A Safe Place for Joey

“MARY MACCRACKEN IS AS GIFTED A WRITER AS A THERAPIST. THIS IS HER BEST BOOK YET!”

– Josh Greenfield, author of A Child Called Noah

“EACH CHILD PRESENTS A UNIQUE CHALLENGE AND EACH CHAPTER A MOVING EXPERIENCE.”

– Jean Vitalis, Educational Therapist, Board of Trustees, Churchill School

Copyright

This book recounts the essence of my experience and in that sense is a true story. However, it is not intended as a literal account, and it is not to be taken as a portrayal of any living person. All names (except for my family’s and mine) of individuals, places, and institutions are fictitious.

HarperElement

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the United States as Turnabout Children by Signet, 1987

This updated edition published by HarperElement 2015

© Mary MacCracken 1986, 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photograph © Vanessa Munoz/Trevillion Images (posed by model)

Mary MacCracken asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007555185

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007555192

Version: 2015-01-12

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my own three children – Susan, Nan, and Steve – and their families, in small return for the joy they’ve given me.

And also to my four stepchildren – Michael, Joan, Karen, and Mark –and their families, who have enriched my life.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Endorsements

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Meeting Myself

Joey

Eric

Changes

Ben

Alice

Charlie

A Safe Place

Appendix

Exclusive sample chapter

Also by Mary MacCracken

About the Author

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

Write for Us

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

I particularly want to thank:

All the children I’ve worked with and their parents. This book might well have been titled “Lessons from Children.”

My husband, Cal, for standing by, putting up with, and continuing to encourage me.

My daughter Susan, for reading every word of every draft and for offering insights, comments, and unfaltering faith.

My daughter Nan, for joining me in private practice, and sharing her talent for growing children.

Gene Young, my friend and first editor, for buying my first book, The Lost Children, and for thoughtfully editing both Lovey and City Kid and much of A Safe Place for Joey.

Fredrica S. Friedman, my current editor, for her hard work, enthusiasm, and careful guidance of this book in its final stages.

Carl Brandt, my agent, for watching over my books, both here and in other countries.

Ruth Watson, for reading, typing, and uncomplainingly retyping the many drafts of this book.

Meeting Myself

Maggie. Ten-year-old, bespectacled, beloved Maggie. She still couldn’t tell time or remember her multiplication facts. She passed a spelling test if she studied the words long and hard, but a week later she was unable to spell most of the words on the test. But Maggie was desperately eager to learn and I was desperately lonely for children, which was why I was tutoring Maggie and a few others until I could get my “working papers” and return to teaching.

I was back in college now, not by choice, but by necessity. The private school where I had taught seriously emotionally disturbed children full time for over six years had become state approved, which meant that by law its teachers must be certified. I had left college 25 years before to be married at the end of my sophomore year, and, although I had been taking courses at night, these credits accumulate slowly and the school had its state approval before I did. I could not teach again until I had a bachelor’s degree in education and teacher certification.

I decided to do it the quickest way I knew – by enrolling full time at the state college. Cal, my husband, supported and encouraged me. Our children were all grown, and some were in college themselves, the same age as my fellow students.

Continuing education for women was not yet popular, and I moved through my days in a sea of twenty-year-olds and dull undergraduate courses. That was okay. But as an education major I had expected to be surrounded by children. Not so. There were plenty of lectures, textbooks, quizzes, term papers, and tests – but no children. In the spring of our senior year, we would be sent into schools for six weeks as student teachers, but that was almost two years away and I knew that I couldn’t wait that long to work with children again.

Before returning to college I had been teaching schizophrenic and autistic children in a small private school, and during those years I had come to love both the staff and the children. The children had been the beginning and end of my days, and without them there was an emptiness that nothing else could fill.

Consequently, when a psychologist I’d known at that little school asked if I’d be interested in tutoring, I jumped at the chance, sandwiching sessions with children between my college courses. And so, without plan or conscious intent, I began to work with a type of child I hadn’t known before.

The first child to come was Bobby – seven years old, in second grade in public school, and seemingly bright, but totally unable to read. When I asked the psychologist who had sent Bobby to me how this could be, he shrugged and replied, “Suspected minimal brain damage.”

Brain damage? The words hit hard. Bobby? I couldn’t believe it. Bobby was bright, alert, bubbling with life, understanding subtleties without explanation – it didn’t seem possible that his brain could be damaged. What I didn’t know then was that in the late sixties and early seventies, learning disabilities was a new field and such medical terms as “brain damage” and “minimal brain dysfunction” were often still used. Now educators would use words like “dyslexic” or “learning disabled” to describe a child like Bobby.

