My presence in my small daughter's life was so extravagant that even when we were apart, it was as if I were still there. That was what I'd had in mind, of course -- that she would "internalize" my presence, that I would be so much in the life of her mind, she would have a sense of my comforting presence even when I was far away. Not that I ever was far away.

It didn't occur to me that maybe she shouldn't have a sense of my comforting presence all the time -- that perhaps she did need to know what lonely, what in-need, what without-me felt like. That even an internalization of another person might be too much company, year round, round-the-clock.

I try to imagine now what the forever hovering in Silas's future -- the forever without his mother; the forever for a child without a mother -- could have meant to my daughter at four, at five, when she didn't even know the meaning of a minute without me. It must have been more terrifying -- can such a thing be possible? -- than it would have been for another child, one who had the slightest sense that he could manage on his own, that he existed on his own, apart and separate from his mother.

* * *

It's possible that there has never been a mother with better intentions. But it didn't matter how good my intentions were; I failed my daughter. There is simply no other way to look at it. Or -- a more precise way for me to say this, and the way that pains me most -- it was because of my intentions that I failed her. If we ended up stalled, lost, under a pitiless sky in a place I'd never meant for us to go, I can blame no one but myself. I paved the road myself -- using a map I'd drawn myself -- with my excellent intentions. The proverbial road; the road to hell.

The first tiny flames, I now believe, began to lick at Grace's feet, so that I had to jump back, still holding her in my arms, while she was still an infant -- before she knew anything; only felt. I was all feelings too; the difference was that I thought I knew things, and I had words for everything I knew. I had plans and ideas. A baby has nothing -- no ideas, no plans, no words, no thoughts, no understanding. And yet. And yet.

I believe now that even then the baby knew something I didn't.

When she suddenly stopped crying for three hours every night and her hunger strike began, I didn't wonder at the synchronism -- I was just relieved I didn't have to deal with both at once. But what I wonder now is whether the end of the "the fourth trimester" -- her little brain clicking into place, her whole self shifting from part-of-me to a separate being, still mine but her own too -- allowed her a more sophisticated way, a more specific way, to register a protest. Against me. Against my good intentions.

Get out of my face, Mama.

That's what she was saying -- I'm almost sure of it now. But I couldn't hear it then.

* * *

Grace is six. It is the summer before first grade, and we have made a toy boat together, out of a four-by-ten-inch rectangle of Styrofoam and a couple of popsicle sticks, aluminum foil and a sheet of green construction paper. It isn't very seaworthy (our forte is art, not engineering) and after we've floated it in the tub once and the construction paper sail is soaked through, it's pretty much a goner. Still, we keep it around for a while -- the way we keep everything around -- and it gets stepped on and kicked aside and eventually mangled, because "around" means on the floor in a corner of the playroom, mixed in with all kinds of other unclassifiable toys that aren't in bins, and toys not in bins always get stepped on and kicked aside.

Finally, when there is nothing much left of it -- the popsicle sticks have come loose from the Styrofoam base, which is chipped at all its corners and broken almost all the way through in the middle, the paper sail has crumpled, and the foil is hanging halfway off -- I throw it away. I don't often throw things away (we're a save-it-just-in-case kind of family, with a basement full of broken and defunct machines and furniture and miscellaneous items -- Glen's motorcycle helmet from when he had a motorcycle, five years before we met, two sets, his and mine, of rusting darkroom equipment, the bathroom sink I replaced when I bought the house -- to testify to that) and I know that Grace has inherited or learned -- or inherited and learned -- Glen's and my packrat tendencies, so something has to be truly useless, finished, of no possible worth to anyone at no time in the future, before I discard it.

The boat goes. And then, not too many days later, Grace asks for it and I have to tell her it's gone, and she cries. "I loved that boat. We made that boat. How could you have put it in the trash?" Naturally I feel awful -- she is weeping as if she's lost a loved one -- but I know this is excessive (her weeping, and my feeling awful, both) and I point out that it wasn't even a boat anymore, that it wasn't good for anything. I tell her we can make another boat. "A better boat," I say. "One that doesn't tip right over when you put it in the water. One that's properly balanced. Maybe Daddy could help us this time. Someone who knows what he's doing." I try to make her smile but she's still crying. "And we could put a sail on it that makes more sense. A sail made out of fabric, maybe." But she doesn't want another boat, she wants this boat. Children say this sort of thing all the time. Every parent knows this -- this is what I tell myself, trying to keep from feeling like the worst mother in the world. I know I didn't do anything awful, throwing the remains of a poorly homemade boat in the trash. But she sobs, I try to soothe her, and we both feel terrible.

