Flotsam and Jetsam

It's not very nice of me, I know, but when I went inside the teen lounge at the JCC on Saturday night to pick Noah up, I couldn't help but think of the kids there as the "flotsam and jetsam" of the teen world. These were the misfits, the socially awkward, the physically gawky. And my child was among them.

There's no shame in that, but there is indeed a good measure of sorrow. It's hard for me not to see a group of teens and young adults such as these and think of words like 'discards' and 'remainder.' Not kind on my part, but at least honest, if that's worth anything. And it didn't help that as I slipped past folks milling outside the lounge's door to find my son, I saw him slumped on a couch, with a look on his face that seemed both pained and sad. Had he been crying, I wondered.

As I got closer, Noah's face seemed to brighten, and I realized that the outline of sorrow I thought I'd seen at a distance either hadn't been there, or had vanished. But what I saw instead was even more disturbing. Noah sat in the middle, on a cheap vinyl coach, and to his right sat another teen, slumped even lower than Noah had been. To Noah's right sat two teens fairly passionately kissing. Just great. I sent my disabled, highly communicatively impaired child to a program that allows other impaired teens to probe the inside of each other's mouths and god knows what else, inches away from other impaired teens. And where the hell were the staff? Is this being encouraged as "typical" behavior?

Don't get me wrong; I don't begrudge disabled teens their hormonal impulses, but these are not kids who necessarily know what's appropriate, or where boundaries are to be drawn. Maybe it sounds like a loony leap, but I immediately wondered whether those teens--or others in the program--had been groping one another. Or if they'd groped my son. That would be my son whose default is to be cooperative and kind, and even when I know he's been miserable, to say that he had fun.

I can't give the staff a pass on this. I can't chalk it up to the chaos of dismissal. I don't send my child out of the house to a staff-monitored program for him to be in a place in which groping, kissing, fondling and the like go unnoticed, unremarked upon. This is just one more way to remind me that the only people who can or will ever protect my son are the people who know him best, and love and care about him most.

Maybe Noah is part of the flotsam and jetsam of disabled teen-dom, but he still deserves caring, concern, and protection. Maybe it's precisely because he's part of this motley crew of young adults that he deserves all that in greater doses and higher concentrations than do other youth.