A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  When I come to pick him up, he is angry, and though he is provocative, he does not lose control. When he shows me his makeup and requests to be “fixed” into a clown, I guess that he wanted that earlier, and use it as an opportunity to comment on how hard it was for him to wait: “It’s a hard job to wait, isn’t it?” He nods, and immediately decides to make full use of his time: “But now is our time. Hurry up and fix me!”

  The clown makeup isn’t part of his outdoor play. It is something he wants from me, but had to wait for, and as such it is part of the work of the session. Outdoors, he has a different piece of work to do.

  I wonder how Ben knows that I am ready to play out this fire scene with him. My dream is no coincidence; it prepares me for Ben’s play as perhaps nothing else can.

  In his play about being a fireman saving the baby and children in the burning house, Ben reenacts the old trauma he cannot consciously remember (he had been less than fifteen months old). In his play he reverses roles in two crucial ways: he is the competent person who was the rescuer, not the helpless baby who needed rescuing, and he also rescues the baby first and “forgets” the mother.

  In his play, he realizes his fear—the baby is actually burning and so is Tea Bags. What is different now? Now Ben is not alone. He has come back to this scene with me. He wants me to play a part, asking me to put out the flames. I also give comfort, and Ben mimics my comforting with Tea Bags, showing his compassion both in his cradling and rocking, and in his anxious question, “Are you all right?”

  The mother in his play frightens him, however. When he calls her “my imaginary mommy,” he implicitly distinguishes fantasy from reality ; but his other label for her is “sorceress,” a magical, powerful figure, and his emotional response to her is fear. So he teeters there behind the tree, balancing fact and fantasy, reality and wish. I ask Ben if the imaginary mommy can get out of the fire, and he says, “Yes, she can. And she will get me!” He is so afraid of her revenge that he is crying by now. The missing connection is an answer to the question, “Why should she want revenge?” I don’t ask Ben this, since I doubt he could know why, and instead I offer an interpretation, “For leaving her in the fire and wishing she’d burn up?” The look on Ben’s face confirms that there may be some kernel of truth in my guess. But my guess also frightens him. When I interpret again, “It is only a wish,” Ben looks immediately relieved. Here the world of fantasy shifts to reality. “Yeah, and it’s only a tree,” he says. I do not want him to dismantle entirely the powerful piece of playing he has done, to undermine his accomplishment, so I remind him that just a few minutes ago it really was a burning house.

  Ben is shaken, but not overwhelmed by this experience. He calms down immediately when I pick him up. He takes my hand in a gesture of simultaneous reaching. In the boys’ bathroom he sounds very vulnerable and wants me to take care of him in a physical, tangible way.

  What has happened here?

  When a child can’t remember events he continues to react to emotionally, they control him and haunt him. Cut off from him, his own fears and wishes, belonging to the forgotten events, come back in fantasy, play, or dreams. Here Ben reenacts a haunting scene, reversing roles, and projects his own wish for revenge onto the imaginary mommy, she who left him shut up in a burning house so long ago he can’t remember it—yet it haunts him. When I show him his wish and his own construction of this frightening figure as “imaginary,” he shifts from a fearful reaction to a startled acknowledgment of reality. Once Ben knows his own wish, the imaginary mommy cannot haunt him and he is freer; but he is also now vulnerable to his feelings of hate and revenge.

  I am beginning to know more fully how Ben’s trauma and mine overlap. This is incomplete knowledge, as it must be, since it is continually revealed in vivo. I am playing with Ben and Blumenfeld by moving toward and away from my own story of trauma.

  Ben and I play more intensely now and with greater freedom. We play from within our two distinct and overlapping stories. But when I am with Ben, the focus of our playing is Ben’s story. I carefully follow his cues, his feelings, and wait to see his responses to my interpretations. Perhaps this is an illusion on my part, however, for Ben did not play any mother scenes with me for those weeks while I was intensely remembering my terror with my own mother, and he played out this crucial fire reenactment scene just after I dreamed of our visiting the firehouse.

  How this unconscious knowing passes from one human being to another is a mystery to me. I sometimes wonder if it depends upon messengers. Are we surrounded by angels as we play together?

  But Ben and I are not playing within a single story. In order for our playing to take place at all, in fact, there must be two stories and two perspectives. When each person is emotionally alive and distinct in the process of playing, she or he notices and responds to the other. Both are filled with one another’s words and feelings, one another’s truths (even if some truths are denials), and the unnecessary distinctions vanish. The two create a world together and a new story. When this happens, it seems to me that each person playing, no matter how conscious or unconscious the process might be, participates in a new story and is healed within it.

  What has been wounded in a relationship must be, after all, healed in a relationship.

  76

  I begin to paint again. I paint the light on the windows. Not any light, but light reflected on glass. I paint the gray of dawn and the golden light of late afternoon and the blue-and-periwinkle light of dusk. The shapes of these colors reflected in the watery glass catch and hold my attention even when I am not painting. I hardly ever have time to paint midday, so I paint the bright light I imagine on the windows then. I paint yellow light that fades into whiteness. It is the most beautiful light I can imagine, yet it fills me with anxiety.

