I searched. One was of the very first child I had ever worked with. Her name was Mary and she was four at the time. I was a college student, working as an aide in a preschool program for disadvantaged children. Mary was my first experience of elective mutism, where the individual, usually a child, is able to speak normally but refuses to do so for psychological reasons. In Mary’s case she had been badly traumatized by what I now suspect was sexual abuse, although this was back in the days before such things were generally recognized. Whatever the etiology, she was terrified of men and spent much of her time at school hiding under the piano. I was charged with the job of developing a relationship with Mary. Like Venus, Mary had been very unresponsive too, although not to the degree Venus was. She had also refused all the staff ’s usual methods of involving her in classroom activities. I was inexperienced and idealistic, so I’d never considered the possibility that Mary was too damaged or had too low an IQ to respond. I’d crawled down on my hands and knees under the piano day after day, talking to her even though she never talked back, reading to her when I finally ran out of words. It was a long, slow process over many months, but in the end Mary did form a relationship with me and eventually she did start talking again. I mulled back over the memory, reliving those long-ago moments spent under that piano that even now stood out in my mind for its unusual color – it had been splatter painted, a zillion white points of paint on a dark turquoise background, like snowflakes against the winter twilight.
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