It had to be bigger than Wichita. Wichita, they could quantify. Last summer. Forty-six days of siege. Two thousand six hundred arrests. Thirty thousand protesters in all. Flattening heat, clothes soaked and throats dry. They sang and clapped and refused to budge. Their action was slowness and stillness. They locked arms in front of the entrances to the clinics, laid prostrate before the doors. They propped themselves up on their elbows, joints and pelvic bones grinding into the scorching pavement. They lay beneath the wheels of cars, filling their lungs with miasma, coughing out prayers for the dying. They felt the hooves of police horses in their ribs and went limp in the arms of arresting officers. One hundred at a time, they crawled toward the police, cornering the cops against fences and clinic walls, a military-precision pincer move. In came the federal marshals, and still they crawled and clapped and sat. “God’s law before man’s law,” they chanted, cross-legged on the concrete. They knit baby caps and booties where they sat, crocheted colorful blankets. A college-aged protester with tangled mermaid hair was knitting a white woolen baby sweater, tiny fabric roses embroidered along the collar. She was swept off to jail, flat on her back, hair swimming behind her, dozens hauled off along with her, only for busloads of new protesters to take their place. Sometimes a protester would take her own place: arrested and jailed and released and then arrested and jailed again, all in the same day.
The protesters aspired to be Paul fallen from his saddle, Peter crucified under his own terms. “A woman’s body, a woman’s choice”—that was the other side’s refrain. But they could make choices with their bodies, too. Their bodies were not their own. They could give up their bodies on behalf of others. And they won, for a time. For seven days last summer, then ten days, then a month, in July, straight into August, they said that there were no abortions in Wichita. Jane didn’t know how they knew for sure.
There was nothing unattainable about the victory in Wichita. These were ordinary people. They did things anyone could do, things a baby could do. Sitting in place, crawling, singing, clapping, unwilling to budge, refusing to cooperate—these were a baby’s pastimes. They made choices fit for babies. Along with the bloody placards and bundles of baby blankets and newborn-sized clothes, they also brought folding patio chairs and Styrofoam coolers. One man, stout in his navy polo shirt, sat cross-legged in a patch of grass, red rubbery carnage propped against his knees, eating a sandwich. Working men and women, moms and dads, putting in an honest day’s work.
“Thirty million,” the reverend was saying in the video. The Respect Life members were watching a television set on elevated wheels that Father Steve had pushed into the classroom. The reverend had beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers; he was smooth and bland as batter. “Can you imagine?” the reverend asked. “Thirty million innocents. Once you think about it, once you truly wrap your head around it, you start to see them everywhere. That extra, empty desk in your son’s classroom—”
Their eyes moved to various empty desks in the classroom, then back to the video.
“Whom did God intend to be sitting at that desk? Learning the alphabet, his multiplication tables? Would he have grown up to be your own son’s best friend? Grown up to be the doctor who delivered your babies? Grown up to be president?”
The reverend was walking through a lakeside scene, green and rolling, denuded of people. Could have been Lake Chautauqua.
“You see them everywhere, even though you can’t see them. Is that mother, beside you at church, missing a baby? Is that little girl, running on the playground, wondering where her brother went? We can’t answer all these questions. But God can. God has the answers. God knows us before we are born. God is with us even then. God is with the babies when they are murdered in the womb. We cannot know why God allows the sin of abortion. Why God allows a baby to be slaughtered inside her—”
Father Steve turned off the video. “The language gets a little heated at times,” he said, flipping the lights on. “The reverend comes from a different rhetorical tradition than we do. But we can find inspiration in his passion, even as we forge our own path.”
Drizzle chattered on the classroom windows. It was the end of March, sky slushy gray with lake effects, last crumbling patches of snow melting into newborn grass. They were aiming for Good Friday or Easter. “As it happens,” Father Steve said, “a baby conceived during Wichita’s Summer of Mercy will be born during Buffalo’s Spring of Life.”
“The message is very powerful,” said Betty among nodding heads. “It’s a bit much, but—yes.”
“Where are the Catholics in this?” Jane asked. “Is there a Catholic video?”
“We are the Catholics,” Father Steve replied. “This is a multidenominational effort.”
“You know,” Betty said, “just the other day, this Presbyterian gal said to me, ‘Oh, but you’re not Christian—you’re Catholic’—”
“Will this nonsense ever stop?!” Phil exclaimed.
“—so, I mean, there are many boundaries to be broken here,” Betty finished.
“Our work will not be without its difficulties,” Father Steve said. “At times it will be painful. It’s a battle, and it won’t begin or end with us. But a soldier in battle knows to find interludes of respite and sustenance. We will remember to rest, to eat, and to drink. Our labors should not preclude folding chairs, coolers full of drinks. For the Lord is my shepherd—”
“I shall not want,” the group replied. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside quiet waters.”
“We know how to tailgate, after all—we are from Buffalo,” said Father Steve, who was from Schenectady.
In Wichita, the cops had to drag and carry so many protesters that the police department purchased wide leather lifting belts, like the ones Pat and Colin and Brad Bender used to wear for weight training during football season.
“To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” Father Steve said to murmuring assent.
“Will we—will people who participate in the Spring of Life risk getting arrested?” Mr. Glover asked.
“We may be arrested,” Father Steve replied. “It’s nothing to fear. I can’t imagine a jail in the suburbs looking like Attica. Arrests are one thing, but in terms of convictions, if we are speaking of an actual prison sentence, it’s very unlikely.”
“How can you be sure?” Mr. Glover asked.
“The necessity defense,” Summer and Charity said in unison.
“The activists in Wichita shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Summer explained, “because of the necessity defense. The courts recognize that sometimes breaking the law can be justified for a greater good.”
“It’s straight out of Thomas Aquinas,” Mr. Glover said.
“Any fair-minded judge will understand that we have to do this,” Charity said.
The ultrasound images that Mr. Glover procured from his doctor friend at Children’s Hospital made Jane think of seafood. A shrimp submerged in brine. A jaunty seahorse. Sean was the only one of her babies who Jane saw on ultrasound. They rubbed a gel on her belly that conducted sound waves through a plastic wand as big as a mixing spoon, and a computer assembled the pictures that bounced back, much like a bat assembles a mental floor plan of his environment through echolocation. Or a dolphin. Sean, her little dolphin! Bouncing his clicks and squeaks around the pool until they etched his self-portrait. The wand was smooth and beige as the reverend. The technician pushed and dug in and worked it over Jane’s belly, like she was moving cold butter through batter with her dumb wooden spoon, like Jane was in the way, or like Jane wasn’t there at all. Trying to reach the baby, to see the baby’s clicks and squeaks. The messages Sean wanted everyone to hear.
