Will's Choice

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by Gail Griffith


  At 9:35 PM, we delivered a badly battered infant boy—not a Susanna—bruised from head to toe the color of ripe eggplant, weighing an astonishing ten pounds, eight ounces. On the spot we decided to name him William, after Bob’s father.

  I held my breath and prayed as the doctors conducted a swift but thorough examination. The pediatrician on duty in the delivery room called out, “The baby’s just fine. Shut down the ICU.” And through a distillation of drugs and exhaustion, I heard the medical team let out a cheer.

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s insight into the nature of war is applicable to the birth of a child. Eisenhower reflected, “Every war will surprise you.” The same is true of a newborn. You can plan, fantasize, make outlandish predictions (become immobilized by fear), but every child enters life setting off a serendipitous and unpredictable chain of events. Maybe that is the miracle of childbirth.

  Will surprised us all—his sex, his enormous weight—and best of all, he confounded the doctors’ dire warnings of a “severe abnormality.” He was battered and bloodied after the rugged birth, but so was I. And wasn’t it fitting that after all we had been through together—the traumatized pregnancy, the anxious and overextended wait, the botched delivery—he and I trumped some serious odds? We were a team! We had won a primal struggle. He was just my kind of kid.

  September 1992

  “My Family”

  by Willy D. ( 8½)

  I have a mom, a dad, a brother, a turtel, and two fish. Thay are all nice to me. My fish east fish food. My turtel eats turtel food, grownd up beaf and ledis.

  My dad’s favrit contre is Italy. He was born in Hollywood, California. My dad likes Christmas the best. We got him a bike for Christmas. He was born in the year 1949.

  My mom is nice too. I love her choclet chip cookes. She is very biyudifol. She is a good cooker. I love my mom. She’s the best.

  My brother picks on me a lot but I stil like him. He is very funny. It is relly his turtel but I call it mine.

  That’s my famly.

  I recently invited Will’s former kindergarten teacher to meet me for tea in a local café. Will started attending a parochial nursery school in Washington when he was almost three. Max was ready for kindergarten, so we enrolled both boys at the same time at Holy Trinity Elementary School, a small Catholic parish school, run by a principal with a reputation for fostering a sense of community and values.

  At a time when many public school systems were agonizing over moral relativism and whose values to impart to students, I was impressed by the confidence with which Holy Trinity defied the wisdom of the times and promoted standards of compassion and decency that I believed were hallmarks of common sense.

  Although Bob was educated in Catholic schools and the boys were baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, we had not assumed that we would send the kids to parochial schools prior to deciding on Holy Trinity. But we looked around and liked what we saw. We decided that if we were going to pay for private education, at the very least the boys would receive a well-grounded, values-based education in exchange for our tuition dollars. It was money well spent.

  Trish Bickford (now Trish Petty) was Will’s kindergarten teacher for two years, from September 1988 to June 1990. He loved her and she took a special interest in him. She followed his progress at the school through sixth grade, and for years after he left Holy Trinity, she kept track of his whereabouts through parents and friends. We were as fond of her as she was of Will. With that in mind, I wanted to talk to her about how she remembered Will as a small child.

  Trying to uncover the origins of your child’s depression is like peeling an onion. You shift through thin membranes of recollection, small incidents and large, looking for clues. Maybe there was something there at the beginning, something glaring that we missed in those early years.

  Trish arrived for our late-afternoon get-together looking as youthful and buoyant as I remembered her. As a brand-new teacher in the mid-1980s, she was a dimpled, athletic, chipper young woman from upstate New York who sported clogs and striped kneesocks. Just a few years out of college, she impressed us with her enthusiasm and insightfulness about her students. Eighteen years later, she had shed the clogs and kneesocks, replaced them with a pearl necklace and a classy sweater set, but she still looked much younger than her years.

  Still teaching kindergarten at Holy Trinity, she talked about the early years of her career with fondness and nostalgia. I had to ask her, “Trish, what do you remember about Will when he was little?”

  “He was adorable, Gail. He seemed like one of the happiest little kids I’ve ever taught. He was a little shy, but playful, and I can still remember hearing his giggle across the room when he and one of his buddies would be huddled in a corner of the class, telling each other stories.”

  “Will’s giggle—yeah, I remember that, too. It was definitely a distinctive giggle.” I too was succumbing to the nostalgia of the moment.

  We sat in the light of a late-autumn afternoon on a bench outside of a Dupont Circle tea parlor. It felt good to be in the company of someone whose judgment about children I valued, telling me what I wanted to hear, no less.

  Trish and Holy Trinity epitomized the kind of educational experience that few families have nowadays. She and the school held an institutional memory, a kind of road map to our children’s early lives. As I try to piece together a puzzle, a portrait of my son, albeit biased and incomplete, where better to start than his kindergarten teacher?

  “You know, Gail,” she continued, “what you guys have been through with the kids, with Will, I don’t get it. If there was something there early on, I’d like to think I would have seen it.”

  “How do you spot a kid who’s clearly showing signs of mental illness that early, Trish? Does it turn up in your classroom as something you recognize immediately?”

