MIRACLE GROW OF THE MIND

Carol LaHines’ debut novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, was a finalist for the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel and an American Fiction Award. Her second novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway (Regal House 2024) was a gold medal winner in the Foreword Indies awards, a finalist for an American Fiction Award and the Pencraft Award, and a Shelf Unbound notable indie. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals including Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Literary Review, The Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Sycamore Review, Permafrost, redivider, Literary Orphans, and Literal Latte.

She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the Lamar York Prize for Fiction. Her short stories and novellas have also been finalists for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, the David Nathan Meyerson fiction prize, the New Letters short story award, and the Disquiet Literary Prize, among others.

Ms. LaHines’ eldest son Dylan was born with Pierre-Robin sequence. His condition, which can lead to breathing obstruction and is potentially fatal, went undiagnosed and was compounded by other egregious medical errors, as a result of which Dylan was medically challenged and severely disabled, at least as defined by society. Having navigated these labyrinthine, Kafka-esque corridors herself, she was moved to write this book as a testament to him and all the other families like hers who have coped with an indifferent medical bureaucracy. Miracle Grow is also laced with the satire, acerbic commentary, absurdist subplots, and the tragic-comic sensibility Ms. LaHines is known for.

“LaHines is a fearless writer. With brutal honesty, laugh-aloud-humor, faultless dialogue, understand, and ultimately with great empathy and compassion, she portrays all our misguided efforts to control our bodies, our children, and our lives.”—Sheila Kohler, award-winning author of ten novels including Cracks and Open Secrets

“Thought-provoking questions about special needs kids, the medical system, parenting, and hope are raised that will immerse all readers—whether parents coping with special needs children or parentless readers…. Life will throw you curveballs—and the ultimate message of Miracle Grow of the Mind is that how these are perceived, navigated, and hopefully turn out for the greater good is what living is all about.”—Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review

“Every parent should read this brilliant novel by Carol LaHines. Miracle Grow of the Mind reveals every shade of a couple’s parenting experience raising a disabled child. Vulnerability, joy, doubts, and triumphs are explored very insightfully. With humor and eloquence, LaHines captures the couple’s evolution from seeing their situation as a burden to seeing it, instead, as a different kind of blessing. This is a beautiful book.”—Neil Desmond, author of Angels of Stockholm

1. How do Michael and Amy’s approaches to parenting differ? Which parent is more invested in Griffin’s outcome? Who do you think is the more sympathetic character? Why? How do their roles vis-à-vis one another and Griffin change over the course of the book?
2. Compare and contrast the respective approaches of the Bureau of Preschool Education, Mel Finkelstein’s Sensory Re-Integration, Barbara Schwartzmann, Estella’s lover Josef, Griffin’s sister Emma, and Amy and Michael themselves to the question of developmental disability.
3. What does Amy and Michael’s experience say about the healthcare system and the educational and medical bureaucracies?
4. Which scenes best demonstrate the parents’ deep love for Griffin?
5. How does the babysitter Estella act as a catalyst in the narrative? How does her own backstory figure into her own motivations for helping Griffin? How does she help Michael and Amy accept Griffin as he is?
6. What of the theme of the “real boy”—Michael serving as the stand-in for his brother; the toy Pinocchio echoing those words; Michael and Amy finally seeing and accepting Griffin?
7. How does Michael’s own story—his mother having figuratively erased him—parallel Griffin’s?
8. How does Estella’s arc—from seeing Josef through rose-colored glasses to seeing him more clearly—parallel that of Griffin’s parents?
9. How do Michael’s legal crusades as a personal injury attorney underscore the absurdities of the healthcare and legal systems?
10. What do Michael and Amy’s struggles show about society’s acceptance (or lack thereof) of individuals with disabilities?

1.

They waited in the playroom of the Bureau of Preschool Special Education. His son gravitated toward the toy piano, avoiding more challenging toys like the Etch-a-sketch, the easel for free drawing, all of which required sophisticated fine motor skills, prefrontal cortex skills, the cognitive will to trace a line or to execute a plan.

Griffin didn’t look others in the eye. The pediatric ophthalmologist said he suffered from strabismus, or lazy eye. He wore a patch over his good eye to force the other eye to work, to make it focus. It was optimal to use this therapeutic approach before the age of three, and Griffin was already five, beyond the therapeutic parameters, but What was the harm? was the attitude of the pediatric ophthalmologist, might as well try it.

The therapists liked to discuss the etiology of what they called his disorder, diffuse anoxic insult, global developmental delay. Michael had read many reports with test results and peer comparisons, reports concluding that Griffin was 33% behind, 66% behind, even less than zero.