Sean. That was Sean. Never anything but Sean. She could have ended Sean, by law.
The gleaming instruments could have ended Sean. She closed her eyes against the glare. She shuddered as the nurse brushed past.
“We obey God’s law before we obey man’s law,” Charity said. “It’s the first commandment.”
“You might argue it’s also in Romans, which is incidentally the most law-abiding of the Gospels,” Father Steve said. “Romans says, ‘Love doeth no harm to a neighbor, therefore Love doth fulfill the Law.’”
“I understand that the doctor in Wichita was doing abortions very late, when the baby is, well, really a baby,” Betty Andrower said.
“It’s always a baby!” Summer and Charity said.
“Okay, but there’s a continuum—” Betty said. She was fussing with the gold cross around her neck, drumming her plum-colored nails against the brief line of décolletage that disappeared into the V-neck of her sweater.
“You sound like Tiller the killer,” Phil said, not a condemnation so much as a correction, like of course Betty didn’t mean what she had said. Tiller was the worst one, his name a curse.
“Well, yes, I know, it’s always a—you know what I mean,” Betty said. “My question is—do we know if any of the clinics in Buffalo—just to play devil’s advocate—”
“And why would we advocate the devil?” Phil asked.
“—are there any, shall we say, special cir-cum-stances,” Betty enunciated, an actorly warble entering her voice to protest all the interruptions, “under which they perform—”
“What type of special circumstance could possibly justify murder?” Phil asked. “This is science. This is a genetically unique, growing, living being. That living being has never existed before and will never exist again. What justification can there be? Why would we look for one?”
“Well, I don’t like even to say the word, but”—Betty’s voice dropped to a scandalized whisper—“rape.” She tugged at her cross.
“There’s no death penalty for rape,” Summer and Charity said in unison.
“Okay, but—it’s hard,” Betty said. “To put someone through all that.” Phil opened his mouth to reply—and Jane knew what he would say: If it’s so hard on the mother, then how hard is it for the baby?—but he stopped himself.
Jane didn’t think Betty’s conundrum was hard.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Betty said, her head stooped prayerfully. “It’s a terrible thing. No words. I mean, that’s why I’m here. Because I think it’s all just terrible.”
Jane had one that was hard. “What about a case where the mother’s life is in danger?” she asked. “Women used to die in childbirth all the time.”
“Used to,” Mr. Glover said.
“It’s rare that a baby would put his own mother’s life in danger,” Father Steve said.
“It’s a myth created by the pro-abortion forces,” Mr. Glover said.
“But even if it’s rare,” Jane said, “even if it only happens to one woman—”
“That woman is a child of God and a whole world unto herself, and that is a tragedy. You are right, Jane,” Father Steve said, nodding.
“Pardon?” Mr. Glover asked.
“Jane,” Father Steve said, “you have heard of the term fetomaternal chimerism.”
It was neither a question nor a statement, and the ambiguity was intended to flatter the listener. “Chimera in the Greek myths is a fire-breathing monster,” she said. “Part lion, part goat, part dragon. Always a woman.”
Surprise or pique crossed Father Steve’s face, but then he was beaming indulgence at her again. “I used to read a lot of fables and myths to the kids,” Jane said. “Sorry,” she added.
“Chimera is also an illusion,” he said, nodding. “A mirage born out of magical thinking. Like in your myths, Jane. The irony, in this case, is that it’s in fact entirely appropriate to think in terms of magic and miracles when it comes to the bond between a mother and her unborn child. Science”—he popped a tiny exclamation point on the word, like in the goofy English pop song the boys used to like so much—“has discovered that a baby’s cells can remain inside his or her mother’s body for years, even decades after he or she is born. They might stay there forever. And those young, new cells can help repair the mother’s body when she is sick or worn down.”
Mr. Glover, reassured, patted the top of his little desk. “It’s good when science and faith are shown to be harmonious,” he said. “Though it’s no surprise to me.”
“But we must pause to think of the mother whose child has died inside her,” Father Steve said. “That poor woman. What toll does it take, to carry around that child’s spirit, in the form of her cells?”
Charity hugged herself. “I can’t imagine,” she said. “A ghost, clinging to your insides.”
“That’s why it drives me crazy when people say, ‘It’s just a clump of cells,’” Summer said.
“I know it’s not,” Jane said. “Four times over, I know it.”
“Do you mean three?” Summer asked.
“I guess it’s clearest and best for us if we think in terms of no exceptions,” Betty said.
“Romans again, my friends,” Father Steve said. “‘And thinkest thou thus, o man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?’”
“No exceptions,” Jane said.
We believe in what we can’t see, she thought, as she heard a sound coming closer, a rhythmic slapping, a rapid pounding, the screams of a child in peril.
A circle of adults crammed under children’s desks, exchanging ideas in shared faith, all of Scripture in their hands—for an hour or so, Jane had mistaken her world for being at least as big as a kindergarten classroom. But really it was the size of one spinning, wailing, inconceivable little girl.
It’s not that she hadn’t talked to Pat about it. She showed him the brochures. She talked about flights, training sessions, paperwork. He indulged her with the same bright solicitous voice he used to put on when Sean became convinced that Midnight could be taught sign language. Soon, though, he became aggravated.
“I don’t want to get all worked up about something that is not going to happen,” Pat said. “Not in a million years.”
He didn’t forbid her from doing it. All he said was that she wouldn’t do it.
You would never.
The bet she made was that he would want to save face. That’s why she made sure, the first night back, that his mother was there, his sister was there. He could not admit to them, or to his coworkers and friends, his daughter and sons, that his wife had blown up his life without his consent. Blown it up again, in fact, and worse this time. Gone nuts, run away, brought home another man’s child. Commanded him to call her his. And he didn’t admit it. He didn’t say much at all. He just started leaving for work earlier and earlier each day, and coming home later and later.
