Balloon Days, Part 2

Elijah's Cup
by Valerie Paradiz

(Page 2 of 3)

"Let go!" Elijah happily sings when the field comes into view.

"Yeah, IN THE FIELD," I remind him again, still so rattled from his shriek in Houst's that I could scream too. There are moments such as these when life with Elijah becomes so narrow, so rigidly charted and overdetermined in every action and word, that I could burst out in fits of anger and resentment. But — I don't know what comes over me — I suddenly see the poignant humor of it all, and I laugh out loud at this crazy, lonely comedy routine we've put together, the one I have no chance of escaping. Elijah's balloon fixation has implicated me. I have no choice but to submit and perseverate with him.

He tugs on my hand, picking up the pace toward the field. My eagerness for today's launch is suddenly growing more palpable. It's rising warmly from my stomach, like butterflies, moving up into the region of my heart. We step out onto the field. It's the same open space where the flea market happens in the summer, where Sharron used to park her van, but today the field is empty. It's winter. We crunch through the hard crusty snow, and before I even have the chance to cue him on it, Elijah releases the balloon.

"Oh! You scoundrel! You let it go!" I tease him.

The orange globe shoots straight up into the gray sky. It goes up and up, drifts momentarily sideways on a breeze, then moves more directly upward again. Elijah carefully monitors every motion.

"High! High! High!"

"Yeah, it's going high up."

"Small!" he adds.

"Small?"

"Small! Small!" he elaborates, still looking up. I'm surprised to hear Elijah use this new word in our balloon context. At the Children's Annex his teachers would call it "spontaneous speech," which he has been expressing with more frequency. Spontaneous speech is language that is neither cued nor prompted nor otherwise pedagogically extracted from him. It's utterly authentic to the situation. We stand there together in the field as we usually do, tracking the balloon until it completely disappears from sight.

"Small!"

"I get it! The balloon is getting small."

"Small," he says again, pleased that I grasp this perception of things.

"Yeah! The farther away the balloon goes, the smaller it looks."

"Small," he affirms satisfied by my description, which he himself cannot summon forth as speech. Elijah is happy and expansive. It has been a good balloon day.

* * *

Over the course of several months, as Elijah's stays at Brookside Cottage become more frequent and regular, we go into Houst's and add new layers of experience to his social repertoire. Soon he is saying the word "helium" all day long, pressing me to engage with him in repetitious talk about "helium balloons" that "float in the sky" and "air balloons" that "stay on the ground." After countless trips to the general store, the tedious social formulas of "hello" and "bye-bye" and "What color do you want?" become less nerve-racking for him. Elijah even chats the checkout lady up, saying five choice syllables the moment he walks in the door: "Heeee... liiii... um baaa... looooon." Then he makes a beeline for the bins.

"What color are you going to choose today?" the woman calls out as he passes by the counter with no answer. He's now making his selection all by himself and brings it back to the cash register without my prompting.

One day, as the woman and I waited for him to return to the counter, I revealed to her that my son was autistic. I thought our camaraderie with her had made it safe.

"There's nothing wrong with him! He's perfectly healthy!" she challenged me, incredulous that I would suggest such a thing.

I fumbled for an answer. "Well... of course there's nothing wrong. He's autistic. That's why we come in here all the time." I had hoped to enlighten her about our ritual, but she just shook her head in disbelief.

That's the day I learned about invisibility and how far Elijah could depart from neurotypicality and seem to go unnoticed. Friends even criticized me for falling victim to "those awful labels that only stigmatize the child," but I found their remarks overly simplistic. Sure, I had my bone to pick with condescending language, but not with the word "autism" itself. Such quickness to deny or minimize Elijah's way of life were insulting in the early years, before I learned that I would have to let go of public ignorance the same way Elijah lets go of his balloons.

A year had passed since I moved into Brookside Cottage. Though Ben and I were divorced, something had changed for the better in our family dynamic. I saw it in the daybook one spring morning as I sat on the back porch of the house reading all of Ben's notes to the school. I began with the day that Elijah had first moved in with Ben, after my depressive episode and trip to the hospital. In the course of this year of loss, gruff Ben had become a mother of sorts! It was right there in the daybook in his notes to the teachers, in a language that was surprisingly taken up with the sophisticated minutiae of child rearing. "Elijah," he writes during the toilet training period, "has been tired this week and [is] off his food in the evenings at dinner... He feels badly that he's still not pooping in the potty. 'I can't,' he sometimes says to me. 'You can,' I say. 'Don't worry.' He smiles and gets happy. 'Sorry!' he says. 'Don't worry, you're doing fine,' I answer. He grins and relaxes."

Much had improved between me and Ben, and by summer we were caring for Elijah mutually on a steady routine that he could count on. My grandparents had left me some money, and when the inheritance came through, my jealousy and judgments of Ben's home and Ben's nanny began to lift. Money made it possible for me to work part time and use the rest of my day to focus on Elijah's intense needs. I returned to the dissertation, a study of the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler, whose life as a writer and single mother of an unusual child had profound resonance for me. Lasker-Schüler was fast becoming my literary mentor. I also began translating German again and eventually returned to a teaching position at a private liberal arts college where I had taught in the past. Elijah and I moved out of Brookside Cottage and back into our old apartment in the clown's farmhouse. We still saw Emma Missouri all the time. Emma was family, but when I bumped into Bob one day in town and was told the apartment was free, I missed the open meadows and the big starry skies at night. I wanted to go back there with Elijah and reclaim a life that had been interrupted by calamity and depression.

That was the expansive summer of Elijah's fifth birthday, when Ben and I sat beside the swimming pool at his house, discussing whether to move forward on a plan to wean Elijah off his anticonvulsant. The neurologist in New York city had given us his blessing. Elijah had been seizure free for more than two years.

