“How long is he in that?” Linda asked, pointing to the Pack ‘n Play.
Ward looked at me and winked, “No more than five or six hours a day?”
I laughed.
“Don’t joke with anyone else like that. You would be surprised how humorless some people are,” Linda advised.
Enter Karen, Thorin’s GAL. Nothing was funny to her. She was a lawyer paid by the state to represent Thorin’s interests. Ward and I were in this limbo existence where his mother was making a case for getting him back although she wasn’t following through on stipulations set for her. Karen could stand in the way of us keeping Thorin if she advocated for Thorin’s biological mother over us. She also seemed obsessed with Down syndrome.
“I’m sure you’ve considered all the things he will not be able to do,” she said.
Thorin was sitting in the middle of the coffee table playing with a Curious George stuffed animal.
“No, we haven’t. Who knows what anyone is capable of? Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.”
“What a nice way to look at it,” she said smiling.
It seemed pointless to explain I wasn’t being nice.
Karen was also a proponent of the “people with Down syndrome sure are happy” mindset. Here, she was not alone. One of the most prevalent stereotypes about people with Down syndrome is that they are always happy. The inference here is “these people” are so blighted their personalities are flatten to a single non-discriminating emotion. Until Thorin moved in with us, I had forgotten I had known someone with Down syndrome.
I was thirteen and two weeks away from my Lutheran confirmation. Without talking it over with my parents, I visited with Pastor Larsen.
“I don’t believe in God, so I can’t get confirmed,” I told him. What I didn’t say was that church seemed judgmental to me.
The pastor gave me reasons to get confirmed anyway, including, “You’re thinking about the whole thing too much. I’m positive there are other kids who feel the same way.”
“So it’s up to them to say something or not, right?”
“That’s not what I meant,” he quickly replied. “No one in my thirty years of being a pastor has ever refused to be confirmed!”
My parents were furious. Not so much for the overthinking religion part but for the embarrassing them business. We agreed they would not drag me by my hair down the aisle of the church to be confirmed, and I would volunteer at the church rather than attend the services. My job was to help in the basement with the “retarded kids” while their parents attended the church service. It was a small group of children who had Down syndrome.
The room had dark wood paneling, brown carpeting, and a large table with chairs. There were no toys, construction paper, or anything for a child to play with. I immediately hated the adult volunteer who ran the little gulag. He seemed to get off on how pathetically hopeless he found the children and how great he was for spending his time with them.
“They’re hopeless. We don’t do much here but make sure they stay in the room,” he told me on my first day.
I nodded, wondering why these kids couldn’t be in the regular daycare—my younger sister was on the second floor of the church in the daycare room, likely eating paste. However, one of the kids was not a kid. He looked to be in his twenties. Even as a teenager, I was very much aware he was an adult. His name was Monty. He wore a green suit with a striped tie; his shoes were shined, and his hair combed back. He was dressed for church. In spite of his circumstances, he presented himself in a dignified manner, sitting at the table sipping from a glass of water. I hoped his impassive gaze toward the center of the room was a mask and inside he was able to spirit himself away to another place.
I lasted there one more week. At thirteen years old, I had no idea how to change what seemed so obviously awful to me in that basement.
The first time I heard the word happy in reference to Thorin was about a week after he moved in. I was unbuckling him from his car seat when a neighbor came up behind me. He hadn’t met Thorin officially but he had seen him.
As he looked over my shoulder at Thorin, he said, smiling, “They’re always happy, aren’t they?”
I knew he wasn’t talking about toddlers in general, but I didn’t know what to say. It was like I was in the church basement again.
Two months into parenting Ward notified me that he wanted Thorin to like him best.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I want to be the favorite. There’s always a favorite parent, and I want it to be me. You’re bossy so it isn’t like you’d stand a chance anyway.”
You can learn a lot about someone when you start parenting with him. My once noncompetitive mate was now actively campaigning against me in the likability department with our son. When I shared my frustration with Sherry, she responded practically.
“Good! Their fun time away from you is your alone time.”
And, it didn’t help that Thorin refused to call me “Mom.” He called me “Ba” and Ward “Daddy,” or sometimes “Mommy.” Thorin even called the mail carrier “Mom” eighteen months before me. I was an inarticulate syllable, and Ward was a fully articulated word commonly used for someone in a parenting role or a character in a Tennessee Williams play.
Did it bother me? Yes, it bothered me. Sure, I was gratified by the stories of other mothers who told me about how daddies are always the favorite. I had more than one friend suggest Thorin was doing it to bother me.
“No shit!” I responded on all occasions.
However others parsed his
