by Laurie Gough
This is what that letter has done, I thought. This is what our friends can do for us, bring some normalcy back to Quinn’s life, to our life. Each visit to our house felt like a bright peephole into the world we used to know. I felt something shift in our house the night that Brant visited, like tectonic plates gliding barely perceptibly beneath the surface. Brant suggested to Quinn that he try transferring the magic bubble in his right hand into his left. “That way you at least have a free hand.” Quinn tried this. He ate pizza with his free hand. After dinner, I was up in our office for a few moments while Brant and Rob were downstairs playing their guitars. Quinn came in, his face brimming with good news. He held up his open hand to me for a high five. Then he held up the other hand, too. Both his hands were wide open. I couldn’t remember how long he’d had those fists clenched. I pulled him in and squeezed him tight, then rushed downstairs to hug Brant goodbye. I don’t think Brant could have realized what he’d done for us that night.
I took care of a little girl named Ruby the next day. Ruby had just turned three. It was a part-time job of mine to be a backup caregiver for Ruby and I loved having her at our house. She could easily sit with me for two hours straight as I read her one storybook after the next. She’d listen entranced to the stories of Enid Blyton, Margaret Wise Brown, and Dr. Seuss. We’d make chocolate chip cookies and I’d let her eat chocolate chips and walnuts while the cookies baked. We’d walk in the forest and spend long dreamy moments staring at caterpillars.
She was curious about Quinn, the big boy who she knew lived at the house and until now had always been at school. Ruby’s presence forced another human interaction, much like Liam’s and Brant’s had the day before, in which Quinn’s OCD stood out to him like a Goth at a pep rally. Quinn and I were standing in the hallway and Ruby was standing squarely in front of Quinn. He was having some kind of OCD episode where everything had to be a certain way. He didn’t like it that she’d moved slightly to the right. So he said to Ruby, “Please move. Move please.” Being just newly three, she just stood there staring up at him with her perfectly round blue eyes. He said it again. She kept standing there, staring at him, unmoving. Rob happened to be nearby watching this and said to Quinn, “Maybe Ruby doesn’t do OCD.” I looked down at her. “Ruby, do you do OCD?” I asked. She shook her head, solemnly gazing up at us as if she knew exactly what we were talking about, and had read the latest in OCD brain research. “No, I don’t,” she said determinedly. I laughed. And then Quinn did, too. It was the perfect response. Even a three-year-old wouldn’t obey the OCD bully.
That week, Rob announced that Quinn’s numbers on the Excel chart they used to track his anxiety levels had been going down. Quinn wasn’t as panicked about not doing the behaviours as he had been. Something was happening to him.
Still, I was continually struck by what an insatiable monster OCD is. The more you give in, the hungrier it gets. Even Howard Hughes with all his millions couldn’t buy his way out of an OCD stranglehold, although it’s not commonly known. It didn’t help that his servants were forever helping him perform the outlandish rituals that his OCD demanded. (As an interesting side note, when Leonardo DiCaprio played Howard Hughes in the movie Aviator, the actor stopped trying to control his own OCD during the weeks of filming so he’d do a more authentic job portraying the OCD of the famous millionaire. DiCaprio was often late on the film set because of his compulsion to retrace his footsteps, avoid cracks in the pavement, and need to walk through doorways multiple times. It took him months to get his OCD under control again after filming stopped. And speaking of actors, if I’d only known at the time, I could have told Quinn that Daniel Radcliffe, the Harry Potter star, had serious OCD as a young child, sometimes taking five minutes to turn off a light switch. “I had to repeat every sentence I said under my breath,” said the actor in an interview.)
One evening that week, Rob said to Quinn, “What would you do if a car salesman said you could have a Bugatti Veyron or some other fancy Italian super-car for only ten dollars?”
“I’d say sure!” Quinn clapped his hands at the thought of the car.
