It was the same with introducing her to new toys — and to extend Elly’s range of play seemed even more important than teaching her convenient household skills. My diary records Elly’s play activities at the time she returned from the hospitaclass="underline"
She is still playing primarily with rattles, which she likes to use as a tool for patting picture books. In fact exercising — joggling or rocking in chair or crib — chaining, and patting are all she does. She can be left alone on a bed for hours with no toys; she will not fall off or get down. Peg-in-hole toys or ring on peg she regards only as something to dismantle, the parts of which can then be used to pat or knock other surfaces.
I had tried to induce her to put rings on a stick before she went to the hospital. Had it been too soon, or had I merely not seen how it should be done? When she came back I thought harder. I got down on the floor, close beside Elly. I did not push the toy into her radius of attention. I began to play with it myself. In slow motion I put on several of the bigger, harder rings. Then I put on a smaller ring, but only halfway. Askew, yet clearly on, even Elly couldn’t consider it too difficult a challenge, and what I was doing was something more interesting than what she was doing, which was, as usual, nothing. I retreated a hand’s breadth and looked away. When I looked back, the ring was on the stick.
More of this, and then I could risk extending it. Perhaps Elly was ready for me actually to give her the smallest, easiest ring. I didn’t put it into her hand — Elly never accepted objects as directly as that. Instead I laid it on the floor beside her hand. And she picked it up and she put it on the stick.
The next day she put all the rings on the stick, easily, neatly, as if she had always been able to. Soon — I can’t remember when — she learned of herself to arrange them according to size, one of the earliest indications of something we were to become more and more familiar with, the extraordinary sense of order of the autistic child — the sense, perhaps, which made it necessary for her to adjust that first ring, left, by a lucky intuition, halfway on.
How hard it is to keep this account from taking on the tone of a success story. For what had I accomplished? In addition to book-patting, chaining, and rocking, Elly could now put rings on a stick. As if in relief at the introduction of some variety into her circumscribed activities, she did put rings on a stick — over and over and over. With each of the few activities I was able to add it was the same — received with delight at first, it was repeated and repeated and finally abandoned as if — as if — in boredom. She would not extend it into meaningful play, and I could find no way of helping her. Blocks were to tower, then to line up parallel, but never to build a house. Indeed at that time I had no reason to think that Elly knew what a house was, that she knew what anything was except perhaps the food she ate and the clothes she wore. It is necessary to emphasize that this account is not to be read like an account of a normal child in which the description of one activity does duty for a whole class. In describing Elly at two I do not have to select. What I tell is all there is to be told.
Yet these tiny successes accomplished something. Narrow as Elly’s spectrum remained, it was less narrow than before. Each miniscule, apparently empty victory nourished something in Elly and in us. In Elly, perhaps some frail sense of adequacy, in us the necessary hope that our daughter had some mind hidden away inside her speechless incomprehension. Not too much hope — foolish hope was something against which we had to defend ourselves. Only enough to mount the next assault.
Elly grows older; she is nearing three. We have taken her on a picnic. Together we sit on a rock promontory beside a brook. I have carried her over the rough ground and the rocks; though she now walks gracefully and well, the slightest shift of a stone beneath her feet is enough to render her motionless. I drop a stone in the pool beside us — a splash, a satisfying plop, a new experience for a child almost without experience. Elly should be able to do this, I figure. The pool is right beside us. She need hardly stretch out her hand. I give her a stone. She has progressed in these months; I do not put it directly into her hand, but she takes it from my outstretched palm. She drops it in (that she would throw it in, with a three-year-old’s abandon, is of course inconceivable). I hand her another, another. She likes this game. The stones are in a small pile close beside us. I move slightly away. With a touch, I call her attention to the pile. She wants another stone, another plop. Will she reach out her hand the six inches it must travel to pick up another stone for herself?
No, she won’t. Not today. I do not press; I know the answer is final. My immobility is a mirror of hers. I have learned to wait.
The readiness expands, though far more slowly than for the slowest of normal children. Each new skill makes the next one easier, though not easy. And that is why I keep on — not so much because it makes life less burdensome if my child can feed herself and make use of rudimentary motor skills, although of course everything she can do for herself is one more thing I do not have to do. It is because each new skill must make her feel a little different. One works on the assumption — it must be, in fact, a faith — that the tiniest success must leave a trace, must move the child, however imperceptibly, towards the experience of adequacy. So, as one thinks of them, and that is very slowly, one sets up the preconditions for new successes, even if these are to be no more impressive than picking up a stone and dropping it into the water. Each new accomplishment is not only a bolstering of confidence, it is an incursion into that guarded emptiness, an enrichment of that terrible simplicity. And though Elly resists each foray, we suspect (for a long time it is no more than a suspicion) that she is glad of them. She can take no initiative towards growth, yet she is no frozen adult but a living child. We must believe she will be glad to grow.
So we keep pressing, not too much, but not too little either, in ways so simple that it seems ludicrous to record them. A few months after she is three she becomes interested in lights. She knows that light comes when one pulls a string or moves a switch. I have not taught her, nor could I; this is just the sort of thing it turns out she knows. When she wants light she moves my hand to the switch. But it is my hand that is her tool, not her own; she cannot move the switch herself. Teaching her to turn on a light is a process of choosing the easiest switch in the house. It cannot be the string, which must be pulled, nor the old- fashioned switches that require pressing, for the muscular effort required of this strong child must be imperceptible. I take her hand. With it I flick the switch down. Down first, lights out, for that is easier. It takes time — how long I don’t remember. At length she can do it for herself.
Though she is fascinated with water, activating a faucet is harder. Using, perhaps, her light-switch experience, she learns of herself to use the kitchen faucet, which requires only a simple push. But an ordinary faucet requires both pressure and twist. I put Elly’s hand to it; wrist and fingers go limp. My whole hand covers Elly’s; using hers as a tool, I turn on the faucet. This first time, and again, and again, all the force is mine. Elly likes water and she has no objection to repetition. Imperceptibly — I hope it is imperceptibly — I lighten my pressure. The small hand beneath mine is no longer quite limp. It seems that there are muscles there after all. I move my hand a quarter of an inch up hers as I turn the water on again. Another quarter inch. A half. Infinitely gradually I withdraw my hand, up her fingers, up her wrist. She goes on turning on the water. My hand moves up her arm. Finally all that is left is one finger on her shoulder, to enable her to maintain the fiction that it is I, not she, who is performing the action. We have been together over the basin a full hour. But the work is not yet over; next day we must go over the process again to re-establish the skill, but we can do it more rapidly. Then I remove my finger; my presence now is enough. The next day she does it alone, thrilled, delighted, over and over. She understands everything about the process, even things I thought too difficult to teach. She never lets the basin overflow, she never turns on the hot water. But the work is not quite done. For weeks she will require a brief retraining before every unfamiliar faucet. It is a long time before the new mastery can be fully accepted.