I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia
Page 15
I have to say that I am unbelievably grateful to everyone in the Corkin family—Heather, Alan, Tracy, Alex, and Cara—for their hospitality and generosity during those six months. But all nine of us living under one roof unfortunately did get old. With the exception of Cara and Kassidy, who rarely argued and always played so well together, the kids began to irritate each other, and Heather and I began getting on each other’s nerves as well. I am sorry now for the way that I acted toward her at the end of our stay in Cairo. Heather and I were terrific friends, essentially from our first meeting. We both loved our kids more than anything. Neither of us was especially stuffy and proper in the way we lived and raised our children. We enjoyed a lot of the same music. We both had fun playing softball and working out together. And we laughed most all of the time we were together. However, at the end, the laughter and fun were totally gone, and one day after school let out for the summer, I packed up the kids and myself and we left for Heliopolis and Le Méridien. Being back in that hotel felt like coming home somehow. We stayed there for a few days, and then flew back to Maryland. I never actually said good-bye and thank you to Heather and her family. That particular fact has bothered me for years.
15
Shiny Happy People
—R.E.M.
We arrived at Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia, exhausted, after traveling for more than thirty-six hours. Kassidy, a shaky traveler at the best of times, had thrown up all over herself and on me repeatedly, but because I had invested in Game Boys for both boys, everyone was, for the most part, intact. It was great to be back in the States after being in Cairo with the kids for what felt like a decade when in reality it was just under two years. The things we take for granted in this country: toilet paper, Kleenex tissues, Jif peanut butter, electricity, clean drinking water directly from the tap, traffic laws, driving, milk, Goldfish crackers, hamburger, ham, and Target! . . . I enjoyed many things in Egypt and I made some great friends while living there, but it was still good to be back.
Not that everything was instantly familiar. Jim bought us a house in Montgomery County, but it was nowhere near where we had lived before in Montgomery Village. He had done extensive research on the schools in the different areas of the county and had determined that the Wootton High School cluster zip codes had the highest SAT score of any that we could afford. It was a good choice of home for our family in a terrific neighborhood.
Jim took us right from the airport to see our new house. I remember feeling so exhausted and filthy that all I wanted was a shower and a bed, but Jim was too excited for us to see our home and couldn’t wait any longer. The kids were excited, too, so off we went. It was a split-level with four bedrooms, three full baths, a beautiful newly remodeled kitchen and deck, a den, dining room, family room, living room, laundry room, and a large walk-out basement. There was a surprising amount of living space in that house, but not much closet or storage space. It had a one-car garage, and a large fenced backyard with a swing set. There was a forest of dense bamboo along two sides of the backyard that served as a barrier between our backyard and Darnestown Road. Because of this bamboo, we early on began referring to our new home as “Bamboo Corners.” I sat down on the hardwood floor in the family room and stared at the beautiful kitchen and, without even exploring any of the rest of the house, I said, “Honey, you did great! This is perfect!” As I sat on that floor, it was easy for me to imagine that this was the home where my life would finally start to make more sense.
Kassidy and I played games together all the time. She usually kicked my ass whenever we played Brain Quest.
Benjamin, Patrick, and Kassidy were all wild! A huge empty house that they could explore, dashing from one room to another, was exactly what they needed to release their pent-up energy. They all picked out their bedrooms first. Patrick’s was light green with fish stenciled on the walls, and Kassidy’s was Pepto-Bismol pink with a beautiful ballet-shoe border. She loved it! Benjamin and Patrick decided they were going to share the fish room initially so we could keep one room as a guest room, but that only lasted a few months and eventually the guest room became Benjamin’s room.
All three kids found bouncy balls somewhere and started throwing and bouncing them all over the family room, where I was sitting half asleep. Okay! Time to go! But first Kassidy had to know, “Where is my dog?” We had promised the kids that we would get a dog when we got back to Maryland. We were back in Maryland now, so where was the dog? Five-year-old logic at its very best.
