MindSpinner

I’m trying to conjure a picture book angel in a garden. Probably floating so he won’t get his feet dirty. And what about that white robe? How long would that last? It would catch on the blackberry briars; the hem would get caked with dirt and splattered with mud. The only place to put the angel, if he wanted to sit down, would be on the stone bench next to the water garden (the big pot with two water plants and two gold fish). One would probably offer him lemonade. He’d glow a bit even in broad daylight, drink the lemonade, probably bring tidings of something or other, and then get himself transfigured elsewhere in short order, leaving me to wash the lemonade glass and continue with the weeding.

The Gabriel who appeared yesterday was much more useful. He did not glow like the angels in Sunday School illustrations; picture him Latino instead, dressed in a work shirt, boots, and jeans covered with little shreds of grass. He came on a mighty mower tough enough to fell brush. He reduced Johnson grass as tall as I am, laced with poison ivy grown rampant, to mere stubble. He did this for $30 and, moreover, he’s a neighbor up the street who will repeat this miraculous deed anytime I like. He even offered to mow the rest of the back yard for free, but I have so many little plants he’d have to dodge in the someday shade garden that I thought that too much trouble to ask.

His appearance cheered me up. I was a little down, truth to tell, about the goats and ducks. I checked with City Hall the other day to see what the regulations are concerning the keeping of pygmy goats, ducks, and the like. It turns out that it’s just fine for me to keep them; their pens simply have to be located 100 feet from any neighbor’s property line. Since my lot on the cul de sac is wider at the back than it is the front, I pulled out a copy of the land survey just to check. At the back edge of the property, the lot is 158 feet wide. Darn. Do you know those goats would have eaten my poison ivy and invasive honeysuckle? Never mind. My neighbor is Gabriel, and he rides one heck of a mower.

I meet a lot of adolescents without fathers in their lives. Many of them write about their missing fathers, and I can see clearly in their writing how the absence of a father has rolled like a great wave through their lives. An African American boy laments his father’s death in a shooting and wonders how life would have been different if his father had lived - would he be more successful now in school? Would he have stayed out of trouble? An accomplished senior girl writes about the father who left and never came back, lost to an addiction. She laments the idolized father her little girl self lost; she vents anger at the father who abandoned her for an addiction. She strives to overcome, and she succeeds, but the hurt places still hurt. Another girl dwells not on the father who left but on the stepfather who became dad. At home, I watch two adolescents struggle with what it means to have a Sunday dad who is otherwise largely unavailable.

Some themes seem clear. Fathers are important. Children have a great need to think well of their fathers, to know that their fathers love them, to look to their fathers for role models. Without stalwart, involved fathers, they feel lost and adrift. They grasp elsewhere for self-esteem. They suffer. Some of them are deeply damaged.

I listened this morning to a segment on Father’s Day on NPR’s News and Notes from Ed Gordon, featuring an interview with Leonard Pitts, author of Becoming Dad : Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. Leonard Pitts weaves his own experiences with an abusive father and his journey to fatherhood with stories of other African American men and their experiences as sons and fathers. I immediately found myself listening on a level that transcends race. I was most moved by accounts of “step-up-to-the-plate” dads, of men who step in to raise other men’s children when biological dads aren’t around.

I don’t have a living father any more to send a card to on Father’s Day, so instead I’ll just extend my gratitude for every biological father and step-up-to-the-plate dad who enfolds the life of a child in his strength, love, guidance, and support, no matter how hard that task turns out to be.

What I’d really like to do is to build a privacy fence around the back yard. I don’t care for fences, particularly, but then I think my neighbors would prefer to be shielded from my aberrant activities. No, I don’t mean gardening in the nude, per se.

Having built my fence, I’d have my two African Pygmy goats. They’d have a little shed and yard, but I’d also park them in a movable pen (already have this) out in the grass, so that they could “mow” here and there. Pygmy goats don’t produce prolific amounts of milk, but they can be milked, and their milk is supposed to be good, as goat milk goes. We are not big milk drinkers in this house, anyway. Their manure would contribute to enviable compost. I’d also keep two Khaki Campbell ducks. Khaki Campbells are excellent egg layers and garden citizens. They make it their business to eat flies and all manner of garden pests. I’ve heard they even eat Japanese beetles, which would endear them to me forever. I’d just have to grow my lettuce someplace where they are not. They’d have a shed and run, and the run would be roofed in case the bird flu invades.

Even though I can’t manage, financially, half of what I mention here, the back yard will gradually become half vegetable garden anyway, neatly arrayed in raised beds. (Two of these are already in place.) The generic red maple near the house would come out before it makes too much shade and would be replaced by three dwarf, disease resistant apples - likely Williams Pride, Ark Black, and Liberty. At the back of the lot I’d plant two Pawnee pecan trees, forty feet apart. There are already peaches, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries and herbs in the kitchen garden.

