Accepting the Personal in the Personal Essay

In this week’s “Revision Diary,” I am offering an account of how writer Mary Ann Payne and I worked from a journal entry to a finished essay.  Mary Ann told me that often when she tries to write an essay from a journal entry, she is unhappy with the results.  She feels that she sounds like a schoolmarm, but she also wants to keep from writing memoir, because she believes that essays should get “important information” out to people.  This idea that personal information detracts from the objective voice you want to establish in writing an essay is one we learned in school. As a reader, however, I believe that personal details and experiences are the vehicle for transmitting the important information.  When someone tells me a story from their life, I learn through their eyes.  Though Mary Ann was hesitant about personal information creeping into her essays, she did send me a journal entry and awaited my advice about how to use that entry as the basis of an essay.

 The entry she chose was about her training with the famous Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, who worked with autistic children as director of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago from 1944-1970. The entry arrived along with a note in which Mary Ann told me about a current life experience. Since I believe that what is going on in the now influences what we remember and record in journals, I kept the note in mind as I read the journal entry.

In the three sections ahead, you will see how Mary Ann wrote her way to understanding that the essay she wanted to write and some of her personal story were one.

The Journal Entry As you read the journal entry, remember you are eavesdropping on someone’s non-public writing, the kind of writing we do in journals to help ourselves contact experience.  At the beginning of the entry, Mary Ann is awakened from sleep and realizes there is a documentary on TV about Dr. Bettelheim.  She is angry at distortions that she perceives in the documentary. She records specific memories from her training to sort out truths.  Then she ponders the effects of Dr. Bettelheim’s ideas on others and compares his tone to the tone of the doctor who recently treated her husband.

****

Midnight, July 16-17, 2001

I fell asleep watching TV and woke to see Dr. Bettelheim’s eyes piercing my consciousness. It was only a fleeting moment but his stooped shoulders, round face in an equally round head and eyes magnified by inch-and-a-half thick glasses were unmistakable.  I always thought he looked like a gnome and I think the people who produced the documentary for KCET undoubtedly consider him one of the trolls that live under a bridge and eat goats for breakfast. The program totally discounted his work and distorted what I heard him say and teach some forty years ago.  They didn’t exactly come out and say he was wrong but they chose which film clips to use and exaggerate.  “Refrigerator moms” and “parents cause autism” are misconceptions I often hear in regard to his work and they were trotted out repeatedly tonight.  Those are not the most important things he taught his staff or wrote in the books I devoured.  He warned us of this by telling us what he learned directly from Anna Freud and from the books her father wrote and how that was different from the popular misconceptions about Freudianism.

Now, I feel like some cult member, ranting and raving to protect the reputation of the master. I don’t want to do that. I know that is not effective, and I know Dr. B. doesn’t need my protection.  Still, I learned so very much from him in the three years I worked at the Orthogenic School that it hurts when other people magnify and distort the mistakes he made. Robert Coles was a bit of a voice of reason, but he clearly distanced himself and put Dr. B. in the context of his times.  Still, I can buy that a parent under extreme stress could easily misinterpret Dr. B.’s exclusion of them from the treatment process and his autocratic harshness as easily as Dr. Duber’s abruptness was difficult for me to hear when Bob was facing his angiogram.

Maybe instead of railing against what others hear and propagate, I should list what I heard and learned:

• Don’t put the chocolate pudding on the table unless you want it to be eaten.
• Just because two people are in bed together doesn’t mean they’re having sex
• I only know three things. (I’ve figured out two.   What is the third?)
• Mary the Bear Man asking every new staff member “Do you eat chickens in Chicago?”
• Judith announcing, “Tornado warnings in the South!”
• Reading Judith’s file and discovering her mother was my babysitter. Maybe that is why I react so strongly to people thinking Dr. B. blamed mothers. If he believed mothers made their kids crazy, then Judith’s mother could have made me as crazy as Judith was. What a staff meeting that was when I dared to ask the question. I think I cried enough to fill up Lake Michigan all by myself and then walked away knowing that everybody makes decisions out of their awareness. Decisions that make sense at the moment and keep you alive in a dangerous situation and often we don’t look at those decisions again so we just keep using them even though they no longer fit the situation, my definition of being crazy, I guess.
• All pathology has logic to its path.
• “I don’t like Mary Ann because she tempts me . . . She makes me want to do things at the table instead of sit on my bed and rock.”
• Another tumultuous staff meeting where I learned to ask questions and listen rather than assume the occupants of the bed were having sex.
• Liv, a story in herself, a lesson in failure and healing and orange/ice cream concoctions at the The Hut as acknowledgement that we’d put up with a lot and that all our love and caring and competence and knowledge weren’t enough.
• Therapeutic milieu, People still don’t understand this. Half of my clients don’t understand that it is the little things that surround people everyday that are healing or destructive, The janitor who unclogs the toilet for the 198th time without complaining is as valuable to a crazy kid as a $400/hour psychiatrist. The woman who sews up the teddy bear seams and replaces buttons torn off clothing shows the child she is as worthy of attention as the graduate student with theories of causation. As a lowly substitute counselor who worked odd shifts, holidays and vacation, my observations were treated with the same respect as those of MA staff members.
• Therapeutic milieu, the lady in the courtyard, the carousel horse, the huge Steiff animals, the gardens, china plates and real glasses, crazy kids choosing bedspreads and drapes, the mural on the wall to the basement, the candy bowl that never emptied, staff living in the house, even tongue for supper
• The staff dining table
• The staff room
• Staff meetings, late night taxi rides back to the dorm, Sarah Lee brownies, tears and resolutions, the person who dared to raise the question probably didn’t learn as much today as the people listening, but she’ll never forget what she discovered. “Did I really go to 5 staff meetings a week?”  Yup, I just soaked up knowledge, more than I did in the ivy-covered classrooms across the Midway.
• Images engraved in the warp and woof of my being. I learned to listen to children at the OG School, and then I carried those skills to listening to parents, to people of diverse ethnic groups, to teens, to Kiwanis men. Bob says I always had listening skills but at the Orthogenic School, Dr. B. taught me to make sense of what I heard in new ways, to see the logic in the path of pathology, to understand in my gut that all people, even crazy kids and terrorists and pompous CEOs and me, are doing the very best we can any given moment to survive. If we could think of something better to do, we’d be doing it.
• But how do I explain the complex interweaving of parent/child systems that sometimes maintains and nurtures dysfunction? The co-dependency fad tried to but that got simplified and jargonized and used as a label very quickly. I wonder where the term “refrigerator mother” came from. I never heard Dr. B. use it.  I do remember more of his lessons though:
• It is not the trauma that causes lasting damage. It is how the trauma is handled, interpreted, responded to.
• It is not the drunk parent or the abusive parent who is the most destructive. It’s the inconsistent one, smiles one day, slaps you across the room the next. If a parent beats you when he is drunk, you learn to hide or stay out of the house, but if a parent brings candy and toys one day and kicks your pet and pulls your mother’s hair and takes his belt off to give you a whipping the next, you’re continually dashed between hope and despair and prevented from creating a safe, stable world view.  The importance of all milieus being therapeutic.
• Our job is to demonstrate that the symptoms which were developed as a life-saving mechanism are no longer necessary, that the world is basically a safe place filled with interesting things and caring people.
• The candy dish says. “There’s plenty of good stuff in the world for you to enjoy” and sometimes staff needed to learn that as desperately as kids.

The Doonesbury Review published an interview with John A. Murray who published Another Country: Encounters with the Red Rock Desert this spring.  He uses 15 short stories and 15 essays to explore one little part of the desert. That is the kind of container/vehicle I need for my Dr. B. stories.  Maybe, but how do I separate the universal from the personal?  How do I get out of my defensive posture?  Where does the anger and pain fit?

Enough. One of Dr. B.’s perennial questions was, “When would you act the way Susan (or Robert, or Rosalind) is acting?  When do ‘sane’ people act ‘crazy’ in this fashion? ” (When they’re over-tired and over-stimulated and don’t want to stop.)  Anyway, we’d pick up a tag end of the tangled yarn that was a child’s life and see what we could unravel.  My life sometimes feels as tangled and amorphous as those hints of sanity, but now I know a good night’s sleep will restore a semblance of order to my world so enough is enough.

From a T-shirt I saw in a catalog, “I live in my own little world, but it is okay, they know me here.”  Good night Gracie!

The note that came with the journal entry said that Mary Ann had hoped to use some of her journal entries in writing over the summer, but instead, her husband had had:

a “routine” stress test, which led to a “routine” angiogram, which led to “routine” quadruple by-pass surgery and our life was suddenly anything but routine this spring.  Now he’s officially well.  I’ve resumed daily walks and have learned to cook differently, and I’m ready to give my writing serious attention.”

She continued:

My recent journal is full of how I re-created a safe, nurturing milieu that was healing for both Bob and me. I think that’s probably valuable to lots of people, but I don’t want a “true confession” or a memoir or even a “how-to/inspirational” piece. I just want to move my words from a private to a public sphere. In the section of my journal, I’ve sent, I am writing about what I learned from Dr. Bettelheim when I studied with him that helped me through the difficult days of being a care-taker and having to make major life changes that I didn’t particularly want to make.

I read the journal entry in light of the note Mary Ann had written about her recent life experience concerning her husband’s heart and her fear that writing anything with the tone of memoir wouldn’t be rich enough.

I wrote the following comments back to her:

As I track my reading of the two pages (influenced by your cover letter about your husband’s situation), I go from the speaker’s angry response to a TV program slamming Dr. Bettelheim’s research and being. The speaker studied with him personally, learned a lot, and feels the media has slanted their view to gain an audience and jump on a bandwagon.

The writer draws a parallel between the parents’ response to Bettelheim’s autocratic harshness and Dr. Duber’s abruptness, which she experienced concerning her husband’s angiogram.

The parallel stops there.

Then the speaker lists interesting nuggets from her experience that express what she learned studying with Dr. B.

The two entries on the therapeutic milieu stand out with clear details, long lists, and images that reach this reader quickly and begin to make a point just in their existence on the page.

Listening skills and making sense of what you heard in new ways shows the effect of learning on the speaker.  Interesting!