  What is it, then, now when shaken and stunned, in the paucity of anything that might help me to know, or even understand what I do not know, that makes me create these illusions of beautiful light?

  I dream of windows breaking, the sound of glass falling, that breaking and crashing a great relief, a big sea breeze of relief. I dream of breaking windows and standing by them to get air.

  I remember the firehouse dream, its sound. Ben was, he said, “breaking out of everywhere.”

  But in his own playing, he didn’t use his axe to break glass. A sense of fear sweeps through my body.

  He cried and said, “Carry me, carry me.” Was that in his play or in my dream of him?

  It was in my dream of him.

  In our play, he cried and I picked him up.

  I look up Ben’s record and realize that the little room he stayed in for the first fifteen months of his life had no window. Someone must have told me that months ago. There it is, plain as day, clear as light, written in the record. That little room he lived in must have been dark, not light.

  Why have I so often imagined Ben bathed in light?

  I paint the light at midday as if it comes from no identifiable source. Glaring. Electric. Yellow into blinding white. This is the realm of speculation and dream. Everything vanishes into that whiteness. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  People vanish and return, people vanish and never return. “Carry me, carry me,” the chant of a child’s terror of vanishing. People vanish and then turn up again to love and to torment. A child wishes they would vanish again.

  The white light is sweeping all my family away, as if by violence. But there is no violence in this light, nothing but my wish for air.

  And, meanwhile, I am talking to Rachael about how to tell Ben I will be leaving him at the end of the summer, the end of my internship. All the gestures of my painting and all the breaking of glass in my dreams seeps into and changes me, so that I feel my loss alongside Ben’s, even before I tell him that I will soon be vanishing.

  77

  Ben has one shoe off when he comes to see me on a rainy day in mid-July. He comes into the playroom and immediately picks up Tea Bags.

  “I’m go
nna paint inside today, Tea Bags,” he announces. “We will stay inside today,” he adds, turning to me.

  “I see you have decided that,” I say. “But where is your other shoe?”

  “In the classroom. I hurt my foot and it feels better this way,” he says.

  “How did you hurt it, Ben?”

  “I tripped and stubbed my toe,” he says absently, looking around the playroom. “Where’s the skirt?” he asks, opening a drawer to look for the painting apron.

  “I’ll show you where it is, but first I want to show you something else,” I answer, pulling down the calendar from the bulletin board above my desk.

  Ben comes and stands by my side, bringing Tea Bags. I knew this moment would have to come, a vanishing point in a painting, and now we are moving toward it and into it.

  “At the end of the summer I will be leaving Glenwood,” I tell him slowly. “And then, you won’t be seeing me, Ben.” I keep my voice steady as I tell him this.

  Ben stands and looks down at the calendar.

  I circle the last day of the first week in August with a red pen. “This will be our goodbye day,” I tell him.

  Ben continues to stand still. I cannot tell what he is thinking and feeling, and I do not want to press him into feelings he isn’t ready for or ask him to respond to such an important event before he has had time to take it in.

  I put a large red X on each day I will see him. “There will be time to say goodbye,” I tell him softly. “You will see me eight more times.”

  “Eight more weeks?” Ben asks, glancing at me.

  “No, eight more times,” I clarify. “Four weeks.” Now the point of vanishing is clear to both of us.

  Again, he stands very still, silent. As if staring into a nightmare, or a white mist. I don’t know how to reach him.

  “I want to paint today,” he finally says without looking at me. But he does nothing. The most ordinary request is tinged with the unbelievable enormity of this leaving.

  “Where’s the skirt?” he asks, opening a drawer.

  I show him where it is and help him to tie it on.

  He stands very still again, as if in a daze. It is as if his mind has emptied itself of everything to take this in, yet he cannot take it in.

  I wait, but Ben does nothing, says nothing. I cannot find the words I am searching for and my mind stumbles for them, frantically. Soon I stop searching and we enter a circle of silence that seems to exist outside of time.

  “You don’t know quite what to think or feel, do you?” I finally ask.

  He doesn’t answer me, but with my words he begins to move again, setting up the plastic mat, the water and brushes and paints. He selects a piece of white paper and paints a blue border all around it. As he works, he gradually grows more animated. It is as if the sun rises slowly out of a white mist into which we are already vanishing.

  “I’m gonna use every color,” Ben declares. “Is this magic? Is it?” he asks.

  “Are all the different colors magic? What do you think, Ben?”

  “No, I don’t think so anymore.” His observation resounds with time slipping away, a time he has already begun to remember.

  He paints in silence for a while, bent over the page intently. Then he stirs the brush vigorously in the clear water, turning it blue.

  “Ooh, look, Annie. Tea Bags, look. It is magic!”

  I smile at him. “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, hmm?”

