What a fantastic thread!
SUPER LONG PERSONAL STORY AHEAD
When I was growing up, my Mother was in foster care. She was considered one of the most reliable parents in the system and would frequently take in the most troubled cases. She broke ground with each of them in turn, making what were before problem children into great members of our family. When they left for one reason or another (one girl finally was going back with her true family; another girl who we took in while she was pregnant, had terrible hygiene and manners and was awful at school. By the end of the two years we had her, she was super hygienic, had lost 100lbs, was a great mother of her newborn and took school very seriously; etc. She has made a life for herself and still keeps in contact, etc), my mother was always deeply impacted at an emotional level, but for me - as a kid growing up - I was rather cold to a lot of them and thus never got emotionally connected, maybe out of jealousy or just being a teenager who hates things.
But there was one exception.
One day my mom gets a call from a desperate Mentor Program. Nobody will take in this 8 year old with autism. He is considered one of the most difficult children in the entire system. He could not eat by himself, cannot use the bathroom by himself, could speak no words except "food" and "bye" and - most heartrendingly of all - was so brutally violent to himself that he had to wear a helmet at all times.
This child had the absolute fucking most nightmarish upbringing. When he was born, his parents pretty soon thereafter knew something was seriously wrong about the child. They believed though that it was not medical: he was possessed by the devil. What they did after still makes me deeply emotional to think about. They began to lock him up all alone in the basement in the dark, only occasionally feeding him. When he did feed, they'd toss him the food and let him just go wild on it. His father would try to routinely beat the devil out of him. Every single day, they said, he would go down there and injure him in some way.
When they found him, he was caked in shit, malnourished to the point of damn near skeletal effect, and could not communicate in any appreciable way. He was essentially purple from bruises.
Immediately he was put in the system, passed around because nobody could deal with him. Because of this, he never had a stable environment to learn anything or develop any potential skills. His development wasn't just difficult due to having a severe case of autism, but because he simply wasn't taught anything.
When my mother sat us down to discuss the kid coming, I was my normal "oh here we go again" self. But something happened over the course of the years we had Johnathan. I began to love him. As a brother. As a family member as important to our life as any other. The sympathy and compassion I felt for him was such that I think it helped changed my entire attitude toward life.
What happened? Well, my mother began the tedious work of trying to teach him things. It was exhaustive and my Mom, who was extremely sick with Lupus at the time, fought through it and did everything she could. Mentor could only manage to find a respite for Johnathan once a month on one weekend. Sometimes even that didn't happen. My mom progressively got sicker, but she pressed out. Soon, Johnathan began to showcase the ability to use forks and spoons. He began to slow his eating down; before he would engulf it likely as a holdover from the years he was tortured. He started to indicate when he needed to use the bathroom, pointing at the door and we could guide him there. But most amazingly of all, he did something that one day when I heard it I cried.
My Mom saw him hitting himself daily before, and my mom tried everything to try to mitigate the injuries he would find a way to cause himself even with the helmet. She gave him plush bats to perhaps allow him to hit himself with something softer that wouldn't cause injury; sometimes it was so bad that we had to actually hold his arms to prevent further injury. This would kill my Mom... she felt like a terrible person but didn't know what to do.
But Johnathan was amazing. Slowly but surely, Johnathan's hitting of himself subsided. It never disappeared completely, no, but if before he was doing it once an hour, after he hardly did it once a week. And then one day he was about to himself and for some reason just stopped. He stopped and then looked directly at my Mom and said one word: "Love."
After that, he couldn't stop using the word. He said "Love" to me and my sisters, "Love" to strangers, "Love" to everyone. But when he said it to my Mom, the only time I ever saw this, he actually began to touch her affectionately. He hated being touched! To see him actually initiate this was astounding.
The doctors who had overseen his case since he was first discovered were astonished. They couldn't believe the effort my Mom put in essentially all by herself. But what the Doctors didn't know is how much Johnathan had changed us. When we finally had to give up Johnathan, because my Mom had fallen so deathly ill for a while that she literally was bedridden and Mentor refused to offer anymore respites, she cried every day for a month.
But what I never would have thought at the start of this is that I cried too. I was inconsolable. To this day I feel the most immense type of guilt that we had to give him up. Me and My Mother still visit him in his care home; but I do not have the capacity to take care of him yet and my Mom is currently suffering from an illness that will kill her. Every time we leave that place we still cry. But we smile too. Because Johnathan changed our lives forever.
