Jen Logan reflects on how her son Tate challenges us to think about the true nature of friendship and how friendship with those we regard as ‘different’ from ourselves can enrich our lives and their lives.
The day our son, Tate, was born was also the day we learned he had Down’s Syndrome. When I first held up his hand I noticed it was more pocket square than hand shaped. Then as he opened his almond eyes to me, the long silence of our midwife to my question, “Does he look to you like he has Down’s Syndrome?” was our answer.
A formal diagnosis would come two weeks later in the post, but while he still lay in my arms in the birth centre, the doctor was called in to inform us of the lesser-known side effects of the diagnosis:
We were told he would have:
- A 50% chance of a heart defect
- High risk of thyroid conditions, epilepsy, obesity and early onset dementia
- Infertility
- Reduced life-span
And that our marriage, statistically, was more likely to break down because of it.
There may have been more predictions, but who could remember them all in such a moment?
As we held our newborn, absorbing each warning, we found ourselves focused not on any of those foreboding possibilities but on another question entirely: Who will be his friend? This question became more urgent when, aged four, Tate hadn’t spoken yet and was diagnosed with severe Autism. We were advised that he would likely never speak. Our fears for his loneliness deepened – How would Tate find others without words?…And how would he be found?
This question turned into a search to discover friendships we hoped might exist between people with and without learning disabilities; friendships that crossed cognitive divides. We wanted to find proof that there could be more for Tate than family bonds or the paid kindness of carers. This search gave rise to the Beyond Mother Love documentary film and qualitative research study (www.beyondmotherlove.com) exploring how such friendships work and what it’s like to be part of them. For example, how do two people form a friendship if only one can remember shared moments? How do two friends communicate if only one of them can talk? And how are these friendships viewed – are they recognized as mutual bonds, or mistaken as acts of one-sided charity?
Our search has brought both hope and heartache. Yes, these friendships exist but they are painfully rare. What isn’t rare is the number of parents who share our worry. We’ve heard from so many of them of their fears that when they are gone, their child will be left friendless. Yet, theologians and ethicists of disability like Revd. Professor John Swinton and Professor Hans Reinders call our attention to the fact that our culture rarely sees those with learning disabilities as potential friends.
‘The successes of the disability rights movement have occurred in the domain of citizenship and have left unaffected the domain of personal intimacy. Despite the success they have found in strengthening their status in the public sphere, people with disabilities – particularly intellectual disabilities – experience loneliness and isolation in the sphere of their personal lives… Our contemporary moral culture disseminates conceptions of a good life that hardly help us to imagine someone with an intellectual disability as a friend… Many traits of our Western culture enable us to see what adequate care and support does for the quality of their lives; but those traits hardly help us imagine what their presence may mean for the quality of our own… As one mother said, ‘My boy now has all the rights the ADA could possibly assure him of, but he still has not got a friend’.’ Hans Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics.
‘Beyond Mother Love’ turns our collective gaze toward these unlikely friendships – where neurodiverse stimming movements of an autistic person, like hand-flapping, are not just accommodated but mutually-embraced as a meaningful way of ‘being together’; where repeating oneself to a friend with dementia is not seen as a burdensome chore, but as a shared act of relational pattern-making, and where silence with a non-verbal person is honoured as a valid form of ‘conversation’. Our hope is that the more these unusual friendships are represented, the more they can be normalised and canonised within our ‘moral culture’.
Who knows if the AI revolution will eventually break down the classifications of ‘disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’, recasting us all as disabled by virtue of just being human at all. But this possibility makes me wonder if people like Tate hold a unique and timely leadership role for us all. Tate will never measure his worth by his intellect, and perhaps increasingly, none of us can. We are on shaky ground there, and friendship with those among us who already understand their value beyond cognition may be the very kind of connection we all need right now.
Watch the beautiful Beyond Mother Love documentary film teaser here:
