Michael Bérubé documents his efforts to find steady employment for his 22-year-old son Jamie, who has Down Syndrome:
What is Jamie capable of doing for a living? Our first checklist filled us with despair: factory work, nope; food service, nope (not fast enough); hotel maid service, nope; machine and auto repair, nope. (Though Jamie expressed interest in auto repair — not a moment of astonishing self-awareness.) With one agency, Jamie had two CBWAs followed by detailed five-page write-ups: one doing setup for conferences and meetings (tables, chairs, A/V), the other doing shelving at a supermarket. Neither went well. He had trouble stacking chairs, dealing with the duct tape for the A/V setup, and attaching skirts to tables. At the supermarket he had trouble with the U-boat, the device that carts dozens of boxes out into the aisles — and besides, they were only hiring graveyard shift.
The result?
For two months, it was basically YouTube in the basement, as Jamie gradually realized (with what I think was a kind of horror) that I hadn’t been kidding about that part. Finally, the local sheltered workshop for people with disabilities offered him an 8:30-2:30 slot twice a week — and then three times a week.
On top of that, I sent out a few emails and got him an afternoon of volunteering once a week at the children’s museum. And most recently, another agency set up a six-month trial volunteering at the Y, doing janitorial work twice a week in two-and-a-half-hour shifts. If the trial goes well, we are told, he will be hired. They like him enormously at the Y. The only question is whether he will learn how to do the vacuuming, sweeping and cleaning on his own; right now, the people at his agency are very generously and carefully supervising him minute by minute. …
I knew Jamie would not grow up to be a marine biologist [as he’d once dreamed]. And I know that there are millions of non-disabled Americans out of work or underemployed, whose lives are less happy than Jamie’s. I don’t imagine that he has a “right” to a job that supersedes their needs. But I look sometimes at the things he writes in his ubiquitous legal pads when he is bored or trying to amuse himself — like the page festooned with the names of all 67 Pennsylvania counties, written in alphabetical order — and I think, isn’t there any place in the economy for a bright, gregarious, effervescent, diligent, conscientious and punctual young man with intellectual disabilities, a love of animals and an amazing cataloguing memory and insatiable intellectual curiosity about the world?
The recent Dish thread on Down Syndrome is here.
The Dish 