But I have no ideahow terrible she feels. Or that the episode of the boat will be what pushes her over the edge. I didn't know she was on the edge. I didn't even know there was an edge for her to be on.

* * *

She begins to have nightmares about the boat. She wakes up screaming, and when I run into her room she's sitting up in bed weeping, thinking of the boat we'd made that's now buried in the city dump. In daylight, she asks me questions about what happens to trash, how and when it decomposes; she wants to know what the dump is like. She wants to know if I'll take her to visit the dump, and when I say no, she cries. She wants to find her boat, she says. She can't stop thinking about the boat, something she made with her own hands -- she says this again and again -- alone and rotting in a heap of other trash.

And she begins to be unable to throw any trash away. This creeps up on us, because at first it doesn't seem that different from what she's been doing since she was in kindergarten. And I begin to understand that it isn't -- but now it's clear that there is something wrong, that her behavior can't be written off to eccentricity or sensitivity, that it can't be written off at all. There's trash hidden all around the playroom and her bedroom, bags of crumpled paper everywhere because I'm still equivocating, "compromising," letting her keep paper trash -- but nothing dirty, I insist -- "just for a while," I say vaguely, because it is so painful for her to let it go. And I get the metaphor, naturally, and she and I talk about it, just as we have talk-talk-talked (so Grace says) about everything, her whole life -- -we talk about how hard it is to part from things, about loss and letting go -- but (as Grace points out) the talk-talk-talk isn't doing any good: she still feels bad. Very bad. And at the same time something else has started, something she calls "catching up." She mentions to me, with studied casualness, that if she bumps one foot -- "like this," she says, and shows me -- she has to follow up by bumping the other foot in the same way.

"What happens if you don't?" I ask her.

She gets a bad feeling, she tells me gravely.

"Would it help if I gave you a name for the bad feeling?" I ask her, and she says she doesn't know, maybe it would. So we talk about anxiety. But for once -- maybe for more than once -- names don't help, and now she'll see me watching her when she half-trips on a hitch in the playroom rug, and goes back over it to make herself stumble again, and she says, "I can't help it. The anxiety made me do it."

The trash-saving has gotten worse, too, bad enough so that her first grade teacher calls me to talk about it, asks me if I can do something about it -- and she doesn't even know that Grace is picking things up off the street (broken bits of plastic, string, empty packages) and begging to take them home with her.

She begins now each night to insist that the towers of stuffed animals that have long "slept with" her in her bed have to be arranged just so; if one falls, she sits up and restacks all of them. The three pillows have to be step-staired behind her head precisely, two inches of pillow showing between each; the three blankets she uses in winter smoothed out so that their ends match up, so that everything is even. The equalizing of bumps and trips, the "catching up," has become by now so much a part of her day, of her life, that it is interfering with her play, her sleep, her daytime concentration. She tells me she can mostly keep it under control at school, and if she can't, she does it secretly. But the stress of keeping the impulse to "catch up" at school takes its toll, and when she gets home she is a bundle of tics for hours, and she is exhausted. At school she's so tightly wound it seems to me a miracle she's learning anything.

* * *

We are on the way to Cincinnati, a two-hour drive, to see a psychiatrist I have been assured will not automatically pronounce Grace obsessive-compulsive and offer a prescription to drug her symptoms into submission. Someone who will take the time to determine what the underlying dynamics of Grace's symptoms are and help us deal with what's causing them.

I've already spent countless hours on the phone trying to find a psychiatrist in Columbus who specializes in the treatment of children and is analytically trained, someone who won't jump to the most obvious conclusion and provide a quick fix -- the easy, the cheap, the modern route -- and so I am unfazed by a roundtrip of four hours for a two-hour consultation. I'm still angry, as we set out, which is all right: it keeps me going, keeps me focused and strong despite how much I have always disliked driving and how phobic I am about highway-driving in particular. Besides, the feeling is mutual. The general consensus in the Columbus psychiatric community about me seems to be that I'm nuts, maybe in need of a good psychotropic drug myself.

So we are going all the way to Cincinnati to see Dr. Knox. It is a trip I will make numerous times over the next few weeks, so that she can talk to Grace -- so that Grace can talk to her -- and a thorough diagnosis can be made. If Dr. Knox determines that the trouble is a neurobiological disorder that has to be biochemically treated, so be it; but if, as I suspect, Grace's symptoms are trying to tell us something, I want to know what they're saying, not just shut them up.