Refrigerator mother comes back, as the speaker wonders where the term came from and reports that she knows that she never heard Bettelheim use that term and doubts he coined it.  Then discussion of more learning and I find myself somehow reading this info as if it is a double entendre –knowing that Bettelheim taught it and the speaker is now realizing it pertains to her as well as it did to when she was someone working with patients.  And the candy dish image, well, with a husband recovering from heart problems, certainly the image one chooses to reinforce that there is plenty of good stuff in the world must replace food no longer healthy for him! Come to think of it: refrigerator mom may have another meaning besides the one Bettelheim detractors want it to have:  how many people feed their loved ones as a symbol of love and how often is that feeding destructive to good health?  How many of us use our TVs with their constant food ads as our refrigerator mom telling us to eat and eat and eat to feel happy and have what we deserve?  (And what do we get and do we deserve it?)

So, you can see that I see a connection between your husband’s medical ordeal and the anger and pain you experience in hearing others misunderstand and misrepresent a beloved teacher, deeply criticize him and cart him off to the outskirts of the profession’s thinking.  Do you feel that maybe you felt attacked somehow by what the doctors were saying to you?  Do you think that in their medical strictness they weren’t creating or seeing the therapeutic milieu that we all try to create for ourselves at home and in love relationships” I’m not sure, of course, about where that anger and pain are located, but I think fishing around for it may help you decide on a thread and a form for an essay here: is there some denial that parallels the denial of the media about Bettelheim’s contribution?  Does the Cole voice of reason correspond to any voice in the situation with your husband and his medical needs?  You’ve learned to cook differently now but the message is the same even if the cooking is different: love.  What message from Dr. Bettelheim do current day practitioners and family have to maintain?  Is it an interest in the therapeutic milieu or something else?

I suggest you begin an essay in the present with the “closest to you healing job” you have ever taken on (your husband’s health) helps you intertwine Bettelheim teachings and experience with your current day experience that will serve you well.

This journal entry is rich, rich, rich.  To use it well in writing for publication look for those places where there is great charge for you. Ask yourself why are you writing this now?  And look for the places of great learning:  what do you know now that you never knew before?

I look forward to an essay from you that may start with an anecdotal account of Dr. D. and his abruptness and then a swing into what you know about the therapeutic milieu and then offer a description of the way you must create one for yourself and for your husband during his recovery.  What new part of the milieu do you know now that you didn’t know even though you’d listened to and helped so many people? How did using listening as the warp and woof of your being help you in your situation with your husband?  Or did you have to work at it to regain this important skill and apply it?

So often our deepest reactions to events in the world (the program on Bettelheim) have their source in our own arguments with ourselves.  I can’t wait to see your draft of an essay!

The Draft:

Mary Ann sent her essay draft along with this note:

Here are three blurbs.  I’ve separated them by pound signs so the process is clearer. I wrote the sketch on the introduction to the Orthogenic School and Dr. B. on Sunday morning when I received your first comments about the journal entries. In my head I heard, “Start where the child is, not where you want her to be,” which is good advice from Dr. B. and from every Early Childhood Education professor and mentor I’ve had.  Since I was still stuck in the parents’ reaction to Dr. B’s behavior, and since, “The writer draws a parallel between the parents’ response to Bettelheim’s autocratic harshness and Dr. Duber’s abruptness” jumped off the page, I started there.

My current concerns: This sounds more like a memoir than an essay and I want it to be less personal and more universal.

Here is the essay draft Mary Ann is speaking of along with the comments I made, which are underlined:

Dr. B. and Dr. D.

I think you are ultimately going to use a title that has to do with your transformation.  I can see this in the juxtaposition of the doctors, one from the past and one from the present.

The carousel horse smiled enticingly from one corner; the 10-foot tall Steiff giraffe peered wisely down its long neck from another.  A firm but comfortable maroon couch filled with needlepoint pillows and two stately wingback chairs crouched between the animal sentinels. Mother sat primly in the chair closest to the horse, twisting a linen handkerchief with a tatted edge nervously in her hands. Father strode rigidly back and forth in front of the fireplace on the opposite wall. Although both hands were firmly clasped behind his back, his right one would occasionally escape his steely grip to slide horned-rimmed glasses up his patrician nose. Standing quietly in front of the giraffe was a small, shrunken boy in blue shorts and a striped tee shirt. One sock was crumpled around his ankles and both shoelaces were untied. One tiny hand reached out tentatively to touch the giraffe’s front leg.

“Peter, don’t touch. Come sit here beside me.” The mother moved in slow motion to the couch and patted one of the pillows.

“Son, you heard your mother. Now move!” barked the father as his hands thunderclapped in front of his body.

“Nonsense!” boomed from the doorway. “Let the boy touch vat he vants to touch.  Dis room iss frrr de kinders as vell as frrr de parents.”  Dr. B. had made his appearance.  He must have looked like one of the trolls who ate unsuspecting goats as they crossed fairy tale bridges. His body was bent from the atrocities of Buchenwald. Glasses with inch-thick lenses further magnified his piercing blue eyes. His thick Viennese accent was commanding. Bruno Bettelheim was renowned among his professional colleagues for his pioneering work with autistic children, but he was viewed with considerable trepidation by parents seeking help for their deeply disturbed children.

