A cold December morning in 1983. An impassive team of child-study professionals gather around a table in a small windowless room and tell me, one by one, that my five year old son, Alan, hasn’t performed well in his year at therapeutic nursery school. He hasn’t socialized with other kids, hasn’t done well on tests, hasn’t made progress. Their assessment: pervasive delayed development with autistic-like elements. Attention span: a minute and a half. IQ: 64.

My heart freezes. I don’t recognize my own child. The Alan I know has a long attention span for things that interest him. He listens to music for hours. He can always find the light switches, can figure out where torn bank slips go once they’ve been thrown away and can pull used tickets from the box at Lake Ontario Park so they can be reused for free rides. But this is not the picture these people have of my son, nor is it the one held by those who have worked with him for the past three years in daycare and in regular nursery school.

At two, Alan loved books, especially nursery rhymes and books with zingy, imaginative pictures. He was singing in tune before his second birthday and even made up a few short tunes of his own. Even though he wasn’t talking, he pointed to all sorts of things and wanted them explained, commented on. He liked toys. He was sociable with grown-ups and had started to socialize a bit with kids he met on the playground near us in Oxford, England, where we were on sabbatical in 1979.

When Alan was still two, we returned to Kingston just before the academic year started, so I had to scramble for child care. I called the local daycare, but they had no space. I advertised for a sitter — too late. I had been assigned courses in American Literature that year, material I’d never studied. I would need preparation time. I finally found a small, fairly new daycare in an older house on a tree-lined street. I liked one of the teachers I met there and Alan seemed to also. I enrolled him in the last available spot there three days before my first class. It wasn’t ideal, but I was starting to panic, and I hoped it would work out.

Parents of children with autism talk about their children being kidnapped before their very eyes. That was exactly how I felt that first year he was in daycare. By December, Alan was eating fewer foods. He no longer liked books. He wasn’t interested in most toys. He still liked music, but he was no longer singing and certainly not making up tunes. The daycare teacher I’d liked so much had been sick, and she wasn’t around much. I was exhausted from constant preparation.

“Do you think we should take Alan out of daycare?” I asked my husband.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Alan is fine. Now help me make up my essay topics.”

At that point, I still trusted him to give good advice.

By the time I took Alan out of daycare, in May 1982, two years later, he had regressed dramatically. He was scared of other kids. He was scared of playgrounds. He didn’t like most foods and insisted on eating alone, where he couldn’t smell foods he didn’t like. His speech was developing, but he left out consonants and was hard to understand. His first phrase, “dark night and fireflies” sounded like “’ark ’ight and ’iref’ies.” He imitated pronouns instead of using his own, so that he said “you” for “I”, “we” for “you.” When he asked for milk he would say “D’yoo ’ant a g’ass of miwk?” He didn’t like answering questions. He was scared of drains and wouldn’t use the toilet.

I found a nursery school for Alan in the fall of 1982 when he was four, and on the advice of the teacher entered him in a class for two-year-olds. He appeared to be the least competent, least well-behaved kid in the class. He often screamed. He often hit other kids.The teacher said she would continue to work with him only if I entered him in the therapeutic nursery school as well.

And now, after a year in this new therapeutic nursery school, the assessors were right: something was wrong. But the sturdy little soul I’d known in his first two years was there too. He was still cuddly, still a great walker. When we visited an old family friend in New York, he pointed to a light switch. “Oh yes, Alan,” Helen said. “The light switch is still broken. What a good memory! You’re right. I’ve got to get it fixed.”

But in both regular nursery school and the therapeutic one, Alan remained closed, except for explosive outbursts. He didn’t answer questions; he didn’t learn; he didn’t enjoy much. The age of four-and-a-half to six is a time of dramatic growth for most children. Alan was stalled — in some ways less competent than he’d been at two.

At our exit interview with the therapeutic nursery school, in the spring of 1984, we all agreed that the nursery school had been a failure. As had daycare. The Director recommended that we either send Alan to a special school in Ottawa or put him in a special program for severely challenged children.

“Why not?” said my husband after the meeting. “Either way, then we’d both have enough time to work.”

But by this time, I no longer trusted his advice.

I vowed to give Alan fifteen years of my best efforts and then reassess. I was sure the baby and toddler I’d known (and still saw in glimpses) was still there. I hoped that if I gave him the right attention and found the right help, he would reappear. Yes, there was definitely something wrong, but any assessment that leaves out strengths is only partly right.

I called the superintendent of special education and got the names of three schools with programs for special kids. Central, the one I liked best, had kids’ artwork all over the walls, a welcoming secretary who spoke to the children before speaking to parents, a special-education teacher committed to integration and a dramatic, vibrant kindergarten teacher, Jane Thompson, who seemed strong enough to handle Alan and imaginative enough to enjoy him — if he ever let her see who he was.

The first day of school was sunny and crisp, and Alan had ridden his much-loved blue bike with yellow wheels (and training wheels). Still, things didn’t start off well. Alan fidgeted as we stood with the other kids, mothers and grandmothers outside the school, waiting for the kindergarten door to open. A large dog, unleashed, bounded by.

“Cawwy me!” Alan wailed and jumped into my arms.

