The Enough House
Last summer, while reading Charles
Dickens’ Great Expectations, I was
surprised to come across reference to
a mansion called Satis House – “which
is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three…for
enough,” said the character Estella.
“Enough House,” replied the protagonist Pip.
“That’s a curious name, miss.”
“Yes,” she said, “but it meant more than it said. It
meant, when it was given, that whoever had this
house, could want nothing else. They must have
been easily satisfied in those days, I should think…”
I want to live in the Enough House, I thought, where
we are enough, just exactly as we are.
My son Ben was born with a rare genetic disorder
and over time we learned he had many disabilities.
He’s 15 years old now, and we’ve spent most of his
life trying to get him to do things he simply can’t:
to grow, to hear, to speak, to write.
When he was a toddler, and still scooting on the
floor while his peers stood up and ran, I remember
bargaining with God that if he would just let Ben
walk, I would never ask for anything else. At the
time, we were struggling to put him through
rigorous home physiotherapy exercises twice a day.
Ben did eventually walk – albeit slowly and with
pain in his knees – but I didn’t keep my end of
the bargain.
Of course, it wasn’t enough.
There were years of special diets, a stomach-feeding
tube and growth-hormone shots to get him to grow;
speech therapy four times a week and trips outside the
country to see specialists; and occupational therapy to
improve his fine-motor skills. We tried every alternative
therapy going. But in the end, none of these things
worked. He never acquired speech, he can’t write
functionally and he’s half the size of his peers.
We live in a culture that values constant self-improvement.
There’s always something to be worked on,
some future state that will be preferable to the one
you’re in now: a time when you’ll be happier, smarter,
richer or more youthful.
I think that value seeps into the world of children’s
rehab, and makes it hard for parents to feel blessed
with who their children are, just as they are. We’re so
busy “working” on things with our kids, trying to turn
every interaction into a therapeutic one – that we can
lose sight of their inherent wholeness. I used to long
to read a book with Ben just so we could sit together,
he in my lap, giggling at the funny parts – and not
because it was a way of squeezing out one more word
attempt.
But time was ticking, and he wasn’t meeting his
milestones.
There’s a push and pull – especially early on – between
wanting to accept our children for who they are and
wanting to make the disability go away.
No parents want to look back and feel they didn’t do
everything possible to promote their child’s development
during the preschool years, when the brain is
most plastic. And it’s easy to get caught up in the
latest “magic bullet” treatment you read about in the
media or on the web.
But sometimes, during those gruelling years of intervention,
I wish I could have breathed deeply and told
myself: “It’s enough. It’s enough that he’s alive, it’s
enough that I love him, it’s enough that we have joy
together.”
I wish I could have visited the Enough House more
often.
Because in the larger scheme of things, ‘enough’ is all
that matters.
Louise Kinross, BLOOM Editor
