by Laurie Gough
Then it happened: Owen shot across the finish line first. A second later, Quinn crossed it.
It was over. Like every other year, Quinn had come in second. I exhaled deeply. Things seemed restored to their normal order.
“Way to go, Quinn!” Rob and I shouted.
Owen and Quinn were bent over, hands on their knees, trying to catch their breaths. Their friends surrounded them, patting them on their backs. A first and second place would give the school lots of points in the overall competition.
When the other kids cleared away, I went over to Quinn to give him a hug. His body was hot, his face flushed. A big smile broke across his face as he looked at me. “Did you see how close I came, Mummy? Usually I’m like, two car lengths behind Owen. This time I was right there behind him. I could have touched him!”
“You were so fast! You ran so hard! I’m so proud of you!” Rob took a photo as Quinn and I grinned for the camera.
For a few glorious moments, we were all free of the OCD bully.
But when Quinn stood on the podium an hour later — all the kids who’d competed and a bunch of parents and teachers were watching — I couldn’t help noticing his movements were jerky. I saw his lips moving when they put the medal around his neck and I knew that he was talking to my dad. I wondered what he was saying, what new bargain he was trying to strike to bring him back. Later, when I went looking for him in the school to give him money for pizza, I spotted him in the hallway jumping across the patterns of linoleum tiles. His hand was on his heart and he was murmuring. My own heart plummeted at how fractured and off-kilter everything was again.
I didn’t know it at the time but perhaps felt it lurking somewhere: The day of the race would be the last day he’d attend school for almost a month.
CHAPTER 12
My mother arrived by train that afternoon. Tina, Halla, Quinn, and I picked her up at the Ottawa train station. While Tina and I waited in the car for the boys to find my mother inside, we watched flocks of visitors arriving for Thanksgiving weekend, while, overhead, flocks of Canada geese headed south. Every day now we’d see the geese, coming from the far north, beating across the sky in dark waves as they honked their way to Florida. I felt like joining them. When Tina and I finally saw my mother emerging from the station, we chuckled darkly about the fact that it was social Halla chatting away with my mother, whom he had never met, while Quinn quietly pulled her suitcase behind them.
That night, while Halla was brushing his teeth, I looked in on Quinn in his bedroom. He was kneeling on his dresser and reaching up to touch the picture of my dad, mumbling to himself with his eyes closed, chanting the same phrase over and over about coming back. I cleared my throat. “Quinn, sweetie, that’s enough. Don’t let the OCD bully make you do this.”
He opened his eyes, shouted, “Go away!” and looked at me with what I can only describe as hatred. The look shot a voltage of dread through me. I’d never seen that look on my son before. How had he become so unmoored from his old life? How could I return him to being the boy he really was, the boy who looked at me with a smile or a giggle on his face? Quinn’s giggle used to be so infectious that a friend of ours had actually recorded two-year-old Quinn giggling so she could remember what happiness sounded like. Where had that boy gone?
Later that night, Rob said something about how the real Quinn was deep inside, struggling to get out. “He hates doing this stuff but he can’t not do it. The real Quinn we know wouldn’t do any of it. We can’t take any of it personally.” I knew Rob was right — Rob was so much better at being patient and rational and level-headed in all this than I was — but it didn’t mean I didn’t feel like buckling in half and sobbing at losing my son before my eyes.
The next morning my mother just happened to pass Quinn’s bedroom and saw him up on the dresser, touching the picture and beseeching her dead husband to come back. It’s one thing to hear how dire a situation is on the phone from your daughter, but to witness something so unfathomable and deeply disturbing about your own grandson with your own eyes torpedoes everything to the surface. I stood in the hallway with a view of my tiny mother staring up at Quinn on the dresser, and a view of Tina and Halla on the couch in the living room. On seeing Quinn, my mother shot me a desperate look, like someone who suddenly finds herself utterly lost, then she turned back to him. Tina, Halla, and I listened, frozen in place, as my mother’s words began to fill the house.
