Following Ezra (7 page)

“Our job now,” she says, “is to give him the tools to put them together and make sense of the movie—or learn to live with them the way they are.”

She gives us a few ideas for how to start: making schedule books with visual cues about what’s going to happen every day, to ease the sense of anxiety that seems to grip Ezra at practically every moment; occupational therapy to help tame the sensory issues; and, she says, the most important ingredient, finding a preschool where he will fit in and where the educators know how to help. Shawn takes notes and I pretend to listen. In my mind, I’m stuck on Dr. Miller’s image of my son desperately trying to make sense of a cluttered heap of movie frames. I’m lost trying to grasp Ezra’s fractured consciousness.

On the way out, Ezra steers clear of the drinking fountain, and I think about how he lives with the new fears that arise around every corner, and wonder how I am going to live with mine.

 

 

If you have cancer, it shows up in a biopsy or an MRI scan. Doctors diagnose diabetes by measuring glucose levels in blood and urine. Diagnosing autism, it turns out, is an inexact science. In the absence of a blood test or a known genetic marker, professionals rely on a kind of Chinese food menu approach. The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition
—known popularly as the
DSM IV
—begins its description of section 299.0, Autistic Disorder, by listing three categories: social interaction, communication, and restrictive and repetitive behavior. Each of the three categories includes a list of specific symptoms—things like “failure to develop peer relationships appropriate for social level,” and “lack of varied, spontaneous and make-believe play . . .” The Chinese menu part is near the top, where it explains that to qualify as autistic, a person must have “a total of six (or more) items from (1) (2) and (3), with at least two from (1) and one each from (2) and (3).”

It’s a hell of a way to diagnose a person.

By my count, Ezra has nearly all of the symptoms listed, and certainly meets the basic criteria. Yet nowhere does the
DSM
mention sudden, irrational fears. At three years old, that is what Ezra keeps experiencing. He seems to exist in a constant state of heightened anxiety, wary that around every corner could lurk the next Alf doll, another drinking fountain. We never know what will set him off.

He’s in the playroom with Ami watching the video of
Toy Story
when suddenly Ezra leaps up from the couch and runs out of the room.

“Turn it off! Turn it
off
!” he’s yelling from the hallway, where he has planted his hands firmly on his ears. Ami won’t turn the set off, won’t even pause the video. Ezra keeps pleading, but won’t explain what’s wrong. They have not been watching a particularly frightening part of the movie, but Ezra won’t go back into the room.

Later, he finds the video’s carton and tucks it in the back of a cabinet. Whenever the other boys are contemplating a movie, he won’t go near it.

“No
Toy Story
! No
Toy Story
!” he pleads.

Random things incite panic. He receives a birthday gift, a silly children’s game called Fishin’ Around, featuring magnets players suspend from miniature fishing poles to nab plastic fish from a colorful, rotating disk. It seems an innocuous pastime, but Ezra somehow finds it haunting. He shrieks and moans when he catches sight of it, then shoves it back in its box, safely out of sight. He seems unable to function in its presence.

The irony is that while Ezra is afraid of the fish game and
Toy Story
, he lacks many of the fears he
should
have: He balances precariously on high playground structures; he wanders off to explore the outer limits of the supermarket on his own, not noting or caring that he has lost contact with his mother or father; left unattended for even a second, he wanders into crowds and onto busy streets.

Of all of Ezra’s early quirks and idiosyncrasies—the disconnection, the endless repetition, the odd gestures—I find this the most puzzling: his topsy-turvy relationship with fear. Perhaps it’s because his fears are so difficult to predict; maybe it’s because I feel so powerless to do anything to prevent them or react to them. Like any father, I want to protect my child, but it’s difficult to know what I’m protecting him from.

It happens again when he starts at a new preschool. We decide to move him to another local early childhood program, where we have learned that the student-to-teacher ratio is lower and the program seeks out children who have had difficulty fitting in elsewhere.

A few weeks before the new school year is to begin, we get a call from a woman named Dawn who will be working as an aide specifically assigned to Ezra. She wants to visit our home to get acquainted with Ezra a bit and help to ease his entry to the new preschool.

