Object Constancy and continuation of my childhood

When I first saw the picture of Annie Le's murderer being arrested I had a intuitive hit which said: "That man has no object constancy." Object constancy is something that most children learn at an early age; it is when mommy leaves she will return or when you put a toy under a blanket the toy still exist. Prior to object constancy when mommy leaves the room she no longer exists, and when you cannot see a toy it is gone forever. (This is probably simplified.) He was able to go play soft ball after he killed Annie because the object of his rage no longer existed, he couldn't see her because he had put her behind a wall and she was gone. Probably all the attachments he has are based on the attachment of other people to him, I mean if they move away or stop talking to him it won't matter to him. They will just be gone and he may never think about them again.

I don't think I had object constancy until I was 12 years old, maybe I had some because my parents regularly came to visit me once a month on visiting Sunday. But my object constancy wasn't very strong, it was a string that should have been a piece of cloth. I believe I had very poor object constancy because I lived in a society (the hospital) where people came into my life and left my life, and I never saw them again. Going home was a constant, but there were long stretches of time in between, going to the hospital was more of a constant because my body was in question there (what will happen next), but mostly there were not many things in my life that were constant. While I was in the hospital at age 12 I threw something under my bed and I thought it was gone, invisible, because I could not see it. After a while a nurse came in and asked me if I had thrown it under the bed, since I was a child I denied it and lied, but I never forgot afterward that just because I can't see someone or something doesn't make it invisible or disappeared.

Some other things about the hospital.

-Mail was censured, a nurse read the letters I sent out and blacked out things they didn't want me to say, letters coming from my parents were opened and read before I received them, if the nurse didn't like what my parents said they would black out those words before I received the letter.
-There was one television in the ward and we were allowed to watch it for 1/2 hour at night, but I do not remember watching television very often.
-There were five or six small side rooms, but most children were in the ward which held about 12 to 15 beds.
-African American (colored) children were segregated from the white children and were not allowed in the ward. (I remember telling Tiio Miller, who had the same disability I have, that she was not allowed in the ward when I was seven years old.)
-I do not remember there being school until I was 12 years old and the school was in a space in a marble hallway taught by Miss Bell.
-I don't remember there being recreational activities until I was older, and I don't really remember them. I do remember coming up from the basement with an activity person, there were five or six of us on the elevator, some in wheelchairs and some in beds, and the elevator door opened onto a brick wall. I was screaming as were the other children, I don't think we were stuck for very long.
-I don't remember there ever being a social worker.
- A Presbyterian minister came once a month and did a service in the auditorium.
-There were no telephones by our beds and we were not allowed to call our parents. I remember once asking to call my parents, I must have been 13 and the nurse dissuaded me from making the call.
-The wheelchairs were the old fashioned wooden wheelchairs, some were like wooden-carts for children in body casts.

There was a big stone wall around the grounds of the hospital, on top of the wall was "million dollar shards of glass that the duPont's had ordered from France when the facility was a duPont home." I remember talking with other children and wondering myself whether the wall was there to keep robbers out or whether it was supposed to keep us in. Along with that question was another question about what we had done "wrong" to be put into the hospital; this was also related to the question "What's wrong with you?" In childhood logic if there was something wrong with us then that was the reason we were in the hospital being operated on, but I never figured out what I had done wrong and I didn't understand why I didn't live with my family like other children did. (One of my fantasies was Tarzan on a condor coming to rescue me from the hospital.)

Well, enough for tonight. Take care, thanks for reading my blog. Blessings, Iris