A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  He stares at me intently, his eyebrows knitted in a deep frown, his hands tense, one with a forefinger extended, the other in a tight fist. Why is he so upset, I wonder vaguely. Suddenly he relaxes and smiles and walks right up to me. He carefully lifts the set of wings from my desk top and opens them up. They are a mosaic of brightly colored tissue paper.

  “See my pretty wings? I’m gonna be an angel.”

  “I do see them. And you made them yourself?”

  “Yep! Wanna see how I can fly?”

  “Show me.”

  The wire on the wings has a loop for arms, arm holes, but the tissue of the wings themselves is also glued to the same wire frame. In his hurry, Ben pushes his arm straight through the wrong loop and shreds one of the beautiful wings. He tears off the wings, ripping more tissue, and backs into a corner. His face flushes red and he stands there making little grunting noises.

  Gently, I tell him, “I know they seem wrecked, but we’ll fix them, Ben.”

  “Shut up!” he shouts.

  He suddenly turns toward the wall and kicks it, then bangs his head against it. He grabs my bulletin board, as if to tear it down, and as I reach out to stop him, he lunges for the door. But I have a good grip on one arm. He strikes out with his free hand, screaming and kicking. I quickly pull him down on the rug. I have seen Mary Louise and other Glenwood staff restraining children who are out of control, but they were never alone. Here it is just Ben and myself, and I have been dreading such a situation. Surprisingly, I am not frightened. As I struggle to find a good restraining position, Ben bites himself and me repeatedly. His eyes are dilated with fear, wild. “Let me go!” he shouts. Then he bangs his head against the floor-a hard thud. This effort seems more deliberate, a request to hold him more securely, not to let go. I get him into a position of eye contact and protect his head, as I have seen other staff do. He strains and squirms, screaming as we make eye contact. This is no longer a scream of anger, but a cry of fear and pain. He turns his head and bites my wrist hard. I feel his sharp teeth penetrate and involuntarily shout, “Ouch!” For a moment, I want to turn him over and spank him, but this makes no sense given the state he is in. Ben pauses in his struggle. “I’m sorry I bit you,” he says. We are panting from the exertion of the struggle, and when Ben relaxes for a moment to say this, I let go of his arms. He strikes out in hard fists, clearly showing me he still needs restraint. I turn him over on his stomach and pull his shoes off his feet and hold onto his arms. In this position he can struggle, but he can’t bite or kick or hit me. But he stops struggling and breaks into convulsive sobbing, then rocks his head from side to side on the rug. The motion seems to calm him a little, and he continues rocking mechanically for a long time. I watch him and wonder how to comfort him. Words seem completely inadequate.

  “Ben,” I say softly.

  He screams and rocks harder, as though to get away from me. I am still, silent.

  Finally he stops the rocking motion, and then I release his arms one by one. He puts his hands under his forehead and gently bumps his head against them. His shoulders and neck are still rigid and tense. When he is still, I relax my hold and let go. I sit beside him, one hand on his back. He sits up and looks at me, his eyes red from crying. Someone knocks on the door and I get up to answer it. It is Mary Louise, wondering if we are OK, since I have gone well over the session time. I tell her that Ben is not quite ready to return to class.

  As we speak, Ben picks up a handful of blocks and throws them at the wall. I sit near him on the floor again, my heart racing. He raises a block as if to throw it at me and I reach for it. Again we struggle, and again I restrain him. He stops struggling very quickly this time, and lies still. What does he need to hear, I wonder. I speak to him.

  “I am bigger than you are, and I am not going to let you hurt yourself or me.” He does not scream or cover his ears. “Listen, things didn’t go so well today, Ben, but it doesn’t really change anything. I still like you. I still care. I still believe you are good, maybe not an angel all the time, but more good than bad. We’ll go on, just like before, and you can still be an angel in the school play.”

  He is very still, and his hands, which still hold his head tightly, slowly relax. His fingers uncurl and he begins to breathe evenly. I stroke his hair and he does not pull away. I sit beside him and he slowly sits up too. He is wet with perspiration.