Another symptom has been added to the mix in the days leading up to this trip -- a need to tell me everything that's on her mind, every passing stray thought, no matter how trivial -- and at the same time the other symptoms, especially the "catching up," has gotten worse. The combination of the new symptom and the catch-ups is especially disturbing, as much of what's on Grace's mind now is the catching up. So that the night before we leave for Cincinnati, for example, before she finally passed out from sheer exhaustion, she sat up in bed talking nonstop to me for hours -- a frantic rapid-fire monologue her own mouth can hardly keep pace with, as she simultaneously describes what happened at school that day and what she thinks about it now and oh, now I just thought about Tenara and I wondered what her day was like at school and I'm thinking about Mr. White and when he taught us about "organic shapes" last year, remember? and that shadow -- look, Mama -- it's an organic shape, what's it a shadow of? and the way the nightlight makes a shadow of the stuffed animals piled in a basket on the floor beside it and remember when you gave me this nightlight? and how her tongue just touched the roof of her mouth when she said that, and so now she has to touch her tongue to the roof of her mouth again and just when I did that I had to swallow, see, like this, so now I have to swallow the same way again and it's so hard for her to get everything out before it disappears forever she starts to cry, It's gone, Mama, I didn't get to tell you and now I've forgotten what it was, so that she's crying while she's talking, talking so fast I'm afraid she's going to hyperventilate, and I interrupt -- I take her hands in mine and say, Breathe, just breathe, ten times, slowly, and it's torture to her to stop talking even long enough to take a few deep breaths.

This has been going on for days. If she doesn't tell me that she just saw a shadow cross the wall, or that she heard a car honking outside, or that she just thought for a second about a girl in her class who spoke cruelly to her -- or the one who almost made her cry by saying something nice -- then that thought, that experience, will disappear forever, she says, I'll never know she had it and it won't be real, it will be lost forever -- and? I say, and she says then she won't be real, she will be lost forever.

She is still holding herself together, just barely, at school, but the instant she is out for the day, the instant she sees me waiting to pick her up, she rushes into my arms and starts talking, talking, talking. Her monologues give the lie to literary, artful, organized stream-of-consciousness -- just what I always told my students: if we really were to put things down exactly as they pass through our minds it would be unintelligible; even the most exhaustive-seeming stream of consciousness is about choice, about making choices -- and Grace has stopped making choices; she cannot make any choices. If she doesn't speak of every single thing that flies through her mind, if she tries at my urging to keep just one thought to herself for just a few seconds, to see how that feels, she is consumed by anxiety. "I know how it feels," she says, "and I hate how it feels. I can't."

Just as she can't keep from making things, everything, come out even. I beg her to sit with it for a minute, half a minute, see for herself that "the bad feeling" that fills her when she bumps her left knee and doesn't bump her right one right away won't drown her, won't eat her up -- won't do whatever she fears it will do. But she can't "sit with it." She has lost the ability to simply be.

And so we are on our way to Dr. Knox.

Grace is in the backseat talking a mile a minute and clicking and ticking away, pausing periodically ever so briefly to take the deep breaths that do help, at least a tiny bit, although after each deep breath she tries to fill in what I missed -- what she missed saying -- while she paused to take it. We are halfway there, and I say, "I need to talk for a minute, all right? Take a few deep breaths," and she does, gamely, tearfully, and I say, "Do you understand why we're going to see Dr. Knox? Who she is, what kind of doctor?"

"Yes," Grace says, and, "wait," and clicks her tongue against her teeth, explaining, "I had to click my tongue just then again because a second ago it clicked against my teeth on accident -- and now I have to put my tongue on the inside of my right cheek because it just -- "

"Take a deep breath," I tell her. "Take ten deep breaths. Slowly. Don't talk. Just breathe. Get some oxygen. Oxygen will help to calm you."

She does, and then she says, politely, "Right, thanks, Mama, that helped a little," and goes on, "Yes, I know who Dr. Knox is. She's Charlotte."

I truly had thought I was past being surprised, but what can this mean? Cautiously, I ask her, "Can you tell me why?"

"Of course I can," she says -- a break to click, to tap elbow to knee, finger to seatbelt buckle, wrist to the side of her booster seat, tongue to teeth again, and then her report on all of these activities -- "because Charlotte saved Wilbur, remember?"

Ah. "In Charlotte's Web, you mean."

"That's right, in Charlotte's Web. And Dr. Knox is going to save me."

I look at her in the rearview mirror. She's been drawn and pale for weeks; she's exhausted, and who wouldn't be, going through what she is? But for the moment she looks radiant. And humble.

