Read A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story for Free Online Page B

about him, presses me on our relationship. Out of curiosity? Dislike? Why can’t I in return ask him why he hates my old boyfriend?
    The doctor suggests that perhaps Temple should be in a foster home. My stunned face betrays me and he drops the subject as fast as he’s brought it up. Next, he instructs me to tell my husband to stop using the word “schizophrenic.” I don’t dare say that he’s the one who used it first. Another thought. Have he and Dick been talking together alone? About what?
    Suddenly, curiously, I hear the doctor exclaim that he wished he hadn’t used the word “schizophrenic.” It’s our first spark of friendship.
    I go home. I continue to drive Temple to Mrs. Reynolds three times a week. I hide my feelings, to protect Temple, to keep us both safe. Or is it to keep me frozen so I won’t feel the despair that descends after each of Dick’s tirades?
    “She’s insane.” He now has psychiatric proof. “You won’t admit it; that’s why you won’t institutionalize her!”
    How do I know he isn’t right?

    One night comes the big weep: such hard sobbing, I think I’m going to strangle on my own tears. Great salt gobbets of grief are stuck in my throat. The next morning I wake exhausted and promise myself that never again as long as I live will I cry that hard. Then comes an odd sense of relief. I’ve peered into the black hole, and I’m still alive. I’ve named my despair and this sunny morning I’m living with it and it’s almost a friend. I make my first big resolve: whatever the stakes, whatever the odds, I will not let Dick put Temple in an institution. I’ll take it one day at a time, as the alcoholics do.
    I make a second resolve: I will keep my head up out of the dark; I’ll allow myself to breathe. Have I been holding my breath all this time? Yes, and it’s been keeping me from thinking. I’ll breathe; I’ll think.
    First thought: between the nanny and Mrs. Reynolds, Temple has improved markedly. I can see that for myself, so forget Dick’s argument that I’m in denial.
    Second thought: the reason I can never win an argument with Dick is because he’s too impatient to hear me out and get my point. Instead, he latches onto the first peripheral that will justify what he wants to justify and shouts me down. So, forget trying to show him how Temple—a living, growing child—is improving. He’s made up his mind she’s a capital investment: she should be institutionalized because that’s what the medical authorities are prescribing these days, and he’s put a lot of money into their advice. Unfortunately, that’s a point in his favor. We live in a conservative world where those deemed “unfit” are routinely separated out and institutionalized.
    “Unfit for what?” I ask, unwilling to give in.
    For a moment Dick looks baffled, then bullies his way back to where he started. “It’s not the way it’s supposed to go!”
    The specter of Bruno Bettelheim rears its head. His book, The Empty Fortess , is on the bestseller list and everybody thinks he’s a genius. Bettelheim believes that autistic children behave like concentration camp inmates, that they suffer from the same helplessness as prisoners who’ve given up hope, that they are wasting away like prisoners who refuse to eat, that they avert their gaze, as did prisoners who avoided eye contact with the guards. Bettelheim believes autistic children, like concentration camp inmates, are trying to blot out an immediate, threatening reality—the SS in the camps, their mothers in the home. *
    Does the Viennese doctor believe in Bettelheim? Why not? Both men are European; both look to be Freudian. Is it possible that the doctor feels guilty to have escaped the Nazis, while Bettelheim was forced to suffer Dachau? Not impossible. Nevertheless, even if that’s so and I’m really the horrible creature Bettelheim’s diagnosis says I am, then why try to please one of his disciples?
    Holding on tight to these first shaky