Gingerly lowering himself to Peter’s level, Dr. B. focused his entire being on the forlorn child.  “It is OK to touch.” His voice was suddenly as rich and mellow as a vat of chocolate, and just as seductive. “Giraffes don’t speak, you know, but they make very good listeners. When you vant, I get Helga who can show you your new home.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Peter hugged the giraffe’s foreleg with both arms and slipped into the safety zone under the animal’s tummy. His hands followed the tree trunk legs up above his head to the soft underbelly and somehow, timid boy, noted professor, and stately giraffe were suddenly sprawled in a giggling tangle in the middle of the oriental carpet.  Without thinking, the father grabbed the boy in one huge hand and tried to stand the giraffe upright with the other.

“What did your mother say about touching things?” he growled. “Now see what you’ve done.”

“Leaf de boy alone!” thundered Dr. B. “Don’t you hear his laughter? Tell me, ven did you last hear your son laugh?” And a single tear cut another scar in his wrinkle-lined face.

“Dere, dere, Petre, it’s OK. De giraffe just vants to play with you. Shall ve help him stand up so he can have a snack?”  With one hand, Dr. B. pointed to the green and blue leaves painted on the ceiling and down both sides of the corner. His extended his other hand to the boy in friendship and assistance. Together they sunk into the prone giraffe and pushed themselves to their feet. Then, with Peter firmly attached to the giraffe’s leg as anchor, Dr. B. slowly and steadily raised the new ally to his own majestic height. Turning to the father, he explained, “At de Ortogenic School, ve do not touch kinders vithout der permission.”   The nod to the woman almost lost in the couch pillows was accompanied by a curt, “Most mutters don’t cry ven their sons laugh.” He turned to Peter and the two were soon lost in a discussion about what food giraffes eat and food that little boys eat and how to guard against poisons.

At the precise moment that Dr. B. was reassuring Peter that he could appoint his counselor as a taste tester, Helga appeared in the doorway.  She was an unimposing, pillow-soft woman in her mid-twenties with soft curls tumbling in twenty directions and eyes that matched the earth tones in her corduroy jumper. Around her neck was a hand-strung necklace of beads clearly created by a child and in her arms was a lacquered tin box mounded with miniature bars of candy.  Nodding to the parents, she moved as silently as a fawn to crouch beside Dr. B. and Peter.  “Hi Peter,” she crooned. “I’m Helga. I’m one of the people you might choose to be your taste tester. What a royal sounding title that is!  Would you like to choose a bar of candy for me to test now?”

Peter cocked one wary eye toward his mother, but his small hand was already making its way resolutely toward the Mounds bar just peeking out the side.  “No, Peter,” was the whisper-soft but firm response. “You know you’re not allowed to have candy before you eat lunch.”

“Silence!” came the thunderclap. “No laughter? No treats to help make a strange place more velcoming? Helga, I think it is time to show Peter the place he’ll live and learn to be a real boy who can enjoy the world around him.”

Both parents stood, stunned with shock and disbelief, as Helga and Peter left the room sharing bits of Mounds bars and Hershey’s kisses.

****

“Do you drink coffee and sodas?  Not anymore! Do you eat out? Not any more!  Do you eat chips and pretzels and snack food?  Not any more! Do you like ice cream and pie a la mode? Not anymore!”

The litany beat in my eardrums like an African drum warning of approaching danger.  What was the doctor saying?  Bob had come to hear the results of a treadmill stress test, and the only warning we received that something might be amiss was the referral from our rotund, friendly family physician to this lean, acerbic Dr. D., a respected cardiologist. Show where you are, using the eye for detail that you used in the opening description of Bettelheim’s waiting room.

Words were exploding like firecrackers around me. I couldn’t breathe.  The leather chairs, plush carpet and certificate-bearing walls slowly creeping inward were suffocating me.

“Stop,” My voice was quiet but firm and it carried decisively into the continuing chant.

“Do you eat French fries and onion rings?  Not any more! Do you eat bacon and sausage?  Yes?  What is it?  Speak up.”

“Please tell me what is happening?  Why are you telling us everything we can’t do?  When will you tell us what we can do?” I asked.

Dr. D. breathed a long, slow, trying-to-show-how-patient-he-was sigh. “Mrs. Payne, your husband has four major blockages in his arteries and unless he follows our orders, you’ll find him dead on the golf course some day. Now, you go back to the waiting room while we make the arrangements for surgery. ” He motioned for the nurse to escort me back to public spaces.

You must have had feelings about being asked to leave the surgery plans to the doctor and your husband, and you can describe them here. After I read below, I had some thoughts concerning rearranging the information you offer in the next section to show these feelings. Hence, my sentence below about moving the paragraph right after the pound signs up into this area.  Additionally, to stay in the doctor’s office scene, think about how you and your husband connected after seeing the doctor and what you thought then in terms of becoming a support for your husband. You could draw on your associations to your training and what happened between patient and doctor.  This might be the place for the scene in Dr. B’s office with the young boy and his parents.  Next, you can include your method for translating the aggressive tone in what Dr. D. was saying so you can become a support rather than an antagonist in your husband’s situation.  You might do this by using another anecdote from your training, which shows a way of learning to listen and hear the other person. Right now, I’m thinking that your ending might be something about courage.  Not the rhetorical question about whether you’d have it, but an actual finding of the courage!  You are certainly now like the boy’s parents, who had to have courage to trust Dr. B, who was so different than they and seemingly taking their child away. I think the essay will become universal when it shows what we all face in the role of support to those who are in a doctor’s care: we become the outsiders and it takes courage to be there!

