The Fourth Child

by Jessica Winter

  “Oh, I don’t know about that—it’s only been five months,” Jane said. “Going on six. I started taking her to doctors almost as soon as she got home. I knew she’d need help adjusting. It just takes time.”

  “Right. The thing is, you don’t have a lot of time,” Delia said.

  It wasn’t a judgment or a warning; it was an empirical observation, a recitation of numbers, a result, a sum. How much time Mirela had lost plus how much time she was losing. Or multiplied by. Six months was one-sixth of her life. Eighty-three percent of Mirela’s life was lost time and cut points.

  They watched Mirela. Now she was lying tummy-down on the floor, legs kicking the air, tapping Mr. Potato Head’s nose against his cheek, singing the tuneless little song to herself.

  You would never know. There were moments when you would never know, and you could string enough of those moments together to add up to an hour, a day, a whole child’s life.

  Welcome to Arden: We Build Bonds That Last Forever

  Amid the peaceful splendor of the Colorado mountains, the Arden Attachment Center is a world-renowned sanctuary for families facing the challenge of attachment disorders. At Arden, your child will learn the language of love, trust, and human connection. And you, the caregiver, will be your child’s most important teacher.

  What Is Attachment?

  Just as a child is taught to read and write, to swim or ride a bike, an infant is taught to love and communicate by receiving the attentions of his mother. Picking him up when he cries, feeding him when he is hungry, changing his diaper when it is wet, gazing into his eyes in loving attention: in these elemental interactions, the mother is helping her baby learn, through example, how to love and be loved. The cells of the baby’s brain and body store those learning memories, which are activated when the child is touched or spoken to.

  Who Is the Unattached Child?

  Due to earlier experiences with severe neglect and abuse, the unattached child is alienated from all sense of safety and security. She is a stranger to a loving touch. In fact, she associates love with pain. Instability and trauma are the normal state of affairs for the unattached child, who seeks a grim solace in control.

  At Arden, we know that love can conquer all. First, though, love must be taught. Love is a language the child will learn to speak fluently. For the child who was loved badly or not at all, there has to be a process of unlearning as well. At Arden, your child will find firm and gentle shepherds to lead her through this challenging but rewarding journey.

  What Is the Unattached Child Thinking?

  It’s the universal question for the caregiver at her wits’ end: What is going through this kid’s head? But it’s important to understand that the unattached child does have a rational belief system, taught to her through abuse and neglect. Her belief system has two main tenets: that she is not loved, and that she cannot trust others to provide for her needs. A loving, authoritative caregiver is a mortal threat to both of these beliefs. That is why she attempts to defy and disrupt the caregiver’s efforts wherever possible. At Arden, we break down this defensive belief system, brick by brick, through evidence-based therapeutic interventions.

  What Are the Responsibilities of the Unattached Child?

  The child must unlearn her abuse by performing it.

  The child must unlearn her rage by giving voice to it.

  The child must unlearn her imprisonment by reentering it.

  The unattached child was denied the opportunity to grow, explore, and become who she was meant to be. She feels a rational rage at this injustice, and that rage is complicated by the grief she feels for the lost birth mother. In short, she has been imprisoned by neglect, abuse, and unprocessed grief. The teams of caregivers at Arden can help her reclaim that freedom for herself through our special two-week therapeutic intensive. During this rigorous program, the unattached child is reborn into a world where once again she has no power, no autonomy, no control—but this time she is completely safe, in the arms of a caregiver who is teaching her unconditional love. At Arden, your child gets a second chance at her childhood—and so do you.

  KEY CONCEPTS OF THE THERAPEUTIC INTENSIVE

  Building trust.

  Teaching love.

  Valuing rage. Think of the unattached child’s rage as a fever. A fever must be treated, but it also must be understood as a cleansing reaction to a bigger threat—a fire that the body sets to smoke out danger. Rage is a rational response to the grief and pain caused by neglect and abuse, and under the right circumstances, it, too, can be cleansing. In the safe, controlled environment provided at Arden, the cathartic release of rage can break down the barriers the child has built against love and trust.