  “Nowadays it does. Now you see kids starting school—remember, this is just kindergarten—and they’re already worried. They’re only five and they’re worried. I see fewer happy kids than ever before and it really bothers me. I think if you had kids in elementary school now, it would be a very different experience than the one you had twenty years ago.”

  “What do you think explains the change?” I asked.

  “Parents are driven, children are driven; the parents are so anxious for their kids to succeed, some are making themselves sick. The kids, even the young ones, are under a lot of pressure. And it makes for seriously unhappy children.”

  I believe her.

  In the spring of 1989 we met with Holy Trinity’s principal, Ann Marie Crowley, and Trish Bickford to assess the results of Will’s standardized testing, which the school administered to all of its students at the end of kindergarten. Will had tested in the ninety-ninth percentile across the board. But with a December birthday and the school’s policy of holding back boys whose birthdays fell after September l for a second year of kindergarten before they advanced to first grade, Trish and Ann Marie weren’t sure what to do with Will. Should he remain with Trish for an extra year of kindergarten despite his high performance on the standardized test, or should we advance him to first grade, where he would be the youngest kid in his class? Would a second year of kindergarten bore him silly?

  Ann Marie argued, “You know, Holy Trinity might not be the right fit for Will. He’s a child with exceptional skills; he might just be better off in a more tailored program that could offer him more individual attention.”

  “Oh, God, Ann Marie, I don’t want him in a ‘gifted and talented’ program—I don’t really want him anywhere but here at Trinity.” Bob agreed.

  “Look, he’s a happy kid. He’s got great friends here. Our goal is a happy kid. I mean, I’ve known a number of kids who were singled out as gifted and talented, and from what I’ve seen some of them thrive but some of them become downright miserable. Do you really believe that he’d be better off somewhere else?”

  Ann Marie thought about it and said, “No, I think we can work with him he
re at Trinity, but I’d recommend that we use the extra year of kindergarten. All of the boys benefit from the added maturity, and let’s let Will be a kid a while longer.” Trish offered to augment his kindergarten routine with special programming designed to keep him interested and challenged. Bob and I left the meeting content with our mutual decision. Will was slated to spend another year in kindergarten with Trish Bickford.

  At the end of his first year of kindergarten a number of Will’s closest friends were promoted to Mrs. O’Connor’s first grade. Most of the kids in the tight-knit school had been together since they were toddlers in the nursery program. We had to break the news to Will that he would be staying behind. We told him he would still be able to play with his old friends; they were all going to be on the same playground at the same time, and he could still spend time with them on weekends, whenever he wanted to. And, we insisted, he would make new friends with the new group of kids coming into kindergarten in the fall.

  But in spite of our sugarcoating the transition, Will was troubled by this turn of events—the first bump in an otherwise blissful childhood. He seemed confused as he struggled to make sense of the decision. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to talk about it. I waited a few days and thought it best to let the news sink in. On a June day, at the end of the school term, when I picked Will up at school, I decided to broach the topic again.

  “Willy, you do know why you’re going to spend another year with Ms. Bickford, don’t you? Do you understand why it’s not time for you to go to first grade yet?”

  “Yep,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s ’cause I’m dumb.”

  I was floored. I scooped him up in my arms and twirled him around.

  “No, you little goofball!” I laughed, hoping to lighten his angst. “It’s ’cause you’re too young. You are one smart cookie. Everyone says so. Ms. Bickford says so. Mrs. Crowley says so. Ms. Bickford wants to keep you with her so you and she can work on special stuff. Just for you, when the other kids are napping. You’re a smart guy, sweetie. And if anyone tells you you’re not, I will eat them up.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy him; at least it was not an issue again until the start of the new school year, when friends from last year’s kindergarten class turned up on the playground dressed up in the simple gray and blue uniforms worn by first-graders—the first outward marker that you were moving up the elementary school hierarchy. If he was troubled by the shift, he did not let on, and he quickly acquired new friends in his second round of kindergarten.

  In retrospect, was keeping him at Holy Trinity the right thing to do? Was holding him back for an extra year of kindergarten wise? Did we fail to seize an opportunity to challenge an extra-bright kid to live up to the full measure of his potential? I still place a higher value on a “happy child”—as hard to define as that may be—over a “gifted and talented” one. We can all be faulted for lapses in judgment when it comes to raising our children, but I trusted my instincts about Will and I am still pretty certain we made the right choice for him.

  Will was five years old in the spring of 1989 when he joined the Blue Sharks soccer team, coached by Jack Brady, father to Will’s closest buddy, John. In the early years, the Blue Sharks team was made up of five-and six-year-old kids from Holy Trinity—tiny kids, just a couple of feet taller than the soccer ball. Will was a natural, a tenacious little runner who played forward and sometimes goalie. John had talked Will into signing up; the boys had been best friends since nursery school and they were inseparable. Their friendship had far-reaching consequences we hardly would have forecast at the time.

  As personal histories go, my own trajectory intertwined season after season with the lives and fate of the Blue Sharks (who huddled for team cheer, “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” at the beginning of each game). Both of my boys continued to excel at soccer well into their teens, and by the time they moved on to high school and other interests, Bob and I had separated and I had fallen in love with Jack, whom I married almost ten years to the day after Will’s first soccer game.

