Before Kaia was born, there was a standing joke around here that we were going to start a 'fund' for him. Instead of a college fund, his was going to go toward paying for the massive amounts of therapy he would undoubtedly need after enduring my sister, my self and the rest of the family for 18 years. We are, to put it mildly, kind of like Dharma... without a strong Greg force. It can be quite scary around here at times.
Of course, it started as a joke and we're pretty sure that Kaia will turn out okay (though my mother's boyfriend swears the makeup and nail polish is going to cause permanent damage), but now that his little brother is nearing 3, we've begun to seriously reconsider that therapy fund. Kaia will turn out well, but what about Aloshua? I have this not so secret fear that the things we force Aloshua to endure now will scar him forever.
Take, for instance, the new device that arrived for him yesterday. They call it a stander... in all honesty it looks more like something the Grand Inquisitors would put believed heretics into during the Inquisition to get them to confess their sins and turn again to the light. And from the amount of screaming and crying Aloshua has done the two times we've put him into it, I think he feels rather much the same.
As I said, he is nearing three and he isn't yet weight bearing. For those of you that don't know what that means, he hasn't yet mastered the art of pulling up and has come nowhere close to learning to walk. He has hip function issues. It's just one of the myriad affects of the spina bifida. He also, thanks to the severe shortage of physical therapists, has been on the PT waiting list for the last 2 years. We do what we can with him at home, but since neither of us are trained in physical therapy, there is only so much we can do. Hence the stander. We're supposed to strap him into it for a bit each day to strengthen his leg muscles and teach him how to bear weight and thus, learn to stand independently.
Except of course, we feel like evil people for doing so because he screams and cries and reaches for us and looks at us as if he doesn't understand why we'd do something so heartless to me. It's quite a sad sight.
And then there are the little metal doctor's tables we force him to endure, the restraints we sometimes have to use when he's in a frenzy and trying to tear his trach out to launch it at us, the nurse we make him stay with 3 nights a week, the passy-muir valve his speech therapist makes him wear, the ventilator that keeps him on a rather short leash 15 hours a day, and a million other little things that, while medically necessary, force him to tears. And that's not even including the trauma he's endured from 13 surgeries and all of his hospitalizations.
It's enough to make you feel like you're an awful person.
Until you read things such as the story of the 73 year old man that kept his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years and fathered 7 children by her, 3 of whom he kept in that selfsame dungeon their entire lives. As awful as I often feel about the things we make Aloshua do and as depraved as it sometimes makes me feel, I cannot imagine how someone can be that psychotic. I can't fathom how someone could live with themselves knowing that his children have been forced to live in a dungeon for so very long.
It's one of those stories that you think has to be faked. It just doesn't seem possible that someone could be so heartless and that no one else even suspected. And then you realize that somehow, it is not only possible, but that it is reality.
It makes me grateful, in some twisted sense, for the things we do make Aloshua endure. He may not understand those things, he may think we're heartless at times... but he will, I hope, grow up knowing that we adore him and that he never cries alone; that when he's strapped to that awful contraption, mommy and nanny are soothing him through their own sheen of tears, that when he's sedated, we're being soothed by nurses as we whisper apologies to him.
The family that was kept in that dungeon will probably never know those things. They, for all intents and purposes, never existed or simply stopped existing. They were forgotten and while life moved on for everyone else, theirs never did.
That's heartbreaking to me. And it's one of the reasons I now study forensic psychology. We've studies so many different things in the course of our studies, but it is cases such as this that really hit me. It's just something that no amount of studying the why's will ever really prepare you for. There just isn't an explanation that puts such inhumanity into a neat little clinical box that you can study without being heartbroken for that family.
And there really is no punishment that will make it better. His daughter was in that dungeon for as long as I have been alive; who knows how many years before that she spent locked in a dungeon of a completely different variety? They could put him to death tomorrow and it wouldn't really matter. He's 73, he's walking the home stretch anyway. They could keep him locked in solitary confinement for the rest of his days and that wouldn't really matter either. He's already lived 73 years as a free man.
In cases such as this, there really isn't any justice. Long after he is gone, having lived his life, his family will deal with the scars that life brought to them. And as much as we know (or think we know) about psychology and the psychology of crime, there will never be an adequate answer for them.
For Aloshua, there will be answers. One day, he'll be free from the ventilator, free of the trach, free of the stander. He may never run, but he'll walk. He'll speak. He'll continue to smile and laugh and to have those happy, carefree moments. And if he remembers everything he's gone through, he'll know that he's still alive and able to do all that he does because of it. This family though, will probably see those dungeon walls for the rest of their lives.
It makes me feel a little bit silly for obsessing over the emotional damage we're doing to Aloshua and more than a little angry that no-one was obsessing over what happened to that woman. In the end, she's the one that could have used the protection, the obsession, and someone who cared to soothe her while she cried.