  “Can I make a paper rocket?” he asks.

  “No, not right now.” I offer him a paper cup and a plastic straw. “C’mon, bear, we’re going to get a drink of water and wash up.”

  He follows me out of the playroom.

  After I take Ben to get a drink and then back to his classroom, I return to my office to listen to the tape and write up the session, as is my practice. I complete my notes and stand up. My knees are shaking, so I sit back down.

  I close my eyes and see an infant boy alone in a crib in a small locked room, screaming and rocking himself. I wrap my arms around myself and cry, allowing Ben’s pain to wash over me in great waves. What was it like to be an infant alone in a crib, locked in a room, with no hope of human comfort? Was he wet or hungry, did he cry? In his rage, did he scream? Did he rock himself to sleep and waken to greater hunger or thirst or rage? Desperate with longing for human contact, his lifeless surroundings wet and now cold, perhaps he screamed through his misery again and slept. No one came. At what point did he become so tortured by the interminable waiting that it was overwhelming? He did not give up. His vital being demanded contact. And now he goes on recreating the torment, trying forever to reinstate the missing response. I am certain that his pain is precisely as serious as it sounds.

  There is so much more than control or lack of control at stake here. When Ben was trying on the wings, he already had his hands full of something else; he had his small hands too full even to handle what he was holding. When he teetered on the brink of losing control in previous sessions, he was showing me how hard it was to deal with any frustration he could not solve right away. Perhaps I was not as helpful as I thought by intervening when his frustration seemed too much for him. I will never know. But it seems to me that my responses to Ben were the sort of behavior every mother of young children knows: when a child struggles with his or her feelings up to a point, frustration serves the child well, but beyond that point it leads to loss of control and to overwhelming feelings the child cannot handle.

  On this particular day Ben came in already upset: “I don’t want any Thanksgiving turkey!” I did not know why he was upset, nor how to respond, so when he dropped the subject abruptly, I went along with him. Then he tried to show me his “goodness,” both in the angel costume and in his desire to try the wings on and fly for me. When he tore them in his attempt to show me his goodness, he became furious, and his fury was much too big for him to handle. Had he done anything short of trying to hurt himself or hurt me, I would not have known how to help him contain his rage; I would not have tightly wound my arms about him in full contact with most of his body. Only when I had him in a very secure position could he feel the fullness of his pain. Only then did his sobs break through.

  Ben has shown me, very clearly, how he learned to comfort himself when overwhelmed by his feelings: he tunes out human voices and rocks himself, but this comfort is really inadequate. After our first struggle Ben was still very tense and tearful. He could not allow me to leave him. When I moved away from him to speak to Mary Louise, even briefly, he threw the blocks at the wall, and when I did not intervene, he aimed a block at me. The second time our struggle was much shorter, perhaps because he was tired, but also because I had learned a secure position to hold him in and did not have to experiment. Something was missing from the first experience and he needed to repeat the struggle to get it. I do not know what. He brought me an angel costume and then showed me himself at his worst. I tried to put these two parts together for him and to tell him that he wasn’t all bad, nor all good. Once he heard me and began to relax, he could also accept my str
oking and become really calm.

  That night I take home my notes as usual, and several bruises and bite marks to remind me of the fullness of Ben’s fury and pain.

  13

  One of the bites gets infected. By Saturday I am hot with fever.

  I lie in bed, propped up on pillows, a glass of 7UP and a plate of saltines on a chair beside me, listening to the faraway sounds of the world: cold wind rattling the glass windows of my back sunporch; children’s shouts coming from the back alley; music drifting down from a radio of an upstairs neighbor. I have taken a paintbrush to bed with me, and I brush the soft flat bristles under my nose, back and forth, back and forth—a soft comfort, the motion of childhood. I have no energy to paint, but two pictures come to me, finished already.

