Michael still loved being with Andrew and another buddy on the Island. Yet, even with them, Michael didn’t really talk, or when he did, he often relied on false bravado for conversation. Nor would he hang with them for long. He retreated back to his room after short periods of interaction because after a while, he hadn’t a clue what to say or do next. After taking a breather, he’d often go back for another dose of sociability, but this also lasted only a few minutes before he retreated once again.
When Robin was asked how his son was, he always answered by saying “He’s Michael.” It meant he doesn’t really know, but Sarah and I always smiled hearing Robin say this. Michael being Michael elicits our tenderness. Clearly, he had a gift. We didn’t know exactly what it was, but it came with him the first day Robin and I held him in our arms, and it hadn’t left since.
A gift that begets love is undoubtedly a blessing. It had ensured our devotion, a devotion that nevertheless had come at a cost to our family. Robin, Sarah and I have paid dearly in our family life. It happens sometimes; you pay a price for love.
I had no doubt that the cocoon of love that enveloped me upon our first meeting, over time, had made me steadfast during our struggles to help Michael find his place in the world.
People often said, “I don’t know how you do it,” in regards to raising Michael. I was never sure how to respond. I didn’t know either. We were the people who had chosen not to adopt a child with disabilities when we were first thinking about adopting. I guess I learned “how to do it” like anyone else would. I muddled through, did my best, pushed a little more than most people have to, drew upon everyone and everything I could to help me along, kept talking, had a few breakdowns, took meds, crossed my fingers, prayed, hoped for good luck, cried, laughed, read mysteries, watched romantic comedies and pushed on.
What exactly were the options?
I played my hand with everything I had. I didn’t want to become like my father. I learned a hard lesson watching him. Burned by his losses in the Detroit riots, his world view and belief in humankind evaporated with the lighting of a match. He died a depressed, bitter man. It was awful to watch and awful to realize that I could do nothing to change that. I vowed not to let that happen to me. It’s a cruel legacy to leave to your children, one I knew too well.
While for the most part I remained a positive person, there were three so-called positive beliefs I thoroughly rejected. They were:
God only gives you as much as you can handle.
Suffering makes you stronger
There’s a reason for everything.
I’ve met too many walking wounded out there. Let’s start with parents of other children with FAS, broken people who couldn’t handle what came their way. They readily admit they’d given their lives and marriages to their kids. Then we could move onto victims of tsunamis, concentration camps or the Cambodian Killing Fields. Whoever’s spouting that sunshine crapola hasn’t had a look around lately or cracked a history book.
Though I barely knew my father’s mother, and of course never knew my mother’s, I believed I was learning what these grandmothers must have known. Life came with hardships and struggle. You protect, look after and fight for your family. Everybody’s got something. What made me and so many other privileged, starry-eyed North Americans of my generation think we were exempt? Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young told us, “We are stardust, we are golden.” Were we? Perhaps it is the folly of every generation’s youth, not only mine, to think so.
I was coming closer to accepting that Michael’s capacity for functioning in the world was severely diminished. Quite likely, he would never live on his own. Both Robin and I had given up the usual expectations and dreams most parents have for their children, all except for one. Despite Michael’s seeming lack of interest in people, I knew he was lonely. A mother knows these things. My son was deeply lonely. I needed to think Michael could one day find comfort, pleasure and love.
We needed to do something to help Michael function better in the world, and if at all possible, become part of it. He needed other people in his life beyond our family.
It was a cold January morning. Once Robin picked up a car cityside, Robin, Sarah, Michael and I would drive 200 km into the snow-covered hill country around Collingwood, Ontario. Our destination was “The Farm,” a residential treatment program where we were taking Michael to live during the coming year.
The mood around the house before we left felt like the morning of Michael’s bar mitzvah. On the surface, it looked like we were each doing our routine morning toilette. Really, we were doing pirouettes on tiptoes, once again hoping not to offend the gods.
Our jitters were showing. Each of us knew that soon, one of us would blow his or her volcanic top before walking out the front door. If there really was such a thing as waking up on the wrong side of the bed, that’s where our feet went kerplunk at the sound of the seven o’clock wake-up alarm that morning.
“Will you go get Michael up?” I asked Robin, the moment my eyes popped open.
“No you, why me? I have to catch an earlier boat than you to pick up the rental car. You’ve got more time.” His tone wasn’t friendly.
“You know we’ll have a better chance if you do it,” I said.
“I’ve got to catch the 7:30.”
He figured that was the end of the conversation. Neither of us wanted the chore of getting Michael out of bed. Robin was saying that since he had only fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before he had to leave the house to catch the boat, it made sense for me to wake Michael. Sarah, Michael and I could catch the later boat. Therefore, I should be the one to get Michael ready.
Not so simple, Robin. “Why didn’t you explain this last night when we set the alarm? We could have factored everything in. We could have woken up earlier so you could get Michael up and we’d all leave the house together. Now, I’ve got to get him dressed, finish packing him, get myself organized and get him and his suitcases out the door and to the boat. Alone. You left it all for me. You’re ducking out.”
“I didn’t want to talk logistics last night.” Of course not. He didn’t want to get into a fight. The one we were now having.