  Reeducating the body. The body is a mosaic of cells. Those cells hold learning memories, and in each of those memories is a lesson, good or bad, about love, trust, and safety. The unattached child must, in a sense, unattach from her dream—or her nightmare—of the biological mother, and transfer her attachments to new caregivers. This is a physical process as much as it is a mental one.

  Elements of the Therapeutic Intensive

  Breaking down defenses. The unattached child can be a citadel of deflection and controlling behavior. His defiance and disruptions may seem out of control, but in taking over his family’s lives, his oppositional behavior is also a means for him to stay in control. The therapist’s first task is to deconstruct those defenses through games, guided play, verbal correction, and other techniques that are therapeutically designed to throw the child off balance.

  “Baby”-ing. Another step in dismantling the child’s defenses is to guide her back to a state of infancy, where she feels both helpless and safe with a caregiver who is both all-powerful and nonthreatening. These techniques include swaddling, cuddling, cooing, and singing lullabies.

  Role-playing. The child is guided toward reimagining traumatic incidents in his early life, unearthing memories that lead to the cathartic release of rage and other emotions.

  Holding therapy. Just as the infant must be protected from her own kick and startle reflexes through holding and swaddling, the unattached child can be shored up against her fear of touch and trust through holding therapy, where she again finds herself at once powerless and completely safe. During the two-week therapeutic intensive, holding therapy is the punctuation mark that ends a hard, fulfilling day of learning, unlearning, and relearning.

  Rebirthing. This profound event grows organically out of holding therapy. It re-creates the child’s first and greatest embrace in the womb: where her mother’s body holds her, safe and warm.

  Lauren

  Paula liked to talk about how different boys kiss. The senior, captain of the lacrosse team, who did it like he was slurping soup. The sophomore on the Model UN team, who thrust his stiff long tongue in and out, like a dowsing rod, “like he could fuck with his mouth,” she said. When Paula described kissing, it was like she wasn’t one-half of the kiss. It was like the guys were sucking at the air or a mirror, and Paula was off to the side taking notes.

  When she was having sex with a guy, Paula said, she would imagine him doing normal things—writing a term paper, standing in line at Mighty Taco. And sometimes when she saw a guy doing normal things, she would imagine him having sex. “But, like, it’s all normal,” Paula said to Lauren.

  They were sitting across from each other at the big table in Tedquarters, sharing a bag of Doritos. “Why is it weird to have sex in front of people but it’s not weird to eat in front of people?” Paula asked. “They’re both totally regular, boring, gross sticky things that everybody does.”

  “Not everybody,” Lauren said sheepishly.

  “I mean, eventually,” Paula said.

  Kurt Cobain was in one of Paula’s magazines with his girlfriend. He had cherry-red hair and an itchy blue cardigan; his girlfriend was kissing him in profile, her lemony hair waxy and curling like a doll’s. “She’s ugly,” Paula said, and she was so happy about it. Paula loved Kurt Cobain, lately
seemed to think about Kurt Cobain all the time, and could work Kurt Cobain into any conversation, much like Mom could with Father Steve. “I think Kurt goes out with her just to piss people off,” Paula said.

  “Or maybe he goes out with her because they like each other,” Lauren said.

  “I bet she weighs more than Kurt does,” Paula said. “Did you know he’s so skinny he wears long underwear under his clothes? To stay warm and pad himself out.”

  Lauren had started to wonder whether Paula made up all her stories of sex with boys, or at least some of them; if she placed herself in their arms the same way she placed herself inside Kurt Cobain’s head as he picked out his clothes in the morning.

