Emotional Disturbance in Children and Teens

It is generally accepted that emotional problems in adults originate in childhood.  Yet such childhood problems may go undiagnosed for years.   Early signs of misbehavior, social anxiety disorders, and mood disturbances, may be ignored and pediatricians, because of the child’s age, may assume a “wait and see” attitude.  it may not be until the child enters school that emotional disturbance is recognized, assessment performed, and treatment provided.  Even then school administrators may decide that schools are not mental health treatment centers or psychiatric hospitals and therefore not mandated to do more than provide an appropriate education.   Fortunately educators are increasingly becoming and motivated to provide appropriate counseling and support services in schools.

The term  “emotional disturbance” is not listed as an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.  In addition to its popular usage, it is more an educational diagnosis than a clinical entity.  Educators and school psychologists adhere to the definition imposed by the nation’s special education law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

                                        Bronx Lyric

                                       

It was a time of hope and a time of trust.  The new president was sworn in the day I came into this world.  Roosevelt was cheered by thousands on the steps of the Capital and acted swiftly to end the banking crisis by going off the gold standard.  Shock had given way to relief when a would-be assassin’s bullet had missed the new leader two weeks earlier.  Now the world gave FDR their prayers and hopes that at last the Great Depression would end, jobs would become more plentiful, and America would fulfill the promise of the twentieth century for progress and prosperity.

Sam and Sophie and their newborn son moved to 3280, a large apartment house in the West Bronx, convenient to school, transportation, parks, and shopping centers.  Sophie’s widowed mother and two younger siblings moved in with them to occupy the five room apartment.  My sister Linda was born five years later.

Sam worked in the garment District in Manhattan.  He was soon to be unemployed later opened his own women’s coat and suit manufacturing business on 42^nd Street.   My mother and grandmother pushed my stroller every day shopping along the store-lined Bainbridge Avenue. They took me to the park where I played in the grass with pail and shovel.  On warm summer days Sophie sat across the street with the other ladies on camp chairs along the chain link school yard fence.  I rode my tricycle up and down the block. In the evening I would sit by the window in grandma’s room watching for my father to walk from the subway, the folded Daily Telegram tucked under his arm.  Once sighted, I would alert my mother to turn the stove on the warm up his dinner.  With the onset of the war the depression abated and Sam’s business thrived.  It was a good time for the family.

3280

Imperious bastion of respectability,

Six levels of arrival to the middle class.

After the Great Depression.

Dumb waiter deliveries to families behind steel,

Observing the world through peepholes,

Incinerating waste in basement crypts.

We scratched obscenities on elevators to the roof,

Where babies rocked and

Working girls bent the sun with silver.

We dared each other to lean over,

Roamed the underground and conquered alleys.

Our lives, time limited, expendable,

Outlined in brick

In this eternal fortress of forever.

Sophie

First generation of immigrant seed,

One of five.                                                    

But for diphtheria there’d be six.

Fatherless before she was grown.

Lower East Side émigré to the Bronx

Morris High School.

Bookkeeper to the garment trade.

Bride,

Homegiver to widowed mother, sister, brother.

Apartment dweller.

Twice a mother.

Carriage pusher.

Avenue shopper for bargains.

Achievement motivator.

Worrier.

Hyperthyroid.

Writer of notes

“Please excuse Marvin for having been absent….

He had a slight cold and had to remain in bed.”

(More than slight required a doctor’s note.)

Suburban homeowner.

Grandmother.

Knitter of sweaters

Floridian

Sweater maker

Stoic.

Great grandmother.

Matriarch.

Time cord

I study the sepia toned image

Three year old smiling,

Sailor suited tot

Of untrimmed curls.

Does this pudgy faced, time frozen entity

Preview the current me?

I search the eyes for antecedents,

Pure, innocent, yellowed

Windows to the soul.

I view the chain extending from generations past,

Fragile at origin, soon robust,

Now knotted and frayed,

Renewed in each succeeding link.

                                                                                                                                               

Genes

Ich vais nicht auf vemin er et gerhuten.

I don’t know whom he takes after.

She had implicit faith in heredity.

Environment, assumed to be naturally good,

Of little consequence here.

My sister misbehaved,

Some long buried great aunt remembers.

