Читать книгу The Silent Son - Ken Atkins - Страница 7

Danny Atkins at age 25

Introduction

A SIMPLE LIFE

“The plan was to get my degree, land a good teaching job, settle down in my small town, find a nice girl to marry, maybe have a kid or two, and spend my life surrounded by good friends. You know, just a quiet life and the simple, easy things like a cold beer and cooking steaks on the grill every Saturday.”

The half dozen guys in my recovery support group stared into their coffee cups or laps and chuckled. The plans we all made seemed so clear and doable when we were teenagers. But years of bad choices, addictions, broken promises or unforeseen tragedies had left their scars, and here we were gathering once a week to admit that our lives had become unmanageable and we were powerless to fix them.

The stories were as varied as our backgrounds, but there was a common thread. None of us ever planned for it to turn out like this, and even though we couldn’t change the past, we believed that, with God’s help and our obedience, the future didn’t have to be more of the same old, same old.

The one part of my life that set me apart from the rest, besides the fact that I was the only white dude in the group and at least twenty years older than most of the other guys, was that my adult son was sitting next to me in the meeting. Usually, our program doesn’t allow family members in the same share group, because their presence can inhibit the openness and brutal honesty that is required to come to grips with the darkest parts of our broken psyches.

But it was OK because my son has been an ever-present appendage for my life almost since he was born, and certainly for the past eighteen years. Danny is twenty-seven. That’s his chronological age. But in reality he will forever be eighteen months old. Danny has a genetic defect known as Angelman Syndrome, which manifests as severe mental retardation, and a very happy, almost always smiling, countenance. Shortly after his ninth birthday, his mother and I separated, and since that time I have been his primary caretaker and decision maker.

He has been by my side, literally, through divorces, a couple of major relocations, career changes, years of ever-deepening depression, alcoholism and now recovery. He has sat in the front seat of my truck patiently watching as I parked on the side of the road weeping uncontrollably, or lost my cool and yelled into the phone at significant others, or worked for hours in the blistering heat or freezing cold at one of the job sites where I earned my pay, or mindlessly put thousands of freeway miles on my truck taking him back and forth to spend time with his mother.

I realized a long time ago that this fact—having a handicapped child and now adult to care for—puts me in a unique and often overlooked part of society. We are admired, or pitied, or put on a pedestal, or complained about, or simply ignored, because we are different from most, and “most” don’t know how to deal with us, so they just avoid us for fear that they might do or say the wrong thing.

Those of us in recovery often joke that we are “those people”—the ones that many churches have turned their backs on and really don’t want to see or talk about, because of the bad choices we have made and the damage we have inflicted on ourselves and those around us. In short, good people avoid “those people” because “they” have problems that “good people” prefer to keep out of their lives.

It is basically the same for those in the handicapped world. I don’t think most people have a dislike for us over here, they just don’t know what to do with us. So best to just smile, nod and move on about their regular lives. Lord knows, every life has enough stress in it, handicap or no handicap.

Raising a child with special needs requires many special talents, special sacrifices and special strengths that you probably never realized you had before. But in more than a quarter century of dealing with all these challenges, what I have found is that the really “special” part of all this is the relationship you will have with the “special” child, and with all the significant others in your life—spouse, other children, dear friends, doctors, therapists, teachers and a handful of angels you will encounter along the way. And with your creator.

Danny is a strapping, healthy twenty-seven-year-old man with a mind that will be forever stuck in the pre-verbalite era. He loves people, and people love him. And though he will never speak a word, he has profoundly changed the lives of many, many people, starting with me.

This is his story—our story. And at the end perhaps you will see the many lessons I learned along the way. His story is not a tragedy, nor a heroic tale. It is the story God wrote for him, and it is pretty much the same one God writes for all of us. We just need to take a step back and try to look past our own selfish desires, fears and doubts.

This wasn’t part of my life plan when I was getting out of high school. It wasn’t part of my plan even when, at age forty, I welcomed him, my first child, into the world.

But it is what it is. And it is pretty darn amazing.