Not Always Happy

by Kari Wagner-Peck

  Forcing an energetic and grateful tone, I added, “Thanks for telling me this! I can dial it back and focus on what he needs.”

  “Sounds good!” she said.

  “Terrific!” I replied. Once I had a few hours of distance from that conversation, I came to the realization I was not a fraud, just a parent on a learning curve.

  Thorin developed his strength quickly with the physical therapist’s businesslike instructions. In no time, Thorin was walking a few steps, falling, getting back up, and trying again. Ward and I held back on the overboard praise. One evening I told Thorin, using a normal tone of voice, that he was doing a good job walking as I pretended to watch Project Runway. Inside I was jubilant. Our pulling back made room for Thorin to show off rather than perform.

  A few weeks later my sister, Ward, and I were sitting in a circle on the living room floor with Thorin.

  “Hey, Buddy can you take two steps to me?” Betty asked.

  Thorin pulled himself up and staggered over like Baby Frankenstein. We all offered subdued praise: “Nice job, Dude,” or some variation of that was said by each of us. Then Ward asked Thorin to walk across the circle to him. The distance was four steps, which he handled like a champ.

  “More!” Thorin signed excitedly.

  The three of us casually spread our circle out to increase the distance he would need to cover.

  “Thorin can you walk to me?” I asked.

  He covered six steps to get to me. Thorin made whooping sounds at his destination, which was our cue. We cheered. Instead of retreating, Thorin clapped wildly. Next, he successfully tackled eight steps. We clapped exuberantly.

  We carried on until he was too tired to continue. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, grinning and holding Thorin close. I got to see my son walk for the first time. He was almost three years old—past the point of when typically developing children walk, but it didn’t feel too late.

  After that night, Thorin was able to walk unsupported unless the terrain was uneven or challenging in some way. Walking for Thorin was no longer a test but a way to get to some place more expediently.

  His speech therapist, on the other hand, was not as accepting of Thorin’s abilities.

  “He’s not where he should be,” she said the first time Ward and I met with her.

  Something about that phrase bothered me. It seemed Thorin was being blamed for something.

  “Where should he be?” I asked.

  “He should be better. He’s so far behind; I don’t even know yet.”

  Ward and I were still new to advocacy. Comments like these, shared by professionals about Thorin, were sometimes stunning, other times troublesome, and, thankfully, usually just annoying. The speech therapist’s comments were troublesome because she might be translating these diminished thoughts into her practice in a way Thorin could internalize.

  Early in our relationship Ward and I had bonded over the fact we both loved Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Our love of Whitman even prompted us to name our German shepherd Walt. It was either that or live with the shelter’s name for him: Shultzy.

  As a teenager, Ward discovered the beauty of Leaves of Grass the same summer he discovered cunnilingus with his then girlfriend. Whitman would have been pleased, I’m sure. When her parents found out Ward had given their daughter a copy of Leaves of Grass—they called Whitman “a dirty poet”—he became persona non grata. I can only imagine what would have happened if both his discoveries were known to them.

  My discovery of Whitman was less earthy. Twenty years before, I’d worked at a small, prominent college as a therapist. One of my clients was a nineteen-year-old returning to school after having a psychotic break. He returned home and saw a psychiatrist weekly. He was meeting with me as part of his transition back to school.

  I learned he liked the psychiatrist but didn’t think he was really listening to him. I also learned he came from a working-class family who saw him as the family hero attaining the unimagined: an education with the sons and daughters of the elite. His mother had already predicted the rest of his life. He would be successful, wealthy, and upper class.

  “Do you see any obstacles to returning to school?” I asked.

  “I have one. I want to leave school and play hockey in Europe.”

  “Oh boy, that’s a big one.”

  “Yeah,” he laughed at the enormity of it.

  “When did you decide this?”

  “In high school, but no one thought it was a good idea. Then the last year while I was home, I spent my days lying on a lawn chair in the backyard, daydreaming of living in Europe, being in a new city every day, and playing hockey.”

  I was thrown. I wasn’t sure what my role was in his life decision. And, I wasn’t sure I wanted his parents or the school upset with me. I shared all these details with my clinical supervisor.

  “In contemplating the leaves of grass, he found his true nature,” he told me.

  “Right.”

  “He doesn’t want to be here. Maybe his break was less psychotic and more of an awakening,” he suggested.

  On the way home, I stopped at a bookstore. That night, I cracked open Leaves of Grass. I immediately opened to the complete, perfect beauty of Whitman. For two days, I dog-eared hundreds of pages and highlighted countless lines.

  “How good are you at hockey?” I asked the student in our next meeting.

  “I’m here on a hockey scholarship.”

  “I guess you must be pretty good, then.”

  “This is possible! I have a friend over there now doing the same thing. The problem is what other people want me to do,” he said, sounding tired.

  During the rest of the session, we talked about following your dreams regardless of what other people thought. Three days later, he came to wish me goodbye. He had finagled passage on a cargo ship headed to Rotterdam. How Whitmanesque, I thought. The lesson I took from him was that not being where you should be—based on other people’s estimations of you—was not a deficit; it was just another place.

