I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (24 page)

Jim recently has begun referring to this behavior of mine as “Now. Not now.” My brain, since the injury, is happiest in the present, and for some unknown reason it is very unhappy in both the past and the future. If I am forced to think of something that happened last month, I have to walk myself backward through time in my head one small step at a time, attaching myself to other things that have happened. The future is much harder for me to walk forward into because there are no events that have yet happened for me to attach onto. If something is happening in my life right now at this very instant—for example, Benjamin is making a fire in the fireplace—I can make sense of that thing and know that it is happening right now. Benjamin is making a fire in the fireplace. If next week I have to look back and remember that Benjamin made a fire in the fireplace, I have to think of lots of other “present” moments that happened throughout the week in order to walk back until I come to the specific “present moment” when Benjamin was making a fire in the fireplace. None of this happens automatically. I actually have to think about it for a long time. If I get the least little bit lost in my mind, if I can’t remember a specific something to attach to, for example, I have to start the whole process over again. It can take me days to answer a simple question like “How did you celebrate New Year’s last year?” Needless to say,
I usually just choose to not go through that whole process. At all. Instead I have “Now” and “Not now.”

Writing this very book you are now holding has been one huge continuous struggle because of the way my brain works. And I am not talking necessarily about the contents of the book. I can always call my parents or talk to Jim if I have a question about a specific anecdote. I am surrounded by reams of paper at any given moment filled with notes of names, places, incidents, time lines, dates, records, and titles. No, the hard part has been deadlines. My editor might say, “Su, I’d like to have Chapter 10 in two weeks, by February twenty-second. Do you think that will be enough time?” I will
always
say, “Yes. Of course!” In reality I have no idea what she is asking and how much time “two weeks” really is. I can look at a physical calendar and count out the days and know that there are exactly fifteen days until February 22. But knowing that information, that there are fifteen days until February 22, doesn’t mean anything
real
to me. And then there is another thing to remember on top of that: Chapter 10 is due to my editor in fifteen days on February 22. Now there are two layers of things that I don’t understand but that I have to remember and do something about. “Now” and “Not now.”

In some ways it’s easier for me to deal with these kinds of deficits now that I understand a bit more how the brain works. But the process of becoming aware of how different I am was a very painful one. And the five years from roughly 2003 until 2008 were an eye-opening, heart-wrenching, and overwhelming period of time in my life that leaves me a bit dazed and confused even now.

—U2

F
or as long as I knew—I always hesitate to say “as long as I could remember”—I kept my truly terrified and genuinely ignorant self concealed, consciously or unconsciously, at least most of the time. But it was an embarrassing and upsetting existence. The ups and downs that I experienced were probably in big part a direct result of the shame and discomfort that I lived with every minute of every day. Just a few years before, I hadn’t even been aware of how much I didn’t know about the world around me. But at a certain point, I began to realize how clueless I really was. For example, I had trouble remembering my own birthday and how old I was, as well as how old my kids and husband were. I often got lost and was late for classes or appointments, or I
forgot about them altogether no matter how many reminders I gave myself or how many calendars I kept. There were days I couldn’t tie my own shoes or button buttons. Some days I couldn’t read or write. If those happened to be days when I was to volunteer at the school library, read the song list on a Spinning CD for a class I was teaching, attend book club or choir, drive to a new pool for a swim or dive meet that required me to read a map and street signs, or even check my kids’ homework, then I had to either come up with an excuse for why I couldn’t, or attempt to fake my way through. This almost always ended badly.

I remember a specific time one summer when I scheduled an annual eye exam for Kassidy on the same day as an afternoon swim meet. Again, understanding the way schedules worked was seldom an area of giftedness for me. Not only were eye appointments with the pediatric ophthalmologist excruciatingly long, they also included eyedrops to dilate the pupils. Sunlight plus dilated pupils equaled eye pain. Swim meets most often occured in the sunlight. Dilated pupils made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to read (especially maps). That week’s particular swim meet was happening at a pool very far away in an area of town unfamiliar to Kassidy and me. It might as well have been in Narnia. There were detailed maps distributed to the kids at practice the day before so that parents and their children could easily find the pool. Parents, that is, who could read maps, and children, that is, without dilated pupils. And Kassidy hated being late for anything. That particular day was a nightmare.

But it was small potatoes compared to the time when I pulled Benjamin out of school during spring of his junior year in 2003.

Though my elder son was obviously extremely bright, throughout nearly all of his school days he had struggled in the large
classes and impersonal environment of public school. And Jim and I had been arguing for what seemed like forever about what to do. Over the years we had looked into the possibility of sending him to one of several small private schools in the area. These schools were highly regarded, as well as hugely successful with kids like Benjamin. Unfortunately, they were also financially way out of reach for us. We lived in an area of the county that had a terrific high school. Thomas S. Wootton High School was regarded as one of the top schools in Montgomery County—for a certain type of student. The type of student that Jim and I both agreed Benjamin was
not.
During Benjamin’s eighth-grade year—and last year of middle school—I found out about a relatively new public high school in another part of the county that specialized in the arts, both performing and visual. James Hubert Blake High School was one of the three Northeast Consortium high schools in and around Silver Spring, each of which had its own signature programs. They were not magnet programs per se, so it was initially unclear as to whether or not Benjamin would even be allowed to attend a high school so far out of our cluster. But the bureaucracy that was Montgomery County Public Schools did not deter Jim. He wrote letters to and met with people up as high as the superintendent himself, explaining why Blake High School would be a perfect fit for our son. In the spring before Benjamin’s freshman year, we were pleasantly surprised to hear that our request had been granted. Benjamin would be able to attend James Hubert Blake as long as we agreed to transport him the forty-five minutes (one way) to and from school each day. By Benjamin’s junior year of high school, things were still getting worse academically for him, and Jim and I were really at each other’s throats. That is, whenever Jim decided to show up at home. He was still traveling most of the time.
And even when he wasn’t officially traveling, he worked long hours and most weekends, so that we rarely saw him. Sometimes the only way I knew that he had even been home was by his dirty clothes showing up in the hamper.