* * *

It is Dr. Knox who disabuses me of the notion that I am doing everything right. She is all I have been promised and more -- both brilliant and wise, as well as sensible, patient, calm, thorough, gentle with Grace, and tough on me. Grace talks freely with her, usually while they sit on the floor playing. In the waiting room, I can sometimes hear them laughing; once, Grace comes out to show me a mechanical creature she has made -- it's battery-powered and can walk, forward and back -- with googly eyes and long wiggling springy arms. Grace tells Dr. Knox everything she can think of about our life at home, about school, about what she can remember from when she was younger, and about what she calls her "problems." On her first visit, Dr. Knox tells Glen and me, Grace sat down on the couch, crossed her legs, and in answer to the opening question, "Do you know why you're here?" said, "Yes, I have three big problems. Here's what they are: I save trash, I have to say everything I think, and I do this thing called catching-up" -- and she stood up to demonstrate the technique, running across the Persian rug, purposely tripping before she reaches the other side of it, then going back and re-tripping. "See?" She sat down again, folded her hands. "Oh, and there's a fourth sort of problem, too, I guess. I need to make sure everything around me is in order. Perfect order. I have to check again and again to make sure. This is called a checking compulsion" -- and, in case Dr. Knox thought she'd made that up -- "Mama told me that."

Then she waited for Dr. Knox to spin the words in her web that would save her.

The words are all for us, though. After several sessions with Grace, Dr. Knox arranges for an hour with Glen and me. We sit side by side on Dr. Knox's couch and listen to what she has to say, which is plenty. She tells us, first, that she does not believe that Grace is suffering from a biochemical disorder that requires pharmacological treatment, and I am so relieved I start to cry. But she goes on at once, without even a pause for breath, to say that this doesn't mean that the situation isn't serious, extremely serious, that we must understand -- her tone is so stern by now that I find myself shrinking in a way I haven't since my own childhood -- we have a very sick child on our hands.

This phrase is etched on my heart. Even thinking of it now, a little more than two weeks before Grace starts fourth grade herself, on a Monday morning half an hour before she's due at her friend Tenara's house to spend the day -- at least till three, when Glen will take her out to Hilliard for their double horseback riding lesson -- and in the meantime she's downstairs by herself practicing the Beatles' "Thank You, Girl" on her guitar, for that lesson on Thursday (and then -- I'm about to call down to remind her -- she has to change the bedding in her guinea pig's cage, and then the water in her fish's tank), I am lightheaded with fear.

But in Dr. Knox's office, I sit very straight. I don't speak. I just listen. She is purposely frightening us into action -- I will understand this later -- since it will be what we do, and especially what I do, that will be the most important part of Grace's "treatment" and she has to be sure we get this, she has to put things in the starkest, most frightening terms possible. And Grace is, at this moment, very sick. I don't know why it hurts so much to have someone say that -- to hear what I already know -- but as the psychiatrist in whom I have placed all my trust tells me that things will have to change at home, and right away, that there's no time to waste -- that indeed it's probably the first small changes that have recently occurred, changes Grace has talked about with Dr. Knox during her diagnostic sessions, some inevitable and some purposeful (Glen has started taking over for me at bedtime once a week; neither he nor I are lying down with her at night to help her fall asleep), that lit the fuse, "which needed to be lit. This is a good thing, not a bad thing," Dr. Knox adds quickly. "This needed to explode" -- and that Grace is likely to fight tooth and nail at every stage of what's ahead (and I remember as she says this the way Grace wailed, gasped, shrieked No! as if she had been told that someone she loved had just died, and then the wail turned into keening, when I let her know that I would not be lying down with her at bedtime anymore, that she would have to fall asleep on her own, by herself), I am so overcome with anxiety and dread I have to remind myself to take deep breaths.

* * *

The key will be helping Grace to get caught up -- "a different kind of 'catching up,' " Grace volunteers when I explain, in the simplest terms possible, what we will be doing, and why -- to where she is supposed to be. Her symptoms are the expression of a severe developmental delay around issues of "separation/individuation" -- this is the gist of what Dr. Knox tells us, and what we will continue to talk about with the therapist, a clinical psychologist named Dr. Meltzer, whom Grace will begin to see weekly in Columbus as Glen and I concentrate on making the changes at home that will help her to "catch up." Dr. Meltzer will point out, gently, that there will probably always be a lag between Grace's actual age and her intellectual age, at least until she is an adult, and that this gap makes the developmental gap even more pronounced and painful: the distance between her emotional and mental ages is vast. What we are to work on -- what we can work on -- is bringing her up to where a normal six-year-old should be in terms of feeling differentiated from her mother. Drs. Meltzer and Knox are in agreement that if we can help Grace do that, the symptoms will subside and eventually vanish.

