Mr. Michael

Chapter 1 

A CHILD TO KEEP 
December never felt as glorious as it did that day. The sights and sounds of Christmas saturated the Nation’s Capital where our family lived. True, the morning wore the gloom of an overcast sky, and my aching body was being pummeled by the Asian flu that was wreaking havoc in the nation that winter. But I ignored the discomfort and savored the delicious slice of life that was mine in the midst of that blessed season. It was December 22, 1968, and I was going home from the hospital with my new son. The day wore all the shades of holiday cheer and colored my emotions. 
We love such days and expect them to last, but it took only until Christmas day for my husband, Clarence, and me to realize that the cuddly little bundle that brought such immense pride and undiluted exuberance into our home had a problem. His eyes rolled from side to side in their sockets. He seemed drugged, cried constantly, and showed inordinate disdain for sleeping at night, but it never crossed our minds to reign in this temperamental star. My husband and I, flushed with extravagant love for our new baby, tried to adjust to his quirky ways and took his mistreatment of us in stride. He was just different, we said, and as time passed, we were to find out how different he was, but even in those early stressful days, we loved him dearly and never saw him as anything but our precious, desirable son, Michael. 
It took a while for the reality to sink in, but time revealed that our child was destined to be hampered by mental retardation. A crushing blow indeed, but my husband and I felt equal to the challenge and tried to make the necessary emotional accommodation. We set about the business of living with our marred child, rearing him in the best way we knew how. 
When Christ promises peace, He gives it so that we don’t have to live in “quiet desperation,” and as time passed, life with my son seemed almost normal until I had a visit from a friend whom I hadn’t seen for many years. The two of us sat in my living room and chatted, catching up on decades of accumulated events—the pain of losing our husbands, the varied lives of our children, and especially about my son, the special one. 
“I admire you,” my friend said. “You never put him away.” Her words jolted me, but, over time, I have developed a well-crafted level of expertise at hiding my feelings. I didn’t respond in any way to let on that the remark mattered. We chatted, laughed, and shared more experiences. Once again the conversation pirouetted back to my son, and once again my friend said, “I really admire you. You never put him away.” This time I made a breezy, forgettable response, and we continued our animated chatter, but the remark stuck with me and ploughed up my thoughts long after my friend left. I wasn’t hurt by her words, which had no hint of meanness. In fact, I think she was being genuinely complimentary. In fact, I could even detect a sliver of admiration in her tone and facial expression. But her remark caused me to look at my situation from a different slant, to analyze what I had long before settled in my mind as an almost-easy yoke. 
My friend’s comment led me to a disturbing question. In those early days when it became known that my husband and I had a special child, were our friends waiting to see what we were going to do, whether we would “put him away”? I couldn’t recall sensing any such attitude, but I began to wonder. I ransacked my mind for telltale evidence—a carelessly dropped hint or camouflaged pity—but I could find nothing. My friends got off clean after my intense scrutiny of their words and actions. 
Put him away? What a horrendous thought! How does a woman put away her child? This was flesh of my flesh. Whatever his flaws, I needed to be close to him, to be his support, not his rejection and abandonment. To be sure, he was a marred vessel, but a flawed vessel in the hands of the Potter can be made into a thing of usefulness. No, I had not put him away, and even in later years if he has to be sent to a group home, he will not have been put away. It will be for his preservation in the world after I can no longer care for him. 
The disturbing comment about putting away my son reminds me of something my mother said to me one day after I had been especially helpful to her and she felt deeply grateful. “It’s a good thing I didn’t destroy you,” she confided, recalling the plight she found herself in as a young girl, pregnant with no husband. In talking with me that day, she seemed happy to have lived without the regret of having had an abortion. Naturally, I’m grateful for her decision. In her youthful quandary, she didn’t panic and do the wrong thing. In time, her fortunes turned and she found an all’s-well-that-ends-well conclusion in marriage to my father. She was also able to have me as her mainstay in her old age. 
My pregnancy with Michael was problem-ridden, but the fact that we were going to have a child was a source of intense happiness for Clarence and me. It brought us closer together, spurring intimacy and romance. Our other child, Douglas, was almost nine years old. We felt it was time for us to have another one. 
A year earlier we had tried having a child, but I suffered a disappointing miscarriage. Even without the benefit of an ultrasound, we were sure then that we’d lost the daughter we wanted. Anticipating that birth, my husband and I had played the expectant parent game to the hilt. The teasing, the tenderness. For me it was a great thrill looking forward to the birth of our baby girl. My stomach had hardly achieved a noticeable bump, yet I donned a maternity shift that advertised to everyone that I was pregnant. 
On a pleasant spring afternoon, I went to a faculty meeting at the college where I was an English instructor. At home that evening, I began having intense pains, and my husband dashed off to the hospital with me. Several blocks from the hospital, a policeman stopped him for speeding, but, in an unmistakable Jamaican accent, he said, “Offisah, my wife is in pain. I’m on my way to the emergency room.” The policeman dropped his official, imposing demeanor and said, “Follow me!” He raced ahead of us to Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C. and flung out his right arm when he reached the entrance. My husband took his cue, gave the car a nervous jerk to the right and swung into the hospital parking lot. 
At about midmorning the next day, I asked the nurse for a bedpan, which she brought and stood by as I used it. What I felt and saw left an unforgettable imprint on my mind. The rush from my body was frightening, but the bloody clump in the bedpan was even more devastating. I knew that the undifferentiated mass was my baby. I grabbed the nurse around her neck, held her tight and wouldn’t let go as I wept on her shoulder. It’s quite likely that she wasn’t too comfortably with the death grip that I had on her, because I can’t remember her saying any words of comfort to me. I held on, however. Something terrible had happened to me. I felt it deep inside. I mourned without even knowing what for. All I knew was that I had suffered a great loss.