The Siege

I should have had to fake it, then. I am convinced of that. And that would have been exceedingly difficult, though much less is impossible than one at first believes. [3] Violent anger is better felt than faked. But it is necessary, if it is the only way of conveying to a child that there are limits to what it can do and that someone cares enough to set them. I am no longer sorry that I used force against Elly. Those who know the story of Annie Sullivan know that she had to use more force than I before she could work her miracle and reach the waiting child inside the lonely little wild animal that was Helen Keller. And the little animal, through force as well as love, in some sense knew that this was the first person who cared enough about their relationship to find a way to make it work.

I found that Elly wanted discipline. When she tore a book or pencilled a wall I began to notice that if I overlooked the transgression she would take my hand and use it to slap her own. As she approached three she made a game of it (I need not reemphasize how unusual it was for Elly to invent any kind of game). With no provocation at all she would herself say ‘no, no’, take my hand, make me slap hers, and laugh her head off. This was in contrast to the infrequent occasions when I really slapped her for a real transgression; she did not laugh then, even though it was usually, now, no more than a symbolic tap. The punishment game made me feel better about the real punishments. I came to see that discipline, too, is a kind of communication. Negative though it is, it sets up a relationship of mutual expectation. I was trying to find reciprocal games; Elly showed me that this was one. If you do this, then I do that. A normal child needs this assurance of order and predictability, but it can survive without it. For an abnormal child whose abnormality lies in lack of contact, it is more important.

For a child suffering from the specific autistic syndrome it is essential. All observers of such children have been struck by their extraordinary investment in order, their urge to set objects in arbitrary but exact and recurrent arrangements, their capacity to note and be disturbed by the most minor displacements. An autistic child may carry on inconsolably if its milk is offered before rather than after its dessert, or if a missing block makes completion of a design impossible. It was this interest in order that suggested autism to Dr Blank when he first saw Elly. Such children, then, might be expected to have a more than usual need for an orderly social environment. What will distress them and fill them with anxiety is not the arbitrariness or unfairness of a punishment. For them, since they have no comprehension of social causes, all events are equally arbitrary and fairness has no meaning. What is difficult to bear is, rather, inconsistency, deviation from that expected pattern of events which is their only surety in an incomprehensible world. A normal child can take it if behaviour that yesterday brought punishment today gets off scot-free; it may sense the reason and will very probably enjoy the fact. An autistic child will not; it will suffer, wordlessly, in the same way it suffers when something is out of place. We are told to be consistent with all our children, and we try to be. But laziness or inattention often intervene or special circumstances arise and the expected consequences do not follow. The autistic child cannot appreciate the circumstances or its goodluck, and shows its anxiety by an uncharacteristic turbulence. Many parents who have lived through Dr Spock’s great revolution in child care have seen the results of dogmatic permissiveness and have come to feel, as Dr Spock himself has, that to indulge a child is to do it no special favour. [4] Normal children, however, can survive permissiveness, as they can survive most things. For an autistic child, the indulgence, hesitation, and softness that are so naturally called forth by its condition must be avoided at whatever cost. They will not help the child or its family, but do serious injury to them both.

Not that Elly’s life was hemmed in by prohibitions. It did not have to be. She did very little, and very little of that needed to be controlled. She was not destructive but passive, not aggressive but withdrawn. This made our work easier. What touched her own safety directly she herself looked out for. Because of her pathological caution there was no need to forbid edges or heights. She opened no bottles, allowed nothing unfamiliar past her lips. Danger from traffic was something else; as I had no need to teach Elly physical caution in running or climbing, so I had for years no hope of teaching her to look out for the danger of an oncoming car. I looked out for her myself and thanked heaven we lived on a cul-de-sac.

