Elián and Marisleysis bonded — until Janet Reno stepped in.
By Dr. Barbara Lerner, clinical psychologist and public policy consultant. National Review. 4/26/00 12:45 p.m.
Are you a little queasy about how 6-year-old Elián González might be feeling right now? Not to worry, the Clinton Justice Department tells us. At the moment of his reunification with Juan Miguel, Elián "wrapped his arms around his father" and "looked very
happy." Believe that? I do, and you should too.
Because if masked, helmeted strangers with machine guns broke into your house before dawn, dragged you, screaming in terror from the arms of your loved ones, threw a blanket over your head, and hustled you, in a cloud of tear gas, into a van that took you to a helicopter that took you to a plane
where new strangers flew you to another city (Atlanta) where more strangers flew you to a military base on the outskirts of a third strange city (Washington), you’d be relieved to see a familiar face in the last place too. Any familiar face. Any familiar anything. The unknown can be terrifying;
for sheer panic-inducing power, unavoidable confrontation with it can push any of us — adults as well as children — off the cliff of sanity, into a limitless abyss, where we fall forever; helpless, dizzy, and nauseated, spiraling ever downward at ever increasing speeds. In that sick state,
the sight or sound or smell of a familiar anything would give any of us a great, gut-untwisting sense of relief, and relief is a kind of happiness. Freud thought it was the primary kind, and I think it’s what Elián felt, when he saw his father at Andrews Air Force Base on Easter Sunday.
Color him happy.
Happy, but scarred. Permanently scarred. That’s my professional judgment, but it’s not exactly the consensus view of my fellow pediatricians, family counselors and other new-age "healers," experts, and specialists who have been parading across our television screens, ever
since the Clinton-Reno Justice Department "reunited Elián with his father." The consensus view is that Elián can be fixed, his scars erased, like pencil marks on a rubber doll, if only the proper professionals, people like them, can get their hands on him, to give him
treatment, lots of treatment, right away, and for a long time, along with "the support of his Cuban schoolmates," and plenty of Janet Reno’s play dough, to "relieve his stress."
I disagree. I’ve been watching Elián on television ever since he came to this country, watching intently as he interacted with his Uncle Lazaro and a host of other relatives and friends in Miami, and with Diane Sawyer and her psychiatrist-translator in his one much-criticized
television interview, and I think the single most vivid and striking thing about this boy is the intensity of his attachment to the 21-year-old woman he calls "Mari," his cousin, Marisleysis González.
I base that conclusion, not on his words or hers or anyone else’s, but on Elián’s body language, the one thing few adults and no small child can fake, the true window to his soul. With everyone else, Elián is sometimes passive and obedient, sometimes playful and
oppositional, but always, always, a very separate little being. With his Mari, he is something else again. Whenever he is with her, his movements are perfectly synchronized with hers; they flow together to form a unity, and the love between them is palpable to anyone who can break free of
abstractions and look, really look, for even a moment, at one very concrete and particular 6-year-old boy.
What that tells me is that this child’s primary attachment in life, the center of his small world, was his mother; and because he could not survive, psychologically, without her at this stage in his life, he transferred that attachment to his cousin, Marisleysis. The press, dimly aware in
spite of themselves that there is something special about their relationship, has taken to calling her his "self-appointed mother-surrogate," but she didn’t make that appointment; Elián did. On his first night in America, in the hospital where he had to stay long enough to get
intravenous treatment for the dehydration his ordeal at sea had left him with, he did not reach out to his great-uncle or his great-aunt, or to any of the other concerned, affectionate relatives he had met before, when they visited him in Cuba. He turned to Marisleysis, a stranger, but of his mother’s
approximate age and build, and begged: "Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me." And luckily for him, she didn’t, except in sleep. And when he woke up crying, as he did every night since he arrived on our shores, she was always there to comfort him immediately, except for
the few times when he awoke later than usual, when she was asleep herself, and in the few moments before his crying woke her, he experienced some of the terror of his loss again – a motherless child, alone in an endless, empty ocean.
And what we — our government — did when we sent in armed strangers to tear this child away from his Mari in the middle of the night, was to rip off the small, tentative scab that was just beginning to form, over the great wound of his loss, and we plunged the knife in again, twisting
it so wide and deep that the wound will never fully heal, and there is nothing his father or any other man, however loving, can do to change that, ever. Because however offensive it may be to the politically-correct, cliché-ridden unisex psychology of today, the sexes are not interchangeable
to children; they are quite distinct. There are times in a boy’s life when what he needs most is a father, and even the most loving mother will not fill that need, but very few boys as young as 5 or 6 are at that stage, and no boy who has just lost a loving mother – watched her die, as Elián
did when the sea swallowed her up in front of him – is anywhere near it.
What Elián needs now is a mother. His own will never come back. His only real hope is that Marisleysis will, and that he will not, by then, be so crippled by the dread of another intolerable loss that he will no longer be capable of responding to her now as he did then. And if he can’t,
or doesn’t even get the chance, all the therapists and all the play dough in the world will not save this boy. As for "the support of his Cuban schoolmates," one can only pray that they do not do to him what they are doing to the other child who was, briefly, on Elián’s
boat, before her tears made her mother take her back to Cuba, and proceed to our shores without her. She, too, misses her mother terribly, and refused to pretend she didn’t — a great mistake, in Castro’s Cuba. She no longer goes to school, because her well indoctrinated little
classmates all ganged up on her and took turns beating her bloody, every day, with the approval of her teachers, because she refused to denounce her mother as a traitor for running away from the prison island that President Clinton and his Justice Department are bound and determined to send Elián
back to.
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