has been and will be. In first embraces, after all, so much must be taken on faith. It is a faith that calls us toward the parts that have been left out or have yet to come. To get to these places, we must ask the unexpected question and develop the discipline of listening, of letting the mind’s eye estrange the familiar.
Did the husband and wife in the tale of Hansel and Gretel begin with such desires? In the first days, at the edge of the imposing forest, the cottage might have seemed like a sanctuary. During the waking hours, the echo of the woodcutter’s axe would have provided a reassuring cadence; for the wife, the mixing of flour, yeast, and water, the kneading of the dough, and the firing of the oven would not have yet become a burden. All might have been the taste of new seasonings, the replenishing moment spilling forth without hesitation. The deepest hunger must have been the desire that came from waiting, the yearning for the next disrobing, the taste of the remembering and telling, and the touch of tongue and breath. In the time of first knowing, this coming together might have been enough, this willingness to talk about the past without judgment or blame amid the fragrance of bread and pine sap.
What is it that was forsaken? What is it that could not sustain the possibility of imagining a way through the famine? The old story does not flesh out what must have been endured. That it was famine which broke the covenant seems the surest of truths. Famine is the slowest of tragedies. It may first come in hints, like happenstance and rumor. The rain does not fall; the blight speckles the first leaves. The neighbor’s front door swings indifferently in the wind; the hoe leans unattended. The people left behind accommodate less. They learn that leanness can even be a mark of strength, the legacy of hard work and diligence. Hope and endurance give way to unsteadiness and malaise. Soon loss narrows into habits of survival; the mouth accepts coarse grain, not flour and bread, then chaff not wheat, then the unimaginable.
It is hard to look back at so many years attending so closely to so little. In my own world of work and home, I became an expert with rationing. As a teacher, I often paused during the day to multiply the number of student papers by the amount of time needed to read, compose responses, and record grades. The reading itself required a kind of empathy, a willingness to listen without intruding too quickly with judgment and correction. It demanded rest and, if rest was not possible, a willed attentiveness. Incoming sets of papers often meant between twenty to thirty hours of additional work over ten days—and then the next set of writing came in, and then the next. In one eleven-week semester, when committee and teaching responsibilities were especially burdensome, I would set the alarm for 3 am and fall asleep after I put my daughter to bed at 9 pm. Beside me, where Mary used to sleep, I left open the unfinished papers or chapters. I stemmed the chaos with numbers; I survived because I knew an end would come. The cycle of work guaranteed completion.
At times, I thought of what could be worse. I remembered the years when I contracted to detassel corn in the fields surrounding Storm Lake. In the summers during college, I would paint houses or farm buildings during the day and, in August evenings and weekends, make extra money by heading out to the fields. Once, my contract included half miles rows, i.e., pulling corn tassels from over six foot stalks, eight to ten inches apart, for a distance of a half mile. It took an hour and a half for one row. Doing this work required a mental discipline, a breaking down the ninety minutes into manageable units. Daydreaming was costly, though inevitable and calming.
In my own way, I unknowingly reduced mystery and story to a spread sheet. I only had so much to budget, literally, for my time at home. What, then, was the cost of a week of daily tantrums, holding Jacob’s arms during his daytime meltdowns while Sarah sat on the stairs and cried or retreated to the basement? How much future interest should Mary and I forsake? We had our time. We had told enough personal histories to provide for the next month and year. Without clearly voicing the change, I began the hard bargain of survival. At night, after Mary left for bed, I slept because I could not stay awake and then awoke because it was necessary. My most productive work emerged in the dark mist of forgetfulness. I learned that story and memory are not like grain to be stored in the Pharaoh’s bins and parceled out during lean times. Memory is a fluid thing, full of feeling and open doors. During the famine, it can be a wolf at the threshold, ready to devour the last of flesh and bone.
In the chaos that provides the stuff of life and fairy tales, evil and good sometimes knock with the same soft touch. When we open the door, we have only what we can imagine and generate from our hearts. It may be years before the bargain is understood, before the riddle is solved, before a story begins to take shape or make sense. The good stories must take it all in, all of it. In the in-between, there may only be questions and then a lying down. Sleeping with Jacob was a tenuous bargain. The fitful nights risked everything: the loss of the emotional strength that sustains the habit of laughter and play and that feeds the desire to know and piece together ever-growing fragments of new memories. But it was a story whose terms we thought we knew and accepted. Something of the nature of sacrifice had been part of our own rearing: as middle children of large families, as individuals whose religious faith centered on a giving up, on a tradition of stories that fostered an acceptance of the hard fact of death and the need to wait for the next day. This was the soft touch, the good that fed muscle and bone and imagination.
But we did not fully know.
If stories do not simply give a face to the good and the bad, the clever and the conniving, the pure and impure, but instead provide a framework within which to house meaning, to greet the unbidden guest, then the reader must remain vigilant. Guilt and blame can offer as much sanctuary as open hands and forgiveness. It is a hard truth that our stories shape how we come to know.
Sometimes we get lucky. The story that might have broken us has been lost or retold, and we can look back and learn. In the current narrative of autism, for instance, we do not attribute the cause of a child’s withdrawal to parenting, to a failure to bond with or properly nurture a child. We know that it is a developmental disorder, a genetically wired way of knowing that shows itself most dramatically around the time that a child should be acquiring language and learning the cues that help establish familial and social ties. Not long ago, however, another narrative framed how doctors and parents saw autism. Oddly, the storyteller is a familiar figure, Bruno Bettelheim.
Less than a decade before penning The Uses of Enchantment, in 1967, Bettelheim published his influential study of autism entitled The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. Having already gained a national and international reputation for research asserting that autism emerged from an individual’s deep rejection of the world, he wrote of initially being disturbed by but curious about children whom he saw as deliberately turning their backs on the world. “If we could understand which isolated aspects of reality were so abortive of humanity as to snuff it out,” he asserts in the introduction, “there might be something constructive we could do.” Quite tragically, here is the story that he told: inadequate mothering at critical stages of development led to catastrophic rejection and resulted in various evils, including schizophrenia and autism. In other words, “refrigerator mothers,” as they came to be called, inflicted psychological wounds severe enough to cause the child to reject the world and turn inward. In this narrative, little imaginative distance existed between the stepmother and witch of “Hansel and Gretel” and the flawed mothers of Bettelheim. Ultimately, parents were told that the child with autism could only be reborn in intensive therapy, separated from the mother, and outside the home. And so Bettelheim formed the Orthogenic School, a supposed sanctuary where the driven out, the Hansels and Gretels, were fed gingerbread and families waited for the return.
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