“Right. So the guy says, ‘Give me the ten dollars and come back tomorrow. You can’t have the car today.’ So you pay him ten dollars and go back the next day. No car. The guy says, ‘Oh, sorry, pay me another ten dollars and I’ll give you the car in a couple of days.’ So you pay the guy again and come back in a couple of days. Still no car. And again, the guy wants another ten dollars. Every time you go he makes you pay him ten dollars but he never delivers the car. The lying salesman is OCD. Always lying, never delivering. He’s selling an impossible dream: to bring Grandpa back, to win an Olympic race eleven years from now. He keeps you hooked, always coming back for more.” Rob paused. Quinn was looking at him intently, barely blinking. “What if you just stopped talking to the guy?”
Quinn squinted as if thinking hard about this, then said, “I get it. I know the OCD is lying to me. But that doesn’t mean I can stop.”
“You can stop,” said Rob.
It seemed to me that logic could enter and clear out a space for him to stop for a few moments, but then the compulsions would take over again. This was his primitive “old brain” at work. The old brain, which is evolutionarily older, is often at odds with the new, more evolved, front part of the brain, which is more of a reasoning machine. The old brain wants what it wants when it wants it. The “new brain” tells us to put the brakes on when we feel compelled to do something that the old brain wants to do, but we don’t always listen. It reminded me of how sometimes chocolate pops into my head and within seconds I’m eating a hunk of dark sea salt chocolate. I hadn’t bothered waiting for the more evolved reasoning part of my brain to stop me. We evolved to crave sugar and fat because they were scarce and needed to be eaten when the opportunity arose. The old brain doesn’t know that too much dark sea salt chocolate isn’t good for us. But the new brain is fully aware of this. Yet sometimes we just say to hell with the new brain and eat the chocolate anyway, succumb to our old-brain compulsions. The OCD bully was lurking somewhere in Quinn’s old brain, slithering through trapdoors and finding hidden passages. Interestingly, the old brain, which is always in survival mode, doesn’t know the difference between past and present. It’s the part of our brain that acts instinctively when it senses danger, sending fight or flight messages to the new brain. For those with OCD, the old brain is constantly firing off danger signals to the new brain even though danger isn’t there. The new brain can see how unreasonable the whole thing is but is overwhelmed with all the warnings. Quick! says the old brain, Say this mantra ten times or you’ll never see your grandpa again! As one man in the Ottawa OCD parent support group that I attended said, “OCD is one part of your brain lying to another part of your brain and that other part of the brain not knowing it’s a lie.” This man had OCD himself and said something else that tore through me like a cold dagger. He said he believes OCD digs down into your deepest subconscious, finds the darkest thing in there, and then turns that thing against you. I imagined Quinn’s OCD bully as a nasty little snivelling octopus-like dictator. I wanted to throttle the thing with a mallet. OCD hunts down the most hidden regions of a person, its suckered tentacles inching along, prowling, and slithering into the most locked box it can find. No matter how unlikely an event (a dead person returning to life, a white kid winning the Olympics by holding magic bubbles in his fists, sudden death by touching a doorknob) if there’s even a fraction of a possibility that the event could occur, OCD will find its way to lodge and furl inside you, making promises it can never deliver, ever tightening its death grip.
In Riveted, by Jim Davies, the author suggests that if you doubt how your old-brain biases can conflict with what you know intellectually, you should try a certain thought experiment. He asks you to imagine how you’d feel putting on a newly washed shirt that Adolph Hitler had worn. If the thought creeps you out more than imagining wearing a washed shirt of a regular p
erson, you’re feeling the power of this effect.
Quinn had somewhat of a setback the next day, during what I’d starting thinking of as the week of Operation Normalization (which came about serendipitously after I’d written the letter and people started coming by). He was slumped on the couch, telling me it was too hard to go out and play with Liam.
“Playing isn’t hard. You’ve been playing all your life. OCD is making it hard,” I said, exasperated. “Do you really want to spend the next eleven years not having fun and being bossed around by OCD every second of the day just to win some race?”
To my surprise, Quinn bolted up off the chair. “That’s true. I think I will play.” He stormed over to the closet, threw on his jacket, and was out the door in seconds. I pumped my fist in the air and mouthed a silent Yes! at the ceiling.
