Alex sleeps in a bed. Ned sleeps in the crib. This is what we thought.
The other night in their bedroom, Alex gathered up his binkie, Elmo, ragged old T shirt (why won't he get rid of this thing?), walked over to Ned's crib, and said, "Crib? Crib?"
About the last thing I want Alex to do is regress to sleeping in the crib, but- "Alex, do you want to get into the crib? Do you want to get into the crib with Ned?"
Alex began scaling the side of the crib; Ned joined him. They scampered like gung-ho Mexicans up the walls of the Alamo. With a parental heave, they were both over the railing. Jill and I prepared for a darling scene of cuddling, our two boys drifting off with arms around each other as the soft light-
Ned and Alex started jumping up and down on the mattress.
"That's why he wants to go in there!"
Creak creak creak went the springs of the crib mattress. Both boys laughed: Ned in his high toddler ha-ha's, Alex in his tickled squeal. They clung to the railing and bounced and bounced.
"I thought they wanted to sleep together in there," I said. It hit Jill and me at the same time:
"Alex likes it because it's a trampoline!" she said.
Ned's knees bent softly with each landing; he braced his arms on the railing and jumped and jumped. Alex knees bent a second or so after he landed, though, and he seemed to be pulling himself up and down with his arms. About a week ago we got a note from Alex's physical therapist at school, saying that he was making slow progress in learning how to jump. True: Alex can do a lot of things on the playground -- slide, climb, swing -- but he jumps with stiff legs. A kid should be able to jump.
Creak creak creak. I recalled a morning a couple of weeks ago, when Jill and I found Alex's bedtime T in the crib. Another time we found Elmo. I guess we thought maybe he'd handed them to Ned. But now that I think about it, how much sense would that have made? It made much more sense that these two had found some fun after the lights were dimmed, after mom and dad had scrammed into their adult evening world of TV.
This event has implications. "The failure mode of mattresses is the tearing of the cover, generally along a side seam. This comes about because every child eventually turns the crib into a trampoline," reads a crib-mattress primer from www.childrensfurniture.com . "A child who jumps on the mattress puts a lot of pressure on the seam, and an inferior cover will split."
Ned and Alex, do you realize this? I chose to believe they do, just as they realize that Ned is likely the last occupant of this crib in our home. This has been a dutiful and cheerful mattress, stains of all sizes, textures, and scents coming off its surface with one swipe of Windex. Alex never put it through such trials when he was the owner: He was more a stand-at-the-railing-and-chatter-like-a-squirrel sort of guy.
"He must have seen Ned jumping in there," Jill says.
Jumping on the mattress is one of Ned's charming maneuvers in the crib, along with asking for a book over and over and over, and allowing Bear and Bully (stuffed friends) to (with dad's help) creep up the side of the crib and bushwhack him over the railing. In the mornings, he leaps and leaps for his freedom. Ned's at home in the crib. So was Alex, in a shier way. Ned will be home in the bed, too, I imagine. He already sprawls in Alex's bed for story time; he rolls through Alex's sleep-space with abandon. On most nights, prying him from Alex's bed and depositing him into the crib makes Ned cry, as he's infuriated with his cage.
It must have seemed sweet to Ned that Alex found something in his crib worthy of a big brother's time, something that drew him away from hopping off his big-boy bed and pawing the toy shelf, away from rattling the doorknob and screeching an almost-nightly demand to be re-admitted to the world of TV. It must have made Ned's heart leap to see Alex scaling the side of the crib that first time, and mom and dad nowhere in sight. Maybe in return, Ned will turn his big brother into a kid who can jump. (May 2003)
Here are the latest developments:
Alex is picking up stuff: It started with parts of the toy train and the plastic letters he can spread over practically a square acre of apartment floor (I thought there were 26 letters? I see way more than 26 letters here...) We can also now get him to stoop and pick up almost the entire bowl of Cheerios he has inevitably upset. We're also working in sweeping, and wiping up spills by putting the paper towel into his hand. He seems to know it's something he's supposed to do: one recent evening, Jill got mad at him because he wouldn't hold still during a diaper change. He cried a little, then ran out into the living room and began scooping up his toy letters. All 90 of them.
Ned playing "Pillow": This starts with Ned begging me to lay down on the bed, with my arms clear of my chest. He then squares his little Celtics baseball hat on his head, breaks into a big grin, twirls and falls on me. Extra points for him if he lands on me elbows-first, and if dad tickles just right. He repeats this over and over - apparently it's more fun than eating dinner - always straightening his hat before the plunge and asking, "You okay?"
Train stuff: Grandpa bought the boys a plastic Battat train set a while back. I bought another on ebay, and grandma threw in a classy wooden set with compatible track. Ned can break out and put away the sets by himself, and I've never seen Alex solidly absorbed for 15 minutes; he is the only person in our house who's assembled a closed-loop track using every piece.
