Imagining motherhood is like imagining old age: there are no reliable forecasts. I assumed I would know more. While pregnant, I supposed that mothers’ intuition was a hard, certain thing, a perpetually replenished reservoir of basic instinct. If there were problems, the gut would howl. If there were risks, the heart would rattle. If the jumbled trivia of daily existence were pulled into a knot, the mother’s hands would separate the strands. But it has not been that way for me. If there is a road map or compass inscribed in my soul, I have not found it. Every day since the first with Jeremy has been a mystery. I am no wiser for having given birth.
During Jeremy’s first two years, I heard — out in the world, at the grocery store, at the park — how other mothers spoke to their children: firm, decisive, self-confident. You have had too many cookies. You are not behaving well. We will not buy that. You will stop eating that chocolate because I am your mother and I know what’s good for you. Their methods were banal, but I admired those mothers for their hard, fast lists of rules. I wondered at the unequivocality of their instructions, their encyclopedic knowledge of right and wrong. I felt inadequate, permeable, without conviction.
I took my son’s side, avoiding argument. I didn’t just let him eat chocolate; I introduced him to it. I gave him time, because it gave me time to watch his features settle deeply into his face. We were alone together day after day, and there were no rules, no map. I got away with this for a while. In fact, in many respects it seemed I had been let off the hook: Increasingly, Jeremy wasn’t asking for much. At the stores, he did not point and insist. In the stroller on the porch, he watched the sky intently, passionately, as if reading it. At home, he had no favorite food he called for, no TV habit for me to discourage. He made no whining demand that we play this one game or another. I could have left him alone for hours with his cars — he was that self-contained, that self-engaged. His Fords, Chevys, MGs, and old Rolls-Royces were spectacular creatures trimmed in glimmering chrome and painted midnight blue and lipstick red. He would lie on the rug and bring them in close and roll them back and forth. Then he would park them in mathematical pinwheels, and none could be moved after that. I began to step with meticulous care around his artlike constructions, feeling the house slowly freezing into place. I suddenly felt much too tall to be a mother, as if no amount of stooping could bring me into my son’s space.
I perceived this to be my own failure. I did not mention it to the few friends who still called. I hid it from my family. Whenever the topic arose with my husband, I changed the subject. At night, I lay awake in the dark and wondered about mothering, worried about my lack of instincts, and concluded that love alone was not enough.
Nervous and lonely, I began to rearrange Jeremy’s ordered world. Though it was cars he adamantly admired, I started insisting upon books. Though he craved solitude, we spent increasing amounts of time with the boy next door — his bright balls, his predictable mix of boy things. Though order was sacrosanct, I upset the symmetry, putting this Ferrari there, that Model T on the shelf, a clutch of white flowers on the sill among his hats. I was trying to move Jeremy out of his world and into mine, to find a common ground.
But it wasn’t enough. I had to conclude that perhaps my son needed time away from home, some new friends, a chance to respond to someone else’s ideas. There was a woman I’d met who kept children. She had a house, a daughter, two young charges, an organic garden. She seemed at ease with herself, perfectly confident in her ability to mother. After several chance encounters and a formal meeting, we agreed that Jeremy would spend five hours a week in her care. With great precision, we laid out what he would do, how she would treat him, how much it would cost. Though it was unspeakably painful for me to lay the groundwork for a separation, I believed it was for the best.
It was the middle of August. Jeremy had just turned two. Outside, the air was wet as steam. On the floor above, Jeremy lay unsuspecting, transfixed by his cars, while I packed his stroller with everything he would need. At 9:30, I climbed the stairs, pushed open the door to his room, and called his name, but he didn’t look up. I called again — Jeremy! Hey, Jeremy! — moved toward him, bent down, turned his face to mine, pulled him away. He came unwillingly, a limp, heavy weight in my arms, one hand still curled around a miniature, old-fashioned milk truck. He wailed in protest. We’re going to go make some new friends, I told him.
We lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, a place I loved for the wildly varying colors and shapes of its 1920s-era houses. They stood right next to one another and were perched perilously close to the street, some with stone porches, some with sagging eaves, some with junkers in the back yard instead of swings, some recently remodeled, done up like beauty-parlor queens. Children were everywhere on that street — boisterous and mostly well cared for, normal in every sense of the word. Mothers clustered on stoops, engaged in ragged conversation. Fathers drove secondhand cars to work. It was a casual society, easy to blend into. But that day, carrying Jeremy through the front door to the waiting stroller, taking his blows on my shoulder and chin, I was nothing but an interloper, shattering the calm. Fighting the stroller, fighting its seat belt, fighting me, Jeremy hollered his anger all the way down the street. I walked behind, saying soothing words he refused to hear.
The sitter lived a few blocks away, on the other side of the rust-colored train tracks, past the brown-brick warehouse of party supplies, past a faceless manufacturer of steel bolts and fasteners. The quickest way to her house was a diagonal route through the community park, a wide expanse of green with a dusty baseball diamond at its center, two splintering benches on either side of home plate. At that time of day the park tended to be empty save for the swarm of striped bees at each trash can and the contingent of mosquitoes near the trickle of a creek. By the time Jeremy and I reached the park, his screams had softened into a sobbing, wordless disbelief. Thinking he might be able to hear me now, I began talking again. I’m taking you to a friend’s house, I said, and there will be new toys there, better food, a new routine. You won’t have to bore yourself silly with those cars. Give me that milk truck, Jeremy. Uncurl your fingers. Show me that you trust me at least that much.
That first day at the sitter’s, I stayed more than an hour, waiting for Jeremy to settle in. There were three other children in the house: the sitter’s daughter (nicknamed “Genius”), a ringleted girl, and a baby boy just learning to crawl. They all seemed shockingly mature, verbal, direct, and opinionated. There was a hierarchy to their play: Genius was the ordained leader, the youngest child alternately mascot and dud, the middle child a follower, flirting and appeasing, screaming loudest of all whenever the balance of play was upset. The sitter had a small, well-kept, straight-out-of-a-magazine house. There were no hallways, just rooms, so it was easy to see from one space to another, to watch the older children as they chased between the kitchen and the toy chest and around the dining-room table, two stick ponies between their legs, galloping in delight and fury. The sitter was at the sink scraping carrots for a snack. I had sat down on the family-room couch. Jeremy, the milk truck still in his hand, was running a confused and anxious circle before me — seemingly deaf and blind to the other children, taking no interest in the pine chest of rattles, puzzles, plastic books, army trucks, and dolls. This will be fun, I told him without much certainty. The other kids want you to play with them. Look. . . .
I stayed too long, whispering weak encouragements to my son: Genius is playing with dump trucks; go see. Can you show the baby this plastic book?
He’ll do better without you, the sitter finally advised from the kitchen.
OK, I’m out of here, I said. I held out my hands to Jeremy and kissed him on the cheek, like a promise. When I come back, I told him, I want to hear all about the fun I know you’ll have.
I heard Jeremy cry as I turned the knob on the sitter’s door. I heard him as I descended the six cement steps. I heard him as I walked past the hedge, through the metal gate, into the field, across the diamond. I heard him when, by all rights, I should have heard only the bees, their electric buzz of panic in the hollow of old beer cans.
Twice a week, for two terrible months, Jeremy and I made our way to the sitter’s. I would pack his things, climb the stairs, call his name, and finally stand over the realm of his play, in violation of his ranks and patterns, until his body closed like a fist and his eyes refused mine and his whole being decried the destination he could now anticipate. Once outside, I would strap him, bucking, into the stroller and push him through the heat, past the gaze of the women chatting casually on stoops, who had learned to wait until we passed by to continue their gossip. At the sitter’s, I would stay — urging, confounded, despairing — while she diced celery at the sink and Genius led a mean parade and Jeremy raced in frantic circles at my feet, trampling a path into the carpet.
At home at night, my husband and I spoke of adjustment, of natural reactions to unfamiliar circumstances. We weighed Jeremy’s terror against his solitude, his habits, his lying immune to the world on the floor of his bedroom. We hid our anxiety from one another, drew reassuring conclusions, thought it best to give it time. A clean house, organic food, other children — wasn’t this what Jeremy needed? Increasingly, I wasn’t sure, but I pushed on, not knowing any alternative.
