TV Psychologist Gets It Right

There's been a story going around that I just heard about a couple of weeks ago. Abbie Dorn, a young mother of triplets who suffered severe brain damage due to complications during delivery, is in a legal battle to see her children. Her ex-husband, who divorced her just a year after the event, saying he needed to "move on", has prohibited their three (now four year old) children from visiting her, and even prohibits anyone mentioning her at all to them. Oh, and after she received a malpractice financial settlement, he's reportedly suing her for child support.

Good Morning America covered this story on April 14th of this year, and played up the "tragedy" of the whole situation. It wasn't terrible coverage, but it wasn't too great, either. It didn't really scratch the surface, so was more exploitative than anything else, as far as I was concerned.

On July 10th I happened to catch this story for the first time on CNN. The Dorn story starts about 3/4 of the way down the transcript that is linked here. After going over the basic facts, the CNN anchor went to Dr. Wendy Walsh, a clinical psychologist who specializes in relationships for commentary. I must admit that I am usually biased against talking head TV psychologists. They either seem to a) say something that is so "common sense" that you just go "Duhh", b) try to wedge whatever topic it is into pushing some agenda of their own, or c) come up with some off the wall thing that they couldn't possibly infer from never ever meeting or talking with the principle people involved.

Dr. Walsh's comments both surprised and pleased me. She was both thoughtful and insightful. After the story focused (much like GMA) on whether Abbie could actually communicate or not thru blinking, Walsh immediately cut thru that to comment

And, you know, the question is, who cares if she can communicate or not? There's a living, breathing mother there...Who deserves to see her children. And the children, you know, Don, kids - everything is new and normal in the world of small children. I don't think that they'll be overly traumatized. Would people prefer that they're given a cold teddy bear to comfort them?

Walsh quickly followed with

And, you know, the biggest question this raises for me, Don, is what's going on in our culture that we institutionalize people with disabilities to the point that now we think it's just so wrong to even look at them or be exposed to them? What does it say that we're sweeping away the ugliness and not allowing families to have an integrated experience with people with disabilities? I think it's making us lose our compassion for people with disabilities.

Walsh also blogged on the story on her own blog here, where she also wrote

I’m concerned that the more we insulate people, young and old, from seeing the full range of human possibilities the more we limit our capacity for compassion.

My hat's off to Dr. Walsh. Rather than settle for a superficial recounting of a "tragedy", she cared enough to dig a bit deeper, and provide some thoughtful analysis. Like a good documentary film maker, she challenges us to think deeper not just about this particular situation, but about ourselves and the wider world.

Maybe I should pay more attention to TV psychologists. Or at least this one.

Missed Signals

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Well, we're off, on what promises to be a great vacation (holiday). We had a mostly good day, with but a small (but typical) interchange at the motel pool after we checked in.

The pool was packed, and noisy. There were kids everywhere. Buddy Boy and Sweet Pea jumped right in, swam around some, and seemed to be having fun.

As I was watching Buddy Boy, he approached a group of kids at one end of the pool. It was apparent that they all knew each other, and were goofing around with each other a bit. Buddy Boy pretty much just inserted himself in the middle of the group and tried to start interacting with them. I couldn't hear what was being said, but then it appeared that (perhaps) they were engaging him and including him in their goofing around. Then I noticed a bit of shoving going on, and the next thing I know Buddy Boy's being shoved a bit forcefully by one of the kids. It turns out that after getting pushed lightly a bit, Buddy Boy kicked him in the groin below the surface of the water. I guess I'd be upset, too. By this time I could tell that something was definitely wrong, and Liz started towards that end of the pool to see what was up (I asked Liz to go, because there were a group of mothers down there, and I thought that perhaps a female touch would go over better than me going down there). Before she gets there the mom of the other boy is pointing at Buddy Boy and shouting that Buddy Boy kicked her son in his private parts (and of course the pool gets pretty quiet, and everyone turns to pay attention).

Buddy Boy, having been shoved a bit hard, comes out of the pool crying loudly. So now the other mother is starting to shout, and Buddy Boy is getting louder. Liz pulled the "A" card (you know, sometimes my son overreacts a little, he's autistic).

Amazingly, it worked. The other mother abruptly stopped, said she understood, and sat back down. We quieted Buddy Boy down, and the kids got back to playing in the water.

Liz says that this incident was pretty typical for Buddy Boy, when he doesn't have someone right by his side facilitating his interactions and intervening. I must admit that I haven't seen things escalate so quickly in the past (okay, maybe I have selective memory), but she sees him more at school, and interacts with his teachers more. Evidently stuff like this happens during recess at school on a fairly regular basis.