Sleeping: Overnight - ha ha - Alex went from being a toddler who slept 11 unbroken hours to being a boy who goes to bed about 9, decides he must catapult into his parents' bed around 2, and gets up with the sunrise. Last night, we did let Alex stay up with us on the couch and watch a movie (Funny Bones), and this morning he did sleep in. More about this when I have the energy.
"Nemo": The movie, Ned's first. Jill took him, and reported that he sat through about half of it before getting up to run around. Sat through the credits, though, and had popcorn. Now he can't pass a fish restaurant, let alone the Disney store on Fifth Avenue, without calling "Nemo?" Maybe we should get him a fish.
New books at reading time: Harry the Dirty Dog and My Many Colored Days have made the favorites list, much as any book does when Alex and Ned have corroded our sweet bedtime routine into a wrestle-fest that goes on and on until dad storms out or somebody gets bit.
Wrestling together: In one of the most promising signs that we're coming together as a family, Alex and Ned have discovered the brotherly joys of pummeling each other. In play, of course. Ned twirls and falls on Alex (see "Pillow"); Alex lays on his back and kicks Ned with gradually increasing force until I stop him. Beware Ned, if Alex and his sharp teeth aren't in the mood for playing, but most times it winds up being a giggle-fest for both boys. I think it's slowly dawning on Alex that he has a handy playmate. For Ned, wrestling with Alex is a wind-up it's difficult to pull him down from; trying to get Ned ready for bed afterwards is like trying to put a diaper on a live lobster.
Brushing teeth: One of my proudest accomplishments. Both boys scoot to the bathroom when I call "Time to brush our teeth!", and, after I dig up their cup and brushes from somewhere amid the bath toys on the floor, they have the drill pretty much down. I have to hold Alex's neck, which he doesn't like. Ned was first to see that you put the little plastic cup in the cup holder when you're done. I never think to do that. (July 2003)
The other morning around 5, Alex burst into our bedroom. He climbed into our bed chattering, woke us both up, and at once filled us with wonder at another day and dread that none of us would get back to sleep before we rolled out for the school bus.
Perfectly normal. Except-
"Alex isn't wearing socks!" Jill hissed. "This is Ned's doing! I'm gonna kill him!"
We still have Ned in a crib, which admittedly is tardy of us parent-wise, but since we keep the railing down and Ned scales up and down the thing with a the dexterity of foretopman, these days we consider the crib just Ned's combination jungle gym/place to sleep. A bed's in the works. Long story. Anyway, Ned already has a bed.
"Ned, is it that you want to sleep in a bed, or that you want to sleep with Alex?"
"Sleep with Alex," Ned says.
A few weeks ago, we began discovering Ned asleep beside Alex. We would find this when we went in to change the boys' diapers for the night -- speaking of tardy parenting -- and there would be Ned, pressed between Alex and the wall, arms up, feet touching and legs making a little diamond beside his big brother, who was snoring and pressed against the bed railing. Often, Ned would have taken off both his socks and Alex's. We would move Ned back to his crib, and in the morning either find him right beside Alex either in the bed, or bolting in tandem to shatter our bedroom peace.
Ned's migration doesn't matter on most school nights, when Alex is snoring on my shoulder even before we're up to "Would you, could you, on a boat?" Ned, who gets an afternoon nap, likes to stay up for the late show of Mud Is Cake or Harold and the Purple Crayon.
At last, after Harold drops his crayon and the little hand creeps toward nine, I ask Ned if he wants to go to bed. "Yeah," he whispers, with a nod.
"Go to your crib," I tell him softly, "until I get Alex to bed." Ned hops down, and pauses. "Crib, Ned," I say.
"Nawwo. Sleep on bed." He scrambles onto the mattress of the toddler bed and flattens himself elaborately against the wall. I lay Alex down next to him. "Do not wake Alex," I warn.
Ned has woken Alex up twice. One evening about a half hour after bedtime, Ned, who can't turn the bedroom doorknob by himself, charged into our living room. Behind him stumbled Alex, clutching Elmo, squinting in the light, and probably wondering if the house was really on fire. I instantly recognized what had happened, and Ned and I had what parents who choose their words carefully might call "a moment."
More recently, Ned and Alex charged into our bedroom at four in the morning. Jill took Alex, and I returned Ned to his crib. "Do not get Alex up again!" I said over him. "He has to get up earlier than you do to catch a school bus, and I have to get up with him. If you get up tonight again, I'll get you up with Alex in the morning." Ned's only three, but this exchange convinced me that he speaks plenty good English.
I cradled Ned in the big chair in the bedroom the other night, after Alex was asleep. "Ned, you want to sleep in your crib?"
"Nawwo."