  A brown oxford shoe and white ankle sock dangle above the floor. The entire picture would include the whole child—in a blue school uniform and white blouse, sitting on a wooden chair—but this is a close-up of just her shoe and sock. I remember sitting on a chair by my bed like this, being punished for some transgression. I remember the hard seat against my bottom and my feet dangling, a stinging on my legs. My shoe was untied and I remember looking down on it, without the will to tie it. I am not subdued—and the rage I feel mixes with a terrible sense of shame. I don’t remember anything else.

  The second picture is the archangel Michael fighting with the adolescent girl at the Psychoanalytic Institute parking lot. Except that they aren’t down on the lot; they fight on a grander plane, up in the dark heavens, turning and rolling out there among bright pinpricks of light. As I see this picture, I feel strong arms about my whole body, wrestling with me—and I know what it is to fight with all my being and have that fury seen and met. I am both maddeningly matched and deeply comforted.

  I know what it is to sit with rage and shame, and I know what it is to be met in the strength of my fury. I know that my willingness to see and wrestle with Ben is essential to that relationship. My love and respect for him deepens. He has fought me with all his strength and I have fought back with all my strength. I turn my face into the pillow, into that coolness on my cheek, and finally sleep.

  I dream of running down a dark hall. I dream of a hand on my arm, a tight band, and a knot of pain above the band. I dream of my own hands as a child, bitten around the cuticles, ragged, tasting of pencils and blood.

  14

  When I come to get Ben in his classroom, he rises from his desk and quickly comes right up to me. I see his little body is tense, and give him the key to open the door to my office, a ritual I hope will make me and the room familiar. I have set several animal crackers out on the desk, and Ben says, “For me?” He suddenly breaks into a smile, but his body is still tense. He picks up one cracker and stands several feet away from me.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “I believe that one’s a rabbit.”

  He bites the ears off carefully and shows me the cracker.

  “Now it’s a rabbit without ears,” I comment.

  A small knowing smile from Ben and another bite which removes the tail.

  In this way he eats the rabbit and I comment on each missing part: rabbit without ears, a tail, leg, head, etc.

  Ben downs the last bite.

  “No rabbit!” I say in mock surprise.

  This is a safe activity, a way for us to make contact again. But Ben is also clearly anxious. He fidgets with the drawing paper on my desk and hops from foot to foot. “Can I go to the bathroom?” he asks.

  I let him go and wait for him in the playroom. He reappears shortly, but hangs back by the open door, playing with the doorknob, neither in nor out.

  “You’re a little afraid to be with me in here today,” I guess.

  Ben smiles, but he is clearly wary. He taps the sign on the door.

  “What does this say?”

  “It says Do Not Disturb. That means don’t bother us now,” I tell him.

  “Don’t bother us,” he repeats and closes the door and comes in. He walks around me and comes to a standstill by my desk. He offers me an animal cracker—a bear, I notice. He watches solemnly as I eat it. Then he opens a desk drawer and finds a white piece of rolled paper.

  “My bones!” he exclaims. “I will be a skel’ton,” he decides, on the spot. Then wistfully, “Will you help me?”

  “How can I help you, bear?”

  “We need to make bones and bones and bones! A mask and feet,” he says, his eyebrows raised high in his anticipation.

  I assemble paper, tape and scissors for him from a new set of supplies out of his reach. I watch him cut the paper and try to roll it, but it bends and comes unrolled each time he tries to tear off tape and tape it. Struggling with frustration, he whines, “Help me!”

  I do not want to make the costume for him; that would only tell him he is incapable. Nor do I want to leave him to struggle alone—that would tell him I am not willing to help. I take the paper and scissors from his hands. I will help, but he will direct and he will help, too.

  “Show me how big this bone should be,” I say.

  Ben marks off the length in the air with his palms open.

  “I will hold the paper steady. You cut, all right?” I ask.

  In this manner we put the costume together. The last part we cut out are “shoes,” pieces of paper which fit neatly over Ben’s red sneakers. I ask for a foot and he puts his foot up on my leg and allows me to fasten the shoe with a string around his ankle.