And they're right. In retrospect, and written down, it sounds too simple-minded and to be true -- and it sounds easier than it actually was. Grace does fight as if her life depends on it at every one of the initial changes we make. They are in the main what feel like stupid, programmatic, forced -- and most often, to me, cruel -- steps toward "normalcy." Each time Glen and I meet with Dr. Meltzer to plan the next step, I cry. I cry because everything we have to do goes against my "instincts" and because I dread telling my daughter what the next step will be, because I can't tell the difference between cold/uncaring/mean and "appropriate." It seems I have become stupid again. Stupid is how I feel. I am paying someone to tell me that my daughter can no longer take a long bath in a tub full of bath toys while I sit on the bathroom floor and play with her! That she can no longer sleep with towers of stuffed animals arranged around her -- or a pile of blankets at the foot of the bed (I begin to see that what she has done is create a sort of crib around her).

Even after she stops protesting each of these changes with shrieks and sobs, plunging into grief for hours -- even after it becomes clear that she welcomes the changes, that she's been needing them (because she protests only for those hours, then calmly, even cheerfully, adjusts to each; because after she shrieks and sobs over my announcement, for example, that she must not wake me in the middle of the night before trying on her own to go to sleep again, she sits down with a piece of paper and a gold pen and makes a list of things she'll try before she calls me -- a long list -- and tapes it up on the wall above her bed) -- I am grief-stricken. That's how I begin to understand what I have done.

* * *

We are warned that we are likely to see tantrums beyond the specific protests to the changes we are making. Tantrums "about nothing" -- irrational, apparently random attacks of anger and frustration. All the tantrums she never had at two.

"There are reasons two-year-olds have tantrums," I am told, and my shame -- which I had not thought could reach any deeper inside me -- scoops down to the core of my being, for I have not forgotten how much I had prided myself on having a two-year-old who didn't throw tantrums. When people complimented me on my daughter's extraordinary "maturity" and pleasantness, and asked if she didn't ever "lose it" when I said no to her, I would blush -- embarrassed: can I help it if I live with perfection? -- and shrug and say, "Well, the thing is, there's never really any reason to say 'no' to her. She never asks for anything unreasonable."

"A tantrum is a protest," I remember telling Dr. Knox, that day when she met with Glen and me for the first time, to talk about her findings over her several sessions with Grace, "and there was nothing for her to protest. She was. . ." I stopped; I didn't have the words for what she was. Or rather I had the words, but I couldn't say them, because I knew they must not be the right words after all. She was perfectly happy. She had everything she needed. She was perfect. I was perfect.

"Completely fulfilled," Dr. Knox said.

"Yes. That's right."

Dr. Knox contemplated me. And even then, even with everything that had happened, was happening, I felt proud: I had managed to completely fulfill my daughter.

"But that's not what she needed," Dr. Knox said gently. It was the first gentleness she showed toward me. "It wasn't your job to 'completely fulfill' her. How would a human being learn to handle frustration, sorrow, strife, any sort of difficulty? These are skills that need to be developed."

"You're telling me she needed to be sad or frustrated? That I should have -- what? Neglected her?"

Dr. Knox cocked her head. "Does anything less than 'complete fulfillment' constitute neglect?"

"I don't know how to make those calibrations."

"Yes, well, that's a problem."

But it wasn't Grace's problem -- or, that is, it wouldn't have been Grace's problem if I hadn't been her mother.

Meet every need. I didn't know that sometimes it might not be so clear whose needs were whose. That the instinct to "meet" a need might be an instinct to meet the need of someone other than the one you're taking such good care of. The one you think you're taking such good care of.

That sometimes -- maybe even more often than sometimes -- mothers and their children's deepest needs will be at odds with each other in ways that aren't in the least apparent. And that even the smartest mother might not know that; that even the smartest and most conscious and purposeful mother has an unconscious.

I would have thought I'd known that.

The funny thing is, I thought I did know that. I thought I knew, and had it licked: I thought I could beat the system by sheer concentration, intelligence, determination.

But I couldn't concentrate enough to figure out that my own instincts weren't instincts in the sense of pure, true mother-feeling -- as I swore they were -- but miswired impulses that were disguised as instincts. Who knew that impulses could be so cloak-and-dagger? That one's own old griefs could be so clever about hiding and emerging in full costume?

She wasn't the one who dreaded being all alone.

Or she didn't start out that way.

Who knew that there are worse things than loneliness, for a child? That never having the chance to be lonely, and figure out how to live with being lonely, might be worse by far in the long run for a child? A child, a child who isn't you but has been entrusted to your keeping -- some other bundle of genetic material and experiences, one not your own, her own package of self -- her own personal genome project.

Who knew that not learning how to let things go just might be worse than never having them at all?