Why am I fantasizing about such things? Am I simply romanticizing a rural life? Well, partly maybe. And I do love gardens and animals. But I’ve lived a semi-rural life before, cared for animals and shoveled stalls; I’ve planted and hoed my mother’s long garden rows in the red earth of the Georgia mountains, so this is not naive foolishness. The vision and the wish really come down to this: this half acre, properly managed, could sustain a small family. I’ve lost faith that my profession will provide enough for us in the long run, and more fundamentally that our way of life in this country is secure and sustainable. Something in me says that a fruitful garden may be more pertinent in the second half of my life than a TruGreen ChemLawn.

Most of the school year I function on six hours of broken sleep nightly, sometimes less. I fight leaden fatigue by about mid-week, especially by evening. But summer’s here, and I’ve had two good nights’ sleep in a row. No alarm to wake me at 5:00. I may as well have been resurrected - energy and joy - yes, joy is the right word - well up from within like a newly fed spring.

Thus restored, I begin to plan the whimsical adventures of summer (OK, along with staining the deck). Next week we hope to visit a farm that raises llamas, miniature donkeys, servals, pygmy goats, wallabies, and horses. I’m keen on the pygmy goats. (They make companionable pets, they eat grass, they produce manure for fertilizer, they can be milked. And they’re cute - that one always gets me.) There’s little danger of my coming home with a pair, though, because the Homeowners’ Association is unlikely to mistake them for dogs or cats.

There’s also free Shakespeare in the park, the wildlife education center down the road about 20 minutes (likewise free and suitable for picnics), the Big River - no cost possibilities abound.

Among the most emailed articles at the NY Times today is this one: “Use of Antipsychotics by the Young Rose Fivefold.” It begins, “The use of potent antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents for problems like aggression and mood swings increased more than fivefold from 1993 to 2002, researchers reported yesterday.” I can hear the clucking now. What is this nation doing to its children? But the closest depiction of truth cannot lie at the top of an inverted pyramid article, in the lead. One comes nearer to it only by drilling down.

In the new study, about a third of the children who received antipsychotics had behavior disorders, which included attention deficit problems; a third had psychotic symptoms or developmental problems; and another third were suffering from mood disorders. Over all, more than 40 percent of the children were also taking at least one other psychiatric medication.

“We feel the medications are effective in children with bipolar and have some data to show that,” said Dr. Melissa DelBello, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, who has done several studies of the drugs.

Dr. DelBello said that the field “desperately needs more research” to clarify the effects of the antipsychotic drugs but that many children struggling with bipolar disorder got more symptom relief on these drugs than on others, allowing psychiatrists to cut down on the overall number of medications a child is taking.

Lisa Pedersen of Dallas, the mother of a 17-year-old boy being treated for bipolar disorder, said he was unpredictable, hostile and suicidal before psychiatrists found an effective cocktail of drugs, which includes a daily dose of antipsychotic medication.

“Believe me, I would never choose having him on these meds,” Ms. Pedersen said in a telephone interview. “It’s not fun watching a child deal with the side effects. But finding the right combination of medicine has made his life worth living.”

Yet this process is one of trial and error for many children. Ms. Pedersen said her son had responded badly to the first two antipsychotic drugs he received. And some experts think the way that psychiatric drugs are prescribed is obscuring any understanding of underlying disorders and the optimal treatments.

“If you’re going to put children on three or four different drugs, now you’ve got a potpourri of target symptoms and side effects,” said Dr. Julie Magno Zito, an associate professor of pharmacy and medicine at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Zito added, “How do you even know who the kid is anymore?”

When do you put your kid on a drug like Ritalin or Adderall?
When you know his ADD or ADHD will otherwise hopelessly undermine his education.

When do you put your kid on an antidepressant that means you’ll be watching her closely for a couple of weeks for suicidal thinking?
When you are pretty damned sure that her life is at greater risk should you do nothing.

When do you put your kid on an antipsychotic with potentially nasty side effects?
When he’ll never have a normal life unless you can get his symptoms under control.

When do you put your kid on a cocktail of drugs that make her very personality seem like a chemical experiment?
When you recognize that your child’s real personality has already been missing in action, maybe for years, replaced by the manifestations of a disorder that is already brain chemistry gone wrong, when talk therapy can’t even start to help until brain chemistry is at least partly righted, and most of all when your child’s life borders on the unlivable otherwise.

It is easy to lament the five-fold increase in the use of antipsychotic medications in young people. But it is impossible to judge, from the outside, the decisions of individual parents and physicians who struggle to find solutions so that troubled young people can aspire to livable lives imbued with a measure of hope.

The search for what works for an individual child is often a matter of trial and error, of weighing the costs and benefits of any course of treatment, of hoping that someday we’ll be able to ascertain just what is out of kilter and how to right it. Solutions are hardly ever found solely in pill bottles, but some solutions in difficult cases, if there are solutions to be had, have as an essential component powerful medications we would otherwise not think of giving to our children.

To those who say, “I can’t imagine giving my children drugs like these,” I can only say, and this from the heart, “I hope you never have to.”