  “Is Kurt Cobain an Asshole, a Creep, or an Unspeakable?” Lauren asked. Paula and Lauren had categories for all boys and men, famous or not. Assholes were usually extroverts, Creeps were introverts, and Unspeakables were unable to be fully comprehended in their assholishness, their creepiness, and/or their dreamy perfection. Stitch Rosen was a Creep. Andy Figueroa was an Asshole, and so was Rajiv Datt, who was Stitch’s best friend. Assholes and Creeps tended to pair off with one another. Brendan Dougherty, a quiet junior, with his pale-blue eyes and choirboy singing voice, was an Unspeakable.

  “Kurt Cobain is Unspeakable with Asshole tendencies,” Paula replied, swallowing the word asshole as Mr. Smith entered the room. Instead of heading toward his desk, Mr. Smith sat down at the big table, next to Lauren and across from Paula. Their elbows touched for a moment.

  “I would have guessed Unspeakable leaning toward Creep,” Lauren said.

  “He’s an A-hole who wants you to think he’s a Creep,” Paula said.

  “Wouldn’t you have to be a little bit of an A-hole to be the lead singer of a band?” Lauren said. She rustled the bag of Doritos. “You need a lot of confidence.”

  “He has a stomach condition,” Paula said. “Maybe it’s because all the attention stresses him out. Maybe he’s a Creep after all.”

  “I think when you’re a rock star, I have a stomach condition really means I do a lot of drugs,” Lauren said.

  “You can cut out the middleman and just say I am a rock star really means I do a lot of drugs,” said Mr. Smith, pulling a sheaf of papers from his satchel. “It’s a good illustration of the transitive property.”

  Paula thought that Mr. Smith was an Asshole, and Lauren thought he was a Creep. He was the only teacher they disagreed about.

  “Maybe Kurt Cobain does a lot of drugs because he has a stomach condition,” Paula said. “But I hope they’re not doing drugs, because they want to have a baby. They say so in this interview.”

  “If they can get heroin, they can get birth control,” Lauren said.

  “That’s why they call it a drugstore!” said Mr. Smith, making a flourish with his red pen.

  “My mom put me on birth control as soon as I got my period,” Paula said, darting a glance at Mr. Smith, who sighed loudly and started to murmur aloud as he read his papers.

  “Me too,” Lauren said, without knowing why.

  “But isn’t your mother super Catholic?” Paula asked. Paula knew the answer. She was saying this just for Mr. Smith’s benefit.

  “Your mom goes to church, too,” Lauren said.

  “But she doesn’t make me go.”

  “My mom doesn’t make me go to church, either,” Lauren said. “Not anymore.”

  Paula stared at Lauren so long that Lauren looked away. “People are complicated,” Lauren said, rustling the Doritos bag again.

  “I have to go to studio art now,” Paula said, standing up. “What a very interesting conversation this has turned out to be, Lauren.”

  Lauren pretended to highlight some important passages about the Treaty of Versailles in her Global Studies textbook as Paula walked out.

  “Will we see you at tryouts for the spring musical soon?” Mr. Smith asked, not looking up from the papers he was grading. Their elbows touched again.

  “Maybe, I don’t know,” Lauren said. She thought about moving to where Paula had been sitting, across the table from Mr. Smith, but she wondered if he would be offended by this, or if the doubtful sensation of inappropriateness hanging over them would only become concrete if she acknowledged it by moving, or if he was waiting for her to move and would become frustrated that she didn’t, and as these thoughts talked past one another and canceled one another out, she remained still and glazed in her chair, as if she weren’t thinking at all.

  “What could be Uhh, maybe, I dunno about it?” he said.

  “What’s the play again?” asked Lauren, who knew that Bethune’s 1992 spring musical would be Grease, according to the posters advertising the upcoming auditions that hung all over school. Paula had designed the posters herself in the studio art printmaking shop while Lauren sat beside her studying for an algebra test.

  “It’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado,” Mr. Smith said, turning a page.

  “What?” Lauren asked. Mr. Smith always had these references ready to go, like he had a filing cabinet full of them and he chose five at random each morning to spread like bread crumbs through the halls and classrooms of Bethune.