****

This next paragraph probably comes right after the doctor tells you that you must leave the room:

Images crowded my mind:  my father’s death when bypass surgery succeeded but fragile arteries couldn’t carry the increased blood pressure; TV hospital dramas with Code Blue cutting through the background as scurrying feet and menacing machines filled the screen; the middle-of-the-night phone call announcing the truck’s collision with a patch of black ice that totaled the car and broke Dirk’s shoulder; the look on two parents’ faces as their child was taken behind heavy fire doors munching on a Mounds bar.

That was my lifeline back to myself.  That scene from my college days would guide me to a place of power and resiliency.  I often used the lessons I learned from Bruno Bettelheim during the two years I served as an assistant counselor at the Orthogenic School. Usually, however, the images were of children and the words involved in helping them untangle the hidden meanings of their symptoms, finding the logic to the path of their pathology. This time, I was seeing the parents’ side.  I’d never done that before, but then I’d never before felt so totally erased by someone who had power over a loved one either.  It was time to write and unravel.

As I wrote, and heard the words repeated in my head, the humiliation slowly evaporated and I could hear the messages behind the words. “Your son/husband is my primary concern. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with him or for him, but I do know I don’t have energy to deal with both his disease and your fears at the same time. You need to take care of yourself. I’ll take care of him. To continue living, you must change.  None of you will be the same again.”

The parents were brave enough to trust Dr. B.  Would I have the courage to trust Dr. D.?

****

The Revised Draft:

MaryAnn reported that the next version, which she did after digesting my comments, took her in a direction that she wasn’t expecting.  In the end, though, she found a title that worked for her. “Dr. B.’s first, and probably most famous book,” she explained, “is titled Love Is Not Enough and is part of the brouhaha about his methods of working.”

Here’s the essay Mary Ann wrote when she let herself take the turn she wasn’t quite comfortable taking:

When Love Is All You Have
By Mary Ann Payne

The only thing that distinguished this particular examining room from dozens like it was the huge wall chart of hearts in all manner of disease and disarray.  The rest of the room was familiar and predictable, high narrow table sitting cattycorner, white enamel cabinets with boxes of disposable gloves and canisters of gauze in their proper places, a blue HazMat trashcan towering over a silver cylindrical stepcan, and pictures of steam locomotives on institutional mauve walls. My husband sat frozen on the edge of the examining table, slowly putting the second button into the third buttonhole, his suspenders crumpled beside him like the useless straps of a window washer’s platform at the end of a shift.  I was squeezed into the single plastic chair wedged into the only available corner.  The cardiologist perched on the cabinet, casually swinging his custom-clad foot in time to an imagined beat.

“Do you drink coffee and sodas?  Not any more! Do you eat out? Not any more! “Do you snack on nuts and chips?  Not any more! Do you eat ice cream after supper? Not any more! Do you eat French fries and onion rings?  Not any more!” The litany beat in my eardrums like an African drum warning of approaching danger.  What was the doctor saying?  Words were exploding like firecrackers around me. I couldn’t breathe.  The diseased hearts on the chart were sucking all the air out of the room

“Stop!”  My voice was quiet but firm and it carried decisively into the continuing chant.

“Do you eat Mexican food? Not any more! Italian? Not any more! Do you eat bacon and sausage? Yes?  What is it?  Speak up!”

“Please tell me what’s happening?  Why are you telling us everything we can’t do?  When will you tell us what we can do?”

The doctor breathed a long, slow, trying-to-show-how-patient-he-was sigh. “Mrs. Payne, your husband has four major blockages in his arteries and unless he follows my orders, you’ll find him dead on the golf course some day. Now, you go back to the waiting room while we make the arrangements for surgery.” And he motioned for the nurse to escort me back to public spaces.

Questions spun like whirligigs in my mind.  Was enjoying a bowl of rocky road after supper every night the cause of my husband’s heart disease? What about the hamburger I browned for enchiladas?  Should we cancel the birthday party with friends at the Chinese restaurant? Weren’t nuts healthy? And what was this nonsense about finding Bob dead on a golf course? He’d never even set foot on a driving range, and he wasn’t about to take up that fool game at 65. Vivid images pushed out the questions: my father’s death when bypass surgery succeeded but fragile arteries couldn’t handle the increased blood pressure; TV hospital dramas with Code Blue cutting through the background as scurrying feet and menacing machines filled the screen; the middle-of-the-night phone call announcing the 4 x 4’s skid on black ice that totaled the truck and broke Dirk’s shoulder; and suddenly, the look on the faces of two parents during my training with Dr. Bettelheim, when their child followed a worker behind heavy fire doors munching on a Mounds bar.

