my son, and he was both punching me and burrowing into me at the same time, and I stayed silent because I know by now saying anything in this type of situation is not a good idea. I just wanted to sit through the inevitable questions and comments, give the right answers and then go home, with DCF off my back, because that’s what happened before.
But this time it didn’t.
It didn’t because I was already on DCF’s radar, which I know sounds suspect. Even the most laid-back liberal person starts to look a little prim when they hear that DCF is involved. Their eyes narrow and their mouths purse and they say, well, what really happened? in a tone that suggests anything you say won’t be reason enough for someone’s child to be taken away, because only monsters have that happen to them.
So here it is: the first time DCF was called, it was by Dylan’s father, Marco. Dylan was two years old and he’d started to demonstrate symptoms—of what, we didn’t know and still don’t. Back then he was too young for most diagnoses—autism, ADHD, the nebulous PDD, or pervasive development disorder, when they can’t decide what’s wrong. The pediatrician, when I took Dylan at eighteen months old, told us to wait and see, and I was happy to do that, relieved to kick that particular can further down the road. But Marco had had enough of the sleepless nights, the tantrums that started for no good reason and sometimes didn’t end for hours, the terror of many household things that led to the aforementioned shrieking, the constant clinging to me—and one night, in boozed-up desperation, he called DCF and said he wanted to commit “voluntary relinquishment.” He’d looked it up on the internet; it’s basically where you give up your own child.
Fortunately, because I certainly didn’t want to give him up, and in any case, thankfully, it doesn’t actually work like that, no one took Dylan away. Still, DCF had a duty to get involved, and so we received a couple of visits. Our home, a shabby little duplex in Elmwood, was inspected, and we were referred to a pediatric psychiatrist all the way in Middletown, because none of the ones near us in West Hartford who accepted HUSKY—Connecticut’s Medicaid program for children—had room on their waiting lists.
I went to that first appointment, even though I was dreading it. Dylan didn’t do well on the bus—Marco said he had to take the car to work, even though he’d known about the appointment—and then the hour-long wait, even with all the toys and books available, strung us both out even more until Dylan was clinging to me like a monkey and burying his head in my shoulder. By the time we arrived in the examining room, he was about two minutes away from a meltdown.
And that’s just what he did, flinging himself on the floor while the psychiatrist, a stern-looking woman with permed hair and deep frown lines, looked on and wrote notes; the scratch of her pen made my own anxiety skyrocket. What was she writing—about what a terrible mother I was?
“I don’t think this is going to work,” I said, as I both tried to catch Dylan’s arms to keep him from hurting himself and sound reasonable.
“This isn’t about Dylan being on his best behavior,” she told me in a teacherish voice. She leaned forward, her expression intent as she spoke calmly. “Dylan, I see that you’re upset and tired. Maybe you’re frightened because of this new situation. But you cannot kick and hurt people, even when you feel that way.”
Dylan didn’t listen to a word she said, not that he would have understood, at just two and a half years old. It was undoubtedly all straight out of a parenting manual, or Psychology 101, and basically useless when it comes to the actual moment, such as it was.
I didn’t go back. DCF called and asked why I’d missed the next appointment, and then they visited us at home, and fortunately Dylan was having a good day, so they finally left us alone. For a while.
The second and last time we came onto DCF’s radar was when Dylan was five. By that time we were completely off the grid when it came to parenting—the playgroups, the story times, the Mommy and Me sessions that most parents seemed to go to, their worlds revolving around each other and their kids—cut-up carrot sticks, picnics in the park, wine o’clock