Every parent of a handicapped child knows loneliness from experience.
The trauma of discovering a child's handicap brings with it an immediate sense of rupture, of separation from the "others."
Parents may feel this loneliness within their own marriage when one spouse refuses to accept the child's condition, or when one of them—for personal rather than educational reasons—insists on institutional placement.
They feel it in encounters with those they must turn to, those who hold all their hope: doctors, specialists, educators who sometimes wonder aloud why the child was brought into existence at all, given the risks, and who invoke abortion as the solution that should have been chosen. And they do this in the name of a social morality before which religious conviction should supposedly bow.
They feel it among people close to them—those from whom they had hoped to find natural support.
But it is often strangers, people on the street, who inflict the deepest wounds—with careless and sometimes cruel comments, with awkward gestures and uncomfortable stares.
Are not indifference and cynicism the consequences of the shock that the sight of a handicapped person provokes, just as they are unconscious reactions set off by his presence?
Some will retreat into indifference, minimizing the weight of the trial borne by the child and his family, avoiding at all costs any chance of being moved, of feeling implicated.
Every parent of a handicapped child knows loneliness from experience.
Others will feel affronted by the place given to handicapped people, by the efforts they demand, by the burden that society must bear for them.
But is not the most painful reaction for the parents and for the child himself that which comes from a certain kind of sentimentality—from those who feel distressed before "such" a sight, who pity clumsily with a hint of superiority and reproach?
By contrast, those who help families of handicapped children, without being personally involved, cannot imagine the richness they bring. They do not know what effect—on parents struck at what they hold most dear—can come from the gentleness and delicate care of someone who approaches on tiptoe. That mother with grown children who offers two afternoons a week; that young woman who visits their daughter every Thursday, the one who never leaves the house—these have helped the parents overcome the hidden temptation to reject their child or to over-protect him.
In other cases, the serenity and generosity of friends have allowed parents to give themselves more fully to the difficult educational efforts that are so necessary, yet so exhausting.
The support of those nearby is essential. A visit now and then, a phone call to ask how things are, other small gestures will have more effect than material help.
That support matters deeply to the siblings of the handicapped child as well. From their earliest years they can distinguish with remarkable insight the people who have a genuine interest in their disabled brother or sister.
As for the handicapped themselves, they need others to take an interest in them beyond their family and educators. And do they not, in their poverty, have much to teach us—"because theirs is the Kingdom of God"? (Mt 19:14).
Those who have begun to approach them with a childlike spirit know how much richness they have received. And it is the whole family of the handicapped person that in a real sense can and must offer this gift to others.
We parents of handicapped children must understand that the dialogue we ask from society cannot be one-way; that if we must overcome the temptation to reject our child, we must also remain open to the problems of others—problems sometimes more painful than our own.
We are often inclined to make our trial absolute, and if we fight for our handicapped children, we systematically tend to place this problem first among social urgencies.
Though this impulse is primordial for us, touching our "closest neighbor," must we not—more than others—take pity on the trials the Lord places in our path, help them overcome the moment of rebellion, offer them that sense of life that our child, through his very presence, teaches us?
That is: a life given not to the illusory pursuit of individual happiness as promoted by our contemporary culture, but to the common search, step by step, for light through darkness.
by Jacqueline and Henri Faivre, 1983
