.
Until she was twenty-two months old, after all, we thought Elly a normal, though increasingly obtuse and stubborn child. She responded to no prohibitions or commands; when she was doing something anti-social it was almost impossible to get her to stop. She simply paid no attention to what we did or said. Amused at first, I would become irritated, then infuriated at behaviour which looked in every way like wilful disobedience. Why would she go on drenching the floor with bathwater when again and again I asked her not to? The other children hadn’t been like that, even when they were smaller. Why wouldn’t this one listen to her mother?
I grew more angry than I have ever been with a child — so angry that I cannot recall it without shame. In my anger, I slapped my little girl’s naked flesh again and again, until I could see the redness on her skin and she was screaming with pain and shock. I screamed myself. ‘No, no, no, NO!’ I don’t know how often I did this — three or four occasions, perhaps, no more. Then it was no longer necessary. Elly understood nothing else, but she understood ‘no, no’. I rarely had even to slap her hand, never to hit her hard. I did not have to scream. The words were enough.
And of course almost as soon as she understood the words, I came to understand that she might not have been able to help the behaviour for which I had punished her. Everything was different after she came home from the hospital. It was years before I could get really angry with her again. Of course I felt guilt for those rages that only Elly and I had witnessed. (I would have been ashamed for the older children to see me behave so. ) It was a bitter thing for me to reflect that in two years the only verbal contact I had achieved with my baby was the word ‘no’. I am a verbal person; for me, words have tremendous significance. It seemed to me that that no might impose its minus sign upon a whole universe.
I was wrong. That guilt was unnecessary and after a time I ceased to feel it. It was not only a matter of realizing that it was better for Elly herself that she now responded reliably to ‘no, no’. I had known that to begin with. I had to go further, to realize that in a child so out of touch with others, any contact is better than no contact at all. Would that I could have reached Elly first with ‘I love you’, or with ‘yes’ (though to be realistic one should remember that the nature of the world is such that ‘no’ is an essential word and ‘yes’ is not, and that most children learn it first). The important thing was that I reached her. Perhaps nothing less than that storm of force and emotion was necessary to break through the wall. If so, I am glad it came when it did; six months later it would have been impossible for me to feel that anger.
