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When I was young/My father said
Son, I have something to say
And what he told me I'll never forget
Until my dying day...
(Cliff Richard, Bachelor Boy, 1963)
Since just after Justin's birth, I have tried to be positive and optimistic about our future, and particularly about the challenges presented by his condition. Sometimes, as will have been clear from other posts, this positivity is aided by an ostrich-like refusal to contemplate future eventualities, but mostly, it's because I feel we've been really lucky: he had no postnatal medical complications; he's loved and accepted by his brothers, he's growing well; there's even a hint of a smile on his face...
There are some days, though, when optimism seems like an overwhelming challenge, days when I almost lose the will to move forward, and when I look around for a large tub of sand (something, like litter bins, that is in desperately short supply in urban Japan). Today was such a day, and it was all occasioned by a short piece that Ayumi found on the web about the family of a DS child (more evidence, if such were needed, that one shouldn't go looking for bad news).
In this chat, a girl asks whether she should still marry her boyfriend now that she has found out that he has a brother with Down Syndrome. Lest it be imagined this is invented, here is an image of the relevant text. The question is bad enough: the responses—overwhelmingly negative—are generally poisonous:
Now, I know that Justin will almost certainly never have children (there are just three reported cases in the history of the condition). It's also very likely that he will never marry, though looking at my single friends, there's no evidence that he will be any less happy for that: Cliff Richard took his own song (well, his and Bruce Welch's!) to heart, remaining steadfastly unattached, and appears to be one of the most content individuals I've ever seen interviewed). So I'm quite sanguine about Justin's future as a single man: in any case, he's only six weeks old, and we have infinitely more important things to worry about over the next 20 years!
Yet the idea that his condition could blight the marriage prospects of our other children is upsetting, less for what it says about this Japanese girl's attitude to Down Syndrome than for what it reveals about her attitude to love and marriage. Call me a hopeless romantic, but until this news I had naively thought that in the modern age—aside from marriages of convenience—if people got hitched at all it was because (they believed—rightly or not—that they loved each other: whether the feeling lasted, the impulse was not a selfish one. Now, I have to wonder if Tina Turner was right: (Though the song comes at this from the other direction, it ends up in the same place.)
Of course, it could be argued that my reaction to this girl's story is a symptom of my cultural insensitivity: it is certainly true that on average, family ties are more important in Japan than in the UK; the idea of marrying 'into' your partner's family is still a concept; the reality may be that this Japanese girl could have ended up with some real responsibility for the care of her partner's brother. But I refuse to accept this defence: in my professional life, I struggle against cultural relativism, and I'm not about to let it excuse callow selfishness in this case. The girl is wrong.
But what still troubles me is whether I am being naive about this: is this girl's attitude representative of that of many women in the world, or only of most Japanese women (I might despise cultural relativism, but I could be wrong!), or—as I fondly hope—of this one sad individual. I don't have a good answer to this, but to save me from despair, at least there is Jacques Brel:
Click to play
Pour un peu de tendresse
Je t'offrirais le temps
Qu'il reste de jeunesse
A l'été finissant
Pourquoi crois-tu, la belle
Que monte ma chanson
Vers la claire dentelle
Qui danse sur ton front
Penché vers ma détresse
Pour un peu de tendresse ?
(Jacques Brel, La tendresse)
When I was young/My father said
Son, I have something to say
And what he told me I'll never forget
Until my dying day...
(Cliff Richard, Bachelor Boy, 1963)
Since just after Justin's birth, I have tried to be positive and optimistic about our future, and particularly about the challenges presented by his condition. Sometimes, as will have been clear from other posts, this positivity is aided by an ostrich-like refusal to contemplate future eventualities, but mostly, it's because I feel we've been really lucky: he had no postnatal medical complications; he's loved and accepted by his brothers, he's growing well; there's even a hint of a smile on his face...
There are some days, though, when optimism seems like an overwhelming challenge, days when I almost lose the will to move forward, and when I look around for a large tub of sand (something, like litter bins, that is in desperately short supply in urban Japan). Today was such a day, and it was all occasioned by a short piece that Ayumi found on the web about the family of a DS child (more evidence, if such were needed, that one shouldn't go looking for bad news).
In this chat, a girl asks whether she should still marry her boyfriend now that she has found out that he has a brother with Down Syndrome. Lest it be imagined this is invented, here is an image of the relevant text. The question is bad enough: the responses—overwhelmingly negative—are generally poisonous:
Yet the idea that his condition could blight the marriage prospects of our other children is upsetting, less for what it says about this Japanese girl's attitude to Down Syndrome than for what it reveals about her attitude to love and marriage. Call me a hopeless romantic, but until this news I had naively thought that in the modern age—aside from marriages of convenience—if people got hitched at all it was because (they believed—rightly or not—that they loved each other: whether the feeling lasted, the impulse was not a selfish one. Now, I have to wonder if Tina Turner was right: (Though the song comes at this from the other direction, it ends up in the same place.)
Of course, it could be argued that my reaction to this girl's story is a symptom of my cultural insensitivity: it is certainly true that on average, family ties are more important in Japan than in the UK; the idea of marrying 'into' your partner's family is still a concept; the reality may be that this Japanese girl could have ended up with some real responsibility for the care of her partner's brother. But I refuse to accept this defence: in my professional life, I struggle against cultural relativism, and I'm not about to let it excuse callow selfishness in this case. The girl is wrong.
But what still troubles me is whether I am being naive about this: is this girl's attitude representative of that of many women in the world, or only of most Japanese women (I might despise cultural relativism, but I could be wrong!), or—as I fondly hope—of this one sad individual. I don't have a good answer to this, but to save me from despair, at least there is Jacques Brel:
Click to play
Pour un peu de tendresse
Je t'offrirais le temps
Qu'il reste de jeunesse
A l'été finissant
Pourquoi crois-tu, la belle
Que monte ma chanson
Vers la claire dentelle
Qui danse sur ton front
Penché vers ma détresse
Pour un peu de tendresse ?
(Jacques Brel, La tendresse)
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