  There was plenty Ward and I didn’t know about childrearing when Thorin arrived. And, there was plenty we didn’t know about Thorin. Very early on, I became aware Thorin seemed to be able to read my thoughts. The first time it really struck me was when I had my back to him in the bathroom. I was washing my hands, and he was unrolling the toilet paper all over the floor. I distinctly remember thinking, I hope he doesn’t notice my keys on the tank and throw them into the . . . splash! He threw my keys in the toilet!

  There were several of these events where I would think don’t do that, and, sure enough, he would do exactly that. Not having been a parent, I thought it was bonding process that occurred between parent and child. I talked to a woman in the neighborhood who had two children and did childcare in her home. I gave her a few examples of Thorin’s abilities.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it, how our kids can pick up on our thoughts,” I said to her.

  “Yeah, I’ve never heard of that.”

  I didn’t have the bandwidth to put a lot of thought into these incidents at the time, what with everything else going on.

  My energy was needed for everything else Thorin, especially communication. Our thinking was if he could be understood more, other things would fall in line. We didn’t pressure Thorin to talk but we did expect him to try as best he could, which he did. We also didn’t place a higher value on talking over other forms of communication. Thorin usually signed to communicate, but he would also spontaneously talk.

  Walt, our seventy-pound German shepherd, was lying on the floor, and Thorin wanted to get by him.

  “Get up!” yelled Thorin.

  He was still less than two-feet tall, but Walt jumped up so Thorin could make his way. Then he complimented Walt, saying “Good Walt!”

  Thorin also started telling me “good job” when I changed his diaper.

  I shared these observations with his speech therapist. She nodded her head but didn’t say anything. I didn’t even get
a smile. I wondered if she thought, Poor Ms. Wagner-Peck . . . can’t accept the fact Thorin isn’t where he should be, so she makes up stories.

  This suspicion by professionals of the accuracy of what Ward and I reported as Thorin’s development would continue over the years. If they didn’t see IT personally, whatever the accomplishment might be, IT didn’t exist. It was frustrating to be considered suspect by someone who saw Thorin only a fraction of the time Ward and I did.

  Our communication challenges didn’t interfere with the fact that I knew when Thorin was mad. He became more comfortable being angry with us—more specifically with me. When Thorin was with Ward, he mostly squealed with delight, but with me, it was a lot of testing behaviors. We had been cautioned in our classes about the honeymoon period that adoptive families experience. Some children who are adopted tend to stifle their natural developmental behaviors until they have assessed the adults’ ability at coping.

  Thorin started signing no to me upon any request I made, which was typical for a two-year-old child interacting with his parent. It annoyed me sometimes, but I took it as a healthy sign. It did get ridiculous when I would open my mouth and he would yell no before I could say anything.

  He also regularly pulled shenanigans to assess my temperament. One morning, I turned my head just in time to duck before getting hit in the head with an open container of applesauce. It decorated the wall behind me, making a drippy mess.

  “That didn’t look like an accident, Mister. Did you mean to do that?”

  Thorin gave me the thumbs-up sign.

  As I cleaned up his mess, I could hear him snickering. A few minutes later, he threw his juice on the floor. Thankfully, it had a top on it. This type of behavior became common at most meals.

  Ward, on the other hand, found parenting a breeze—primarily because he was most comfortable in the realm of fun stuff. I had to deal with the actual responsibilities of parenting: transporting Thorin to and from school; meeting with staff at the school; buying clothes, toys, and books; and dealing with the mostly typical behavior meted out by toddlers.

  At least a few times a week, I would ask, “Can you say Mommy, Thorin? Can you please?”

  “No, Ba,” he said, shaking his head vigorously.

  Thorin’s rebuff reminded me of a story that one of our adoption class instructors had told about her adopted daughter. For ten years, the girl addressed every birthday card to her in the same way: “Happy Birthday, Mrs. Clifton!”

  I took two things away from that story: it gave me hope that the girl used an exclamation point, and I remembered Mrs. Clifton saying not to take it personally. I would eventually figure out that most of parenting was not taking things personally.

  In the outside world, I also was often not acknowledged as Thorin’s mother. My age caused this confusion, and I struggled to not to take it personally. Soon after Thorin started preschool, I argued with a five-year-old who insisted I must be Thorin’s grandmother.

  “Really, with all that gray hair?” he countered.

  “For your information, it’s platinum,” I retorted.

  “Yeah, right.”

  On another day, I walked out our front door with Thorin in my arms, looking, I thought, hip and youthful in my dark rinsed jeans, my short-wasted safari jacket, and my black cat-eye sunglasses. As we made our way to the car, a man about my age passed by.

  “Are you the grandmother?” he asked.

  My cover was blown.

  “No, I’m the old mother,” I said breezily.

  During those months before we officially adopted Thorin, I turned fifty. It was not a traumatic event; it was a cakewalk, in fact. With all the things related to being new parents, Ward forgot I was celebrating that seminal birthday. No one else remarked on it either. I was not the recipient of the longstanding tradition of black birthday balloons or not-so-funny cards commenting on my advanced age. I realized that my mid-life crisis looked like what most people do with the first half of their lives. I was literally flipping the script.