"Ned, you know something that's going to change in here soon?"
"Yeah." He didn't know, but this is just what he says.
"We're going to get another bed in here. You're not going to have the crib anymore."
"Fred is my friend," he said.
Ned will miss scaling the railings, but this room will be bigger without them. I imagine the beds, neat with blankets and pillows, right out of a toddlers' magazine. Next will go the changing table, replaced by another dresser, which will make one for Alex and one for Ned. Soon, Jill's paintings may disappear, too, replaced by posters of some cartoon hanging over my sons' beds. By then, Ned might even be using his own bed once in a while. (April 2004)
- Alex now sleeps in a bed. A real bed from Ikea! "This is gonna take you weeks to put together!" Jill assured me over the phone on the day it arrived. Took me a couple of hours, that's true, not counting the moments I had to make sure not to accidentally puncture Alex and Ned with my power drill while they helped me. Now Alex sleeps in a bed. So does Ned, despite his promises that he'll leave his big brother alone through the night and despite his bed - Alex's old toddler job - still being plenty big enough. We often go in to find him jammed against Alex, both of them snoring gently as little marines, Alex at least a centimeter from sliding off the edge of the mattress.
- Jill puts Ned on the potty in the bathroom. She kisses his head and settles him on the seat. He fidgets. "Who else is going to love you and kiss you when you're taking a poop because it's so cute?!"
"Shut the door!" Ned yells.
- One dinnertime, Alex hauls out our boom box and tries to lift it to the table. I'm sick of the kids-sing-Beatles CD, however, so I find another: chamber music from Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin sea novels. Alex munches his pretzels and seems to like the music. I show him the picture on the front of the CD case. "Ship," I say. "Chip," he replies.
-I'm in the kitchen. Jill is finishing her dinner out at the dining room table. Ned dashes into the kitchen and demands chocolate. "Ask mommy if you can have chocolate," I tell him. He runs out to the dining room and I hear him asking Jill. "You may have one piece!" I hear her tell him. I stick my head out. "What's the word on the chocolate for Ned?" She starts to tell me when Ned slams against my legs and tries to force me back into the kitchen: "No! No!" he shouts. "Don't talk to mommy!"
- Jill provides this report of her and Ned at nap time: "If you want to lie down next to Mommy, Ned, and take a nap, that's fine. But you have to be quiet." Ned waves the plastic tree trunk from a Play-Doh toy through the air, making whooshing noises. Jill closes her eyes. She senses, next to her, Ned scrabbling around doing something, then putting his fingers to her lips. It's not the plastic tree.
"Eat this! Eat this!" Ned says. Her eyes fly open and she asks, "What is that?" "Eat this! Eat this!"
She repeats her question, and Ned replies: "Something from my foot!"
- In a similar vein, Jill playfully asked last night if she could bite Ned. "I'm not food!" he fired back.
- Alex charges up to me and sticks his tiny toy plastic rooster an inch from my nose. "Cock-a-doodoodoo!" Alex says. Close enough.
- In the quarter-hour Alex has between getting up and catching his bus for Saturday camp, he manages to strew Legos all over the living room floor. Then he announces that he wants to kill the wait time with an Elmo DVD. "No, Alex, no Elmo until-" I don't get a chance to finish before he's sweeping through the Legos and putting them back in their box.
- Alex catches a mild case of Pink Eye, and the doctor prescribes eye drops. Ned seems delighted when he catches the Pink Eye, too, as he gets to announce, "I need my eye drops!" Nothing tickles him like a new kind of medicine.
- In the grocery store I find a package of cinnamon-sugar Pop Tarts, unfrosted, Jill's favorite. I bring them home, and Ned is the first one to get the package open. He's sitting at his little table, gnawing his ill-gotten Pop Tart, when Jill asks if she can have one. "They're mommy's favorite," Jill tells him. "Naw," Ned replies. "You wouldn't like it."
- Alex dumps out the Legos one night in a clatter across the living room floor. Then he selects a couple dozen Legos of the same size and color, and starts building a staircase. That's clever enough, but when the staircase gets too long to hold in his hand without breaking in half, he learns to set it on its side on the table: They're more stable and easier to add to that way. I never would have thought of that. "Alexander bear!" Jill cries. "He's saying, 'Look what I built!'" (May 2004)
Yesterday afternoon I had a few hours alone with Ned, and he claimed he wanted to go to the playground. So we set out across 72nd Street toward Central Park, where there's a playground. We entered the park and I told Ned to turn right for the playground. "Naw," he replied. "That's for kids, daddy."
Declining to answer my subsequent question ("What the hell do you mean by that, Ned?"), he headed first downhill for the boat pond, then across a hill of mulch and new grass.
"Ned, the playground is over here!"
"That's for kids, daddy. Want to climb the rocks."
