Anna comes home and says to me: "Mom, I want to make love with Roberto"—her brother-in-law.
"That's impossible, dear. Roberto is married to your sister."
"Then I want to make love with you, because I love you and you love me, and I want a boyfriend." "Anna, you can only make love when you love a man."
"I can't find any man, so I can't love and I don't have the right to make love. It's not fair. Can't you be happy without making love?" (sic)
Anna is thirty years old, but she remains deeply confused about sex. She links it to desire and pleasure rather than to affection. I've tried to explain what sex is for—its natural end: having children. I'm not sure she understood. Still, as I have with her brothers and sisters, I've always shown her that love and sexuality belong together, that they can't be separated.
Anna lives in a group home—mixed, Christian-inspired—with no protection against possible sexual activity. She can't tolerate the pill, and I won't even consider tubal ligation. For that to happen, Anna would need to understand, but even now at thirty, she doesn't grasp her disability clearly enough. She isn't fully mature yet. How could I ask her to accept never having a child?
And harder still—the cruelest thing I face as her mother—would be to say to my daughter: "It wouldn't be right for you to have a baby."
What anguish for parents!
If she did become pregnant, we feel we couldn't raise a child at our age. So what's left to do? Trust in Providence? How long? Must we simply accept whatever comes? I know Anna has had very strong sexual drives for a long time now. How do I protect her? She hasn't lived with us in years, but what if she still did? If Anna felt genuine affection for someone, could we allow her a sexual relationship without marriage or children in the picture? What anguish this brings us. And why should we demand a certain kind of life from Anna that we never demanded from our other children, who have surely lived more freely?
- L.M., 2003
Loneliness, Loneliness
Disabled people, shaped by their surroundings and the models they see, feel a powerful desire to live as others do—especially in big cities, in their own apartment with a partner. They want to erase their difference, to live like everyone else. But once they're in that apartment, they face their isolation and ... the television. Is that the answer? Those of us who work with them must confront questions of homosexuality, must respond to their longing for a life as a couple, to requests about contraception and abortion. We offer the pill as a tool, but that doesn't touch the real problem.
What genuine possibilities for friendship and connection exist for people so hungry for companionship?
An educator working with disabled adults in independent living