A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  When I arrive to pick him up in his classroom, Ben is waiting. He walks ahead of me to the playroom and straight through the open door. Immediately he spots a large yellow puppet on the top of the toy shelves. “What’s that?” he asks, reaching up to get it.

  “That’s Tea Bags,” I answer, giving him the name of my large furry yellow puppet with a blue nose. Ben puts the puppet on his arm and rubs his face in its soft fur. Then he takes the puppet off and puts it back on the shelf. He looks at the baby bottle.

  “What’s that? What’s that for?” he asks.

  “To play with, if you like.”

  He moves over to the desk, and in a series of swift motions folds a piece of paper into an airplane. He throws it and it careens upward, then crashes into the floor, denting its nose. Ben grunts and stamps his foot. He tears off half of the tablet of paper.

  “I’ll take this back with me,” he announces.

  “No, Ben, that stays in the playroom,” I tell him. “But you can take a sheet to make another airplane, if you want.”

  “Two?”

  “No, just one.”

  I have not said no to him before, and I wonder how he will respond. I know that he can fly into rages with very little provocation. But he tears off just one sheet of paper and carefully puts it aside.

  “Can I paint?” he asks.

  I show him the paints in the top right desk drawer. Ben lines them up on the desk top.

  “Do you have any magic paper? Yes, you do!” he answers for me, selecting a piece of purple construction paper from the desk drawer. Stirring the paints, he turns to face me for the first time.

  “See how the colors mix? See how it’s magic?”

  “You think that’s magic, hmm?”

  “Oh yes. I know!”

  He bends and carefully paints several blue squares, then swirls red paint over them. Abruptly he puts the paints aside, getting the blue paint on his hand as he screws the lid on. He squeals and stamps his foot. His face is red with frustration, but he turns to me.

  “Will you wash it off for me?” he asks.

  I get a sponge, run water over it, and wipe the paint off his hand.

  “That’s a magic sponge; it’s magic, it’s magic!” he declares, staring at his hand. “You are the magic lady with the magic sponge.”

  Ben walks away from me to the toy shelves. He picks up the baby bottle, fills it with water at the sink, then stands and faces me solemnly as he sucks on it. Then he takes a light-blue blanket from the toy shelves.

  “We need this,” he says, and drops it on the floor. Using the red batakas for a pillow, he lies down on the floor.

  “Today, just today, cover me up,” he says in a small voice.

  “Today I will cover you up,” I reply. I cover him up and sit on the rug near him and watch him drink. He sucks intently and does not look at me. In the silence, broken only by his sucking noises, I think of his lost babyhood. Abruptly he sits up.

  “I want to leave, I’m missing gym class,” he says.

  He had been relaxed and comfortable playing baby, sucking on the bottle. I sense a sudden fear and guess he is afraid of being so small and vulnerable.

  “I’d like you to stay, Ben. Nothing bad will happen here.”

  He lies back down, then rolls over to grab a box of small toys. Leaning on his elbow, he searches through the box.

  “Where are those marbles?” he asks.

  “They were there before and now you can’t find them,” I say, wondering where they are myself. He puts the box down and reaches for the Tinkertoys. I look at my watch. “In just a few minutes it will be time to go, Ben.” He ignores me and dumps out the Tinkertoys, selecting a long piece and two round pieces. He quickly makes a barbell, then walks his fingers up to it.

  “This little person is weak. He can’t pick it up,” and the hand fumbles.

  Then the hand walks again. “This big man can lift it!” And he lifts it high above his head.

  “Sometimes you are little and weak, and sometimes you are big and strong,” I notice.

  Ben nods. He folds the blue blanket haphazardly, collects his airplane, his dried painting, his piece of plain white paper, and we go out of the playroom together.

  Ben and I do not speak about the three weeks he refused to see me. I do not know with any certainty why he needed time away from me, nor for that matter why he decided to come back. And perhaps he doesn’t know himself. I trust his decisions, and do not press him for answers.