He found a 5-foot-high boulder and took one sheer side in a blur of Gap Kids T shirt, and paused at the summit to find fresh stuff to climb because it's there and it isn't for kids, daddy. He then spied a boy doing the same thing on a rock a few yards away. Over Ned went, spidering up past the boy. He stopped on a ledge that overlooked about a three-foot drop, his toes sending pebbles into space.
"Ned, I don't think this is a good idea without a hand, all right!"
He agreed, for once since he was born, and took my hand and leaped. His sneakers hit the dust with a hard little plat while I tried to not recall my own clearest memory of rock climbing: my accidental ascent up the 5,000-foot back side of Mt. Cadillac near Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1979, an afternoon that again comes alive for me whenever I think about planting my foot in a pencil-size crevice filled with wet moss, with nothing behind me but too much sky.
Boulders are taking the place of playgrounds as the dangerous entertainment for my boys. The old days of weekend afternoons used to feature me shoving a double stroller back and forth across the Park, the boys strapped in, and hitting three or four playgrounds, countless water fountains, and a few snack bars for hot dogs and chips. Back when we still did playground and their jungle gym equipment and when I first saw Alex take a the ladder of chain rungs or Ned fall into space to wrap himself around a pole and slide to the ground, I felt the gray hairs. But soon it was common stuff: Alex went up like a veteran of a sailing ship; Ned came down like a longtime member of a fire brigade.
Now, the walks down Fifth Avenue feature a couple of little boys scampering on top of the benches, dodging homeless and slowing down not for dog crap and busted malt liquor bottles, but only to see how slippery these giant tree roots snaking out of the cobblestones really are. And don't forget Alex's determination to ditch me and Ned and disappear down the sidewalk to find an apartment of his own. "Alex, stop now!" Shoving that damned double all over upper Manhattan was easier, I think. Don't all parents, once you crack them a couple of beers, admit to preferring the kids strapped in?
First time I tried free-ranging my sons was last Thanksgiving. With time to kill in the morning before the relatives showed and the Lions kicked off, I rolled the boys to a little clearing behind the racquetball courts in mid-Park. At one point, I recall, Ned was a speck down by the ball diamonds. "Ned?" I saw the legs on the speck pump as it grew smaller. Alex scampered over rocks and mud, took a spill, accepted a hand up and a brush off. This territory was level, and fair to little kids.
Big rocks are different. Big rocks weren't assembled in some toy factory that can be sued. Rocks are sharp and unforgiving. Big New York rocks are used by other people, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes to hear bottles break, or as cover to inject a drug of choice. Big rocks are what you climb when you're out in the world.
A few weeks ago, Alex and Ned and I walked all the way across Central Park, and they climbed every boulder in sight. The boys shot up and over, scampering against the sky. I'd have pulled them down if only I could've caught them. (July 2004)
After dinner, it's time for me to slice up one of those chocolate protein bars for the boys (my latest tactic to sneak nutrients into Alex), and I ask Ned to please get a bowl out of the kitchen drawer for himself and for Alex.
Ned pulls out a big bowl for himself, and hands a little bowl to Alex.
"That's the sort of thing my mother would be very angry at," notes Jill.
Jill's mom has a theory that Ned sometimes tries to bully Alex. Like the other night at bedtime, when Alex was already asleep but Ned was bouncing around on his own mattress. Ned kept elaborately still when I told him that I needed him to go to sleep and not wake up Alex, because Alex had to get up a lot earlier the following morning to catch a school bus. "Want to sleep with Alex," Ned said. Fine, I told him, but don't wake Alex up. I went out and shut the bedroom door behind me until I heard the latch click. Ned can't open the door when it's latched like that; Alex can.
A few minutes later, and Alex stumbles out blinking at the living room lights. I dash in and find Ned sitting upright on his bed, under his blanket. He knows Alex can open the door, and he can't. So cute. So obvious what he did. I grab him. "I asked you not to do that, Ned!" I guide a perplexed Alex back to bed, and for the rest of the evening Ned slowly falls asleep on the couch next to Jill, and ignores me.
On the next night, while Ned and I are brushing his teeth, I deliver one of the first of my true Dad's Speeches:
"It's easy for you to take advantage of Alex sometimes, Ned," I say. "Alex is special. Some things are harder for Alex to understand than they are for you. You have to resist the urge to take advantage. Do you understand?" Ned nods, in the same way he nodded to when I told him I was depending on him to go to sleep.
Alex doesn't really talk. Ned talks. But sometimes I think it's plainer to me when I get through to Alex. Maybe Alex has a gentler nature, less devious.
"Jeff," says Jill, "Ned is only three." And they seem to love each other, always quick to shake hands or clasp each other in a cute and tight little brotherly hug until I wrench my hands in there and say, "Okay, break it up before somebody gets bit!"