“So leaving it for this morning would make it different? The only difference is that last night you couldn’t walk out once you told me.”
We’d been awake for less than five minutes and were already fighting. We were so anxious about today’s trip to Collingwood, we’d once again forgotten that we should be comforting each other rather than giving grief.
The decision to send Michael “away” was tearing us apart. It had been long in coming, though Robin and I seldom acknowledged or discussed it. It was a possibility we each tucked into the back-pocket of our minds — just in case. At the same time, we were praying that just in case never came. Over the years, we had heard successful stories about other difficult kids who had been sent to The Farm. Many came home after a year or so with their behaviours sufficiently changed that they could successfully live with their families again.
Options like The Farm had always been crucial to both Robin’s and my mental health when things were particularly rough. We always needed to know that if one day we “reached our limits” and couldn’t “take it” anymore, there was something left to do. With mild shame, we quietly squirreled away options.
The Farm, run by the Hincks Dellcrest Foundation, was a structured, live-in treatment centre on a hundred-acre working farm in the Georgian Bay area of Ontario. It took roughly twenty or so “hard to serve, at-risk” youth through the age of sixteen. Kids having trouble with school, family and, oftentimes, the law were selected to live there with professional staff. They went to an on-site school, did chores, grew crops, raised sheep, poultry and livestock. The staff, who lived there around-the-clock, taught, parented and helped the kids develop life skills, improve their behaviour, manage their anger and build self-esteem.
Three years ago, we had put Michael’s name on The Farm’s waiting list, just in case. Michael l
oved animals and being in the country. Maybe, if worse ever did come to worst, this might be a good thing.
We never seriously expected to send him, though. Michael’s therapist had concerns. “If Michael weren’t adopted, it might be okay,” she told us after one of his sessions. “But adopted children have severe problems with ‘abandonment’ and ‘rejection.’ Being sent away from home can be counterproductive.”
The Farm’s experience underscored her point. Their “success rate” was lower with adopted children. One more option door firmly closed, we thought.
But things got progressively worse at home. Michael completely shut down. After quitting school, he would do nothing all day but play video games, no matter how hard we tried to motivate him to do other things. We tried taking him places he would normally enjoy, doing things with him we used to all enjoy together. Taking the video games away didn’t change a thing. He sat in his room, stared at the ceiling or slept, punched holes in the walls and picked at his skin. He created physical chaos in the house, emotional chaos in the family.
I was worried that Michael was depressed, still mourning Kira. We spoke to the doctors and a therapist, but nobody knew for sure because Michael wouldn’t open up. We tried different meds, but it was the Ritalin we still mainly relied on. He was the same Michael, but age and hormones were in play. He was a teenager. As a teenager he became more threatening in stature when angry. Sadly for us all, Michael had, as we expected, lost all desire for physical warmth with Robin and me. Up until then, it had been our most successful form of communication. With that now gone, there was little he wanted from us. Not unnatural for a teenager, but we were Michael’s only real link with the world of others. Now that too was gone.
For the ten years since his diagnosis, we’d tried our best to do all the things we thought we should do. Various therapies, special camps, tutors, social skills programs, therapists, tough love, soft love, plain love.
We hadn’t been perfect. The best I could say in our favour was that we’d never wavered in our love and always made sure he knew that. Yet, if you asked either Robin or me what, in our opinion, had the most positive effect on Michael over the years, we’d both probably still say “meds and physical maturation.” It made us wonder, sadly, if anything we did ever really mattered.
The words “I’ll never do that” bounced in my head that day driving to The Farm, like smug, gremlin-style boxers pummelling me with miniature fisticuffs. I’d mumbled those words under my breath ten years before when the doctor at SickKids told us a family had decided to send their child with fetal alcohol syndrome away. “I’ll never do that,” I had smugly mumbled to myself.
The little monsters were repeating over and over in my brain, “I’ll never do that” “I’ll never do that” “I’ll never do that,” as I went into Michael’s room, sat down beside him on his bed and said as calmly as I could, “Good morning, Michael. It’s Thursday. Daddy’s just gone into the city to get the car for us. Today’s the day we go to The Farm.”
Robin was just plain on-edge nervous and scattered before leaving for the boat. He was rushing around madly, dropping things on the floor, losing things, barking at everyone.
Sarah didn’t say much. She kept looking to me for comfort. Part of her hated the idea of her Mikey leaving. Not much different from the way both Robin and I felt. There was another part to each of us, though. We wanted to know what home life would be like without Michael. We each had had enough for a while.
And Michael? How was he feeling about it all? Who knew?
We’d taken Michael to The Farm for several visits. He had met the staff, hung with the animals, walked the property. We’d presented his move there as positive, like going to camp. It’s not a punishment, we reassured him. It’s an opportunity to be in the country, with animals, learn skills. They’ll take you camping, skiing, snowshoeing, rafting. You’ll have opportunities to meet girls, learn useful skills and go to a school made for kids with learning disabilities. You’ll get to drive a tractor. We’ll call and visit often. You’ll come home for visits. The staff are wonderful.