Jane and Mirela lived on an eroding isthmus, then an archipelago. Sinking dots they tried to string together driving along in the dragon wagon. Possible playdates ebbed away, one by one, after Mirela peed all over Bitsy Spizzoto’s bedspread, after Henry Bingham went face-first into a glass table—three stitches to the chin, talk from Henry’s blustery lawyer father of pressing charges. Sean’s basketball games sank away after Mirela flung herself backward off a bleacher into two rows of sitting fans, the brunt of the impact again falling on the Figueroa family. Mirela emerged bruised along one arm and leg, laugh-screaming, her hair sticky with crying little Susie Figueroa’s grape soda.
They could do Wegmans grocery store, but only just after the store opened in the morning, when it was still almost empty of shoppers. They could do Sunday mass for about ten minutes, fifteen, before the stares got too much. Worse than the glowering stares were the friendly, sympathetic ones, for conveying that Jane and Mirela were there to put on a show for an audience that would laugh and smile and clap along. Mirela was the instrument by which the parishioners could express their virtue and tolerance.
They could do playgrounds at dusk, after most other children had gone home for supper and bathtime. If other children were there, and especially if those children were talking to one another, Mirela would put her face in theirs and yell until they stopped. If any other children happened to be holding a stone or a stuffed bear or a Ziploc bag of animal crackers, Mirela would slap the object to the ground. If a child hung from the monkey bars, Mirela would try to pull her down; if a child was sitting at the top of the slide, Mirela would try to push her not down the slide but off the side of it, in a dead drop.
It wasn’t so much that Mirela wanted things. It was that she wanted others not to have them. Most of all, she didn’t want Jane to have her. She ran through any open door, climbed into any unlocked car. Trying to go off with strangers not because they were so enticing, but because they were not Jane.
Jane’s own mother could barely look at her anymore. Jane suspected that her mother felt a grim triumph in what she perceived to be the catastrophe of Mirela—how it proved, once and for all, that Jane was a performer of catastrophe, setting off explosions for attention and expecting others to clean up the wreckage. But her mother needed to relish that triumph privately, away from the gaze of her daughter, and it was inconvenient for her mother’s case that Jane was peering out from inside the wreckage. Their telephone conversations now were all cold logistics: her mother wanted to take the older kids to the mall, or out for pizza.
“Just trying my best to give them a bit of their childhood back,” she said.
Mirela could do almost anything once. Anything that was strange, anything for the first time. She did best when there was no history, no memory, when the question of what is she had not been answered, not even posed yet. She excelled at first impressions. She would home in, her eyes all over yours, her hands on you, your fingers intertwined, her spaghetti arms wrapped around your waist, such a happy, friendly girl—what would you do, push her away? Would you refuse to answer her questions—and you couldn’t be sure what the questions were, the consonants and vowels familiar but strung together out of order, curving upward questioningly at the end? Would you refuse to reciprocate her smiles, her unprompted and delighted laughter? A typical girl her age—and, sorry, how old is she again?—was so shy, thumb in mouth, turning away, one shoulder rising up to shadow her face, hands clutching at her mother’s legs. This one wasn’t clingy, no sirree, no stranger danger here. What a charmer. Gotta keep your eye on that one, Mom.
They did the garden center once, when the ground was still frozen. “She’d be at home most anywhere,” the owner said, tousling Mirela’s hair as Mirela headbutted her midsection repeatedly, with mounting force. The woman had a silky worn face, grays at her temples. Surely she had raised children; by now her children had children. She should know better. She should know that shyness in small children was a sign of security. Shyness was discernment: of who was safe and who was unverified. She should know, as a mother, not to be flattered by Mirela’s attentions.
Stop polishing the apple was what Jane’s mother always said about flattery. Jane could never take a compliment with grace. Maybe that was the problem—she couldn’t take a compliment paid to Mirela, either.
“So much spirit!” the woman at the garden center said. Jane made herself grin and nod. The woman meant well—most of them did. Jane heard this a lot, about Mirela’s spirit. A spirit was a ghost; Jane heard a deadness in this word. She used to see a glint in Mirela’s eyes; now she suspected she had misapprehended it. It wasn’t Mirela’s own light. It was just a reflection of light, bouncing off a cold, hard surface.
“Is she yours?” the kindly gray woman asked.
Something else Jane heard a lot. The color of Mirela’s skin, her syllables, how she walked and danced on invisible stilts—it all placed her elsewhere. Outside of a family that Jane would belong to. Mirela was here yet somehow not. Whose do you think she is?
“She’s adopted,” Jane said.
“How lucky she is to have you,” the woman said. Always that. How fortunate. They wanted to weigh in on Jane’s goodness. How God has blessed you both. You are doing the Lord’s work. What a sacrifice.
The worst was God bless you for rescuing her, like she was a dog at the pound. Or saving her, like she was money, or leftovers; like she was a recyclable that got mixed up with the regular trash. Jane imagined herself responding, No, she saved herself, by surviving long enough for me to find her. But that would trigger more praise and more questions.
Where is she from?
What is she?
Mostly, Jane tried to foreclose further discussion with what she intended as an enigmatic smile, but what resulted, she suspected, was a tight little smirk. If Jane was smug in her goodness, that meant she wasn’t good.
The language of the dog pound came at times to Jane’s mind unbidden, too. I rescued her. She knew she shouldn’t judge others for saying it. She should first and only judge herself, and God would judge her last.
Once in a while, she prayed penance for her thoughts. There were so many of them. One was I never got to go to college, but this poor Romanian orphan will!
Maybe Mirela was insane like a saint. She ate next to nothing. She had a startling capacity for pain. She spoke and behaved in ways that were impossible to explain. She arrived in a vision. She was impervious to reason. Like Catherine of Siena, she eschewed friendship. Like Catherine, she would take her family’s belongings without asking—she was a prodigious stealer and hoarder of the food she didn’t eat, squirreling it in closets, drawers, dollhouses, pants pockets, air vents.
The thief is not looking for the object that he takes. He is looking for a person. He is looking for his own mother, only he does not know this. That was Winnicott.
They could have a babysitter once or twice. Unsuspecting teens, at first all from Bethune, but then Jane had to cast a wider net. An hour or two, sometimes only long enough for Jane to donkey up Muegel Road and back for groceries, or attempt a nap upstairs, although she would just lie there awake, spent and manic, listening out for trouble. The first time, the sitter would leave the house flustered but intact. Perhaps she went home feeling a small sense of accomplishment. The assumption was that the next time would be better, calmer, because by then Mirela and the sitter would have learned each other. This was the narrative Jane presented, almost certain that it was false. If Mirela learned you, she could beat you. After the second job, the sitters didn’t come back. A bruised lip, a torn shirt. A sobbing heap on the kitchen floor when Jane came home, the sliding glass door to the back patio cracked diagonally across and Mirela spinning in the yard, her hands smeared with blood or raspberries. Angry calls from the sitters’ mothers. Strange looks at Wegmans. Word got around.
