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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (32906)	3/20/1999 12:35:00 AM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I know, penni, sex for the retarded presents real problems, both philosophical and practical. It took two years before we understood the grimness of the prognosis for our daughter, or should I say the extremeness and absoluteness of it, and during that time i was gripped by the conviction that i would be able somehow to create a life for her. The fact that she was a beautiful, beautiful baby encouraged me in this fantasy. I would find a nice retarded young man for her. His parents would feel the same as we did. Our boy and girl would be sterilized. We would have a big house, where they could live, and have love and cuddling and sex together, and maybe i could devise some sort of work they could do, and they would be happy, and when we died, her older brother would take on the responsibility. This was an extremely intense fantasy. I didn't know, of course, that it was a fantasy. I thought it was a plan. When we couldn't manage any more, emotionally or physically, our daughter went to an institution near us. It wasn't as small or as personal as the home she lives in now, but they did their best and they saved our family, and i am grateful to them and had few complaints, and she didn't have the awareness to miss being at home. When I was visiting one summer day, I took my daughter out to sit on the lawn, where we were joined by two young men, residents of the institution. They were high- functioning retarded kids, they were maybe eighteen. I remember that one of them worked a few hours a week in the bakery, and was so proud of this that he mentioned it at every opportunity: "Tomorrow I have to go to my job." "I get flour all over my clothes when I go to my job, but I don't mind." "I do a good job in the bakery. I eat a roll every time." While we were sitting and talking on the grassy hill that overlooked the road, a convertible sped by. The young people in the car, teenaged boys and girls, were having boisterous fun, laughing, talking loudly. The two boys watched the car go by, and became very quiet. After a few painful minutes, they talked about the way they had felt while they were watching the convertible go by. I have erased most of this painful conversation from my memory, but i do remember that they were surprisingly explicit and open in expressing their sadness about the fact that they were not allowed to have dates or have a car or have a wife. One said that he had kissed a girl, he gave her name, in a phone booth and that he and she were going to try to do it again. It was seriously against the rules. He referred to her as his girl friend. This experience made me even more secure in my belief that the retarded should not be deprived of physical love. But I always thought it was obvious that for this to be the case, the individuals would have to be sterilized. Sterilization seems to have become controversial. It is evidently politically incorrect. So situations like the ones you describe arise. Here's a different but related situation. No one will believe this, but I read an account that described this situation. I think it was happening in Canada. In this country, handicapped, i mean challenged, people, people in institutions or hospitals, had certain legal rights, including the right to have privacy for sexual encounters and to masturbate. The thing is, some of these people couldn't manage to do this. They were physically incapable of the act of masturbation. But the regs were written so that... I'm not making this up... if a person with a disability that made masturbation impossible requested assistance, the nurses were expected to provide it. The reason this made the news is that some nurses were protesting this assignment rather vigorously. I only saw one article about this, and don't know what happened next. Isn't the world insane?