that kids must learn to sleep alone to build independence. She responded, “They’re independent all day long. Can’t they have a little nighttime cuddling and connectedness?” Then she stepped way out of bounds: “What do you wear to bed, Doctor? Do you sleep alone to build up
your
independence?” She was trespassing and she knew it, throwing off the kind of question Berlin/Freud would never answer. But in spite of the teasing and questioning, and the alien cultural landscape of psychiatry and psychotherapy, we loved Dr. Berlin and credited him with saving us from sliding into serious despair. We were experiencing the hard truth that parents have had to learn through the ages: you are only as happy as your least happy child.
A few years later, when we moved to Chicago, Chesa met twice a week with Dr. Bennett Leventhal—a lifesaver for sure—at his open, sunny office at the University of Chicago. It was quite a contrast: family photos, games, toys, gardening on the roof and art materials everywhere, the walls decorated with children’s drawings. My favorite was a giant, framed painting of a toddler-drawn tadpole person, thick-lined smiling face without a body, legs and arms dangling precariously from the head with the dictated words along the side: “Dear Dr. Leventhal, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Love, Aaron.” Aaron somehow channeled every kid in crisis with a parent or a teacher or a shrink—he said it all—and it echoed Jean Boudin’s painful proclamation: “I love you and I hate you.” Leventhal was fully engaged and completely there for us. We met often, and he met as well with Jean and Leonard, talked on the phone and corresponded with David and Kathy, and even went to visit Kathy in prison once, well aware that he had inherited a hugely unique blended family. He was also a normal enough guy around the neighborhood—we’d see him at the market or the park, and always at Little League games because one of his sons was in Chesa’s class and on the baseball team that Bernardine coached with our friend Rashid Khalidi.
Things got easier and better, and yet when Chesa was ten and Leventhal told us that his therapy could at long last come to an end and that the kid would be fine without it, we were nonplussed: Don’t abandon us, I thought. Bernardine said, “I didn’t know that therapy ever came to an end; I thought your professional code dictated that once you guys got your hooks into somebody treatment continued forever.” We all laughed, but Leventhal added sagely, “Your family’s been organized around having a troubled kid, and he’s no longer troubled; for years, every relationship has had to bend toward that reality, but reality has shifted, and now every relationship has to shift along with it.”
Soon after that Bernardine came home from work looking as if she’d been run over by a truck. All week she’d been interviewing kids locked in mental institutions as part of a class action lawsuit she’d helped organize on behalf of abused and neglected children, and all the interviews were heart-breaking, but she had spent two hours that day talking “with a kid who could have been Chesa.” Their life stories overlapped eerily: both were ten years old, both had lost their parents at fourteen months, and both sets of parents were now doing life sentences in prison. But one was beginning to thrive and the world was opening up for him, while the other was trapped in a secured facility writing poetry in a tiny notebook, abandoned, fiercely making his own meaning, disappeared from the known world. Of course, the youngster she’d interviewed didn’t have a relatively stable family to fall into as well as psychiatrists, reading tutors, speech specialists, neurologists, and a wealthy grandfather to pay for it all. But it was just too close for her that day, too harrowing and upsetting—a clear reminder, as if she needed one, of the fickleness of fate, and more to the point of her legal
your
independence?” She was trespassing and she knew it, throwing off the kind of question Berlin/Freud would never answer. But in spite of the teasing and questioning, and the alien cultural landscape of psychiatry and psychotherapy, we loved Dr. Berlin and credited him with saving us from sliding into serious despair. We were experiencing the hard truth that parents have had to learn through the ages: you are only as happy as your least happy child.
A few years later, when we moved to Chicago, Chesa met twice a week with Dr. Bennett Leventhal—a lifesaver for sure—at his open, sunny office at the University of Chicago. It was quite a contrast: family photos, games, toys, gardening on the roof and art materials everywhere, the walls decorated with children’s drawings. My favorite was a giant, framed painting of a toddler-drawn tadpole person, thick-lined smiling face without a body, legs and arms dangling precariously from the head with the dictated words along the side: “Dear Dr. Leventhal, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. Love, Aaron.” Aaron somehow channeled every kid in crisis with a parent or a teacher or a shrink—he said it all—and it echoed Jean Boudin’s painful proclamation: “I love you and I hate you.” Leventhal was fully engaged and completely there for us. We met often, and he met as well with Jean and Leonard, talked on the phone and corresponded with David and Kathy, and even went to visit Kathy in prison once, well aware that he had inherited a hugely unique blended family. He was also a normal enough guy around the neighborhood—we’d see him at the market or the park, and always at Little League games because one of his sons was in Chesa’s class and on the baseball team that Bernardine coached with our friend Rashid Khalidi.
Things got easier and better, and yet when Chesa was ten and Leventhal told us that his therapy could at long last come to an end and that the kid would be fine without it, we were nonplussed: Don’t abandon us, I thought. Bernardine said, “I didn’t know that therapy ever came to an end; I thought your professional code dictated that once you guys got your hooks into somebody treatment continued forever.” We all laughed, but Leventhal added sagely, “Your family’s been organized around having a troubled kid, and he’s no longer troubled; for years, every relationship has had to bend toward that reality, but reality has shifted, and now every relationship has to shift along with it.”
Soon after that Bernardine came home from work looking as if she’d been run over by a truck. All week she’d been interviewing kids locked in mental institutions as part of a class action lawsuit she’d helped organize on behalf of abused and neglected children, and all the interviews were heart-breaking, but she had spent two hours that day talking “with a kid who could have been Chesa.” Their life stories overlapped eerily: both were ten years old, both had lost their parents at fourteen months, and both sets of parents were now doing life sentences in prison. But one was beginning to thrive and the world was opening up for him, while the other was trapped in a secured facility writing poetry in a tiny notebook, abandoned, fiercely making his own meaning, disappeared from the known world. Of course, the youngster she’d interviewed didn’t have a relatively stable family to fall into as well as psychiatrists, reading tutors, speech specialists, neurologists, and a wealthy grandfather to pay for it all. But it was just too close for her that day, too harrowing and upsetting—a clear reminder, as if she needed one, of the fickleness of fate, and more to the point of her legal
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