A rapid pounding. The screams of a child in peril. Holly Haverford was standing in the door to the classroom. Holly, the babysitter of the day, was a senior at Knox and a friend of a girl whose brother used to be on a basketball team with Sean.
“No exceptions,” Jane was saying as she looked up to see Holly. Mirela was grabbing at Holly’s hand. An older, aghast version of Holly stood just behind them.
“You don’t have to pay me, and don’t call me again,” Holly said, yanking her hand away from Mirela and turning to go. The older Holly, shaking her head in pity and horror, followed Holly out.
“We are glad to have you join us, Mirela,” Father Steve said as Mirela ran to the center of the room and overturned a desk piled with flyers and laughed at him. He was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. As Jane started to wedge herself out from under her desk to go to Mirela, the words Summer Huebler said scattered, locking into partial formation as Jane’s attention cohered on them after the sounds had left the air.
“What did you just say?” Jane asked, turning in her seat to face Summer.
She wasn’t sure.
“What did you just say,” Jane repeated, her hands gripping the desk.
She was seventy percent sure. Eighty percent.
“Summer?” Jane asked, because now she was one hundred percent sure, because Charity was talking at a fast clip about transportation arrangements for the protests and because Summer was sitting silently, hands folded, wearing the enigmatic smile that Jane aspired to in moments of foreclosed discussion.
“Did you just say that you can think of one exception?” Jane asked, and then Mirela was crawling into her lap and pushing away from her at the same time, pulling at Jane’s hair, her screams inside her and outside her and surrounding her.
Jane tried to think of Mirela as she would a newborn. What helped Jane through the early, sleepless days and nights with her infants was the thought that they were working past exhaustion and despair just to stay alive outside of her, to adapt to the cold, blinding world they’d been exiled to. This was their kenosis. Jane remembered taking Lauren out into the demented whiteness of the post-blizzard landscape, swaddled in too many blankets, just her little snout visible, the steam of her warm breath meeting the freezing air. She looked like a breathing mummy, neither alive nor dead. For a couple of wrenching days when she was about ten weeks old, Lauren shrieked with gas, her cries piercing and rhythmic as contractions, and then she whimpered for a while as she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to be struck awake with new pain. Photographs of Lauren in her first few months—you could see it with PJ and Sean, too—depicted passages of blissful sleep but also something closer to sweaty collapse, her eyes screwed up against the marauding light. Getting air into her lungs, finding the milk in her mother’s breast, gaining control over the reflexing limbs that kept jerking her awake—it required a strenuous trial and error.
Lauren’s systems weren’t prepared for this. Nearly forty weeks’ gestation, yet she felt she had come too soon. Her stated position was that she was not supposed to be here.
Was Mirela supposed to be here? In this body, in this place? She had the height and the canter of a child still new to walking, but her limbs were thin, older, worn out, as if they’d already been stretched and whittled by this task they had not yet completely learned, and her face was drawn, literally—there were lines etched from either side of her nose to the corners of her mouth, years too deep. If they arrived at Saint Mary’s playground before other kids had cleared out, Jane could watch other parents watching Mirela, trying to figure out her age, her origin. Just what is she.
The foundation of the health of the human being is laid by you in the baby’s first weeks and months. . . . You are founding the health of a person who will be a member of our society. This is worth doing. That was Winnicott.
But Jane hadn’t done the thing worth doing. Not with Mirela. She wasn’t present at the laying of the foundation. She didn’t know who Mirela was.
There was the pediatrician who recommended a sedative, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, it caused her to sleepwalk. Mirela couldn’t walk up or down stairs, but she could sleepwalk them. Late one night, before they had locks on all the doors, Jane found Mirela in the kitchen, kneeling by the light of the open refrigerator. She had taken out all the produce and arranged it in a grid on the tiles, and fortified it with a snaking perimeter of jars: jams, ketchup, relishes, Jif peanut butter. She stacked the emptied areas of the refrigerator with cans of cat food. The child worked grimly, silently, mapping her inventory for some harrowing siege that lay ahead.
There was the pediatrician who recommended an anti-anxiety medication, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, the tensions it uncoiled produced a new and frightening energy that contracted her muscles with supernatural force as she raised her tricycle over her head and bashed it over and over into the ribs and flanks of the poor dragon wagon. She went about her violence mute and dispassionate, a tiny lumberjack splitting logs on an ordinary morning.
There was the pediatrician who recommended a cognitive stimulant, which calmed Mirela down for a while until it didn’t, and when it stopped working, her sleep grew threadbare and tenuous. That was the worst. Because she did sleep. “She’s a good sleeper,” Jane told everyone. Sometimes, not always, Mirela didn’t want to wear clothes (the rubbing of the cloth against her skin taunted her, smothered her), and sometimes, not always, she didn’t want to use the potty (though the messes seemed at times less like accidents than decisions, statements). But at night, she wanted to sleep, invariably, and there was a miracle in this. Jane remembered to pray thanks to God for it. The endless chaos, the screaming, the smashing, and then silence. Like flinging a sheet over a noisy bird’s cage. Mirela fought in her sleep, kicked and punched against sleep like someone was holding her down. But she slept.
There was the pediatrician who spoke of “cut points” for Mirela. Emotions, behaviors, cognitions that were placed out of her reach after twelve months at the institution. After eighteen months. After twenty-four months. There had been a year, almost to the week, between Barbara Walters and bringing Mirela home. A year of cut points. Neural pathways choked off and wasted away. Her brain pruning itself, weeding the dead patches, sealing off the dead ends. Maybe these deaths were reversible, or maybe Mirela was out of time, or close to it.
“The child who is loved learns to be lovable,” this pediatrician said. “The child who is not loved learns the opposite. Being lovable is not necessarily in itself a sign of character. It’s a sign of how you were raised.”
There was the specialist in “theraplay,” Miss Amber, who wore a tiered flowing skirt and Birkenstocks. She had a degree from Buff State and looked like an editorial cartoon of a disarmament activist.