Half an hour later, Christine called to tell me that she’d been watching out her window and Quinn was hiding by himself in the woods. “And before that he was trying to ride his bike backward. He seems to be having some trouble.”
Operation Normalization, like the rest of this journey, seemed to be two steps forward, one step back.
Journal
Today I ran into a woman at the Wakefield General Store who’d seen my letter about Quinn. Someone had forwarded it to her. Like the woman who talked about the “native animal connection,” she also talked about “Spirit” telling her things. She was almost breathless, as if she couldn’t wait for me to receive this important information. She said, “Spirit told me something and it makes so much sense. I know what needs to happen for your son: third chakra.” I said, “What?” She replied, “His third chakra needs to be realigned with his sixth chakra. He’d need a shaman to do this, of course. But I know of one.”
I stared at her for a long time to see if she was joking. She didn’t seem to be. Finally, I said, “Wow, that sounds really scientific.”
She went on trying to explain her theory, in more detail. Normally this would have seemed a riot to me. I would have tested myself to see how long I could keep a straight face.
All I want is for life to return to itself. There’s no FUN left. I’m pretty sure we used to have nothing but fun. It was the magic carpet beneath our feet, it spiralled out of the sky, it flew in from Jupiter, it dwelt in our DNA. What happened to it? I don’t even have an appetite. I don’t even want dark chocolate any more. How can this be? I’ve lost weight. I don’t even care. Normally I might be pleased about this but what does it matter? On top of all this, tomorrow is Halloween. We haven’t even bought a pumpkin this year. Or Halloween candy. Every Halloween Rob sets up his shop by the laneway and makes it look scary and builds a campfire and loops that Tom Waits song, “What’s He Building?” so the kids hear it over and over. Do we just pretend Halloween isn’t happening?
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for hope to settle inside me, the hope that my husband and everyone else seems to be talking about, the hope that’s a lifeline to keep people afloat.
CHAPTER 25
I was born on the night of Samhain, when the barrier between the worlds is whisper-thin and when magic, old magic, sings its heady and sweet song to anyone who cares to hear it.
— Carolyn MacCullough, Once a Witch
When Quinn woke up on October 31, he announced he wanted to go out for Halloween that night. I was thrilled, but dubious. His fists were back to being clenched, containing the Olympic-winning magic bubbles. He was still backtracking everywhere, still erasing words. I couldn’t imagine how he’d put on a costume, let alone walk down the street without getting stuck, or talk to people on their front porches. Nonetheless, I encouraged him. “Have you thought of a costume yet?”
“Ninja fighter. Fighter ninja.” I had no idea where this idea had come from but told him it sounded perfect. We could look in the Halloween box for black clothes and a mask and could fashion a sword of some kind.
We’d been lucky to get another appointment with Dr. Cebulski, scheduled for four o’clock that day. The timing wasn’t great. We’d have to rush home from Ottawa after the appointment, grab something for dinner, then wait for Quinn to clench-fist a costume on, all in time for him to meet the neighbour kids out on our road by six o’clock.
This time, Dr. Cebulski talked to Quinn on his own for the first half of the appointment. Rob and I read Psychology Today magazines in the waiting room while a warm yellow light seeped out beneath the doctor’s office door. I kept wondering what was happening on the other side of that door. On the drive to Ottawa, Quinn had been especially agitated, mumbling and erasing, rolling down the window to murmur into the wind. Medical appointments were clearly anxiety-inducing for him. I hadn’t seen Quinn this wracked with OCD in days. Damn, I thought, as we drove down Highway 5. There’s no way he’ll make it out for Halloween.
Finally, the appointment was over and the door opened. Dr. Cebulski stood smiling at us. “You can come in now.” When we walked into the office, which still felt like a living room, Quinn was at the coffee table leaning over a checkerboard. He looked up at us and grinned. “I beat him!” said Quinn.
“He’s not a bad checkers player,” said Dr. Cebulski.
Unlike the last time, the mood was light and jovial. It was obvious the doctor had broken through and got Quinn talking. Playing checkers was a brilliant technique. “He’s coming along,” said Dr. Cebulski. “Aren’t you, Quinn?”