“Tell me about what kinds of things he likes,” she asks Shawn over the phone.

“Anything that has to do with Winnie the Pooh,” Shawn tells her.

Two days later, on a hot and sunny August afternoon, the doorbell rings and Ami runs to the door. Shawn follows close behind, calling for Ezra to join her.

Dawn walks in. She’s in her thirties. She’s full of energy, immediately plunking herself down on the hardwood floor in the entryway. Ezra is lingering behind Shawn’s leg.

“Are you
Ezra
?” she says with great enthusiasm and flashing a big smile. “I have something really
special
for you!” She holds up a white plastic shopping bag she’s brought.

That gets his attention. Walking on his tiptoes, he tilts his head, carefully examining the bag from a few feet away.

“Guess what I
have
?” Dawn says.

The boys all crowd around, trying to guess.

“Can you
guess
?”

Right away, I see that this woman knows how to connect with children. They begin guessing.

“Cookies?” Ami asks.

“Close,” she says.

“Ice cream?”

“Even closer!” she says. “What do you think, Ezra?”

Ezra won’t guess; he’s not playing her game. He just wants her to open the bag.

“Okay,” she finally says. “We don’t want them to melt.” She opens the bag and pulls out a box of popsicles—orange and black in wrappers bearing the likeness of Ezra’s favorite character.

“Tigger!” Ezra shouts. He grabs one of the popsicles and launches into the Tigger dance from the movie; then the other boys take theirs, and we move to the back porch, where we sit and Dawn tries to talk to Ezra about the new school, never dropping her energy level even for a second. But he’s not listening; instead, he starts sifting through his box of plastic animals.

“Ezra,” she says, “your mom and dad and I are talking about you. I’m going to be your teacher when you come to your new school!”

He doesn’t respond.

“All the kids are so excited to meet you!”

Shawn and I share a look. It’s become rare for us to see adults talking to Ezra. Most give up quickly when they realize he’s not looking at them and seems lost in his head.

“I’m not sure he can hear you,” Shawn says softly.

“Oh, I know he can,” says Dawn.

“I’m not sure he even understands he’s going to a new school.”

Dawn continues undeterred. “Well, I’ll tell you how I look at it,” she says. “Some teachers figure, Well, you speak Japanese, and I speak English, so there’s no way we can ever communicate. But I want to learn Japanese. I want to learn to speak Ezra’s language and communicate with Ezra, so he’ll let me into his world. That’s what this is all about.”

That sounds good to me.

 

 

Dawn suggests that we bring Ezra to the preschool a few days before school begins. She wants to give him a chance to explore his new classroom and the playground without any children—to acclimate to the new surroundings without being overwhelmed by the chaos and crowds of the first day. I think of how little fuss he made about entering Karen’s classroom a year earlier, but since then he has become increasingly anxious about changes, wary of new situations. He thrives on routine, clings to the known.

On a sunny late August morning, we drive to the low-slung brick preschool complex and meet Dawn at her office. It’s decorated with children’s art—finger painting and crayon sketches with canary yellow suns and stick-figure children. Her shelves are full of picture books and Slinkys, Crayolas, and modeling clay.

“Hi, Ezra, remember me?” she says with the same warm ebullience she showed at our house. Dawn knows the keys to winning the affection of toddlers: high energy, exaggerated facial expressions, and popsicles. She’s full of looks of surprise, over-the-top smiles, and pouty frowns. Ezra is a tough audience, mostly scanning her shelves for toys and occasionally echoing a question.

“I want to show you around your new school, so that when you come next week, you’ll know where everything is,” she says. “So let’s go.”

The three of us follow her out the office door and into the courtyard. Ezra spots a large sandbox and immediately collapses, planting himself in the sand and running his fingers through the gray granules.

“Ezra, come on,” I say. “That’s not what we’re—”

“No, it’s okay,” Dawn says, interrupting. “I want him to make himself at home.” She hands him a bucket and shovel. “Let’s sit here for a little while, Ezra, and when you’re ready, we’ll go into the Hungry Caterpillar classroom.” She sits down in the sand with him, handing him plastic rakes and scooping at the sand with another trowel. After a few minutes, she asks, “Ready to go visit?” Without hesitation, he tags along behind her.

