NOTE: Here is a continuation of an excerpt from a book I'm working on, called "Far From Magnolia Drive." It's a story of a mother and her family, echoing some of my own experiences, but not a memoir. If you want to read the first excerpt, it's in my archives. Hopefully, there will be more chapters to come.
Lying sleepless in bed, she
listened to Rick snoring softly. The
sound didn’t really bother her. She was just
envious that he was asleep. Her mind was
whirling around, trying to pray, but her thoughts kept wandering.
Turning onto her right side, produced an
angry meow.
“Sorry, Tiglet,” she whispered. “Didn’t know you were there.”
The tiger-striped cat they’d been given
last year curled up between her knees and arms, in the hollow made by lying on her
side. They had always been cat people,
so after Rick’s first cat Tiger died, all of them longed to have another
brown-striped cat. Since this one was a
kitten, the name Tiglet came naturally. He
felt warm and cuddly, and the sound of his purring began to relax her. Still the thoughts kept flowing:
She remembered
when they first noticed Jay squinting his eyes and blinking a lot in
kindergarten. Sometimes his mouth
twitched, too. When they took him to the
eye doctor, they learned he did need glasses, but glasses didn’t stop the blinking. When they asked the pediatrician about it, she
said he’d outgrow it.
The
next thing that came along was the constant throat clearing, with clicking
sounds interrupting his speech. About
this time, she saw a feature on Tourette’s on one of those news shows, probably
Sixty Minutes. That’s when she began to wonder, but no one else noticed. Maybe I’m being paranoid, she told herself
at the time.
Next they took Jay to an Ear, Nose, and
Throat doctor, who said his noises weren’t caused by allergies, and maybe he
was becoming a stutterer. This turned
out to be another dead end. She decided
God was making her work too hard at learning patience.
How she wished she could go to sleep, to
keep these thoughts from carrying her away.
They just wouldn’t stop tonight--like a dam had burst in her mind, with
all kinds of old suppressed feelings flooding out. She kept petting the cat, and he purred. But her mind reeled on:
By second
grade, Jay’s vocal noises were a disruption in class. The teacher sent him to the school counselor,
who suggested getting a full psychological evaluation. The nearest child psychologist was over sixty
miles away. Though their health
insurance didn’t pay for any of this, they went through with it, wanting to
help Jay as much as they could.
After the
psychologist’s long session with Jay, he sent them to a neurologist. When were they going to get any answers? The neurologist did a battery of tests, too,
including an EEG. They had to drive over
an hour to the doctor’s office for each test. Jay was deathly afraid of needles, and by the
end, he didn’t like doctors either.
After all that, the neurologist said Jay probably had Tourette’s
Syndrome.
If only they’d explained beforehand
that there’s no definitive test for Tourette’s, but all they can do is rule out
every other possibility. What an
ordeal! she sighed. I’m not sure who it was harder on, Jay, or Rick and
me. I still hadn’t learned enough
patience apparently, for this was only the beginning. The neurologist said we had to wait a year
before trying any medication. I guess
they were waiting to see if anything else showed up.
She knew she’d been hoping for some
miracle drug that would make things all better.
But there never was one for Jay.
Denial set in,
especially on Jay’s part. He wouldn’t
even let them use the word Tourette’s around him. She and Rick had to meet with
his teachers every year to explain Jay’s condition, to let them know that Jay
wasn’t being intentionally bad.
There are so many misconceptions about
Tourette’s. It was barely even mentioned
in the psychology courses I took for my teaching certificate. She mouthed these words to the cat.
Still stroking Tiglet’s head behind the
ears, where he liked it best, she mumbled aloud, “I wish I was a cat. My life would be so much simpler—just eat and
sleep.”
Almost as though he heard her, Tiglet
put a paw on her hand.
At this point in her life, she felt a
desperate need to get all these scattered memories collected into some kind of
order. Maybe it was a symptom of aging,
this need to look back, to try to convince herself that life had been
worthwhile.
Right now, the memories bounced around
in her mind like popcorn flying out of a pan with the lid off. Somehow, she must corral them, maybe try to
put them on a string, like the popcorn garlands they used to make for the
Christmas tree, when Amy and Jay were young.