of courage, compassion, and hope, Bettelheim himself seemed the storyteller to meet a parent’s (and nation’s) needs. He promised the possibility of mastering the evil within by doing more than simply offering the stories; he provided a master narrative, a way to piece together all the fragments: the mother’s deception, the father’s abandonment, and the child’s exile or silence.
Still, caught up in these fantasies of psychoanalysis, I did wonder just how much to trust Bettelheim’s shaping of Grimms’ tales. Within the forest of his own enchanting logic, I began to lose what it meant to live with and in a tale, to sit beside the child, to taste the words as they drifted amid the smells of steaming tea and scones. I felt the imposition of meaning and a kind of forgetfulness, as if such stories do not shift and bend within the realities of an intimate storytelling. Is it not possible for the loving gesture, the timely sacrifice, to hold the weight of both suffering and hope and thus repair some painful gap or fracture in life? With her grandchildren upon her lap, my grandmother did not use her hands or words to choke meaning from a harsh world; she was no witch mixing evil with sweet breads. But, she did invite evil in, gradually, describing the outlines of wickedness and sorrow, letting our bodies lean against hers in the fear of the imagining. In this space, death did not go away; Straw and Coal still fell voiceless in the rushing stream. And, yet, having experienced a kind of exile from her home in leaving her family to come to the United States with her World War I husband, my grandmother must have known that the texture of a story’s truth emerged in more than the hard and ever-present reality of loss. With some nudging, she invited a simultaneous and complicated truth—that the meaning changed with Straw’s gesture, even when considered in light of the perhaps predictable rashness of Coal. In the legacy of this interpretation of the story, I find different questions. Is there an account of the tale where the bridge holds, where one can feel the heat scarring the back yet lie without breaking across the chasm? Or, perhaps, is the story of the falling just the beginning, a point where the listener takes up the emptiness without forsaking the need to cross the gap together?
I think of my son’s restless nights and our wrestling in the dark. I recall the days and weeks when I felt the fall and the splash, felt his fingers in my flesh and my too-hard gripping of his body. But, if the truth be told, there is more in the remembering: the echo of “hug” and a leaning of his body into mine, a laughter and lightness of spirit that sees Madeline floating and shapes a world through the happy endings of Pooh. Can I find a way to capture the whole story? Can I see that at different times Jacob and I exchange the putting of our bodies down, the stretching toward the other side? Can I write a new story out of the old ways of seeing, a tale that honors the fall but holds more than death and loss?
Perhaps these questions point to the truth that another reader of Bettelheim, Maria Tatar, so eloquently expresses in Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, a book that stood near The Uses of Enchantment on the library shelf: “Just as every rewriting of a tale is an interpretation, so every interpretation is a rewriting.” Here, then, is one more framing of the storyteller’s dilemma. In the end, no tale receives a passive listening; no telling enacts an innocent repeating. We can never get out of our place in the plot.
So what is my place in the tale? How can it be told? How does the imagination embrace the child or parent lost along some journey? How do the mother and father bargain for the son or daughter who has bitten from some forbidden fruit? Like children, adults, too, spin out their own fantasies.
Mary and I started sleeping with Jacob when he was five years old. He had always been a restless sleeper, unlike our daughter Sarah who, at six weeks, began sleeping through the night. We could not count on our son for such accommodation. Having learned to walk by nine months, Jacob soon mastered the gymnastics of climbing from his crib. It took a few weeks before we realized that he was spending parts of the night wandering in his room. When Mary or I brought him into our bed and laid him between us, he would rarely return to sleep. In the end, one of us would take him back to his room and nod off in the rocker or on the floor with Jacob looking on. Finally, succumbing to our need for sleep, we bought him a full-sized bed, cleared the room of any thing that might fall or be swallowed, and attached an outer latch to the door.
But nearing three years of age, he also began waking in a panic. When we arrived in his room, he would be shaking. It was as if the bedroom filled up with what he could not name, though once or twice, in his limited speech, he seemed to describe animal sounds or shapes. It was a panic that could not be calmed, could not be quickly soothed from his memory. What experiences or stories, we asked each other, haunted him to the point of such fear? Rocking with him, we would repeat, “It’s all right; it’s okay,” and soon Jacob began to take up the incantation. “It’s all right; it’s okay,” he would say, as we laid him back down, his limbs still trembling. We wondered why he would not call out our names when he needed us—and then we realized that he had rarely called us by name. And we thought of those nightmares from which we awake, gasping for air, unable to find our voices or words to cry out in recognition or for comfort. After we found out that Jacob had autism, we tried to remember that ignorance, not cruelty, had led us to abandon him in his trembling and wakefulness.
Sleeping with Jacob started slowly, the way hunger creeps up after a missed meal. We first tried the routines and rituals of our own childhoods; we read books, turned on the soft light of the night light, and rested against the bed until Jacob fell asleep. We picked out the stories composed for such times: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Weird Parents. Eventually we brought up a single mattress to rest upon as we watched for signs of Jacob’s slumber. It was more comfortable as we waited, though we often slipped into sleep before he did. Soon, we crawled into bed alongside our son and stayed through the night. We alternated nights, Mary usually sleeping four days of the week or five if my teaching schedule intensified. We stayed for five years.
Succumbing to such sleep fulfilled the needs that come with confusion and uncertainty. The evening began to seem more peaceful without the worry of Jacob’s noises and aloneness. Moreover, when Mary or I slept with our son, we believed, in the better times, that it was a kind of gift, a brief respite for the other. We began to feel as if we had some control over or achieved some deliverance from the evils of the day: the after-school tantrums, the seemingly impossible diet recipes designed to “recover” our son, the uncertainties of medication, the urgent demands of work, the isolation from friends and family. Let loose during the daytime, the evils retreated at night—or so we pretended. Like all the stories that we told, we believed that our own wit and will, mixed with the sacrificial magic of sleepless love, could replenish and sustain us.
When I married, I thought that I would never again sleep alone. I knew that Mary and I would be apart at some time. She or I would return alone to family in Iowa or travel to a conference or workshop or interview. Still, with the exception of these infrequent absences, I pictured our bed as a place where the day ended—in conversation, in weariness, in making love, in the quiet play of what we knew and still wished to discover about who we were and wanted to be.
In marriage, this kind of knowing is its own story; it is the mystery that holds together the gaps in history and memory and motivates the desire that pervades the telling. It is a narration without resolution, however, for the past is endless and forever calls the other to ask and wonder and at times forgive. For instance, not long after we were married, I discovered a picture of my wife when she was twenty. She sits on a metal folding chair in her parents’ basement. Behind her, the cement block wall gives greater distinctness to her white cotton shirt and red pants. Her left leg is crossed upon her right knee; her hands cup her left calf. She is unaware of the picture-taker. She looks toward a place that I cannot see; it is not in the room but something interior—perhaps something fleeting like a thought about driving home from college or perhaps something deep and intimate like a future child or a parent’s death. So much history registers in this random flash. In looking upon this moment, this distant glance, I risk a kind of disorientation, a loss of bearings. How is it that, in our storytelling, we can act as if the unknown past and future can be taken in? How can I hope to knit together what seems so vast and unknowable? Yet,