Good news. He’s willing to follow Dawn. She leads us across the small courtyard to a doorway.

“This is going to be your classroom,” she says, as the three of us step inside the spacious room, taking in the colorful posters and the toddler-size tables and chairs in a variety of primary colors.

“Look,” Dawn says. “Here are the names of all of the kids who are going to be in your class!” She points out a long picture of a friendlylooking green dragon that somebody has painted on butcher paper and hung with masking tape just inside the door. “Can you find your name?”

Shawn and I are just starting to kneel down to help him search when suddenly, without warning, Ezra turns away and sprints out the door, back into the courtyard. It’s as if a phantom is chasing after him. It happens so quickly that I’m not sure what startled him. We follow him into the courtyard, where he plants himself behind a wall and around a corner from the classroom.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Shawn says.

“I don’t like that dinosaur!” Ezra says firmly.

“You saw a dinosaur?” I ask.

“I don’t like the green dinosaur,” he says again. I peek back toward the classroom.

“That’s not a dinosaur. It’s a friendly dragon, Ezzy,” I say. “Let’s go back in.” But now Ezra is running the other way.

“I’m not going.”

Dawn catches up with Ezra. “Sweetheart, that’s just a picture with everybody’s name. See? Let’s go find your name!”

He’s not going. Suddenly he’s got a look, the same terrified expression that flashed across his face in Dr. Miller’s office. And he won’t budge. He won’t listen to Dawn or Shawn or me. Ezra is not moving.

“That’s okay,” Dawn says calmly, with the same cheerful voice. “’Cause you know
what
? You’re going to come back next week and all the kids are going to be here and they’re all going be so excited to meet you!”

Ezra is either not listening or doing a great job of pretending not to listen. He’s not looking at Dawn. He’s walking in little circles while Dawn keeps talking to him as if he’s responding. I would have stopped talking a while ago, figuring that he can’t hear, or can’t grasp what I am saying. Dawn, though, seems to assume that he can.

Maybe that’s what she meant about the Japanese.

The next Tuesday morning, we drive Ezra to the preschool. He’s in the car seat in back, wearing maroon sweatpants and a royal blue T-shirt with a picture of Tigger on the chest. Shawn is telling him how exciting it is that he’s going to be in a new school. He pulls his hands over his eyes.

“I don’t want to see the dinosaur,” he says. “No dinosaur!”

“Don’t worry about the dinosaur,” I say. “It’s just a picture.”

We walk into the building, but when we get close to the Hungry Caterpillar classroom, he stops. All around us moms and dads are shepherding their sons and daughters inside—little girls in pink tops and pigtails, little boys wearing surfer shorts and colorful T-shirts. Some of the dads are holding camcorders to capture these fleeting moments between summer and fall, between babyhood and the school years. Children are finding their name tags and photos and cubbies and exploring the toys and puzzles and books.

I look down and see Ezra, with fear in his eyes.

“No dinosaur!” he says, turning from the room, just as Dawn is arriving.

“Hi, Ezra! Ready to go in?” she says with a big grin.

He’s not. He stands with his lunch box in his hand and walks to the sandbox.

“Come on,” I say. “Time to go in.”

He won’t budge.

I wonder what’s truly bothering Ezra. Is this really about the green dinosaur—or dragon, or whatever it is? Or is Ezra terrified by the entire experience: the new school, the unfamiliar teachers, the fresh crop of children? I wonder what he is not telling us—or cannot tell us. Is he experiencing separation anxiety? Is it a fear of losing control? Any of those would be in the realm of normal concerns. My worry is that Ezra’s fear is really just about a picture. He’s scared of the poster the way he was scared of Alf and the drinking fountain. It’s not more complex than that. In a sense, that’s even scarier than any of those more rational explanations. My son isn’t anxious about school or making new friends. He’s afraid of a crudely drawn dragon painted on a swath of butcher paper.