Xander.

I was up all night writing about a little boy, Xander, who had been adopted from Ukraine. It started off as a happy story about an adopted babies. I've changed the angle to be a story about how Down syndrome children are not wanted in Eastern Europe because they're still considered to be Mongoloids. I've hated every minute of this research. I found Facebook groups against DS people. It has made me sick. In trying to do the children justice, I've just begun to hate their biological parents.

Here's the lede:

The child weighed 16 pounds on his fourth birthday. He had never seen a toy because his keepers thought toys would give children with Down syndrome heart attacks. He had never smelled like Johnson & Johnson because baby powder was considered too much of a luxury at the orphanage in Artemivsk, Ukraine. The only taste he knew was vegetable broth out of an infant’s bottle and the only home he knew was a closet where he lived with five other children. He stared at the ceiling for 23 hours out of the day and for one hour he was put in a cage on the front lawn just so he would not forget what the sun looked like.
Still, he was one of the lucky ones. His hands and feet were not bound to his bed by leather straps.
There were six metal beds in that closet. Each bed contained a small child that was unable to leave unless it was at the hands of their keepers.
They did not want to hurt him, so they didn’t touch him. The six damaged children at the orphanage were kept in one little room where they were safe, and the other children were safe from them and their diseases.
The child laid in the bed and rocked from side to side for endless hours. With each movement, the skin on his back would rub away leaving bedsores on his undiapered bottom. They will never heal.
With every motion, a little piece of his neediness would rub off with his skin. With every sway he would replace the need to be touched and held by a human with the sensation of the threadbare sheet against his skin. He would later be diagnosed with autism, and would struggle with different sensations as he tries to find some touch and pressure that is satisfying. There was no one to hold him in the orphanage, no one to touch his face. All he had was the pressure of the bed against his back and the sight of the shadow creatures on the ceiling.
On the day he was born, the doctor that delivered him told his parents that he looked different from the other children. He had little arcs under his eyes and his toes pointed in the wrong direction. No tests were done, but because of those signs that he was not like the other children, they left him there. His birthday and the day he was abandoned became one, and it would be a thousand nights before he had clean pajamas again.
He never heard a lullaby and he will never know what it means to belong to someone who shares his eyes. To his biological parents, he was just another one of God’s mistakes.
He was a bundle of hopelessness, wrapped up in a cheap blanket and left to be picked up by whomever got the task of driving to the hospital that day. He was condemned by an extra chromosome, and the sentence was carried out by the ignorance of the Ukrainian people. In Eastern Europe, they still think Down syndrome children are damaged goods. Nobody wants a mongoloid child.


I hate this, but I'm glad I'm writing the story. I don't think Professor Bragg will like it because it's just a student scratching the surface on what could be a major break in the fight for human rights, but I'll keep this around. I'll see if anyone wants it, and the one day, I'll do this story right.

jg