  “Boy, they won’t even know me!” he declares. I attach the “bones” to his blue turtleneck jersey and brown corduroy pants, as he directs me. He suggests using tacks, but I decline and use paper clips.

  “I won’t get hurt. I don’t ever get hurt,” he protests.

  I point to the Band-Aid on his forefinger.

  “Oh,” he allows.

  Suddenly he breaks into a wide smile. “Look at me! This is fun today! Let’s do this all the time!”

  “You liked making this costume today, hmm?”

  “We made it,” he corrects me. “And I will take it home.”

  I hand him scraps of paper to throw away and clear off my desk top and we leave together, Ben rustling down the hall in his bones.

  Ben is wary, as if he can’t quite believe we’ve both survived the struggle of our previous session. In his play with the animal cracker, he destroys something bit by bit while maintaining contact with me. He has not destroyed the relationship we’ve built, but he is not really sure of this. His anxiety shows clearly when he goes out to the bathroom and returns but doesn’t come into the room. When I explain the DO NOT DISTURB sign to him, I am trying to tell him that it will be all right for him to be alone with me—I don’t want any interruptions. Then he comes in, ready to play with me.

  Before, Ben moved back and forth between playing baby and being helpless and playing out his need to control. Today he is able to be both helpless and capable, to give directions and to take directions. The kind of costume we made, even its quality, does not matter so much. But the process of finding out how to make it together marks the beginning of a more cooperative relationship.

  It is curious to me that Ben (and the other children I see) almost always use the art supplies in the playroom, and that they also draw me into the process of making art, sooner or later. The other therapists and interns hardly use the art supplies. I was an art major originally as an undergraduate, and continue to draw and paint. Ben discovers our pleasure in making things together. He comes back to make costumes and repeat this joy: becoming a clown, Santa, and a reindeer over the next several sessions.

  But Ben does not repeat his tantrum—not in this session or ever again. He certainly will be tense, frustrated, disappointed and angry at times, but never again so overwhelmed. At home and at school his self-abusive behavior decreases, but does not disappear altogether.

  15

  I sit up in bed, my eyes wide open, like one of those dolls I had as a child. Whenever I sat them up, their eyelids fle
w wide open. My pulse races. Outside it is snowing; I can tell by the light on the shade, the muffling of sounds. I can’t remember the dream, but I shake myself from it, and don’t want to fall asleep again. I put on slipper-socks and a robe and go into my study. The Christmas paper-whites have bloomed already, though it is only early December. Paper stars above slender green tongues, white rocks in a blue bowl that holds ugly brown bulbs. The scent of their flowering enters every room. At first I did not like their peculiar odor—it made me fearful, a smell of something burned and dampened but still smoldering. But now that I have grown accustomed to it, I don’t mind.

  The world is quiet and remote tonight. I find myself asking, “Where was he?” I don’t know how that question came to me, but there it is—under my nose, so to speak, and I think aloud the longer version of it: “Where was Ben when they decided the first foster home was not any good for him?”

  I fall asleep and waken in the morning to snow flung over the trees and fence and yard, waken from dreams I don’t recall. I remember the smell of paper-whites, a burning smell, and a question. I don’t remember it clearly now, but it was about Ben. “Amnesia” goes through my mind—now there’s a word! I push away a sense of rising fear with practiced nonchalance and quickly butter my toast. My mind plays with other words: “memory repression,” “psychogenic fugue.” I feel muddled with these clinical terms that reveal nothing. I am going to be late if I don’t focus and hurry. As I sweep off the car windshield, a line comes to me, whole, like a finished painting—“What you fear most has already happened.” I do not apply this line to myself but to Ben, and then I remember my question of the previous night.

  That day, and consistently every day for the next two weeks, I call the Division of Children and Family Services about Ben’s first foster placement. I get the runaround until finally, one day, a clerk in a record-keeping office gives me the missing information: Ben spent most of his first year and a half alone in a crib, locked in a small windowless room. When a fire broke out in the house, he was discovered there in his crib after the family had been evacuated and the fire extinguished. That was how he was removed from his first foster home.