“All the gals at Buff State have flowers in their hair and hair under their arms,” Jane’s mother said. She must have overheard this somewhere, and every time she said it, it was with a smug surprise, like she had just thought it up on the spot.
In the patchouli-and-jasmine-scented parlor room of Miss Amber’s Queen Anne house on Elmwood Avenue, Mirela sat cross-legged on a mat amid a pile of toys: play-kitchen utensils, dolls, trucks, blocks.
“Does is?” Mirela asked, slapping at a truck. She didn’t yet pick things up: she slapped at them, scrabbled and pawed at them, before trying to grab hold. In her unrehearsed and tactile way, she was sizing them up. “Does is?”
“That means What is this?” said Jane, sitting off to one side of the mat.
Miss Amber, in the lotus position, held up a hand. “Here, words can mean whatever Mirela wants them to mean,” she said.
Mirela picked up the truck and smiled expectantly at Miss Amber.
“Now you’ve decided to pick that up,” Miss Amber said. “What is that?”
“Does is?” Mirela asked.
“It’s a truck, Mirela,” Jane said, to a disapproving look from Miss Amber.
“What do you think it is, Mirela?” Miss Amber asked. “It can be anything that Mirela wants it to be.”
“Tuck,” Mirela said, smiling harder. She scrabbled at a baby doll. “Doe-ie,” she said.
“A doll,” Miss Amber said. “You wanted a doll, and now you found a doll.”
Forty-five minutes and $150 later, Jane said to Miss Amber, “I’m sorry, but with all due respect, what is this meant to accomplish?”
“We’re putting the child in the driver’s seat,” Miss Amber said, flipping her wavy auburn hair over both shoulders. “The child is empowered to make her own decisions. We are simply there to facilitate those decision-making processes. The goal is for the child to develop self-efficacy at the somatic level.”
“I’m not sure that Mirela wants to be empowered to make decisions,” Jane said. “I think Mirela just wants control.”
“What is the difference?” Miss Amber asked. Mirela smiled over Miss Amber’s shoulder.
“I mean that she wants control, but—control of what?” Jane shook her head, frustrated that she couldn’t articulate herself. If she was presented with a pad of oversized white construction paper, Mirela would grab a crayon and scrawl upon every single page. Scribble-scribble-scribble rip scribble-scribble-scribble rip, through ten pages, twenty pages. She did this with seething focus, aimed not so much at claiming what was hers but rather at ensuring no one else could claim it. It was spite, Jane thought—a chip on Mirela’s skinny shoulder. Yet Lauren used to do similar things as a toddler, and Jane had interpreted those acts as the opposite of destructive: a proof of self-assurance, manual dexterity, an announcement of the self.
“Once she had control, what would she do with it?” Jane asked. “She’s practically still a toddler.”
“Well, so many of these words are labels,” Miss Amber was saying. “Toddler, controlling—when we over-rely on labels, rather than experiencing and observing a uniquely beautiful set of gifts and challenges, we’re communicating to the child, and to ourselves, that there is something wrong with the child.”
“There is something wrong,” Jane said.
“Wrong is a word,” Miss Amber said.
“. . . Yes,” Jane said.
“Think of a cup.” Miss Amber held up her mug of tea. “What if instead of saying, ‘This is a cup,’ we said, ‘This holds liquid’? Try the same substitution with Mirela. What if instead of asking, ‘What is this child?’ we ask instead, ‘What does this child do? What does this child hold inside her?’”
“Does is?” Mirela asked, reaching for the mug.
“We can absolutely ask those questions,” Jane said, “while also trying to find a diagnosis.”
“Well, if we must use labels, then choose different ones,” replied Miss Amber, holding the mug over her head. “What if we decided to label Mirela as an empowered child?”
“What do you think of that, Mirela?” Jane asked as she helped the girl with her coat. Mirela punched her in the stomach, and Jane did not react, except to ponder, for a split second, her lack of reaction. A breath-sucking impact to the gut was no longer, in the present scheme of things, a sufficiently novel impetus to merit recognition from Jane’s psychological or physiological pathways.
“Sometimes a mismatch of temperaments simply calls for a change in communication styles,” Miss Amber said, saluting Jane and Mirela with her mug of tea. “Until next week!”
The following week at Miss Amber’s, Mirela stood up, and Miss Amber said, “Now you’ve decided to stand up!” She sat down and Miss Amber said, “Now you’ve decided to sit down!” Mirela stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down, for the remainder of the allotted time, with Miss Amber narrating, their smiling faces locked in a feedback loop. Miss Amber wore a tiara of wildflowers.
“The same and the same and the same,” Mirela admonished Miss Amber at the beginning of their third session. Then she smashed a green dump truck into the rug over and over until it splintered and flew into pieces, shards of plastic whirligigging in the air. As Miss Amber tried to intervene, Mirela screamed, “I DE-SY-ID! I DE-SY-ID!” She was about to crash a Fisher-Price barn through an oriel window when Jane caught her from behind and pulled her close, wrapping both arms around her as they both sat down on the parquet. Jane waited for the girl to wear herself out against her grip.
“Oddly enough,” Jane gasped from the floor, pressing her chin against Mirela’s collarbone to keep the girl from smacking her head against Jane’s nose, “this eventually calms her down. Keeps her from hurting herself, too.” Mirela arched her back and tipped them both backward.
Mirela was the child who touched the top of the hot stove once, and then again, and then turned up the heat on all the burners and climbed into the oven, and there was no pain or shock that could override the necessity of chaotic control, of being in control and having wrested that control away from her captor, the exaltation of I DE-SY-ID!
“I don’t think you will find what you are looking for here,” Miss Amber said to the writhing pile on the floor.
A walking catatonia sometimes took possession of Mirela in the late afternoon. Her no-Mirela face, her eyes cloudy and unseeing. Usually Jane tried to break the no-Mirela spell, despite the respite it could provide for everyone around Mirela, and perhaps for Mirela herself. Jane spoke soft commands and entreaties, cupped Mirela’s chin lightly between her thumb and forefinger, tried to beam her eyes into Mirela’s eyes. If Jane aimed that beam correctly, it risked alighting the girl’s fury. Or Mirela’s eyes would dart and dance away from the beam, the effort agitating her, activating her motors of constant talk and constant movement. Still, any Mirela was better than no-Mirela. There were many Mirelas, but no-Mirela was the only version of her in whom Jane saw no hope. She was quiet without peace, cauls forming over her eyes.