She, too, a kuchlefel.

A mixing spoon who stirred things up.

I brought home a good report card, 

Some tzadik on her father’s side,

Lineage easily traced.

Attributes of maternal descent.

Darker leanings on my father’s side, she believed.

Life was fathomable.

All could be explained.

Home movies

Pedaling the shiny Ivy Johnson

A five year old from a flickering past

Aimlessly traces circles on the living room rug.

My mother’s mother,

Silver haired matriarch on high backed chair,

Sits by the radio,

Crocheting by incandescence and H. V. Kaltenborn,

As waning sun through slotted blinds

Sketches snake leaves on the wall,

And I wave shyly to a future self.

Bronx Love Rite, 1940

Together they sortie

Young mother pushing shopping cart

Whitened matriarch beside.

Wheels click over concrete

Hurry past 205th Street terminal to the underground,

Down the Avenue of Plenty.

Fill the basket.

An unseeded twist from Hanscom’s,    

A quarter pound of Daitche’s belly lox,

Slice it thin,

Ground chuck from Olash the Kosher butcher.

Saunter by the Marqueed Mecca,

Of Metro Goldwyn Mayer,

Celluloid escape from Rinso White.

At last, the Great Atlantic and Pacific.

Plain milk a penny cheaper,

Scoop off the cream.

A primitive ritual this,

Maternal devotion.

Foraging mission abroad

To nourish and sustain.

Park

Shaded oasis in a concrete world

Where I marked my milestones.

Benches worn thin where mothers rocked carriages.

Grassy knolls cushioning first steps.

Sandpiles to shovel.

I pedaled three wheels down earthen paths,

Touch tackled on the green,

Sledded around trees,

Encountered girls and smoked Chesterfields,

Rubbed my fingers with leaves to camouflage tobacco smell.

Woodlands of the Bronx

Mother of Parks

Archetype of all that grows.

And still I seek the green leaves of time.

                       

Gramma’s Remedies

The old ways survived for Grippe and Krupe,

Before the wonder drugs.

Steam that seared the lungs trapped in a Turkish towel.

Cover the chest with flannel.

Tissue burning Iodine for cuts.

Foul-tasking Caster Oil.         

Pot of water on the radiator for humidity.

A candle prayer at sundown Friday when she benched lecht.

           

Searching for threads

The child is father of the man

But does a self survive?

Is my childhood psyche still alive

Or am I an also ran?

I search for signs of current me

In shaded memories

That drift in on a morning breeze

And will not let me be.

The echoes of a mother voice

In dreams of long abandoned toys.

In visions of a place and time

That are forever mine.            

                                                                       

Parkway School

City schools, numbered not named.

Brick boxes behind chain link,

Backboards and baselines

Yet 80 was the Queen.

Columned façade on tree lined boulevard,

Funneling from ghettos like ink

Into wells on wooden desks.

Cursive letters over slate,

Unfinished Father George above the flag.

Through fifth story windows I watched

A thousand stickball games until

Snow purified the coarse concrete.

I heard the whistles as classes filled

Through grafittied doors.

Inside tyrants and crones screeched threats

While more gentle souls gave stars

As we traced arcs in Penmanship.

Fridays we sat assembled,

Boys’ blue knit ties on white shirts,

Girls’ gold neckerchiefs on middy blouses

Singing “Our school upon the parkway…

In voices full of glee.”

But not Donald who cursed a teacher

And made her cry

Or Mr. Schultz who threw a chisel

At crazy Shu who

Prepared my tooth for root canal,

And no one ever left Miss Marshall’s “ungraded” class. 

I could not skip in kindergarten

Bit I skipped 1B

And couldn’t catch up socially

Or do cordwork.

Boys went to Shop while girls did cooking.

We planted a tree on Arbor Day,

Sang Amaryllis and Country Gardens and Holy, Holy, Holy

(Before Brown v. the Board of Ed),

But I was a listener.

In eighth I worship Arlene

From across the room,

Took her to the prom and gave tea roses and

Never dared to speak with her again.

Graduation and Robert signed my album

May your face never turn the color of this page,”

And said goodbye to our school upon the parkway.

Mackinaw Train

Steel wheels ply slender rails

Hauling flat cars carrying logs.