In any event, I was sure that Bobby could learn to read. A friend helped me find an unused room in a nearby church, and Bobby and I met there twice a week. Almost immediately, he began to read. Not on grade level, of course, but within a few weeks he knew both the sounds and the names of the consonants, then the short sounds of a and i – and before one season changed to the next he could not only read, “A fat cat ran to a pit,” he could write it as well.

It was a heady experience to be part of such phenomenal growth. Phenomenal to me, at least. I was used to months, sometimes years, of struggle before a child could acquire what Bobby learned in a few weeks’ time.

It was not that I was doing anything so special. I was teaching the way I always had – moving slowly, sequentially – making sure each session ended with success. It was Bobby who was taking off, all by himself, and I was so caught up in the delight of his learning that I could hardly contain myself. Working with Bobby was my first experience with a child with learning disabilities, although I did not know it then.

Soon a friend asked if I would help Nancy, and someone else sent Henry, and Henry’s mom referred Peter. And then a teacher who was also a friend sent me Maggie, and without knowing it she changed the course of my life. Maggie was small with a narrow little face and brown curly hair. She was a quiet, intense little girl, not especially pretty except when unexpectedly something she had been working on long and hard became clear to her – then her face lit up, and for a minute or two Maggie was beautiful.

Maggie never complained, although sometimes her stomach ached before a test. She just kept on working diligently both in and out of school. She kept an alphabetical notebook of all her spelling words; she wrote multiplication facts in toothpaste on her bathroom mirror until she knew them by heart; she refused a gift of a digital clock, determined to learn to tell time the “usual” way. Maggie put in a lot more effort than most ten-year-olds, and still she struggled.

Why? What was wrong with Maggie? Her mother said she thought maybe Maggie had a learning disability and brought me an article from a magazine. Now, besides the escalating pleasure of being able to help these children, there was also a little tick of recognition.

Unable to spell correctly. Tick. Unable to tell time. Tick. Enormous difficulty putting a simple puzzle together. Tick. Tick. Tick. That was Maggie. That was also me.

In kindergarten the school nurse discovered I had almost no vision in my right eye. I was immediately taken to New York City to Dr. Sternhow, who had me look at his pencil, follow his flashlight, turn knobs to try to make things meet. I was given reading glasses, a black patch, a colouring book, and weekly remedial sessions. It did not seem serious. In fact, my mother and father seemed almost relieved. “No wonder she’s never been able to catch a ball,” they said to each other, smiling at me.

But despite the glasses and remedial sessions, I still couldn’t skip or sing on key or remember a new phone number, or make my letters the right way.

As I got older, I was conscious of mixing up left and right, and was not able to set the table correctly unless I stood directly in front of each place and pointed my watch, which I knew I wore on my left hand, toward the spot where the fork should go. I was never sure in which direction to deal cards, and I had to work excruciatingly hard to learn the new steps at dancing school, practicing alone in my bedroom at night, saying everything out loud to myself in order to get it in the proper sequence. I was never a very good speller, and handwriting and artwork were a struggle.

As a young adult, I knew and tried to cover up the fact that I couldn’t tell east from west or read a map. Even “before” and “after” were difficult, and I had tremendous trouble learning to tell time. Even now I say, “It’s about ten to two,” not sure whether it’s actually twelve or eight minutes before the hour.

But I was lucky, I grew up in the safest of worlds – in a home full of love, warmth, good food, enough money, and tender care. I went to school in the same town year after year where there were small classes, good teachers, and loyal friends who picked me for teams despite my strikeout potential. So I was spared the loneliness and feeling of inadequacy that haunt the lives of so many learning disabled children. My language center was not affected – I could read, my grades were good – so I didn’t have to deal with terms like “stupid” and “idiot.” Hard as it was, I’m sure it would have been harder still for both my parents and myself if I had had to struggle in school. Then, as now, academic success and intelligence were considered synonymous. Instead I simply, though painfully, thought of myself as a klutz.

Still, I know what it’s like, at least to a small degree – this feeling that the world is a little out of whack, slightly askew, and then one terrifying day you wake up and wonder if maybe it’s not the world, but you.

