I could identify with Annie Jungwirth and her sweet gingerbread-scented denial. Raising children is gloriously but also frighteningly uncertain. Although we make choices every day to protect and to teach our children right from wrong, parenting is like rolling dice, and I’m not sure which digits add up to a more disastrous loss—child as perpetrator or child as victim. Until Ryan took on this case, I had forgotten to allocate a percentage of maternal worry toward these kinds of dark thoughts: What if my child commits a heinous crime? How would I manage to console a child who was locked up, far away from home?
Ryan’s only argument for why Wes should be sentenced to probation without serving any prison time was to blame his parents for their son’s volatile childhood. After all, according to many witnesses, Zane knew of his son’s misdeeds but was passive about enforcing a remedy. All the abuse transpired under Zane’s roof, and at one point Zane was even described as stumbling upon Wes in bed with his sister but doing nothing.
“I thought it was about cigarettes, or drugs, or alcohol. If I’d known it was sexual abuse, I would have done something.”
Ryan would argue Annie was responsible for having dragged Wes on her journey of transience and abuse throughout his childhood, even though Ryan was not, by nature or profession, accusatory. How else could he explain the vile crimes his client had committed? Ultimately, Ryan’s sentencing argument would hinge upon that turning point in Seaside, Oregon. “When I went in that closet with Clayton, I didn’t know any better,” Wes told investigators. “I just did whatever people told me to do.”
While Wes had committed certain crimes as an adult, he began committing those crimes, including the most heinous of them, as a boy. Ryan argued that ten-year-old Aloysius would not have been sent to prison, and therefore eighteen-year-old Aloysius should not be either. Wes was never allowed to develop a true appreciation of his deviance, and his parents failed to guide him in meaningful ways. It was obvious to Ryan, though, that eventually Wes began doing whatever he wanted, using his sisters’ bodies for foreplay and then masturbating in private and public bathrooms, unusually preoccupied with his own sexual gratification.
Over the course of familiarizing himself with Wes’s story, Ryan had developed a kinship with the boy’s maternal grandparents, not only because they paid him for his services and treated him with respect but also because they reminded him of his own extended family. He repeatedly referred to Wes’s grandfather as the patriarch, trustworthy, and altogether lovable. Sometimes it seemed impossible to understand how inherently good people raised deviant kids.
In a final effort to build a case, Ryan enlisted the help of a well-respected Oshkosh psychologist, Dr. Hammond, hopeful that Wes’s history of trauma, combined with his young age upon first committing abuse, would result in an appropriate diagnosis. A personality disorder or PTSD would prove useful legally in mitigating his sentence. Ryan wavered constantly between feeling a professional, and slightly personal, obligation to help Wes’s family, and bottoming out with a sense of disgust. “It’s all a bunch of sick shit,” he’d say. More than anything, Ryan wanted to ensure that Wes would get help so as not to re-offend in his adult life. Defense attorneys, like everybody else, worried over recidivism. We sat back—or perhaps forward, on the edges of our seats—and waited for the psychologist’s official evaluation. Even Wes’s siblings became advocates for allowing Wes to remain part of their family and the community. Neither of the girls wanted Wes locked up.
Our own boys take turns suffering from what I call little-boy big-boy syndrome. In the throes of weaning, a process I approached passively, the boys would alternately brandish swords, playing pirates like big boys, and then crawl into my lap for “milky” like little boys. Even as Leo matured, he would reject hand-holding in public but crawl into my lap in private, clutching my wrist like a chew toy and blowing warm peppered air into my palm. One step forward, one step back was a dance we memorized. Leo would take enormous risks, like throwing fastballs across city streets or intentionally belly-flopping into deep water, but if he hurt himself, often bleeding from the nose, he’d come running, calling, “Mama, help me,” his voice nostalgic and infantile, a baby wailing to be held.
When mothers exchange pleasantries, we say, “They grow up so fast” or “Enjoy these years while they last.” There is no way to forestall their growth and maturity, even if we document their rites of passage, fastidiously marking our children’s coming-of-age. Whereas breeching, an occasion in which mothers first dressed their little boys in britches, was once momentous in a son’s life, what now, I wonder, has replaced this ceremonious event? And for girls, what has replaced such old-fashioned coming-of-age rituals as shortcoating or donning a bodice? Perhaps for all children today, those first rites of passage entail learning to walk, talk, read, and ride a bike, or the first pierced ear, the first Swiss Army knife, the first sleepover, the first house key, the first cell phone. But it was not so long ago that girls celebrated their “coming out to society” by wearing their hair off their necks—elaborate updos—at public parties or balls.
Among contemporary generations of children, certainly we’d include the first kiss, the first drink, the first cigarette, the first joint, not to dismiss the most taboo of all the coming-of-age rituals, losing our virginity. But how do the rules of