  Sherry notified us that Thorin’s former foster brother, Jacob, was being placed with a family in town, and he would soon be attending the same preschool as Thorin. The boys had only seen each other one time since Thorin moved out of Sherry’s house. I knew Thorin missed Jacob. Someone had given him the book The Snowy Day, where the central figure is a young African-American boy. Whenever I read it to him, Thorin would press his hands over the boy and say “Jac-ub.”

  When the boys saw each other again in the hallway outside of their classrooms, Jacob said hi to Thorin and reached toward him. Thorin was smiling brightly. They gave each other a light pat on the arm. Then they spent part of the morning playing together.

  The relationship was not an easy one for Thorin to continue. When they lived with Sherry, they were the only children in the house; they were each other’s playmates. At school, Jacob had his pick of many children to play with. He was also able to talk, walk, and run and had the strength to explore the entire playground.

  I was told by staff every once in a while Jacob would play with Thorin in the sandbox, happy to hang out with his former foster brother. I asked Thorin if it bothered him.

  “No, Jac-ub good.”

  Thorin’s propensity to throw food, drink, and objects increased in occurrence and location. He was doing it at home, others people’s homes, restaurants, and school. We bestowed upon him the nickname Throwy Peck. Throwy was a bit of a misnomer. Aside from throwing, he could reach over and ever so lightly knock over his juice or milk.

  My response to this behavior alternated between ignoring it, pretending it was an accident, yelling, and, while ineffective, crying over spilled milk. For a while, I thought maybe it was Pavlovian. What was troubling was my belief that he was training me with the unconditioned stimulus of throwing things to elicit a conditioned response. How frustrating for him that I kept changing my reaction.

  Ward realized I was doing more than my fair share of parenting—after I told him every day for months. There were gaps in Thorin’s preschool hours, and I couldn’t fill them all. Four days per week, Ward started going into work early so he could take off Thursday afternoons to be with Thorin.

  On one of their Thursdays, Ward and Thorin were downtown when a woman panhandler asked Ward for spare change. He handed her a couple quarters. What came next was wholly unexpected.

  “Is his name Thorin?”

  Ward was taken aback. “What?”

  “Is his name Thorin?” she repeated.

  “How do you know him?”

  “I’m friends with his mother,” she answered. She then looked at Thorin, who was staring at her.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.

  No acknowledgment came from Thorin, and Ward continued walking forward, cutting off any more conversation.

  “It’s good you got him! You’re doin’ a wonderful job,” she called after them.

  This encounter would not be the last time we would run into someone who knew Thorin before he became part of our family. People usually commented on how good Thorin looked or how glad they were he was with us. We never experienced hostility in these encounters, but it was always disconcerting. What did they know about Thorin we didn’t?

  Another type of encounter—more like an intrusion—we continue to experience to this day is strangers who can’t get over the fact Thorin has Down syndrome. We found traveling with Thorin must be similar to being with a celebrity. Thorin is recognized by his Down syndrome in the same way Brad Pitt is recognized by his distinctive features. And the same way Mr. Pitt is just as likely to be lionized as condemned, Thorin is also the recipient of a continuum of opinions. In both cases, public people think they know you, and you must engage with them simply because they recognize you.

  The first time it happened, I was at Target with Thorin. A woman inexplicably yelled, “I love the way Down syndrome babies look!” I ignored her. Her teenaged daughter looked like she wanted to dig a hole so she could disappea
r. The woman must have thought I couldn’t hear her so she yelled it a couple more times, running along our cart as I sprinted away.

  I yelled in her direction before losing her in the housewares department and said, “Okay, that’s enough!”

  Ward and I started comparing notes on our bizarre stranger stories. We both had encounters with the overly familiar fan who is completely tone-deaf to the concept of stranger danger. Over the years, untold strangers have asked Thorin to hug them. I’m guessing in their mind they think, I’m not some creepy adult. I just want to hug a boy with Down syndrome. Early on, Thorin would try to comply with their requests, but either Ward or I would intervene. Later, as Thorin developed a healthier concept of strangers, he would run to me. Insistence is a big feature of this type of intruder. I had one woman repeatedly insist.

  “Please, please can he hug me?”

  “He really can’t,” I said putting my arm around Thorin as we walked away.

  “How about a high-five then?” she yelled.

  Money givers are another fan who Ward has run into on several occasions. This person, without exception, is an elderly woman who presses a dollar bill in Ward’s hand and says, “For the boy.”

  In preparing for Thorin’s third birthday—his first with us—I wanted to make sure everything was to his liking. I consulted him on the kind of cake, frosting, and decorations by showing him online photos. He wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, topped with dinosaurs, which I liberally interpreted as anything prehistoric. Ward’s mother and brother came from New Jersey for the event. The Burdins and McGirrs from next door came with their girls. And, Jade came.

  Jade attended to Thorin’s every need and criticized almost everything I did. Her honeymoon period with Ward and me had clearly worn off, and she choose me as the target—similar to Thorin. She liked me and was happy Thorin was with us, but she treated me like the inept stepmother she would have to school in the ways of parenting, which made sense to me since she had sacrificed so much to care for him.