Twilight Children: Three Voices No One Heard – Until Someone Listened

“Sometimes when kids come to the unit, they think they must have done something wrong and leaving their families to come to the hospital is a punishment for that. It’s important to understand that isn’t true. You didn’t come here because you’ve done anything wrong – ”

“Yes, I have,” she interjected in a casual, almost cheeky voice. She didn’t look up at me.

“You think you’ve come here because you have done something wrong?”

“I put a frog in the blender! Whirr!” She reached out with one finger to press an imaginary switch. “Just like I’m going to do with this dolly right now. Here’s a blender,” she said, pointing to a bare space on the table. She held the doll upside down by its feet and lowered it into the imaginary blender. “Whirr! It’s chopping it all up. Look at the blood. It’s gone all bloody. Whirr!”

She looked up cheerfully. “And now I’m going to take the lid off. The blender’s running and I take the lid off. WHIRRRRR! The blood spatters all over you! You’re all bloody now. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

O-kaaaay. I sat back. I was definitely getting a better sense of what Earlene Baker had meant by Cassandra’s “creepy” behaviors.

“I’m taking the lid off again. It’s still running. Whirr! Blood and guts going all over. All over you. Splash! Splash!” Cassandra threw the doll into the air and made wild gestures with her hands to indicate splashing.

I remained silent. I didn’t want to get drawn into questioning Cassandra on her imaginary blender. I suspected it was simply a replay of the old joke: “What is red and green and goes two hundred miles per hour? A frog in a blender.” As with our conversation the day before, there was a vaguely manipulative feel to what she was saying, a sense that she was trying to shock me or engage me in a way she could control. Even if it were a true event and she had really put a frog in a blender, I wanted time to suss why she had chosen to insert this topic into the conversation here. So, instead of responding to her comments, I reached into the box and took out a doll, too. It was a blond boy doll dressed in hiking shorts and a T-shirt. I walked him along the side of the table.

“I haven’t got a doll,” Cassandra announced, even though she was still holding on to the red-haired doll. “Mine’s all chopped up. Here, put yours in the blender.”

“You know what this boy’s wondering?” I asked and walked the doll closer to her.

“Unh-uh. And I don’t care.”

“He’s wondering, why does that girl want to play that game?”

“What game?”

“This boy says, ‘Why do you want to pretend something that’s not true?’”

“Because I want to.”

“He says, ‘Why do you do that?’”

“Because it’s fun,” she said rather defiantly.

“This boy says, ‘Sometimes when I do that, it is because I don’t want to talk about something else. When I play a silly game, people get distracted and stop asking me.’”

“Not me. I do it because it’s fun,” she replied. “Funnest thing in the whole world and so that’s what I do. Squish up frogs. And other stuff. I step on anything I see and watch its guts squirt out.”

I held my doll in a standing position on the table. “This boy says, ‘I have yucky feelings sometimes. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know how to explain them. Sometimes they make me do things I don’t mean to and I get into trouble. But if I play a silly game, people won’t ask me about these feelings.’”

“You’re stupid,” Cassandra replied. “That never happens to me. It happens to you because you’re stupid. You should go in the blender.” She reached over to pull the doll out of my hand.

“I’m not stupid. I’m just scared,” I said for the doll. “Being scared doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It just means it’s hard for me to think because I’m too frightened sometimes. And when I’m that frightened, I don’t want someone to get angry at me and put me in the blender.”

“You belong in the blender. You’re very bad. Very, very, very, very bad. Come here. Get ground up.” She reached for the doll again.

Holding on to it with some effort, I kept the boy doll standing upright on the table. “I’m not bad,” I said for the doll. “Being scared doesn’t mean I’m bad.”

“Yes, it does. You’re bad and stupid. Everybody’s bad and stupid. The whole world is bad and stupid. Everything should be ground up in the blender!”

This outburst seemed to explode out of her physically, and she leaped up, throwing her doll high into the air. It fell to the floor and she picked it up. Holding it by the legs, she pounded its head against the linoleum in a frantic way.

“Cassandra?” I said.

She paid no attention to me.

“Cassandra, I can’t allow you to do that. The doll will break if you treat it that way.”

She continued to hammer the doll’s head against the floor with vicious, uncontrolled swings.

Rising from the chair, I came around behind her, leaned over her, and stopped the movement of her arms. “It’s all right to have angry feelings, but I can’t let you turn your anger into actions if it will hurt things. It’s time to stop now.”

As I spoke, it was as if a wizard cast a spell over the room. Cassandra froze the moment I touched her. When I removed the doll from her hands, her fingers retained their positioning, even though they were no longer holding anything.

Setting the doll back on the table, I returned to my seat. “You had some very strong feelings just then, didn’t you?”

Cassandra lowered her hand. Still sitting on the floor, she stared straight ahead.

“That’s all right. In here it’s okay to have such feelings. And if they get too strong, I’ll always be able to stop them.”

Still looking into the space in front of her, she remained motionless.

“However, it’s easier to cope with strong feelings when we have words for them. So one of the things you and I will do together is try and find ways to express your feelings with words. Then they won’t be so scary.”

Cassandra still didn’t move.

The strength of her emotions seemed to have literally paralyzed her, so I thought rather than pursue them at this point, it would be better to help Cassandra reestablish equilibrium. I reached into the box and took out a girl doll with long dark hair.

“I’m going to change her clothes,” I said. “Right now she is wearing pajamas, but I think it’s time for some day clothes, don’t you?”

Cassandra looked over at my doll. It was a slow, almost turgid movement, as if she were having to turn through a thick fluid. She said nothing.

“What about this long dress? If we look through the box, we’ll find a sunbonnet that matches it. Would you look for it for me?”

Cassandra regarded me. She didn’t answer.

“The lady who made this outfit wanted it to seem old-fashioned. Like perhaps one of the dolls was traveling west on a wagon train in the old days. So she made this long dress with lace on it like they wore in those days and a sunbonnet, because often the women and girls would walk alongside the wagon as they traveled and they didn’t want to get a sunburn.”

Cassandra stared at the doll in my hands.

“Cassandra?”

Again, the slow, solemn turning of her head.

“When we work together in here, I’ll always keep you safe.”

She glanced only briefly at my face and then away, staring into the space beside my chair.

“Sometimes we’re going to work on hard things together, but you will decide how fast we go. We’re not going to do anything that is too scary or too difficult. And I’m strong. If your feelings get too big, I’ll help you with them. They won’t be too big for me to handle. And I won’t be scared by them.”