“Oh, Quinn my love, Grandpa’s not coming back. Touching that picture won’t do anything. Grandpa is dead. People die. That’s what happens. People have been waiting two thousand years for Jesus to come back but it’s not going to happen. Grandpa wouldn’t want you to ask him to come back. He wouldn’t want you to be sad. He’d want you to be your old self again. I miss Grandpa, too. I miss him so much that I dream about him every night and I miss him every minute. I understand why you want him back. I’d like him to come back, too. But he’s not going to.” She stopped talking as a long single note of a high-pitched wail of sorrow began to drift out of the room. For a second I didn’t even realize it was coming from Quinn, so unearthly it sounded. My mother continued, her voice remaining firm. “But Quinn, I’m still alive. I’m right here and I’m your grandma and I love you more than anyone in the world. I’ve loved you since I first held you when you were two days old. I’m alive and I love you.”
Just as her words had filled the house, now silence rushed into every dusty corner and up to the highest ceiling beams.
It felt like a giant pause button had been pushed. Nobody moved. But then, to my surprise, Quinn got down from the dresser, forgoing the rest of the please come back ritual, and threw himself into my mother’s arms. They hugged a long time while Quinn sobbed. Tina mouthed, “Oh, my God, oh, my God!” from the couch, giving me the thumbs-up. I couldn’t speak. I was too overcome with admiration for my strong and wise mother, and the scene unfolding in front of me.
Of course, I thought, it had always been my mother who had loved Quinn, her only grandchild, so wholeheartedly, playing and reading with him, buying him books, making him healthy meals, worrying about his every cold, wondering about the comings and goings of his days. Although my dad loved Quinn, it was my mother who’d stayed with us the first six weeks of Quinn’s life, who’d spent so many hours down on the floor playing with him as a toddler, searching the stores for some Thomas the Tank Engine water tower or little elfin dolls to drive his toy cars. Sometimes when the three of us were visiting my parents in Guelph, she’d sing out before dinner, Wash your hands! and Quinn and I would race to the bathroom sink, giggling, nudging each other out of the way, and I’d have the uncanny feeling that Quinn was my little brother rather than my son, and she was our mother, so much more motherly than I was.
Why hadn’t I said this to Quinn more often? Grandma is still alive.
For the next four hours after the talk on the dresser, Quinn didn’t display a single OCD behaviour. This was the longest he’d gone without doing anything OCDish in weeks. It was as if he’d snapped out of it. Later in the morning, when the boys were playing outside, Halla came in for a glass of water. My mother and I were in the kitchen — she jokingly saying, “I better darn-well stay alive now as long as I can” — when Halla came over and touched her sleeve. “I wanted to tell you that what you said to Quinn did wonders for him. We’ve been playing out there and I haven’t seen him do any OCD all morning.” An enormous smile took over my mother’s face as she put her hand on Halla’s slim shoulder and told him how lucky Quinn was to have a friend like him.
Later, I came to realize that my mother’s speech to Quinn on his dresser that morning had been one of a few incidents where a window had opened, however briefly, and for a while, Quinn stopped using the protection of OCD to mask his pain. Her words somehow broke through his shell and must have reached his very core, thus that haunting wailing sound. For a brief while he’d let the truth come inside.
But
like a drunken neighbour at a barbeque who finally leaves but annoyingly returns after dark, Quinn’s OCD gradually made its unwelcome reappearance over the course of the day. That night, Quinn actually took the framed photo of my dad off the wall and stuck it under his pillow. When I wanted to read the boys a chapter of The Time Thief, Halla on the bottom bunk and Quinn and me on the top, Quinn couldn’t make space for me because he said he had to stay in the exact position he landed in when he’d jumped into bed. He was sprawled diagonally on his back with his bent arm elbowing upward, one foot raised high in the air, knee slightly bent, staring straight up at the ceiling.
“That’s ridiculous,” I heard myself say in exasperation to his comically frozen form. “You’re actually giving up hearing what happens next in the book to do that? Are you planning on sleeping with your elbow and foot in the air?”
Halla popped out of his bed to take a look. “Whoa, that’s so not what I was expecting,” he said. At this point, Quinn broke out laughing, which made Halla and me laugh, too. Quinn must have realized how silly this whole thing was. He didn’t move from his position, though. It seemed that every so often, he’d realize how ludicrous and funny his OCD was, but it was rarely ludicrous and funny enough to stop doing it.