There were only a few things we had to be strict about, so we could come down hard on those. For the rest, she could do as she liked. Since she could understand so few prohibitions — at this time, in fact, I do not think she understood any — we were glad to keep them to a minimum. They concerned almost exclusively damage to other people’s property — extended to her own if the situations were too similar to expect her to distinguish them; for example, she was not allowed to tear her own books or any others. I did not, in these early years, say or suggest ‘no, no’ for a whole range of behaviour that might well have been limited. I let her eat snow. I let her splash through puddles. She was an unusually healthy child and I had worse things to worry about. I let her soil herself, though to keep her socially acceptable I moved fast to clean her up. I let her make puddles on the floor; by the time she was four her natural fastidiousness allowed her to make very few. I did not try to force her to the pot, guessing it would be useless. Characteristically, she developed her own strange controls; by the time she was four she was holding her urine all day, to empty it into her bath. It seemed to cause her no discomfort; after a while it caused me none.

I did not try to modify such behaviour because it did not seem important to me. What was important to me might have seemed equally unimportant to another: it was important to me that Elly should not disturb me at night or wake me early in the morning. Since this is not something one can effect with hand- slapping and ‘no-no’, I made use of every expedient I could think of. I put animal crackers in her bed for her to find when she waked up. Later (for she was four before she climbed out of bed and five before she opened her door) I went to the length of locking our bedroom door when she got into a spell of waking us at six-thirty. Not that I approved of locking a little child out; I did not, and least of all Elly, whom I had spent years teaching to want my company. The point is something else; it goes beyond what specific behaviour should or, ideally, should not be limited, or what methods are justifiable in limiting it. The important thing is not what the child should be allowed to do, but, rather, what you can stand. For beyond the importance to the child of any specific prohibition, even if it affects such potentially sensitive areas as toilet training or exclusion, is that which is of the most crucial importance of all: that the people who live with the child must not be pushed beyond what they can endure. People can stand most things if they have to, but no one can stand everything. Other mothers might have got up cheerfully with the child at 6. 00 a. m. and balked at the puddles. If so, they should have done what they had to and gone guilt free. What is important for the child is not that it be liberally treated in this or that aspect of its behaviour, but that its mother and its family do not fall apart. If they go under, the child goes too. For every family the last straw will be different. Whatever it is, from smearing food to being followed into the bathroom, it must be eliminated, firmly and with no sense of guilt. That is what discipline is for. Any child would sense the firmness and find security in it. An autistic child will go further and, once the firmness of the limit is appreciated, will welcome it as an essential part of its routine.

No more is being said here than that if an abnormal child is to be helped in the family, by mother, father, other children — then mother, father, and other children must be considered as well as the abnormal child. As most families are set up, it will be the mother who does most of the considering, and one of the things she must consider is how much she can stand. It may be a great deal, but she must not take on everything in a misguided spirit of self-sacrifice, since if she cracks no one will be helped at all. She must assess how much the rest of the family can stand, too, before they begin to feel that this burden is more than they can bear. What I had to do was to keep Elly and her problems as peripheral as I could to the major concerns of my husband and my children.

I even had to keep her, in some sense, peripheral to my own. Not that this was possible in the hours and days at home with Elly, shifting puzzle pieces, sitting in closets, lying under quilts. As long as I was at home, even while she was asleep, Elly was in my mind. I do not know what would have happened to me and to us if I had followed the rigid conception of my duty that I had had when I became pregnant again with this fourth child. I had thought that because I must give no less to this one than to the others I would put off my re-entry into the world for another six years — until she was ready for school. I would see about going back to teaching then. Luck, however, was with me here, as in other things. Circumstances changed my mind for me.

It was true luck, not intelligent decision-making. Elly was just two; we had entered the six-month period of watching and waiting to see if she would catch up with normal children. We were anxious, but not yet sick at heart. It was summer, and I read in the paper that a community college would open in a city twenty miles from our small town, to be the first in a projected network of two-year colleges which would bring higher education in our state within reach of every student who could use it. In all the thinking I had done about returning to teaching the stumbling block had been how and where. My husband’s all-male college would not employ me even if I were qualified, which I was not. I had no teacher’s certificate, so I could not teach in the public schools. There was a private school near by; now and then they needed a teacher of elementary Latin. I was ready to teach grammar to thirteen-year-olds (I was ready to do almost anything). But as I read of the new college I realized how glad I would