Master of the line, I work miniature switches,

Accelerating until the speeding mass vaults the track.

He was seeking work

Surviving depression years,

While I, barely launched myself,

Approached a birthday, effortlessly.

She, chagrined as he unveiled the gift,

The wind a knife that year,

And I was prone to Krupe.

It was a mackinaw I needed,

Not Lionelle.

But he knew what excited boys.

Trains would do what wool would not.

Sixty year old engine still intact

Rests idle on my mantle now,

While I pursue a different track,

And he lies stationed underground.

Sister

She’d barely started school that year

When I, the older brother,

Sensitive to her fear,

Obedient to our mother,

Led her by the arm,

Protecting her from harm.

Secret baby names she had

That embarrassed and amused

To show me that she cared.

Her love was not refused.

The games that I devised

Affection undisguised.

A light cord in the hall,

The target of our ball.

I was to watch her at the Jewish Center,

Guarding her from harm.

But when the teacher called, I left

Until I remembered with alarm.

A dozen streets to cross, the pathway home,

She set off on her own.

Discovering her gone, I ran,

A terror-stricken search,

Until at last I grabbed her hand

Outside the Catholic church.

I left for college, she remained.

Without me she earned a high degree.

(Somehow a woman she became.)

Teaching brought security.

The dentist husband I’d brought home

Gave her children of her own.

The boy, extension of herself,

Achieved high status and great wealth.

The girl, revealing a maternal strain

Defied her in marriage, causing pain.

And I, once more protector,

This time hers, not her

Did naught to urge her to defer,

Tried not to make her stay.

Such bitter tea this action stirred

I too was cast away.

Until a mother’s passing

Bound us once more in grief,

Fond memories lasting

Of words we used to speak.

And now we share these memories

Of  pure and happy early days.

Of sounds upon the Parkway breeze

And games we used to play.

Bicycle

Wartime and all the steel going to the fronts.

Twelve year old needs wheels.

Rusting, red Schwinn in rental store with dented side panel

Balloon tires, front light, and horn.

It would do.

A bike was freedom.

No place too far. 

Van Cortland Park to Webster Avenue. 

The roads were mine.

Telephone Number

OL 2-2547

Forever engraved on some deep cerebral sulcus.

Not a PIN to be careless punched on some cheap plastic box

But an identity caressed with gentle rotary care,

Sensing each digital click.

Still today on an ancient closet relic

Secretly I dial up kinesthetic memories of Home.
Care giver

She comforted Gramma in the back room

Barely out of adolescence, my aunt,

Always an adult to me.

Harry James on a wind-up Victrola,

Trying not to disturb.

Toys for me at Woolworth.

Life was hard,

Sharing a room but not a home.

Administrative Assistant to an executive.

Not bad without college.

Young niece and nephew

Suddenly motherless.

She moved in and brought them up.

Marrying only when they were grown.

Sharing a new life on the Island

Retiring to the sunshine

Where she learned to dive and square dance.

Then comforting her widowed sisters,

Completing the cycle.            

Hallway boys

We boys at twelve,

Rowdy, loud, aggressive,

Riding elevators, pounding doorbells, haunting hallways.

Who will let us in?

Playful boys, hiding Luckies in secret places,

Sharing obscene humor, punching shoulders

Basement to roof, it was our building.

We boys of 3280

Hallway boys now grown.

The corridors remain as

Voices of a thousand new pretenders

Mask echoes of our youth.

Sam’s Place

242 West 38^th,                                                                                    

The heart of the garment district.

Elevator to the 9^th floor loft.

We called it “The Place.”

Factory behind front show room,

Office for the bookkeeper who doubled as a model.

Racks of fur trimmed broadcloth,

Persian, beaver, white fox, sometimes mink

Collars and cuffs.

Long cutting table on which are lain, carefully,

Layers of cloth from huge rolls, precisely aligned, no wrinkles,

Sometimes thirty deep.

So that Louie the cutter can trace a pattern.

One error reaps yards of waste.

Don’t distract Louie.

Sam endlessly rearranged oaktag forms of each part

Until he found the tightest fit.

And sometimes, after hours, he did the cutting

Union rep need not know.

Women operators sat at long tables pumping ancient Singers,

If not lovingly, at least laboriously, stitching together each coat.

