“NO, QUINN. POINT TO THE RED DOG, NOT THE BLUE DOG. Try again!”
“No, Quinn. Hands are for helping, not hurting. We don’t use our hands when we’re mad, we use our words. Try again!”
“No, Quinn. The blocks go on top of each other, not next to each other. Try again!”
How many times had Dawn stood alone outside the playroom when Craig was off at work (attending to the needs of other women) and sobbed as she listened to yet another therapist fail to connect with Quinn? Why—why was it so hard for her four-year-old daughter to simply follow the rules of the world, to engage with other people as they wished? Quinn’s brain functioned so beautifully in some situations—building Legos, identifying the make and model of practically any car, sorting confetti by color, and reading every word of Frog and Toad aloud when most of her peers only looked at the pictures. Why was answering basic questions, following simple directions—never mind putting on shoes, eating a decent lunch, or using her words—so impossible?
It was after the third day care had “kicked out” Quinn—suggesting that Quinn take a break until she learned to use her words instead of her hands, and, on occasion, her teeth—that Dawn began attending a weekly parenting support group at a place called the Nurtury Center for Child Development. She’d seen it advertised in a stack of business cards on the reception desk at Quinn’s pediatrician’s office. “Facilitated by Reece Mayall, MS, Integrative Health.”
At Dawn’s first meeting, Reece, a strikingly beautiful Black woman in her late twenties, had taken Dawn’s hand and led her to a chair in the circle of four parents. Dawn had spent most of the meeting fighting back tears as she listened to each parent share stories of the challenges they’d had with their own children—situations nearly identical to those Dawn had suffered with Quinn.
“My girlfriend couldn’t be here,” said the tall guy in the hipster newsboy hat, who’d introduced himself as a novelist and “quasi-adoptive dad” to an “amazing, brilliant, and atypical” five-year-old boy named Ethan. “But I wanted to come on her behalf, because, honestly, this group is what holds my relationship together, and I don’t even believe in support groups.” They had all laughed.
One woman, a free-spirited redhead named Summer with a loud voice and a tendency to use it, sat clasping hands with her wife, Joanie, a stylish seemingly unflappable Korean woman with a bone-dry wit that, Dawn would learn, belied her extra-sensitive soul. The couple told stories of the heartbreak they had felt in discovering that one of their twins, Maisie, was neuroatypical, while the other, Audrey, was “as mainstream/traditional as neurology gets.”
And Mia had been so vulnerable then. Unrecognizable from the bubbly blonde Dawn had seen on TV. Her skin sallow, dark moons beneath her eyes, freshly separated from an “emotionally handicapped” husband and unable to mitigate her four-year-old son Nate’s epic tantrums that occurred several times a day. “I just can’t soothe him,” Mia wailed, her cornflower eyes glassed with tears. “If his mother can’t soothe him, who can?”
Reece had guided them. “My heart aligns with your stories. I, too, am so-called neurologically atypical. But I’m also trained in both Eastern and Western healing methodologies, and I want each of you to understand that you’re not alone and that much of what your pediatricians, teachers, and therapists may have told you, though well meaning, is not in service to you or your children . . .”
Her gaze latched on to Dawn’s. Something passed between them.
What a relief it was, for Dawn, to imagine Quinn’s issues weren’t her fault alone. Before the Nurtury, before Reece, Dawn had never questioned the diagnoses and often conflicting advice of the army of psychologists and pathologists; occupational, speech, and physical therapists; neuropsychiatrists and nutritionists who had evaluated Quinn—poked at her, prodded her to stack alphabet blocks, pick out the horse from a page of barn animals, slip a plastic star in the right hole. “No, Quinn, not that one. Try again. No, Quinn. Wrong one. Come on, you can do it.” Until Quinn’s frustration overflowed, and she threw the tests disguised as toys across the room. Until Dawn’s beautiful freckle-faced, ponytailed little girl bit the evaluator’s hand.
Each week, at least one parent in the group—all of whom soon became Dawn’s close friends, maybe the closest she’d had, so complete was the comfort of their shared experience—would inevitably ask Reece, usually during a crying jag, “Why is my baby like this?” They all knew the science, of course, dispensed to them ad nauseam by pediatricians, therapists, magazine articles, the AMA, the AAP, the CDC.
Translation: Nobody really knew what caused autism, or Asperger’s, or any of the so-called spectrum disorders.
Reece had been the first person, the only person, to offer Dawn and her new friends a clear possible answer. The five parents had been meeting with Reece for more than a year, their fussy babies now tantrum-throwing preschoolers, when Reece’s single question set the Nurtury parents on a path that would change their lives. Her brown eyes were wide and inquisitive as they panned around the Nurtury, making eye contact with each parent as she spoke, her voice gentle and free of judgment.
Had any of them, Reece asked, happened to notice any changes in their children after they’d gotten their MMR vaccine shots?
Mia raised her hand. “Actually, yes! I also read an article. And then a book. I carry it with me everywhere now.” She leaned over to rummage in her giant Gucci tote, pulled out a book, and held it up.
Defeating Autism Naturally, by J. McCartney and Gerry Kartzel, MD.
“That’s an interesting book, Mia,” Reece said.
“But it’s written by a freaking D-list actress,” Graham added, but Dawn saw he’d straightened in his chair, come to attention. “You know she paid that doctor to use his name.”
“No judgment in the Nurtury, please,” Reece reminded him. “Now, my friends, has anyone heard of Dr. Andrew Wakefield?”
Dawn’s heart began to thud. She leaned forward in her seat.
Perhaps a shot was the answer to why? Perhaps a shot had made Quinn—and Maisie and Nate and Ethan—the way they were?