Holland on My Mind

Don't know if I've used that title before, but anyway.

I went to see Jason Kingsley and Mitch Levitz the other night at our Y. There was a decent-sized crowd there, including a frum contingent I wouldn't necessarily know b/c their kids are in private school. There were some administrators and teachers I knew, which I thought was nice: seemed to indicate that their jobs weren't just...jobs.

There was a moderator who initially annoyed me (as did the person who introduced them), b/c they were both coming from a perspective of "Gee, I didn't know anything about this stuff, so I thought it would be interesting to do a series." Which immediately irritated me b/c some of us are living this, not just casually interested, except, as I started to tell myself when my initial bitchy reaction (default mode) subsided, these people didn't HAVE to be interested, and they chose to and then followed through.

Anyway: both Mitchell and Jason read from the update to their book Count Us In, and the moderator asked them some fairly scripted questions. One of the bigger laughs of the night was when the moderator asked Jason re his marriage plans, and he said, "If there's a lucky single lady out there, I'm available." He also pointed out one of his roommates as the expert on setting the romantic mood. He and Mitch were generally charming.

There were some questions from the audience, some of which were dumb: one physical therapist asked if they had advice about PT they'd gotten as toddlers. Mitch said something polite about the importance of early intervention, and Jason said something along the lines of, "I really can't answer that." Because it was when he was BABY, you dope.

Jason's mother is Emily Perl Kingsley, author of "Welcome to Holland." I don't think I've ranted in this space about "Welcome to Holland," but suffice it to say I've spent a lot of time being ambivalent about it, b/c it always comes up on email lists I'm on, or people mail it to me, or it appears in various publications. I'd just had a lengthy exchange w/someone on our school district's board re WTH, in fact, and I'd told her about all the parody versions: "Welcome to Beirut"; "Holland Schmolland," etc. With that background, then, I couldn't resist asking Ms. Kingsley about the response to it.

She didn't seem that aware of the parodies: she hadn't heard of the two I mentioned. I told her it often started thoughtful discussions on email lists b/c people had different responses. She said some interesting things, one of which was that she didn't like it when people took it as saying that it's all positive. She said she's spent plenty of nights crying and worrying, that Jason has experienced very significant depression, and she's "not lying on a beach with a pina colada," as I think she put it. She talked a little bit about the concerns she has with trusts and estates at a time when other friends of hers are attending their children's weddings or welcoming grandchildren, and she worries re who's going to send him a birthday card after she's gone (I told her I would, which was pat of me). She also said that yes, it's a lifelong grieving process.

She also told me that she'd seen one essay that said something like, "If I meet that woman, she's going to end up with sawdust in her mouth from my wooden shoe," and added, somewhat indignantly, that this woman's child had autism and she wasn't talking about autism. Which I thought was interesting, b/c the essay is general: no particular disability is mentioned in it, so the type of disability this woman's child had shouldn't matter. On the other hand, I always thought the subtext to WTH was that Jason does have Down Syndrome, that fewer children are being born with it b/c families usually elect to terminate if they learn prenatally that the baby has DS, and that Kingsley was insisting on the value of the life he was leading, that it wasn't lesser--that it was, as Michael Berube puts it in his own book on his son w/Down Syndrome, life as we know it.