None of the baby books said anything about this. Dante would not stop crying. He wasn’t hungry, not thirsty, not too hot nor too cold. He wasn’t wet and he wasn’t alone. Stacia remembered she had one of those little round activity centers that her sister had given her at the baby shower. Because it was for older babies, she hadn’t even taken it out of its wrappings.
Since a three month old can’t hold himself upright, she rolled up towels and placed them all around Dante so that he could sit in the little fabric seat in the middle of the activity center. In front of him were buttons and knobs, musical instruments and other easy to manipulate toys. The moment she placed him down, Dante became quiet and got to work with the little toys. Could it be that her three month old son had been…bored?
When he was two and a half, Stacia went into Dante’s room late one night to straighten his covers.
“What are you doing up so late?” she asked.
“I’ve been thinking about the number twelve. Twelve breaks into threes and fours and twos. Isn’t that so pretty, mommy?”
Division.
At four, a neighbor at church asked Dante, “How high can you count, young man?” “Numbers don’t end,” he explained. “They go to infinity.”
“Oh! Well, yes. Yes, of course….they…do.”
Dante loved numbers. In elementary school, Dante would spend hours decorating the house with numbers that corresponded to the days of school. The numbers were written on little symbols—either fall maple leaves, pumpkins, Thanksgiving turkeys, Christmas trees, Valentine’s hearts, spring flowers or suns. Each symbol corresponded to the season during the school year in which the numbered school day occurred. They symbols were taped in order on the walls of the house. Where a doorway interfered with his order, Dante strung yarn, and found a way to hang his numbers across the yarn. The house was filled with his beloved numbers. Similarly, Dante loved clocks and keeping track of time. Every moment of life had an associated set of numbers. Joy.
People were not as predictable, reliable and as easy to understand as numbers. When Stacia said they would eat dinner at 5:30, Dante would become extremely agitated at every minute that passed following that time. 5:34 was so unacceptable that Dante would scream, “Why did you LIE to me?”
By the time he was nine, Dante had decided that the world was filled with liars. “I’ll be there in a minute,” was at least as much of a deception as a cheerful, “Just a second!”
The timing of televised sports games as in, “There’s only two minutes remaining,” felt scandalous to Dante. Two minutes in sports was at least ten minutes in real clock time.
Language itself had so many hidden meanings that Dante was exhausted searching for them. People said his mom Stacia was “on fire” when she sang and, it turns out, she was definitely not on fire; she wasn’t even feeling unusually warm when she sang. They spoke of a “monkey wrench in the works” when there was no monkey to be found in any room in the house.
Stacia just wanted to have family dinner together with Dante without fighting. She, too, was exhausted. Translating the world for Dante who argued every point had taken so much of the happiness out of mothering.
Carson’s In Home Therapy team came to help. They started by introducing Dante to the idea that most people talk in averages, in approximation—most of the time, they mean something close to what they say, but not exactly what they say.
“Only math is perfect,” his In Home Therapist told him. It’s a big idea for Dante, with lots of applications. So that’s where they are. Practicing.
When they are stuck in traffic and his mom despairs, “We’re never going to get anywhere!” Dante remembers what his Carson team told him. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t panic. He says to himself, “Yes, we are. It’s just going to take longer than we thought.”
By JAC Patrissi