Three, yeah, but cunning. And when he gets the chance, a little bossy. I often see him, his index finger jutting, commanding Alex in the same tone of voice he's heard us, mostly me, use: "Alex, why'd you do that! Alex, don't - do - that!
"Ned, take it easy."
He turns to me with a lost, slight shrug, as if addressing a comrade in the war of grown-up befuddlement. "I just don't know why Alex did that! Alex broke it..."
"Ned," I reply. "You broke it. I watched you break it."
"I just don't know why Alex did that!"
He is only three. There's no evil intent there, I guess. Who's to say who gets the idea, Ned or Alex, to wait until daddy leaves the room to begin monkeying with the DVD buttons or jacking his brother's favorite tape out of the VCR? Who yanks the expensive wooden blinds first? Who instigates the shoving match? Who bites first?
That last is simple: Alex bites first, at least he always has, a hard and empurpling assault on Ned's back, arms, or legs that belie any notion that Ned is the one picking on Alex. You should hear Ned howl. If you lived within two floors of us in our apartment building, you would hear Ned howl. Grown-ups with brothers or sisters about the same age assure me that this is normal behavior. Maybe normal, but certainly Alex getting even for any bullying. Besides, wasn't it Alex who, when Ned first came home some three years ago, nonchalantly held any toy both he and Ned wanted out of reach?
Until the other night, when Ned put up with a few minutes of shoving, then, perhaps his little brain recalling all the bites and all the toys held nonchalantly out of reach, pinned Alex down and clamped a deep dental imprint right on his back. Ned got up looking line a linebacker who's leveled a running back right one play after being penalized with a cheap flag. Alex cried, but not as long as you'd think, and even though he doesn't talk I saw him look at Ned and seem to say, "Yeah, yeah, okay." Nobody was special anything at that brothers' moment, and nobody was being bullied. Let's hope it stays that way. (September 2004)
It's hard to know what Alex thinks of Ned. Ned was out on a playdate this afternoon, and Jill says Alex asked for him nonstop. "'Ned? Ned Ned?'" she says. "Mostly because he was stuck with dull old mommy."
I've heard those "Neds", too, especially once when we started playing Pillow and Ned was still in the bath. "Ned? Ned?" I think this is good. For Ned's first couple of years, Alex only noticed him when we pointed him out, as in, "Alex, touch Ned nice," and Alex would say "Ned" softly and pet his little brother's hair.
Not long ago, my sons began interacting with each other only when one of their parents wasn't in the room. Stuck at the kitchen sink for a minute, I'd hear the TV droning and all else quiet. Then I'd hear a few bumps. Then the slap of feet like the bogeyman after the lights are out. Then ned saying "No!", then what sounded like a punch and a grunt from Alex. Then nothing. Then a wail from Ned long and loud, enough to guide a big freighter through a thick fog.
"Ned, what happened!?" Wail wail wail. Alex seems glued to "Elmo." "Ned, what happened?" Eventually the wails give way to words, and I get the story. Usually it involves teeth marks, and Alex being hauled to his room.
Alex will veer out of his path to place both hands, palms first, onto Ned's chest, and shove. The other night Ned was bawling about something or rather, planted there crying and crying and crying. He paused as Alex approached. Alex stood in front of him for a moment, looked him in the eye, and slapped his hand down across Ned's head. Jill and I laughed hard and silently into our hands, then put Alex in his room. It's kind of like having two Stooges around, except this pair seems to take their routine solemnly.
Ned mimics Alex, talking out of the side of his mouth, claiming "I'll cry!" when we ask him to do something he doesn't want to do (to be fair, Ned isn't being mean here, and would probably have thought that one up on his own). They also screech together, and Ned trails Alex and kicks the wall whenever his big brother does.
Things are getting better, I guess. They summon each other for Pillow. Alex's biting has trailed off (and did so fast after the only Ned decided to strike back with some teeth marks of his own), but I'm still alarmed. Others aren't so much, especially if they had siblings close in age. "Oh my brothers, man," said one therapist, in her 20s, "They used to biiiiite me!" Still, these attacks often leave a pink crescent, as if Ned had been gnawed by a fish. We put Alex in his room, and when we finally let him out, I take him by his forearm -- no soft hand-holding at this moment -- and steer him toward Ned and demand that he shake his brother's hand and apologize. Lately, Ned runs away when I bring Alex, and yells, "Nooooo!"
"You stop it now!" Ned will say to Alex, who says nothing, but if the situation doesn't improve, Ned will hit Alex in the chest with his fists. No one taught Ned to do this -- I'm a little brother, and I can attest that you're soon conditioned for this action -- but Alex's reaction is usually to giggle harder, and I think this confuses Ned.