"Mum, Dad... watch this!" Joanne, the nanny, called out to Ben and me as she cued Elijah to jump from the board of the swimming pool. He jumped without inhibition, diving far far down to the bottom.

"What a little guppy!" Ben called out proudly from where we were sitting. Then he turned back to me, his eyes wet with tears. "You know, Val, during those months when Elijah was living with me most of the time, it changed my life. It humanized me."

"Me too. Things are getting better, aren't they, Ben?"

"Yes," he said. "You're a good person, Val."

"You are too. Can I tell you something?"

"Sure."

"Please take care of yourself, Ben. You're overworked. Elijah and I both need you."

"Yeah."

One of my new freelance jobs involved translating German documents for the science writer Dennis Overbye. Dennis was working on a book about Albert Einstein, and I was to render some of the physicist's unpublished personal correspondence into English. I met Dennis once a week and sat beside him in his office, translating Einstein's letters aloud into English as I read the German original to myself. Dennis pecked away at the keyboard, transcribing my words.

A few months into the job, I began to hear reports from autism circles that Einstein was probably a high-functioning autistic with Asperger's syndrome. As I deciphered Einstein's handwriting in his letters to his family and to his closest friends, I began to read intimations of autism between the lines. As a small child, Einstein was thought to be a dullard, at least that's the word his grandmother used to describe him, and his parents were certain that he was subnormal. He was prone to emotional outbursts. He was solitary and taciturn, and he fled from the raucous sounds and sights of parades. He had a speech delay, showed signs of echolalia, and possessed a deep affinity for objects. "He was well past two," writes Dennis Overbye, "before he made any attempt at language. His most memorable utterance was at two and half when his sister, Maja, was born. Apparently expecting some kind of a toy, he demanded to know why she didn't have any wheels. Until the age of seven he had the curious habit of repeating softly to himself every sentence he said."

Einstein also seems to have had delays processing language, for there was a lag time, or hesitation, before he answered questions that were asked of him. Ilana Katz, an Einstein scholar and parent of an autistic child, says young Albert was "withdrawn" and "avoided contact with other children his age, preferring to play by himself." When he reached school age, he was taunted with Biedermeier by his teasing classmates, the German equivalent for "wonk" or "nerd." Academically, Einstein's strengths and weaknesses in subjects were notable for their polarized extremity, a common autistic trait, sometimes called "scatter." On the one hand, Overbye writes, "he got good grades in math," but "his precocity displayed itself only fitfully to those charged with his formal education." His Greek professor "at Munich's Luitpold Gymnasium, where he was enrolled at the age of nine, is said to have informed in front of the whole class that he would never amount to anything at all."

Einstein's life was one of serial preoccupations and intense focus on a limited number of interests at one time. They began as a child with his zealous study of the Jewish faith (much to the surprise of his secular parents), which he abruptly dropped at age twelve in exchange for mathematics. During his summer vacation that same year, says Overbye, Einstein "worked his way through the entire gymnasium mathematics curriculum, including calculus, sitting by himself for days on end proving theorems and solving problems in textbooks that [his father] brought home for him."

In spite of his obvious strengths in math, he did not graduate from the gymnasium, having been expelled for his disruptive classroom behavior. To his good fortune, however, a formal education at a higher institution was not denied him when he managed, with some difficulty and postponement, to be accepted into the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School in Zurich. Unlike most other universities at the time, the Polytechnical School did not require a gymnasium degree in order to be admitted. Once enrolled, Einstein spent most of his time there perseverating on physics. Other subjects proved to be a challenge and a chore, because he couldn't bring himself to study subjects that didn't involve his intense interests. He found the professors' lectures to be an intrusion to his own process, and he often skipped class, preferring to study alone and intensely. His peers reported that "he didn't listen to anyone" and "didn't follow directions in the lab." He was known to pay no heed to social constrictions, stepping "out of the everyday world whenever he wished." The invisibility of Einstein's autism attracted the same sort of neurotypical commentary that is often said of autistic youths and adults today. They are "in a world of their own." They are "eccentric" and "aloof," seeming, on the surface, to find no need for emotional relationships with others.

Einstein had obvious neurological differences. He might have been epileptic, and he definitely stimmed and perseverated. "There were the strange occasions," writes Overbye,

on which he would go into some sort of trance or seizure, as if he had just disappeared into his own world. Later he would claim to have no recollection of what had happened... Throughout his entire life the people around him [remarked] on his ability to suddenly withdraw from even the most raucous surroundings to concentrate on some thought of his own... To the outside world and even to himself Einstein looked a little unworldly.

Compelling fixations remove one from normative social milieus. Elijah's balloon routine is a good example. He has no compunctions about letting go and feels no sense of loss for the object. In fact, to hold on to the balloon is a disruption to his perseverative fascination with the spatial experience of how distance changes the apparent size of an object. In the very early days of our routine, Elijah used to release his balloons right on Tinker Street, but invariably some passerby would make a disparaging remark or even scold me. This is why we go to the field for our daily launches. Some neurotypical expectations are too intrusive. It's probably why Einstein didn't go to his university lectures. Before he reached genius status in the public mind and was hailed as an important physicist, many of Einstein's teachers and employers thought he was a loser or a social dropout; in fact, he was fixated on finding his way through the maze of complex questions that eventually led him to the theory of relativity.

Copyright © 2002 by Valerie Paradiz

About the Author

Valerie Paradiz was born in Colorado and has lived and worked in Germany and Japan. For several years she has taught literature and writing at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. She lives with her son in Woodstock, New York.