Not that Elly’s life was hemmed in by prohibitions. It did not have to be. She did very little, and very little of that needed to be controlled. She was not destructive but passive, not aggressive but withdrawn. This made our work easier. What touched her own safety directly she herself looked out for. Because of her pathological caution there was no need to forbid edges or heights. She opened no bottles, allowed nothing unfamiliar past her lips. Danger from traffic was something else; as I had no need to teach Elly physical caution in running or climbing, so I had for years no hope of teaching her to look out for the danger of an oncoming car. I looked out for her myself and thanked heaven we lived on a cul-de-sac.
There were only a few things we had to be strict about, so we could come down hard on those. For the rest, she could do as she liked. Since she could understand so few prohibitions — at this time, in fact, I do not think she understood any — we were glad to keep them to a minimum. They concerned almost exclusively damage to other people’s property — extended to her own if the situations were too similar to expect her to distinguish them; for example, she was not allowed to tear her own books or any others. I did not, in these early years, say or suggest ‘no, no’ for a whole range of behaviour that might well have been limited. I let her eat snow. I let her splash through puddles. She was an unusually healthy child and I had worse things to worry about. I let her soil herself, though to keep her socially acceptable I moved fast to clean her up. I let her make puddles on the floor; by the time she was four her natural fastidiousness allowed her to make very few. I did not try to force her to the pot, guessing it would be useless. Characteristically, she developed her own strange controls; by the time she was four she was holding her urine all day, to empty it into her bath. It seemed to cause her no discomfort; after a while it caused me none.
I did not try to modify such behaviour because it did not seem important to me. What was important to me might have seemed equally unimportant to another: it was important to me that Elly should not disturb me at night or wake me early in the morning. Since this is not something one can effect with hand- slapping and ‘no-no’, I made use of every expedient I could think of. I put animal crackers in her bed for her to find when she waked up. Later (for she was four before she climbed out of bed and five before she opened her door) I went to the length of locking our bedroom door when she got into a spell of waking us at six-thirty. Not that I approved of locking a little child out; I did not, and least of all Elly, whom I had spent years teaching to want my company. The point is something else; it goes beyond what specific behaviour should or, ideally, should not be limited, or what methods are justifiable in limiting it. The important thing is not what the child should be allowed to do, but, rather, what you can stand. For beyond the importance to the child of any specific prohibition, even if it affects such potentially sensitive areas as toilet training or exclusion, is that which is of the most crucial importance of alclass="underline" that the people who live with the child must not be pushed beyond what they can endure. People can stand most things if they have to, but no one can stand everything. Other mothers might have got up cheerfully with the child at 6. 00 a. m. and balked at the puddles. If so, they should have done what they had to and gone guilt free. What is important for the child is not that it be liberally treated in this or that aspect of its behaviour, but that its mother and its family do not fall apart. If they go under, the child goes too. For every family the last straw will be different. Whatever it is, from smearing food to being followed into the bathroom, it must be eliminated, firmly and with no sense of guilt. That is what discipline is for. Any child would sense the firmness and find security in it. An autistic child will go further and, once the firmness of the limit is appreciated, will welcome it as an essential part of its routine.
No more is being said here than that if an abnormal child is to be helped in the family, by mother, father, other children — then mother, father, and other children must be considered as well as the abnormal child. As most families are set up, it will be the mother who does most of the considering, and one of the things she must consider is how much she can stand. It may be a great deal, but she must not take on everything in a misguided spirit of self-sacrifice, since if she cracks no one will be helped at all. She must assess how much the rest of the family can stand, too, before they begin to feel that this burden is more than they can bear. What I had to do was to keep Elly and her problems as peripheral as I could to the major concerns of my husband and my children.
I even had to keep her, in some sense, peripheral to my own. Not that this was possible in the hours and days at home with Elly, shifting puzzle pieces, sitting in closets, lying under quilts. As long as I was at home, even while she was asleep, Elly was in my mind. I do not know what would have happened to me and to us if I had followed the rigid conception of my duty that I had had when I became pregnant again with this fourth child. I had thought that because I must give no less to this one than to the others I would put off my re-entry into the world for another six years — until she was ready for school. I would see about going back to teaching then. Luck, however, was with me here, as in other things. Circumstances changed my mind for me.
It was true luck, not intelligent decision-making. Elly was just two; we had entered the six-month period of watching and waiting to see if she would catch up with normal children. We were anxious, but not yet sick at heart. It was summer, and I read in the paper that a community college would open in a city twenty miles from our small town, to be the first in a projected network of two-year colleges which would bring higher education in our state within reach of every student who could use it. In all the thinking I had done about returning to teaching the stumbling block had been how and where. My husband’s all-male college would not employ me even if I were qualified, which I was not. I had no teacher’s certificate, so I could not teach in the public schools. There was a private school near by; now and then they needed a teacher of elementary Latin. I was ready to teach grammar to thirteen-year-olds (I was ready to do almost anything). But as I read of the new college I realized how glad I would be not to have to. My teaching experience, such as it had been, had not been with privileged younger adolescents in a sheltered school, but with freshmen in a teacher’s college and a state university. They had ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-seven, for I had been privileged to teach among the great wave of veterans who flooded the colleges after World War II, and in my first class there had been only two students who were younger than I. Such a background, I thought, might be usable in the new college. I had been twelve years at home, my time spent largely in the company of young children and of other mothers absorbed in their care. I knew these years had scarcely added to my professional adequacy or my ability to function outside my home. A place like this, however, would perhaps not find it easy to recruit teachers. I could drive over for an interview and still not risk much. I would merely fill out an application and get my name in their files. I could come to terms with my hesitations gradually. It was already the middle of August; the college was to open in September. They couldn’t still be hiring faculty at this date. Even if they took me, I could hardly begin teaching before next year.