Piece work according to Union rates.

God bless Dubinsky and the ILGWU.

Joe the Presser, in undershirt, sweating steam billows.

Foreman, Moe, gruff taskmaster, Sam’s older brother

Made no friends among the operators.

And finally Willie, packer and delivery man,

The last to touch each garment

Simple, loyal Willie, eternal lackey.

This was The Place that paid the bills and more,

Which Sam did not want for me,

Still I spent one summer assisting Willie,

Making boxes, schlepping deliveries to the Post Office,

Pushing wheeled coat racks to Macy’s and Gimbel’s (never both together),

Or lesser middlemen,

“Don’t give this to anyone outside the store.”

So this was not to be my legacy,

Protected forever from the “schmata business”

But left to wonder how I, my father’s seed,

Perhaps a potential Ralph or Calvin,

Might have fared on 38^th Street

Super

A Polack they called him.

Mr. Rock,

Fixer of sinks, trimmer of hedges.

Rent collector.

A familiar fixture, like some old cellar pipe,

Indestructible.

The day the furnace exploded, spewing steam,

He emerged, blackened, bruised, silent,

Unbent.

A stern chisel of a man, and yet

He shaped a wooden rifle for me

From a cast off plank.

A beautiful thing, smooth to touch.

When, without notice, he died,

Son Alex, in navy blues,

Stood solid by the door,

Shaking hands,

Continuing the line of stone.

Best friend

Shoulders broadened

By years of lifting cartons at the store,

He once hit a baseball fifty yards…foul

His humor drew me to him

A sense of the absurd.

He used his adolescent awkwardness to amuse.

When once we trained to sell encyclopedias,

He was told to use his little finger to point

Delicately to some key spot on the colored page.

He covered the entire volume with a beefy paw

For me alone to see,

Removing me from training in laughter paroxysm,

While he sat innocently unscathed.

He dragged me through the agony of adolescence,

I was grateful to have him there.

Later we moved our separate ways

I pursued a professional career while he,

Became a poet,

Displaying sensitivity of spirit I had never seen.

Loss

Friend of my friend

The poorest of us,

Ill-fitting, his father’s cut down trousers.

In a two-room fourth floor flat.

Pinched faced, jaundiced boy.

Who didn’t want to go to that hospital.

From which he never returned.

His mother cried over the canary

That flew from her window

And never returned.

The Suge

Adolescent boys give labels to each other.

The spelling of his eluded me,

Was it i before e or the reverse?

So I substituted u and he became then and forever in my memory

The Suge.

Angry young rebel,

He fought authority and suffered for it.

Refused to buy a senior hat.

It was his father, the plumber, he hated.

While we, sons of the middle class, had vacations in the Catskills

And went to summer camp,

He slept on a cot in the living room

In his underwear.

Unlike us, a nature lover.

His parents alone allowed a dog.

He brought home snakes from Van Cortland Park.

His German teacher asked his favorite hobby.

Schlangen, he replied, honestly.

That was the end of class that day.

To rile him up we’d pull a leaf from a nearby tree.

Girls made him nauseous and he went for therapy

And learned of Oedipus.

Off to Kansas to become vet, he

Shoveled manure one summer on a farm

And gave it up. 

The first of us to have a girl and sex.

(Kansas girls were easier, perhaps.)

An ROTC lieutenant in Germany,

Came home angrier still and went north in search of work.

He came to visit me one day, much later,

Was working in a pizza place,

Seemed happier, and then

Had no more truck with us.

                                               

Healer

First trumpet in the orchestra,

Formed his own band.

Socially smooth,

Where we lagged, he soared out of orbit.

Torn between music and medicine,

He chose Hippocrates,

And as the cosmic bonds of boyhood stretched thin,

We heard not of him.

Professor now at a prestigious medical school,

He did not answer my e-mail.

Reunion

Yesterday we conquered alleys together,

Roamed the streets and parkways, seeking wonders never found.

Oafish names I called you, lovingly, because you were large and strong,                      And broke things, naturally.

We wrestled and traded shoulder punches,

Made each other laugh and delighted in such power.

We lost our childhood years together and became men.

You made becoming easier.

Then we walked our separate paths alone,

Not always happily or with success.

