The Ones We Sent Away: I thought my mother was an only child. I was wrong. [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/disabled-children-institutionalization-history/674763/

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https://archive.li/HaBhd

This story starts, of all things, with a viral tweet. It’s the summer of 2021. My husband wanders into the kitchen and asks whether I’ve seen the post from the English theater director that has been whipping around Twitter, the one featuring a photograph of his nonverbal son. I have not. I head up the stairs to my computer. “How will I find it?” I shout.

“You’ll find it,” he tells me.

I do, within a matter of seconds: a picture of Joey Unwin, smiling gently for the camera, his bare calves and sandaled toes a few steps from an inlet by the sea. Perhaps you, too, have seen this photo? His father, Stephen, surely did not intend it to become the sensation it did—he wasn’t being political, wasn’t playing to the groundlings. “Joey is 25 today,” he wrote. “He’s never said a word in his life, but has taught me so much more than I’ve ever taught him.”

That this earnest, heartfelt tweet has been liked some 80,000 times and retweeted more than 2,600 is already striking. But even more so is the cascade of replies: scores of photographs from parents of non- and minimally verbal children from all over the world. Some of the kids are young and some are old; some hold pets and some sit on swings; some grin broadly and some affect a more serious, thoughtful air. One is proudly holding a tray of Yorkshire pudding he’s baked. Another is spooning his mom on a picnic blanket.

I spend nearly an hour, just scrolling. I am only partway through when I realize my husband hasn’t steered me toward this outpouring simply because it’s an atypical Twitter moment, suffused with the sincere and the personal. It’s because he recognizes that to me, the tweet and downrush of replies are personal.

*snip*