We took a short walk up to see the Westleigh Community pool and tennis courts before piling back into the car. Jim had flown to his parents’ house in Georgia before we arrived home from Egypt and they had given us their old car. An extremely generous gift. And it wasn’t long before we were also the proud owners of a purple Plymouth Grand Voyager named Jewel, after my softball team in Cairo, the Jewels of the Nile.
I was not yet going to get my shower and bed because Jim wanted to show the kiddos where they would be going to school. Kassidy was tremendously excited to be starting kindergarten come the fall, Patrick would possibly be repeating fourth grade, and Benjamin would be heading to sixth grade in middle school. Jim drove by Dufief Elementary School first because it was close. We got lost looking for Robert Frost Middle School, so we gave up and went to the Woodfin Suites, where we stayed until closing on our house the following weekend.
For the first time ever, Jim took time off work and helped out with this move into “Bamboo Corners.” And things went relatively smoothly, although there were so many boxes piled everywhere. We had boxes and furniture that came directly to us from Egypt, as well as boxes that we had placed in storage before moving to Cairo. Opening up the boxes that had been in storage was like discovering an entirely different household. Everything was brand-new to me. I started to panic. This wasn’t our stuff. I had absolutely no recollection of those particular plates, glasses, books, towels, sheets, dresses, boots, coats, or toys. It was a strange sensation, because it felt as though we had gotten somebody else’s stuff delivered to our house. Wouldn’t those people wonder where their stuff was? Jim, with his usual impatience, told me to just stop freaking out, just unpack it, and put it away.
Early in the fall of 1997, we fulfilled a promise to Kassidy and adopted two gorgeous Lab puppies from the organization Lab Rescue: Linus, a roly-poly chocolate Lab boy, and Lucy, a beautiful tiny black Lab girl. Amber and Alexander, the two cats that we had brought back from Cairo, were utterly dismayed when Lucy and Linus first arrived, but eventually everyone got along just fine. Guess who ended up taking care of both dogs and both cats most of the time? Jim would walk the dogs with me on nights he was in town, and the kids, especially Kassidy, would walk with me, too, but pretty much everything else fell to me. I was on feeding duty, poop duty, bath and brush duty, daytime walk duty, and vacuuming-pet-hair duty. But I loved those dogs, and their unconditional dog love got me through some tough times. (I loved the cats, too, but their love was always a bit more contingency based.)
Dinners at our house were often unusual. Here Patrick is eating toast, Benjamin is eating soup with a fork because he only liked the noodles, and Kassidy is eating animal crackers. On the table behind the kids sits my bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
But my life back in Montgomery County was often chaotic, especially during the school year. Because Benjamin and Patrick had both been diagnosed with ADHD and other learning difficulties, they were required to have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). What this meant in the Montgomery County Public Schools was a lot of meetings to discuss appropriate levels of disability support services, lots of signed papers and documentation about the different kinds of classroom accommodations that might be suitable, then more meetings with classroom teachers who didn’t believe in making any classroom accommodations for students, many times having to change schedules in order to get teachers who might follow the IEP, and finally lots of extra doctor’s appointments for appropriate-dosage medication checkups.
/>
For the first couple of years after we got back from overseas, Jim worked for a small systems integration company, and he didn’t have to travel too much. He went with me to many of those IEP meetings for the boys at their schools if they were scheduled early enough in the morning or late enough in the afternoon. That is, he went with me until he shouted at Benjamin’s administrator and made Benjamin’s special educator, Wendy Salzman, cry. Then he didn’t go to any more meetings for a few years. In fact, on the letters that came ever after, there was always a handwritten question at the bottom: “Will Mr. Meck be joining us for this meeting?”
During the fall of 1998, Jim was diagnosed with Lyme disease and was on IV antibiotics for six months. An IV pole lived in our bedroom, and every evening when Jim returned home from work, he would lie in bed and medicine would drip into his arm through an inserted catheter. A nurse came once a week to check his catheter for possible infection and to bring him his week’s supply of antibiotics bags. Soon after that, he lost his job. His next company was a commercial security software company, and his job there had him back on the road most of the time. With this company, Jim was responsible for North American pre-sales engineering.