I was making Benjamin’s bed up with clean sheets on a Friday afternoon early in February 2003 when I discovered a notebook between his mattress and box spring. I pulled it out, opened it, and the writing inside made my heart stop. There were pages and pages of Benjamin’s distinctive handwriting: “I hate my fucking life,” “I hate going to fucking school with such fucking idiots,” “I wish I was dead,” “Why does everyone in the world hate me?” “Life Sucks,” “Fucking High School sucks,” “I want to die!” This kind of stuff, plus lots of other indecipherable scrawls, was written on page after page, over and over again. The entire notebook was filled to near capacity with Benjamin’s raw emotion. At that very moment, sitting by myself on his half-made bed totally in shock, I decided that Benjamin was done with the Montgomery County Public Schools.

When Benjamin arrived home that afternoon, I told him that I had inadvertently found his notebook, and I held it up. He went immediately into his legendary “Happy Benjamin” patter: Oh-Mom-it’s-nothing-don’t-pay-any-attention-to-that-everything’s-fine. I interrupted him and asked him if he would be okay with me making the decision to pull him out of school. He stopped talking and looked at me with such an expression of relief. But not even a minute passed before he looked worried again and asked, “Is Dad okay with this?” Truthfully, I hadn’t even thought about whether or not Jim would be okay with it. And frankly, I didn’t really care what Jim thought. In my gut, I knew that I had to take my son out of school, or something really bad was going
to happen. Like always, I had no plan, but I knew that this was the right thing to do.

The following Monday morning, Benjamin and I marched into the main office of James Hubert Blake High School and asked to speak with Benjamin’s administrator. When he eventually appeared, he wished me a good morning and asked how he could help me. I told him that I was there to fill out whatever paperwork was necessary to pull Benjamin out of school. He stared at me with a smile frozen on his face.

I have little recollection of precisely what I said, or what he said, or what Benjamin may have said, or what exactly happened next. I do recall that at one point the administrator argued that I couldn’t pull Benjamin out of school for the simple reason that my son’s PSAT scores were among the highest in the school’s history. Regardless of that fact, not too long after the fun little powwow in the administrator’s office, I was filling out paperwork and withdrawing Benjamin from school. Just like that.

Afterward, Benjamin and I went to Checkers and got french fries and milk shakes. When we got home, Benjamin went to bed and slept nearly straight through two full days and nights. On the afternoon of the exact same Monday that I pulled him out of school, he received a letter in the mail informing him that his PSAT test scores had qualified him as a semifinalist for a National Merit Scholarship. When his SAT scores came in the mail later that summer, he learned that he had missed two math questions. Total.

How did I tell Jim about all of this? He remembers a long and intense “dog-walk conversation” one evening. I told him about what I had found (the notebook) and what I intended to do (pull Benjamin out of school). We must have walked those dogs around
those soccer fields at least half a dozen times while I talked. Jim also remembers that it hadn’t been so much a discussion as my informing him that this
was
happening. He adds that he hadn’t heard that kind of urgency in the tone of my voice, or seen such determination in my demeanor, for a very long time. I’m not entirely sure if he was totally on board with the situation initially, but to his credit, he didn’t try to put a stop to it.

Benjamin took his GED exam and (surprise, surprise) got a perfect score. I knew he would have to figure out his next steps at some point. Was he going to get a job? Was he still going to try to get into college? Would he try to pursue acting full-time? I knew he had to figure some of this stuff out, but I also wanted to give him some time to recover. I wasn’t sure exactly from what he was recovering, but I was aware that something about him was not quite right. We were both traveling through uncharted territory and for several weeks he followed me around like a lost puppy. He occasionally joined my morning classes at the gym, and almost always came with me on the midday dog walk. It was during these long, peaceful walks that he began to open up to me and tell me what school had really been like for him. I was shocked and horrified. Benjamin had been beaten and bullied all through elementary school, middle school, and into high school. He had his PE clothes flushed down the toilet and thrown out of the bus window while in middle school. He always told me he had lost them. He had an English teacher repeatedly “send him to Siberia” when he didn’t have his homework. She would have him sit in an unoccupied desk underneath a hanging plant. As he sat there, she would water the plant, and the water would seep through the dirt and stream down onto him. He was often shoved into his locker and pushed off of his seat on the bus. If he was at lunch reading a book, it was often
grabbed from him, torn up, and thrown into the trash or a toilet. If it was a library book, or textbook, he told me he had lost it, even when I made him pay for the “lost” books himself. So many dreadful and appalling stories poured out.

I asked repeatedly why he never told me, and he always gave me a similar answer. “Mom, you had enough to worry about.” Or, “You wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway.” Or, “Mom, you don’t understand what it’s like at all!” Or, “Telling you would have just made stuff worse.” Or, “Mom, what exactly would you have done even if I had told you?” Or, “You don’t always do too well in stressful situations.” In essence, he was telling me that he had always been more concerned about stressing me out than he had been concerned about his own safety and well-being.