  “No, it really isn’t,” he says, his voice low, and then with energy, “but it could be!”

  He stirs the brush in the red paint. “It needs some water,” he announces and begins to tilt the large container of water, then decides to try another way. He runs and fills the baby bottle, then dumps a little into the paint jar.

  “That’s enough, Ben,” I say, as the paint fills the jar to the brim, but he ignores me and pours in a little more. Expectedly, it overflows. Ben mops it up with a towel, then turns toward me.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asks. What is he asking, I wonder.

  “Am I mad at you for not listening?” I guess.

  He nods.

  “I am exasperated. Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “It means angry with a big sigh in it, and a smile right behind it. Get it?”

  “Yeah,” he says, but he still seems anxious.

  “Look, Ben, you wanted to find out if it would spill. You found out and you wiped it up.”

  He turns and smiles. “Yep. I did!”

  He paints a birthday cake in red, with six candles on it, and six tiny yellow flames.

  “This is a present for Tea Bags,” he says solemnly. He looks at the yellow puppet. “How old is he? Is he six?”

  “He could be six, that seems about right,” I answer. “That seems just right for Tea Bags.”

  “He’s my friend. Look, Tea Bags! I’m making you a cake. Annie will put Happy Birthday Tea Bags on it.”

  “I will? Yes, you know I will.” I take the brush and paint as he requests.

  “Let Tea Bags paint?” Ben asks.

  I put the puppet on my hand and carefully put a brush in its mouth. I have the puppet paint another cake, as close to Ben’s as I can make it, while Ben looks on.

  “Now, a big tall hat for me. A shiny hat with stars and dots,” Ben says, his eyebrows characteristically arched high in excitement.

  “A magician hat or a birthday hat?” I ask.

  Ben is puzzled about this. “Both!” he exclaims suddenly.

  Together we glue red and blue paper together and add yellow stars and pink dots. He leads me down the hall to the main office to have it laminated, running ahead of me and then back to me to urge me on.

  In the office, he introduces Tea Bags to the two familiar secretaries, Jill and Karen. “This is my friend Tea Bags.” He talks about his hat and asks them to have it “made all shiny.” When the paper goes into the laminator, Ben stands still and watches the clock, counting the seconds aloud with Nancy.

  “Boy, it’s hot in there! It’s getting all shiny!” he breaks out.

  I staple the high, wizardlike hat together for him and place it on his head. It covers his dark head so only his face shows, whimsical and serious.

  “I got to show this to Mrs. Engle,” he shouts and runs out. I have the sense that he is already leaving me.

  He reappears at the door. “C’mon, Annie, you come with me.”

  I’ve been searching all my life to play with a child as Ben invites me to play with him. Ben has found in me an adult who has the capacity to play with him and enter the drama he needed to play out in order to know that he has survived, a drama about abandonment. Yet Ben and I continue to search for one another, perhaps most intently, as we begin to say goodbye.

  But this ending is not Ben’s choice. I am the one leaving, and Ben has been left in devastating ways before. So I worry. Over the year, as Ben played with me, he has changed. He has changed me, too, as we played together. I can now hurt him and he can also hurt me, simply because we have become attached to one another. Harm is possible in our play, as well as healing.

  I am worried about how my leaving will affect him. I run a terrible risk if I deny that I can hurt him. But if I wait and watch for his moments of hurt, if I can sustain the courage to accept these moments as part of loving him, then perhaps we might heal one another, most poignantly touch one another, in saying goodbye.

  But saying goodbye is a risk to each of us, because love is fragile and cannot withstand any degree of hurt. So to deny the possibility of damage on both sides of this therapeutic relationship is also to deny the fragility of human love.

  Upon first hearing of my leaving, Ben seems almost in shock, standing so still and silent, listening and trying to absorb what I am saying. Knowing his history, I read his silent gestures. But I don’t know how to reach him, what words to bring to him. He is concerned only with the number of times he will see me, but does not approach the emotional experience of leaving me
.

  For the next several sessions, each time he returns, we look at the calendar and mark off another red X and Ben counts the days left. I sometimes suggest, “You might feel sad,” or, “You have spent a lot of time here, and now it is ending,” or simply, “It’s hard to say goodbye.” Ben ignores me, as if he hasn’t heard my words. But we mark off the Xs and I make these tentative remarks anyway.

  Today Ben uses the baby bottle to carry water. During the time left with me, never again does he use it as a baby bottle. Though it is not his birthday, he points out his age and Tea Bags’s age, solidifying his relationship to the puppet as peer and friend. Over the next four consecutive sessions Ben relates to me as a six-year-old boy—struggling to understand what is magic and what is not, trying to do things by himself, but including Tea Bags and me, and occasionally asking for help. Ben does not play the mama-baby games again with me, perhaps because to do so would make the leaving too difficult, perhaps because he has played out what he needed to, culminating in this awareness of the wish to leave the imaginary mommy in the fire. I do not really know.