It did not take long to learn that to put Elly into situations of extreme pressure was not only lacerating but useless. I have mentioned that she learned to crawl upstairs at seventeen months, and then forgot. After many months — it was after she came home from the first trip to the hospital — she learned again, and with some help she learned also to crawl down. But she did not learn as other children do, a skill to be extended, applied in new situations with a feeling of mastery and pleasure. She could crawl up and down our main staircase. Not our third-floor stairs, however, and not any staircase in a neighbour’s house. One day — she was just past two — we carried her halfway up a friend’s stairs and marooned her. I stayed at the bottom, smiling encouragement. She understood the situation at once, she who understood so little. She began to cry, with a kind of crying very rare for her, for though she might fret, or cry loudly if hurt, she did not cry much or long. This was a hard crying to listen to — lost, furious, totally committed — a crying that came up from the inside depths we never reached. We let it go on for twenty minutes. Then we carried her down. What would she have learned if we had left her there? Nothing, I think, except that we were willing to treat her with inconceivable violence. We could not have left her there. I think, I really think she was ready to stay there till she died.
But she did want to come down enough to cry about it. That itself was rare. Her detachment usually provided her with better armour. In almost all situations, the weakness of her desires was there working for her, against us. The rat wants the flavoured pellet, the pigeon wants the corn. What did Elly want enough to meet any conditions for getting it? Not a cookie, not a toy, not a ride in the car. A baby who like a Zen adept acquires the knack of inhibiting its desires approaches something akin to the Zen satori. Serene, in perfect vegetative equilibrium, it can be content to do nothing at all. When a creature is without desires the outside world has no lever by which to tempt it into motion.
So again and again it was as if she could but wouldn’t. That, of course, was the source of the doctors’ uncertainty. Those vigorous legs, those exquisitely controlled fingers sifting the links of her chain became weak and useless when confronted with any imposed task. And what was an imposed task? To climb, to reach, to walk — all the activities other children spontaneously throw themselves into in their delighted desire to learn and grow. Elly seemed strong. But between her and any normal development lay this terrible weakness, a weakness that was no less real because it seemed to lie not in the muscles but in the will.
Who knows what is willed and what is not? Who boasts he can read minds — least of all a wordless baby’s? In humility I can only say that Elly’s weakness seemed as if it was willed, in full realization of the difficulty of believing it. It is a little too much to swallow — to accept that an infant can assess its situation as we have all seen frightened grownups do — and decide that anything is preferable, even total withdrawal, to the risks of activity and growth. It is as if... As if. Again and again we used this formulation, as we searched out explanations of our child s strange contradictions. As if — yet we could not and cannot be sure. We cannot help interpreting. The words as if must function to remind us that we can be sure of no interpretations.
It was as if, then, Elly had realized early, earlier than it seems possible for any child to realize, that if she remained motionless, sitting on a rug in the middle on the floor, nothing could occur to threaten her, that if she attempted to do nothing, she need never fail. She did not in fact sit motionless — she was alive and healthy, her body functioned and impelled her to a fuller interaction with the world than that — but it seemed to us that this was the model of her condition. Her body was as strong as it was beautiful, but in comparison to a normal child she used it hardly at all. The first strategies of the besiegers must deal with this least abstract, most accessible of Elly’s weaknesses. It was useless to assault ears that would not hear us and eyes that would not see. The first approach — the only way in — was to try to return to her her primary birthright, the use of her body.
How elevated that sounds, how elaborate and complex! Yet it is a fancy description of something most simple. There can be nothing esoteric about a mother working with a baby, trying tactfully, delicately, to encourage it to do new things. This is what all mothers learn. Everything I found to do in this abnormal, extreme situation was only an extension and intensification of things I had done with my normal babies. Such tact as I had I had learned with them. So it may be with a feeling of anticlimax that the reader moves into a description of what was actually done. It seems very simple and it was. There wasn’t anything else for it to be. Even the most accomplished professional therapists of children, if we view them operationally, considering what they do, do something quite simple. They discover the right games to play.
Consider one of the first skills we managed to convey to her — drinking from a cup. She sat with us at the table, she fed herself, but although her cup was there before her, small and comfortably available, she never picked it up. When it was time to drink I held it up for her, as I had done ever since she was a small baby. If I put it in contact with her fingers they refused even to close around it, let alone expend the force necessary to lift it to her mouth. Months went by — she was twenty months old, two years, and still incapable of grasping the cup. Incapable at table. In her bath she had cups which she used with finesse, not only picking them up but deftly pouring water from one into the other. More months pass. It is late in November; Elly, born in July, is nearly two and a half.
One day at dinner Elly surprises us. Rapidly, decisively, she picks up a small glass of milk, pours it accurately into her apple sauce. There is a precedent; the previous day I had poured milk into her apple sauce for the first time, but that hardly explains it. Though man is an imitative animal, Elly does not imitate. Nevertheless, some resistance seems to be giving here; the very next day she picks up one of her bath cups and drinks from it. The day after, she picks up her cereal bowl, quickly drinks some of the milk, and pours the rest on the table.
There was so little at any given time going on with Elly that it took no special acumen to note a new readiness, which could perhaps be made use of. Experience had taught me that while other babies might be encouraged if congratulated and made a fuss over, Elly would react in just the opposite way, with retreat. It worked badly when we called attention to anything Elly was doing — she always stopped doing it. As if she didn’t want to be committed to any forward progress — as if she feared that any concession she made would at once be taken advantage of. I knew the new skill was best ignored, not pressed.
So I got a very tiny cup, much smaller than her small child’s mug — so small, so inconspicuous that it would be hard indeed to regard it as a challenge. I filled it with Elly’s favourite juice. But half full only. With her uncanny accuracy she wasn’t likely to spill even a full glass, but I wanted to eliminate the slightest threat of failure. I put the cup, not on the dinner table where her ability, if displayed, would be noted and seem formally to commit her, but on a low chair. It was not yet serving time and Elly was moving about the kitchen as usual. She spotted the little cup, and when she did pick it up and drink it none of us appeared to notice. Indeed it was easy not to, she did it so fast Above all, we did not at once set cup and juice at her place at table; we fed her her liquids exactly as before. Not for several days did I move the tiny cup from chair to table, and not for several more did the juice begin to appear in successively larger vessels. One must respect other people’s concessions, and recognize that they may have cost more than may appear. Even a tiny child has face to lose, and we guessed that Elly had much invested in her disabilities, although we did not, still do not, know what it was, and is.