“Yep,” said Quinn, who was attempting to leave the office without using his feet. This involved a kind of knee-walking.
“Hey, I’ve never seen that one before,” I said.
Quinn was giggling. “Yeah, I kind of just invented this one.”
Dr. Cebulski shook his head in amusement. “I have a challenge for you. Why don’t you try putting one foot on the carpet before you leave. Just for a second.”
Quinn knee-walked out of the office, stood up in the waiting room, then turned around to place the very top millimetre of his running shoe on the office carpet. He’d met the challenge, even if it was for a millisecond. He was giggling the whole time. At least he was happy.
Dr. Cebulski turned to Rob and me, smiling. “I can see you’ve been working hard on the exposure exercises. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working. Keep it up, all of you.”
On the drive home Quinn didn’t talk except to lament the pouring rain. “Rain Halloween bad. Bad Halloween rain.”
Despite what the doctor had said about his progress, I wondered just how bad things might get that night.
An hour later I looked up to see my son wearing a black ninja costume and a black mask, wielding a cardboard sword in one hand and a bag for candy in the other. No clenched fists. Fists clenched no. I felt like doing cartwheels.
“Bye, Mummy!” He rushed outside into the rain to find the kids on the road. They always met at six at the bottom of our laneway on Halloween. They’d been doing it for years. They’d dash up and down our little road collecting chocolate bars as one shrieking neon-orange, ghost-sheeted ecstatic unit.
Half an hour later he arrived home, drenched, cheeks rosy, smiling. “Can you drive me down to Burnside Drive? It’s raining too hard for me to walk all the way.” Burnside Drive was a street full of century-old houses off Wakefield’s main road. Burnside was where all the candy was. On Halloween, all the kids in Wakefield went to Burnside.
“Sure, get in the car. Let me grab my keys.” Could this really be happening? I almost skipped to the car in the rain.
Just as we reached the main road, called River Road since it follows the river, Quinn called out, “Stop! I see my friends! They’re at that house! Stop the car!”
I pulled over and we squinted through the rain-splattered car windows to see a cluster of costumed kids crowded on someone’s front porch. “Wait, sweetie, before you get out, we need a plan. How about I meet you in half an hour or so at the ice-cream shop? They give out free ice cream. I’m sure your friends will be going t
here.”
“Sure! See ya!” He slammed the door and ran off to meet his friends. I could hear them calling his name as he got closer. “Is that you, Quinn? Are you a ninja?” Quinn hadn’t seen his school friends since the day he’d played soccer at recess and he hadn’t been at school since the day of the cross-country race. I was delighted his friends actually remembered him.
I drove farther down the road. Everything was veiled in mist from the rain, draped in soft black velvet. Kids dressed as scarecrows and Draculas, as genies and Lego people danced along the sidewalk in their breathless pursuit of candy. I drove to an empty parking lot, hoping Quinn wouldn’t notice me when he and his friends rushed by. I was killing time before meeting him at the ice-cream place, but still, I felt like a stalker of my own child. I was curious about how he’d be making out. Beside me, a maple tree was fully naked, its leaves a soggy orange dress circling its feet. When Quinn and his friends finally scurried by my car, I heard one of the boys say, “That’s Quinn’s mom in there,” and they all looked my way. I felt like slinking down and hiding but it was too late.
Inside the ice-cream shop, a tiny clapboard house, I sat and talked with other parents about the rain. Finally, the boisterous group of boys arrived. I winked at Quinn and he smiled back. When he ordered his ice cream I overheard the serving girl asking him to speak up. Before they bustled out again, we made a plan to meet next at a house of friends of ours on Burnside.
Before I’d left home, I’d asked Rob what he suggested I do while Quinn was trick-or-treating. I couldn’t exactly follow along behind him like a helicopter parent. He was way too old for that, even if he did have OCD. “Go to the Rooneys’ house,” said Rob. The Rooneys were friends of ours who lived near Burnside. They were documentary filmmakers who’d also started Theatre Wakefield and ran a summer film camp for kids.