October 4, 2007
Writer’s Block
It is almost the end of the year. This is only my first column for this space for the year. Checking into the archives, I find that the last time anyone has heard from me is exactly a year ago. It has been a long time, long enough for me to start doubting my own abilities as a writer. Long enough for me to question if anyone else would even care to read what I had to say.
Is this writer’s block? For many months, I would sit in front of the computer for hours, fiddling with the keyboard, forcing myself to type endless streams of gibberish and hoping that the words would somehow mercifully string themselves into sentences. Most days, there was nothing there except that: gibberish. I’d wake up the next day and it would be exactly the same excruciating experience all over again. Pretty soon, I started avoiding this futile exercise altogether. My fount of words had dried up inexplicably.
But what had caused this strange affliction, one may ask? For one so naturally verbose and loquacious, losing precious words meant losing a grip on life. I should have seen it coming, true, but then again, nobody ever imagines the worst until it stares you in the face. Let me then bring you back to November 2006, when my world started to unravel.
I was living a writer’s dream late last year. I had regular assignments. I wrote from the home and went out a few times a month to do research and the occasional interviews. Balancing this dream with my real-life responsibilities as a fulltime mother and primary caregiver to my sons was a total breeze, it seemed. Alexander, my eldest, was wrapping up the last few months of seventh grade. Alphonse, my autistic son, was thriving beautifully under strict routines and schedule at home. We were so hopeful that Alphonse’s developmental gains were becoming permanent that we had even begun decreasing the doses of his medications.
Then, tragedy struck. With a little more than a week’s notice, our ABA provider removed our therapist, essentially depriving Alphonse of his most important foothold to normal life. Unable to provide us with immediate replacement, they could do little but check in on us occasionally. There was no one else left to continue the teaching program except me.
It was a task I willingly shouldered. In truth, it was just a minor sacrifice in the big scheme of things, but Alphonse had severe difficulties adjusting to the new situation. Still, I did not feel too bothered at first. Alphonse had his nannies and me, and we strove to make him feel like nothing was amiss. But each day, he would wait for his teacher to come at nine in the morning. He would bathe and dress up, sit outside in our plastic lawn furniture, a bottle of bubbles in hand, and wait. And wait. And wait. I could not coax him to come inside the house. He simply wanted to wait.
As the days wore on and still no teacher in sight, he would be, in turns, disappointed and distraught. Some days, he would cry a bit and flail against our attempts to calm him down. Other times, he would wail pitifully and ask to be shown the empty doorway over and over again, as if to make sure that there was really no one there. I decided to move his sessions outside because he would not go inside the house. He still wanted to wait.
Barely three weeks later, his nannies left this time. Now there was only me. Truly inconsolable in grief and bewildered by the sudden changes in his previously orderly life, Alphonse finally snapped.
How many blows can the human head withstand before it finally gives in? How long can a human body sustain itself against beatings? I found out the answers the hard way.
For days and weeks and months thereafter, Alphonse beat me with his fists. In the head. In the face. In the abdomen. He would strike me repeatedly till all his anger was spent. I parried his punches with great effort, but I was no match for his relentless fury. Each time his punches connected, it fueled his anger more. Once, he punched me so hard in the face that my eyeglasses broke into pieces of glass and twisted metal. Another time, he viciously struck me in the neck that I threw up all over myself. My life was a flurry of blows I could not stop.
My husband and my eldest son tried to shield me from Alphonse’s anger. When Anthony came home from work, he took charge of Alphonse himself and gave me time to cry and breathe normally again. He skipped his lunch breaks so he could come home and check up on Alphonse and me. And Alex, my dear stoic son, would hold on to his brother for dear life when Alphonse would make attempts to hit me again. Sometimes, in an effort to get away from their restraints, Alphonse would momentarily shift his focus on them and hit them, too, until he could get at me.
By January, I sported so many new bruises and cuts that it was difficult to see where the new ones were. I had to cut my hair real short this time; where Alphonse would pull at my hair to hold me down while he beat me, there were bald spots, shamefully and painfully plain for everyone to see. My arms, from the shoulder down to my fingers, were always tingling and painful; my neck was always stiff. The blows to my head and neck had caused considerable trauma to these areas.
I started binging. I could not eat a single bite during the day; I had little appetite. I vomited from the stress and anxiety of each waking moment. But when Alphonse would fall asleep from exhaustion, I forced myself to eat without thought or reason. I stuffed myself full while I cried myself hoarse. I gained 25 pounds in two months. I was miserable and depressed. Those days, I simply waited for the last blow to end it all.
I asked for help, but no one seemed to know what to do. Professionals who handled Alphonse’s case gave us potent medications, but some of them made him zombie-like, stuck in one pose for long, uncomfortable minutes, drooling and staring vacantly into space. As much as it hurt us to see him like that, we had no option but to choose the blank, drug-induced state over his raging violence. We thought we had lost Alphonse completely.
Alphonse’s developmental pediatrician and his psychiatrist removed the new ones and put him back on his old medication. They increased the dosage in increments until his aggression was once again blunted. It took weeks to get the dosage right, but as important as it was to keep him under medication, it was more important to put normalcy in our lives and get him back on track.
I looked for new therapists to help me out with him. One teacher we tried lasted all of three days and quit after getting a few blows on the head. Another lasted a week but left, too, when he received a resounding slap. We interviewed potential applicants, but they were all unable to commit themselves to dealing with an aggressive twelve-year-old. One day, however, the clouds over our heads parted long enough for a sliver of sunshine to come through. Teachers Rod and Pau came into our lives when we needed help the most; we finally found people who were willing to brave the odds and help us on the road to recovery.
By April, Alphonse was no longer hitting me constantly and I could go for days without wearing my protective helmet and neck brace. In May, Alphonse started smiling again. My sweet, loving child was finally back, awakened from a long terrible slumber.
My wounds ran deeper this time. For many months, I could not sleep as I relived moments of terror. I had nightmares long after Alphonse started to get well. There were also times I found myself flinching unconsciously when he came near me. One particularly shameful episode was the day he tried to hug me and I was so scared that I almost jumped out of my skin. Alphonse was startled and confused that he cried. I silently berated myself then; how could a mother fear her own child?
Worse, I could not write. I was totally empty. I could not articulate what my heart and my mind were screaming to say. I would sit in front of the computer and pretend to write, but nothing came out - not my grief or my pain. I could only come up with unintelligible bits and pieces of tortured thinking, and these I scribbled feverishly in my journal.
It isn’t really completely over for me, I think. However, I am deeply grateful that we emerged at all from these experiences, though I would gladly exchange those months in a heartbeat. And these days, while my soul has yet to be completely restored to health, I think I have recovered enough to start finding the words I lost not so long ago.
In this light, I would like to apologize to my editors, Judith and Lali, for the long months of silence from me. They were the ones who gave me a venue for expression and I went on the deep end, disappearing from the face of the earth, without telling them. I hope that while this in no way excuses my shortcomings, I am able to make them understand what I’ve been through these past months.
I am trying to cram everything we missed in those long months of darkness, soaking in as much of the sun as possible. Little steps, baby steps, but I am taking them. Yes, it is still a lot harder to just sit down and write in white heat, much like I did in the carefree days of the past. Nowadays, I write in longhand first, in a ratty old journal that has obviously seen better days. I go cautiously slow, like I do in real life. Then, too, in the past month, I’ve started blogging to get the fog out of my head, to shake off the inertia, and to rid myself of writer’s block. And when I still feel completely overwhelmed, I resolve to take it one day at a time. Maybe even one word at a time.
I have never been able to write this all down until today. This is catharsis for me.
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