In a heart-wrenching article today in the Science Times section of the New York Times, Lisa Reswick writes about her banished brother, born with Down Syndrome and sent away by her physician father to become a ward of the state.
She and her siblings grew up knowing about the existence of her brother Jimmy, but no one was allowed to visit him. No one was allowed to speak of him. The author only met her brother at the end of his life, at his deathbed and then at his funeral.
It’s hard to think about the world advancing so much in empathy with the current likes of Trump, Cruz, and the extreme version of them: ISIS. Or just today, the state of Mississippi affirming business owners the right to discriminate against gay people based on religion. We do however live in more enlightened times in terms of our feelings about individuals with special needs like Down Syndrome, Autism Spectrum to name but two. Not even the Donald would risk diss-ing a Down Syndrome person. At least I hope not.
But back in the Dark Ages of my childhood it was a different story.
The author of the article in the New York Times was haunted throughout life by the notion of a brother she did not know. A brother who was different than she was. A brother who did not belong and therefore a brother who was sent away. And of course the hidden message in all this is: if I can send him away, I can send you away. Better behave!
Though I have always had all my marbles (relatively) and my IQ is adequate, I too faced expulsion by my father to an institution: an orphanage.
Though I was never actually banished there, (could I have blocked it out like so many other things?). Nevertheless, some small persistent part of me still lives there in that orphanage to this day. To paraphrase Ferlinghetti, “The Buckner Orphanage of the Mind.”
I was born prematurely after my mother’s tubes were meant to be tied fourteen months after the birth of my brother, the longed for boy. And according to one account, an abortion attempt. I was in an incubator for a long time. I guess I was one of those miracle babies you read about on the front page of The National Enquirer: “Can’t Kill Her Now She Won’t Shut Up!”
But I was no miraculous thing, not to my own father who in a playful mood as he often was, told me I came from Buckner’s Orphanage in Dallas, Texas where we lived until I was five. And that’s where I would be going if he had anything to say about the matter. “I’ll know the reason why!” is one of his charming expressions that to this day, resides within me invoking terror when I think of it. And in fact, there was even, a car trip of some few miles to view the outside of the orphanage where presumably my place was secured. It was a large establishment with lots of out buildings. My adult mind would label it Dickensian, and indeed, the building and the institution date back to the Nineteenth Century. I just checked. Everything is on line, every childhood terror has a website! Buckner Orphanage lives on.
My overweight father literally exploded when I was very young, following some Luau where he ate too much suckling pig. I know, it sounds almost like a joke by Nabokov. But it’s true. One day he was there, shouting and reviling and the next day he was dead meat with an apple in his mouth. He was very very young to die, but there was nothing to be done for him. After he was gone, there were no more threats of sending me to Buckner Orphanage. And of course no possibility of changing the way it was between us. Could I have one day made him like me? I’ll never know.
To this day, pitiful though it is, I can truthfully say, I missed out by not being a Daddy’s Girl. Someone who was once called Princess, or Sweetie pie. Or whatever Daddy’s Girls are called.
Someone who would tell me I was pretty enough to win a contest and smart enough to go to med school. Not Buckner Orphanage where my doppelgänger lived. My doppelgänger who actually had been dropped off in the Chrysler by her father for sins too numerous to mention.
She still lives there at the orphanage, and like the children in fairy tales she has never grown old. She is three or four or five and she is as integral to who I am, as my arms, legs, eyes, shoulders, imagination or sense of the absurd.
The late Nobel Laureate Irme Ketesz wrote: “We suffered on account of our youth, as of a serious illness. Families I hate you!” He also said, “I read, that the concept of rule is invariably one of terror, and rule by terror invariably means rule by the father.”
The good part of having grown up at least metaphorically in Buckner Orphanage is Jane Eyre lived there. And so did Oliver Twist. When I grew up I found out Patrick Melrose also lived there as well as all sorts of other great and talented children.
Rule by terror be damned: I’m in very good company!
by 