  Besides sports, one of Will’s unique gifts was—and is—his facility with language. As soon as he was able to string a phrase together, he demonstrated an ability to capture visuals with a clever or fantastical description. “Wow! Look, a bird race!” was how he described, at age three, a triangulated flock of geese migrating south. Squirrels chasing one another across an electrical wire strung between utility poles became a “squirrel circus” blinking red and green Christmas decorations were “having a light party.”

  He was barely able to read and write when he began making up fanciful stories about spacecraft and monsters, and on long car rides, we could count on Will to keep the driver awake by spinning a never-ending yarn, linked with the absolute segue to end all segues, “…And, you know what?” Later in life Will would use his writing skills to expose some of his darkest moments.

  My Big Fish

  My big fish

  Just floats around

  Slowly moving

  Without a sound.

  The seasons are changing

  Outside it’s snowing

  But my fish just sits there

  Wading and growing.

  My fish is no dummy

  He just likes to swim.

  And if that’s all he wants

  I think I will let him.

  Willy, age 6

  If I were tempted to measure my children’s development by a psychologist’s checklist, I’d have to believe that Will sailed through early childhood without major mishap, no horrible catastrophes—just standard everyday fare. We even had a classic “oedipal” encounter one afternoon, when Will, age four, suggested that we take steps to find Bob a new place to live so that he and I could marry. Whoaaa. He caught me off guard, but I tried to handle the moment with the sensitivity and aplomb of a female Fred Rogers: “Sweetie, that just won’t happen. Dad and I are already married and you will get married one day too to someone you love.”

  He furrowed his brow, his lower lip jutting out, as he glared at me, unconvinced and clearly dissatisfied with my response.

  “And,” I continued optimistically, “she’ll cook all of your favorite foods and she’ll smell wonderful,” assuming these attributes were central to the limited scope of his desire.

  “But, why can’t we find Dad a new wife and then I can marry you?” The endearing little nitwit was really pressing his case and I wanted to get out of the conversation before it became any more surreal.

  “Well,” I proposed, “since we’re all pretty happy right here—you, me, Dad, and Max—why don’t we just live together for a while and see how things work out?”

  It was logic fit for a four-year-old. “Okay.” He seemed satisfied with the notion and ran off happy as a clam. The subject never came up again. His childhood was about as untroubled as a kid’s could be: Max doted on him, his dad adored him, and he was my happy-go-lucky good-luck charmer.

  Thursday morning, March 15, 2001, found us—Jack, Bob, Max, Will, and me—in an overcrowded patient conference room on the fourth floor of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington. With us were Dr. Vaune Ainsworth and the psychiatric social worker assigned to Will’s case. We assembled in a chaotic little cluster around a speakerphone on a side console and placed a call to Melissa, in San Francisco, so she could be patched into the family meeting.

  Max, who had been with us since early Monday morning, needed to get to the airport later in the day; he would return to the West Coast and college and to midterm exams he had asked his teachers to postpone.

  The space was so cramped that Will sat hunched up on the floor, looking uncomfortable and distant. There are times in your life when you are happy to be the center of your family’s attention, but for Will, this certainly was not one of those times.

  Dr. Vaune Ainsworth began by suggesting that Max be given an opportunity to express any thoughts he might have before he left Washington and said good-bye to Will.

  “Is there anything you’d lik
e to say to Will, Max? I know you have to get back to school and I thought you might want to convey your feelings about Will’s suicide attempt before you leave today.”

  Max stared unabashedly at Will, who reddened with humiliation and guilt before deciding to fix his gaze on a coffee stain on the carpet directly in front of his feet.

  Silence.

  “Is there anything you can say to Max, Will, that might make him feel better about leaving today?” Vaune prompted.

  “Yeah, well, you know I love ya, buddy, even if you’re a jerk most of the time,” Will offered in an attempt to defuse the tension.

  “Max?” Vaune probed expectantly.

  Another several seconds, then, “Yeah, Will…you broke my heart. You really…broke my heart.”

  Stunned silence. And then tears. Hot, irrepressible, noiseless tears made their collective slide down each of our faces. Leave it to Max with his intensity and unflinching honesty to lob a charge so bald and raw. And true.

  Max struck a note so true—and tapped the feeling we each fought hard to keep under wraps for the past few days: we hurt horribly. What good could possibly come of this awful event? We were all broken and vulnerable—and Will more so than anyone.

  No one in my family thought I would take to mothering. I had a reputation for taking myself a little too seriously, and my notions about work and career were a little overvaunted in their minds. My younger sister, Suzy, was married and had two children before I was shoved in the direction of motherhood by a hormonal surge, which whacked me unexpectedly in my thirtieth year. Suddenly I saw infants everywhere, like spring bulbs pushing up cartoon shoots in fast motion. I followed toddlers out of the corner of my eye with the concentration I had once reserved for shoe-store windows; I smelled babies in my sleep. I was hooked. I wanted babies.

 

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