This meant I couldn’t read the boys the book. We weren’t supposed to enable the OCD. Enabling the OCD bully shows the child that the bully has power over us. “Your OCD bully isn’t the boss of me,” we were always saying. I had to tell him that since he wasn’t making room for me, I couldn’t read the story that night. When I turned off the bedroom light, the last things I saw were Quinn’s elbow and foot still wavering above his body, like spare parts that didn’t know where they belonged.
The next day I was on the phone with my sister in Colorado. I’d emailed her about how serious Quinn’s condition was and now she was determined to find a solution over the phone. “Would a couple of days at Disney World help? I could take him there. Nobody could be unhappy at Disney World.” When I dissuaded her from that suggestion she said his problem must stem from seasonal affective disorder and the grey skies of Canada. “He’s just depressed,” she said. “The sun never comes out where you live.”
“First of all, that’s so not true,” I said. “If you’d said this to me in February, when the sun really doesn’t come out much, I’d have thought grey skies could be a contributing factor. But summer just ended and the sun has been out for months on end. His vitamin D count is fine. It’s OCD. It’s not the weather.”
“Still, I think Disney World would help. And more omega-3.” At this point I gave the phone to my mother, who suggested to my sister something more helpful than Disney World, such as some money to help pay for the child psychologist bills. My sister and her wealthy husband sent us money straight away.
We took my mother to see Quinn’s first indoor soccer game of the season, wondering if the OCD bully would interfere with his playing. From a bench on the sidelines we watched Quinn perform various dekes around other players and saw him running at lightning speed up the field on some breakaways. Nobody there could have known how tormented his mind was. It seemed the thrill and immediacy of soccer was the perfect antidote to OCD. The OCD bully didn’t stand a chance during the adrenaline-pumping moments when Quinn was close to the ball. Only when there wasn’t much action on the field did we see Quinn struggling, jerking his body, walking backward, hopping on one foot, or putting his hand on his heart and murmuring up at the ceiling rafters. At one point, we could see him across the field on the bench beside some teammates waiting their turn to go back on. When one of the coaches, a French-speaking woman built like a refrigerator, called for him to go back out, Quinn didn’t move. He was immobilized on the bench. We watched her go over to him, grab his arm, and physically yank him up. In seconds he was back on the field and even shot us a smile. “Well that worked,” said Rob, chuckling. “The yank. Let’s try it at home.” Later in the game, when Quinn made a beautiful pass to a player who scored, my mother turned to me with tears in her eyes. “Your dad would have loved to have seen this.” I blinked back tears. She was right. My sports-loving dad would have been so proud and thrilled to watch Quinn play soccer.
Email, October 14, 2013
Hi Tina,
Since you and Halla left yesterday, Quinn is going in and out of these strange trances in which he seems totally lost. Somehow, my mum is able to bring him back out of it by talking to him. But now I’m worried that after she leaves tomorrow I won’t be able to do it myself. He keeps touching her arm, an OCD thing, probably because he associates her with my dad. I’m sure he’s thinking he can magically communicate with my dad through her.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit better about it all right now because I just spent the last hour (jeez, it’s almost midnight!) doing an experiment. I tried hypnotizing Quinn to get him to stop worrying and get to sleep. (I’ve made an appointment for him with a hypnotherapist and thought I’d give it a try myself.) Before starting this tonight, Quinn had been OCDing like crazy as he lay next to me, totally lost in another world. I got him to take a bunch of deep breaths and then I began this long rambling story in a slow monotone voice. I was making it up as I went along. It went something like this:
“You’re totally relaxed. You’re standing on a white sand beach with the ocean waves lapping at your feet. The sun feels warm on your skin. A little breeze is ruffling your hair. Nobody is around. It’s just you, alone on this long white-sand, powdery beach. You start walking along the shore. You’re so happy and free. No worries in the world. You start running a little. It feels so good to run that you just keep running down the beach, happy and free.” I yammered on like that for at least twenty minutes. Amazingly, Quinn seemed to be relaxing, not flinching or doing any OCD at all. I couldn’t believe it was actually working and he was getting a break from OCD. Then I said, “You see someone far ahead on the beach. You keep running. When you get closer you see the person is Grandpa. He says, Hi Quinn! You give him a hug and the two of you run along together. Happy and free. Then Grandpa says he’s a little tired and he’d like to sit and rest on this beautiful beach and you should go on and keep running. Happy and free. You give him a hug goodbye and keep running. You feel so happy and free. You’ve let Grandpa go and you know he’s happy back there, sitting on the beach. You’re back to running and feel so happy and free. Happy and free. Happy and free.…”
Quinn was breathing so deeply and seemed so relaxed that I thought he was asleep. Just as I was leaving, he whispered, Don’t leave yet, just sing “Moon River” first. So I sang the song twice and he lay there smiling peacefully. If only this were the end of it. If only a simple old song that I used to sing him as a toddler was all that was needed to free him from his torment. I could hear his breathing changing toward the end and realized he was asleep. My experiment actually seemed to work. Fingers crossed about how he’ll be tomorrow.
