A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler Read Free Book Online Page A

left pieces of themselves behind on various battlefronts: Men who’ve faced the worst, who are afraid of nothing, and aren’t about to swallow Harvard whole. I’ve watched these men stand up in the middle of government lectures, challenge the professor, question his theories, even his facts. Their words are still in my ears. I’ve seen their crutches, their empty sleeves; I’ve caught their fever, their fervor, an under ripple of “beat” rebellion that won’t fully surface for another fifteen years. They’re my idea of the future.
    What none of the three of us has yet noticed is that the fifties are already detaching into two separate futures: the bebop, beat world, and the suburban “Leave-it-to-Beaver” world. Each sees the other as worthless, neither speaking to the other. I see the “beat” world as exciting, immoral, and grungy. I see the “Leave-it-to-Beaver” world as serene, obedient and temptingly pretty, yet, somehow, never quite real. Part of me keeps thinking I can make it real simply by being obedient to it. The other part keeps breaking loose and running for dear life to the creative life of Harvard and Cambridge.
    Two separate cultures. Can I live with a foot in each? Am I striking out on my own or am I, like Temple, a schizophrenic?
    I begin a long slide into theory. I figure if I can tie the scary facts of autism in with what I’m reading, find in Henry James, Erik Erikson, and English eccentricity some kind of all-encompassing life vision, I’ll get a handle on the reality of our lives and be able to accept it. But reality keeps escaping behind the scenery, waiting to pop out and scare me again. I’m alone in the prim fifties with a child who doesn’t want me and a husband who isn’t sure he wants his child.
    Ultimately, a hunger for meaning will lead me to a deeper study of autism but not until it has journeyed through my consciousness for many years. For now, it joins forces with myth.
    The dictionary defines myth as a person or thing existing only in imagination, but when I come upon the old changeling myth, I know it’s no thing of imagination. A changeling must have been a child with autism.
    According to Celtic mythology, changelings are fairy children. Endowed with mysterious powers—both generous and spiteful, friendly and malevolent—the one thing fairies lack is the capacity for human feeling. And, because of the lack, they want to join us, inspire us, but then will extract a cruel and capricious price.
    Before a mortal baby is christened, the Celtic warning goes, don’t let her wear green ribbons, for the fairies will see the green and steal her away to replenish their empty hearts. They’ll put one of their own in her place; it will look like your child, but it will be sickly and odd and will want to be left alone. Remembering its forest home, it will cling to a block of wood, giving its loyalty only to the wood. Instead of speaking, it will hum and make strange croaking noises. And, if you are so unwise as to try to caress it, it will laugh and spit and take revenge on you with obscene tricks. A changeling baby has no Christian soul. It must be thrown on the fire. The purifying flames will strip it of its enchanted shape, so it will have no choice but to fly back to its fairy home.
    Changelings, I learn, were part of the ancient Celtic earth rites which didn’t start to give way to Christianity until after 500 A.D. Green, the color of nature, was the fairy color. Fairies, like nature, were thought to be beautiful, bounteous with gifts, but capricious. Like nature, they could snatch away their bounty at a moment’s notice, blight your crops, sicken the livestock, and level your barn with a single storm.
    The country folk of the Middle Ages understood physical deformity. Their countryside abounded in cripples and idiots. But a spiritual monster—hiding in the body of a beautiful child—that was demonic.
    Temple is a beautiful child, but her beauty is uncanny. She still