Unstrange Minds by Roy Richard Grinker EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Roy Richard Grinker
- Publish Date: January 1, 2007
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Mental Illness
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Pages: 352
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 0465027636
One in Three Hundred
SOMETIMES, AT NIGHT, ISABEL has a hard time falling
asleep. It helps her if I sit in a chair in her bedroom. Looking
at her then, from across the room, I see two different
Isabels.There is Isabel awake—often hyperactive and isolated
—and Isabel asleep, a beautiful child drifting into a calm
night. And then I realize something unsettling:
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I feel more
affection for the sleeping Isabel. She looks so peaceful and
relaxed. And I wonder what this says about me. Do I love her
less when she’s a real person, awake and in the world?
When I can hear each breath, I know she’s finally fallen
asleep, but I sit for a minute more—just to make sure, I tell
myself. The truth is, it’s nice to be in the same room with her
without having to work so hard.
Isabel has always been a slim girl, but she has a round face
that invites kisses. Joyce calls her cheeks “bo-bo-bos,” some
Korean baby talk she learned as a child that refers to balls of
fat in adorably plump babies. Before I leave her room, I kiss
her cheek, and she’s usually sweating, as children so often do
in their sleep. I think about how much she has to struggle
every day, just to deal with what to her must be chaos, and
what to most of us is simply everyday life.
I try not to think about what other teenage girls are like—
the ones I see outside our local middle school, gossiping and
talking about boys—and focus only on Isabel. If I compare her
to the rest of the world, she seems so impaired. But if I
compare her with herself, and consider all the progress she’s
made, more than any doctor ever predicted, I’m suddenly
filled with respect for her. I don’t know how she keeps herself
so happy.
It’s at those moments I have an odd feeling of liberation. I
remember that during my childhood one of my cousins
described having a child with a severe disability as “a prison
sentence.” It doesn’t seem that way to me because I cherish the
idea of being with Isabel forever. Joyce and I are free of the
stressful ambition of having Isabel go to a high-status high
school or college, free of the anxiety about a child leaving us
to live somewhere else or marry.
I am not a religious person, but there is something
profoundly meaningful, if not spiritual, about being the father
of a child with autism that has pushed me to consider lofty,
abstract principles of life like truth, beauty, and goodness. I
just have a hard time seeing them during the day when I’m
fighting with Isabel to stay near me on a sidewalk next to a
busy street, pay attention to her homework, or turn off the
television.
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