I was teaching a bunch of aerobics and Spin classes each week at two different gyms, and all three kids were always involved in lots of activities over the years. I let them try whatever it was they were interested in for any given year. The only rule was that they had to finish out the season or semester of whatever they started; they weren’t ever allowed to quit in the middle. Both Benjamin and Kassidy ultimately found their talents were best suited for musical theater. With musical theater came voice lessons, dance classes, and an endless string of auditions, shows, and recitals. But before that, Benjamin had tried violin, soccer, baseball, gymnastics, karate, rock climbing, math club, swim team, and improv team. Kassidy had taken dance classes from the time she was three, before even going to Egypt, but she also tried soccer, horseback riding, gymnastics, swim team, track and field, and diving. They also both sang in choir and played handbells at church, and took piano lessons for several years. Patrick ended up as a nationally ranked platform diver in college. But before that he sang and rang in choirs for a couple of years, played soccer, took gymnastics classes, art lessons, photography classes, and had been part of chess club, cross-country, and the mass driver club. My point is, I lived in my car for more than ten years.
But, you may say, a lot of moms do that. In fact, most moms these days schlep their kids to and from dozens of activities. The difference with me was there was no rhyme nor reason to the kids’ schedules. For example, if Kassidy came and told me she wanted to take horseback riding lessons, I would say, “Sure,” and just sign her up for horseback riding lessons on Thursdays from four to five-thirty, not necessarily making the connection that Patrick’s gymnastics class was already on Thursdays from four to five-fifteen in a totally different part of town. Or that Benjamin’s jazz class was also on Thursdays from six to seven-thirty in yet another part of town. All this driving happening during rush hour in Montgomery County. Because I wasn’t able, for whatever reason, to make connections between one thing and another, our lives were a hectic, jumbled, disorganized mess most of the time. I often forgot to pick up one kid or drop off another at the proper time. Other mothers did not like to carpool with me.
Jim recently has begun referring to this behavior of mine as “Now. Not now.” My brain, since the injury, is happiest in the present, and for some unknown reason it is very unhappy in both the past and the future. If I am forced to think of something that happened last month, I have to walk myself backward through time in my head one small step at a time, attaching myself to other things that have happened. The future is much harder for me to walk forward into because there are no events that have yet happened for me to attach onto. If something is happening in my life right now at this very instant—for example, Benjamin is making a fire in the fireplace—I can make sense of that thing and know that it is happening right now. Benjamin is making a fire in the fireplace. If next week I have to look back and remember that Benjamin made a fire in the fireplace, I have to think of lots of other “present” moments that happened throughout the week in order to walk back until I come to the specific “present moment” when Benjamin was making a fire in the fireplace. None of this happens automatically. I actually have to think about it for a long time. If I get the least little bit lost in my mind, if I can’t remember a specific something to attach to, for example, I have to start the whole process over again. It can take me days to answer a simple question like “How did you celebrate New Year’s last year?” Needless to say, I usually just choose to not go through that whole process. At all. Instead I have “Now” and “Not now.”
Writing this very book you are now holding has been one huge continuous struggle because of the way my brain works. And I am not talking necessarily about the contents of the book. I can always call my parents or talk to Jim if I have a question about a specific anecdote. I am surrounded by reams of paper at any given moment filled with notes of names, places, incidents, time lines, dates, records, and titles. No, the hard part has been deadlines. My editor might say, “Su, I’d like to have Chapter 10 in two weeks, by February twenty-second. Do you think that will be enough time?” I will always say, “Yes. Of course!” In reality I have no idea what she is asking and how much time “two weeks” really is. I can look at a physical calendar and count out the days and know that there are exactly fifteen days until February 22. But knowing that information, that there are fifteen days until February 22, doesn’t mean anything real to me. And then there is another thing to remember on top of that: Chapter 10 is due to my editor in fifteen days on February 22. Now there are two layers of things that I don’t understand but that I have to remember and do something about. “Now” and “Not now.”
