“Thorin can you walk to me?” I asked.
He covered six steps to get to me. Thorin made whooping sounds at his destination, which was our cue. We cheered. Instead of retreating, Thorin clapped wildly. Next, he successfully tackled eight steps. We clapped exuberantly.
We carried on until he was too tired to continue. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, grinning and holding Thorin close. I got to see my son walk for the first time. He was almost three years old—past the point of when typically developing children walk, but it didn’t feel too late.
After that night, Thorin was able to walk unsupported unless the terrain was uneven or challenging in some way. Walking for Thorin was no longer a test but a way to get to some place more expediently.
His speech therapist, on the other hand, was not as accepting of Thorin’s abilities.
“He’s not where he should be,” she said the first time Ward and I met with her.
Something about that phrase bothered me. It seemed Thorin was being blamed for something.
“Where should he be?” I asked.
“He should be better. He’s so far behind; I don’t even know yet.”
Ward and I were still new to advocacy. Comments like these, shared by professionals about Thorin, were sometimes stunning, other times troublesome, and, thankfully, usually just annoying. The speech therapist’s comments were troublesome because she might be translating these diminished thoughts into her practice in a way Thorin could internalize.
Early in our relationship Ward and I had bonded over the fact we both loved Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Our love of Whitman even prompted us to name our German shepherd Walt. It was either that or live with the shelter’s name for him: Shultzy.
As a teenager, Ward discovered the beauty of Leaves of Grass the same summer he discovered cunnilingus with his then girlfriend. Whitman would have been pleased, I’m sure. When her parents found out Ward had given their daughter a copy of Leaves of Grass—they called Whitman “a dirty poet”—he became persona non grata. I can only imagine what would have happened if both his discoveries were known to them.
My discovery of Whitman was less earthy. Twenty years before, I’d worked at a small, prominent college as a therapist. One of my clients was a nineteen-year-old returning to school after having a psychotic break. He returned home and saw a psychiatrist weekly. He was meeting with me as part of his transition back to school.
I learned he liked the psychiatrist but didn’t think he was really listening to him. I also learned he came from a working-class family who saw him as the family hero attaining the unimagined: an education with the sons and daughters of the elite. His mother had already predicted the rest of his life. He would be successful, wealthy, and upper class.
“Do you see any obstacles to returning to school?” I asked.
“I have one. I want to leave school and play hockey in Europe.”
“Oh boy, that’s a big one.”
“Yeah,” he laughed at the enormity of it.
“When did you decide this?”
“In high school, but no one thought it was a good idea. Then the last year while I was home, I spent my days lying on a lawn chair in the backyard, daydreaming of living in Europe, being in a new city every day, and playing hockey.”
I was thrown. I wasn’t sure what my role was in his life decision. And, I wasn’t sure I wanted his parents or the school upset with me. I shared all these details with my clinical supervisor.
“In contemplating the leaves of grass, he found his true nature,” he told me.
“Right.”
“He doesn’t want to be here. Maybe his break was less psychotic and more of an awakening,” he suggested.
On the way home, I stopped at a bookstore. That night, I cracked open Leaves of Grass. I immediately opened to the complete, perfect beauty of Whitman. For two days, I dog-eared hundreds of pages and highlighted countless lines.
“How good are you at hockey?” I asked the student in our next meeting.
“I’m here on a hockey scholarship.”
“I guess you must be pretty good, then.”
“This is possible! I have a friend over there now doing the same thing. The problem is what other people want me to do,” he said, sounding tired.
During the rest of the session, we talked about following your dreams regardless of what other people thought. Three days later, he came to wish me goodbye. He had finagled passage on a cargo ship headed to Rotterdam. How Whitmanesque, I thought. The lesson I took from him was that not being where you should be—based on other people’s estimations of you—was not a deficit; it was just another place.
There was plenty Ward and I didn’t know about childrearing when Thorin arrived. And, there was plenty we didn’t know about Thorin. Very early on, I became aware Thorin seemed to be able to read my thoughts. The first time it really struck me was when I had my back to him in the bathroom. I was washing my hands, and he was unrolling the toilet paper all over the floor. I distinctly remember thinking, I hope he doesn’t notice my keys on the tank and throw them into the . . . splash! He threw my keys in the toilet!
There were several of these events where I would think don’t do that, and, sure enough, he would do exactly that. Not having been a parent, I thought it was bonding process that occurred between parent and child. I talked to a woman in the neighborhood who had two children and did childcare in her home. I gave her a few examples of Thorin’s abilities.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how our kids can pick up on our thoughts,” I said to her.
“Yeah, I’ve never heard of that.”
I didn’t have the bandwidth to put a lot of thought into these incidents at the time, what with everything else going on.
My energy was needed for everything else
