When my brother, Steve, was about five
years old, he told mom he wanted to run away from home.
So, mom helped him prepare for the
journey. She got him dressed appropriately and made him some sandwiches for the
road and packed them in a brown paper lunch bag. Mom then rolled Steve in his
wheelchair out onto the front sidewalk and told him to tell passersby that he
was running away from home and ask them if they would take him home to live
with them. Mom said she was going back in the house, but she would look out
periodically to see if he was still there and if he still was she’d come out
and check on him.
Well, fortunately, there were no
passersby. I figure that’s what must’ve happened because otherwise this thing
probably would’ve gotten all blown out of proportion. Because this was 1952 or
so and if anybody would’ve come across an abandoned crippled kid saying to them,
“Please take me home,” they probably would’ve freaked out and called the
authorities and somebody from the state might’ve come and taken my brother away
from my mother because she would’ve been seen as some kind of negligent shrew or
something.
But just the opposite was true. First off,
I’m sure the weather was conducive to running away from home. I’m sure my mother never would’ve set my brother out there on the sidewalk alone if there was a blizzard
going on.
And second, I really doubt my brother was
ever technically alone. I’m sure my mother was in the house watching through
the window the whole time.
What she did was the opposite of
negligent. It was actually quite brilliant. My mother knew a few things about
raising crippled kids. She raised three of us. And she handled it pretty much
the same way she handled it when my brother wanted to run away from home. She
didn’t try to stop us from doing all the stuff kids want to do. She let
us go out and do dumb shit and screw up and learn from it. She knew we could
take it.
After a little while, mom went outside
and said to Steve, “Oh, are you still here? Would you like to come back in the
house?” Steve said yes.
Mom and Steve went back in the house and a little was that.
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