Following Ezra (5 page)

The book was right. The first time, it takes an hour to get Ezra to sleep. The second night, though, he’s still awake and alert after
two
hours—more than one hundred repetitions of the cycle. Determined, disciplined, and confident in the wisdom of the authors, I stick with the plan, keeping in mind their assurance:
By the end of the first week, the problem is almost always over.

The third night I post myself on a chair just outside Ezra’s door, eager to see the system begin to work. But that night it takes even
longer
. For more than two hours I’m walking back and forth on the stretch of carpet from my chair to his bed. I’m still trying to be businesslike—zombielike is more like it—but I am beginning to question the plan I have chosen to follow. By the fourth evening, Ezra seems excited for bedtime, and I feel hopeful that this might be the night when the system kicks in.

No such luck. The more frequently I scoop up my three-year-old and drop him back into bed, the more awake he seems.
The problem is almost always over
, the book promises. I start reading the passage like a lawyer, noticing the word I had glanced over before:
almost.
It has been four days, and my problem isn’t
nearly
over. My problem is
worse
. When I repeatedly return Ezra to his bed, I’m not soothing him into drowsiness. He’s being
stimulated.
What was supposed to get him to sleep is, instead, waking him up. The repetition that would knock out almost any other child is, to him, a tantalizing tonic he has come to crave like a crack addict seeking his fix.

In that moment, sitting wearily in the hallway outside his room, I come to realize something: Ezra has a different kind of mind. The rules that make sense with other children simply don’t work with him. The predictable, orderly world of
What to Expect
and the growing collection of other parenting books on our shelves doesn’t exist for him. The wisdom we have drawn on to raise our first child so far isn’t going to be effective with this one. All bets are off. We’re on our own.

 

 

It’s not just his mind that is different. By age four, Ezra seems uncomfortable in his clothing, stripping off his shirt and pants as soon as he walks into the house—and often in the homes of other people, even when he doesn’t know them well. A couple we’ve met in the neighborhood invites us for a weekend lunch, and—friendly and nonjudgmental as they’re trying to be—seem hard-pressed to act nonchalant when Ezra squirms out of his booster seat within minutes, removes every piece of clothing, and then starts running laps around the table.

His instincts seem to be the opposite of what any other child might feel. At the playground of a nearby park, he rides the merry-go-round at full speed, imploring, “Faster! Faster!” no matter how fast it is spinning, and then walks off in a straight line, his steps and posture steadier and surer than before. On the swing set, he begs, “Higher! Higher!” even when the swing is already flying precariously above my head.

He craves the feeling of being tightly squeezed, pleading for Shawn and me to roll him up in a blanket, and then demanding that we do it again, only more snugly. He climbs under heavy objects—mattresses, area rugs—but flees from his mother’s embrace and shakes his body away to avoid holding my hand. On sultry days he nestles into heavy comforters. At the pizza parlor he demands a single regular slice, cut in half—he calls it “broken plain” (which we misinterpret initially as having something to do with a disabled aircraft). He won’t eat it before touching the surface with an index finger to make sure the pizza is so hot that it seems sure to scald his mouth. He refuses to consume a banana if it is not whole, and secretly sneaks whole bricks of cheddar cheese from the fridge, gnawing at them like a rodent. He is drawn to feeling the textures of all kinds of fabric, obsessively pulling fibers out of quilts or clothing and chewing on them, sometimes purposely ingesting the threads.

He has a compulsion to test unknown textures with his tongue, occasionally fingering the carpeting in a doctor’s office lobby or an unfamiliar house and then, intrigued, getting on all fours and licking. We try to stop him, but he appears to be almost magnetically attracted, unable to pull his body away. Once, while visiting a neighbor’s house, I notice black fragments of something on Ezra’s hands and teeth and ask where it came from. He won’t say, so I snoop around in the backyard, where Ezra has been exploring. There, I follow a trail of the black bits leading to the large airconditioning unit and assemble the story in my mind: Apparently curious about the look and the feel of the black foam insulation around a duct from the unit, he has peeled some away and tried to chew on it. Almost daily, he unzips the sofa cushions, pulls out wads of fluffy synthetic stuffing, and spreads it across the floor, calling it snow or cotton candy. It’s not enough to scold him about this. He seems incapable of stopping himself.