  During this session and over the next several weeks a clear pattern of playing emerges. Ben comes and chooses to make something, often a painting, and he calls the process magical. At some point during his play he becomes clumsy and extremely frustrated, either with the paints or with some toy he is trying to manipulate, and teeters on the edge of a temper tantrum. Then I intervene, either making a suggestion or removing the source of frustration, and redirect his activity. I am careful not to deprive him of the experience of frustration and of his own solutions, but wait until he is on the edge of losing control. Ben calls whatever I do “magic.” Invariably, my intervention calms him down. Then he makes himself more vulnerable. His voice changes, becoming small and sometimes sad, and often he lies on the floor playing baby, as he does in this session.

  This is the first time Ben labels his activity or mine “magic.” Magic becomes a theme to be replayed in many variations over the year: I am a magical lady, and Ben, too, is a magician. When finally he learns that I am not magical, he makes a wizard’s wand and points it at me to reinstate my powers. When gradually he learns that he, too, is not magical, he makes himself into magical beings, such as Superman or Santa Claus.

  Like all young magicians, Ben seems to believe that his wishes, his needs, have a special power. And they do—each time I respond to fill his need, whether to provide the satisfaction of painting or the relief of removing a frustration, Ben experiences his magic.

  I recognize that it would be easy to let all this magic go to my head and start to believe I know what Ben really needs, or that I can protect him from his pain. Yet I believe deeply that Ben knows what he needs and how to guide me. When I take the magic too seriously, I forget how to follow his cues, and the whole experience of magic is broken. On the other hand, when I hold the magic lightly, I allow Ben to become increasingly open to his feelings, especially his painful feelings.

  9

  As Ben becomes more open to his feelings, my feelings gather a new force and open too. September’s heat has given way to October’s golden chill, its shorter days.

  I run along the edge of the park near my apartment late in the afternoon, my body loping along at a forty-five-degree angle to my long shadow and the rippling shadows of leaves on the path. The strings on my windbreaker swish back and forth as I run. Crows cry out above. I remember my dreams clearly these days, at least parts of them. I dream of a little black bird with a drop of crimson on its breast, a little bird that goes out walking in the night, its footfalls so loud it sounds like one of those monsters we gleefully frightened ourselves with as children. I dream of a red barn that goes out for a winter night’s walk too. It lumbers down to a frozen lake and skates there until the ice begins to break. The barn stands on the shore. The ice breaks and floats in segments that tap together and part in channels of dark running water. Under the water, a girl’s face breaks up—I see it in ripples in the dark water as it taps the edge of the ice and disappears. I try to draw this face, and after many nights, finally succeed. I try to guess how old she is, but I can’t be sure. I dream of feet that go up rungs. I feel the pressure of each rung on my instep in the dream, but I’m not the one climbing. I see angels climbing up and down wooden ladders, the kind used for painting houses. Among the larger angels, I see the child-angel I thought I saw in the university library two months previously.

  Wind pounds the blood in my ears as I run. Gold branches catch the liquid light’s rhythm. Up and down with each footfall the hill rises up to meet me. I could
be running like this into infinity, or into my dreams. The horizon doubles, little silver dots of light fall down over the path, and shadows draw me into the recesses of dark trees. Everything seems terribly alive. I listen to surfaces and hear everything roaring with life.

  The world is too much alive, too much with me. This experience is not new to me, but I do not speak about it with my friends. I do not allude to it in supervision with Rachael or Mary Louise. I do not mention this world too much alive in my own therapy.

  I paint and write and sometimes look sleepy to my friends. We compose ourselves as a study group to prepare for dissertation work. We meet and then go out dancing, or go out for beer and pizza. I fall asleep at the pizza parlor. My friends wake me, give me strong coffee before I climb into my car to drive home after midnight, to dream again and waken early. I write and paint through the early morning hours.

