Chapter Twenty-Two “He’s a Tyler!”
Twenty-two
“He’s a Tyler!”
During the first few months of Alex’s life, I found my footing as a mother.
I saw my job as keeping Alex healthy and safe in our well-protected den, and with every passing day, I got more confident that I was up to that task.
But after Maxwell and Epstein’s back-to-back intrusions, that confidence crumbled.
The thought of the two of them tracking my family’s location kept me up at night.
Just like that, my former abusers had stolen my peace of mind.
With Robbie away at work each day, I stopped leaving Alex alone, even for a minute—when he napped, I sat in the rocking chair in his room, keeping watch.
Robbie was worried, too—not only about the danger Epstein and Maxwell posed but also about my fragile psyche.
He made the decision that we would stay with his parents in Sydney until our second child was born.
We all had to cram into one of Nina and Frank’s guest bedrooms, but we made it work.
Tyler Shane Giuffre, who smiled for the first time when he was just a few days old, brought happiness into our hearts again.
I had my hands full with two kids, and we were on a tight budget, since Robbie was the only one working.
But we more than made the best of it. After we moved back home, when Tyler was three months old, we got a kitten, whom we named Sophie, who joined Champ in our ever-growing menagerie.
We kept up our weekly outings to Featherdale National Park, where, at four months old, Tyler pet his first koala bear.
At night I held my boys close as I read them Curious George and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
When I needed a break, I let them watch Sesame Street and The Wiggles on TV, and Tyler developed a fixation on Thomas the Tank Engine.
At eight months old, Tyler started crawling, and soon I was finding train tracks everywhere I went.
I’d be cleaning the house when I’d stumble over a vast toy transportation hub.
“Boys?” I’d call out to my sons. “How am I supposed to vacuum around this?!”
In April 2008, when Tyler turned one, I answered a prompt in his baby book—“Describe a typical day”—like this: “Not much changes around here. We eat, sleep, poop, play and do it all over again.” But there was something else I didn’t write down: I was beginning to worry about my youngest boy.
Something wasn’t right. I just sensed it.
Tyler was crying all the time. As he learned to walk, we’d jokingly called him the Drunken Master, because he wobbled and fell a lot.
But it wasn’t funny anymore. At times, it seemed he had trouble focusing.
At other times, like when he wanted to run straight into a swimming pool or attempt some other dangerous activity, I couldn’t distract him from his goal, no matter what I did.
More than once, I’d had to jump fully clothed into bodies of water to save Tyler, even though I had been watching him like a hawk.
(How many cell phones had I ruined that way?) One friend recommended I put Tyler on a leash.
I balked at the thought, but eventually I gave in.
A leash was the only way to keep him safe.
At this point, Tyler was almost completely nonverbal.
He’d indicate something he wanted with his eyes, or by yelling when you touched it.
Someone told me it wasn’t uncommon for second children to talk later than firstborns did—something about the younger one letting the older one speak for them.
But when Tyler began banging his head on the floor, I went in search of help.
“It feels like he just wants to be heard, but he can’t get the words out,” I said, guessing at what I thought my second son was feeling.
More than one doctor brushed off my concerns, treating me like a helicopter parent.
But I didn’t give up. “Please,” I said again and again. “I just know there’s something wrong.”
I enrolled Alex in a preschool near our home in Chester Hill, so I would have more time to focus on our youngest. Soon I was ferrying Tyler from speech therapy to occupational therapy, and Tyler and I became regulars at a sort of “Mommy & Me” for nonverbal kids—he’d play with other children, I’d sit with the other parents (mostly moms) and trade stories about what was and wasn’t working for us.
Some moms swore by special gluten-free diets for their kids, which I dutifully tried.
Cooking a whole separate meal for Tyler was a hassle, but I was willing to do anything to make his life better.
In Tyler’s case, at least, special diets seemed to make no difference at all, so I eventually abandoned that.
But there was nothing I wouldn’t try. I took him to an alternative healer who practiced iridology, which looks for clues about a person’s health by studying the irises of their eyes.
We’d gotten him a helmet to protect his head.
But he still got blood blisters from all the headbanging.
Often he awoke in the middle of the night screaming, and he was utterly dependent on pacifiers to calm him down.
On one particularly hard day, another mother handed me an essay that she said had helped her. It’s called “Welcome to Holland,” by Emily Perl Kingsley, and as I read it—sitting in a parking lot, with Tyler screaming in his car seat behind me—it made me laugh and cry at the same time.
“When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy,” it begins.
“You buy a bunch of guidebooks, and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.
You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands.
The flight attendant comes in and says, ‘Welcome to Holland.’ ”
Holland is not what you signed up for, the essay—which Kingsley, a writer for Sesame Street, composed after her son was born with Down syndrome—explains.
“I’m supposed to be in Italy,” you protest. “All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.
” But there’s been a change of plans, and Holland is where you must stay.
So you do. “The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place,” the essay says.
“It’s just a different place.” Holland is slower paced and less flashy than Italy, but it has windmills and tulips and Rembrandts.
Sure, everyone you know is “coming and going from Italy. They’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.
And for the rest of your life, you’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go.
That’s what I had planned.’ The pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away…
because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.
“But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things…about Holland.”
This made a lot of sense to me. I had initially felt sad that Tyler’s behavior as a toddler wasn’t like Alex’s.
But that was just me torturing myself with thoughts of Italy.
I loved Tyler, and he’d taken us to Holland.
I resolved to embrace where my second-born child actually was, not my fantasies of where another child might have been.
Certainly, life didn’t get easier right away.
It was around this time that a cop car rear-ended Robbie, leaving him with three bulging disks.
Suddenly my husband was almost completely unable to help me with the boys—he couldn’t bend over and pick either of them up without feeling excruciating pain.
At times I was so tired at the end of the day that I’d fall asleep midway through a Dr. Seuss book.
One day at Robbie’s parents’ house, Alex was in the backyard, picking figs from the tree and putting them in a bucket.
I went in the house to wash my hands, but I must’ve dozed off on the couch for a minute, because when I woke up, he’d eaten the entire bucket of figs.
I won’t spell out for you exactly what that many figs can do to a three-year-old’s digestive tract.
You can imagine that for yourself. But the point is that I was tired.
Many days, Robbie would come home from work to find one boy breastfeeding, the other in an automatic swing set that we called the Nap-o-Matic because it put babies right to sleep, and me in the middle, at my wit’s end.
I’d shoot my husband a death stare that said, “You’re going to die a horrible death for doing this to me. ”