A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (2 page)

Later in the morning, the doctor gives orders for me to be pumped. The nurse makes a face, brings the pump, clamps it on me and sets it going. Pain! Unimaginable pain!

“That’s because you’re already giving too much milk,” she says. “With the pump, you’ll give even more, so the pain will be worse.”

Perhaps the nurse is right.

“Do you want me to take the pump away?”

I nod. I give up. She takes the pump away.

The next day, miraculously, I have nipples. They work, and the baby can suckle, but the nipples are now ulcerated. The nurse applies some kind of stinging salve. The baby screams at the taste of it—heartbreaking screams. I would do anything to assuage her infant grief. Then, surprise: hunger wins out and the baby is feeding. I have milk in abundance for her, but the pull of her suck on my ulcerated nipples is making the ulcers worse.

Meanwhile, in the time between feedings, a ritual social hour takes place and a steady stream of visitors parades into my room. Reared to social obligation, I array myself in a silver gray negligee with ruffles down the front and receive my guests, hoping my milk won’t leak through the crepe de Chine. My baby, too, has her social hour. Sealed in her germ-free nursery, she is wheeled up to an observation window for visitor inspection.

At last the required ten days are up. The hospital nurse brings in my baby and dresses her in the tiny infant clothes I’ve brought with me from a Best & Co. layette
*
, along with an infant sweater I’ve knitted, and a receiving blanket knit by my mother. Elated, I dress myself. The ulcers have improved. I’m ready for our new life together.

There’s a knock at the door. It’s the practical nurse who has been hired to go home with me for the customary six weeks. We all ride down in the elevator together: Dick, the hospital nurse carrying the baby, the practical nurse, and me in a wheelchair. I’m not allowed to stand on my own until out the hospital door. The hospital nurse carries the baby to the door, then hands her to me. At last she’s mine. But no, the practical nurse steps forward.

“The home nurse carries the new baby,” she announces, sweeping her from my arms.

I ride in the front seat with Dick, cradling the last of the fading chrysanthemums and magnolia leaves. The home nurse rides in back, cradling my baby. I keep turning around to look at her, but she’s fast asleep, oblivious to the arms that hold her.

Finally we’re home, but home looks a bit strange. I’m allowed to walk up the one flight of stairs to my bedroom. Only once a day will I be allowed to walk the stairs. That, too, is part of the ritual: no stairs for six weeks. We put the baby in the bassinet borrowed from my sister-in-law. Weeks earlier, I’ve washed and pressed its quilted silk lining, sewn on new tie ribbons, papered the nursery wall in pale blue with pink lilacs. The bureau I’ve painted white. Then, in a flight of fancy, I’ve painted the drawers with a flourish of tumbling blue and pink baby blocks, a letter on each block, spelling out “Baby Grandin.” In the weeks before the birth, I’ve opened the drawers over and over, to arrange and rearrange the perfect little Best and Co. layette. I know every shift, blanket and garment by heart, but now they all look insignificant. Feeling let down, I watch the nurse put the baby in the bassinet; then Dick puts me into bed.

Finally, after much fussing and ceremony, the home nurse brings Temple in to me for her first feeding. She sucks. Nothing happens. She lets go, bleats her little “lah, lah,” roots around for a better hold, sucks again, lets go, and cries in earnest. Something’s wrong.

“We need formula,” the nurse says.

“Why?”

“Your milk is gone.”

I look down, I touch my breasts. They’re flaccid.

It’s long after business hours, so the local drug store is closed. Dick makes an emergency call to the owner. Together, he and the owner go to the drug store. The owner unlocks the door, and sells Dick the baby formula. Dick brings it home in a fury; the nurse heats it, puts it in a sterilized bottle, comes up to the bedroom, takes the screaming baby from me and departs, leaving me empty-armed. I look at Dick.

“Why can’t I feed her the formula?”

Dick’s mouth goes tight: “We wouldn’t have this problem if you’d listened to the nurse at the hospital.”

I lie there feeling useless and ashamed, Dick’s angry words washing over me. The baby. The baby. When will she be
my
baby?

The next day, the home nurse, warning me about germs, shows me how to make a sterile formula. She feeds the baby; I watch. She shows me how to give the baby a bath. She bathes the baby; I watch. She shows me how to wash the baby blankets. She watches; I wash.

Finally, the six weeks are over and she leaves. I curl up alone with Temple. She’s mine, mine. Yes, but she doesn’t seem to care, and I’m not sure how to win her over. She’s too quiet. She sleeps a great deal. Too much, perhaps? I don’t know. Mother and baby, we don’t either of us know.

Not an auspicious beginning.

Was that the beginning? I’m not sure. When did Temple take on her strangeness? With the men off fighting World War II, few babies have been born, so how would I, who’ve never even held a baby, know whether or not she’s strange? Ashamed of my disloyalty, I let my qualms slip into the darkness. Temple and I go our separate ways—she into oversleeping, I into polishing silver for the coming housewarming party.

Still, there are moments in those early months, occasions at other houses where other mothers dress their babies in pretty outfits and play patty-cake, jig their babies up and down, show them off, dandle them, coax them into gurgling grins. Other mothers’ babies snatch at earrings and jacket buttons. Drooling and chuckling, they grab fistfuls of their mothers’ hair and try to stuff them in their mouths. Temple puts nothing in her mouth, not even her thumb.