At that moment, Jane appeared at the top of the stairs. “Good morning, boys and girls!” Her voice promised excitement, the joy of learning, but Alan wasn’t listening.

I knew Alan was upset about the dog so I went inside with him. He didn’t want to sit in the circle with the other kids, so we sat a little apart. The room had a piano. And a sand table. The walls were bright with pictures. There were enormous blocks and a puppet theatre. The room invited imagination and energy.

Jane sat at the piano and sang out a Bob Schneider song: “Listen to the water, listen to the water, rolling down the river…”

Alan was quiet for the music but started fidgeting and talking loudly when Jane introduced her assistants and began to talk about the year ahead.

“Sssh, Alan,” I whispered, “pay attention,” but he was screaming now. He tore a picture off the wall. Maybe that cold, clinical assessment of the team at the therapeutic nursery school was right. Maybe Alan did belong in a special school, one that was more behaviorist in orientation, more controlling.

Jane circled Alan with her arms. “Alan,” she said, “You go for a walk with Nancy till you calm down. Elizabeth, would you go to the staff room?”

When everything was quiet, she joined me. I was afraid she would say, like the teachers at daycare and at both nursery schools, that she couldn’t deal with Alan, that he would have to leave.

“We’re going to do our very best to make this work,” Jane said. “I want you to see me or Nancy every other week. Nancy will keep careful notes so you know what Alan is doing. We’ll need to work together so that Alan gets consistent approaches in home and in school. Can you tell me the best way to calm him down?”

“Explain to him why he can’t do something.”

“Ah, logic.”

I was limp with relief. Jane wasn’t giving up on Alan just yet, and she’d seen him at his most out-of-bounds, his most unreachable.

There continued to be difficulties all through the year, but there were also triumphs. Alan started sitting on the mat with the other kids, except on bad days. He started answering to his name. In music class he would join in with the hand motions. By spring he could count to a thousand. When he made progress, there were stickers and praise. When he lost his temper or hit other kids or swore, he was removed from class, talked into calmness.

My part of the consistent approach was to make number cookies, to arrange play dates when I could. After years of stasis, Alan was growing again. He became toilet trained, though he would be wary of strange toilets for several more years.

When I learned that Alan would be going on to first grade with the rest of his class, I was happier than I’d been when I got my own PhD.

Alan was lucky. He had a truly gifted kindergarten teacher who believed in him and created a climate of acceptance in the classroom, who saw beneath the surface to the child inside. His educational assistant, Nancy, was caring, consistent and firm. Jane was the first teacher who had suggested that I could nurture Alan’s growth through structure, limits and opportunities to be around other children, rather than just manage his disability.

Kindergarten was a major turning point for Alan — and for me. I still had to search at different points for the right teachers and the right schools, still had to insist that, with the right support, Alan could maximize his potential. At least, I knew what to look for.

When Alan was fifteen, I took a healing course that involved releasing stress at the cellular level through guided meditation and energy work. When I put my hands over Alan’s head to give him energy, I couldn’t believe what I was sensing. I had finished my course just two weeks earlier and it hadn’t prepared me for this: Alan’s left brain felt normal, but his right brain felt inert.

The left brain (Alan’s dominant brain, which felt fully energetic) controls logic. Left brainers tend to be strong on detail. The right brain controls synthesis. A brain as imbalanced as Alan’s would be strong on logic, strong on detail (usual strengths of autistic children) but weak on synthesis and the ability to generalize (inabilities usually connected with autism.) Craniosacral therapy, gentle manipulation of the body to rebalance the fluid in the brain and spine, is usually considered helpful for children with autism. For Alan, this was a significant part of healing and growth. He received treatment from a gifted healer for several years, and gradually stopped hopping, twitching and jerking, mannerisms that marked him as a special kid, but which may have simply been his body’s response to an imbalance in cerebrospinal fluid. By this time, Alan was emerging much more frequently from behind the invisible wall, only going into loops of language and repetition when he was upset.

Alan is twenty-seven now, taking Environmental Studies at Trent University, three courses at a time. He has peer tutoring; he gets extra time to write exams. He has also had photographic shows, won prizes and placed in photo contests in Kingston and at Trent.

Yes, my knees still shake when I think how easily it might not have happened, if I hadn’t gotten so much support from the school system, if I’d listened to the experts’ predictions instead of sticking with my own inner knowing.

Photo © Martine Bresson

Elizabeth Greene was born in New York and came to Toronto to do an M.A. in Medieval Studies and a Ph.D. in English Literature. She began teaching in 1969 at Queen’s University in Kingston, where she helped found Women’s Studies and was instrumental in her department’s decision to offer courses in creative writing. She has long been associated with the Ban Righ Centre, a centre for mature women returning to university, and has chaired the board during the planning of its thirtieth anniversary celebrations. She currently teaches the course Contemporary Canadian Women Writers.

She edited and contributed to We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman, co-edited two other anthologies of previously unpublished fiction and poetry and is editing a collection of poetry by Kingston poets for Artful Codger Press.

She thanks her son Alan for permission to make him the subject of a memoir, for reading “Dark Night and Fireflies,” and for permission to publish it. She also thanks Shannon Cowan, Nancy Ginzer, Carol Goodman and Fiona Lam for reading early and later drafts of this material, and for their friendship, support and encouragement.