Still, we survived and passed our seed accordingly.

A generation later we seek each other out.

Our lives are more than halfway passed.

Loose ends need re-tying.

We face each other now, tentatively at first,

Hoping to discern what once went unquestioned.

Then briefly we are boys and laugh once more.

Friend’s 50^th Birthday, 1982

THEY say we’re growing old, my friend

And life has passed its prime.

But what do THEY know of the cold,

And of the flow of time?

The breadlines never touched us but we were depression babies.

Turned off the lights when we left a room.

Bought “plain” milk to save two cents

Skimmed the cream off with a spoon.

And then the war, distant yet exciting.

They sent us home from school one day,

Air raid false alarm.

We heard of Anzio and Iwo, and Bremmenhofen on the kitchen Philco,

Watched Quadacanal Diary at the Tuxedo,

Acted out sadistic fantasies.

Ringelevio, caught, caught, caught.

Freeze!  You moved.  Seven and a half.

Remember Pearl harbor. Sneak attack.

Cans up.

One, two, three, shoot.

Out goes Y-O-U.

Songs of our childhood.

Parkway, yard, and Oval, our playgrounds.

We played handball and threw “Spaldines” at wooden broomsticks,

Played “chicken” on the roof and rode the elevators.

Listened to Hop Harrigan, the All American Boy

And Captain Midnight.

Carried  schoolbooks in leather straps.

Briefcases were for girls.

Rode the “4” bus and the “D” train to school.

Pseudo-scholars the two of us.

Walked the streets at night

Looking for girls.

Why were we so poor at that?

Snuck Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields.

Rubbed fingers with green leaves to mask the smell

Once we rode to Cooney Island on New Year’s Eve.

There were other friends.

One owned the football and the only TV in the Bronx.

We knew he’d be a brain surgeon or physicist,

Or whatever he wanted to be,

So we abused him for it.

We went to college separately and moved apart.

Soon the Bronx was behind us.

Most days slid by unnoticed.

Those are the ones THEY count.

But some remain as benchmarks on our personal calendars…

By that reckoning we’re only toddlers now.

Now you have palaces to run.

Your children go to summer camp.

I write endless tomes with budgets

“For your consideration…”

To moneyed givers in tall buildings,

And rake October leaves

But here we are again. My friend,

And fifty doesn’t seem so very long.

THEY say we’re growing old, my friend

And life has passed its prime.

But what do THEY know of the cold,

And of the flow of time.

The passing, 1984

Poppa’s gone now

But the earth still turns.

The sun comes up.

The yarsteit candle burns

Poppa’s gone now

But the trees still grow

It’s spring again

The crocus grows.

Poppa’s gone now

Yet lives unfold.

My girls are grown,

Now I’ve grown old.

The dreams I’ve had

I cannot find

Beyond the reaches of my mind.

Poppa’s gone now

But the stars still burn.

Poppa’s gone and I still feel grief.

Poppa’s gone and hours still turn.

He passed this way but his stay was brief.

Touching bases

Back to our childhood

Mom and sister in back seat, between chemos

One last look before the unthinkable.

Continuity and metamorphosis,

A half century of coalescence.

From afar the same brown brick Tudor

Standing imperiously on the Avenue,

Overlooking school and park.

Still majestic, commanding the skyline.

Six stories of arrival from the tenements.

Middle class Jews supplanted by Spanish speaking folk.

Lines of windows, rusting fire escapes.

I see myself, fifth story,

Fourth window from the right

Surveying ancient stickball games.

Now mobile classrooms stand.

Privet hedges no longer line the base.

Elegant French doors, now steel.

Less welcome than before.

Inside lobby barren of the high backed chairs

Where old Mrs. Pincus sat.

Must visiting ghosts now stand?

I ride the elevators, once red, replaced by sterile grey,

Doors devoid of key scraped initials.

The fifth floor hall we roamed as boys

Now small and dingy,

Only the incinerator remains unchanged.

I stand before 5-I, no key in hand today.

Dare I ring the bell once more?

In memory I walk the hardwood floors,

Foyer, kitchen, bedrooms, bath.

Caution prevails.

Better to leave memories untouched.

Senses hide what sense reveals.

It’s I, not stones, that time has changed.

***