  10

  Ben meets me in the hall, coming in from outdoors with a red nose. He reaches for my hand and leads me down the hall with his coat still zippered up. When we enter the playroom, he takes off his coat.

  “Take off my shirt, too?” he asks.

  “If you want to take it off, sure.” I am glad to see him.

  “No, it’s too cold. Take off my shoes?”

  “You want them off?”

  “Yes,” he says, offering me a foot and holding the desk for support.

  “Oh, you want them off. But I should take them off?”

  He nods. I kneel by him and put each foot up on my thigh, untie each shoe, and slide each one off. He pads around the playroom in his socks, looking all around. He turns back to look at me.

  “I am five years old. Soon I will be six. January eleventh I will be six. I will learn to write in cursive.”

  “You will!” I affirm. “Did you know we were born on the same day, Ben?” I ask.

  Ben looks at me sharply, raising his eyebrows. “Nope. You are way older than me. You are grown and I’m just coming up.”

  “That’s right. We were born in a different year.”

  Ben frowns. “Nope. You are older. I know.”

  He walks up to me. “I know, let’s paint.” I open the drawer with the paints in it and he pulls them out. He brings water, brushes and paper from the sink.

  He tilts his head and asks, “Will you paint with me?”

  “You want us to paint together?”

  I pull my chair close to where he stands. He paints a long blue strip along the bottom of the page, then turns to me.

  “You know what this is gonna be?”

  “Nope.”

  “This is a barn. Will you make it for me?”

  “I will do another part. You’re doing it fine.”

  He paints a brown stripe up the page over the top and down the other side. “Will you put a horse in our barn?”

  I take the brush and paint in a horse.

  “Make some hay for it to eat,” Ben says. “Lots. Put some in the barn so he can eat it. Put some extra outside too. A saddle. How ‘bout a saddle?”

  I add each piece as he requests it. He looks satisfied.

  “You paint good,” he declares. “When you grow up, you can make art.”

  “You think so?” Somewhat dismayed, I ask, “You think I am not grown up yet?”

  “No. You are all grown. But you are not as old as my mommy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You are grown up young.”

  His accuracy stuns me a little. I hand over the paintbrush. He paints a little boy in the corner of the barn, then picks a smaller brush and carefully paints the letters of his name.

  “You helped to paint, so you will help to clean up, too!” he announces, grinning.

  We stand at the sink running water over the fat bristle brushes. Ben leans over so that he is snug against the sink up to his underarms. “Ooh, look at the colors.” He laughs, and then he splashes me, a light splash, but I laugh and splash him back a little. This is the first time he has ever teased me. We lay the brushes on paper towels on the sink to dry.

  He puts the paint jars in the drawer and covers them with the apron. “I am putting them to bed. Go to sleep, paints. You wake them up in the morning.”

  He sits on a plastic chair and slides his shoes back on, then asks me for my assistance with the shoelaces. He picks up his coat in one hand and the painting in the other. He stands in front of the door and looks at me. I open it for him and he walks down the hall a pace ahead of me, dragging the jacket behind him, his entire attention fixed on holding his still damp painting away from his body.

  It is mid-October. I have been seeing Ben twice weekly since late August, with the interruption of his retreat. This is a session of many significant firsts. This “hyperactive, oppositional” little boy converses with me and paints in an organized, relaxed manner for nearly thirty minutes! He reaches out for my hand, then gives me his feet twice—to take off his shoes and to lace them up. For the first time, he invites me into his painting, creates the painting through a turn-taking activity. It is Ben who introduces the word our to refer to the painting, and it is Ben who teases me about helping to clean up, and then initiates splashing at the sink. I can hardly believe this is the same child who was labeled autistic one year before and now has to be restrained several times each day because it is so unbearable for him to give up control and to cooperate. I mark the difference and feel uneasy with it. I know that this is not an “integrated” picture. I wonder about this.