“Griff, hey, check this out.” Michael handed him a puzzle, twenty-four pieces, four construction vehicles. Griffin stared at it as if there were nothing to be done.

“Where do you think this goes, bud?” he asked, hopefully, presenting a corner piece, the anchor stone for the others.

Griffin looked at him.

Michael completed the border, leaving only the middle empty. “What about this?” he prodded, showing him the missing bumper of a tractor.

Griffin shrugged and played the same note on the toy piano, fa-fa-fa.

“Here, Griff.” He offered his son a tissue to catch the drool escaping his mouth. Griffin stared at the four pieces composing the bright yellow backhoe, confused as to how they all fit together.

Griffin’s low muscle tone extended to the facial muscles. This deficit in neural signaling was responsible for the hang-dog look, the drop-jaw expression, and accounted for the drooling, the escape from the mouth of what ought to have been sensed and swallowed. It’s common in kids with low muscle tone, the speech pathologist had assured them, noting that it was helpful to tie a bib around the child’s neck.

Michael snapped two of the backhoe pieces into the puzzle, then a third, waiting for Griffin to supply the missing piece.

“Come on in,” the Executive Director of the Committee on Preschool Special Education motioned.

He had dealt with Ms. Zenobia-Ashby since Griffin had graduated from state-mandated Early Intervention (ages zero through three, the greatest window of opportunity! The greatest potential for formation of neurons and forging of critical networks!) Early Intervention having failed to achieve its purpose, therapy was now geared towards integration, celebration of different learning styles, acceptance of disabilities, accommodation instead of rehabilitation.

“Will your wife be coming?” Ms. Zenobia-Ashby asked.

“No, she couldn’t come,” Michael replied.

“Well,” Ms. Zenobia-Ashby began, “I wish we had better news to report. Of the goals outlined for Griffin at the last meeting, he’s made little measurable progress. He’s still unable to hold a pencil, still unable to reliably identify letters when presented in an array (two out of ten trials, less than could be accounted for randomly). He’s failing to reliably articulate his wants and needs (he regularly soiled himself, unable to inform the teacher that he needed to go). He shuns complicated textures (refuses to stroke the pet hamster, to stick his hand in the bean jar). He can’t count beyond ten (unable to intuit larger pattern, a failure after multiple trials).”

Michael wished that he had more than a Dixie cup of water to slake his thirst.

“We’re authorizing an increase in services across the board. More sessions with Dr. Marcy. Increase the time at the sensory gym. More vestibular-proprioceptive activities, more sensory stimulation.”

“I know he needs—” Michael struggled for the right word, “support, but is this the best way? How much can he be learning in school? The kids in his class have PDD or ADD or ADHD or behavioral problems and isn’t that distracting?” The water cooler gulped.

“The children in special education classes represent a wide spectrum of disorders. Yes, many have ADHD. But your son doesn’t have issues because he attends class with ADHD kids.”

His son had issues, as Ms. Zenobia-Ashby put it, because he was born prematurely, at twenty-eight weeks, a gestational age at which 50% of children experience mild developmental problems, and a significant percentage, 25%, experience lasting disabilities: cerebral palsy, speech delays, deficits in visual processing. Griffin spent six months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, 850 grams at birth, small even for twenty-eight weeks. The nurses glared at his wife, as if thinking the least she could do was expel him at a good weight, two pounds, three pounds, something they could work with. His wife suffered from a blood clotting disorder, previously undiagnosed, leading to a compromised umbilical cord and unfortunate interruptions in oxygen delivery to the fetus, as well as, of course, premature delivery.

He remembered staring at Griffin in the incubator, propped on a nest of rolled-up blankets. Oxygen cannula in his nostrils, dark goggles to shield him from the phototherapy lights, skin so translucent Michael could see his heart beating through his chest. He was accustomed to watching Griffin’s wave forms on the monitor: heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation level, hovering just over 90%. In the weeks after his pre-term birth, Michael had watched his son struggle for breath, struggle to remain pink, struggle to gain weight, struggle to develop his suck and swallow reflexes, skills he should have developed in utero rather than in the pods of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

He had to be weaned from a respirator, weaned from continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), weaned from the apnea monitor, a device that signaled, through several loud emissions, if his rate of breathing slowed for more than thirty seconds. Couldn’t the Committee for Preschool Special Education see that Griffin had to master so much, tasks most took for granted, bodily functions like heart rate and respiration and temperature? Couldn’t they just let him be?

Meet Carol LaHines

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