The day I met Maggie I met myself again, and I knew I had to find out why we were like that. Did we have learning disabilities? Why were we different from Bobby? Were we all brain damaged? Was there more than one kind of learning disability? What caused it? What could be done about it? And what was this word “dyslexia” that cropped up with increasing frequency?

I continued my dual major in special education and elementary education through my junior and senior years. The undergraduate courses remained dull and the professors uninspired. I still quaked silently through every quiz and exam, but in spite of it all I gradually found myself liking school – enjoying the books and journals, exploring the library stacks, discovering microfiche, talking with other students, becoming friends, Cal and I even partying with some, despite the gap in our ages.

But most of all, I liked tutoring the children – helping them learn, learning from them. I had always intended to return to the children I had first taught – to the strange, beautiful, haunting world of emotionally disturbed children. They were, after all, the reason I had returned to college in the first place. But now I found myself increasingly caught up in this new field of learning disabilities. I had to learn more, understand myself and Maggie, and the others. I was thoroughly and completely hooked.

I applied to a program offering a master’s degree in learning disabilities and was accepted. I spent the next year and a half studying the historical development and theories of learning disabilities, the processes of the brain and the central nervous system, the techniques and tests involved in diagnosis, and the teaching strategies of individualized remediation. Unlike those of my undergraduate days, the courses fascinated and engrossed me and we had able professors to teach us.

We learned the electrical and chemical components of the brain, the functions of the right and left hemispheres, and the importance of such things as the development of the corpus callosum, the myelin-covered bundle of nerves that divides the two hemispheres. We learned that the delayed maturation of myelinization can slow down communication between the two hemispheres.

We learned that the cortex alone has over nine billion nerve cells and millions of interconnecting neural pathways. I marveled that there are millions of tiny neurons inside our brains, firing again and again during a single second – a colossal Fourth of July finale going off continuously inside our heads. I wondered that any of us got anything straight.

We learned that there is not just one single, simple learning disability, but many. The term “learning disabilities” covers disorders in written language (also known as dysgraphia), disorders in arithmetic (dyscalculia), and disorders in receptive and expressive language and reading (dyslexia), as well as difficulties in perception of spatial relations and organization. We learned that dyslexia is a specific condition with its own causes and symptoms and that special teaching techniques work. The problem is not a lack of intelligence, but an inability to process language.

We learned that there were many more boys than girls with learning disabilities, although no one was quite sure why or just how many more children in the United States were considered to be learning disabled.

Statistics now show there are five to ten million children, up to 20 percent of all our children, who have some type of learning difference, and probably even more who are not diagnosed. I know from practical experience that in almost every typical classroom there are one to two children who are destined to fall behind unless they are recognized, diagnosed, and given help. Recent studies give indications that there are more dyslexic boys than girls not only because of genetics but also because exposure to the male hormone testosterone affects boys during prenatal development of the brain.

I was continuing to see Bobby and Maggie and three or four other children at the church, and I was sure now that once I finished graduate school and had my learning disabilities certification, I wanted to set up a private practice.

Most of my fellow students were planning to work as learning disability specialists on state-mandated child study teams in public schools, and they urged me to do the same, citing the advantages of vacations, insurance, tenure, and pensions.

But I loved working in a one-to-one situation with a child. In the quiet I could almost hear what was going on inside the child without the need for words. I loved having it all together – doing both the diagnostic evaluation and the remediation, although of course at times I did just one or the other. I felt that there was a tremendous need to provide help for these bright, sensitive children who were so often misunderstood and thought stupid by some and lazy by others. Few understand the courage it takes for a child to return to a place where he failed yesterday and the day before and, in all probability, will fail again the next. I was moved time and again by the bravery of these children and joyous when they realized that they could learn and be successful. I loved them without reserve.

The difficulty of setting up a private practice in learning disabilities lay in the lack of models. I couldn’t locate anyone who had actually done what I wanted to do, or even anyone interested in exploring the possibilities. I decided the thing to do was to be practical and just proceed one step at a time. I had some children – now I needed an office. If I was to be a professional, I had to have a place of my own.

I had been following newspaper ads and calling real estate salespeople without success when, unknowingly, one of my children, Fred, led me to my office.

With acuity and cruelty his fourth-grade classmates had dubbed Fred “the pig boy.” He was not really a pig, of course – but when he was upset or angry he flared his nostrils and curled his lips until a kind of snout appeared while he snorted and grunted and crawled under his desk.