  It seems for all the world as if Ben has put big parentheses around our relationship, or rather, that we play together inside big parentheses. He sounds and looks like a different child with me, but this is not odd; so do all the other children I see, if not quite to such an extent. It is as if Ben has decided that the long sentence of his life can be broken up now, that he can play with me and enjoy it—almost as if he’s taking a break between his battles for control in the classroom and his rocking, head-banging nights at home in bed. For my part, playing with Ben brings me unadulterated happiness, a rare thing for anyone.

  11

  I sit in a seminar room listening to weekly student case presentations. The floorboards in this room are scuffed with desk tracks. We’ve arranged the desks around a large bare circle. White walls rise around us, fluorescent lights hover overhead, humming tubes of brightness. Three floor-to-ceiling windows stand together along one wall, closed tight. The slanting surface of my wooden desk is scratched with words. Its pencil slot at the top is etched in a line of thick lead, and it has a place for books underneath. I feel as if I could blink my eyes and find myself back in Sister Joel’s fifth-grade class.

  Today Darrell is presenting a case to us, his friends, his clinical colleagues. Darrell has thick brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses. It is rumored that he obtained perfect 800 scores on all three parts of the Graduate Record Examination.. An aura of envy and awe surrounds him. He is never entirely unguarded. This afternoon he wears a tie and suit jacket. I like him, nonetheless. We sometimes play racquet-ball. Now he presents a woman he calls Mrs. A., his voice dry.

  “Mrs. A., a forty-seven-year-old Caucasian woman, sought treatment with me for her adolescent son after he was picked up by the police for illicit drug use.” He loosens the knot of his tie and takes off his jacket, as if he is going to let us in on something big. “She appeared for her interview dressed in the fashion of a teenager herself. Although socially poised, engaging, and intelligent, she portrayed herself as helpless and confused when dealing with the demands of handling an adolescent ...”

  This is familiar enough to me: the case presentation, short, evaluative, the summing up of a human life in a few paragraphs. Darrell is treating Mrs. A. and her son, and he isn’t getting very far, from what I can tell. He’s diagnosed this mother as “borderline” and sees her son as the teenage delinquent victim of a “borderline mother.” Now he begins to discuss Mrs. A.’s “rapidly escalating confusion” around her son, and to consider her “seductive and inappropriate manner of rel
ating” toward Darrell. My throat tightens. I am suddenly irritated with Darrell, his seeming smugness, his test scores, his dry voice under the humming lights while others take notes, copying out his words, his brilliance twisted into this jargon.

  The professor uses Darrell’s case now to talk about “the provocative communications of some patients.” We are ready to be launched into another familiar genre—“the countertransference warning.” In the face of Mrs. A.’s “provocative communications” Darrell is instructed to hold to a consistent line of “appropriate expectations” and to keep his “boundaries” clear, because Mrs. A. shows a “fragmenting ego structure” and she needs this “structure” to support her son. We scarcely mention her son, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I don’t think Mrs. A. would recognize herself.

  I glance out of the corners of my eyes at my colleagues—a mix of strangers and friends, none of them really close to me. Not one of them seems in the least disturbed by this. Yet who among them would recognize herself or himself described as a case here?

  Driving away in the gray, muted green of the early evening, I want to hide myself in the yellow leaves and silent shadows, slink into the dusky edge of myself. Out of sync with the new clinical speech of my friends, I feel like a foreigner in a strange land. I admonish myself not to take it all so seriously. I roll down the window and the night air blasts in, roars in my ears.

  12

  Ben comes into the playroom and hangs back by the door. He wants to go back to his classroom to get the angel costume he has made for the school play. I tell him, “Yes, sure, go get it.” He reappears shortly, carrying a halo covered with tinfoil and a set of tissue-paper wings on wire. Rather than showing them to me, he puts them on my desk and goes past me to the toy shelves. There he turns and shouts:

  “I don’t want any Thanksgiving turkey!”

  Puzzled, I ask simply, “No turkey? Why not, Ben?”