Through August and September and into October, I read Jeremy’s behavior — his solitude and rage, his desperate circles, his empty gazing at the sky, his indifference to sleep or food — as an indication not of his inability to connect, but of my own inability to mother. These were the consequences of a mother without a map, a parent who had fallen so deeply in love with her son that she had kept him from the world too long and now lacked the grace to push him into it. It was my fault, and I asked no one, save Jeremy, what to do.
And then I went to a good friend’s wedding in Atlanta, and for the first time Jeremy and I were apart. How disorienting it was to pack my bags and get on a plane, put a book on my lap and start to read it. Once I arrived, I was surrounded by other friends of the bride and a kaleidoscope of conversations that made no sense to me because they seemed so carefree: easy laughter, incidental stories, rumors, gossip. We paired up and rented cars, rustling maps, forecasting grand adventures. Someone else drove. I sat in the back, taking in the roadside advertisements and the yellow plains of Georgia, having nothing much to say. I was that full. I was that empty.
It was a wedding of initials — M.D.s, Ph.D.s, D.M.D.s — except for me and the best man, who sold boilers in Caterpillar country. After vows, rings, kisses, and cake, I summoned the nerve to track down a pediatrician and explain, in the quiet corner to which I’d dragged him, that I was worried about my son. He hums these melodies, I said. He hardly looks at me, rarely puts forth a sentence. I slumped against the brocaded wall of the reception room as the doctor began enumerating possibilities — debating with himself, it seemed, rather than answering me. I’d see a specialist, he said, at the end of all that, and then he was off, heeding an old friend who was waving to him from across the room, rescuing him perhaps, keeping things light.
Afterward, I escaped to the city with two old friends and drove three different roads named Peach to a faceless motel. We took a room on the motel’s backside, where the neon sign of the Tattletale Inn next door didn’t shine. The talk was female and vaguely familiar, and I sank into it, finding myself in the middle of a friend’s story before I understood where it was leading: It breaks my heart the way her whole life is seeping into his, but thank God they diagnosed it early. There’s medication for cases like these, and lots of therapy. In the best-case scenario, the child can be trained to escape his own terror. But it’s clear as day the autism’s changed her whole life. Her husband wants to leave. She’s lost her family dreams.
Long after the others had crawled to sleep, I lay awake listening to the bang of doors and the sound of footsteps from next door. I imagined the Tattletale refugees — big men and broken-toothed women. All night, I thought about that struggling mother, and I grew frightened for her. I despaired over what my friend had said, how she had defined the word autism: preoccupation with inner thoughts, daydreams, fantasies; disregard for the real world.
Jeremy did not remember me when I came home from Atlanta. He stared past me and ran in circles, and one afternoon he flung himself deliberately from the top of the staircase. I was right behind him, but not close enough, and he fell and fell. After that, I stopped taking him to the sitter’s. I stopped taking him to visit the boy next door. I started driving him around for hours every day, so that he could not run in circles. I was terrified, desperate.
Late that October, Jeremy and I met my mother at the local shopping mall. It was a gray day, raining, the trees molting soggy leaves, and I felt more than the usual anxiety at the prospect of an afternoon with my mother. I had been hiding something from her — hiding Jeremy. On top of that, I was feeling vulnerable, and angry at my husband, who had begun to suggest that something was wrong with Jeremy, that a doctor should be called. Please be OK, I pleaded with Jeremy as I pulled him from the car. We’ll be here for only an hour. Please be good.
But you can’t lie your way out of trouble. My husband and my mother knew that. You can’t come in from the dismal rain with your hair all wet and your nerves shot and your son in your arms and say things are good. Nor can you say things are bad and blame it on yourself, when perhaps no one is to blame. You can’t even speak. You can’t believe how deep the hurt goes, or how black things look, how broken. I know what’s going on, my mother said, before our jackets were even off or the stroller unpacked, before Jeremy, eyes averted, small hips bucking, was even settled in. I know a doctor. He’s a friend of a friend. He’s waiting for your call.
“Where Silence Starts” is excerpted from Beth Kephart’s A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage, to be published in June by W. W. Norton.
— Ed.