He defies gravity. From the time he was two, Ezra has seemed driven to climb almost anything, as if he’s trying to escape the bounds of earth. That compulsion is combined with a fearlessness that I find both extraordinary and alarming. Once, on a visit to relatives in Connecticut, as our family of five posed for photos on their front porch, Ezra slipped out of the frame and scaled a nearby garden trellis, not stopping until he was well above us, dangerously out of reach. At our dinner table, he climbs on Shawn’s body, clambering from her lap onto her shoulders, and occasionally sitting atop her head as she tries to eat. At a neighborhood park, as little girls hold a pretend tea party in a miniature pergola, Ezra scales the side of the structure, climbs onto the metal mesh canopy, and balances precariously there, oblivious to the children below. Nannies and moms flash looks of concern that say,
Who in God’s name would let their kid do that?

Me.

The climbing finally catches up with Ezra one winter morning when he is four. Shawn and I are awakened before dawn by a crash, and then the sound of someone screaming. I run out to the playroom and find Ezra running toward us in nothing but underwear.

“I broke myself! I broke myself!” he is screaming as he sobs. “I fell down! I broke myself!”

The playroom is in disarray, with stuffed animals and plastic bins strewn about—no different from most other times. I examine him for damage, and it takes a few moments to find the wound, a deep, bleeding puncture on the left side of his lower abdomen. It looks as if he has been stabbed. My first thought is that Ezra has punctured a lung. I look at his mouth, expecting him to start coughing up blood. He doesn’t, but he is in distress.

“I broke my chest!” he keeps screaming. “Fix me, Abba!
¹
Fix me!”

“What happened?” I ask. He can’t tell me. While Shawn gathers some clothes for me, I grab my wallet and keys and look around the house. In the kitchen, I spot a chair out of place and, beside it, a door on a lower cabinet at an awkward angle, snapped from its upper hinge, wood splinters protruding. I piece together what happened. The previous night, I had stashed a box of cookies on the top shelf of a cabinet. Ezra had obviously seen me, so when he woke up to a quiet house, he decided to help himself. He climbed from the chair, planning to use the open lower cabinet door as a step stool, but when he stood on it, the hinge cracked, and as Ezra fell, the corner of the door jabbed his gut.

“Fever?” the orderly behind the desk at the emergency room says when he sees me rush in clutching my whimpering son. I shake my head and show him the wound. “He’ll need stitches,” the man says. The wait is nearly forty-five minutes. Ezra, in shock, clings to my body, moaning softly and occasionally nodding off. Shawn arrives—she has delivered the other boys to neighbors—and finally a nurse calls Ezra’s name.

“We’ll have to hold him down,” the ER doctor tells us. A nurse wraps Ezra in a sheet to control his arms. I grasp his shoulder. The nurse steadies his head. It takes just a few minutes for the doctor to apply sutures; it’s a remarkably quick procedure, especially considering my early fears upon finding Ezra that morning. As soon as the doctor tells my son he is finished, Ezra hops onto his feet, ready to leave, completely—almost eerily—back to normal.

“
Good-bye
, Nurse!” he says. “Thank you!”

As we walk to the car, I hold on to his arm and wonder whether the experience might teach him to be more cautious. I doubt it. When it comes to his body, Ezra seems incapable of using logic to control impulses. No matter how many times we warn him to be careful, he seems drawn to the climbing, the swinging, the spinning in ways that defy normal bounds.

We learn later that therapists have their own way of saying that: he lacks normal proprioception, the body’s sense of where it is in space in relation to other objects and people. He doesn’t know where his body is—unless he is wrapped tightly, or feeling intense physical pressure, or—best of all—in water. When Ezra is in the bathtub, surrounded by his toys, he becomes exceptionally calm and quiet. When we visit friends who have a Jacuzzi tub in their backyard, he settles in for hours, magnetically drawn to the womblike feeling and rhythm. In swimming pools, his entire body enveloped in warm water, he magically transforms into a chattier, more connected version of himself—and experiences a serenity that lasts for an hour or longer.