****

The carousel horse had smiled enticingly from one corner while the 10-foot Steiff giraffe peered wisely down its long neck from another.  A pillow-encrusted couch and two stately wingback chairs crouched between the animal sentinels. Mother sat primly in the chair closest to the horse, twisting a linen handkerchief with a tatted edge nervously in her hands. Father paced rigidly back and forth in front of the fireplace located on the opposite wall. Although both hands were firmly clasped behind his back, the right one would occasionally escape his steely grip to slide horned-rimmed glasses up his patrician nose. A small, shrunken boy in blue shorts and striped tee shirt was standing quietly in front of the giraffe. His clothes were immaculate and not a hair was out of place. Even his fingernails looked spotless. One tiny hand reached out tentatively to touch the giraffe’s front leg.

“Peter, don’t touch. Come sit here beside me.” Mother moved in slow motion to the couch and patted one of the pillows.

“Son, you heard your mother; now move!” barked Father, his hands thunderclapping in front of his body.

“Nonsense!” boomed from the doorway. “Let ee boy touch vat he vants to touch.  Dis room iss frrr de kinders as vell as frrr de parents.”  Dr. B. had made his appearance.  He must have looked like a troll who ate unsuspecting goats as they crossed fairy tale bridges. His body was bent from the atrocities of Buchenwald. Glasses with inch-thick lenses magnified his piercing blue eyes. His thick Viennese accent was commanding. Bruno Bettelheim was renowned among his professional colleagues for his pioneering work with autistic children, but he was viewed with considerable trepidation by parents seeking help for their deeply disturbed youngsters.

Gingerly lowering himself to Peter’s level, Dr. B. focused his entire attention on the forlorn child.  “It’s OK to touch.” His voice was suddenly as rich and mellow as a vat of chocolate. “Giraffes don’t speak, you know, but dey make very good listeners. De giraffe und I vill listen a bit. Den, ven you vant, I get Helga to show you your new home.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Peter hugged the giraffe’s foreleg with both arms slipping into the safety zone under the animal’s tummy. His hands followed the tree trunk legs up above his head to caress the soft underbelly. Suddenly, the timid boy, noted professor, and stately giraffe were sprawled in a giggling tangle in the middle of the oriental carpet.  Without thinking, Father grabbed the boy in one huge hand and tried to stand the giraffe upright with the other.  “What did your mother say about touching things?” he growled. “Now see what you’ve done?”

“Leafv de boy alone,” thundered Dr. B. “Don’t you hear his laughter? Tell me, ven did you last hear your son laugh? And a single tear cut another scar in Dr. B.’s wrinkle-lined face.

“Dere, dere, Petre, it’s OK. De giraffe just vants to play vit you. Shall ve help him stand up so he can have a snack?”  With one hand, Dr. B. pointed to the green and blue leaves that seemed to grow on the ceiling and cascade down both sides of the corner where the giraffe lived. He stretched his other hand to the boy in friendship and assistance. Together they sank into the prone giraffe and pushed themselves to their feet. Then, with Peter firmly attached to the giraffe’s leg as anchor, Dr. B. slowly and steadily raised the new ally to his own majestic height.

Turning to the father, he explained, “At de Ortogenic School, ve do not touch kinders vithout der permission.”   The nod to the woman almost lost in the couch pillows was accompanied by a curt, “Most mudders don’t cry ven their sons laugh.” He returned his attention to Peter and the two were soon lost in an animated discussion of food that giraffes eat and food that little boys eat and how to guard against poisons.

At the precise moment when Dr. B. was reassuring Peter that he could appoint his counselor as a taste tester, Helga appeared in the doorway.  She was an unimposing, pillow-soft woman in her mid-twenties with soft curls tumbling in twenty directions and eyes that matched the earth tones in her corduroy jumper. Around her neck was a hand-strung necklace of beads clearly created by a child and in her arms was a lacquered tin box piled high with miniature candy bars.  Nodding to the parents, she moved as silently as a giraffe to crouch beside Dr. B. and Peter.  “Hi Peter,” she crooned. “I’m Helga. I’m one of the people you might choose to be your taste tester. What a royal sounding title that is!  I don’t think I’ve ever been given such an important job before. Would you like to choose a bar of candy for me to test now?”

Peter cocked one wary eye toward his mother, his small hand making its way resolutely toward the Mounds bar just peeking out the side.  “No, Peter,” was the whisper-soft response. “You know you’re not allowed to have candy before lunch.”

“Silence!” came the thunderclap. “No laughter? No treats to help make a strange place more velcoming?  Helga, I tink it’s time to show Peter where he’ll live and learn the vorld is a pleasant place for kinders.”

Both parents stood, stunned with shock and disbelief, as Helga and Peter left the room sharing bits of Mounds bars and Hershey kisses.

****

I hadn’t thought about Dr. B. and my experiences working with autistic children for years, and now this painful scene– the most controversial of his actions replayed in full Technicolor and Surround-Sound. Before I could begin to understand how this might be connected to my situation now, the door to the back offices opened and my beaming husband appeared.  His shirt was buttoned correctly, color had returned to his cheeks, and he was vigorously pumping the doctor’s hand.