Still, in the corner lot down the street from Miss Amber’s house, strapping the girl into her car seat, Jane was tempted to take icy refuge inside no-Mirela. She could consent to the thought. She is tired. Let her be. She’ll snap out of it. You don’t have to do everything all the time. Jane stepped back from Mirela, forgetting the door frame behind her, and as she stood up she knocked the top of her head against it. She felt the stunned freedom in the pain—not an ennobling ache you could pray thanks for, but real pain, the erasure of any intellectual or emotional or physical sensation but the blow itself and the response of her nerve fibers, the white flashes of light popping just above her field of vision that a saint would take for a sign, and then a notion Jane could somersault into: what if she hit her head against the door frame again and again, what if she did it enough times to knock herself unconscious, what if she split her head open against the door and her brain was impaled on her skull and she never woke up again and she just made it all stop, and she turned the thought inside out and thought what if she could hit Mirela, what if she allowed herself to do it once, just once, which would of course allow her to do it again and again and what if she never stopped until it all stopped, all of it, done, gone, over, and she understood why Pat had never hit her, not even once.
That night, after Mirela was in bed and the boys were watching TV in the basement, Pat still at work, Lauren at a friend’s house—Paula, probably—Jane was shelving books in the den when a giant set of cartoon teeth swiped past her vision, a glancing blow, and her whole body surged with chemical overwhelm. She held still on the floor as panic coursed over her.
The Book of Teeth. One of a stack of little-kid books Pat had brought down from the attic for Mirela. A sweet gesture, for him to remember the books, to cull thoughtfully from a larger pile and bring them downstairs. The Book of Teeth had been one of Lauren’s favorites when she was two, two and a half. One weekend afternoon, Pat had erupted over—the laundry? The bedsheets? Linens and detergent were somehow implicated. Jane locked herself and Lauren into Lauren’s room, Pat shouting and throwing things elsewhere in the house, Jane quietly weeping, Lauren oddly calm. She toddled up to Jane with a smile and handed her a book like a tissue. It was a compendium of snouts, fangs, tusks, chompers, with pull-out tabs that made the animals’ jaws work up and down. Lauren sat in Jane’s lap as they moved the tabs back and forth. The snap-snap of the shark’s teeth. The crunch-crunch of the bear’s jaw. Lauren turned around in Jane’s lap and hugged her, patting Jane’s shoulder.
“Book for Mommy make it better.”
There was much that Jane could forgive Pat, but she could not forgive him this.
Now The Book of Teeth between her fingers beat an electric current through her. On all fours on the carpet, Jane pressed her head against the book’s cover and waited until her heart slowed and her skin stopped prickling. When Pat’s anger was over, there was always the memory of it to confront. The memory could contaminate anything, at any time: The Book of Teeth, photographs, songs, the children’s toys. Her friendships, dead or saved. It grabbed hold of the things they and she loved best. It ripped up and desiccated those things, and turned them into sentimental lies.
A dinner party at the Samersons’, early summer. Pat tripped over a step to their back deck, and as he recovered himself he looked back at Jane behind him, his features spasming. She turned away as if she hadn’t seen—sympathy or humor made everything worse. If she identified herself as a witness to the crime the step had committed against Pat, then she was admitting her guilt—her complicity in the crime. She read the story in his head. She knew about the step and didn’t warn him. He wouldn’t say it out loud, but he thought it, and he knew it, and he would behave according to what he knew. What he knew she knew. She foresaw him tripping on the step. She’d built the step. She’d built and designed the whole deck for the Samersons and planned this party and finagled an invitation all to orchestrate this one humiliating stumble. Because that was the sort of person she was. Spiteful. Devious. And what kind of people were the Samersons, to cooperate in such a ruse?
“Your friends,” he said. Spat it out, disgusted. Friends was an accusation. He accused her of friends a lot, even after she’d mostly stopped trying to make them. Respect Life was a bunch of friends. The venom of it was cryptically sexual—she was spreading herself around. She’d been around the block and the kindergarten classroom and the Samersons’ deck.
Jane never had the Samersons over for dinner. She wrote them a thank-you note, brought them blueberry muffins she baked from scratch, but she didn’t properly reciprocate their invitation. When PJ and Sean went to play with the Samersons’ twin boys, Pat would say, just audibly, “Those goddamn people with the deck.”
The dinner at the Samersons’ happened back when Jane worried about appearances and niceties, about seeming rude or avoidant, about reciprocating dinners. She regarded this old self with benign condescension. It was a time before Mirela, when her husband didn’t yet have anything to be angry with her about. It was before Jane herself had experienced cut points as Mirela’s mother. One of her cut points came when she stopped hoping that people wouldn’t think they were strange, and instead she started hoping that people thought they were very strange indeed, strange enough that they should be left alone.
Jane put The Book of Teeth back on the shelf, leaving a pile of other books on the den floor, and got to her feet. She walked past the downstairs bathroom and heard the thump-thump-thump of Mirela self-soothing. The panic coursed again—Mirela was in her bed, Mirela was asleep, the door was locked, had Mirela sleepwalked downstairs again? Then Jane realized the sound she heard was her husband, a man she once thought she knew, hitting his head against the wall tiles. He was home—Jane hadn’t realized. And where was Lauren, exactly? Pat would know, and he would know if Lauren needed a ride back from somewhere. He knew more of these things, nowadays, even though he never seemed to be here. Or had Pat driven Lauren home, while Jane was wallowing in The Book of Teeth? She raised a loose fist to knock at the bathroom door, hesitated, and instead continued toward the stairs, the thump-thump trailing off behind her.
Their marriage was the ficus in the dining room that Jane was occasionally startled to discover was still alive. She would dump water on it, its leaves would go swollen with abject thanks, she’d resolve to pick up the right plant food from the nursery and add watering to the daily morning routine, and then weeks later she’d happen upon its almost-corpse once again. It would not die passively. For the ficus to die would demand a decision.
Jane climbed upstairs to check on Mirela, and lingered in the open doorway to Lauren’s room instead. Not home. Jane didn’t know the bands on the posters anymore. Lauren no longer kept her stuffed animals and dolls on her bed. Jane slid open the door of Lauren’s closet and saw them in a jumble on a high shelf, her favorite purple bear’s hind leg dangling.