We encouraged him to talk about his feelings about being away from home, but he never said anything other than “Riding the tractor could be fun.” We let him know it would be tough for us to be without him.
Robin and I said everything to Michael short of the complete truth: we were sending him away because we were frustrated, exhausted, losing heart, in a state of crisis. We didn’t tell him “We’re hoping other people can teach you things you need to know to live without us someday.” We didn’t say that we were afraid we hadn’t done very well as parents, or that there was too much tension in the house. I never said, “Having you at home has been a serious strain on Daddy’s and my marriage and rough on Sarah. She needs us all to herself for a while.”
And over and over we said, “We love you.”
After we arrived at The Farm, we helped Michael unpack, make his bed and hang Metallica posters in his room until it was the designated time to leave.
We hugged and kissed Michael goodbye. We didn’t look back as we walked solemnly to our car through the heavy snow.
Sarah was in the backseat crying, a condition usually monopolized by me. For some reason, I was not. When I tried to comfort her, Sarah made it clear she didn’t want to talk; she was putting in her iPod earbuds to listen to Ozzie Osbourne’s “Dreamer,” a song she found comforting: I’m just a dreamer, I dream my life away. I’m just a dreamer, who dreams of better days.
She planned to remain plugged in for the whole trip. Robin was concentrating deeply on the snow-covered road he was finding difficult to drive. He didn’t want to talk about anything, either. Nor did I. What was there to say? In my case, I could usually find something, but not right then. I was experiencing everything I expected to feel, including guilt, sadness and worry. But there was something new mixed into the equation. I felt remarkably free and unburdened, as if I had shed a clay water jug that I’d been balancing on my head during a sixteen-year journey to a well.
The countryside we were driving through had gentle rolling hills dotted with grazing sheep and snow-covered apple orchards. I liked the sense of peace and order on the farms we passed. My eye was drawn to the neat, symmetrical row of trees, allees, lining both sides of the road leading up to their front entrances.
Though it was mid-winter, the landscape made me think about my garden back home. I began forming pictures in my mind’s eye of formal gardens I’d seen during our travels in Europe. I was envisioning the grand properties with clipped hedges and geometric pathways around palaces, palazzos and castles in France, Italy and England. The kind I’d always found a bit stuffy. The kind where people, the silly beasts, were trying to control nature. Such gardens were the polar opposite of the gently informal cottage garden in my front yard on the Island. No one could have been more shocked than I was — for the first time in my life I could see something good in those seriously structured landscapes.
What was happening to me?
“What’s so funny?” Robin asked, hearing me quietly chuckle.
“I was thinking about our backyard and wondered how it would look as a formal garden.”
“A formal garden on the Island? Like Versailles?”
“Exactly.”
The next morning, my first day home without Michael, I got up early, took the boat into the city and went shopping for new garden books. The dozens I already owned wouldn’t do. I needed ones with pictures of moss-covered lion-spewing water fountains, tightly clipped hedges, intricately designed knot gardens and oversized urns dripping with ivies and ferns. That night, reading one of my new books, something delightful caught my eye.
I turned to Robin. I remained utterly dependent on him for anything that required spatial and mechanical sense or involved an instrument other than pen or pencil.
“Will you look at these then tell me if you think you could make one for the garden?”
He took the book, studied it momentarily
then laughed aloud. “Sure. Why not? It might take thirty years to get a bush large enough, but sure, I could clip a shrub into the shape of a partridge or giant aardvark. I could even make a kingfisher for you.”
“Now there’s an idea,” I said. “A kingfisher.”
Several weeks later, I saw an ad in The Toronto Star newspaper about a contest they were sponsoring. A free makeover in the backyard garden of the person who writes the best hundred-word essay explaining why they think they should be chosen for the reno. It was perfect. I carefully worded my essay and sent it in. I thought I was a shoe-in. I had had a history of good luck with newspaper ads in my life.
Help! I Want My Backyard Back
I turned our backyard garden over to our children when they were young, for sports and creative acts of destruction. Now that they have grown into surly, rebellious teenagers, I’m ready to reclaim my turf. I request your help to turn the yard into a calm oasis, totally different from the more free-flowing, cottage-style garden in our front yard here on Toronto Island. My desire for a mini-Versailles reflects a need for more order and control during this period of parenthood. I am now attracted to straight paths, formal geometric borders and clipped hedges. I want orderly plants that stand at attention in tidy little rows where I tell them to.
If such a garden ever came to be, the children would be invited by invitation only.
Perhaps for afternoon tea.
I never heard a peep back from the newspaper. I was disappointed, but didn’t let that stop me. I called Penny, my Island gardening buddy.
“How about coming for coffee? I need to talk to you.”
“I can tell this means trouble,” she said, “but whatever it is, I’m up for it.”
And so, the frenzy began. I never doubted for a second that building the garden, with all the unimaginable demands, which included hauling bricks, stones and cobbles to my carless Island, was therapy for my soul. I needed to nurture beauty, put my energy into building something concrete, stable and orderly; something that would bring me joy, comfort and solace. I needed Constructive (or was it Construction) Horticultural Therapy.
Not Exactly As Planned Page 23