“Sounds like a plan,” he agreed. “Next Thursday I go in for an angiogram and then we look at the repair job we have to do on this faulty pump of mine. I’ll bring that book on the mechanics of hydraulics I mentioned.  I think you might find it interesting.”  Turning to me, he beamed and said, “Ready to go?”

It was more of a statement than a question, but I sat glued to my seat in total shock and disbelief. Here I had him at death’s door, and he was talking mechanical engineering with the doctor.  In a corner of my mind, I was stopping at the grocery store to get chicken and some fresh salad greens for a healthy supper to prolong his life for a few more days, and he was ready to race me down the stairs. I pulled my bones out of the too-soft couch and walked in a trance through the door he held open for me.  As we waited for the elevator, my husband continued to pepper my consciousness with words that barely made an impression.

“Yessir! I’m certainly glad Dr. C. sent us here.  This Dr. D. is a non-nonsense man who says what he thinks and knows what he’s doing. No namby-pamby hand-holding and equivocating around the bush. He comes straight to the point and tells it like it is. It hurts, sure it hurts, but it’s a nice, clean, sharp hurt like the cut from a newly honed knife. And that means it will heal quickly, too.  All a matter of physics, my dear. Now, what’s for supper?”

****

What was I doing?  What could I be doing? I was pacing aimlessly through the quiet house, unable to sleep, unable to write, even unable to lose myself in my favorite books.  We’d stopped at the grocery store, fixed the chicken with wine and fresh rosemary so it wasn’t totally tasteless, read all the handouts the cardiologist had provided, and talked until the wee hours of the morning. Then Bob punched a spot for his head in his pillow, rolled over once, and started snoring his gentle little rolling gurgle. I breathed deeply and acknowledged each exhalation, imagined myself sitting beside a mountain stream, counted my blessings, and still couldn’t find a shred of relaxation much less the comfort of sleep. In quiet desperation, I finally got up to roam the house searching for answers. Now I was wearing out the carpet in our tiny living room. I shook the cat awake and answered my questions with a vehemence I didn’t realize I possessed.  I was working at holding my fears at bay so they didn’t overwhelm him, and leaving our comfortable bed so Bob could get a good night’s sleep.

Where was I in all this mess? Mary Ann: wife, confidant, lover, friend–where were they? Left out. That’s where I was, alone and lonely. I was lectured about what I could no longer do, patted on the head like a good dog, rewarded with pamphlets and banished to the sterile waiting room while Bob and the doctor formed a relationship over charts and diagrams. Was I supposed to pretend that I wasn’t affected by this turn of events?  Go on with life as usual even though my internal world was pitching as violently as our house did during the Whittier quake?

The cat looked at me with her all-seeing eyes. She was used to these night-time disturbances and knew it was the price she paid for living with an emotional human. She blinked once and lifted her neck to be scratched. I stopped pacing and huddled under the down snug sack in my slightly sagging but oh-so-comfortable recliner. My feelings were still frozen but tears were threatening to break away. I was back in the doctor’s waiting room, humiliated at being excluded, too shocked to be angry, alone with my frightening thoughts. Detail after tiny detail flashed before my eyes and then I was once again in the living room of the Orthogenic School.  I saw the connection I had looked for earlier.

This time I wasn’t the impartial observer watching from the doorway. This time I was inside the parents’ skin. I was feeling their fear, their anger, their sadness, and their helplessness.  Wave after wave of mind-numbing emotions washed over me, tossing and turning my mind like a beach ball caught in the tide. This time I was feeling the agony of seeing someone I loved walk away to a place where I couldn’t follow.

I remembered how one night staff crammed into double rows of chairs and couches in the tiny off-duty room for the weekly late-night staff meeting, resident staff dressed in bathrobes and curlers. Those of us who had just come off duty rubbed the sleep from our eyes, stretched sore muscles, and took off our shoes.  The environment was informal but the meeting was far from casual. Every eye was trained on Helga, Peter’s taste tester, who was alternately weeping and raving.

“I think he stayed awake just to manipulate me. He knows I have a staff meeting and he could probably guess I wanted to present tonight. He was just being mean and spiteful and refusing to go to sleep.  And after all the trouble I’m having choosing anniversary gifts for him. I just wanted him to–.”

“Stop! Stop!”   The hand was raised like a policeman’s but the words were surprisingly gentle. “Vat is going on here? Vy should a little kinder like Petre vant to torment a nice girl like Helga? And his third anniversary just a veek avay. Come now, let us put our heads together and figure out vat is going on here. You know de question– ven vould you act dis vay?”

The box of Kleenex had made its way to Helga and after saturating a half dozen she was able to answer between sobs.  “When I was mad at my folks. When they didn’t get me what I wanted for my birthday. Then I’d get mad and throw a temper tantrum and stop them from getting what they wanted. Oh, and now Peter is mad at me because I don’t have the slightest idea what to get him for his anniversary, and he knows that, and….

“Slow down. Slow down.”  Again, the cautionary hand was in the air stopping the flow of words and emotions.  “Dat is a possibility, true, but I doubt it. After all, you’ve taken good care ov Peter up to dis time and he hasn’t opened his anniversary presents to see what a faker you are.  Somvun else? Anyvun else? Ven vould you stay avake ven you knew your parents vanted you to go to sleep?”