Liz and I talked, and we think it's because he just can't read the situation. He doesn't understand how groups of kids that already know each other don't necessarily want someone else to insert themselves into their group. He doesn't get their signals when they tell him to nicely get lost. He doesn't know the difference between gentle playfulness between close friends, and him being a stranger pushing just "that" much harder than they are (which then sets them off, to his surprise and dismay, which escalates his response).

We've tried explanations (which he doesn't want to listen to-"I KNOW"), we've tried a little role playing, which he also doesn't want to partake of. We coach ahead of time, and I always struggle with how far to let him go on his own. I don't want him to have bad experiences, but I also know that eventually he needs to learn to navigate on his own (and it does work, sometimes).

I blame myself for tonight. I should have recognized that the pool was much too crowded, the kids perhaps too tired, and me too lazy to change into a swimsuit and instead sat on the side. I wish I was a bit more like Emily.

Hope They Can Believe In

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So Tuesday afternoon (the day of Obama's inauguration) Sweet Pea comes home from school and says to Liz,

"I know this is a little bit mean, but I wish my daddy were Barack Obama."

As Liz relates this to me when I come home, I imagine that my daughter is finally getting some racial identity with the African-American side of her heritage. Perhaps she'll identify more with her black dolls, and less with the blond Barbie?

Liz continues that she responded,

"Oh really, sweety? Why do you say that?"

"Because then we could have a puppy."

"Couldn't you just wish that your dad wasn't allergic to dogs?"


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Last year, Buddy Boy suggested we could get a dog, and "Don't worry, Dad. You could live in the basement." (The unfinished, unheated basement of our 125 year old house).

It's good to know that, given a choice between a real living dad and a hypothetical dog, the dog will always win.

Clean Sweep

There are many more important things that I could (and should) be blogging about, but this amazed me so much I just had to write about it. My sister came to stay with us from out of state for the Thanksgiving holiday. While we were preparing our back room upstairs for her to stay in, Liz noticed that the walls had some "stuff" on them.

"What is that?", she said. Sweet Pea, ever the helpful one, said "Looks like poop!" "What is it?" Liz says again, a bit more stridently. "It's smeared all over the place."

Buddy Boy chimes in "That's from the fly paper."

My heart sinks a little. The fly paper.

A couple of weeks ago we had thousands of flies swarming outside of our house for a couple of days. We called an exterminator, who assured us that this was common this time of year, and that they would go away with the first frost. Needless to say, a couple dozen made their way into the house. Buddy Boy insists that any insect must be returned to it's environment if we won't let him keep it as a pet (Andrea would love this kid), and Sweet Pea seems to think that any insect has the power to kill her instantly, and is thus terrified of them.

Faced with the prospect of dealing with both of them, I looked for a way to eliminate the problem. I looked thru our pantry and found a couple of rolls of flypaper. Thinking this might work, I put one up in the back room. Liz had me take it down a couple of days later after it became apparent that the unique sticky surface attracted curious kids more than it did flies. I didn't notice at the time that they had managed to smear some of the sticky stuff on the cream colored walls (which we don't have matching paint for).

Now, with 24 hours before my sister shows up, I was tasked to "Take care of that!"

Realizing that I didn't want to make a bad situation worse, I resolved to get the icky brownish yellowish stuff off the wall without destroying the paint (I did not want to have to paint a wall before she arrived). So I proceeded carefully.

First, I started with a rag with dishsoap on it. I scrubbed carefully and increasingly harder for over 20 minutes. I got some of it off, but most of it stayed where it was.

Like a philosopher progressing steadily up thru Maslow's pyramid of human needs, I tried what I viewed as successively more potent materials on the wall. The next material I tried was a floor and tile cleaner. I tried it carefully on an out of the way spot to make sure it wouldn't ruin the paint, then had at it again for another 20 minutes. Again, it left most of it where it was, only it turned what remained a darker shade of gray. Getting exasperated, I retreated to the mud room and tried some pine based floor cleaner, again to no avail. This was starting to get to me. I finally decided to go for the big guns-a scouring pad and kitchen cleanser-realizing that I would have to be very careful and would still probably remove some paint.

Luckily Liz saw me at that point and asked what I was doing. Fortunately it had been long enough that she had lost most of the fire out of her eye, and recommended the Mr. Clean magic sponges kept under the kitchen sink.

With little hope for successful resolution of the problem at this point, I took the sponges to task. I moistened one and started scrubbing lightly. And after spending more than an hour trying to get the stuff off, it started lifting off immediately. What's more, the paint underneath seemed totally unharmed. In five minutes I was done with those spots, and gleefully going after other spots (finger prints, putty, crayon marks, etc.).

"There's some rockin' chemist out there that hit one out of the park with this!", I said. Life is full of small miracles, and I experienced one this week.