One morning we were on a walk, and Alex paused on the steps in Central Park, and turned right around and without a word hugged Ned. Ned went all Sally Field: "Oh, he likes me!" Ned exclaimed. For two days afterward, Ned was convinced that that hug on the concrete steps overlooking Central Park West, like a sudden kiss under the leaves, signaled a new turn in a relationship. "Alex is my buddy," Ned would say. "Alex likes me and he isn't going to bite me any more." Alex said nothing. Ned also sleeps with Alex every night, and has for a while. Mostly because he wants to sleep with Alex, although Ned's mattress is pretty hard. They sleep feet to feet. When Ned started sleeping with Alex, their feet barely touched. These nights, I see their legs overlapping to the knees.
"You guys get along," says Jill. "All you guys are gonna have in the years to come is each other. So get along."
They bathe together, and are getting too big in there, too, bunched up in our tub under the faucet. "He's not giving me any room!" Ned will say. Alex says nothing. (February 2005)
Last night, Ned said, "I've been telling my friends to stay away from Alex."
To be fair, this came mere seconds after Alex grabbed the tiny plastic guns off Ned's new G.I. Joe. Alex returned them after I told him to, then he whacked Ned. This all came maybe just 90 minutes after Alex had gone wild and whacked Ned and made him cry. Ned's wails were more confusion than pain, I think. I don't envy Ned.
I got on the couch beside Ned and explained that Alex actually treats Ned in a special way -- as Ned had just seen, come to think of it -- because Alex is Ned's brother. Alex treats Ned in a way he doesn't treat any other person.
"He does it to all kids," Ned countered. I didn't know 4-year-olds could "counter." "I've been telling my friends to stay away from Alex."
"What do you mean? What friends?"
Ned has friends. "My friend Alex," Ned replied, referring to a boy he'd met in the park. "All my friends." Herewith Ned shot his cuffs and announced underway his candidacy for a Special Needs Sibling class.
I then announced my candidacy for Try-To-Talk-This-Out Kind of Dad. "You shouldn't tell other kids to stay away from Alex," I said, speaking as if I was trying to make my voice securely carry eggs. "Alex is a hard talker, and he has some differences, but he likes other kids. Doesn't he like to shake hands? Doesn't he treat our neighbor's two little girls nice when they come here?" Ah-ha, I think, just a minute here. "And Ned, I've seen you do the same thing: Didn't you take crackers right out of Alex's bowl last night? Be fair. He's a hard talker and he has some differences, but you shouldn't tell kids to stay away from him. Jill! Come out here! It's important!"
I filled her in. "I think 'hard talker' is a difficult phrase to understand," she said to me. To Ned: "What friends? Friends at school or in the park?"
"Friends in the park," Ned said. Then it was time for Sugar Pops and "Sponge Bob."
Ned was there a few weeks ago, during that chasm between summer respite camp and the beginning of school, when Alex bit another boy in the park. Ned has also been there when Alex bites him; we think Alex left his second baby tooth in Ned's arm. To be fair, Ned has also been there when Alex has hugged him and kissed him and shaken his hand. I think Ned was being as unfair as, well, Alex when he grabbed G.I. Joe's gun.
Nonetheless, to Ned is left the lifelong trial of being the brother of an autistic kid. I don't envy him. The role can swamp his behavior at family dinners, when not long ago Ned would find it the height of graciousness to bolt from the table in mid-chew, run around, watch TV, and in general leave his parents open to that special criticism that comes down on moms and dads who seem to condone this sort of stuff.
"It's like you've got a couple of three-year-olds," said Jill's cousin, a kid-loving pediatrician, during one dinner. Except Ned was three then. Alex wasn't, and this, like the silences that greet his hellos to Alex, must still confuse Ned.
Lately, though, Ned has assumed more the role of policeman. "Alex no screaming!" he will say when Alex lets one fly. "Alex no!" he will say when his older brother moves toward the VCR, intent on cutting off Ned's turn at "Sponge Bob" with yet another airing of "Elmocize."
In Ned's tone I hear my own. He is learning, from perhaps not the best model, how to try to govern Alex.
I once wrote a story about special needs trusts, which are funds set up to help people like Alex in their adult years. Often, parents set up the trusts, and lay all responsibility for overseeing the trust on the typically developed adult sibling. Bad move, advisors said: Even if that sibling loves the special needs individual, the person that sibling marries might not.
I had Ned late in life; it's possible I won't see that other key person at Ned's wedding - there are already an alarming number of bridal candidates, for this boy with many friends - but I do hope Alex isn't there screaming and trying to watch "Elmo" ("He does it to all kids ..."). I hope Alex behaves himself, and understands that the day is Ned's. I'm trying not to hope that Ned will want him there at all. (October 2005)
In presentations I state that I've never had a conversation with Alex. This is no longer strictly true, and it's about 10 miles from true with Ned.