Just as he seems comforted, so are Shawn and I, discovering that there are ways to bring Ezra some peace. Of course, much as he would like to, Ezra can’t live in a hot tub. And it is difficult to escape what I am coming to understand is one of his foremost challenges: Our son is not comfortable in his own body.

Ordinary experiences unexpectedly cause him such extreme discomfort that they torture him. The summer he is three—the same one we spend at the retreat center in Simi Valley—his unkempt brown hair has started to bother us enough that I take Ezra into town for a haircut, randomly choosing the first salon I come across, in a strip shopping mall. Ezra expresses some resistance—but, I think, so do most kids at his age when it’s time for a haircut. An expressionless hairstylist gestures for him to come to her chair. He climbs in, but then his body goes limp as he slides out of the seat and onto the floor. I lift him back in, and he slips out again. Finally, I sit on the chair myself, holding Ezra in my lap, and tell her she can start.

As soon as she lifts a comb to his head, Ezra screams.

“
Noooo!
Don’t touch my hair!”

I reassure him: “She’s just going to give you a haircut, sweetheart. She won’t hurt you.”

That doesn’t help. But she tries again.

“
Nooooo!
” he screams.

Surely the woman has experienced fussy children, so she reassures him and simply starts cutting. Ezra shrieks. She keeps going, trying to calm him. By then, Ezra’s crying and shouting are enough commotion for other patrons to notice. The manager approaches, holding some candy.

“It’s okay, honey—it’s just a haircut,” she says, smiling and handing him a red lollipop. Ezra grabs it and throws it back in her face. This is not going as I planned. I’m wondering whether I should have researched hair salons a bit more carefully.

“Ezra!” I say firmly. “Say you’re sorry.”

He can’t even hear me. The hairstylist, seemingly motivated by the challenge, continues hacking at his hair, and Ezra keeps squirming. When he can’t get far enough away, he grabs the scissors out of her hand and hurls them to the floor. She steps back. She has seen crying kids before, but this might be a first.

“That’s it!” I say, scooping my son up with me and helping him out of the smock. Ezra, with a bad half haircut and loose, cut hairs sprinkled across his face and neck, sprints toward the exit as the two women stand by, expressions of repugnance and disbelief crossing their faces. I grab his hand, mutter an apology, pay the bill and throw in a ten-dollar tip (I don’t wait for the change; I just want to escape), and chase my son out into the sizzling August afternoon.

Driving away, I look at Ezra in the rearview mirror, his eyes red and puffy from the crying, his brown hair trimmed in some places, still scruffy in others. As the motion of the car helps to calm him down, I ponder what could explain how an ordinary haircut escalated into a violent standoff. I once understood that having children meant sacrificing some sense of control, but more and more I find myself in situations like the one at the hair salon that seem completely out of hand, and beyond my ability to manage.

That night, Shawn and I wait until Ezra is finally asleep, and then she pulls out a pair of office scissors and a comb to try finishing the job Ezra had put a stop to at the salon. For many months after that, we let his hair grow long and unkempt. When it gets out of hand, we sneak up on him in his sleep, and Shawn does her best to trim the fine brown strands falling across his forehead without waking him up. Occasionally, she tries coaxing him to balance on the pedestal sink in our bathroom with a towel under him to catch the hair, but he can endure that for only a minute or two. That’s what serves as a haircut.

Until we discover Hugh, the special-needs barber.

It has been nearly a year and a half since Ezra’s disastrous encounter at the salon. Shawn asks around, and a woman at Ezra’s school produces a scrap of paper with a handwritten name, Hugh, and a phone number. It turns out the salon is in Pacific Palisades, an upscale community more than half an hour’s drive from our home. There are probably a few hundred hair salons and barbershops spread across West Los Angeles between our home and the Palisades, including a handful specifically for children. But we’re desperate and figure it’s worth a try. She makes an appointment, and I pick up Ezra at school on a rainy Thursday afternoon. To sweeten the deal, Shawn has told Ezra that he will be getting a new video, so we stop to pick one up, then find our way to a small, two-story shopping center not far from where Sunset Boulevard ends at the Pacific.