It was only when I met her 16 years later that I understood the physical implications of this: a markedly smaller head. My mother elaborated that the bones in Adele’s head had knitted together far too early when she was a baby. This was the proper descriptor, found in textbooks and doctors’ charts. There had been no language revolution back then.
Weird: Who in our family had red hair? (Actually, my great-grandmother, but I knew her only as a white-haired battle-ax dedicated in equal measure to her soap operas and cigarettes.) She is profoundly retarded, my mother explained. My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what I’d do if I ever had a disabled child. Yet how are we to know them, really, if we don’t? And show them compassion and understanding as they age? Strange how seldom we think about who our parents were as people before we made their acquaintance-all the dynamics and influences that shaped them, the defining traumas and triumphs of their early lives. It would be 40 years before she saw her again. Then, at the age of 6 and a half, she watched as her only sibling, almost five years younger, was spirited away.
PRETTY BLACK BABY GIRL PICTURES FULL
I now even understood, perhaps, the flickers of melancholy I would see in my grandmother, an otherwise buoyant and intrepid personality, charming and sly and full of wit.Īnd my mom: Where do you start with my mom? For almost two years, she had a sister. (At the time, my aunt lived in a group home where the residents were taken to church every Sunday.) Now I understood my grandmother’s annual trips to the local department store to buy Christmas presents, although we were Jewish. Now I understood why my grandfather spent so many hours in retirement as a volunteer at the Westchester Association for Retarded Citizens. This fact at once astonished me and made an eerie kind of sense, suddenly explaining the gravitational force that had invisibly arranged my family’s movements and behaviors for years.
When I first discovered that my mother had a younger sister, I reacted as if I’d been told about the existence of a new planet. She is a thinning shadow, an aging ghost. Here are all these pictures of nonverbal children, so pulsingly alive-their parents describing their pleasures, their passions, their strengths and styles and tastes-while I know nothing, absolutely nothing, of my aunt’s life at all. It is extraordinary what we hide from ourselves-and even more extraordinary that we once hid her, my mother’s sister, and so many like her from everyone. Before this very moment, in fact, I have forgotten she exists at all. She is, at the time of this tweet, 70 years old and living in a group home in upstate New York. He knows that I have an aunt whom no one speaks about and who herself barely speaks. It’s because he recognizes that to me, the tweet and downrush of replies are personal. I am only partway through when I realize my husband hasn’t steered me toward this outpouring simply because it’s an atypical Twitter moment, suffused with the sincere and the personal. Another is spooning his mom on a picnic blanket. One is proudly holding a tray of Yorkshire pudding he’s baked.
Some of the kids are young and some are old some hold pets and some sit on swings some grin broadly and some affect a more serious, thoughtful air. But even more so is the cascade of replies: scores of photographs from parents of non- and minimally verbal children from all over the world. That this earnest, heartfelt tweet has been liked some 80,000 times and retweeted more than 2,600 is already striking. “He’s never said a word in his life, but has taught me so much more than I’ve ever taught him.” Perhaps you, too, have seen this photo? His father, Stephen, surely did not intend it to become the sensation it did-he wasn’t being political, wasn’t playing to the groundlings. I do, within a matter of seconds: a picture of Joey Unwin, smiling gently for the camera, his bare calves and sandaled toes a few steps from an inlet by the sea. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
0 kommentar(er)