Lauren would have slipped away anyway, she told herself. The boys, too. You lose them no matter what, everyone said it. Marie had been telling her since Lauren was born that if you lose them it means you’ve done everything right, you’ve prepared them to become independent in the world, and after all, she wasn’t losing them solely for the usual prosaic adolescent reasons but also for the good cause of Mirela, the cause of saving a child. Jane slid the door shut and lay down on Lauren’s unmade bed, fitting her own body to the imprint that Lauren’s body had left. She buried her face in the quilt and the pillow.
She smelled smoke. She sat up and the image assembled itself: Lauren kneeling at the headboard of her bed, smoking cigarettes out the window, blowing through the screen. Jane opened the drawer of Lauren’s bedside table and rummaged around toward the back. A pack of Marlboro Lights and a Bugs Bunny lighter. She laughed to herself. Next would be cloves, and after that, marijuana. Beer would sidle up soon enough, maybe after the cloves but before the pot.
She checked that the child safety latch was in place on the Bugs Bunny lighter and put it in her pocket. She paused over the cigarettes, then returned them to the back of the drawer and pushed it shut.
She should confront Lauren about the smoke smell, Jane thought as she made her way back downstairs, dropping the lighter into her purse hanging on the bannister. Or not confront—just talk. Make helpful observations. Before Mirela, Jane had found these sorts of semidisciplinary situations both easy and false. Jane’s children regarded her less as a moral-philosophical authority and more as a faucet to be turned on, a car that went go, a refrigerator holding a bottle of orange juice. In her role as a utility that went largely unnoticed unless it was broke-down or temperamental, it was difficult for Jane to make her children happy, exactly, but if it was ever the case that the faucet didn’t turn on or the car wouldn’t go or the refrigerator was out of orange juice, then it was absolutely, definitionally Jane who had made her children unhappy. This state of affairs didn’t particularly trouble her; the nice thing about being a light switch is that your day-to-day life is plain cause and effect. The connection between terminals is either open or it is closed. The children are upset, and here is why.
Cause and effect did not apply to Mirela. You could not extract remorse from her. She took a transactional satisfaction from her misbehavior, with all its rewards accruing to herself. Punishment could provoke her anger, but just as often, punishment seemed to be a source of repletion. Jane gave Mirela time-out after time-out before she realized that Mirela was misbehaving to get the time-outs—that she was hunting down her punishment because she wanted to be alone, but it wasn’t safe for Jane to leave her alone, but refusing to leave her alone intensified Mirela’s fury and thus the danger that she would cause herself or others harm, but it was increasingly the case that no one but Jane was willing to be alone with Mirela, or be with her at all.
Maybe what Mirela thought she wanted was an empty room. Blank and scrubbed. That room was where she went when she was no-Mirela. She met the warm smile of a familiar face as a mask, a trick played on her. She played the trick right back at first, to keep things balanced. She couldn’t be fooled. She played the part of the bright, happy girl as long as she could, but in truth she lived in the dark, and she was perpetually outraged to be dragged from it, to be known, to be made not a stranger, to be found out.
Inside the blank scrubbed room, Jane could see the tall nurse in white. The counterfactual was always present with Mirela. The terror of the counterfactual used to lie in the image of Mirela in her crib, in that place, waiting for a year, and another and another, crying until she accepted that her cries would not be answered, while her family, an ocean away, puttered around ignoring her, Lauren on a stage or in a swimming pool, the hollering octopus that was the boys, Pat in the garage, Jane donkeying the groceries up Muegel Road. But now the nurse was beckoning Jane out of her own living room. Barbara Walters was blowing a kiss and saying, “Good night, dearest Jane.” The nurse was switching off the TV, guiding Jane up the stairs, into the bath, into her bed. She’d been so tired, the night of 20/20. She couldn’t remember if she’d even taken a shower after cleaning up that poor man’s shit.
Jane didn’t always turn away from the nurse. Sometimes she closed her eyes and sank into the almost-scalding bath, the warm towel just out of the dryer—had the nurse taken care of the laundry?—the sheets susurrating against her body as she pressed her face to her pillow, the curtains drawn in the warm dark, the nurse sitting on the edge of the bed, smoothing Jane’s hair, rubbing her back, singing a soft, wordless tune until she fell asleep. The uniform crackling and rustling like white noise, like the wind on the window, so starched it could snap. A branch scraping along the glass, the old leaves crumbling against it. Jane wakes up in a house where Sean still has a bedroom of his own upstairs, where Midnight doesn’t live with the Schecks down the street, where pictures hang on the walls, where there aren’t bars over the windows, where nobody locks the doors.
There was the early childhood development center at UB, a one-way mirror reflecting and penetrating the playroom. Every playroom that Jane and Mirela visited had its standard chorus of toys: the stacking rings, the shopping cart, the rotary phone in primary colors, the cheerful croaking puppy-on-a-string. Each toy a standardized test, a multiple-choice bubble that a child filled in by the order in which she stacked the rings or by how lovingly she offered the clacking puppy a strip of plastic steak.
In this playroom, they met Delia, a graduate student whose research focused on emotional regulation. Jane liked Delia immediately. She spoke at low volume and high rapidity, she preferred observations over opinions, and she didn’t interrupt. Her kind and sleepy demeanor, her hooded eyes, reminded Jane of Dr. Vine, how a gauze of exhaustion wrapped his evident quickness and sharpness in a cottony bundle.
“Have you ever heard of the strange situation?” Delia asked Jane.
“There are so many jokes I could make right now,” Jane said. Mirela babbled like a schoolmarm at her own reflection.
“Ha, I believe it,” Delia said. “It’s an experiment. Dates back to the 1960s and ’70s. What happens is—”
“No, wait, I remember,” Jane said. The small wings of a memory opened and retreated along the top of her head; she squinted slightly as if to glimpse it flapping away toward the Clearfield Library. “I’ve read about this before.”
“So in the strange situation, you put a mother and her child, who’s around one year old, in a room with some toys. The kid crawls or toddles around, plays with stuff, looks back from time to time to see that Mom is still around, gets onto Mom’s lap, gets down, wanders around some more, does his whole baby thing.”
“Yes, yes, I remember this! Then Mom leaves for a while.”
“Exactly. Maybe the baby cries while Mom is gone, maybe he’s okay, maybe he’s anxious. Doesn’t matter all that much, because Mom comes back. The kid who was anxious or crying is happy to see her again.”
“He finds comfort in her return,” Jane said, nodding.