xxoo
Laurie
I continued my email the next morning.
Tina, he’s back to OCD-ville. But at least the experiment put him to sleep. He asked me if I’ll do it again tonight.
CHAPTER 13
Afer my mother left and Thanksgiving weekend was over, it was obvious that Quinn was in no condition to go to school. He was engaging in a storm of compulsions and hourly changing rituals of magical thinking that debilitated his entire day. Going to school was out of the question. He couldn’t even read anymore because he had to read the sentences backward after reading them the first time, to erase them. Rob proposed he and Quinn spend the mornings doing the exposure response prevention exercises they’d been working on.
At the end of the school day, I went to talk to Quinn’s teacher Mr. DeFranco, to pick up school work Quinn could possibly do at home and to explain why he was absent. The young teacher’s eyes were full of concern as I spoke. “Come over here,” he said, beckoning me to Quinn’s desk. He pulled out Quinn’s math workbook. “I was going to
tell you this so I’m glad you’re here now. Take a look.” I stared down at the pages of the workbook, which was supposed to be full of solved multiplication problems. Instead of numbers, tiny words were scrawled in Quinn’s printing all across the bottom of the pages, the same words, dozens of times over, the same ones we’d heard for weeks: “Please come back, please come back. I love you. Please come back.” I flipped back the pages. It was the same plea over and over, a boy’s impossible prayer hidden in a worn math notebook.
I felt the room starting to spin. A kid I knew, a casual friend of Quinn’s, bounded into the class just then to riffle through his desk to find something. Quinn had helped teach this kid how to ride a unicycle not that long ago. The boy said hi to me and his teacher and shot out of the room again: untroubled, shoes untied, a regular kid on his way to build a fort or buy a chocolate bar with his friends at the dépanneur. Why wasn’t that Quinn? I felt the cruel randomness of life weighing me down like never before.
It was around this time, in mid-October when Quinn wasn’t at school, that I could feel myself withdrawing from my familiar social world. It didn’t matter that I knew people’s lives were never perfect and that life could be complicated for everyone. The people around me still gave off the impression that things were fine, but the happy family life that Rob and Quinn and I had known had long ago skipped town.
Rob told me that night how hard it had been for him to find behaviours for Quinn to work on, meaning behaviours Quinn wasn’t supposed to engage in, or at least behaviours that he was supposed to try delaying for a period of time. The idea of ERP, the so-called “gold standard” for treating OCD, is to expose yourself to your fears by not performing any of the reassuring compulsions brought on by the fears. You place yourself in a situation deliberately designed to exacerbate your anxiety. In other words, you force yourself to endure the constant temptation to revert to your defensive rituals. You hang yourself out there, often in something close to terror, waiting for the misery to subside. A child who has a fear of germs, a common type of OCD, makes herself touch a doorknob that she believes is covered with deadly germs. After touching the doorknob for a set amount of time, the anxiety level decreases and the child realizes that nothing catastrophic has happened. She is habituating herself to the anxiety. Just as neurologists have shown that every time you resist acting on your anger, you’re actually rewiring your brain to be calmer, so with exposing yourself to your anxiety are you rewiring your brain, forming new cognitive pathways. The next time, the child can try touching the doorknob longer. Eventually, the compulsion loses its appeal. The more one is able to avoid acting on the compulsion, the weaker the bad connection becomes. You’re recircuiting your brain. If someone has a compulsion to put things in order, he might expose himself to clutter for a few minutes without touching anything. It’s facing the thing you fear a little at a time until you’ve finally conquered it. The longer you’ve had OCD the longer this therapy takes since well-worn cognitive pathways have deep grooves and take time to be remapped in your brain. This is why the sooner you start ERP the better.