https://goo.gl/fo5CIL
If you have an hour, the Invisibilia episode is well worth a listen, but I’ll continue to recap some of the finer points. By and large, the answer Baxter got from families was: no. It was not a burden to live with their boarders. And this was not because the boarders did not exhibit symptoms of mental illness. One man locked himself in a bathroom. Another hallucinated that he was being attacked by lions. A third developed an infatuation with his host woman, Toni, who had to negotiate her boarder’s desire to hug and kiss her relentlessly. (Toni’s husband was less than thrilled.) Instead of finding it a burden, however, the families said they found the situation “normal.” This was just part of life in Geel. It was a tradition older than the existence of the United States. Sure, the families figured out accommodations for their boarder’s unique behaviors—the host of the lion hallucinator, for instance, pretended to chase away lions—but they did not try to “fix” their boarders. They accepted them as they were.
Somehow, somewhere, the urge to want to change my kid subsided. Maybe it subsided when my husband and I took one-year-old Fee to a national gathering for people with 4p- and their families. Maybe it subsided when I saw all these differently abled people—people in wheelchairs and people who ran, people who ate orally and people fed by gtubes, people who spoke and people who didn’t—and I finally felt in my bones that all of these ways of being were good. And by good, I don’t just mean, “Hey, it’s all good.” I mean in that deep, affirming way that things are proclaimed good in Genesis. There is dark, and it is good, and there is light, and it is good, and there is a grown woman who gets around by scooting on her butt, and she is good, and here is my daughter, one year old, twelve pounds big, who has just started learning to hold up her head (thanks or possibly no thanks to our tummy time), and she is good. She is so, so good.