With Ned, the language flows. Take, for instance, the morning about a month ago when we were walking from the subway to his kindergarten and I asked him to look up at me. His face was dirty. "Ned," I said, "when we get to school, I want to stop by the bathroom and wash your face."
He looked back down at the sidewalk. "They don't have a bathroom," he said.
"What?"
"They don't have a bathroom at my school!" he said.
"What do you mean they don't have a bathroom at your school?"
Stage pause. "Dad," said Ned, "it's a joke!"
Nice delivery, and precise mimicry of incredulousness and whining on "school," but I have no clue where he got this disruptive characteristic. Then again, Ned is revealing himself to have a catacombed mind, and even at age four he'll occasionally let go with the variety of poetry one usually sees only in undergrad literary magazines. One recent bedtime, he and I were discussing trees. "There are all kinds of trees," Ned said. "Apple trees. Pear trees. Cherry trees. New Jersey trees..." I also have reason to believe that Ned said the following after hearing "The Three Bears" in his after-school playgroup: "Goldilocks was invisible and then she died. The three bears played soccer."
I can converse with him to that pinnacle of human communication: the argument. The evening that Goldilocks kicked off, I took Ned to dinner and then some household shopping. In the drugstore for cat food (Toast doesn't talk yet), Ned grabbed a little plastic pistol key chain that, when he pushed a button, made about three screechy noises that went through my head like nails. I told him we were not buying the key chain. He countered that he was due a toy, and he was, but, I assured him, it would not be that pistol on a key chain. We spatted. "You can't come to my birthday!" he said at last. Yoo-hoo! I thought, realizing that Ned's birthday this year falls on a Sunday afternoon during football season.
Later, on the bus home, he uncrossed his arms and, by way of apology, said, "Okay, you can buy me a really big Transformer for my birthday. If you want."
Though still not straying into what anyone would mistake for chat territory, Alex is actually talking more, too. There are times when Alex will spit out a wholly appropriate word, such as "Lights!" when I ask him to turn out the lights. And he's made himself like all other kids himself in the sense that he's much more motivated to do what we want when he, in turn, wants something. For instance, Alex hasn't been in daytime diapers for routine Number One for a quite a while, and we were coming home in the elevator one recent afternoon when, beginning to dance on one foot, he said, clear as any president during any State of the Union, "I - want - a - diaper!"
(As I also say in presentations, I hope Alex hears that story someday, and yells at me for it. I don't know if that will ever happen, but I hope it will.)
"Binkie!" Alex barked in my face one evening when he was tired. "Go to bed! Take a NAP!" Alex likes to talk in italics and caps, such as whenever there's something on our TV screen that isn't red and furry and has a voice like a plastic pistol key chain ("Watch ELMO!"), or whenever he thinks there aren't enough crumbs on the living room floor ("Want CRACKERS!").
"How about pretzels?" Jill said once.
"How about crackers!" Alex replied.
Jill has managed to confine Alex's saltine eating to his little dinner table; he used to eat them in front our TV, and as a result our entertainment unit must have been featured in more than a few cockroaches' Zagat Guides to New York. In front of the TV remains his favorite spot for crackers, however, and - again with mainstreaming himself - he will, like a normal kid, sneak back there with the bowl of crackers when he thinks we're not looking.
"Alex! At the table!"
He heads back without a word. Both boys have learned what it means when their parents talk in italics. (November 2005)
"Retarded" as been used three times in the past six months aloud in my office, usually in reference to someone - a vendor, a source, someone who holds a job - doing something dumb. "That's retarded!" "He's so retarded!" "I'm not a retard!" Each time, the word flew right out of a cubicle, clear and loud, for all to hear. I think anyone older than 5 could imagine many words that would cause quite a stir, and a lawsuit, if they flew right out of cubicles. "Retarded" and "retard," so far, don't seem to be among those words.
Words change. "Special needs" seems to have replaced "challenged," which replaced "retarded," I guess, though I've come to this game relatively recently and may not have the etymology right. "Retarded" has really stuck around, though. I Googled the word and turned up more than 19.1 million hits, including a band with the name (which somehow popped up first among the 19 million), retardedhumor.com, "retarded animal babies," and "movie criticism for the retarded" (which on Google scores right ahead of "Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons").
Jill and I often think of how Alex looks to other people: on the street, in restaurants, at the airport and on the bus and the subway. Many people still look at Alex; when I say "look at" I mean in that honest way that shows they'd like to engage him. Sometimes Alex notices them, sometimes not. Sometimes he answers them in a somewhat appropriate way if they ask him a question; often not. "That's the way they communicate," one woman said to me once in a McDonalds, meaning autistic people, about whom she seemed to know something; I somehow thought it a kind observation, though I was just guessing. As usual. In general, people still look at Alex more or less with kindness, as if to say, There's still time for me to look at him like this.