“Yup, and the kid who was fine when she was gone is also happy she’s back. I’m oversimplifying, but those are basically the two outcomes you’d want to see: sad-then-happy, or fine-then-happier. Pretty neat. That’s where you’re seeing what we’d call secure attachment.”
Mirela laughed and spun herself around in circles until she fell down. She got up again, spun, fell down laughing.
“But in the strange situation, sometimes you don’t see secure attachment,” Delia said.
“Sometimes you get a baby who’s clinging to Mom from the get-go, whining, crying, not wanting to explore the playroom,” Jane said .
“Yup, something like that. Then Mom leaves and the kid explodes. Just totally freaks out. When Mom returns to the room, everything should be okay again, right? But sometimes it’s like Mom coming back makes the kid more resentful. She’s darned if she does and darned if she doesn’t. So that’s another type. We call that anxious-avoidant.”
Mirela spun and fell down and stayed where she was, on her back in a snow angel. She watched the ceiling, engrossed by a shadow-puppet show that only she could see. She softly sang along to the song she could hear them playing up there.
“There’s a third type,” Delia said. “This third type of kid doesn’t explore the room and doesn’t seem to care what Mom is up to. Mom is there, she leaves, she comes back—whatever. This type is what we call anxious-ambivalent, and in some ways, that’s the worst-case scenario. When a baby just doesn’t care.”
“Is it possible to overanalyze it? It could be just that the baby is relaxed. Or having an off day.”
Some children are never allowed even in earliest infancy just to lie back and float. They lose a great deal and may altogether miss the feeling that they themselves want to live. That was Winnicott.
“Sure, it’s possible,” Delia said with her sleepy smile. Jane liked her so much. “What it also might be telling us is that already, at just one year old, the baby has been conditioned not to care, not to place any bets on Mom coming back or his environment having something to offer him. He’s not a dumb kid—he knows he’s going to lose that bet because he’s learned it through experiences of neglect or trauma, because he’s been paying attention.”
“He cries, nobody answers, so he takes that feedback and she—she uses it . . .” Jane trailed off.
Delia waited and nodded. “Yes. And that’s the most challenging scenario, because the kid has been given information and he’s acting on it in an intelligent and rational way, in what he thinks is a self-preserving way, and it’s challenging to talk him out of what he’s learned from his own experience.”
“I wish we could go back in time and put Mirela in the strange situation,” Jane said. “Although I think Mirela would be the one to leave the room.”
“Could be,” Delia said.
“If I’d found Mirela back when she was young enough for the strange situation,” Jane said, “we probably wouldn’t be here.”
“All the same, I’m glad you’re here now,” Delia said.
“It’s hard to think about—before—what could have been.”
“No, of course.”
“I try to avoid thinking about it. Because there’s no—”
“I understand—”
“—no possibility of going back.”
“It’s a room that is shut. The past.”
“It’s over. The door is closed and locked. Why knock at that door when you know it won’t open?”
“And so you concentrate on the now. That’s healthy.”
“I wish she could have a do-over,” Jane said. “I wish I could give her that. I wish she could just start all over again.”
“In all of your research, have you come across the Arden Attachment Center?” Delia asked. Jane shook her head. “I have some literature for you. It’s a clinic that focuses on kids with attachment issues. They’re in Colorado.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that—it’s only been five months,” Jane said. “Going on six. I started taking her to doctors almost as soon as she got home. I knew she’d need help adjusting. It just takes time.”
“Right. The thing is, you don’t have a lot of time,” Delia said.
It wasn’t a judgment or a warning; it was an empirical observation, a recitation of numbers, a result, a sum. How much time Mirela had lost plus how much time she was losing. Or multiplied by. Six months was one-sixth of her life. Eighty-three percent of Mirela’s life was lost time and cut points.
They watched Mirela. Now she was lying tummy-down on the floor, legs kicking the air, tapping Mr. Potato Head’s nose against his cheek, singing the tuneless little song to herself.
You would never know. There were moments when you would never know, and you could string enough of those moments together to add up to an hour, a day, a whole child’s life.
Welcome to Arden: We Build Bonds That Last Forever
Amid the peaceful splendor of the Colorado mountains, the Arden Attachment Center is a world-renowned sanctuary for families facing the challenge of attachment disorders. At Arden, your child will learn the language of love, trust, and human connection. And you, the caregiver, will be your child’s most important teacher.
Just as a child is taught to read and write, to swim or ride a bike, an infant is taught to love and communicate by receiving the attentions of his mother. Picking him up when he cries, feeding him when he is hungry, changing his diaper when it is wet, gazing into his eyes in loving attention: in these elemental interactions, the mother is helping her baby learn, through example, how to love and be loved. The cells of the baby’s brain and body store those learning memories, which are activated when the child is touched or spoken to.
Due to earlier experiences with severe neglect and abuse, the unattached child is alienated from all sense of safety and security. She is a stranger to a loving touch. In fact, she associates love with pain. Instability and trauma are the normal state of affairs for the unattached child, who seeks a grim solace in control.
At Arden, we know that love can conquer all. First, though, love must be taught. Love is a language the child will learn to speak fluently. For the child who was loved badly or not at all, there has to be a process of unlearning as well. At Arden, your child will find firm and gentle shepherds to lead her through this challenging but rewarding journey.
It’s the universal question for the caregiver at her wits’ end: What is going through this kid’s head? But it’s important to understand that the unattached child does have a rational belief system, taught to her through abuse and neglect. Her belief system has two main tenets: that she is not loved, and that she cannot trust others to provide for her needs. A loving, authoritative caregiver is a mortal threat to both of these beliefs. That is why she attempts to defy and disrupt the caregiver’s efforts wherever possible. At Arden, we break down this defensive belief system, brick by brick, through evidence-based therapeutic interventions.
The unattached child was denied the opportunity to grow, explore, and become who she was meant to be. She feels a rational rage at this injustice, and that rage is complicated by the grief she feels for the lost birth mother. In short, she has been imprisoned by neglect, abuse, and unprocessed grief. The teams of caregivers at Arden can help her reclaim that freedom for herself through our special two-week therapeutic intensive. During this rigorous program, the unattached child is reborn into a world where once again she has no power, no autonomy, no control—but this time she is completely safe, in the arms of a caregiver who is teaching her unconditional love. At Arden, your child gets a second chance at her childhood—and so do you.