Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [113]
This word gave me hope; until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I’d lost every bit of it.
I was under no illusions that working with Ryan would be easy or that he would improve right away. I knew the road would be long and frustrating, but he was my son.
My son who could learn.
I knew then that I’d walk every step of the way with him, no matter how long it took. Taking his little face in my hands, and though I knew he wouldn’t understand, I whispered: “You and I are going to work through this together, okay? And I’m not going to quit, so you can’t either. And you’re going to be just fine.”
The next day, I worked with Ryan for another six hours, and that night I called my wife in Hawaii. I apologized again for the argument we’d had, then put Miles on the phone so he could talk to his mom. When I got on the phone again, I said casually,
“By the way, Ryan has something to say to you.”
I put the receiver up to Ryan’s head, held out a little piece of candy, and mouthed the words I wanted him to say. The words we’d worked on all day long. And into the receiver, he said:
“I wuff you.”
I love you. These were the first words Cat ever heard him say.
That night, I made the decision to quit my job selling pharmaceuticals, but I fully understood that I would continue to work a second job. In addition to writing my novels, I spent the next three years working with Ryan for three hours a day, seven days a week. And in the end, I would teach him to talk, one slow, painstaking word at a time.
It wasn’t easy. Ryan didn’t suddenly get better. It was a horribly frustrating process. It wasn’t two steps forward, one back; it was like a half a step forward, then back almost to the beginning, then wander sideways for a while, then go further back than where you’d started in the first place, then finally tiny improvement. Months after we started, Ryan had begun to parrot words; he could say almost anything, but had no idea what words were or what they were used for. To him they were simply sounds to get a piece of candy. It would take months and months of effort to finally make him understand that the word apple meant something.
There were behavioral issues, too. Lack of eye contact. Poor motor skills. Food phobia. Potty training. Cat and I worked with him on all those areas as well. He was, for instance, terrified of the thought of going to the bathroom. To finally get Ryan potty-trained, I had to strip him down, have him drink glass after glass of juice, and literally sit in the bathroom with him, coaxing him to go in spite of his fears. For eight straight hours.
While the structured work with Ryan lasted three hours daily, I didn’t want his entire experience with me to be one of struggle and challenge. Thus, my time with him wasn’t limited to teaching and learning; I tried to spend at least an hour a day with him doing only the things he wanted to do. We would play on the jungle gym, take walks, coloring—whatever made him happy.
But at the same time I never forgot that I had another son. I remembered believing as a child that attention equaled love, and I didn’t want Miles to grow up feeling as deprived as I had. I spent hours with Miles as well, doing the things he liked to do. We rode bikes and played catch, I coached his soccer teams, and he and I would eventually study Tae Kwon Do together.
Truly, my children had become my other vocation.
In May 1997, we moved back to New Bern, and began remodeling the home we live in today. It was a major construction project, one that took months, but by then, moving and remodeling—with all the associated stresses—seemed almost simple.
Cat and I continued to work with Ryan. In August, I finished my second novel, Message in a Bottle, and my sister called later that month to tell us that she and Bob were getting married. Soon after that, Micah and Christine got engaged as well, and would be married