A co-worker once came up to me mid-afternoon of a workday. "Do you ever go to the park over by the river to eat your lunch?" he asked. I said no. "The guys from the special school go there," he said. "They sit on the benches and drool!" And this particular co-worker is a nice guy.
Alex remains, at age 8, a nice-looking kid. Dark hair and eyes. Eyebrows that women love both on themselves and on men. A killer glance, when he makes eye contact. Slim, downright skinny; it'd be hard for most people older than 5 to see him as any kind of threat. Unless you count the 2-year old he slapped on the playground two summers ago. She probably saw him as a threat.
"It's one thing if you have a cute little boy acting like that," Jill has said. "But he isn't going to be a cute little boy forever."
There was a guy on a playground a few summers ago. He was a big teenager with a tiny shaved head and five 'o clock shadow. He looked familiar to me, somehow, as he loped through the playground, seeing nobody. Little kids scattered before him like fish. And an "older" guy from a special-needs high school in Ned's school building got into the first-grade classroom the other day. "He had black hair. He ran in and sat on the teacher's chair," Ned recalls, adding that he himself hid under his desk until somebody came and fetched the young man. A few days after that incident, when Jill picked Ned up from school, Ned's teacher said Ned was great when the guy came in, telling her not to be scared and that the guy was just "sensitive, like my brother."
I tried to explain to Ned that the young man was indeed probably a lot like Alex. "I was scared," Ned said. I explained that the young man wouldn't have hurt Ned, but even as I said I wondered if I was absolutely right. (February 2007)
Ned has been assigned the memorizing of two words a day. I steer him words associated with everyday happenings, such as "dish" or "filter" (dessert and vacuuming the couch) or "peanut" and "butter" (pleasant cookies after school).
"Teach him words he'll use in school!" says Jill. So I teach Ned "union" when explaining how Alex's bus driver can always be late in the morning and still not get fired. I try teaching Ned "cliché" before I realize that he hasn't been alive long enough to recognize one.
One word Ned has learned on his own, more or less, is "sensitive," which he uses to describe Alex. I ask Ned where he picked that up. "In my sibshop," he says, referring to the three-Saturday program he attends a few times year with other school-age brothers and sisters of special-needs kids. Ned says most of the attendees are boys, their "siblings" sisters. I would've expected mostly girls attending sibshops because of their brothers, but you learn something new every day.
"I use that word. It describes Alex," says Ned, "like, 'My sensitive brother bites.'"
My mother used to sometimes use words this way, too, words vaguely appropriate yet still indistinct, words that sort of fit and were comfortable to speak. In my debris-strewn early twenties, for example, I had once-a-week "counseling" (therapy) with a psychology grad student at the local community college. Mum called it my "class." To be fair, my mother was 61 at the time, and Ned is 6.
"Alex doesn't bite you anymore, Ned," I say.
"If I didn't use 'sensitive,' people would think he's different from me."
"People would think he's different from you?"
Ned glares at me. "Aren't you listening? If I didn't use 'sensitive,' people would think he's just like me."
"He's sensitive like my brother," Ned said to his first-grade teacher a few months ago when an autistic teenager from the special-needs school that's also in Ned's school building somehow got into Ned's classroom. "He's sensitive," Ned announced then, "and my brother is very sensitive."
It's hard being the parent of a "sensitive" kid; I can't walk by a homeless person or anyone babbling on a New York City sidewalk without wondering if I'm glimpsing a future for Alex that, when it comes, I'll no longer be alive to prevent. But to be the brother? I think of my older brother. Thirty-five years ago, he never bought himself a balsa wood glider without getting one for me; he took me fishing off a roadside bridge for sunfish when I was five; in all the time he studied karate in the early 1970s, he never practiced on me for longer than half an hour. His pet name for me was often "What a dufus!"
Alex giggles and giggles when asked to turn on the bath taps for Ned (who still claims he can't do this). Alex rushes to do this brotherly duty, and just like a typically developing brother makes the water far too cold. (Wish I'd thought of that for my brother.) But Alex may never call Ned "dufus," and Ned will probably have to be the one to buy the gliders for a long time to come.
In sibshop (Ned's "class?"), he and the other brothers and sisters draw, paint, make their lunch, eat candy, and have talks and play games designed to bring out their feelings about having a sibling with special needs. In the only sibshop game Ned has actually told us about, the kids sat in a circle and passed around a potato. Whoever held the "hot potato" at a given moment had to tell how their siblings made them feel. "Embarrassed, sometimes," was all Ned would report having said when he got stuck with the potato.
"Ned," I ask, "if you didn't use that word 'sensitive' to describe Alex, what word would you use?"
He thinks. "I would use, sort of like, 'autistic,'" he says. (April 2007)
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