I worked with Fred on reading and writing, but he also saw Dr. Oldenburg, a clinical psychologist, for his deeper emotional problems. Rea Oldenburg was both respected and controversial. She was well known in the field for her work on the origins of children’s fears, and almost as well known for her outspokenness. We conferred by phone several times a month about Fred’s progress. During one of these conversations, shortly before my graduation, Rea Oldenburg mentioned that Fred’s mother had told her that I was planning to open a practice in learning disabilities and was looking for office space.

I stalled, trying to choose my words, sure she would think me presumptuous. But instead she said, “If you’re serious, there’s office space opening up here in our building. It’s only one room, but there’s off-street parking. Dentists and eye doctors downstairs. Psychologists and psychiatrists upstairs. You’d be on the second floor with us. We all have patients like Fred, who have learning problems as well as emotional ones.”

I was at the address Dr. Oldenburg had given me before nine o’clock the next morning. Any office building with Rea Oldenburg in it would have been attractive to me – but to have it on a quiet, tree-lined street in what was or had been a residential neighborhood seemed too good to be true. The building itself was wood shingled with a stone front and blue-shuttered windows. The dozen nameplates beside the wide front door announced its metamorphosis from home to business.

“It’s small,” Dr. Oldenburg’s secretary repeated, opening a door to a room, off a small waiting room on the front side of the building. “And there’s no bath – but Dr. Oldenburg would probably let you use ours.”

“It’s perfect,” I said.

I scrounged up the security deposit and first month’s rent. I furnished the office with a windfall of slightly inappropriate office furniture from a friend who was closing his BMW dealership. Not the small, welcoming round table and chairs and white wicker I’d visualized – instead a six-foot-long, black-walnut-topped desk with black swivel chairs behind and green leather chairs in front. I bought a secondhand file cabinet and had a phone installed, and I had a place of my own.

The children loved my office almost as much as I did – especially Michael. Eight years old, not yet reading, painfully shy – until he reached the desk. Once there he leaned back in the huge swivel chair, propped his feet on the desk, lit an imaginary cigarette, blew smoke rings, and proclaimed himself ready to begin. I sat beside him in a smaller chair – and Michael was right. He was ready and he began to learn to read. Michael was the first of a number of children referred to me by the psychologists and psychiatrists on the second floor. Maggie, Bobby, Fred, and two or three others whom I had been seeing at the church moved with me to my new office. Gradually, my practice grew.

I had been seeing twenty-year-old Tony at the church, and he too preferred my new office space and furniture. His father had bought Tony’s way through private high school by paying tutors to write Tony’s reports and by making donations to the school building fund in amounts large enough to bring him passing grades. Tony had been referred to me by a psychiatrist with the comment, “He wants to learn to read; he will also benefit from healthy mother figures in his life.” Tony himself told me he was coming to me because he wanted to be able to read the “f ——— menus” when he went out on dates.

Then there was eight-year-old Adam – sandy-haired, freckle-faced, with the nicest parents in the world. “He’s just like I was,” his father said. “I had a terrible time learning to read. I still can’t spell. Just help him as much as you can, make it as easy as possible for him. I know he’s going to be all right. It just takes a while.”

Next came Robin, six years old, referred to me by Dr. Oldenburg. “I don’t think there’s that much wrong,” Rea said, “but she got a poor report at school – doesn’t follow directions, reverses her letters. A lot of it is developmental, but she’s an only child of older, well-to-do parents and she’s under a lot of pressure. Be a buffer for her between school and parents. Give her some academic help. I think it will pay off.” Robin looked just like my old Shirley Temple doll – the same blond curly hair, round brown eyes, and rosy cheeks. It was hard to believe I should be paid to work with Robin. But Dr. Oldenburg was right, and within six months she was in the middle reading group and blooming like an amaryllis.

I was beginning. Sometimes I feel as though I still am. I grew under the tutelage of Rea Oldenburg and the other professionals on the second floor, but it is really the children who have taught me. Sometimes with joy, sometimes with sorrow, I learn a little more about how to help children from each child who enters my life.

There are many ways to write about children with learning disabilities. I have chosen to tell the stories of five children because this is the truest way I know to show what these children are really like. They are not all cut from one bolt of cloth – they have different disabilities and different degrees of disabilities. It is an injustice to lump them all under one broad term and assume they are all alike. Instead, it is necessary to know each child in detail, adding one tiny specific after another. Nothing ignored – everything important – until all of a sudden the child becomes clear to me and I can see what needs to be done. The label is the least important part, and I have finally stopped fussing over which term is best. It is the child who matters.