Anna Visloukh - A Thunderous Silence. Raising an Autistic child. My True Story

I dare to write this book teetering on the brink of self-irony and tragedy, the serious and the ridiculous, the absurd and the random, prophecies and dashed hopes, expectations and losses.

Far away dogs are barking hoarsely, distant voices are shouting commands in a strange language, but I understand them. They demand we stand in a line, we need to go somewhere… but where, why? I see my son being taken out of the crowd. I can’t hear what the guard is saying, but somehow I come to realize they are taking us away. Lord, where are we? Fear threatens to suffocate me and breaks out as a silent groan.

I scream but I do not hear a sound, only the barking and the guttural commands of the strangers hitting us, pushing people into a formless speechless mass. Oh Lord, where have they taken my son? He will never survive there, in the snow, in the woods, in his lacquered leather shoes put on bare feet and his light leather jacket… How do I know he is being taken out to the forest? I, too, will be taken there, but I’m strong. I will survive, but he… he is but a boy! How can they do this to him?

«What are you doing?» I shout, choking with horror. The cry rips my mouth but there’s still no sound going out, they don’t hear me and take him farther and farther away.

«We are prisoners,» someone says nearby. «Leave your illusions behind…»

«No, no, let me give him socks at least!»

Somebody grabs me, and I fight to escape, but I can’t see who is holding me. Suddenly, there is nobody around me, and I blindly wander, bumping into mystic transparent walls. Tim is there, behind the wall, obedient and silent. I will not give up on him! I throw myself against the slippery wall that seems to be made of ice. I push further, cling to it as close as I can and see it melting from the heat of my body. Just a little bit more before he is gone forever… Hey! Somebody help me! Give him the socks!

«Anya, what are you saying?» My husband gently touches my shoulder. «What are you talking about? What socks? Give them to who?»

Shuddering I open my eyes and realize it was just a dream. The boundary between the dream and reality is so elusive. These weird people, capturing us… was I a prisoner?

Do I need to break free from the illusion I’m all-important in my son’s life? Back there, in my dream, I couldn’t. And here, in real life, I can’t either. Just because…

We even scream together: my unborn son and I. I can hear it so clearly, his cry inside of me. The baby’s screaming because of pain and fear, and I’m screaming because he is in pain and scared. When the fear and the pain get doubled and tripled, and I come to understand that I can’t handle this horror any longer, the child takes off like a swimmer off his starting block (that’s how I imagined it, I swear), he pushes and… arrives in this world. He is off to start. One minute, two minutes, three minutes of a new life, and they get to outweigh the hellish eternity of labor. They race on, so light and weightless; my body still remembers their price but the pain is already receding. Thank God it’s over!

«Look, mommy. It’s a boy!»

The small purple something, looking rather like a piece of cloth hanging on the midwife’s arm and whimpering so feebly – is this my baby? How can it be him if I did hear his distinctive loud voice inside of me? Is this truly made up of my body tissue, my blood, my veins, and my life? He is now my universe, my life.

My thoughts are confused, piled up on each other, while I am staying in bed for the due two hours after labor and I don’t realize it yet that these hours will be the most carefree ones for the rest of my life. The medics are busy taking my blood pressure, fussing around, asking me for my husband’s phone number, while my little boy and I are lying there as though in Nirvana already parted by nature, but not yet separated by people.

When I gave birth to my elder child, my daughter Masha, there had been no ultrasound to predict the sex of an unborn child. We could only guess. One thing that we knew for sure was that if it was a girl then we would name her after my dead mother. We had no idea how to name a boy. We discussed many names, but I didn’t like any of them.

So, when Masha was born, I was not surprised at all as if I had been sure our family name would come back to us again. When I realized that I was pregnant for the second time, once again I had no doubts, I knew that this time it was going to be a son. My intuition did not fail me. Using the ultrasound, which was in general use by then, the doctor announced that it was going to be a boy, indeed.

I didn’t realize it then that I would not see my son for another 24 hours. The next time I saw him he was wrapped up in a rough deep-gray starched swaddle supplied by the hospital. He was asleep and his eyes were shut. He was breathing so lightly that you could hardly hear him. Tiny, less than three kilograms, he showed no desire to eat.

Of course, he didn’t understand that his mother desperately needed his help to feed him! He tended to shirk responsibility from the very first day of his life, you see. In order to save me from mastitis the doctor brought me two abandoned babies. They were much bigger than my little one, and so for a week I fed all the three of them.

«Should I keep them all…?» I suddenly thought one day.

No, it was not me, it was my husband who mentioned it as a joke. «Come on,» he said. «Let’s keep them all».

I shook my head in disbelief, «They will never let us. There is a queue to adopt such sweet babies.»

So I didn’t dare.

«Forgive me,» I was thinking, looking at the nurse wrapping my tiny baby in the cute nappies brought from home, looking at my husband who felt guilty that at the last minute he had left my shoes behind… It seemed to me I saw myself from an outsider’s perspective, too, wearing giant leather slippers, getting into a taxi with my son in my arms, and asking myself who would be feeding the other two babies. Was that all there was to it?

«What’s going on?» my husband asked in a worried voice. «You are crying. Are you in pain?»

I silently replied, «Yes, I am in pain. I think my soul is in pain.»

My soul is like a withered wound all over. If I scratch it lightly, pain comes up to the surface, just like litter in a puddle in spring. It will torment me for a long time, but gradually the pain will grow dull and leave my consciousness, like a scorching sun going down beyond the horizon, so that the earth becomes immersed in the cool of the night.

I plunge myself into everyday household chores, which brings me back to reality and does not allow me any self-pity or guilt for anything when I finally accept my weaknesses and inability to make a complicated decision that will heal my soul. Many years later I will tell my story to a priest. He will be wise, he’ll explain to me in simple terms why things happened as they did, that there was no other way out of that peculiar situation because I was destined to go through another ordeal.

The first two days flash by us like pages of a tear-off calendar. We seem to be in the middle of a euphoric maelstrom, and we have no rhythm yet to our daily routine. We don’t fully understand what is going on around us and our routine chores have not yet become dull and monotonous, as we are still celebrating our new arrival. All of us: my husband, my six-year-old daughter, and my sister who happens to have arrived in our town on a business trip, happily ignore the daily routine and just keep staring with delight at the tiny wrinkled face of the boy sleeping peacefully in his cot.

We put aside all the things we are to do, we cannot have enough of this little miracle. Nine months ago, it was an ugly tadpole with a tail, and next… consult a textbook on biology. Everybody knows how it works. Now he is a fully formed child, a Tom Thumb, contemplating our emotional gestures with a serious look on his face, almost like an alien that has landed in our house graciously accepting the enthusiasm of these odd earthlings, «Come on, I have arrived here to stay for a long time, not just to visit; you’ll have plenty of time to get used to me!»