I try dressing her up, but it feels odd. She looks pretty, but no patty-cake for her, thank you; no grabbing for my hair. I write off dandling and games to indulgence. I’ve been raised to think one shouldn’t indulge one’s baby, and my baby seems to understand this better than I do. I’m too green to admit, even to myself, that her indifference makes me feel trivial and snubbed.

The qualms return. I recall a baby doll I’d had as a child; how I’d bathed it and dressed it and put it to sleep on a little footstool I’d made up into a dolly bed, how I’d chosen to ignore what my doll was missing: that the puppy had chewed off its dimpled rubber fingers. My grandmother had sewn up the holes, so the hands looked almost whole if you didn’t notice the knots of gray cotton thread. Not noticing. Was it an old trick?

Summer comes. I take Temple to the new swimming pool at the Dedham Polo Club and watch to see what the other mothers do. Since the wading pool is still being built, they put their toddlers into big orange life jackets and float with them in the shallow end of the grown-up pool. I copy them, and Temple, floating waist high in her jacket, seems almost to enjoy it.

In August, we go to the Vineyard. On a calm, waveless day on South Beach I put the life jacket on her again. We float together on the gentle swell, I standing waist deep, Temple riding waist high in her orange life jacket. I should have known better, should have known that South Beach, even on a calm day, was no swimming pool. A sudden swell lifts her out of my arms. I grab for her; the swell carries her sideways away from me. Frantic, screaming, I try to run to her in the water, but it’s like dream running: I make no headway. Each time I grab for her, she slips further sideways, no deeper, no shallower, bobbing like a Halloween apple just out of my reach. A man hears my yells, sees what’s happening, scrambles ashore, runs down the beach, dives into the water and catches her as she floats toward him on the current. Unconcerned, Temple accepts his rescue.

How could I have been so careless? How could I take the sea for granted? What if the man hadn’t heard me, hadn’t thought to get out of the water, run down the beach and catch her floating toward him on the current? Why hadn’t I thought of that instead of yelling and churning and getting nowhere? But that would have meant abandoning her.

It will be years before I can look at an orange life jacket without the recollection returning to me in sick waves. And even more years before I can think beyond my long ago panic to puzzle over Temple’s lack of response that gray day on South Beach, to see her lack as a symptom of what was to come. I can understand her enjoying bobbing in the sea and not being aware of the danger. Any child might do that. But when we became separated—a moment when most toddlers would have let out a howl—she had no response. Nor did she respond, good or bad, to being rescued by a stranger, even when the stranger handed her tenderly back to me. Through all of it, she seemed neither happy nor unhappy.

Was that the beginning? Is that when I began to pray, “Give her back to me”? Why the odd phrase “Give her back,” as if she’d been taken away from me to somewhere quite far off?

Or did it all begin long before Temple was born, back when my soft gelatin self was first set out on the windowsill to stiffen in its tin mold?

I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts in the middle of the Depression. I watched men scrounge in trashcans for something to eat, watched them sell pencils to my mother at the front door. My mother always offered them a meal.

When war came, my father joined the War Production Board, and we moved to Cambridge. By that time I was in boarding school in the Berkshires; the trains carrying us home for Christmas vacation were hours late and jammed with soldiers. We sat on our suitcases and flirted with them. Shoes were rationed along with butter, meat and sugar. Silk and rubber didn’t exist. We resoled our sneakers with some kind of tarry substitute we spread on with a kitchen knife and hoped would stick. Harvard was turned into a naval training post, and Radcliffe was put to training WAVES. Both groups marched through Harvard Square singing as they swung their arms.

In the middle of the war Winston Churchill made a secret visit to this country to urge us not to lose heart. As word went round that he was coming to Harvard, we wangled passes and crowded into the Harvard Yard. Squeezed together on the top steps of Widener Library, we craned our necks and, there across the Yard, on the steps of Memorial Chapel—that chapel built to honor the Harvard men who’d died in WWI—stood Winston Churchill, his bald head shining in the sunlight, his words from the Church of England Litany rolling out to us from the speakers attached to the trees.

“Till we have beat down Satan under our feet…”

The Yard was solid with rows of Navy men in dress uniform, their white hats like so many peppermints. We sang “God Save the King”—it was a king then—and “The Star Spangled Banner.”

In June, 1944, when the war was at its peak, Dick Grandin and I met at the Boston Debutante Cotillion. I was seventeen, twenty-four hours out of a girls’ boarding school, and he was an officer in the tank corps, on leave before being sent overseas. It was his thirtieth birthday, and he looked like Gary Cooper.

My father, in a rare moment of obstinacy, had refused to attend the Cotillion and present me to society. So Dick’s older sister, who was giving a dinner in my honor, suggested Dick for the job. One look at him and my mortification over my father’s betrayal turned to enchantment. Dick took my arm, escorted me down the red carpeted stairs, and the rest of the evening was a dizzying whirl of satin and uniforms and flashing photographers. The next morning our picture was on the society page. Topping that came three ecstatic days of telephone calls, flowers, and girlfriend envy. Dick then departed for duty overseas, where he announced by mail that he planned to marry me.