I walked not in the way of righteousness - part four

Before I begin at my beginning I need to lay one more piece of pipe to my story...Douglas McArthur Parsons - my so called ‘retarded’ brother.
I have learned in life that “Perception is Reality”. What you believe is your ‘truth’.
My Mom and Dad never could perceive Dougy as anything but ‘retarded’. So that is how they treated him. Sadly, since that was the way he was treated - that’s how he acted. Truth is he wasn’t/isn’t/or-ever-will-be ‘retarded’. You see I have a different perception of him. (Confused yet?)
Doug began as the last fling for a G.I. going to the European theater during W.W.II. His birth mother was ‘slow’ mentally and did not understand she was pregnant until about her 8th month. Being ashamed of herself, she then hid it from everybody. Dougy was born in the outhouse, behind the house where she lived. After giving birth, she left him on the floor of the ‘privy’ while she went in the house and got some old rags to clean the mess up. Thinking the baby to be dead, she wrapped him up in the rags (umbilical cord still attached) and put the whole bundle in the trash can in the alley.
Very shortly afterwards, a state social worker was walking up that same alley to visit a family further up the hill, as they say. Thinking she heard a cat squalling, she said to herself that if it was still there on her way back down she would let it out. The family she was going to see was gone so she headed back down the hill. She faintly heard the cat still squalling so she open the trashcan, saw the bloody rags and began looking for the noise maker. She found the baby, barely alive.
She ran the 7 blocks to the hospital with the new born still wrapped in the rags and afterbirth. The nurses and doctor worked frantically to keep him alive.
My Aunt Maud’s youngest child was in the same hospital for care. When Aunt Maud went to see her daughter, she passed by the baby room to look at the newborns and saw a bassinet without a name on it. Asking a nurse about the baby, she learned he had been abandoned and would be up for adoption. On her way home Aunt Maud stopped by to see Momma. She told Momma about the poor little baby and that she was going to adopt him. Being childless, Momma pleaded with her oldest sister to let her adopt the baby boy.
When Momma went back to work after her lunch break, she told Daddy about the little baby that Maud had seen. He promised her that they could go see him after work.
After they finished work, stopped to get a bite of dinner they went to the hospital. When they got to the baby room, Momma looked for the bassinet without a name and didn’t see it. Thinking the worse, she asked a nurse about the abandoned baby boy. The nurse went into the restricted room and consulted the nurse in charge of the babies. That nurse, smiling, came out to talk to Momma and Daddy. She pointed out to them the baby boy they were interested in. The nurses felt bad about calling him “the abandoned boy” or “orphaned boy” or “him” or “it” so they named him after the hero of the day - General Douglas McArthur. The nurse assured them that was only for the benefit of the nurses. They didn’t need to keep that name if they decided to adopt him. The nurse then said that because of the circumstances of his birth he was going to have ‘problems’.
The Parsons’ decided before they got home that they wanted this child. Daddy called the hospital the next day and started the paperwork. A little over two weeks after that, they brought Dougy home. A month later it was finalized and Douglas McArthur Parsons was...
When Dougy-Mac was about 9 months old, they found his “birth mother”. (Which is, in case you were wondering, how we found out the back story of his birth.) She did not want the baby back but had been told that Momma and Daddy owed her money because they adopted him. Daddy did have to restrain Momma or Doug might have been orphaned again. This girl showed up a couple of other times, never interested in Doug, but wanting a handout. Then she stopped coming by. They never saw her again.
Douglas did have problems. It seemed that every illness known to man he dealt with before he was ten years old. Because of his poor care at birth his immune system was very weak. Also, one side of his body is smaller than the other. Other than those two ‘problems’ his physical development was fine. By the time for him to start school came, our parents knew he had a learning ‘problem’. In 1947 there was no special ed, or special learning teachers; if you couldn’t do the work you were ‘retarded’. Thus Dougy was labeled and people quit expecting anything of him - he delivered what they expected.
In 1990 I worked for a special ed boarding school as the lead milieu therapist. As a favor to me, they tested Doug. What they found I knew or suspected all my life. Doug’s verbal I.Q. was within normal range. They could not get a gauge on his written I.Q. because (sarcasm alert) he was ‘retarded’ and could not be taught to write - so why waste valuable time on someone like him. It was discovered that Doug’s reading problem was because he was severely dyslexic. With all the advances they have had in education in the past 25 years, if Doug was born today, under the same circumstances, he could look forward to a normal life.
Doug is a survivor. He made it through his birth, his sickly early life, growing up in Detroit, an alcoholic mother, a passive-aggressive Daddy, and a psychotic brother. He is doing fine.