In some ways it’s easier for me to deal with these kinds of deficits now that I understand a bit more how the brain works. But the process of becoming aware of how different I am was a very painful one. And the five years from roughly 2003 until 2008 were an eye-opening, heart-wrenching, and overwhelming period of time in my life that leaves me a bit dazed and confused even now.
16
Some Days Are Better Than Others
—U2
For as long as I knew—I always hesitate to say “as long as I could remember”—I kept my truly terrified and genuinely ignorant self concealed, consciously or unconsciously, at least most of the time. But it was an embarrassing and upsetting existence. The ups and downs that I experienced were probably in big part a direct result of the shame and discomfort that I lived with every minute of every day. Just a few years before, I hadn’t even been aware of how much I didn’t know about the world around me. But at a certain point, I began to realize how clueless I really was. For example, I had trouble remembering my own birthday and how old I was, as well as how old my kids and husband were. I often got lost and was late for classes or appointments, or I forgot about them altogether no matter how many reminders I gave myself or how many calendars I kept. There were days I couldn’t tie my own shoes or button buttons. Some days I couldn’t read or write. If those happened to be days when I was to volunteer at the school library, read the song list on a Spinning CD for a class I was teaching, attend book club or choir, drive to a new pool for a swim or dive meet that required me to read a map and street signs, or even check my kids’ homework, then I had to either come up with an excuse for why I couldn’t, or attempt to fake my way through. This almost always ended badly.
I remember a specific time one summer when I scheduled an annual eye exam for Kassidy on the same day as an afternoon swim meet. Again, understanding the way schedules worked was seldom an area of giftedness for me. Not only were eye appointments with the pediatric ophthalmologist excruciatingly long, they also included eyedrops to dilate the pupils. Sunlight plus dilated pupils equaled eye pain. Swim meets most often occured in the sunlight. Dilated pup
ils made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to read (especially maps). That week’s particular swim meet was happening at a pool very far away in an area of town unfamiliar to Kassidy and me. It might as well have been in Narnia. There were detailed maps distributed to the kids at practice the day before so that parents and their children could easily find the pool. Parents, that is, who could read maps, and children, that is, without dilated pupils. And Kassidy hated being late for anything. That particular day was a nightmare.
But it was small potatoes compared to the time when I pulled Benjamin out of school during spring of his junior year in 2003.
Though my elder son was obviously extremely bright, throughout nearly all of his school days he had struggled in the large classes and impersonal environment of public school. And Jim and I had been arguing for what seemed like forever about what to do. Over the years we had looked into the possibility of sending him to one of several small private schools in the area. These schools were highly regarded, as well as hugely successful with kids like Benjamin. Unfortunately, they were also financially way out of reach for us. We lived in an area of the county that had a terrific high school. Thomas S. Wootton High School was regarded as one of the top schools in Montgomery County—for a certain type of student. The type of student that Jim and I both agreed Benjamin was not. During Benjamin’s eighth-grade year—and last year of middle school—I found out about a relatively new public high school in another part of the county that specialized in the arts, both performing and visual. James Hubert Blake High School was one of the three Northeast Consortium high schools in and around Silver Spring, each of which had its own signature programs. They were not magnet programs per se, so it was initially unclear as to whether or not Benjamin would even be allowed to attend a high school so far out of our cluster. But the bureaucracy that was Montgomery County Public Schools did not deter Jim. He wrote letters to and met with people up as high as the superintendent himself, explaining why Blake High School would be a perfect fit for our son. In the spring before Benjamin’s freshman year, we were pleasantly surprised to hear that our request had been granted. Benjamin would be able to attend James Hubert Blake as long as we agreed to transport him the forty-five minutes (one way) to and from school each day. By Benjamin’s junior year of high school, things were still getting worse academically for him, and Jim and I were really at each other’s throats. That is, whenever Jim decided to show up at home. He was still traveling most of the time. And even when he wasn’t officially traveling, he worked long hours and most weekends, so that we rarely saw him. Sometimes the only way I knew that he had even been home was by his dirty clothes showing up in the hamper.