The Lost Children

Standing him up, I’d hook his thumbs beneath the elastic at the top of the underpants and pull them up, and then, finally, I’d release the child and capture another and begin again.

And somehow, it did not seem like drudgery. I was, after all, in bodily contact with the child the whole time, touching him, helping him learn. And I knew, without really knowing it, that this touching was my own best way of communicating with these children. There are other ways for other people, but I could almost hear the children through my fingertips, and I think I also spoke to them.

That was all I asked for in the beginning, just the underpants. But I did not set our table or pour the juice until all the underpants were on.

For Chris, this was merely relearning. I had seen him put on and take off his own jacket, even his shoes, dozens of times in Helga’s classroom. I knew he had not “regressed”; there was too much intelligence in his laughter, in his willful disobedience. It was a matter of getting through again.

Brad learned to manage both underpants and jeans – he could not get past his stomach to his shoes and socks.

Billy was much slower, finally able to pull on his underpants with help. I never got as far as taking off his shirt.

I was happy and totally absorbed. I loved being on my own with the children; they were making progress, I was sure of it – and now I understood Helga’s reaction to having volunteers. I was glad the Director did not visit my room, grateful that no volunteer or aide had been assigned to us – just the children and myself. Without interference of adult words in the room, I could hear the unspoken words of the children – their rage, their refusals, their protests, their pleas, their questions, compliance, or excitement.

I stopped taking the class to the lunchroom for the noon meal. There they had been allowed to eat what they liked, Chris roaming around, snatching food from other plates. It was not that the school or Joyce was lax: I felt then and I still feel that of all the schools I’ve seen – and there have been quite a few now – ours was one of the finest. It was not that they were lax; it was that these four children of Joyce’s were so difficult. They were in many ways more like small animals – some wild, some tame – than like human children. Because the other children in the school were more advanced, though perhaps as sick in their own way, the other teachers were more tolerant of these four. Asking less, making fewer demands.

But I did not want this. If I accepted it, or allowed the children to, it meant that I did not believe they could improve; and if this was so then we were without hope. And it was necessary to hope; more than necessary – it was essential. On this I built my own new creed. I believed in the children.

I had tried teaching them to eat sitting in the lunchroom. But it was too difficult. The day in my second week that I tried to keep Chris in his chair at lunch, I could not. He performed his trick of turning his small body into a limp, heavy weight, and slid from his chair to lie beneath the table on the floor; and when I reached down to retrieve him, he set his teeth into my hand and bit so hard that I had to pull it back.

And Brad wept for his bottle and Billy howled and the other teachers were uncomfortable with the commotion.

Dan spoke to me about it after school. He found me in my classroom long after the children had gone home. He came in, turned one of the small pink chairs backward, straddling it, and studied me with his blue eyes.

“That was a rough scene today. How’s your hand?”

He was too big in my classroom. Incongruous with the pale green wall and tiny chairs. He was well over six feet tall, and now his long legs stretched out interminably across the tile floor. His remarks to Zoe still burned in my ears and I wished only that he would leave.

“Fine, thanks. Nothing at all.”

But his hand insists, examines the purple swelling, touching it with his fingertips. “No skin broken. That’s good,” he says.

I pull away, conscious of his youth, of the maleness of him, and go to wash my blackboard. If he notices he doesn’t show it, and goes on talking in his slow way, actually helping me devise a plan whereby my class can eat in our own room. He believes my boys can learn to eat like other children and I am grateful to him for this.

They were learning to feed themselves, to dress themselves; but still they were not toilet-trained. It had never been a problem with Elizabeth or Rick, and sometimes I had felt that some of my friends were overanxious concerning their own children’s early toilet training. But here in school it was different; these children were five, six, seven – Louis was eight, but I did not try to change him; it would have been cruel and useless. But I was sure that the others could learn to go to the bathroom in a toilet rather than in their diapers – and if they could learn to do this, perhaps their parents could take them with them on small trips or at least feel some pride and relief, and maybe hope, in their children. I wanted this, because if I had an enemy, if I did battle against any one thing while I was at the school, it was against the “institution.”

There were some good residential settings, but the cost was exorbitant – over seven thousand dollars a year even then. And I had seen some of the others – the state institutions for the mentally ill where the children were mixed with the adults and wore only hospital gowns and dropped their feces upon the floor. I had read and heard tales of horror, and I fought hard to keep the children from being sent there. Every time I had to change a diaper or mop the excrement from my classroom floor, I fought a little harder, worked more determinedly, to train my children.