  “Lauren,” he said as he made a note in the margin of the essay he was grading, “you know that I know that you know what the play is, and your too-cool-for-school act is ironically quite befitting of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s classic musical in its portrayal of teenage rebellion as manifested largely in a wholesale rejection of the state academic apparatus.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He was so smart, and she would be as smart as him one day, but she wasn’t yet. He’d had more time to learn the words, the names. All she caught was too cool and act and rejection. Or rebellion? But she wasn’t acting cool, and she hadn’t rejected anything. She was just sitting here. What was she doing that she didn’t know about?

  “The pose you strike, of the disaffected, eye-rolling adolescent alienated from the opportunities extended to her, and to a great extent alienated from speech and language itself, is spot-on,” he said.

  Mom hated it when Lauren rolled her eyes. She said that nobody wanted to be around that kind of negative energy. That was the threat—that everybody was looking at Lauren and nobody liked what they saw.

  “Too good to talk to me now, huh?” Mr. Smith asked.

  Lauren breathed faster. His joking tone was a warning. She needed to explain herself, to say something he couldn’t criticize or argue with.

  “I need to be home more, these days,” she said. “Might not have time for the musical. I’m sorry. I—I’ve told you about it—my situation at home.”

  Mr. Smith frowned at his papers. “Don’t I remember you trying to get out of the fall play, too? You don’t mean it.”

  “No, I mean it. I need to be around more to help my mom with my adopted sister.”

  “And how is that going?” Mr. Smith asked, putting down his pen and turning to look at her. “You’ve said that it’s been challenging.”

  “It’s good. She’s good. It’s just a lot of work for my mom.”

  “Your adopted sister has tantrums?” He was turned ninety degrees in his seat to face her fully, Lauren staring straight ahead.

  She shrugged. “Probably like any kid. I don’t know. It’s not such a big deal, I guess.”

  “I thought you were in the middle of explaining to me why it is such a big deal.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does your mom do when your adopted sister has a tantrum?”

  “Different stuff. She just deals with it.”

  “You are incredibly difficult to talk to.”

  A pumping in her throat, in her ears, rings of sound, gold rings, rattling, visible.

  “Just deals with it? How?” he demanded.

  “Sometimes she holds her tight.” A metallic ringing at the front of her head, behind her eyes. Gold spotting her vision, like she’d won a prize.

  “How do you mean?”

  “She
just tries to hold her close. My mom puts her on her lap, turned away, so they’re both facing the same direction, and she wraps her arms around her from the back, like this”—Lauren wrapped her arms around an invisible child on her lap—“to stop her moving around so much, to calm her down. She wraps her, like swaddling a baby, and she rocks her like a baby, too. Sometimes Mirela hums, like she is singing to herself. And they just hold and rock like that until she calms down.”

  “Your mother learned that from a licensed professional?”

  Lauren suspected she had said too much, or said the wrong thing, but she didn’t know what. It was hard to hear her thoughts over the ringing, to see her thoughts through the gold spots. “I think it’s just instinct. She calls it the squeeze.”

  “Why is your voice shaking?”

  “I’m nervous.”

  “You’re nervous? Because you’re concerned about your adopted sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay.” Mr. Smith was rubbing her back. Mom used to do that. Blood pounding in her ears. The gold spots turning black at the center, the black blooming, the gold a dying outline. But she also had a warm pooling feeling in her chest, a pleasurable sadness.

  “My mom said when I was two I had an ear infection,” Lauren said, “and the medicine I had to take gave me crazy tantrums, and she would hold me like that and I would calm down.” There was a creak in her voice, like after sobbing or like when PJ and Sean would do frog-monster voice, like Lauren was fake-crying in an All My Sons rehearsal. “It was bright pink medicine. I liked how it tasted. I don’t remember that, though—it’s what my mom told me. I think she just goes on what feels right.”

  “What feels right.” He was holding her hand with one hand and rubbing her back with the other. He played variations: rubbing circles and then up and down, tracing ticklish patterns and pushing with the heel of his hand.