The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son by Ian Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

as well, which didn’t encourage his therapists.
    The eye doctor couldn’t get an accurate reading on what his eyes needed, and Walker couldn’t say. Ditto his hearing. Added to the eleven times he was at Dr. Saunders’ office in 1998 alone, along with trips to Emergency, Walker logged a medical visit a week. And that was if he was more or less healthy.
    Better to concentrate on his gross motor abilities, the experts told us: if he learned to walk, at least, he could vary his environment and stimulate himself that way, and would be that much less dependent on others for the rest of his life. That was the phrase: for the rest of his life . To teach him, we undertook a costly and radical Venezuelan therapy three times a week for two years. The medek method entailed hanging him upside down and pulling his legs into unnatural positions. The only medek specialist in the city, Esther Fink, lived forty-five minutes away by car, in a north Toronto neighbourhood heavily populated by Hasidim with a substantial number of disabled children of their own. It was another world, and I was suddenly part of it.
    Walker hated the sessions, started screaming the moment we pulled into Esther Fink’s driveway, but he learned to walk. At least he had that. He could be what his name said he was. Maybe that was why we insisted.

    The strange thing was that all this darkness could be relieved by a few pinpoints of light. A reaction alone was notable; a smile or one of his glee sprees charmed my afternoon.
    I remember how proud I was the first day he went to school. By the age of three he was enrolled in Play ’n Learn, a daycare program that integrated normal and disabled children. I could spot the parents of the delayed kids in the school parking lot when I dropped Walker off: they were the ones who looked as if a bomb had just gone off in the back seat of the car. They were starved for contact and longing to tell the truth. One afternoon, I ran into a woman whose severely disabled fourteen-year-old daughter had died two years earlier. “Do you know the first thing I did—on the way back from the funeral?” she said. “I said to my husband, ‘Pull over. Let’s have sex.’” She later divorced him.
    From Walker’s first Play ’n Learn report card:
Walker enjoys exploring objects by manipulating them. He turns objects through his fingers as he looks at them, and has also begun to bang objects together .
    Play ’n Learn’s theory was that integrating normal children and their disabled counterparts would sensitize the normals and inspire the delayed. The school boasted a full-time sensory integration therapist (CFC children are often overwhelmed by their senses and have to be conditioned to them, even to someone else touching their skin) and an occupational therapist, to teach basic concepts of sociability such as sitting down with others at lunch. To my surprise, Walker slowly became bolder, more outgoing. The staff (all women) were dedicated teachers of the disabled, optimists who saw hope in everything.
Typically, he produces open vowels and consonant–vowel combinations—which may include any of the sounds [b, n, d, 1, y] with an “ah.” Although he will not initiate an interaction, he enjoys having his peers around. When a peer is holding his hand, he seems to be content .
    It was the last line that crushed me. He needed someone to moor him.
    The provincial government in Ontario, keen to show it was serious about education, insisted that all children be graded. Grades meant standards. The first time Walker arrived home from Play ’n Learn with a report card in his backpack, we learned he was improving at math. Math! And improving! We laughed like hell, and then we kissed him and said, “Well done, Walker! Two plus two is four!” We did that for a long time, held on to it like a rare, delicious treat. Not that we believed Walker could do math as we defined it. But it was a story he had brought us that anyone could appreciate,