“When I was thirsty.

“When I was scared of the monsters.”

“When I wanted to hear what they were saying.”

“When I need to go to the bathroom.”

“When I wasn’t sleepy.”

“When I wanted to finish the chapter.”

“Exactly, you stayed avake for your own reasons, not to torment your parents. Und all of dose reasons ver gut ones.  De all deserved to be treated seriously. And vat did you want from your parents?”

“To be heard,”

“Cuddled.”

“Noticed.”

“Included.”

“And how did de do dat?”

“By listening, by cuddling, by getting a drink of water, by telling you they’d see you again in the morning, by looking under the bed. Now Helga, you’re a smart girl. You know dese answers. In fact, you’ve done all these tings and more, right?  Vy couldn’t you tink of dem tonight?”

“Because I was so tangled up in my worries about what to get Peter for his anniversary.  Because he HAD to go to sleep so I’d have time to prepare my talk for tonight.  Because I HAVE to have answers about what to get him.”

“Your needs, not his, nein?  And so you try to get in your parents’ heads instead of trusting you own. So?  Ven did Petre go to sleep?”

“When I listened to him, and got him a drink of water, and sat beside his bed, and told him I’d see him tomorrow morning at breakfast.”

“So, you do know vat to do to help a child go to sleep peacefully. I said you vere a smart girl. Now, vat are you going to get Prince Petre for his anniversary?”

“How should I know? We haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet.  I need your ideas.”

“Vat?” The word exploded in the air and sent visible shock waves through the staff.  “Ven vill you learn vat you already know?  I don’t have de answers. YOU have de answers. Tink and feel and you will know vat is right for you to give Petre! Staff meeting iss over. Ve haff vasted enough time on your foolishness.”  And with that, Dr. B. moved determinedly from his chair to his office across the hall.

The room was quiet.  Anne Marie got up to get sandwich fixings and brownies out of the fridge, Stephanie set out coffee mugs for cocoa, and Helga wept quietly with her box of Kleenex. We knew better than to offer suggestions.  We knew Dr. B. had ears like our mothers’ that could see and hear the tiniest movement or sound. On a deeper level, we also knew he was right. Only Helga had the answer to her question. Only Helga had established a tenuous but strong relationship with the quiet boy who loved giraffes. Only Helga knew what would best to express her care and concern to her young charge. Peter would recognize that love and be strengthened by it and next year, the agonizing process of choosing the “right” gift would prove easier.

****

The sun was peeking through the curtains. My box of Kleenex had soaked up the Nile, but I had learned again that the answers were within me. Bob was in good hands with a doctor he trusted.  He would be all right. I was a smart girl and I knew how to care for someone with love and respect. If I listened to myself, I’d know what to do when it was time to do it. Together we’d be courageous enough to take the next steps on our separate but intertwined paths.

Can you say something about a change in diet?  It seems like such a strong thread. Were you thinking beyond all that you could not longer cook for Bob to what might be interesting to try?  Something about that would tie things up well here.

Mary Ann revised the last paragraph: The sun was peeking through the curtains. My box of Kleenex had soaked up the Nile, but I had learned again that the answers were within me. Bob was in good hands with a doctor he trusted.  He would be all right. I was a smart girl and I knew how to care for someone with love and respect. If I listened to myself, I’d know what to do when it was time to do it. I’d already fixed chicken a “heart healthy” way. I could fix French toast with Egg Beaters for breakfast. I could throw out all the old cookbooks and treat myself to new ones.  Next week, we’d go to The Thinnery and choose desserts we could enjoy with friends.  And next year, I’d know exactly what to buy for Bob’s heart’s anniversary gift.

“Here it is,” Mary Ann wrote when she sent the new paragraph.  “I didn’t see the food theme running through it. It’s so obvious I’m amazed at myself, but then I still consider food to be a major ‘issue.’ ”

What a grand testimonial Mary Ann has written to the writing process, to life, and to the wisdom and wished for “something useful” in her essay!  It takes being specific about our experience to find the wisdom in it.

When you are shaping essays, remember that backing away from personal stories diverts you from finding the wisdom in your experience.  Weaving personal experiences together, however, helps you find wisdom you didn’t know you had, and it helps you pass this wisdom on.  When Mary Ann called up the memory of Dr. Bettelheim’s dialog with Helga and his staff concerning the knowledge needed to cope with little Peter, Mary Ann saw how she could apply the insight she gained long ago to her current crisis.  That is the magic of essay writing–self-growth and sharing lessons useful to others.  What we learn about Dr. B and his approach is certainly indelible and worthy of our respect, but it is the speaker, Mary Ann, who wins our hearts.  Without talking theory, Mary Ann allows us to see the value of Dr. B.’s ideas despite his seeming harshness.  She wanted to defend him and she did this by showing us the way his teachings helped her make a change she needed to make.  Sparked by the desire to place Dr. B.’s teachings in a proper context, Mary Ann wrote an essay that works well because it evokes the way she called up Dr. B.’s lessons just when she needed to use them! She found that the proper context for her experience with Dr. B was in fact her own life.