Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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СКАЧАТЬ truck. As it had been all along, the children’s behavior remained quiet and directed. The students and their bus driver made use of the mattresses, the few flashlights, and the bit of food left for them in the van. The older students looked after the younger ones, as the children mostly slept and sat in the dark and waited until far into the next day for what would come next. What came next was that, heavy with dirt, the roof of the moving truck began to collapse. Spurred into action by this immediate, life-threatening emergency, the driver and some older kids stacked the mattresses high, and they found a way to move the metal plate and dig their way out. The children expected to be shot when they emerged from the truck, but instead they stumbled into nothingness in the middle of nowhere.

      After finding help, the children were taken to a nearby prison where they were given hamburgers, apple pie, and brief physical examinations. None of the students were shaking or screaming or falling apart, so the doctors declared that they were “all right.” Only two kids connected the word kidnapping to the experience they had just lived through. According to Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist who later worked closely with the families, “Nobody else in the group had known what to call it.”

      ***

      That same summer on the East Coast, a six-year-old girl named Emily and her thirteen-year-old babysitter were spending a Sunday playing board games. Emily’s neighborhood was an orderly grid of tree-lined streets, where large, old homes were set back tastefully from the sidewalks, and sidewalks were set back tastefully from the street. It was a neighborhood where no one said no to anyone; that was not neighborly. And certainly no child said no to an adult; that was not polite. So when the red-faced man from down the block pounded on Emily’s front door while Emily’s parents and her twin brothers were at a baseball game, the babysitter flung the door wide. And when the man pushed past both girls and charged into the kitchen looking first for Emily’s father and then for something in the kitchen, both of them did their best to help.

      Slurring his words, the man rifled through the cabinets demanding to know where the liquor was, yet Emily thought he was saying pickles. “Where are the pickles? I know your father has pickles! Where does your father keep his goddamn pickles?” the angry man yelled, more into the cabinets than at the uneasy girls shifting around nearby.

      This was confusing. Pickles were kept in the refrigerator, not the cabinets. And it was Emily’s mom who pulled out the pickles for sandwiches, not her dad. Emily looked in the refrigerator but there were no pickles that day. She told the man this—over and over—but he went on searching for pickles in all the wrong places, knocking boxes of macaroni and crackers on the floor.

      This did not make sense.

      When the angry man left, Emily and her babysitter went back to their board game. They acted as if nothing had happened because nothing had happened that they could explain.

      When Emily’s parents and the twins returned, the babysitter reported what she could, and now it was Emily’s mom who looked angry. Emily’s parents whispered forcefully to each other in the next room, using some words Emily did not understand. Her mom hissed the word “alcoholic.” Her dad said “fucking New Jersey blue laws.” The conversation ended with her mom saying in a strange tone: “Of course you’re his first stop when he runs out on a Sunday . . .”

      All Emily could piece together was this: There was something wrong with Emily’s father, and some people—like their neighbor—might know about it.

      ***

      Watching a man ransack your kitchen is surely not as terrifying as being snatched off your school bus at gunpoint. Yet as different as these two stories seem, both tell us something important about what many children—and even many adults—do when they are afraid: They tend to go on behaving as usual. This comes partly from a wish that life would go on behaving as usual, a wish that if we just keep acting normal then everything and everyone around us will go back to being normal, too. But this is also what our brains tell us to do.

      Remember that when the amygdala detects a threat in the environment, it fires up a state of preparedness or a “readiness to behave.” What it means to behave, however, depends on the situation. Maybe we get ready for a fight, or maybe we get ready for flight. Yet because children are often outmatched by bigger, stronger, faster adults, fight and flight can feel like options they do not have. This leaves children feeling helpless and vulnerable and, in that case, the best thing may be to take it easy, to make no sudden moves. Go along to get along. Be quiet in every way.

      If the amygdala is the “hub in the wheel of fear,” then the part of the brain called Broca’s area is the hub in the wheel of speech. It takes what we are seeing and hearing and feeling and puts it into words; then it signals the motor cortex to produce those words. Research on the brain shows that, for some people, when there is greater activity in the amygdala there is less activity in Broca’s area. In the face of terror, as the amygdala fires up, Broca’s area quiets down and so does the individual. This is likely the neurological basis for being scared speechless, and there is clearly adaptive value in not drawing attention to yourself—say, by shrieking and letting a nearby lion know you are hiding terrified in the bushes. This is probably why one boy who was on the school bus that day in Chowchilla reported later that he had simply been “too scared to cry.”

      When the brain is overwhelmed with fright, the words do not come and cannot come, and this is especially true for experiences that are unusual or without familiar labels. From both Emily’s story and the children of Chowchilla, it seems clear that often children are not only too scared to cry; they are too confused to cry as well. Even when Broca’s area is active and ready to do its job, we cannot put experiences into words if we do not have the words to work with. Much of life is pattern recognition, as what we see links up with what we know. We call a banana a banana—and we know it is a fruit—because we learned that in preschool. A round orange object could be a different piece of fruit such as a tangerine, or it could be a basketball, depending on its size and on how it feels and smells. All day, every day, our ordinary moments link up with words and categories we already know. This is how we talk about what we see.

      Sometimes, though, things happen and we do not have the words or categories to match them. We have experiences we cannot name, and naming can be especially difficult for children who have lived less of life and who have fewer labels at their disposal. In moments like these, children need others to help them articulate their reality. Otherwise, they are left with a sort of alexithymia, or the inability to put feelings and experiences into words. We are all alexithymic as infants—the root in fans means “not speaking”—and as we grow, we label our inner and outer world with help from those around. People in our lives say, “That’s a car!” or “You’re tired!” or “That hurt!” and we say, “Yes!” When complicated grown-up problems do not fit with the words that children have—when no one says, “That’s an alcoholic!”—they are left with the silent awareness that something important and frightening, yet unspeakable, has gone on.

      In her graphic memoir, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel details a camping trip she went on when she was ten years old, a weekend that was part of her origin story. While her mother stayed home, Bechdel was accompanied by her brothers, her father, and a young man who was one of her father’s secret gay lovers. Also on this trip, Bechdel stumbled across pornography for the first time, held a gun for the first time, and saw a giant snake in a riverbed. Years later, she would find this diary entry from the trip: “Saw a snake. Had lunch.” The rest of it went unsaid for more than a decade. “My feeble language skills simply could not bear the weight of such a laden experience,” she rightly concluded about her ten-year-old self.

      Just as the children of Chowchilla could not begin to understand where they were going when they were driving around in those vans, neither could Emily make sense of why a man would angrily search her kitchen for pickles. No one ever explained that the slurring man СКАЧАТЬ