Communication between one person and another seems primary to us, spontaneous, natural—effortless. A mother speaks to her child from the earliest hours of life. She looks at him with the love that rises from her heart, expressed in her gaze, in her smile. A nurse places the baby in her arms or takes him back; both understand that their gestures of great tenderness correspond to the mystery of knowledge and love contained in that tiny person.
From the womb itself, the child senses well-being and suffering. From birth, without quite knowing it, he enters into contact with the outside world through his senses, through affection, and then, without warning, through intelligence, which awakens. Even more: he perceives anguish and love. In his vulnerability, he can grow and develop only if a vital communion is established between him and those around him.
Yet sometimes this relationship between person and person fails. It becomes impossible. Some children, sometimes from the first month of life, seem deaf. They are not. They see everything, hear everything. All five senses are intact. And yet they do not connect with the world around them. Parents discover gradually that the child is sealed off within himself. The heart, affection, seem never to have been awakened. Now silent and cold, even hostile, now aggressive, like a stranger to himself (he often speaks of himself in the third person), he uses only certain words of his choosing, grows as if his imaginary world were the real world, reducing to almost nothing the life of relationship with those around him.
Parents discover gradually that the child is sealed off within himself
Medicine has named this disability—so painful for the child himself, for the family, for relatives—"childhood psychosis." This still poorly understood illness presents very different symptoms and varying degrees of severity. In its severe form it is called "autism."Discovering this withdrawal in a child constitutes one of the heaviest trials parents can face. There are indeed mental handicaps, even very severe ones, that leave the child not only intact but sometimes heightened in his capacity for joy and sorrow, expressions of affection and rejection. Parents of a psychotic child do not have even this consolation. They reach their child's heart, his person, poorly or scarcely at all. What would they not give to receive a smile of gratitude, to discover a sign of joy, to catch the secret yet certain tremor of affection and love!
It must be acknowledged: it is almost inevitable that these parents ask themselves questions, and often these circle around their own guilt. What did we do to cause our child to suffer this way? "Why can't I, his mother, understand what he needs? Why can't I reach him where he is? Why this indifference? This strangeness? This aggression with no apparent cause?"
In the impossibility of finding an answer, there is the risk of sinking into corrosive guilt. Yet it is so fundamental not to let oneself be overwhelmed by this sense of guilt. Because even if some parents, especially through their own fragility and personal wounds, had not been sufficiently welcoming and affectionate with their child, God is near them. With infinite tenderness, He came not to judge, but to heal and to save.
Only when the question "Am I responsible or not?" has been surpassed can we begin to reach the secret of the child. It is in faith and with trust that one can live with a child like this, ceaselessly recognizing that he is a person, endlessly remembering that God dwells in him.
From encounters with many parents, I learned gradually that what they seek in their deepest hearts is not that we ignore their suffering, nor that we add our sorrow to theirs, nor that we let them hope for miraculous healing, nor that we try to free them from guilt with arguments however sound. One thing they want: to receive light and strength, and to reach the hidden mystery of their child in whom God, He alone, recognizes His own son.
—Marie Hélène Mathieu, 1984
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